As the first modernist nation, the United States, though the "daughter of Europe," as Charles de Gaulle put it, has stuck to its own course ever since. Thus like the Jews, America remained the "Other," but unlike the imagined omnipotence of the Jews, America's power was real-and soaring, to boot. No feudalism, no socialism; no established church, no religious war; no absolutism, no statism-that is the gist of the American story, which also explains why in the United States market and modernity keep trumping the providential state embedded between Iberia and Siberia.1

To taint the agent as culprit demands little effort. And so it is easy to blame America for the miseries of modernity, for a relentless revolution in the way we live, produce, and consume. America embodies the "constant revolutionizing" that Marx and Engels cheered and reviled in the Communist Manifesto. Or as South African writer Breyten Breytenbrach recently wrote: A chicken on almost every plate, and we are stuffed with hormones and antibiotics. We are turning rich and fat through a myriad of designer-bred pigs and can no longer drink the water of our earth. We consume voraciously and are suffocated by mountains of garbage. We are destroying the planet in an orgy of pollution. Even the poor can afford hamburgers and fries, growing overweight. ... All of this reveals the Golden Thread of globalization, which is but a code word for globalized capitalist exploitation .... The poor are getting poorer.2

"Global capitalist exploitation" is an instantly understood code word for "America." A large part of anti-Americanism is indeed antimodernism. But noting this connection does not resolve the more interesting issues: Why and when does anti-Americanism change from latency to virulence, from mind-set to manifestation, as it has at the turn of the twenty-first century? Here is a very rough measure of the surge that is only suggestive and in no way systematic. In 2005, Google showed 280,000 entries for the keyword "antiAmericanism," without a year attached. When "anti-Americanism" followed by a particular year was entered, there were 180,000 entries for 2004. In 2003, there were 150,000; in 2000-03, an average of 100,000. This was in dramatic contrast to an annual average of 40,000 throughout the 1990s. The 1980s, when searched year by year, yielded an average of 18,000. For the 1970s, the average was 12,000, as it was for the 1960s and in the year 1950.These numbers are only suggestive, but they do underscore the original question: Why the sudden surge? What has driven deeply embedded constructs (and obsessions) about America to the surface? The best shorthand answer is: "The Rise of Americanism." This catch-all, in turn, breaks down into "Ubiquity," "Seduction," “Modernity” and “Superpower.”

"America is everywhere" is a statement attributed to the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone (1900-1978). Today, the dictum should be expanded with "and even more so by the day." When this author grew up in postwar West Berlin, America was not everywhere. At that time, America was military bases, but usually well isolated from the rest of West Germany. America was the Berlin Airlift (1948-49), which saved the Western half of the former Reich capital from Soviet encirclement; it was the M-48 tanks that faced down Soviet T-55s across the Berlin Wall in the fall of 1961. America was Westerns and Grace Kelly movies at the local cinema, interspersed with lots of German, Italian, French, and English films. And it was just a single station, the American Forces Network (AFN), which twice daily played forbidden rock 'n' roll during programs like Frolic at Five or Bouncing in Bavaria on AM radio.

The only true American piece of apparel was a pair of Levi's, prized all the more for being the real thing as opposed to the cheap German knockoffs. U.S. TV fare was rationed-mainly because there were only three public channels in Germany until the mid1980s, when private networks were legalized, as they were throughout Europe. Vacations were spent in the Alps or at the North Sea, not in Yosemite or on Cape Cod. A phone call to America was so expensive that it was placed only once a year, at Christmas or for an important birthday. Neither USA Today nor CNN was in Europe, and the Paris editions of the New York Times and Herald Tribune were read only by American tourists. Mickey Mouse comics, which arrived in Germany in 1951, were too costly for the average child (one week's worth of pocket money). In school, it was the occasional Steinbeck or Hemingway work in translation, and a lot of Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare. Food was strictly of the local kind: sausages, seasonal vegetables, pork, herring, cabbage, dark bread, potatoes. So was drink. When ordered in 1960 at the Berlin Hilton, a Coke consumed 60 percent of a teenager's weekly allowance. Above all, any European could spot an American from fifty feet away. Telltale signs were the short-cropped hair, the "flood leg" pants, the white socks, the mighty horn-rimmed glasses, the loafers or the bulky wingtips, and the bluish coiffure of the older women. Save for the tourists and soldiers, America was not a reality but a distant myth, as portrayed in soft brushstrokes on TV by series like Lassie and Father Knows Best. No more. Today, the entire world watches, wears, drinks, eats, listens, and dances American-even in Iran, where it is done in the secrecy of one's home.

Today, it is impossible to distinguish a young American from a young European (or Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Arab) by his or her clothes. The international look consists of jeans, loafers, buttondowns, Nikes, baseball caps, T-shirts, backpacks, iPods-all either made or invented in the United States. Though H&M and Zara have established beachheads in American department stores, there is nary a European city without its Gap, Hilfiger, DKNY, and Ralph Lauren store-not to mention Shanghai, Tokyo, and Tel Aviv. Among the even younger set, the bulky pants of street surfboarders became de rigueur almost instantly, as did Oakley sunglasses (which were preceded and succeeded by Ray-Bans). Hip-hop and rap have radiated outward with an intensity that is reflected in local-language knockoffs throughout Europe and the rest of the world.

Suddenly, Halloween, complete with the American paraphernalia, has become an institution in Germany and even in France, a country that prides itself for defying all things American.3 Valentine's Day, arguably an invention of the American greeting card industry has been etched into the European calendar. Suddenly, the German Weihnachtsmann looks a lot like the American Santa Claus, and the garish Christmas decorations that festoon middle-class American suburbs in December have sprouted up allover Europe, complete with the (electrified) reindeer that had previously never been a feature of Continental Yuletide. Thanksgiving, this most American of feasts, complete with turkey and cranberries, is making its debut in the more cosmopolitan homes of Germany. Even the lowly bagel is spreading across Europe as an ironic testimony to America's gastronomic clout. Originally, the bagel (from the German word beugeL, meaning "that which is bent") was parboiled and baked in the southwest of Germany, whence it emigrated with German Jews to eastern Europe and then traveled across the Atlantic to New York's Lower East Side. Unseen circa 1990, muffins can now be ordered in any bakery. Pizza, though invented in Naples, has changed citizenship and swept the world, courtesy of the U.S.-based chains.

