Sanders - American avatar the United States in the global imagination

American Avatar

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The UNITED STATES in the GLOBAL IMAGINATION

Barry A. Sanders

Copyright 2011 by Barry A. Sanders

Published in the United States by Potomac Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sanders, Barry A.

American avatar : the United States in the global imagination / Barry A. Sanders.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59797-681-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-59797-774-6 (electronic edition)

1. United StatesForeign public opinion. 2. United StatesForeign relations2001-2009. 3. United StatesForeign relations2009- 4. Anti-Americanism. I. Title.

E895.S26 2011
327.7300905dc23

2011019989

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard.

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To Nancy

No one likes usI dont know why
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try
But all around, even our old friends put us down
Lets drop the big one and see what happens.
Randy Newman, Political Science, 1972

On September 12, 2001, while Ground Zero in Manhattan still glowed and smoked, Americans awoke to find themselves bathed in expressions of sympathy and affection across the globe. Jean-Marie Colombani, editor of the French daily Le Monde, headlined, We Are All Americans. He asked rhetorically, How can we not feel profound solidarity with those people, that country, the United States, to whom we are so close and to whom we owe our freedom? Flowers were strewn before American embassies from Germany to Japan. Crowds poured into the streets of foreign capitals to express their grief over the murders and destruction in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

A little more than two and a half years later, the same Jean-Marie Colombani wrote a story for Le Monde entitled, We Are All Un-American? Similar drops in public favor were reflected in many other countries around the world. By mid-2004 the percentage of Jordanians expressing approval of their ally and major cash benefactor, the United States, dropped to 5 percent. What happened? What does it mean?

The United States was not universally loved even before September 11, 2001. Arabs celebrated the attacks in large public demonstrations in Cairo and Nablus, while people elsewhere expressed quiet satisfaction at the blow to the United States. Even where the pre-attack measurements of United States popularity were high, they were never 100 percent. At the deepest level, some of the expressions of disapproval of the United States reflect the same emotions that motivated the perpetrators of the attacks, who took their own lives in the process of striking out at the symbols of American economic and military power. In his sympathetic article on September 12, 2001, Colombani wrote, America, in the solitude of its power in certain parts of the globe ... seems to draw nothing but hate.

For some it must be hate. For many others it may be too much love unrequited love, disappointed love. The United States bears the worlds hopes and dreams as no other nation in history. In its solitude of power, the United States evokes expectations and longings among foreigners in their version of the American Dream. This is true American exceptionalism, and it is unique in history. In his first visit to Europe as president, in April 2009, Barack Obama answered a question from a Financial Times reporter about whether he believed in American exceptionalism. He said, I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. His suspicion ignores the anomaly of American exceptionalism. There is no discussion of British or Greek exceptionalism among the citizens of those nations, and certainly no such concept among foreigners. And this difference is not about relative power. We know of no concept of Roman exceptionalism believed by the people on the edges of the Roman Empire or Mongol exceptionalism by the outside observers of Genghis Khans hordes. The world outside its borders has high expectations for America. Those expectations are a mixed blessing.

We must proceed with caution in analyzing attitudes based on opinion polling. The rapid decline in American popularity between 2000 and 2004 partly reflects the fickle and superficial nature of public opinion and the unreliability of global polling. Despite the absence of any real change in the United States or its policies between 2004 and 2005, Jordanian approval of the United States more than quadrupled to 21 percent in that time. French and German approval also rose, and British opinion dropped even further than in 2004. By May 2009, following the inauguration of President Obama and before he had implemented any significant changes in foreign policies, favorability ratings for the United States were once again at or above the levels from 2000 in most countries. This volatility in polling hints at a more fundamental problem in interpreting such results: public opinion is a superficial phenomenon, like surface eddies in the sea. The images on which they draw are deeper currents that change more slowly and, over time, more consistently influence peoples conception of the world around them, including their pictures of the United States. This book examines both that fundamental visualization of America and the dynamic process of its expression.

Surveying the imagery people express about the United States exposes their consistent undercurrents of thought. People change their views rapidly, leaning toward more negative or positive opinions, but the imagery they use to articulate their concepts draws from a pool of old ideas. This pool changes, but only gradually. The United States is seen as rich, powerful, hypocritical, racist, imperialist, and democratic, among a host of other qualities. All of these and many others date back at least one hundred years in the popular imagination. All have some basis in fact, yet all are stereotypes, and none can be completely true. They are the data in peoples minds, the components that people assemble to articulate their attitudes.

The attitudes that rule the selection of images from the pool are controlled by a set of predispositions. Some are fleetinga mood, a temper. Some are deeper rooteda fear, a hope. Some are quite permanenta religion, an ideology. Many people can harbor conflicting predispositions, making predicting or changing their attitudes a confounding process. These biases guide the formation of opinions on any subject. They are the filters that sift through and select among the stored images. We must look at both the nature and process of image collection and the biases that determine which images are selected, in order to understand the views people express on America, whether changeable or permanent, pro-American or anti-American.