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Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
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In title opinions comes to you from Stanford, California,
in the U.S. of A.
But whoever's familiar with our show knows that we're not particularly
American in our focus.
We talk about things Greek, French, Russian,
Italian, German, Australian, Caribbean.
We aspire to what Nietzsche called "Good Europeanism."
That is a non-nationalistic, blurry lingual,
and historically layered orientation.
Today we're going to address the topic of anti-Americanism
with my colleague Russell Berman,
who joins me here in the studios of KZSU.
He's the author of a recent book entitled "Antai-Americanism
in Europe."
But you all know how it works around here.
Before introducing the guest and getting down to business,
your host needs to opinionate a bit.
So let me start by declaring categorically that,
after half a century of being an American myself,
I've come to the conclusion that it's almost impossible
to arrive at a coherent or comprehensive understanding of America.
No one really understands America.
Not even those of us who are said to live in New England,
if only because America and its citizens are determined through and through
by the law of contradiction.
Nothing is more consistent in America than the law of contradiction.
It was slave owners, after all, who declared,
"We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal."
Most of what one can say about Americans that is true,
the opposite is equally true.
We are the most godless and the most religious,
the most puritan and most lascivious,
the most charitable and most heartless of societies.
We are interventionalists to the degree that we are isolationists.
We espouse the rose maxim that government governs best,
which governs least.
Yet we look to Washington to address our every problem.
Our environmental conscientiousness is outmatched only by our environmental
recklessness.
We are outlaws obsessed by the rule of law.
We are individualists who speak of family values.
We are a nation of fat people with anorexic standards of health and beauty.
The only things we love more than nature's wilderness are malls and hyper technology.
One day on another program, maybe we'll undertake a genealogy of this law of contradiction,
which keeps us Americans at odds with ourselves,
and which prevents us from knowing who we really are.
It would certainly be fascinating to explore the roots of it,
but we're not going to attempt that here today.
Suffice it to say that if we Americans can't understand ourselves,
then how much more so are those who see us from the outside,
bound to form conceptions of us that are false,
or that are at least partially false, for again,
there's not much one can say about America that is not partially true.
It's the whole truth that's the problem.
One more opinion before we turn to our guest,
America does not export well.
It exports a lot but not well.
Americans are at their best at home, at their worst abroad,
while it's true that our vices are eminently exportable,
our virtues seem to be intransitive.
They mostly stay at home.
What are those virtues you ask?
Our professionalism, for instance,
an innate sense of fairness,
an ethic of self-responsibility,
a belief in the dignity of the citizen,
a love of justice, those are some of them.
It's something of a tragedy that American virtues don't export well,
or not at all, for as we know the nation is committed to export.
Consequently, this terrible Americanization of the rest of the world
is for the most part of venial and todry Americanization,
precisely because it's only partial,
and the worst part at that.
It's no surprise, therefore, that anti-Americanism is going strong around the world,
more so today, perhaps than at any other moment in our history.
Of course, it's not clear how much of this anti-Americanism is directly related to America's policies,
actions, and products,
and how much of it has to do with imaginary projections.
Power is by its very nature of fantasmatic,
and superpower is super fantasmatic.
My guest, Russell Berman, who teaches in the Department of German and Comparative Literature here at Stanford,
argues in his most recent book that European anti-Americanism is to a large extent,
disconnected from the reality of America,
if there is such a thing as the reality of America,
and that it has the character of a prejudice,
a prejudice that remains stubbornly resistant to evidence, proof, or rational argument.
In some, European anti-Americanism, according to him,
says a lot more about Europe than it does about America.
This is a provocative thesis to be sure and raises several questions
we'll try to engage during the next hour.
Russell, welcome to the program.
Hello, thank you. I'm happy to be here,
enjoying these spacious quarters, and look forward to our discussion.
I appreciate your thoughts, which were I to contradict them,
which just demonstrate my Americanness.
Exactly.
So I can't lose.
Neither can I.
So, Russell, you're a literary scholar by training,
in particular your distinguished Germanist.
You've done important work in the theory of the novel,
the Frankfurt School, and other things.
But this recent book of yours, Anti-Americanism in Europe,
which came out in 2003 with the Hoover Institution Press,
is anything but a study in literary criticism.
Nor is it cultural history as we typically practice it in the humanities.
It relies a lot on statistics, it engages issues of public policy.
In short, for me, it has a definite social scientific bent.
Would you agree with that?
