British Anti-Americanism
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Page 8 of 14 The far from tempered tone of Pinter’s speech, and others like it, undermine the claim that anti-Americanism is simply a rational response to US foreign policy. This claim has been made most strongly by the American academic Noam Chomsky. His influence upon the politics of radical protest in the UK, or for that matter throughout Europe, has been vast. Chomsky has argued that the terrorist atrocities of 9/11 and other such attacks are not motivated by opposition to globalisation or US cultural dominance, by opposition to McDonald’s or Hollywood, but are a response to what he perceives as the iniquities of US foreign policy.16 Pinter went on to make much the same point in his speech: that, ‘The atrocity in New York [9/11] was predictable and inevitable. It was an act of retaliation against constant and systematic manifestations of state terrorism on the part of the United States over many years, in all parts of the world.’17 The comment editor of The Guardian, the UK’s leading left-liberal newspaper, argued on September 13th 2001, i.e. two days after 9/11, in the same fashion that ‘for every “terror network” that is rooted out, another will emerge – until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed.’ This article was provocatively entitled ‘They can’t see why they are hated – Americans cannot ignore what their government does abroad.’18 Such statements show a somewhat jaundiced interpretation of US foreign policy. Even setting this aside, their high-pitched tone also suggests that they are less based on levelheaded analysis than on some deeper antagonism towards the United States. On another occasion, Pinter, commenting on his two pet hates, has said; ‘Blair sees himself as a representative of moral rectitude. He is actually a mass murderer…The US is really beyond reason now…There is only one comparison: Nazi Germany.’19 This begs the question, who is really beyond reason, the United States or its more vociferous critics? So what are the supposedly rational bases for foreign policy anti-Americanism in Britain? There appear to be three separate sources. The most significant group are those who object to the extent of US power and how this power is used. They object to the USA using its role as the only superpower in a unipolar world as a kind of global policeman and usually attribute nefarious motives to any US action. Interestingly some of those in the UK, including Tony Blair, who have been strong supporters of the United States and of an interventionist US foreign policy, do so partly for the obverse of this reason; they see USA power as being the most significant bulwark in maintaining a semblance of international order and in challenging those states which are a threat to global security. Others object to US support for Israel. There are also those who have a residual antagonism towards America stemming from Cold War politics. With the US being the sole dominant player in the international system in the post Cold War world it is inevitable that doubts about its role have arisen. This is the fate of any dominant player in a given situation. Fears of US military dominance have often been combined with fears of economic dominance. Such legitimate even if misconceived concerns, however, soon become overblown in the rhetoric of the opponents of US power. Eric Hobsbawm, the renowned British historian and lifelong member the Communist Party stated, that ‘A key novelty of the US imperial project is that all other empires knew that they were not the only ones, and none aimed at global domination… the present US policy is more unpopular than the policy of any other US government has ever been, and probably than that of any other great power has ever been.’20 |
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