June 14, 2007
French Anti-Americanism Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:10 PM EST Alex Burns, citing a March 2003 Pew poll with contrary data, wonders where I got the notion that anti-American sentiment in France did not increase in the run-up to the Iraq war. I remember reading this a couple of years ago, although I do not remember where, but Googling now, I find an article titled “Global Anti-Americanism and the Lessons of the "French Exception", published in an electronic version of The Journal of American History (Vol. 93, No. 2, September 2006), by Phillipe Roger, whose book I had cited in the previous post. Roger writes, “It is worth noting, for instance, that in the polls taken by the U.S. State Department in the fall of 2002 (which showed strong evidence of the surge of adversarial views in Germany and Great Britain), France, which was in the forefront of political opposition to the Bush administration, showed no sign of aggravated anti-Americanism, with negative opinions staying at the same level as before the diplomatic crisis (a 1 percent variation, irrelevant in such polls).” That said, I would not claim that French anti-Americanism hasn’t risen since the Iraq war, because I have seen polling data suggesting that it has. On the other hand, a little over a year ago I gave a seminar paper, on which occasion I met a distinguished and I thought shrewd American academic who had just spent a term teaching in Paris at one of the Grandes Écoles. He reported that on the strength of his experience with students from the French elite, whose views he seemed to think were a leading indicator of majority opinion in France, the French were about to become both more pro-Israeli and more pro-American, in part in reaction to the wave of immigrant riots and arson that had recently swept France. I do have the sense that some (by no means all) European opposition to the American invasion of Iraq was inspired by fear that troubles with Muslim immigrants would worsen in the wake of any war. Now that the troubles have duly worsened, the same anxieties may have produced an opposite and somewhat perverse and misconceived reaction: The Americans may be imagined to be hitting back at Islam, after having provoked it, and after it has newly alarmed the French. When something frightens us, our responses can be contradictory, and volatile.
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