And if so, does a scholar trained in literary analysis have a special set of competencies
to bring to bear on issues of public opinion,
which are usually debated on the other side of the quad from us?
I mean, in the social sciences, or even the Hoover Institution?
Well, you know, my initial work was primarily in German,
German literature, in German cultural history,
and therefore I'm participating in the institution of the study of Germany
from an American vantage point.
That institution, that history of German in the US,
has always been a discipline or a field that has involved political questions,
going back to the 17th, the 18th century.
It was German immigrants in Pennsylvania who issued the first protest by white people against slavery,
since you mentioned that in your introduction.
The first documented instructor of German at Harvard was fired from his position there in the early 19th century
for his abolitionist positions.
So this overlap between social and political concerns are built into German studies
in the US, going way back.
I don't share the anxieties that you may be alluding to about the social sciences,
in this era in which interdisciplinarity is the mantra of so many,
why not interdisciplinarity with the social sciences?
To be sure when we engage in the questions and paradigms and methods of another discipline,
we have to wonder what are the limits of our expertise,
and indeed alas, I don't do regression analyses on the figures that others collect,
but I do read their results.
I think it's a virtue to read what scholars and other fields study,
the data they collect, and look at their interpretations and try to enrich our own scholarship,
even if we reach across the quad.
But there's another, and probably much more important question implicit in your methodological introduction here.
What is a study of literature have to do with political matters,
in particular the issues that were at stake in the debates between the United States and Europe several years ago?
Why do we study literature at all?
What's the point of literature?
Surely even in this age in which we all pay attention to professionalism and students' training,
we don't teach literature in order to prepare professionals for the publishing industry.
Some may pursue that track, but that's not what it's about.
We study literature, and of course your viewers will understand your viewers, your listeners.
Our listeners, I'm speaking here.
Our listeners will understand this.
Immediately we study literature because of an assumption that literature has something to do with a broader human condition,
novels, poems, plays, teach us something about how we are as humans, and part of how we are as humans is in political communities.
So I see literature as a universal passport to all possible topics rather than a narrow limitation to a specific set of questions.
Well, no disagreement for me.
This show in general promotes exactly that sort of position that literature is opening onto the world in all its complexity and its density.
Of course, there is a certain expertise which one does develop in literary studies about how to deal with the literary artifact in order to uncover those complexities and ambiguities and certainties.
But I would also suggest that so much of literature has to do with the reality of the human imagination.
And I take it that you are this recent book of yours.
It doesn't just deal from the outside with statistics and public opinion polls and things of that sort.
Am I right in saying that it also tries to penetrate into the imaginary of European anti-Americanism and maybe to read statements, anti-American in their gist in a way that is trying to uncover maybe something that's not there on the surface as we do when we teach literature in the classroom or write about it?
Literature is absolutely about the imagination.
The imagination is the vehicle for freedom, for human freedom, for our capacity to imagine how to live otherwise.
Part of that living can be measured empirically.
You can ask people what they think.
You can ask people what their opinions are.
But this is not the only features of life.
They are not only our opinions.
They are institutions.
You talked about trade before.
It's about our loving, caring, our believing.
All of these make up what goes on in literature.
So yes, when I look at European anti-Americanism and as I suggested, this was done in the context that debates three or four years ago.
Part of what I look at are public opinion polls.
I think that's interesting data.
I don't think it proves anything conclusively, but I think it's useful to look at that.
I also look at political statements.
I look at contemporary statements by intellectuals and politicians, but I'm also concerned with longer-term evidence.
But there is a, I wouldn't say necessarily a branch of literary studies, but certainly something very close to what we do, which is in French, which would call Eastois de Monta Lite, history of mentalities.
I think there's a little of that also going on in your study, the European mentality.
But since we're talking about literature and this phenomenon, which is a topic today of anti-Americanism in Europe,
I think it's interesting that in your introduction you quote a writer, Salman Rushdie.
So maybe I'll read what he said and that will get us into our conversation.
Rushdie, Rushdie wrote anybody who has visited Britain and Europe or followed the public conversation there during the past five months will have been struck even shocked by the depth of anti-American feeling among large segments of the population as well as the news media.
Western anti-Americanism is an altogether more petulant phenomenon than its Islamic counterpart and oddly far more personalized.
Muslim countries don't like America's power, its arrogance, its success.
In the non-American West, the main objection seems to be to American people.
That's a very bold statement on his part, but I take it that you agree at least in part with what he's saying there.
