Tismaneanu has written widely on Eastern and Central European
politics. See his chapter on Romanian "Communism" ala Ceausescu
in, "The Stalinist Legacy, " edited by Tariq Ali. And, "The Crisis
of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe. The Poverty of Utopia."
London/NY: Routledge, 1988.
Michael Pugliese
On Anti-Americanism: The Resources And Persistence Of A Political
Myth
By Vladimir Tismaneanu
The period of relative calm that was characteristic of the 1990s
-- in spite of the conflicts in the Balkans and the Gulf War
-- has come to an end. Far from having ended, as Francis Fukuyama
(1992) predicted in a moment of euphoric Hegelian elan, history
continues to be haunted by neuroses, fantasies, and political
myths. Ideological tensions have not exhausted themselves, and
the new political and economic spasms have deep origins in not
so new collective anxieties and anguishes. Ethnocentric tribalism,
racism, rationalized by intellectuals with pretensions of national
saviors, clerical and militaristic populism are rampant at this
beginning of a new century and millennium. The age of extremes,
which British historian Eric Hobsbawm regarded as the hallmark
of the 20th century (1996), an era inaugurated by World War I
and concluded with the collapse of the European Leninist regimes
during the revolutions of 1989-91, sends its alarming prolongations
into the new century.
The liberal revolution and the rise of a planetary open space
have generated both immense hopes and excruciating fears. Not
everybody is happy in this emerging globalized space (Shafir,
2001, pp. 410-411): from the French farmers to the Polish peasants,
from the neo-anarchist movements to the Latin American neo-Bolivarian
nationalists, we are witnessing the resurrection of romantic
anticapitalist sentiment. Old nostalgia related to the agrarian-pastoral
visions of the organic community have made a comeback -- this
time under the banner of the struggle against the new inequalities
provoked by "market fundamentalism." Ironically, this term entered
the political and economic debates thanks to American financier
and social thinker George Soros, himself one of the main promoters
of the new civic globalism (Soros, 1998). As I anticipated in
some of my earlier analyses, the post-Marxist age, the aftermath
of the redemptive political-secular messianism, including their
ultimate expression, communism, is dominated by a feverish search
for a new set of values, or, better said, for a new axis mundi.
Political myths respond precisely to these collective uncertainties,
and intellectuals are more often than not those who articulate
these utopian expectations and impulses (Tismaneanu, 1998). Some
of these myths, including those referring to global civil society
and democratization as inexorable engines of modernity, serve
the affirmation of a world based on rationality and intercultural
dialogue. They help us come to terms with a political and symbolic
universe that favors diversity and pluralism and opposes self-absorbed
forms of monistic determinisms (Bauman, 1995). Other myths, however,
are imbued with vindictive passions and energies. They stem from
the failure to find explanations for and solutions to the growing
marginality experienced by the denizens of the peripheral areas
of the new globalism. To mention but one example among many:
Indian novelist Arundhati Roy has become one of the most vocal
critics of the U.S. in its attributed posture of driving force
of Western neo-imperialism (see Dugger, 2001).
A new world system has been emerging for the last two decades,
dominated not only by the globalization of information and markets,
but also by the universalization of the classical principles
of liberal democracy, especially the sovereignty of the individual.
The United States -- as the symbol of this new globalism -- makes
it the target of enduring anti-imperialist resentment. For reasons
that need thorough analyses, America and its closest allies among
the Western advanced democracies have become the target of political,
psychological, and terrorist attacks with catastrophically tragic
consequences. In spite of countless soothing declarations, dictatorial
regimes from countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Cuba, etc., perceive
America's hegemonic position within the post-Cold War international
political, military, and economic system as a threat to their
very survival. One thing needs to be clear: it is not the defense
of local cultural and religious identities that harbors this
anti-American resentment, but the fear that in a world emancipated
from absolutist constraints the old forms of domination -- justified
via religious or ideological mythologies -- will fall apart.
