Politics of Anti-Americanism

Abstract

Academic, popular, and political inquiry into the nature, origins, and consequences of anti-Americanism rose after the terrorist attacks against the United States on 11 September 2001. Prior to 9/11, anti-Americanism had received attention from scholars and policymakers, but not consistently, and not in a manner readily available to the public. The US State Department, for instance, had commissioned polls and published reports on foreign attitudes toward the United States beginning in the 1950s, but many of these documents remain hard to access outside the US National Archives. Following 9/11, however, a flood of polls was widely disseminated for free by several organizations, including the Pew Research Center. News media also generated significant coverage on anti-Americanism, and it became a topic of discussion among world leaders, particularly surrounding the outbreak of the Iraq War in 2003. Critical investigation of anti-Americanism therefore surged after 2001, with a crest in scholarship at the close of the decade, and something of a resurgence after the election of US president Donald J. Trump. Central to this scholarship are five questions: How is anti-Americanism defined and measured? Does anti-Americanism originate from what the United States is, from its values and culture? Or does it originate from what the United States does, from its policies and actions abroad? What effect, if any, does anti-Americanism have for the United States and other actors? Lastly, what is the nature and origin of anti-Americanism within the United States, looking at home-grown movements and ideologies? These questions have been explored using increasingly complex social science research methods and data from polling organizations, such as Pew. Because these polling organizations have hisorically focused predominately on European and Middle Eastern publics, however, there has been comparatively little on other parts of the globe. At the same time, most polls focus predominately on attitudes toward the United States among foreign publics, not foreign elites. Yet scholars and policymakers require a better sense of what foreign elites think and feel to understand more clearly how foreign governments interact with the United States. Moreover, given that the study of anti-Americanism tends to be episodic (e.g., it soared after 9/11, subsided under Barack Obama, and then increased following the election of Donald Trump), longitudinal studies are needed to interpret complexities over time. Additionally, although survey data are relatively abundant on foreign perceptions of the United States, another step forward in this research agenda would be to include a systematic comparative analysis of global attitudes not just toward America, but also other great powers, like China, India, Brazil, and Russia. This would herald a larger field of study that explores not only anti-American sentiment, but also “anti–great power” sentiment.