Traveling Under the Shadow of Anti-Americanism

When I told a friend recently that I was going on vacation in Europe this summer, he said: “Don’t tell anyone you’re an American.”

Seems like sound advice. More than ever, Americans are targets these days for invective, if not murder. Moreover, because we elect our government democratically and because that government is the richest, most intrusive force on the planet, each of us seems to carry the burden of our country’s actions on our shoulders. More so than other nationals, each of us is as poisonously emblematic as an offending T-shirt or a flag.

But vehement anti-Americanism has been around a lot longer than the war on terror, and in countries that were supposed to be our allies. Growing up in England in the late 1970s and the ‘80s when my father was working at the European headquarters of Ford Motor Co., I was derisively called a Yank on a daily basis and told in unprintably explicit terms to go back to my own country. When I was 11 years old, grown men approached me and said things like, “Thanks for giving us President Carter” and “You people think you own the world.”

September’s events and the aftermath have exacerbated these incivilities. The danger quotient for Americans abroad has soared because of the continuing terrorist threat. But there’s more to it than that. Something else is afoot.

There was the assassination of conservative Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn on May 6 and the surprising victory his party enjoyed in the national elections thereafter, coming as they did after a wave of anti-Semitic crimes across the Continent. Perhaps it was the strong showing of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the French general elections this month or the rise of the British National Party last year in the midst of brutal race riots across England. Then, there was the bombing May 9 that killed dozens at a parade in the Russian republic of Dagestan, an atrocity blamed on Chechen separatists.

These events can’t help but make us suspect that something ugly has been brewing in Europe for a while, and that whatever battle is coming to a head between East and West may well happen, as it did in the two world wars, on European soil.

This fear seems to be propelling the strong wave of xenophobia sweeping the Continent, and understandably so. Europeans don’t want the world’s battles fought in their backyard again.

Consequently, Europe is beginning to feel like a caldron, foreboding to outsiders, as it did in the 1930s. As the German newspaper Tagesspiegel recently described it: “Whether Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Portugal, France, Belgium or now Holland, everywhere the right-wing populists are on the march.”

While it’s true that so far the fear is mostly directed at emigrating potential terrorists, the hate encompasses Americans as well. And why? Because, as always, we are the evil empire, the bullying, imperialist philistines who think we own the world.

This is a battle long in the making and one for which Sept. 11 was only the final catalyst, not the cause. If anything, Sept. 11 is beginning to seem like an event akin to the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, which sparked World War I. In this case, the terrorists’ attacks might be the beginning of a third world war, which may never be formally declared.

History, perhaps, is repeating itself in historian Arnold Toynbee’s spiral; the critical mass is accumulating, though the combatants have different names and causes.

The pockets of discord stretch from North Korea to Chechnya to Sudan to New York. There’s no escaping it, and the lurid truth of rabid nationalism and wanton terrorism is that everybody’s a target. Welcome to the new world order.

Have a nice trip.