To the extent that globalization means the universal expansion
of American mass culture, there are sufficient reasons to defend
and assert the local identities. On the other hand, one needs
to remember, there is no strategic plan meant to impose this
expansion. It is a spontaneous phenomenon, driven both by market
forces, consumerism, and mimetism, and it is linked to the general
decline of high culture in mass societies. But American values
mean much more than fast food chains and Hollywood. In a famous
book, political philosopher Hannah Arendt demonstrated that the
main distinction between the French and the American revolutions
lie in their paramount guiding principle: equality for the former,
liberty for the latter (Arendt, 1985). More recently, a similar
position -- inspired by Arendt's seminal volume -- has been taken
by the former Polish dissident Adam Michnik, one of the most
profound thinkers on post-Communist evolutions (see "Intellectuals
and Social Change," 1992, pp. 621-627). Once again, I hasten
to add, we deal with political myth, not with fiction or chimera.
By myths I understand the symbolic narratives that motivate,
organize, and mobilize actions of political communities. Their
force, as authors like Ernst Cassirer (1946, pp. 47-48) and Isaiah
Berlin (1982, pp. 318-319) showed, depends on their credibility,
not on their truthfulness. From this perspective, nationalism
-- especially in its primordialist-fundamentalist versions --
is a political myth opposed to the cosmopolitan dimension of
liberal democracy. Nationalism stakes on sentiments of dignity,
wounded pride, psychological vulnerability, and social alienation.
It is equally related, as Yugoslav writer Danilo Kis memorably
wrote in a tragically illuminating essay (1995), to the paranoid
attempts to explain historical defeats and setbacks. Conspiracy
theories abound in this type of fantasy-ridden compensatory discourses.
As of the writing of this essay, important figures in the Muslim
world's mass media unabashedly maintain that behind the terrorist
attack on 11 September were not the Islamic mystical revolutionary
extremists, but the Israeli secret service. The disgraceful and
long-since debunked slanders that form the perfidiously anti-Semitic
pamphlet "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" have resurfaced
in forms only slightly refurbished. More than ever, the liberalism
that the civilized world can oppose to these explosions of resentment
is one of lucidity and skepticism: one rooted in the awareness
of the threats that we have confronted and will continue to confront,
including the proliferation of movements inspired by hatred,
fanaticism, and unswerving rejection of pluralist modernity (see
Hollander, 2001).
Communism and Fascism, in their traditional incarnations, have
failed. The same cannot be said about the psycho-ideational structures
that made their rise possible. There is a primordial form of
radicalism that cannot be effectively opposed with quotations
for the philosophers of the Enlightenment. The struggle of the
foreseeable future will oppose those who defend, at any price,
the vision and practices of an open society, and their opponents,
recruited from the most diverse countries and social zones. Contrary
to Samuel Huntington's initial (1991) approach, the "clash of
civilizations" is a divide within each political culture, East
and West. Whether we like it or not, we are living in an age
of acute ideological warfare. To resume a statement attributed
to Leon Trotsky, it is irrelevant whether we are interested in
war. What matters is that the war is interested in our lives
and us. Indulging in sophistries about culpability, denying the
basic contradiction between civilization and barbarism, looking
for the culprits among the victims and not among the authors
of terrorist atrocities, means simply to close our eyes to the
mortal threats to the very destiny of the democratic world, as
U.S. political scientist Benjamin Barber recently argued in an
interview with the French weekly "L'Express" (20-26 September
2001).
Thus, the 11 September catastrophe has revived a very important
discussion on the presence of the anti-American political myth
in the ideological structures (intellectual "dispositiffs," to
use Michel Foucault's terminology), inspiring fundamentalist
terrorist movements. Without understanding the motivations of
these fanatic sects there will be no way for a comprehensive
and systematic response to their terrible challenge (it is symptomatic
that for weeks, the title of "The New York Times" special section
dealing with the war on terrorism and its consequences has been "A Nation Challenged" -- a formulation quite different from the
almost universal media reference to "America Strikes Back.").
In his discourse to the U.S. Congress delivered in the aftermath
of the terrorist attack, President George W. Bush correctly pointed
out the connection between the extremist ideologies inspiring
these movements of "true believers" and the 20th century's totalitarian
disasters. Indeed, we deal with the same type of one- dimensional
thought, obsessed with conspiracies and impregnated with eschatological
ardor. In both of these incarnations, religious and secular,
fundamentalism erases the separating line between the City of
Man and the City of God. It promises immediate redemption through
the destruction of all the presumably corruptive and perverting
factors.*
Years ago, Venezuelan political thinker Carlos Rangel published
a book (1976) that needs to be carefully reread. He traced the
road "from the virtuous savage to the good revolutionary." Later,
the same author dwelt at length on the radical hostility to liberal
values among both Western and Third World elites (Rangel, 1982).
