Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America by Andrei S.
Markovits (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)

THOMAS ALBERT HOWARD teaches history and directs the Jerusalem & Athens Forum at Gordon College. At present, he is working on a book about European perceptions of American religious life.

In 2005, the European Union experienced
a significant setback when the
electorates of the Netherlands and France
refused to ratify the European Constitution.
Euroskeptics and American critics of
“the European project” appeared justified
in having pointed out the limits of Brussels’
aspirations and the resilience of oldfashioned
national identities. But if one
looks closer, a major contributor to pan-
European identity, hostility to the United
States, appeared on both sides of this debate.
Critics of the Constitution worried that
the “neoliberal” reforms encouraged by
the EU threatened to hasten “Americanized”
conditions in European labor markets,
whereas boosters of the Constitution,
such as Jacques Chirac of France, plead for
ratification so that Europe might emerge
as a counterweight to American political
and economic hegemony. The invocatory
power of resisting America, in other
words, was recognized and deployed by
divergent political voices, and thereby—in
the interpretation of Andrei Markovits—
hangs a tale.

The past and present of anti-Americanism
in Europe is that tale and the subject
of this provocative book. To be sure, the
subject has received much attention in
recent years, but Markovits—holder of
an endowed chair in comparative politics
and German studies at the University of
Michigan—brings nuanced and insightful
considerations to the table, some in fullyformed
analyses, some in suggestive comments
that beg for greater elaboration.

Markovits has little patience for leftists,
at home or abroad, who are eager to
dismiss anti-Americanism as a politically
loaded term. A man of the Left himself, he
feels obliged in the preface to trot out his
progressive bonafides, from support of the
Kyoto Protocols to regular enthusiasm for
minimum-wage increases. But he finds it
increasingly difficult on both sides of the
Atlantic to be a leftist in good standing
(of the homo academicus variety) these days
without paying homage to two nonnegotiable
“wedge issues”: anti-Americanism
and an anti-Zionism that often borders on
anti-Semitism. He believes the two often
hang together, and he devotes a chapter
to their overlap, but the former, regarded
as “a normative and empirical construct,”
receives the lion’s share of his attention.

Markovits brings an interesting autobiographical
dimension to his subject. A
postwar Romanian Jewish immigrant
to the United States by way of Vienna,
he recounts how his Viennese-inflected
German was adored by German-speaking
enclaves in New York. For business
and family reasons, his father returned
the family to Vienna, where Markovits
attended the Theresiansiche Akademie,
one of Austria’s leading gymnasia. Here
he was regularly reprimanded by his English
instructors for speaking the abomination
of an “American dialect” and warned
never to use “‘American spelling’ with its
simplifications that testified prima facie to
the uncultured and simpleton nature of
Americans.”

Attention to language emerges as a
virtue of the book. Markovits notes, for
example, how German translations of
American authors almost inevitably come
with the line aus dem Amerikanisch (“from
the American”), whereas no equivalents
are used for other English-speaking areas
or for any other erstwhile colonial countries
where the mother country’s tongue
is spoken. The fabricated language of
“American,” in his interpretation, tells
us less about cultural realities than about
“the ascription of cultural inferiority”—a
frequent reminder in print to the highbrow
European mantra: “The Americans
don’t even speak proper English.” And
this is but one example of America’s putative
“uncouthness”—his word of choice
to summarize elite attitudes toward our
“upstart” nation.

While the work draws on statistical
evidence, Markovits’s best analyses derive
from anecdotes and opinions drawn from
the media, entertainment, sports, and academic
textbooks. He seeks to downplay
political discourse in order to demonstrate
that hostility to the United States is far
more than simple “policy disagreements,”
as is frequently claimed. It is a deeper, cultural
phenomenon. Policy disagreements,
for example, cannot account for the great
popularity of the Austrian journalist Eric
Frey’s Schwarzbuch USA (Blackbook USA),
a humorous commentary on the putative
backwardness and venality of American
life—and a book that has been met with no
protest, quite unlike Stephane Courtois’s
truly chilling Black Book of Communism,
which Frey follows conceptually. Nor can
policy disagreements account for the enormous
popularity of Michael Moore films
in Europe and of material from other artists
and intellectuals, whether European or
American, bent on depicting “the sheer
weirdness of the American citizenry.”
But Markovits does not completely eschew
politics. He is especially keen to point out
how longstanding anti-American currents
influence European perceptions of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The plight
of the Palestinians remains a first-order
moral concern, he believes, but this issue
would never have become such a cause célèbre
among European intellectuals were it
not for the fact that a word for the Palestinians
doubles as a jab at both Israel
and the United States. What is more, this
issue cannot even be interpreted cynically
as an effort to appease the sizeable Muslim
minorities in many European nations;
for “precisely those Europeans who were
the most silent during the Bosnian War’s
massive slaughter of Muslims at the hands
mainly of Serbs but also Croats have been
among the most vocal opponents of Israel.”
Anti-Americanism—in this case dovetailing
with anti-Zionism—provides the most
adequate explanatory factor in the interpretation
of Markovits.