I noted his statement with interest. I took it as an invitation to distinguish among attitudes toward the United States in different regions which may be driven by differing mentalities.
And I was particularly interested of course in his conclusion because I was writing about European anti-Americanism.
I was not writing about anti-Americanism in Latin America or in the Islamic world. These are interesting comparative cases, but not my topic.
He was suggesting then in that quotation that you just read that the anti-Americanism in Europe is directed at American people.
There is a not against you particularly me particularly, but there is a negative stereotype of the ugly American which attracts a considerable denigration on the part of the abstract European.
In fact, the German theater director, Peter Zadek, that you go on to quote is even more virulent in that where he says I think that it is cowardly that many people distinguish between the American people and the current American administration.
The Bush administration was more or less democratically elected and had the support of the majority of Americans in its Iraq war.
Bravo Zadek, I mean what he does there is explode the liberal response to my kind of argument, the liberal responses.
This isn't about America, it's not about Americanism or anti-Americanism, it's only about Bush.
And if Bush and his policies were to go, we would return to the natural love feast that ought to be prevailing between Europe and the United States.
This is wrong, Zadek is suggesting that there is a, that there is a long with Rushdie, that there is a hostility toward something deeper than current policy.
Okay, well now we want to get into that because in my reading of your book you make a strong case for why this anti-Americanism has little to do with us in America, has little to do with our policies.
That it mostly has to do with problems in the European psyche, visa via America.
And I'm not sure that I've been convinced entirely by your argument the way it's laid out, but I'd be happy to give you more occasion to convince me that that indeed the case that there is no effective and
the empirical rational reason for Europeans to have. That's fine, I think if a book is thoroughly convincing then it's visa is probably not bold enough.
Okay, so one of your thesis that anti-Americanism really operates like a prejudice and a stereotype and that it's largely impervious to rational arguments or factual proof.
What leads you to this conclusion when it comes to the Europeans?
Why would such a prejudice have developed in the first place against America?
Let me give you an example and then I'll reflect on perhaps the origins of the prejudice.
In the car atmosphere one of the figures of thought that Europeans sometimes direct negatively to the United States is that it's a country gripped by religious fanaticism and that it's been a country of religious fanatics from the start when a fanatic group of protest and sectarians left the civilization.
of England to establish the theocracy of New England.
And the argument, if it's an argument, goes on to suggest that that defines the nature of American society culture and politics.
Let's leave aside a theological debate of the nature of those immigrants who settled on the New England shores.
But just take note that it's a massive generalization even in terms of 18th century history.
New England was settled with religious inspiration, certainly not Virginia which was the political powerhouse well into the middle years of the republic.
So what you have is a pairing down of data to those points with which a negative stereotype can be constructed.
There are other examples one could cite in which what appears initially to be a criticism of policy turns out to be a predisposition to to to negativeism with regard to the United States.
So let's leave us leave aside questions of the Iraq war. Let's leave aside questions of the European Union. Let's leave aside questions of multilateralism unilateralism.
One finds in Europe, actually the best work on this is done by Andy Markovitz of the University of Michigan and a forthcoming book from Princeton University Press.
He shows that Europeans will direct hostility to the United States with regards to questions as apparently unpolitical as the preponderance of women in sports or the nature of soccer enthusiasm in the United States will be regarded with disdain by Europeans because Americans apparently don't get it right.
So there are issues which are far away from Conde Reiser George Bush. There's a hostility.
So it's as if on any sphere of life an opportunity for a negative judgment is sought frantically.
Why is it then that Europeans have a predisposition to behave in a prejudiced manner and look for to cherry pick experience in order to find the negative examples in order to prove the legitimacy of the negative judgment?
I'm not sure you mean some Europeans because of course first of all some Europeans. Although these are Europeans that have been particularly influential in the press in the public in the past decade.
And let me, I will concede from the start that this anti-Americanism has existed in a, well you started out the binary series, dialectic with a, with a file of Americanism, an American enthusiasm, not necessarily in the same people, sometimes in the same people, but they're intertwined.
So it's not as if all Europeans only have a negative judgment on the United States and I don't say that, right? But what I do say is that in European culture there is a, in European mentality to use your term, there's a, a reservoir of potential hostility to the United States that can be mobilized when particular politicians want to do it.
Now why is this? Again the critics will say, oh it's not that it's, it's, it's no mentality, it's just the Bush policy. But Bush policy can't explain anxieties about the United States going back to the 17th and 18th century.