Why would Starbucks open up in Rome and Vienna, the two historical capitals of coffee? By 2003, Starbucks had established its 1,000th coffee shop in the Asia-Pacific region, bringing the total outside the United States to 6,500.4 In the meantime, this global chain has spawned many imitators. The Hamburg version is called Balzac Coffee, complete with Starbucks-type interiors, and it advertises its wares (in English) with "Coffee to Go." Walk through a Continental shopping street, and you'll see the stores abound with "SALE" signs and names in English like "Labels for Less." Even American punning habits have infiltrated store signs, as a barbershop in Munich demonstrated. Its moniker was Hairgott, a bilingual pun on Herrgott, "Our Lord." A German television chain's slogan (in English) is "We Love to Entertain You."

The obsession with American (or American-sounding) monos sometimes leads to amusing consequences. A German cosmetics chain with branches elsewhere in Europe, recently plastered its storefronts with "Come In and Find Out." Literally translated into German, this meant to those less familiar with English basics "Come In and Find Your Way Out Again," which did not sound very enticing. Indeed, English-or, more accurately, "Bad English"-is the world's fastest-growing language, with an American accent, of course. Or a bowdlerized version of American English, as reflected in such words as downloaden or downsizen. Lufthansa advertises itself (in a German ad) with "There Is No Better Way to Fly," and Volvo with "Move Forward." Siemens praises its cell phone as "Designed for Life," while Skoda, a VW subsidiary, adorns its logo with "Simply Clever."5

Not only is American English the world's lingua franca, American culture became the world's cultura franca in the last fifth of the twentieth century. Assemble a few kids from, say, Sweden, Germany, Russia, Argentina, Japan, Israel, and Lebanon in one room. They would all be wearing jeans and baseball caps. How would they communicate? In more or less comprehensible English, with an American flavor. And what would they talk about? About the latest U.S.-made video game, American hits on the top-ten chart, the TV series South Park, or the most recent Hollywood blockbuster. Or they would debate the relative merits of Windows and Apple operating systems. No, they would not talk about Philip Roth or Herman Melville, but neither would they dissect Thomas Mann or Dante. The point is that they would talk about icons and images Made in U.S.A. If there is a global civilization, it is American-which it was not twenty or thirty years ago.

Nor is it just a matter of low culture. It is McDonald's and Microsoft, Madonna and MoMA, Hollywood and Harvard. If twothirds of the movie marquees carry an American title in Europe (even in France), the American ratio is even greater when it comes to translated books, with traffic across the Atlantic overwhelmingly going one-way. The ratio for Germany in 2003 was 419 versus 3,732; that is, for every German book translated into English, nine English-language books were translated into German.6 A hundred years ago, Berlin's Humboldt University was the model for the rest of the world. Tokyo, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Chicago were founded in conscious imitation of the German university and its novel fusion of teaching and research. So was Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Stanford's motto is taken from the German Renaissance scholar and soldier Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523): Die Luft der Freiheit weht-the winds of freedom blow.

Today, Europe's universities have lost their luster, and as they talk reform, they talk American. Ancient degrees are being changed to the B.A. and M.A., and they have to be completed in a set time in contrast to the open-ended studies of yore. With America's top universities in mind, their European counterparts are speaking more about "excellence" and less about "equality." They are rethinking free tuition and open admission while eying a rigorous separation between undergraduate and graduate education in the American way. Read through mountains of debate on university reform, and the two words you will find most often are "Harvard" and "Stanford."

America is one huge global "demonstration effect," as the sociologists call it when they want to avoid a normative term like "model." America's cultural sway at the beginning of the twenty-first century surpasses that of Rome or any other empire in history. For Rome's or Habsburg's cultural penetration of foreign lands stopped exactly at their military borders, and the Soviet Union's cultural presence in Prague, Budapest, or Warsaw vanished into thin air the moment the last Russian soldier was withdrawn from Central Europe. American culture, however, needs no gun to travel. It is everywhere, even in countries where it is denounced as "Great Satan." In his Second Treatise concerning Civil Government, John Locke wrote that "in the beginning all the world was America."7 Today, he might muse, ''All the world is becoming America." If so, all the world does not necessarily like it.

Joseph S. Nye, the Harvard political scientist, has coined a term for this phenomenon: "soft power." That power does not come out of the barrel of a gun. It is "less coercive and less tangible." It derives from "attraction" and "ideology."8 The distinction between "soft power" and "hard power" is an important one, especially in an age where bombs and bullets, no matter how "smart," do not translate easily into political power-that is, the capacity to make others do what they would otherwise not do. A perfect example is America's swift military victory against Iraq, which was not followed so swiftly by either peace or democracy. Still, "soft power" does not deal very well with contemporary anti-Americanism. Indeed, the relationship between "soft power" and "hard influence," that is, America's ability to get its way in the world, may be nonexistent or, worse, pernicious.

In the first instance, there may be no relationship whatsoever between America's ubiquity and its influence (or ability to capture hearts and minds). Hundreds of millions of people around the world wear, listen, eat, drink, watch, and dance American, but they do not identify these accoutrements of their daily lives with America. A baseball cap with the Yankees logo is the very epitome of things American, but it hardly signifies knowledge of, let alone affection for, the team from New York or America as such. It is just an item of apparel with a pleasing art nouveau logo, though cool enough to wear-either straight or sideways, which is another U.S. import. The same is true for American films, foods, or songs. The film Titanic, released in 1997, has grossed $1.8 billion worldwide in box office sales alone. It is still the all-time best seller. With two exceptions, the next 257 films in the revenue ranking are American as well,9 But this pervasive cultural presence does not seem to generate "soft power." These American products define images rather than mentalities, let alone sympathies. There appears to be little, if any, relationship between artifact and affection.

If the relationship is not neutral, it is one of repellence rather than attraction-that is the dark side of the "soft power" coin. The European student movement of the late 1960s took its cue from the Berkeley free speech movement of 1964, the inspiration for all post 1964 Western student revolts. But it quickly turned anti-American; America was reviled while it was copied. A telling anecdote is a march on Frankfurt's Amerikahaus during the heyday of the German student movement. The enraged students wore jeans and American army apparel. They even played a distorted Jimmy Hendrix version of the American national anthem. But they threw rocks against the U.S. cultural center nonetheless. Though they wore and listened American, they targeted precisely the embodiment of America's cultural presence in Europe.10

Now shift forward to the Cannes Film Festival of 2004, where hundreds of protesters were denouncing America's intervention in Iraq until the police dispersed them. The makers of the movie Shrek 2 had deposited large bags of green Shrek ears along the Croisette, the main drag along the ocean. As the demonstrators scattered, many of them put on free Shrek ears. "They were attracted," noted an observer, "by the ears' goofiness and sheer recognizability."11 And so the enormous pull of American imagery went hand in hand with the country's condemnation.

