Frankreich und Amerika
Aus der Beschäftigung mit den Ursachen des Antiamerikanismus ist mittlerweile eine ganze Literaturgattung erwachsen. Paul Berman hat sich für “The New Republic” einmal umgeschaut, was französische Autoren über den Antiamerikanismus in ihrem Land zu sagen haben:
The French began to hear about an oppressive political atmosphere in America–the sort of atmosphere in which American magazines and newspapers could shortly expect to be crushed under Washington’s iron heel, and political dissidents could expect to be violently suppressed, and power would fall into the hands of a tiny sinister clique. And this most sinister of anti-democratic cabals–who were its members, exactly? Here followed the murmurings about neoconservatism and the heavy hand of Israel on the American steering wheel.
Nor was America’s lurch into a post-democratic, ultra-montane, and crypto-Zionist authoritarianism going to bestow upon the world any of the benign effects that might be expected from a well-administered dictatorship–a reliable sense of security, for instance. On the contrary! In France a fear arose that, for all of America’s bellicosity, expansionism, and savagery, American power was fragile, and the United States was poised to collapse into economic catastrophe and racial mayhem–which meant that if, out of some perverse logic, France felt tempted to cast its lot with Bush’s America, any such alliance would prove to be imprudent, and America was going to drag its friends and allies down to defeat. Weakness, not strength, was the ultimate American reality.
(…) What, after all, is this amorphous thing, anti-Americanism? A reasonable person might even wonder if such a phenomenon actually exists. In our modern world, hardly anyone outside of the fervid ranks of the most extreme Islamism and movements of that sort will acknowledge harboring any kind of top-to-bottom contempt or hatred for America at all–only a mix of yay and nay on American themes, as with any country and its failures and achievements. Emmanuel Todd, in his After the Empire, goes so far as to emphasize that he has an American ancestor, who was Jewish to boot.
Antiamerikaner will eben niemand sein. Umso schwieriger ist es, das Thema zu fassen. Ausführlich widmet sich Berman den Autoren Philippe Roger (”The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism”), Pierre Rigoulot (”L’Antiaméricanisme: Critique d’un prêt-à-penser rétrograde et chauvin”), Barbara Lefebvre und Ève Bonnivard (”Élèves sous influence”), Jean-François Revel (”Anti-Americanism”) und André Glucksmann (”Le discours de la haine”). Sein Fazit fällt gemischt aus, gibt es doch nicht nur tiefverwurzelte antiamerikanische Ressentiments unter den Franzosen, sondern auch hellsichtige Intellektuelle, die wider den Strom schwimmen:
Yes, there is an anger in France today. Some of it is directed at the United States, on the most traditional of grounds. And yet, as these quotations show, some of the French anger turns out to be anti-anti-American–an anger expressed by the dissident intellectuals, directed at French traditions and not at modern America. A new sort of anger: lucid, historical-minded, scholarly, critical, and eye-opening.
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