Anti-Americanism
by Jean-François Revel translated by Diarmid Cammell
Encounter. 176 pp. $25.95
No one has attacked the illusions of the French Left more audaciously, or persistently, than Jean-François Revel. A columnist for the newspaper L’Express, Revel has devoted much of his career as a political commentator to defending the United States and debunking Communism. In Without Marx or Jesus, published in the early 1970’s, he challenged the idea, then prevalent in certain circles in France, that the Vietnam war had turned the U.S. into a fascist state; he predicted that America would soon recover and go on to lead a global economic revolution. In the 1980’s, in How Democracies Perish, he praised Ronald Reagan and condemned the passivity of western Europe in the face of Soviet totalitarianism.
Now, in Anti-Americanism, a best-seller when it was published in France in 2002, Revel seeks to explain why so many Europeans view the U.S. as an evil empire. His own country, he believes, has long functioned as a kind of laboratory for these views. Drawing on political speeches, television and radio interviews, and newspaper articles, he shows how leading French intellectuals and politicians have distorted the most basic American realities in order to nurse grievances about Europe’s—and their own—loss of status.
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In Revel’s view, French anti-Americanism poses less of a peril to America than to France itself. Condemning alike the French Left and Right for their attachment to dirigiste economics, he inverts their shopworn arguments, suggesting that only by adopting the American model of capitalism can France recover its former greatness. Indeed, as Revel sees it, anti-Americanism is nothing more than a stalking horse for those in Europe (and the third world) who reject economic globalization.
After September 11, millions of Europeans turned out for rallies to honor the memory of the thousands killed in the assaults on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, but it was America-as-victim that appealed to them. The sympathy quickly ebbed. As Revel reminds us, it took only a few days for the European press, led by the French, to publish crackpot theories about American culpability for the attacks.
When the U.S. fought back by bombing Afghanistan, 113 French intellectuals launched an appeal decrying this “imperial crusade.” By early 2002, Thierry Meyssan, in his best-seller The Awful Fraud (L’Effroyable Imposture), was claiming that no airplane had crashed into the Pentagon on September 11. Rather, the American secret services had set off a truck bomb so that President Bush could justify attacking first Afghanistan, then Iraq. The Left, Revel writes, could not bring itself to “renounce its demonized image of the United States, an image that it needs all the more since socialism has ended in shipwreck. . . . Woe upon those who would deprive them of the convenient Lucifer that is their last ideological lifeline.”
In judging the U.S., the French also routinely employ a double standard. Like other Europeans, Revel argues, they blame America for its supposed military adventurism but elide their own role in creating geopolitical messes, whether in the former Yugoslavia or in former colonies in the Middle East and Africa. At the very moment that France was invading the Ivory Coast without the sanction of the United Nations, it was denouncing the Bush administration as it sought the world’s approval for deposing Saddam Hussein.
In much the same way, the French press condemns American-style capitalism for supposedly impoverishing workers and the middle class, but refuses to acknowledge the dead hand of the French welfare state and regulatory system. Even as unemployment in France climbed to over 9 percent in September 2001, Le Monde was publishing an article titled “The End of the American Economic Dream.” If, as French elites insist, “American civilization is nothing but an accumulation of economic, political, social, and cultural calamities,” Revel asks, “how is it that the rest of the world is so worried about America’s wealth, scientific and technological preeminence, and cultural ubiquity?”
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Entranced by memories of past grandeur, French socialists believe, according to Revel, that their country can replace the U.S. as a world leader by challenging globalization. As former foreign minister Hubert Vedrine would have it, “Now that the threat of an excessive homogenization is looming, France again has a good hand to play.” What they overlook, Revel points out, is that the third world has been impoverished not by the global market but by state socialism. No amount of U.S. aid or debt forgiveness can overcome the criminal mismanagement of oligarchs like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.
But a rational assessment of the pluses and minuses of American power is hardly what French politicians and intellectuals wish to disseminate. As Revel writes, “The principal function of anti-Americanism has always been, and still is, to discredit liberalism [i.e., capitalism and free trade] by discrediting its supreme incarnation.” To this end, the French public is provided with a picture of America as a den of iniquity, where limousines glide past famished indigents, Muslims are pursued by an implacable secret police, only the rich have health care, and the President, a naive religious fanatic, is controlled by oil companies.
No less distorted is the portrait of American foreign policy. As far as Revel is concerned, it is the leaders of Europe, not George W. Bush, who must shoulder any blame for a unilateralist American foreign policy. Americans, he asserts, have become accustomed to reflexive European opposition, prompting them to dispense altogether with consultations. Stuck in cold-war thinking, European capitals denounced the Bush administration’s decision to withdraw from the ABM treaty and refused to recognize that treaties alone cannot stop the accumulation by dictators of chemical, biological, and nuclear arsenals. “Europeans’ voluntary blindness with regard to these radical changes,” Revel concludes, “renders any American attempts at dialogue fruitless; as a result, America has no other option but to make unilateral decisions.”
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Revel has written a fascinating, impassioned, and largely persuasive account of the ills that afflict the French intelligentsia, and in doing so has performed a vital service. With the exception of such generally sober thinkers as Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann, he has been virtually alone in protesting both the reluctance of French intellectuals to face up to their Communist past and their unwillingness to acknowledge the Islamic threat.
In his eagerness to defend the U.S., however, Revel runs the risk at times of becoming a mirror-image of his opponents. As he sees it, it is French, not American, democracy that is open to a charge of degeneracy. It is the French who are saddled with a moribund constitution, a government that only knows how to tax and spend and is incapable of upholding the law, “an intelligentsia that is ever blinder to the world,” and “citizens who grow ever idler, convinced that they can always earn more while doing less.”
Is France really in such bad shape? Revel’s criticisms are so categorical that they lead one to wonder whether he is not offering as great a caricature of his own country as his foes draw of America. Similarly, his portrait of the U.S. is so flattering, so lacking in even the smallest shortcomings, that it may cause the most ardent America-booster to blush. I suspect that if Revel really thought France was so hopeless, he would not be troubling to confront his countrymen with a rosy picture of the American alternative.
Dismissing anti-Americanism as a neurotic obsession, as Revel does, also runs the risk of making Europe’s attempt to emancipate itself from the U.S. seem more trivial than it is. Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder was not suffering from an inferiority complex when, during his own bid for reelection, he lashed out at President Bush; he was making a shrewd political calculation that would advance his own interests. Similarly, French President Jacques Chirac skillfully maneuvered to strip Bush and Tony Blair of much international legitimacy for the war in Iraq by constructing an opposition bloc made up of China, Russia, and Germany. The danger is that Europe, far from becoming an economic basket-case and suffering a nervous breakdown, will pose a real obstacle to American foreign-policy aims in coming decades. Countering that prospect will require a strategy based on more than psychoanalysis, however brilliant.
Still, Revel has provided a telling inventory of the more malign impulses emanating from France. A country that has exported not only miniskirts but the Ayatollah Khomeini has a lot to answer for. In his new book, Revel has begun the reckoning.
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