Between Vietnam and Iraq, America's cultural presence has expanded into ubiquity, and so has the resentment of America's "soft power." Or as Richard Kuisel puts it: "In France, Germany, Great Britain, and Italy, but especially in France, majorities say the spread of something vaguely called 'American ideas and customs' is 'bad.' "12 As early as 1997, the French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine couched the resentment in diplomatic language: "The United States has assets not yet at the disposal of any other power: political influence, the supremacy of the dollar, control of the communications networks, 'dream factories,' new technology. Add these up-the Pentagon, Boeing, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Hollywood, CNN, the Internet, the English language-the situation is virtually unprecedented."13

Ubiquity breeds unease, unease breeds resentment, and resentment breeds denigration as well as visions of omnipotence and conspiracy, as evoked by Vedrine's carefully chosen words. In some cases, as in the French one, these feelings harden into governmental policy. And so the French have passed the Toubon law, which prohibits on pain of penalty the use of English words. A car wash must be a lavage voiture, and perhaps the day is not far when another such edict decrees that the disque-tourneur (DJ) must call the hit parade parade de frappe. In 1993, the French coaxed the European Union into adding a "cultural exception" clause to its commercial treaties exempting cultural products, high or low, from normal free-trade rules. Other European nations impose informal quotas on American TV fare. America the Ubiquitous has become America the Excessive.

Even America's high culture is not immune to the impulse of denigration nourished by fantasies of conspiracy. A fine example is how the art critics of two distinguished German newspapers, 5iiddeutsche Zeitung (leftish) and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (centrist), dealt with an exhibit of two hundred pieces from the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Berlin in 2004. More than a million visitors had stood in line from February to September, many for up to nine hours, to view the objects from across the Atlantic. Yet the fervor of the hoi polloi mattered little to their betters whose comments ran the gamut from contempt to conspiracy. The opening shots were fired by the Suddeutsche Zeitung of Munich. Without having seen the collection, its critic aimed his volley straight against imperial America. Regurgitating a standard piece of European Kulturkritik, the author insinuated that what America has in the way of culture is not haute, and what is haute is not American. Or as Adolf Hitler famously proclaimed, "A single Beethoven symphony contains more culture than all that America has ever created." After World War II, the critic contended, America had wrested "artistic hegemony" from Europe in two sleazy ways. One culprit was "a new abstract school of painting [Abstract _Expressionism] that had hyped itself into high heaven." The other was American mammon: "Everything still available in old Europe was bought up." And this "stolen idea of modern art will now be presented in Berlin." Thus was pilferage and grand theft added to the oldest of indictments: America's cultural inferiority.

The critic of the Frankfurter Allgemeine went further. If his colleague had claimed that America's art was either hyped or heisted, the man from Frankfurt thundered that MoMA's Berlin show was a mendacious ploy, indeed, an imperialist conspiracy. It was done by "concealment" and "censorship" in a game full of "marked cards," and its name was not only to blank our Europe's greats but also to suppress their magnificent contribution to American art in the second half of the twentieth century. This was an instance of the selective perception that suffuses any anti-ism. For in truth, the exhibit happened to contain an impressive number of European works: Matisse, Picasso, Manet, Rousseau, Brancusi, and Mondrian, plus assorted Expressionists and Surrealists.

That did not count. What about contemporary Germans like Beuys, Baselitz, and Kiefer? the critic huffed. The untutored million, who had spent a total of 446 years waiting in line, according to a local newspaper, might have thought that bringing such artists to Berlin was like carrying coals to Newcastle. Bur even here, MoMA had done its universalist duty, capping the progression with Gerhard Richter's" 18 October 1977" cycle, which depicts dead members of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang. That MoMA would display these German works enraged the feuilletoniste from Frankfurt even more. That particular choice, he fumed, was the final proof of American perfidy. The terrorist motif was insidiously selected to finger Europe as a "creepy" place, as a messenger of "bad news." With that, antiism came full circle. First it was denigration ("the U.S. has no culture of its own"), then it was demonization ("it steals or obliterates Europe's grand tradition"), and finally projection ("Europe is the victim of American malevolence"). 14

There is a moral in this tale of two critics (which could easily be retold throughout Europe). It is the curse of "soft power." In the affairs of nations, too much hard power ends up breeding not submission but counterpower, be it by armament or by alliance. Likewise, great "soft power" does not bend hearts but twists minds in resentment and rage. Yet how does one balance against "soft power"? No coalition of European universities could dethrone Harvard and Stanford. Neither can all the subsidies fielded by European governments crack the hegemony of Hollywood. To breach the bastions of American "soft power," the Europeans will first have to imitate, then to improve on, the American model-just as the Japanese bested the American automotive industry after two decades of copycatting (and the Americans, having dispatched their engineers for study in Britain, overtook the British locomotive industry in the nineteenth century). Imitation and leapfrogging is the oldest game in the history of nations, and in the civilian aircraft market, Europe's Airbus is already a worthy competitor of Boeing. But competition has barely begun to drive the cultural contest where Europe, mourning the loss of its centuries-old supremacy, either resorts to insulation (by quotas and "cultural exception clauses") or seeks solace in the defamation of American culture as vulgar, inauthentic, or stolen. If we could consult Dr. Freud again, he would take a deep drag on his cigar and pontificate about inferiority feelings being compensated by hauteur and disparagement.

As the tale of MoMA in Berlin illustrates, America's ubiquity goes hand in glove with seduction-why else would more than a million visitors have crowded into the exhibit, a few hundred thousand more than at any other time in Berlin's museum history? Europe-indeed, most of the world-also wants what America has. Nobody has ever used a gun to drive Frenchmen into one of their eight hundred McDonald's, and we have the French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine to make the point when he attributed to America "this certain psychological power ... this ability to shape the dreams and desires of others."15

No force need be applied to make Europeans buy clothes or watch films Made in U.S.A. Germans take to Denglish as if it were their native tongue. So might the French to Franglais if their authorities did not impose fines on such linguistic defection. Contemporary Western dictionaries do not even contain words such as "anti-Frenchism" or "anti-Russism" or "anti-Japanism." Japan's cars and electronics have conquered the world, but very few people want to dance like the Japanese. Nor does the rest of the world want to dress like the Russians or (outside India) watch movies made in "Bollywood," though India produces more movies than all Western nations put together. Nobody risks death on the high seas to get into China, and the number of those who want to go for an M.B.A. in Moscow is still rather small. 16

America's "hard power" is based on its nuclear carrier fleets and its "stealth bombers," as well as on its twelve-trillion-dollar economy. But its allure rests on pull, not on push, and it has done so since Columbus set out to tap the riches of India, but instead ended up in America. Why? One need not resort to such sonorous terms as "freedom," the "New Jerusalem," or John Winthrop's "cittie upon a hill with the eies of all people upon them" -concepts that evoke religious transcendence and salvation. Americas magnetism has very tangible roots.

