Right-wing Anti-Americanism: Cultural Variations of Anxiety About Globalization

Abstract

The end of the Cold War and the rise of the internet have made it harder to define and combat „right wing anti-Americanism.” Four political contexts that gave these terms their firm meaning have shifted: 1) Since the artificial order of the Cold War imploded, the United States, now the only global hegemonic power, has tended to act unilaterally in international crises (Somalia, Kosovo) and to yield to the temptation of ignoring international conventions. Criticism of the unilateralism of the „global bully” has increased worldwide. 2) When socialism collapsed as a viable alternative to the capitalist order, a crucial ideological marker disappeared with it. America became the only model—or scapegoat. 3) Southeast-Asian and Japanese critics began citing the social problems of American society as proof of the contradictions of Western liberal democracy. In Europe a psychologically deep and historically old cultural nationalism resurfaced. A common anti-American denominator with antiliberal roots has reemerged. 4) Since 1990, the liberal market economy—accelerated by a communications revolution—has developed a dynamism that has become threatening, particularly to those critics who consider globalization a function of Americanization. Older reservations toward the American experiment (of the kind that characterized European attitudes from 1789 to 1933) have returned at this dramatic moment and have revitalized global historical doubts, feeding into a new cultural anti-Americanism with a neoconservative spin. This ambivalent anti-Americanism calls for American economic and technical know-how to be adopted while avoiding the excesses and mistakes of the American social and cultural order: „laptop and lederhosen.” The radical right is more outspoken in its antiliberalism. It tries to instrumentalize and bundle all criticism of America into a neofascist rejection of the „American-led” liberal global world order