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America Seen Through European Eyes
 Explore the Series.
For more than two decades, Sylvia Poggioli has covered Europe, the Balkans and the Middle East for NPR. In this Reporter's Notebook, the senior European correspondent describes her four-part series on shifting European attitudes toward America.
Oct. 14, 2003 -- This series was prompted by the widespread opposition of European public opinion to the American-led war in Iraq. We wanted to understand how and why European perceptions of America had changed over the last two years, since 9/11, when there had been such an outpouring of solidarity for the American people.
So, on Sept. 8, producer Jeff Rogers and I embarked on a whirlwind tour of four European countries -- Germany, France, Italy and Poland. The first two opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq, Italy backed the Bush administration despite widespread public opposition and Poland fully supported the U.S., even sending some troops to the Gulf. We have tried to provide listeners with a picture of America through the eyes of some of its beholders.
Everywhere we went politicians and analysts tried to convince us that "there is no anti-Americanism here." In talking to normal people, however, we found that that anti-Americanism is alive and well. And we began to trace its roots and causes in different European societies.
In Germany, we found a newly reunified country eager to break the bonds with the American Protector that had tried to mold post-war West Germany. This is a society still psychologically and economically divided into east and west and it is searching for a new identity. What we found in Germany was the end of decades of political correctness and a much more open and confrontational language toward the U.S.
We then traveled to France -- the cradle of anti-Americanism. Disdain and disapproval of the United States has a long history here -- it goes back to the Enlightenment when French science decreed that nature in the New World was second class, damp and degenerate. Those scientists went so far as to believe that the U.S. habitat led to impotence and therefore humanity would not survive in the American climate.
The poet Baudelaire coined the expression Americanization and he did not mean it as a compliment. Stendhal sniffed that Americans were concerned only with the smell of money, and, in the fifties, that American import the refrigerator was denounced as a plot to destroy French domestic comfort.
Generation after generation of French intellectuals added their contribution to what has become a national conviction that America poses a danger to everything the French hold dear.
This body of intellectual anti-Americanism is in total contradiction to the visible Americanization of Paris -- perhaps nowhere else in Europe are there as many U.S. fast food and clothing outlets. No one was able to help us solve this enigma.
However, if the best-seller list is any indication, the French are beginning to question some of their long-held prejudices. Book shops are filled with new publications about America -- not only negative ones, but also several scholarly works analyzing French anti-Americanism, which Le Nouvel Observateur describes as "stupidity and paranoia."
Our third stop was Italy, where we found there is still a great deal of gratitude for America's role in liberating the country from Nazism and Fascism.
And we found a passion among the older generation for the popular culture that the GIs brought with them -- music, movies and movie stars.
But Italian anti-Americanism has deep roots in the country's two major cultural forces: Catholicism and communism. For decades, the Catholic Church criticized American Protestantism, individualism, materialism, and consumerism. Most of all, the U.S. was seen as a dangerous symbol of Modernity. As for the Italian Communist Party (the largest in the West), it took its cues from Moscow and America of course represented the Imperialist enemy.
Today, communism has lost its appeal and Italy is a very secular country, but there still are strong strains of anti-Americanism in public opinion. And it was Italians who invented the rainbow-peace flag that hung from thousands of windows and balconies in the country and became the anti-war symbol throughout Europe.
Our last stop was Poland, where pro-Americanism is alive and well -- nourished by the large Polish-American immigrant population and by gratitude for American political support throughout the 20th century. In fact, there is a saying there that Poland is the most pro-American country in the world, including America.
Poland is the only post-Communist country to have willingly undergone an American-inspired economic reform known as "shock therapy." The country is in total transformation: the once-flat skyline of Warsaw is now dotted with steel and glass skyscrapers, MTV Poland is a huge success in millions of homes, and the new entrepreneurial spirit is so prevalent that -- in the land of Solidarity -- trade unions are no longer welcome in many companies.
However, there is growing concern that the transatlantic rift could have negative repercussions on Poland, which in May will become a full member of the European Union. Many Poles worry they may be forced to chose between Europe and America.
As a child, I traveled often to Europe during summers with my parents, during high school I lived for six months in Paris and six months in Rome, and after college I got a Fulbright Fellowship to study at Rome University. That was 1968, the height of the Vietnam War, and I was a constant target of diatribes against American government policies, before anyone ever bothered to ask where I stood on the issue. That has given me a particular perspective on the phenomenon of anti-Americanism.
What appears to be emerging in post-Cold War Europe is not only a political rift triggered by the Bush administration's policies in Iraq. There is also clearly a growing gap in social and cultural issues -- the environment, the death penalty, gun control, the welfare state, health insurance and even... vacation. (The idea that an American could willingly give up vacation time is incomprehensible and unacceptable for the average European.)
I sense something new today: the U.S. as a single superpower elicits a hugely complex gamut of emotions -- from totally uncritical fascination to outright hatred, from admiration to envy. The U.S. is seen as either El Dorado or the cause of all the world's economic and social ills.
The U.S. is now also a cause for fear. Europeans -- who for half a century bonded with America as their military and economic protector against the common Soviet threat -- today feel the United States is unpredictable. As one analyst told me, "out of control." This perception could lead to dangerous consequences: the European Union, which is struggling to speak with one voice and to make its political weight felt in the world, could be tempted to use anti-Americanism as a rallying cry to forge a new European identity.
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