If it is transcendence, it is of a very secular type-a society where a peddler's son can still move from Manhattan's Lower East Side (now heavily Chinese, and no longer Jewish) to the tranquil suburbs of Westchester in the span of one generation, never mind his uncouth accent. Hence, the best and the brightest still keep coming, even if there is no Metternich, Hitler, or Stalin to drive them out. Nor is citizenship bequeathed by bloodline. People can become Americans; they need not have it bestowed on them by their progenitors. They do not have to invoke Deutschtum or italianita to acquire citizenship; they merely have to prove five years of legal residence, swear allegiance, and sign on, symbolically speaking, to documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. American-ness is credal, not biological. Nor do the newcomers have to profess fealty to a particular faith, because America never had an established, let alone state, religion. And the newcomers' ethnic origins matter less in a society where everybody, at one time or another, came from somewhere else. A degree from a top engineering school, whether from Bombay or Shanghai, will trump a birth certificate anytime.

These factors explain the two million legal and illegal immigrants who push into the United States year after year. But they do not explain the seductive force exerted by things and ways American on those who remain at home. The best explanation is the universality not only of American citizenship but also of American culture. Though the "American dream," as Samuel Huntington has argued, may be an Anglo-Protestant project,!? it is a "work in progress," and it has recruited an endless string of collaborators: not just WASPs, but Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, Jews, Africans, Italians, Poles, Russians, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indians-the whole world. Every new group has contributed its own ingredient to the melting pot (or "salad bowl," as the more correct parlance has it).

In fact, it was Russian Jews with (refurbished) names like Goldwyn, Mayer, and Warner who first interpreted the "American dream" for a worldwide audience on celluloid. It was the descendants of African slaves who created an American musical tradition, ranging from gospel via jazz to hip-hop, that has conquered the world. It was Italian Americans who turned the lowly Neapolitan pizza into a global dish. The most ''American'' cuisine is not catfish or chitlins but "fusion"-a blend of Asian, Italian, and French. It was a Bavarian Jew by the name of Levi Strauss whose jeans swept the planet. Frenchmen transformed Napa Valley into a house hold word for wine. Scandinavians implanted a social-democratic tradition into the politics of the Midwest, while Irish built the great political machines of Boston and New York. Hispanics set the architectural tone of California and New Mexico. And the "work in progress" continues. At the end of the twentieth century, 60 percent of the American-based authors of the most-cited papers in the physical sciences were foreign-born, as were nearly 30 percent of the authors of the most-cited life science papers. Almost one-quarter of the leaders of biotech companies that went public in the early 1990s came from abroad.18 In a seminar that this author taught at Stanford in 2004, three out of five straight-A papers were written by students named Zhou, Kim, and Surraj Patel (and the course was not about computer science but about American foreign policy).

And so, America has become the first "universal nation." A universal nation, one surmises, creates artifacts, images, and narratives that appeal to a universal audience. Take Disneyland near Paris. Condemned as American imperialism by France's guardians of culture, it contains a plethora of ur-European motifs taken from the German brothers Grimm, but expressed in a universally comprehensible language. Whereas French and German films (which each wrote chapters of the canon in the first half of the twentieth century) have come to rely on parochial, sociocritical, or torturously introspective plots, Hollywood's output replicates myths imbedded in the human consciousness: good versus bad, evil overcome, trials mastered, dangers vanquished, love requited, friendship triumphant, loyalty rewarded. It is boy meets girl, the eternal plot since Adam and Eve, and boy gets girl, either after a dramatic or funny battle of the sexes. In literature, Ole Rblvaag (Giants in the Earth) and Henry Roth (Call It SLeep) could not appeal only to Norwegian or East European immigrants; they had to make themselves understood to an American audience that was itself multiethnic. Philip Roth can be understood everywhere; the nouveau roman takes some crosscultural effort. And so it continues into the twenty-first century, for instance, with Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex). The book starts out with a Greek American love story and then builds up to a real-life incarnation of the hermaphroditic myth whose roots reach back to the beginnings of mankind.

If it is not universal myth, it is universal convenience. This is America's most powerful export, as evidenced by a never-ending imitation effect radiating outward. Power windows and air-conditioning in cars; the cash machine that saves a trip to the bank; the sideby-side, no-frost refrigerator that requires neither deicing nor crouching; the self-service supermarket that allows for endless choice in countless aisles without an intermediary behind the counter; the cafeteria that eliminates menus, waiters, and waiting time; the motel that demands only a few feet of luggage hauling; the iPod that stores hundreds of CDs. Convenience is modernity, and modernity is America-one huge "demonstration effect."

Imitation even extends to the import of American mores. Suddenly, in Europe, it is no longer the gruff voice of a receptionist on the telephone. It is: "This is [company name]. My name is ... What can I do for you?" Suddenly, bidding somebody good-bye is transformed into "Haveniceday" in the local language, while "Hi" or "Hello" is turning into a universal greeting. "Smileys"-emoticonsare everywhere, on Post-its as well as in e-mails. Why? Modernity is the experience of anonymity in an ever-expanding circle of daily contacts-a far cry from traditional interaction, where roles and identities were fixed, few, and familiar. To avert collisions or misunderstandings, people seek to signal benevolence with friendly overtures; to reduce anonymity, they identify themselves quickly. As the first modern-that is, both geographically and vertically mobilesociety, America developed these rituals early on. As other nations follow America into the service economy with its plethora of nameless encounters, they adopt them because such etiquette fits the new realities of interaction better than do the traditional ways. Demonstration, seduction, imitation-this is the progression that feeds into "America the beguiling." So why doesn't irresistible imitation generate affection and soft power? The answer is simple: seduction creates its own repulsion. We hate the seducer for seducing us, and we hate ourselves for yielding to temptation.

