On Really Existing Anti-Americanism - Hoover Institution

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Hoover Classics : Berman hcberman ch3 Mp_68 rev0 page 68 68 Anti-Americanism in Europe have done, since the opponent is only a belated discovery. This sort of hostility, on the contrary, is an expression of an internal cultural or psychological process that requires the invention of a threat: an imagined enemy representing the fictive danger required to sustain a troubled identity. The image of the enemy is not the result of a real opposition but acts instead as a mechanism to confirm the identity of the group. The enemy, in this sense, is just a scapegoat, and the vilification of the scapegoat confirms the cohesion of the community. The discourse of enmity, the sharply contoured external-oriented narrative of hostility, turns out to be largely internally driven; rather than describing an external world, it plays a role in the construction of identity. Hostility, in such cases, is not about the enemy but about the self. It involves an animus that predates the encounter with the presumed enemy. Instead of a model in which a real opponent elicits a hostile response, there is an internally generated anger, which only subsequently finds an object to oppose. This is the case for European anti- Americanism: it is not a matter of a plausible response to a real threat but rather the construction of an external enemy in order to maintain the coherence of an identity for Europe. This argument concerning an endogenous or subjective hostility is not meant to pertain to all conflicts. In other cases, tragedy and opposition do exist and lead to real-world struggle. Here, however, it is a matter of conflicts that are primarily subjective, driven by the internal logic of a cultural or psychological need to find an opponent, rather than by a confrontation with a par-
Hoover Classics : Berman hcberman ch3 Mp_69 rev0 page 69 Really Existing Anti-Americanism 69 ticular opponent in an objective competition for a specific good. In the case of a subjective hostility, the passion of belligerence, be it on the individual or collective level, is ultimately separate from and prior to the choice of the target of vilification. In political propaganda, this is precisely the dynamic that George Orwell described so masterfully in 1984: mass sentiment would be channeled into hatred for ever-shifting opponents for reasons that had little to do with those opponents and everything to do with ensuring the stability of the totalitarian political culture. Hatred becomes a free-floating instinct, available for redirection toward whatever object is most expedient. The ritual denunciation of the opponent may refer to distant circumstances, but it serves a purpose closer to home. It has ultimately nothing to do with the vilified opponent’s real existence, about which it prefers to remain largely ignorant and uninformed. Because it depends on this distance from and denial of facts, this sort of mind-set unleashes a continuing process of reality loss. The drama of enmity is therefore false drama, as we can explore in the case of current European anti- Americanism. the case of anti-americanism To say that European anti-Americanism lacks a genuinely dramatic scene means that it is not a reciprocal conflict between equal opponents. Anti-Americanism cannot be explained as part of a mirror-image hostility. There is, to be sure, some diffuse blowback, moments of anti-European hostility in the United States, but it is
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On Really Existing Anti-Americanism - Hoover Institution

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