I believe that some of the, some of the anxiety about the New World was exactly that, that here was a, that here was a continent that displaced Europe from the center of its pre-copernican universe.
In addition, there was a, there was surely some, some class element involved, that is who were the, who were the migrants leaving.
Europeans judged them retrospectively as those who could not make it in Europe and therefore had to flee to this foreign distant bizarre land. Beyond that, the emergence of the United States is a world power out in the age of the, in the era of the First World war and after that.
Surely there's a certain amount of jealousy in the course of the, the middle third of the 20th century. The United States emerged as a superpower while the European empires dissolved. There's some enmity about that. Beyond that, I think there are some special local circumstances. The German experience of, of the United States is really different from the French given the German occupation history.
The Italian history, the Irish history. There are, there are lots of local nuances. Nonetheless, I believe that there is operating a predisposition to look for, look for the worst and to overlook the best.
And in fact, in your second chapter, you, you analyze three variances, you call them a anti-Americanism in historical kind of chronology where you start with a pre-democratic cultural elitism.
That dismisses American mass culture and then the anti-democratic legacy of the communist attacks on the United States. And then finally the post-democratic resentment against the United States for retaining a national independence when the rest of Europe is, is unifying or federating. Do you want to say something briefly about these three different stages or variants?
Sure, and they're not, I don't mean them as stages. I mean them as descriptive, as a descriptive typology of, of, of attitudes that exist. Anti-Americanism like all prejudices is not rational. That is to say one can hold contradictory judgments in the United States as long as they're both negative. When, when steps back and looks at the array of negative judgments,
however, I believe one can discern these, these three different clusters if you will with their own distinct genealogies.
Particularly individuals may participate in more than one for sure, but that's not the point for, for analytic purposes.
Perhaps for literary critical purposes we can look at the discourse and, and see these different, these different centers of gravity if you will.
One is cultural leaders, it's the sense of the United States as the location of bad democracy, a bad leveling mass society in which that which is the best that which is aristocratic cannot thrive.
Is that a prejudice? Yeah, that's a prejudice for sure. Absolutely. It's, it's, it's, it's a stereotypical mindset that has been, a metastatic in European mentality since the early 19th century at the latest.
The, I know that I'm certainly a degree of prejudice. Anyway, that go on. Well, we'll talk about it.
Now, now I think it is possible to engage in a discussion of a critique of democracy, but to suggest that the, the, how should I put it, the shadow side of democracy is less operative in Western Europe than is in the United States. I think it is, is, is mendacious.
The, the second type I described is the, the legacy of, of communist anti-Americanism. The, the, the Soviet world collapsed with the opening of the Berlin Wall.
The, the left is still trying to regroup from that. Nonetheless, we should not underestimate the extent to which the old communist rhetoric of anti-imperialism still circulates and generates a, a kind of a kind of anti-Americanism.
We could, we could talk about that. We could talk about how it's distributed probably unequally over Europe. It's, it's very, very strong in former East Germany, not surprisingly. It's not that strong in other parts of Europe.
The, the third, and I think conceptually most interesting actually is what I call post democratic anti-Americanism.
This is the figure of thought that is especially resentful of what was denounced as unilateralism or the American insistence on its, its own national sovereignty and, and unwillingness to subsume its political
to, to international organizations. Here we have a real, a real topic to discuss with regard to the future democracy. Democracy as we know it existed once in city states, the policy and then became a national formation. We have national elections and then we would have local elections as well.
We don't have international elections and before, until we have international elections any, um, devolution of political prerogatives to international organizations represents the construction of an undemocratic bureaucracy that has no accountability.
Frankly, I think this is the way many Europeans experienced their own European Union as a bureaucracy without accountability. And let me if I can just finish this thought, the resentment directed against the United States is its insistence on legitimacy of national democracy.
Whereas in Europe, the politically correct line is that it was national egoism that led to the catastrophes of World War One and World War Two, therefore the agenda of overcoming national egoisms and creating a, a structure that abolishes the nation.
I have a few responses. One is that I agree that from an American point of view, there is something almost outrageous in Europe that when you have governing bodies that have not been popularly elected, who are deciding things that have huge consequences for the European people as a whole.
I'm thinking, for example, the Euro, who gave their consent to the introduction of a unified currency, no one, except some people in Brussels or likewise the European Constitution.