The main idea in the earlier volume was that the behind the frantic
revolutionism of Latin America's radical left one could detect
a painful inferiority complex generated by the political and
economic success of the United States. Even now, the partisans
of Colonel Hugo Chavez, the populist president of a country rebaptized
the "Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela," do not hesitate to question
the terrorist nature of the activities undertaken in the 1970s
and 80s by Ilich Ramirez, the notorious Carlos "the Jackal."
Nobody denies the fact that we live in a world of glaring economic
contrasts. Rangel's argument, however, was that the causes of
both success and failure are to be found within one's own country,
not outside its borders. It is not North America's fault for
the Argentine debacle in the 20th century, but rather the Peronista
populist demagoguery, and the failure of the home elites to seriously
address the challenges of modernity and to accept the spirit
of capitalism, including its less convenient consequences. It
is much easier to promise the pie in the sky to the "descamisados"
of this world, the celebrated wretched of the earth, than to
organize economic and political life in accordance to the principles
of a free and open society. Never ever did populist radicalism
offer more than what Max Weber once called "sterile excitation"
(Weber, 1957, p. 115). The attacks on "mondialism" coming from
the anti-American Left and the Right attached to the values of "Blut und Boden" (blood and soil) have one common denominator:
the angst, the fear provoked by the dislocations of modernity,
the rise of the middle class (bourgeoisie), and the dissolution
of traditional forms of state and religious control over citizens.
Hence the fascination exerted by leftist -- in fact neo-Leninist
-- theories of dependency on the ideologues of the radical Right
(in Russia, Hungary, Romania).
The anti-American mythology consists of constellations of emotions,
attitudes, sentiments and vaguely structured ideas that reject
pluralism, the state of law, modern secular humanism, and freedom
as a self-constitutive value. Communism and Fascism have opposed
these principles on behalf of holistic visions, which claimed
to propose revolutionary alternatives to liberal modernity. They
were themselves forms of modernity, but structurally different
from the experiment that made its historical debut with the Renaissance
and has culminated in the vision of a world emancipated from
any form of absolutism. Without any doubt, the anti-American
myth is most powerful in non-democratic societies. There are
of course anti-American outbursts in Europe and Asia, but the
virulence and vehemence of the myth are particularly notable
in closed societies-secular despots (Cuba, Syria, Iraq) or theocracies
(Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan). Anti-Americanism, as a political
myth, conjures up the image of a "soulless" country (the U.S.)
enslaved by the God of money. In this demonology, America means
thirst for profit, mercantilism, cupidity, plutocracy, militarism,
imperialism, and all the rest. And, of course, as in the Nazi
(or Stalinist) scenarios, the power of the money (banks) means
the power of the international Jewry and its accomplices. The
myth ignores the fact that for decades America has been the main
source of humanitarian aid for the underprivileged nations. It
does not matter, in this hallucinatory amalgam, that the U. S.
military had no other reasons to intervene in Somalia but to
stop the local warlords from completely exterminating their unfortunate
population. And, again, it is irrelevant, within the mythological
framework, that America intervened in Kosova in 1999 to prevent
the regime of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic from completing
the macabre, anti-Muslim, Albanian ethnic-cleansing operations.
