On Anti-Americanism in West Germany

Abstract

Reports of a dramatic increase in West European anti-Americanism have filled the American media in the past few years, giving casual readers the impression that the alternative and peace movements in these countries are motivated by an almost pathological hatred of the United States. Demonstrations which condemn, for example, NATO missile deployments are taken to be thinly-veiled attacks on the American way of life and are reported as such, to the exclusion of coverage of the protesters' reasons for demonstrating.' Nowhere is this phenomenon more prevalent than in press coverage of oppositional movements in the Federal Republic of Germany. Some observers on the Left have suggested that the emphasis placed by the media on the anti-American component of alternative movements in West Germany is a deliberate effort to divert attention from the real issues at hand.2 While I do not necessarily concur, I would contend that the definition of anti-Americanism, as it is popularly used, mistakes reasoned protest for irrational prejudice, and thereby deprives the term of its usefulness in identifying this phenomenon where it really exists. The perception of West German anti-Americanism on the part of journalists and politicians in the United States is largely the result of structural factors inherent in the nature of the alliance between the two