June 13, 2007
More Normandy II Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:15 PM EST Fred Smoler’s post yesterday, “More Normandy,” added some interesting thoughts to our exchange about World War II and the uses of historical analogy. Mr. Smoler summarizes my argument–that the deterioration of American efforts in Iraq followed an increase and led to a decrease in heavy-handed historical analogy from both pro-war Americans and anti-war Europeans–and remarks that it is “a very logical and initially persuasive speculation,” but one that he does not necessarily agree with. Mr. Smoler suggests that anti-American sentiment in France actually did not increase in the run-up to the Iraq war, which it presumably would have in a situation where American arrogance was provoking caustic French editorials comparing the U.S. to Nazi Germany. I’m not sure in which information Mr. Smoler is grounding his assessment of French anti-Americanism, but I’m familiar with at least one or two sources that support a different set of conclusions. In March of 2003, during the last weeks of the run-up to war, the Pew Center conducted a survey of European attitudes toward the United States and the results were grim. In France, just 31 percent of respondents reported having a positive view of the United States, compared with 63 percent who did in 2002. To be precise about what that statistic means, it may not exactly indicate a doubling of anti-American sentiment, but it does show a halving of pro-American sentiment. The drop-off in France was not as precipitous as it was in Germany (61 percent in 2002 to 25 percent in 2003) or Russia (61 percent in 2002 to 28 percent in 2003), but it’s pretty good evidence of a decline in American standing there. Additionally, over a longer time period, from April of 2002 to March of 2004, French support for an independent European foreign policy grew by 15 percent. I think Mr. Smoler is probably right, in a sense, that anti-Americanism did not increase in France after “the burst of American France-baiting in the run-up to the war”–that is to say, I don’t think the French started resenting American foreign policy because some Americans said mean things about them. I do think, though, that these data show movement away from sympathy with the United States coinciding with America’s unrelenting preparations for war. I doubt that overblown, Rumsfeldian historical analogy, and the corresponding venom from Le Monde, set this Franco-American schism in motion, but these rhetorical exchanges were at least the proverbial smoke that signaled a more dangerous fire. None of this, incidentally, clashes with the point Mr. Smoler makes in the third paragraph of his post, that “it is mostly increasing U.S. power and apparent hyper-modernity that provokes apprehension and animosity . . . When the threat of American hegemony looks most acute, any rival of America’s may look good, and Chirac sought to bring in the Chinese as French allies against the U.S. When the Americans begin to falter, a second look at the prospect of Chinese hegemony may have made that alternative seem less appealing.” Indeed, this argument meshes nicely with the one I’ve made above, regarding the relationship between war preparations, rhetoric, and Franco-American animosity. And it also helps explain why someone like Nicolas Sarkozy, who might once have been rejected as an American fifth-columnist, a twenty-first-century Pétain, just moved in to the Palais d’Élysée.
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