The outraged reactions among exponents of some traditions that
feel threatened by the invasion of modernity express panic created
by an undesired contact with values that subvert presumably sacred
hierarchies and order. In the 1960s, a famous Iranian writer,
Jalal Al-e Ahamad, deplored the cultural disease that had allegedly
infected the urban intellectual milieus. To describe this malady
he proposed the term "Westoxication." Two decades later, Iran's
Ayatollah Khomeini started his own war against this "pathology,"
imposing a theocracy that claimed to be immune to the siren songs
of liberal democracy. In the fall of 2001, the most wanted terrorist
of all time, Osama bin Laden, proclaims as the ultimate reason
for his actions the presence of the American ("infidel") troops
in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden announces that we have entered a new
era of religious warfare against the "crusaders" (read Christians)
and the Jews. Obviously, the Arab world's hostility to Israel
is linked not only to historical-territorial issues. The ultimate
cause for this adversity is that Israel is a democratic and prosperous
society, despite the absence of natural resources comparable
to those held by its Arab neighbors. In its radical versions,
at the extreme left and right of the political spectrum, anti-Americanism
is synonymous with anti-Semitism and anti- Zionism. Explicitly
or implicitly, it repudiates the foundations of Judeo-Christian
morality in the name of completely opposed norms. The result
is the shaping (indeed the invention) of a tradition of victimhood,
sacrifice, martyrdom, and sacred duty to kill in the name of
the ultimate sacred goals. The end, once again, sanctifies the
means.
The anti-American myth is present not only among the intellectual
elites in the Arab countries, or, more generally, in the Third
World. It can be encountered, under various populist disguises,
even in highly sophisticated Western circles, including the U.S.
Immediately after the 11 September attacks, famous historian
Paul Kennedy maintained, during a debate at Yale University,
that it is the military, diplomatic, cultural, and economic power
of the United States that provokes adversarial and resentful
reactions. Things are, of course, much more complex than these
disembodied ideological schemes (see Hartocollis, 2001, as well
as Sciolino, 2001, for a generally thoughtful and informative
discussion of the anti-American reactions linked to envy, anguish,
and resentment). Anti-modern nihilism includes, but is not limited
to, anti- Americanism: its origins are related to the zealot
mentality of the true believer and the regimented fanaticism
of charismatic-salvationist movements. For the members of such
groups death is the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of an alleged
heroic cause. The fanatic cannot accept the modern world with
its real perplexities and risks. He does not find in its satisfactions
a sufficient reason for life. The ultimate cause, the destructive
exorcism bound to defeat what appears to him as a crooked universe
provides the true believer with an exhilarating "ratio moriendi."
In spite of its inner logical contradiction and shocking historical
simplifications, anti- Americanism is credible precisely because
it appeals to the infrarational zones of the collective psyche,
especially in disconcerted societies, among marginal and frustrated
social strata -- including the Islamicizing, disenchanted post-Marxist
intelligentsia of the Arab world (see Keppel, 1991). What the
members of Bin Laden's terrorist cells have in common with the
Italian Red Brigades, or the Baader-Meinhoff "Red Army Faction,"
or the Russian nihilists of the 19th century (Sergei Nechayev,
Andrei Zhelyabov, Sofia Perovskaya), or the mystical revolutionaries
of Romania's Iron Guard, or the Nazi and Bolshevik ideological
maniacs, is the horror toward a world of risk and free competition
of values. For them, there is only one truth, revealed in the
dogma they cherish.
The liberal West and those who share its values reject precisely
this exclusive, intolerant monism, proposing a political order
based on tolerance, moderation, and recognition of individual
rights. At this moment, whatever reservation one may have toward
the historical experiment called the United States, anti-Americanism
has become synonymous with anti-humanism. It is hard to make
any prediction regarding the denouement of the ongoing struggle.
The only thing we can safely say is that the struggle oppose
those who favor a world based on tolerance and diversity to the
exponents of a destructive radicalism whose hatred for the West
is just a rationalization of tormenting inferiority complexes.
Anti-systemic fundamentalism, not patriotism, is the source of
this aggressive revolt against the internationalization of the
world. This fundamentalism is not a negation from within or an
attempt to creatively transcend the many forms of existing injustice.
It is rather an effort to abolish all the principles of the imperfect
liberal modernity in the name of a terrifyingly perfect, fully
controlled world. Anti-Americanism is the main ideological ingredient
of the ongoing revolution against bourgeois, liberal modernity.
*The author wishes to acknowledge the illuminating comments by
the distinguished Israeli sociologist Samuel N. Eisenstadt on
the essence of modern fundamentalism, religious and secular alike.
Vladimir Tismaneanu is professor of government and politics,
University of Maryland at College Park.
SOURCES
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Cassirer, E., 1946, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University
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Dugger, C.W., 2001 ,"An Indian Novelist Turns Her Wrath on the
U.S.," in " The New York Times," 21 November.
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People's attention is scarce. Do not abuse it.
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