ANTI-Americanism can be defined as opposition or hostility to the people, government, culture or policies of the US.

This label is readily applied by pro-American thinkers to an assortment of worldviews, many of which they consider polemic in their interpretation of the term.

The first edition of Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) defines ‘anti-American’ as opposed to America, or to the true interests or government of the US, or to the revolution in America. In French, the term ‘l’antiaméricanisme’ has evolved since 1948, entering the political currency in the 1950s. The recent exponential rise of the phenomenon is ascribed to particular American policies or actions, such as the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Many critics term it as a label employed for the blanket dismissal of any action by the US as irrational. American scholar Paul Hollander describes it as a relentless, critical impulse towards American social, economic and political institutions, traditions and values.

This takes us to the degeneracy thesis espoused by Comte de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle in 1766. It was proposed that climatic extremes and other atmospheric conditions in the New World (America) weakened the genetic stock of men and animals. Purportedly, the American fauna was smaller than its European counterpart, venomous plants were more abundant etc. In 1768, Dutchman Cornelius de Paw described America as a degenerate or monstrous colony, arguing that the weakest European could crush it with ease. French intellectual Abbé Raynal at the time wrote that America had not produced a good poet, an able mathematician, or a man of genius in a single art or science. This degeneracy thesis was later rebutted by early American thinkers such as Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

Authors James W. Ceaser and Philippe Roger have read this as a kind of prehistory of anti-Americanism, one which has debatably fostered vehement rejection of anti-Americanism by the Americans. Purportedly, this long-standing feeling of anti-Americanism has ‘carried over’ to the present times, which, according to some pro-American scholars espousing this theory, lends a mimetic quality to anti-Americanism. French scholar Marie-France Toinet contextualises it as an allergic reaction to America as a whole. Anti-Americanism has also been equated with prejudices such as racism.

Hollander talks of anti-Americanism as not fully rational, a free-floating hostility or aversion feeding on many sources besides America’s discernible inadequacies. Others have put down anti-Americanism as irrational and an ideology dressed up to look like Marxism.

Jean-François Revel and Philippe Roger tend to ascribe anti-Americanism to a long-standing aversion to Americans and everything American, nourished by a concoction of non-liberalism and an irrational resistance to change.

Anti-Americanism is also touted as the ideological basis upon which ruling elites gain power, this hostility being harnessed to concretise specific political or religious agendas.

For instance, Francoise Thom highlighted the importance of anti-Americanism in fostering the political and ideological struggle in France, consolidating the various destructive forces in France including virulent Trotskyists, Islamic extremists and radical supporters of anti-globalisation in the context of anti-Americanism.

Scholar Josef Joffe suggests five aspects of the phenomenon including reducing Americans to stereotypes, believing US to be essentially evil, ascribing conspiracy theories to the American establishment aimed at world domination, holding the US responsible for all the world’s evils and isolation from the pervasive influence of American culture and goods. Using anti-Americanism as a symbol of irrationality, the ‘anti’ part of the term becomes the epitome of something pure. Against this, ‘anti’ implies the antithesis of that other ‘goodness’. Using this model, ‘Americanism’ becomes the unpolluted version but at the same time the root cause of ‘anti-Americanism’.

All these often conflicting definitions have lent a certain incoherence to the term turning it into an inherent paradox capable of being rendered articulately as a critique of the opposing viewpoint by critics on both sides of the fence.

In this context, Pierre Guerlain argues for a two-pronged approach in order to approach clarity. One is systematic or essentialist, which is a form of prejudice targeting all Americans. The other refers to the way criticism of the US is labelled anti-American by those supporting American policies in an ideological bid to discredit their opponents. Guerlain insists that the two forms can morph in certain situations making the analysis pertinent only in a particular paradigm. This is the middle way which at least accepts that anti-Americanism can be a manifestation of genuine grievances.

It is not a coincidence that intellectual Noam Chomsky draws parallels with the totalitarian state methods by comparing anti-Americanism to ‘anti-Sovietism’, a label utilised by the Kremlin to demonise dissident or critical thought.

The reductionist view is widely used by the American media in particular, which espouses that the essential goodness of American culture generates jealousy and awe in less inspired societies, which compensate for their lack of freedom as compared to America by turning their awe into hostility. ‘They shall not violate our way of life’, ‘we will protect our liberty’ and ‘they hate America for our way of life and freedom’ all become slogans associated with eliciting a schizoid response from irrational wannabees.

This viewpoint blatantly ignores the fact that people in the rest of the world could, in fact, be rational human beings, have genuine grievances and may put the onus of their grudges on America’s foreign policy. The fact that the end of the Cold War and unipolarity has been associated with an almost simultaneous escalation of anti-Americanism supports evidence of foreign policy as an alienating agent.

Of course, many cogent arguments could be offered from both sides, and undoubtedly there are biased views of the US, but the viewpoint offered by some among the right-wing US press and even academia that anti-Americanism is an entirely irrational reaction to the American way of life does not bear scrutiny.

The writer is a security analyst.