The French Way (55 page)

Why is this rural story relevant to anti-Americanism? Because long-term socioeconomic change in the countryside so diminished a traditional point of reference that Frenchmen and women had difficulty defining Frenchness—and someone or some force, like American-led globalization, had to be at fault. Or, as Dominique Moisi observed in 1993, “There is less and less of France abroad, and more and more that is foreign in France….One minute it's dinosaurs
[Jurassic Park]
, the next North African immigrants, but it's the same basic anxiety.”
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Into the midst of a nation engaged in self-doubt and introspection stepped the United States.

Once again, as in the early 1950s, Uncle Sam was in a proselytizing mood. American leaders unabashedly celebrated the market economy and globalization. The Clinton administration seemed to lecture, if not hector, the French about following American ways. The message from the New World was, if only you opened your economy and stopped subsidizing uncompetitive sectors like agriculture, you could create more jobs and enjoy our standard of living. This celebration of the market ran against a French sense of tradition and solidarity. It revived stereotypes about the ruthless ways of Americans and their willingness to submit all activity, including agriculture, to market criteria. The more Bill Clinton's America challenged the French over globalization and the primacy of the market, and the more the distance between present and past grew, the more the French tried to preserve traditions like rural life that defined identity.

In 1992 there was an expression of this sentiment when many urbanites rallied to the cause of farmers in their protest against American efforts at cutting agricultural subsidies during the GATT negotiations. The farmers' plight evoked nostalgia among a sentimental urban populace. When farmers presented their case to Paris by erecting stands serving wine, cheese, pate, and other produce, according to the press, “a million Parisians turned out to welcome them as if they represented a threatened species.”
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This GATT affair evoked the aura of a desperate
effort to reconnect the mass of urban society with a rural past—even though the contemporary farmer barely resembles this past.

As a way of illustrating this analysis of late-twentieth-century anti-Americanism it is helpful to recall the case of Jose Bove, who gained national and international notoriety by vandalizing a McDonald's construction site in 1999. The basis of Bove's protest was intensified Franco-American competition over trade—especially over food—and specifically the U.S. government raising duties on certain French luxury imports including his own crop, Roquefort cheese. Besides endangering small producers, in Bove's eyes there was the threat of Americanled globalization because the United States was trying to force la malbouffe—represented by McDonald's—on the French. He argued that the Americans threatened two markers of national identity, the small farm and food. The Bove affair, moreover, expressed a third aspect of anti-Americanism, the stereotype of Americans who allegedly ate badly and treated everything, including food, as merchandise. A final familiar element was the way politicians, including the president and prime minister, exploited anti-Americanism and helped make Bove a national hero.

In 1990 the French asked themselves a question that was unimaginable in 1930 or even 1960: Was France any longer France? Did France exist if there were no peasants and only a few practicing Catholics ? If immigrants refused assimilation? If the French language was bastardized by American phrases, McDonald's sold hamburgers on the Champs-Elysees, Hollywood films appeared on over half of French cinema screens, and Euro Disney attracted over three million French visitors in its first year of operation? If the government let the price of a baguette rise and Renault became a private company? If the state could not control the exchange rate of the franc and Brussels dictated agricultural policy? Such doubts reflected just how acutely self-conscious and defensive the French had become.

Why did America at the fin de siecle appear as the appropriate target for this sense of loss, powerlessness, and malaise ? There are three reasons.

First, America was the target because the United States was the principal obstacle to French independence and influence in international affairs. The U.S. government tried to impose its laws on France, for example, against doing business with Iran and Cuba. It opposed the creation of an independent European defense capacity. It dragged France into war against Iraq. It excluded France from vital decisions like NATO expansion and the Middle East peace process. And it did all this out of self-interest rather than for its alleged desire to maintain peace or advance democracy. By the end of the century half of those polled, in a truly remarkable finding, said France and the United States were either adversaries or semiadversaries.
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Second, America was intrusive and its behavior seemed self-serving. The United States, given its vast array of privileges and its self-confidence, appeared to be willful and omnipotent. The “hyperpower” not only promoted policies like globalization and trade liberalization but, when necessary, inflicted them on the French. Uncle Sam forced changes, like the import of genetically modified seeds, feed, and food, which many thought were unsafe. And Americans did so to serve their interests, it was said, for example, to fatten the profits of multinationals like Monsanto. Globalization, in the eyes of 25 percent of the population, primarily benefited the United States.
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Hubert Vedrine observed that America profited most because of its economic scale, technological advantages, market-oriented economy, and mass culture, and because globalization spoke American English.
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Finally, America became the target because there were, from a French perspective, obvious shortcomings to the “American model” of society and its “unculture.” The two countries seemed to have different conceptions of what defined a good society, leading the French to charge their transatlantic friends with lacking a sense of social solidarity—pointing to how Americans shredded their safety net or failed, under the guise of multiculturalism, to assimilate immigrants thus tolerating the Balkanization of their society. And resistance to Hollywood, fast food, and American English was necessary in order to preserve bon goiit and elite culture.