A key battle cry in the German electoral campaign of 2002, which continues to reverberate through the country's political discourse, was "no amerikanische Verhaltnisse"-''American ways." In 2005, the enemy was yet another American intruder-private equity and hedge funds, or "locusts," that were accused of gobbling up German companies and destroying jobs for the sake of a quick profit.19 "I don't want amerikanische Verhaltnisse," said Chancellor Gerhard Schroder as early as 2001.20 Amerikanische Verhaltnisse were flogged not only by the chancellor, a Social Democrat, but also by his rival Edmund Stoiber, a conservative, who lectured, "Of course, you could quickly produce more growth with maximally flexible labor markets. But we have a completely different history and mentality. For us, solidarity and social protection playa completely different role, as compared with America."21 "American ways," a seemingly neutral term, was in fact a fighting word with the same import as the French prime minister Lionel Jospin's diatribe against "the unbridled laws of the market."22

"American ways" were pernicious to the better ways of Europe, or as Schroder put it, "We have no reason to hide the German, the European social model from the Americans. I have enough selfconfidence to say that it is superior."23 Amerikanische Verhaeltnisse were the foes of social justice, predictability, protection, and redistribution. The slogan was a battering ram pointed at high wages, employment security, and the munificent state-against the socialdemocratic dispensation that is the core of Europe's unwritten social contract from Lisbon to Leipzig, from Narvik to Naples, no matter what the government's ideological coloration. That social contract could be reduced to two articles: first, no change; second, if change is unavoidable, losers must be compensated.

But why raise this flag on the threshold of the twenty-first century? Because the "European way," which had brought both private and public prosperity, could no longer be sustained. The state that had typically taken around half of the gross domestic product and disbursed about one-third of GDP as transfer payments like social supports and subsidies-almost twice as much as in mid-century depended on sustained growth. With steady growth, the expanding welfare state could give to Peter without taking from Paul, thus nipping society's conflicts in the bud. Yet growth began to falter and then to stagnate in the mid-1990s.

And so, the blissful arrangement of the postwar period began to groan under its own weight. Full employment gave way to stubborn joblessness of around 10 percent (closer to 12 percent if retraining and subsidized jobs were counted). As tax revenues declined, social expenditures soared. Enter globalization or, more accurately, "Euro peanization," that is, the admittance of ten low-wage East European states to the EU. "China" was suddenly right next door. Economic decline and EU enlargement began to gnaw away at the very foundation of the welfare state, which presupposes a closed economy. "Closed" does not mean "no trade," for Europe's economies have a much higher trade component than do America's and Japan's (a typical EU country exports about 30 percent of its GDp, while the U.S. share is about 10 percent). Rather, "closed" means a high degree of state control over the economy plus a "social contract" that favors producers (including workers and farmers) over consumers, domestic suppliers over foreign ones, and consensus over competition.

The assault on the fortress of the European welfare state has been proceeding on three axes. Let's call one "China," which stands for the export offensive of low-wage and ever higher-tech economies in Asia with their undervalued currencies. Let's label the second axis "Czechia," which symbolizes the low-wage and high-productivity nations east of the former Iron Curtain. And let's use "Brussels" as metaphor for the least dramatized and most momentous force of them all: the relentless razing of national economic borders by the European Commission.

Those "Eurocrats" have done more to break down the walls of separation, which allowed protection to flourish, than either China or Czechia. Berlin wants to subsidize Volkswagen? The EU's competition commissioner says nein! France wants to stop foreign takeovers? Brussels says non! Governments want to procure nationally? No, nein, and non-everybody must have access to the public trough. One edict after another has opened up markets not only for goods but also for capital and financial services, like banks and insurance. If a Danish dentist can say "Open your mouth" in Spanish, French, or German, he could set up his drill in these countries. Telecoms and transportation, once the jealously guarded preserves of national regulators, have been liberated, and so national favorites like Siemens, Sabena, and Akatel, either had to compete or perish. The ED has been turning twenty-five countries into a single market of 450 million people, and technology, which keeps shrinking the costs of transportation and communication, is doing the rest. To dispatch a multimegabyte program file via the Internet costs exactly nothing. Europe's "China" is not ten thousand miles away but inside-in Poland, Czechia, Hungary. These investment magnets need only be mentioned by management, and the unions will start talking cost cutting. So when Europeans bemoan "globalization" as a code word for "Americanization," they should actually target "Europeanization." That they began doing in 2005, when the German government, along with the French one, demanded a halt to ED efforts to liberalize all services, that is, to create a free market for labor, on the grounds that it would trigger a "race to the bottom."24 The battle cry was "social dumping" or "tax dumping," and the targets were those ten new members to the east that had been admitted to the EC in 2004.

Sacred dispensations are crumbling, and so are jealously guarded privileges. The thirty-five-hour week has turned into a distant dream, and Europeans must work more for less. Big-box stores, with their lower prices, are crowding city outskirts, driving out not only mom-and-pop shops but also downtown department stores. Municipal hospitals must outsource or sell part of their operations to private investors. Cozy patronage is yielding to the privatization of utilities, airlines, and arms manufacturers, and firings are becoming easier to navigate past or through the labor courts. Social security, pay-as-you go schemes throughout the West, will have to be flanked by private insurance. Copayments to doctors by clients of national health services are increasing, and such wonderful privileges as sixweek cures have gone the way of the thirty-five-hour week.

In short, the market has been rearing its mighty head, and just as Jewish capitalists (or communists) were blamed for what the "invisible hand" had wrought in the first third of the twentieth century, America has been designated as culprit in the beginning of the twenty-first. When Germans attack amerikanische Verhaeltnisse, or when a French prime minister castigates the "unbridled laws of the market," they are responding not to America but to the travails of societies that can no longer hold back pent-up change. And so, such statements are mendacious at heart, because all Continental leaders have been in the business of transformation since the late 1990s. They have all been trying their hand at the reform game by chiseling away at labor market rigidities, constraints on competition, and lavish welfare payments. And all of them, especially those of France and Germany, were punished in and at the polls. So scapegoating America offers a number of advantages, all of them domestic, for governments that are conservative at heart, no matter whether they carry a leftish or a rightish label.

To assail amerikanische Verhaeltnisse is to delegitimize those rivals for political power who praise America's flexible labor markets as a "model," as the German Federation of Industry has done. Summing up a survey of German business leaders, the monthly Capital 25 reports, "Eighty percent say that the future belongs to the American system." This is a dramatic testimony to the enormous demonstration effect that is America, especially during the boom years of the 1990s, when U.S. unemployment was half that of Europe's (as it has remained in this decade). And the implicit prescription is "Make us like America." This does not sit well with chancellors and prime ministers who can change course by only a few degrees because their clientele, junkies of the welfare state, are wedded to maximal social protection.