Markovits accords great significance to
the massive street protests that took place
throughout Europe on February 15, 2003,
just prior to the American invasion of Iraq.
Here as elsewhere, he does not gainsay that
legitimate policy questions were at stake,
but the scale and shrillness of the protests
and the convergence of attitudes among
divergent sectors of society, he feels, bears
witness to something more fundamental
and abiding. “Never before,” he writes,
“had there been such perfect harmony
among intellectuals, governments, and ‘the
people’ on such a broad foundation and in
such an impressive international . . . con
text. This rare congruence could happen
only because of a clearly perceived common
enemy for all parties: the United State
of America.” Whether this “anti-American
Europeanism” (Hannah Arendt’s phrase)
will provide the needed catalyst to foster
further European integration in the future
is anyone’s guess, but the fact that European
identity appears to draw so much
succor from “convenient [anti-American]
ideological refl exes,” Markovits believes,
should be a cause of concern for people of
good will on both sides of the Atlantic.
For American conservatives worried
about the contribution of market forces
to social disintegration and the trivialization
of high culture, Markovits’s book will
offer much food for thought. Indeed, one
cannot help but find much resonance in
common European conservative criticisms
of the consumerist excesses and competition-
and productivity-frenzied aspects
of American life. Even so, one must be
wary, for the European-led effort to make
“Americanization” nearly synonymous
with “globalization” often bears witness
to an exculpatory motivation for Europeans
themselves; it allows them to take
their eye off similar issues and problems in
their own backyards. Markovits sums this
up nicely:

By equating globalization with
Americanization, Europeans score
two goals with one kick: First, those
that really worry—rightfully—about
the ills of this globalization exculpate
their conscience by not having to
ponder the fact that European companies
and countries have been equal
agents in this process of capitalism
as have their American competitors
and the United States. Second, this
gives the European global players an
advantage over their American counterparts
in the increasingly important
court of global public opinion;
they and their detrimental activities
slide under the radar of scrutiny and
opposition since they are not American
and thus not the bogeyman.

Put differently, processes of globalization,
insofar as benefits in some areas have
proved disruptive to family, community,
and religion, are not helpfully blamed on
“America,” but should be examined as
a more general and pervasive phenomenon
of modernity, which of course is
profoundly rooted in the exigencies of
Europe’s own history since the time of the
Scientific and Industrial Revolutions.

Commendations aside, the book exhibits
four shortcomings. First, the preponderance
of data is drawn from German-
speaking countries. This is perhaps
understandable given Markovits’s own
academic training and interests, but a
more well-rounded book—and one that
would better live up to the title—might
have drawn more examples and illustrations
from other European countries. Second,
too little mention is made of Eastern
Europe. While Markovits offhandedly
states several times that hostility to America
is much less pronounced east of the
old Iron Curtain, it might have served his
purposes of understanding western European
anti-Americanism if he had reflected
more extensively on its relative dearth in,
say, Poland or in his own home country
of Romania. Third, many of his points
could have been expanded and deepened
if he drew more from the works of various
European critics of anti-Americanism, such
as, for example, France’s Jean-François
Revel, who regrettably does not appear in
the index.

Finally, in a book devoted largely to
transatlantic cultural analysis, surprisingly
little attention is given to religion
and religious differences between the two
continents. We do, however, come across
the tantalizing claim that “the divergent
paths [of ] religion . . . differentiates the
United States from Europe perhaps more
than any other single social, political, or
cultural factor.” Yet, besides a few passing
references to Europeans’ bemusement
at Americans’ “Puritanism,” Markovits
never fully substantiates this claim. If he
did—and in doing so incorporated more
non-German voices—then this illuminating
book could be recommended even
more heartily. As it stands, the book merits
a serious reading. Markovits’s own
political leanings and nuanced analyses
disarm accusations of a politically motivated
“anti-anti-Americanism.” The book
makes clear, too, that the future of Europe
and the future of transatlantic relations
involves far more than a tangle of policy
disputes to work through. Longstanding
and embedded questions of cultural perception
and cultural divergence are in
play in a way that they have not been in
recent memory. They are unlikely to disappear
soon.