Anti-Americanism in the 1990s was a form of retaliation—retaliation against an obstructionist, unreliable, and expendable American hegemony in international politics; retaliation against a seemingly omnipotent United States that tried to impose the self-serving process of globalization on France; and retaliation against American promotion of economic practices, a flawed social model, and mass culture that challenged a traditional construction of Frenchness and debased true culture.

Comparing Two Decades

An explanation of anti-Americanism during the 1990s invites some reflection on the more benign decade that preceded it. In the 1980s there were still two superpowers, which allowed France some space for maneuver; after 1989 there was only the old transatlantic ally/nemesis in Washington. The earlier decade was also marked by the relative absence of issues that provoked anti-Americanism later: there were no major wars that required France to fight as an ally with the United States and the contentious problem of remaking the Atlantic Alliance was not yet on the table. There were also no demonstrations, except possibly for Libya, of America's enormous lead in military power that would be apparent later in the Balkans and Iraq. What wrangling occurred between Washington and Paris was over less passionate issues, at least for the ordinary French man or woman, like trade sanctions against the Soviets, the exchange rate of the dollar, arms control, the Strategic Defense Initiative, or aid to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Unilateralism and triumphalism in the earlier decade were also less blatant despite Reagan's posturing and Bush's assertive management of German reunification. In the Reagan-Bush years triumphalism had not yet reached the stage of parading the “indispensable nation” or extolling the American economic model as displayed at the G7 summit in 1996. And imports of American popular culture seemed less intrusive.

Moreover, during the 1980s the French malaise—that is, the anxiety over problems like immigration, Brussels, and globalization—was only beginning to emerge. In brief, to the French the United States appeared less hegemonic: in the mid-1980s half of those surveyed expressed little or no concern about U.S. interference in French foreign policy and even fewer said they were anxious about interference in economic affairs.
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Polls ten years later revealed far more worry about the hyperpower.

It would be misleading to draw too sharp a contrast between the decades, for in many respects the Reagan-Bush years anticipated the 1990s. Mistrust and rivalry marked international relations; positive attitudes toward America concealed anxieties and ambivalence; Americanization, or at least certain vectors of American popular culture, appeared as threats; and dystopian anti-Americanism still carried a certain cachet among intellectuals and those on the political margins. Looking back, the presidency of George H. W. Bush ushered in the testy new decade with the emergence of the controversial questions of restructuring the Atlantic Alliance and controlling Iraq. War in the Balkans roused French anxiety about American policy while quarrels over a new European security policy soured relations. In short, well before Bill Clinton took office the familiar rivalry and anti-Americanism were in the ascendancy.

The Novelty of Contemporary Anti-Americanism

Despite the striking continuities in the history of anti-Americanism what emerged at the fin de siecle was in certain respects different from its interwar, or even its early Cold War, predecessors.
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The phenomenon under discussion here is principally the expansive, popular form of the phobia rather than its restrictive, dystopian variant.

Contemporary anti-Americanism is less about the horrors of the coming standardized, technology-driven modernity, or the suf-focation
of mass culture, or even the empty lifestyle of consumerism than it was in the interwar years, though some of these tropes persist. Americanization had advanced too far by the end of the century to sustain these phobias. Consumer society and American popular culture were so accepted, so ubiquitous, that it was difficult to denounce America as an outsider that had perpetrated a cultural crime. The anti-Americanism of the fin de siecle focused less on modernity itself and more on American policies—both domestic (principally socioeconomic) and foreign—as they impinged on France. What was driving contemporary anti-Americanism was mainly the policies and politics of the hyperpower.

Fin-de-siecle anti-Americanism was also different because it was inserted into the wider debate about globalization. The process of globalization had shaped Franco-American relations for a long time, but the flows of commerce, investment, technology, people, culture, and information across the Atlantic in recent decades expanded in magnitude and kind and accelerated in velocity. This new interconnectedness seemed to magnify the presence and power of America and fuel anti-Americanism. To the French, as to many others, globalization came with an American face. The Internet begot Microsoft, American websites, and American English while foreign investment brought the power of American investors. Fast food, soft drinks, and family entertainment increasingly bore the trademarks of McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and Disney. International organizations like the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organization, and even the European Union, in the eyes of the more paranoid were supposedly accomplices of the U.S. government. As popular opposition to globalization grew among the French, it generated new activist movements and created new fractures among political parties.
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Those who actively resisted globalization tended to target the United States as the champion of “ultraliberal” capitalism and free trade, though they usually claimed they were not “anti-American.” But protests against American-led globalization often seemed incoherent and confused; much of what these
demonstrators denounced as globalization was only remotely linked to America. The rally for Jose Bove in 2000, for example, included not only adversaries of McDonald's but also housing activists, Greenpeace militants, proponents of the Occitan language, and opponents of the Lyon-to-Toulouse superhighway.