But change they must, and so amerikanische Verhaeltnisse serve as a nice distraction from the necessary evil that must be done. As the bitter medicine is dispensed in small doses, the soothing message is "We will never be like America." Another part of the sugarcoating is "We are better than America-and so we need not become like them."26 Hence the tone of superiority and deprecation that runs through the European discourse. The mendacious subtext is that America, the "home of ultracapitalism," is to blame for the ailments that Europe must overcome. America is a nice shorthand for the Europeanization and globalization that is eroding group privileges while killing jobs and driving down wages. This is the oldest theme in the history of anti-ism: turn the abstract into the political, and the political into the personal-into the "Other." And presto, misery is explained and exorcized in the way of the biblical scapegoat that was loaded with all the sins of Israel and then dispatched into the desert. On the most general level, anti-Americanism in Europe is both a conservative utopia and an ersatz European nationalism. The weightiest example, and by no means an idiosyncratic one, is an appeal, "Our Renewal," authored by a German, Jurgen Habermas, and cosigned by Jacques Derrida, a Frenchman, two writers categorized as philosophers in Europe.27 The buzzwords are "a model-like European welfare system," "taming of capitalism," "pacification of class conflicts," "skepticism about markets," "trust in the steering capacities of the state," "limited optimism about technological progress," "preference for the protective guarantees of the welfare state and solidaristic solutions," low "tolerance for force." All these European virtues ought to feed into a "common [European] identity." And against whom might this identity be established? Against those who stand for an "individualistic ethos that accepts flagrant social inequalities" and who have refused to imbibe the moral lessons learned by postimperial Europe: no more war and, instead, the "murual limitation of sovereignty." The message is that Europe has risen to a higher moral plane, while America is still mired in its prepostmodern state.

The French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine lists the indictments in more concise language. The ideological enemies of France are an "ultraliberal market economy," the "mistrust of the state," "nonrepublican individualism," the "reflexive pursuit of the universal and 'indispensable' role of the USA," flanked by "common law, the Eng What Sombart foresaw only dimly in 1915 is a full-blown reality today. Having inherited Britain's imperial mantle, the United States is modernity's mightiest engine-the agenda setter that inflicts adaptation-indeed, engenders emulation from the rest of the world (with China and India jostling forward on the no longer so distant horizon). No wonder that Europe, clinging to its formerly winning ways, resents the intruder that it is forced to mimic. Is envy the motor of resentment, as so many commentators have surmised31with America embodying the might and the glory Europe no longer has and therefore pretends to disdain? Perhaps, but it is more plausible to point to the seductive demonstration effect that is America, coupled with the angst that Europe must (at least partly) become what America already is. That does not sit well with societies that have been weaned on a very different dispensation in the aftermath of the twentieth century's cataclysms. Fair Europe, attractive and dynamic in so many ways, a magnet for many nations pushing into the ED's "empire by application," has been in a state of social and economic crisis and paralysis since the mid-1990s. The crisis is measured by low growth, high unemployment, massive aging, and demographic decline. The problem extends from Madrid to Moscow. It is further exacerbated by Europe's limited ability to integrate another "Other" into its cultures, the "Other" being immigrants of different color and faith who are thronging into the banlieues of Paris and Rome, and into the inner cities of Berlin and Amsterdam. Societies in crisis, as illustrated by the torturous encounters with modernity between 1789 and 1945, tend to succumb to anti-ism, whether of the American or the Jewish kind. No wonder that Arab society, which has to battle many more dysfunctionalities than Europe, harbors the most virulent anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism of them all. Anti-ism flows from what the target is, and not from what it does. It is revulsion and contempt that needs no evidence, or will find any "proof" that justifies the prejudice.

The problem with America, though, is more intricate. Unlike African Americans, Jews, and Freemasons, America is powerful indeed, the mightiest nation in history. And being easily leads to doing, or to fears of what America might do.

As early as 1997, France's foreign minister Hubert Vedrine began to muse about the temptations of "unilateralism" afflicting the United States and about the "risk of hegemony" it posed. Though George W. Bush had not yet flashed his Texas cowboy boots on the world stage (Bill Clinton was still in the White House), it was time for Paris to shape "a multipolar world of the future."32 In 1998, France "could not accept a politically unipolar world or the unilateralism of a single hyperpower."33 By then, the United States was the "indispensable nation," as Bill Clinton and his secretary of state Madeleine Albright liked to put it. It was a power that, in 1999, would unleash its cruise missiles to bludgeon Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic into the surrender at Dayton. By 2002 and 2003, it was sheer hysteria in the streets and squares not only of Europe but of the rest of the world-complete with the most vicious antiAmerican epithets like "Nazi" and "global terrorist."

But while  I have mostly quoted  Europe so far, another Pew Research survey carried out this spring show antiAmericanism is much more present in Muslim countries. The poll interviewed Muslims in two batches of countries: six of them with long-standing, majority-Muslim populations (Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey) and four of them in Western Europe with new, minority Muslim populations (France, Germany, Great Britain, Spain).

Plus also in not one Muslim population polled does a majority believe that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The proportions range from a mere 15 percent in Pakistan holding Arabs responsible, to 48 percent among French Muslims. Confirming recent negative trends in Turkey, the number of Turks who point the finger at Arabs has declined from 46 percent in 2002 to 16 percent today. In other words, in every one of these ten Muslim communities, a majority views 9/11 as a hoax perpetrated by the U.S. government, Israel, or some other agency.

Likewise, Muslims are widely prejudiced against Jews, ranging from 28 percent unfavorable ratings among French Muslims to 98 percent in Jordan (which, despite the monarchy’s moderation, has a majority Palestinian population). Further, Muslims in certain countries (especially Egypt and Jordan) see Jews conspiratorially, as being responsible for bad relations between Muslims and Westerners.

Conspiracy theories also pertain to larger topics. Asked, “What is most responsible for Muslim nations’ lack of prosperity?” between 14 percent (in Pakistan) and 43 percent (in Jordan) blame the policies of the U.S. and other Western states, as opposed to indigenous problems, such as a lack of democracy or education, or the presence of corruption or radical Islam.

All the Muslim populations polled display a solid majority of support for Osama bin Laden. Asked whether they have confidence in him, Muslims replied positively, ranging between 8 percent (in Turkey) to 72 percent (in Nigeria). Likewise, suicide bombing is popular. Muslims who call it justified range from 13 percent (in Germany) to 69 percent (in Nigeria). These appalling numbers suggest that terrorism by Muslims has deep roots and will remain a danger for years to come.