That I can agree with, but at the same time certainly there are some very important tensions there that one can't ascribe to prejudice. The fear or even paranoia in some cases of national egoism is well founded.
And the more the world becomes internationalized and globalized, the more there seems to be a need for transnational or super national institutions, whether it's the tribunals for war crimes or whether it's for environmental protection because the environmental degradation doesn't know anything about national boundaries.
So the European concern for establishing a set of institutions that have a certain degree of authority, if not sovereignty, over decisions made by particular nation states doesn't seem to be particularly irrational or the prejudicial. It has something to recommend it, wouldn't you say?
It's the European Revulsion at the American Assistance on Independence that is the prejudice.
Far be it from me to reject out of hand any institutional project. However, while building institutions has much to recommend itself, it would seem that the European, again,
generalize massively, but the European breeders position is to generate institutions as a substitute for action.
If it were up to the Europeans, Milosevic would still be in power in Serbia, and the Red Army would still be in East Berlin.
For all of their institutions, the Europeans proved themselves repeatedly incapable of decisive action.
But Russell, that's their failure to react to these realities.
But if I'm certainly not an expert in this domain by any means, but my sense in speaking to Europeans is that their investment in creating these super national institutions is not to create institutions that are able to react,
to actually to forestall another Milosevic down the line, or to forestall a totalitarian regime growing in their midst in Europe and so forth.
The more there is a kind of integration or federation of the larger the European Union becomes, the more unlikely it is in the future that one will have to deal with these rogue states or rogue regimes.
Now, I think here I'm maybe more Nietzsche in the new, I think the, I'd agree with the first half of the sentence that they, they, they create the institutions in order to forestall, but to forestall the decision to take action.
Well, again, I'm trying to, I'm wondering whether by, for example, bringing in all these Eastern European countries into the European Union, whether the thinking there, the reasoning is that by bringing them into the European Union, this is a way of guaranteeing peace and stability far into the future, where we don't have to go and bomb,
Delgrade, or take out a regime within within that purview, but anyway, we can leave that, we can leave that as an open question.
Could, but of course, let's remember that there were many West Europeans who were enormously opposed to the expansion of the Eastern, and if anything, it was an American foreign policy initiative to expand the EU to the East.
Yeah.
Which was then criticized by Europeans as a devious American attempt to weaken the EU.
In fact, we're talking about Europe as a very complicated aggregate of not just nations, but ideologies and attitudes and political equations and so forth.
Here's one thing that I'd like to ask you about your third category of post-democratic anti-Americanism, which resents the national independence that America has shown in its Union lateral decisions, but I think conjugated with that is also is an anti-globalist sentiment.
So, that globalization is something that is associated with America, and you write about that, that length.
These two things would seem somewhat contradictory on the face of it that on the one hand America wants to operate in isolation with its own national sovereignty.
On the other hand, it is at the vanguard of pushing greater and greater internationalization and globalization.
And there's a lot of objection and resentment against that.
Yes, I think that a considerable amount of the hostility toward America overlaps with hostility toward globalization.
Let's leave aside the question of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the critique of globalization from a political economic standpoint.
But what this demonstrates, this overlap, is that anti-Americanism is among other things also an expression of lingering European anxieties about modernization.
The weather the United States is truly the agent of globalization, as opposed to the much more export dependent economies of Western Europe, is another matter that one could cite data on.
The United States has not been particularly effective in opening up China to American consumer goods.
It's a globalization in that sense, only works in one direction, and that's becoming a political issue in this country, where indeed there would be a desire for greater but symmetrical globalization.
I also found it interesting, I don't know if you would call it psychological analysis or cultural analysis about how, when you say that anti-Americanism functions like a prejudice, that it has this magnifying effect.
Now, because America is the sole remaining superpower, that doesn't mean that it's very powerful, it means that it's infinitely powerful, it has an infinite omnipotence, and that therefore all the woes of the world can be ascribed to it.
When you speak about this magnifying effect, when you give two examples about McCarthy era here in America, many people assume that the communists were so super organized and functioned so perfectly that they were everywhere, and that they had this omnipotence that then subsequently turned out not to be the case at all.
Likewise, you use the comparison with anti-Semitism, where the anti-Semite typically will see the power of the Jews just everywhere, and that there is a strain among Europeans which has magnified American power such that it can always take the blame in any case.
That's right, this is not a particularly European disease, although I think it is a feature of European anti-Americanism to ascribe and omnipotence and really also an unlimited rationality to the American government.
