Anti-American Futurology

Abstract

If the interwar period saw anti-Americanism regain the ideological certainty it had lost toward the end of the nineteenth century, it happened largely by way of compensation, as a way of dealing with Europe’s crisis after World War I. As Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, the nineteenth century was the most European century in world history; no continent before or since was able to exercise global supremacy on a comparable scale.1 While this supremacy manifested itself most strikingly in the form of great colonial empires, its mental correlative was a continental self-confidence that posited the universality of European culture as an unquestionable fact. The World War dealt a massive blow to this self-confidence. The war had not only revealed a shocking willingness on the part of the civilized Europeans to send millions of young men to their deaths, often for uncertain causes or trivial gains, but had also shown how easily the technological and scientific advances that had been the pride of the nineteenth century could be turned against humanity itself. With Europe’s normative power in shatters, the end of the war triggered a process of intense cultural self-scrutiny. The old idea of the natural life span of civilizations gained new currency as the historico-philosophical foundation for a new wave of cultural pessimism, and the dominant prognosis was that Europe, having passed it zenith, was now locked in unstoppable decline. In the words of Paul Valery reflecting on the contemporary “crisis of the spirit,” the war had taught Europeans that their civilization was as mortal as the great civilizations of the past.2