Thus singular power, especially power liberally used, transformed a festering resentment into an epidemic, and so the anti-American. Reducing its might to reduce hatred is not an option for the last remaining superpower. Nor can America seek to please the world by becoming more like it-less modern or more postmodern, less capitalist or less religious, more parochial and less intrusive. The United States is unalterably enmeshed in the world by interest and necessity, and it will not cease to defend its dominance against all comers. Great powers do not want to become lesser ones, nor can they flatten themselves as a target. There is no opt-out for No.1, unless forced to do so by a more potent player, and there is no change in persona for a nation whose exceptionalist self-definition is so different from that of the rest of the West.

The United States is different from the rest, in particular from the postmodern states of Europe stretching from Italy via Germany and Austria to the Benelux and Scandinavian countries. The European Union is fitfully undoing national sovereignty while failing to provide its citizens with a common sense of identity or collective nationhood. Europe is a matter of practicality, not of pride. As a work in progress, it lacks the underpinning of emotion and "irrational" attachment. Europeans might become all wound up when their national soccer teams win or lose, but the classical nationalism that drove millions into the trenches of the twentieth century is a fire that seems to have burned out. If there is a common identity, it defines itself in opposition to the United States-to both its culture and its clout.

Europe, with the partial exception of Britain, France, and some of the eastern newcomers like Poland, takes pride in overcoming the strictures of nationhood and the "atavism" of war. Its ideology reflects (and protects) actuality. The fountainhead of all major conflict in the past millennium, Europe suddenly, after 1945, enjoyed a surfeit of gratis security, courtesy of American power. As strategic dependence on the United States has trickled away, new strategic threats have not emerged. And substrategic threats like Islamist terrorism are not potent or pervasive enough to change a creed that proclaims, "Military violence never solves political problems." Of course, massive violence did solve Europe's existential problems twice in the preceding century, but that memory takes second place to the horrors of two world wars or to Europe's refusal to sacrifice a bit of butter for lots more guns. But why should Europe make that sacrifice? Its actuality is peace, which has made for a far happier way of life than did the global ambitions of centuries past.

Europe's empire is no longer abroad. Its name is European Union, and it is an "empire by application," not by imposition. Its allure is a vast market and a social model given to protection, predictability, and the ample provision of social goods. Its teleology is one of transcendence-of borders, strife, and nationalism. Its ethos is pacificity and institutionalized cooperation-the ethos of a "civilian power." Shrinking steadily, European armies are no longer repositories of nationhood (and ladders of social advancement), but organizations with as much prestige as the post office or the bureau of motor vehicles.

If this is postmodern, then America is premodern in its attachment to faith and community, and modern in its identification with flag and country. In the postmodern state, "the individual has won, and foreign policy is the continuation of domestic concerns beyond national borders .... Individual consumption replaces collective glory as the dominant theme of national life [and] war is to be avoided."35 The modern state fused power to nationhood, and mass mobilization to a mission. Still, the difference between Europe and the United States is not one of kind. After all, Americans are just as consumerist and pre0ccupied with self and family as are Europeans, nor do they exactly loathe the culture of entitlements that spread throughout the West in the last half of the twentieth century. If the "statist" Europeans invented social security, the "individualist" Americans invented "affirmative action" as a set of privileges for groups defined by color, race, sex, or physical disabilities. "Political correctness," the very epitome of postmodernism, is an American invention. But if we subtract the postmodern from the modern in United States, a large chunk of the latter remains. For all of its m and ethnicity, America possesses a keen sense of self-and what it should be. Patriotism scores high in any survey, as does religiosity. There is a surfeit of national symbols throughout the land, whereas no gas station in Europe would ever fly an oversized national flag. With its sense of nationhood intact, the United States is loath (Q share sovereignty and reluctant (Q submit to dictates of international institutions where it is "one country, one vote." The country still defines itself in terms of a mission, which Europeans no longer do though the French once invented a mission civilisatrice for themselves, and the British the "white man's burden." The army, though digitalized to the max, can still draw on remnants of a warrior culture, especially in the South; as was once the case for the "Fighting Irish" of the Civil War, the army still offers newcomers one of the swiftest routes to inclusion and citizenship. America's armed forces, unlike most of their counterparts in Europe, are central tools of statecraft. American bases are strung around the globe, and no nation has used force more often in the post-World War II period than has the United States-from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq, and in countless smaller engagements from Central America to Lebanon and Somalia.

But whatever the distribution of pre-, post-, and just modern features may be, the most critical difference between America and Europe concerns power and position in the global hierarchy. The United States is the nation that dwarfs the rest. With its planetary clout, its location athwart two oceans, and its global interests, it remains the universal intruder and hence in harm's way. Its very power is a provocation for the lesser players, and, unlike Europe or Japan, No. 1 cannot huddle under the strategic umbrella of another nation. Nor can it live by the postmodern ways of Europe, which faces no strategic challenge as far as the eye can see. (Neither would Europe be so postmodern if it had to guarantee its own safety.) The United States is the security lender of last resort; there is no ISF, or International Security Fund, where the United States could apply for a quick emergency loan. And so, the United States must endure in a Hobbesian world where self-reliance is the ultimate currency of the realm, and goodness is contingent on safety. The anatomy of the international system, to borrow once more from Sigmund Freud, is destiny. Where you sit is where you stand-postmodernism, postnationalism, and all.

But a predominant power that wants to secure its primacy can choose among various grand strategies. While anti-Americanism has been, and will remain, a fixture of the global unconscious, it need not burst into venomous loathing. Nor is the fear of American muscle necessarily irrational when that power seems to have no bounds. It is not anti-Americanism when vast majorities, ranging from 59 percent in Germany to 80 percent in Canada to 82 percent in France, believe that the United States does not pay attention to their countries' interests.36 Power unbound also suggests why 50-73 percent of the people in key NATO countries prefer more independence from the United States, why even larger majorities throughout the world (from 58 percent to 85 percent) don't want the United States to remain the one and only superpower.37

"Oderint, dum metuant"-"Let them hate me as long as they fear me" -the Roman emperor Caligula is supposed to have said. Fear is indeed useful for deterring others, but it may turn into a vexing liability when great power must achieve great ends in a world that cannot defeat, but can defy, America.
 

1. This is the message of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and of Louis B. Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955).

2. "Es gibt keinen Fortschritt," excerpts from a speech in Berlin, in Die Zeit, December 2, 2004, p. 43. Though the Unired States is not mentioned in the text, there is a telling clue. Residing in the United States, the author let it be known that he had not personally delivered the speech at a Berlin conference on world cultures, because he had "feared difficulties upon reentering the United States."

