British Anti-Americanism
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Page 9 of 14 The use of the language of empire in relation to US power has become widespread. It has obviously been used by opponents of the United States as part of the standard lexicon of abuse. It has also, however, come to be used by some commentators, most prominently the previously mentioned Michael Ignatieff, in support of the US adopting, where possible, an international humanitarian role and intervening militarily to remove pariah regimes, which are threatening the security, indeed the lives, of their own people and those of their neighbours.21 In this analysis the United States is seen as the major, if not the sole, power to lead such interventions because it has the power to do so. In the UK the Blair government clearly implicitly supported this argument. It has also converted sections of liberal and formerly left wing opinion, whilst shying away from the language of imperialism, to become much more supportive of the USA. While part of the British left strongly opposed the Anglo-American led NATO mission against the former Yugoslavia, others warmly welcomed it as just such a humanitarian action. This argument has also been used, admittedly by far fewer than over the former Yugoslavia, in relation to the Iraq war. For example, Ann Clwyd, a Labour MP on the left of her party who was a strong supporter of the campaign for Britain to unilaterally renounce its nuclear deterrent, became a strident supporter of the war on Iraq not because of weapons of mass destruction or security issues but as a way of removing an appalling regime that was abusing the human rights of its own people on a massive scale.22 For much of the left, however, all Western and especially US interventions remain suspect and probably carried out for purely economic motives. There is no analysis of the intervention’s individual merits, simply a knee jerk reaction to the use of US or western power. When Noam Chomsky was asked if could think of any worthy interventions, he said that the British intervention in Sierra Leone might be genuinely humanitarian, ‘but that’s probably because I haven’t looked at it properly.’23 Arguments have repeatedly been made, and suggestions proposed, for how to limit US power. Some of those keenest on European integration, although less so in the UK than in continental Europe, see the EU as a bulwark against US dominance. The United Nations has also often been portrayed as an institution that can channel and act as a control to US power. Much of the more temperate UK parliamentary opposition to the Blair strategy on Iraq argued that acting without a new UN resolution would encourage US unilateralism and thus undermine a major impediment to US power not just in this situation but also in the future. Their opposition was thus motivated by an explicit desire to hold US power in check. For some more radical thinkers, neither the EU nor the UN as currently constituted can hope to be satisfactory constraints on US power. What is needed, they believe, is a whole new global system of governance. An extreme proposal explicitly developed to shackle the United States both economically and politically, and also to limit what he believes to be the ever-growing power of often US multinationals, has been put forward by George Monbiot. He is both the UK’s leading chronicler and advocate of the anti-corporate protest movement. He has suggested that the way to ‘stop America’ is to abolish the United Nations Security Council, thereby removing the veto powers of the 5 permanent members, and let all decisions be made by the General Assembly with countries having votes both in proportion to their population and as to how democratic they are and separately from this establishing a directly elected World Parliament, with each constituency representing 10 million voters.24 Although this proposal is very unlikely to be seriously taken up, its extraordinarily far-reaching nature shows how central to the concerns of today’s protest movements objections to US power have become – these protesters started by targeting Nike and McDonalds but their objections to the United States are much wider than just an objection to the ubiquitousness of US trainers or burgers. |
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