The sense that if there is something wrong in the world, it was carried out and planned intentionally by the Bush administration.
The most salient example in your listeners should know this is the circulation of bestsellers in Europe, which assert that 9/11 was an American plot.
This is not just...
It's a very minority opinion.
It's a bestseller in France, I'm forgetting the title, but I'm not suggesting that all Europeans agree with this, that would be silly, but it's a widely circulated and placed in the world.
But the efficiency, rationality, and power of the American government.
Anyone who lives in this country would have significant doubts about the unlimited efficiency of the government and surely its rationality.
But Europeans think that if it's decided in Washington it will happen in the world. This is silly.
It is silly when it's taken to that extreme, but here's where I have certain hesitations about the concept of prejudice, which is either as reasonable or as prejudice, or the idea that the American government is
omnipotent, or that that's either a delusion or simply false.
Can there not be prejudices which are half true?
Can one not believe that the American government does have a certain kind of reach and efficacy when it puts its mind to something, even though it's not omnipotent,
and that it doesn't control everything, but some things.
Well, I agree. I mean, it's an interesting epistemological question. I think there's probably no prejudice that isn't half true, but what that means is there's no prejudice which isn't about 50% false.
If it's a prejudice, that means some people believe it, and therefore there must be some shards of evidence with which people
talk themselves into believing that such and such a claim is true. Prejudice is false, but it's not fully false.
I am not arguing that the United States is without power, but there's a big, big distance between powerless and omnipotent.
And the European predisposition to see the United States as the source and origin of all evil in the world that it plans and it carries out.
This is just pathological.
It goes too far, but sometimes you phrase it very strongly when you want to denounce that prejudice by saying that
anti-American is not the function of a real world experience of the United States or of American behavior. That sounds very categorically. Maybe it's partly a real world experience in American behavior that it's you speak about a political fantasy and irrational ideological view of the world that spreads largely independently of any objective contact with the United States or its culture.
Why are you committed to taking that analysis to such an extreme where it's sometimes it seems like it's an either or, either you're on the part of the dilutional,
or you're on the side of the rational, and if you're on the side of the rational, oftentimes America seems to have to be ex-cultated of all the possible
objections that the other side might bring to bear.
No, I think, you know, choosing between the side of the dilute and the side of the rational, I choose the side of the rational.
But does it have to be an either or?
I think one has to understand the rationality of the delusion that is where does the delusion come from?
And the predisposition in the public debate on these matters has been to suggest, well,
if someone has a critique of the United States, it must be valid.
What is wrong in Washington that leads people to come to these negative judgments?
My suggestion is, well, let's step back a second and ask why the predisposition to come to negative judgments?
I think another dimension to all of this, frankly, and you got close to this in your introduction,
although I don't talk about this in the book, is that there's a certain echo chamber effect in so far as the positions.
I will call them diluted in wacky positions that circulate in Europe about the United States.
Frequently, we'll be congruent with statements that Americans may well hold domestically.
That is to say, delusion too can enter the country without a passport.
The, when's this predisposition to be so severe in a judgment on the United States?
I think there are European sources for this that go back centuries,
but I also think that there are American sources for it.
In your description of the United States as most puritan and most lecivious,
which you intended presumably as opposites, I'd gloss that and say simply,
"Well, no. In fact, the Puritan saw themselves as the most lecivious,
because they had the strongest predisposition to self-criticism.
This culture, this American culture, inherits that and then exports it.
And we face it in the form of European anti-Americanism."
Well, Russell, we don't have that much time left. I wanted to ask a little bit about the politics of the book,
because a book like this is clearly going to be categorized by some of the readers about where it falls
in the political spectrum between liberal conservative.
And we know about the inadequacy of those categorizations,
but nevertheless, you were known as being really on the far left.
When I arrived at Stanford back in the '80s,
and you have a noble lineage with the Marxist tradition of a certain type with the Frankfurt School and so forth.
This book seems to have a much more conservative inflection than any of the work of yours that I've known you to do in the past.
Do you see it that way as well?
Yeah, I think that's a possible response. I'd have to nuance all those terms.
What exactly is conservatism?
The oxymoron of noble Marxism would be also interesting to pursue.
But let me just say this, and maybe we can proceed from there,
that I think it's good that Saddam Hussein was removed from power.
I think it was the right thing to do.
I think it was very plausible to imagine weapons of mass destruction being there.
