Washington Post - The Americanization of Europe - Exploring the roots of anti-Americanism among European elites. - by Andrei Markovits

For the complete report from the washingtonpost.com click on this link

The Americanization of Europe - Exploring the roots of anti-Americanism among European elites. - by Andrei Markovits

Markovits -- a native of Romania who came to the United States in 1960, now teaches politics and German studies at the University of Michigan, and by his own ready admission has "a life-long affinity with the democratic left in Europe and the United States" -- claims, somewhat unconvincingly, that "Bush and his administration's policies have made America into the most hated country of all time," but he also argues that the history of anti-Americanism among West European elites is long.

There exists the fear that Europe's masses -- childlike in their own way -- also succumb to America's superficial veneer that woos innocents to do something worthless at best, at worst well-nigh deadly. Thus to this day, Europe's elite discourse often depicts America not as proletarian, which at least to leftist Europeans has the connotation of authenticity, but rather as commodified, commercial, vulgar -- values that exude inauthenticity, plasticity, and heteronomy.

European elites' image of America as 'Las Vegas,' 'Disneyland,' basically as 'white trash' -- or what the British call 'chav' -- has a distinguished pedigree: gaudy jewelry, expensive-but-tacky clothes, garish makeup, platinum blond hair, tattoos, vulgar demeanor, in short inauthentic and kitschy glitter best captured by the term 'uncouth.' "Europeans also fear what they glibly and reflexively call "Americanization," which embraces everything from language to food to movies to etiquette. They "bemoan a loss of agency, a seeming self-incapacitation vis-à-vis America's cunning and compelling ways, which are clearly experienced as dangerous and undesirable but against which one appears to be helpless." To put it another way, they're afraid that the temptations of America are so great that they -- the intellectual, artistic, political, journalistic, social elite -- will not be strong enough to resist.