3. By 2002, almost half of the 18- to 45-year-olds celebrated Halloween in Germany, and 64 percent of the younger set, reports the German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche, adding, "The model is the U.S.A." Issue of October 21, 2002, p.92.

4. Xinhua News Agency online 2003, http://www.china.org.cn/english/BAT/ 70112.htm, 11/2/04.

5. These four examples are taken from the January 31, 2005, issue of DerSpiegel.
For more, see Christine Brinck, Das Beste von Allem: Das Buch der Listen (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2005), pp. 42-43.

6. Though this count does not distinguish between "English" and "American," the overwhelming majority of them must hail from the United States, as a quick perusal of a German bookstore suggests.

7.  Chap. 5, sec. 49.

8. Joseph S. Nye, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990), p. 188. Nye elaborated the theme in Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).

9. Or, like Lord of the Rings, coproduced with foreign companies. International Movie Data Base, "All-Time Worldwide Boxoffice," http://www.imdb.com/box office/alltimegross?regionfiltered=world-wide, December 4, 2004.

10. See the excellent essay by Wolfgang Pohrt, "Anti-Amerikanismus, AntiImperialismus," in his Stammesbewußtsein, Kulturnation (Berlin: Edition Tiamat, 1984), p. 79.

11. Lynn Hirschberg, "US &THEM: What Is an American Movie Now?" New York Times Magazine, November 14,2004, p. 90.

12. "French Opinion and the Deteriorating Image of the United States" (MS, Georgetown University, n.d.), http://www.princeton.edu/ -jjun/webs/PIIRS/papers/ KuiseI.pdf. The data are from Pew Center Global Attitudes Project, What World Thinks in 2002, p. 63. http://peoplepress.org/reports/pdf/165.pdf. Kuisel's paper is one of the very best analyses of anti-Americanism in Europe and especially in France. The Pew report had this to say: "In general, people around the world object to the wide diffusion of American ideas and customs. Even those who are attracted to many aspects of American society, including its democratic ideas and free market traditions, object to the export of American ideas and customs .... Publics in every European country surveyed except Bulgaria are resentful of the American cultural intrusion in their country. The British have the most favorable view of the spread of American ideas, but even half of British respondents see this as a bad thing."

13. As quoted in Jim Hoagland, "The New French Diplomatic Style," Washington Post, September 25, 1997, p. A25.

14. Holger Liebs, "New York, New York," Suddeutsche Zeitung, February 17, 2004, p. 15. Werner Spies, "Die amerikanische Unfehlbarkeitserklarung," FrankfUrter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 17, 2004, p. 35.

15. Les cartes de fa France a l'heure de la mondialisation: Dialogue avec Dominique Moisi (Paris: Fayard, 2000), p. 10.

16. For accuracy's sake, it should be noted that people do want to eat and dress like Italians and Frenchmen, and that Africans do court death on the Mediterranean when trying to get into Europe. But these forces of attraction hardly add up to the sum total of allures exerted by the United States.

17. Who Are we?: The Challenges to America's National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).

18. "Alien Scientists Take Over USA!" Economist, August 21, 1999.

19. Franz Mlintefering, chairman of Schroder's Social Democratic Party, targeted "certain financial investors [who] do not care about the people whose jobs
they destroy. They remain anonymous, have no face, and fall like locusts over companies. These they graze bare and then move on." "Die Namen der Heuschrecken," Stern, May 3,2005. The names of these equity funds were quickly published by the party. They were mainly American.

20. fu quoted in "Onkel aus dem Westen," Der Spiegel, August 28,2001, p. 29. 21. fu cited in Josef Joffe and Elisabeth Niejahr, "Wie in einem Kramerladen," interview with chancellor candidate Edmund Stoiber, Die Zeit, July 25, 2002, p. 4. This was his response to the question "So no amerikanische Verhaltnisse?"

22. fu quoted in Claire Trean, "Le reseau francais ... ," Le Monde, July 25, 2001.

23. "Wir schicken Soldaten, urn sie einzusetzen," interview with Die Zeit, February 28, 2002, p. 3.

24. "Deutscher Dienstleistungsmarkt soll geschlitzt werden," Die "Welt, February 5, 2005, p. 5.

25.  "Die EntdeckungAmerikas," April 1, 1997, p. 170.

26. The German business journalist Olaf Gersemann has pierced the usual arguments about Europe's better socioeconomic performance in Amerikanische Verhiiltnisse: Die falsche Angst der Deutschen vor dem Cowboy-Kapitalismus (Munich: Finanzbuch-Verlag), 2003. English edition: Cowboy Capitalism: European Myths, American Reality (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2004).

27. "Unsere Erneuerung: Nach dem Krieg-Die Wiedergeburt Europas," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 31, 2003, p. 33. Since this essay was written in the convoluted language of postmodernism, the author has taken some liberties with the translation.

28.  Les cartes de fa France a l'heure de fa mondialisation, p. 29.

29. (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot). The subtitle is Patriotic Reflections.

30. For a concise review of Sombart's thinking, see Colin Loader, "Weber, Sombart and the Transvaluators of Modern Sociery," Canadian Journal of Sociology, Fall 2001, pp. 635-53.

31. For instance, Paul Hollander, "The Politics of Envy," New Criterion, November 2002, and Paul Johnson, "Anti-Americanism Is Racist Envy," Forbes, July 21, 2003. Oscar Arias, former president of Costa Rica, opines, "People are envious of the United States. The images that flash across TVs all over the world portray a wealthy, comfortable society removed from the violence and misery so commonplace elsewhere." fu quoted in "The Last Word: Why Hate America?," Newsweek (Atlantic Edition), September 9, 2002.

32.   Quoted in Hoagland, "The New French Diplomatic Style," p. A25.

33.'The des symboles est terminee," interview with Vedrine in Liberation, November 24, 1998. Also "Vedrine critique la puissance americaine. Il faut un contre-poids, estime Ie minime," Liberation, December 25, 1998.

34. "Rede von Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schroder zum Wahlkampfauftakt am 5. August 2002 in Hannover." For full rext, see hrrp://www.spd.de.

35. The distinction between premodern, modern, and postmodern was borrowed from Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twentyfirst Century (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003). This quotation is from p.53.

36. The Pew Global Arritudes Project, American Character Gets Mixed Reviews (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2005), p. 23.

37. Ibid., p. 30. Even Americas best allies, the British-58 percent-want American power to be rivaled by another world heavyweight.

For updates click homepage here