I also think for human rights reasons alone it was good and would that the Europeans show the same muscle in corollary cases,
but they have a greater tolerance for human misery.
I suppose that could be read as conservative or is the term neo-conservative,
but I think the terms are wrong.
What George W. Bush has pursued as a foreign policy after 9/11, not before,
is very much in the tradition of Wilsonian foreign policy.
What a colleague has once called an evangelical liberalism,
a sense of a mission to spread democracy throughout the world.
This is not a conservative position.
This is not an isolationist position.
It's a position that has been associated with all the great advances in liberalization in Western society from the French Revolution.
The French Revolution issues into Napoleon.
I think Napoleon spread civilization in the rule of law through Europe,
and I think that was a good thing.
I also think that Saddam's removal was a good thing.
Well, it's clear.
I put you certainly on one side of this debate that's raging in this country.
I don't see it that way at all actually.
I have concerns about the recurrent phrase in your book,
for example, of democratic capitalism.
You often use those terms as if they're equivalent one to the other,
or that capitalism is the natural correlate of democracy.
When I look at the certain policies that our nation promotes,
I think democracy is more often than not used as a euphemism for capitalism,
and that the two things are not at all equivalent one to the other.
And two often democracy is, again, a noble veneer behind which is operating another quite venial motivation.
In fact, we have a long history of promoting capitalism in countries which are far from democratic,
and we couldn't give a damn whether their democracies are not democracies,
as long as they open their markets to us, as long as the interests of capital are welcomed into those countries.
So far from insisting that democracy be the precondition for us over the expansion of capitalism,
we use the rhetoric of democracy when it suits us really euphemistically for something else.
I think that capitalism without democracy is flawed in the middle term.
It won't survive, or it will democratize in order for the market to flourish.
I think democracy without capitalism, democracy without protection of private property is just foolishness.
Well, democracy is more than just protection of private property.
But it's a good place to start.
So, but again, do you also say that in anti-Americanism in Europe that it's a kind of universal general judgment?
And that I can't find the place in your text now where you say that what anti-Americanism resists is the history of freedom and liberation,
or something along these lines. I can find your exact terms, but I think that you'll recall that there are places in your book where you associate America
with the leader in this movement towards universal emancipation of humanity, which is not, again, this is highly debatable.
That's pure Hegelianism, of course, is debatable. But I believe one of the points I was making is that for the European elite,
the emergence of a thriving democratic republic on the western shore of the Atlantic represented a threat to the hierarchical societies of Europe.
One of the strands, not the only strand, but one of the strands in European anti-Americanism has been the legacy of this anxiety about democracy, about democracy and capitalism.
America is attacked as democratic, that is mass vulgar, pagery, I think was your term.
America is attacked as capitalistic, as venal, as greedy, as avaricious. Of course, Europe is neither avaricious nor tojri, so they're in a good position to criticize us.
No, they can be both, but the notion that anti-Americanism resists what you call the potential of freedom in human history, makes it again this either or, either you're with us or you're against us.
That, to say that if one is going to be anti-American, it means that one resists freedom in human history, doesn't leave room for a reasoned anti-Americanism, which sees, if not the idea of America, at least the policies of America, as not having promoted freedom everywhere, it's left its mark, that on the contrary has all too often been in bed with regimes that we would never tolerate.
I doologically speaking. So, maybe there's room in the middle for having a much more reasoned anti-Americanism that has basis, in fact, and indeed in America's policies.
Many regimes in North America and in Western Europe have been in bed with all sorts of unsavory characters.
It is, however, only toward the United States that this poor choice in bedmates is directed as a basis of criticism.
With us or against us, it would be illuminating, I think, to hold a seminar on the complexity of that opposition.
With us does not mean full and complete agreement does not mean lockstep, but I do think that in political life, that is political life of states and the political life of citizens who participate in states, moments of decision do come where it does become yes or no.
We in our seminars can go on forever. Radio shows probably not, but seminars for sure. Parliament for sure discussions at dinner parties well oil can go on forever.
But in moments of politics decisions have to be made in a certain point, yes, with us or against us.
Well, that is a good place to end the rest of the lines we are at a time. So thanks for coming on. I want to remind our listeners that we have a web page.
I just log on to the French and Italian departments web page, Stanford's French and Italian department click on entitled opinions, leave your comments, listen to past shows.
Thanks to David Lummis for his technical assistance as usual and thanks again Russell for coming on.
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