Why france hates america

Accusations of "arrogance" and "unilateralism" became the daily bread of the French media again. France had gotten its wits back, and the intelligentsia, annoyed that a passing lull could ever have been taken for desertion, had retaken its position on the front line.

With precious few exceptions, the French intelligentsia's reaction to the events of September 11, , refuted any suspicion of a conversion. Only days after the attacks, the op-ed pages of major French newspapers were filled with the usual America-bashing contributions, which greatly outnumbered the declarations of sympathy or solidarity—with unexpected consequences.

At long last, the French were looking at anti-Americanism without blinking; and what they saw involved France's identity much more than America's. French anti-Americanism is a historical construct with deep roots in French culture.

If you try to understand it by reading anything into its seasonal varieties, it is bound to slip through your fingers. Developed over and shaped by the long haul, it forces the investigator to plunge into the long haul. It did not start with the Vietnam War or with the cold war—or even in the s, which was its peak.

Nearly all the ingredients were there more than a century ago: its narrative structures had largely been formed, its argumentation polished up, and its rhetoric broken in as early as the s.

And even more surprisingly, it was already consensual. In a time of strident divisions, it was already the most commonly shared idea in France. From then on, it was neither exclusively right wing nor left wing. It brought together spiritualists and secularists, nationalists and internationalists. Favored by the extremes, as might be expected of any "anti" stance, it also permeated the more moderate segments of the population. Everyone knows how the Statue of Liberty was finished before its pedestal.

The statue of the American Enemy raised by the French, however, is a work in progress: each successive generation tinkers at it, tightening its bolts. But its pedestal is well established. And its foundations—the Enlightenment's strange hostility to the New World, which I will examine in the prologue—are over two hundred years old. The present work stems from the firm belief that it is impossible to unravel the riddle of French anti-Americanism without taking a deep dive into the past.

As we have noted and will see in detail, this strange cultural object is just not subject to circumstance. Passing trends have no important or lasting effect on it. Happenstance might have had a role in the early days of its development; we will see this in the case of the Civil War and the Spanish-American War of Quickly, though, the thick layering of discourses and representations amassed by French anti-Americanism allowed it to absorb exterior shocks without deviating from its flight path.

France's anti-American discourse is not solipsistic, but it is largely self-referential and autarchic—two characteristics inseparable from its Sartrian "bad faith. Clearly, that is just one more illusion or self-deception—and not the least dangerous, considering how, to give one example, such thinking helped hone France's diplomatic, economic, and moral isolation in the s; or, more recently, how otherwise perfectly legitimate political and diplomatic differences could easily evolve into an all-out confrontation, by triggering anti-Americanism again and again and setting off the infernal machine of a nearly Pavlovian hostility.

Where does all this come from? Semiotics generally has a hard time defining the exact critical moment when "it takes," as Barthes put it; when a discourse takes on a certain consistency; when it can run on its own obtuseness. A discourse of this kind works through repetition. Its strength is in its stubbornness. Its peaks can of course be charted by opinion polls, for instance , but its most important element is elsewhere: in a long, drawn-out stratification of images, legends, jokes, anecdotes, beliefs, and affects.

Shedding light on all of these elements takes more than just opinion polls which, rather than plumbing the depths, offer a snapshot of a given moment : you have to root around, dig up old deposits, excavate the matter, clear out the veins, and follow the seams. I don't even know what the word means," declared Sartre in His logic would have delighted Lewis Carroll—not to mention the Mad Hatter.

The same logic still is running the show in current attempts to obstruct the concept of anti-Americanism. In fact, since Sartre's day, the hard line has only gotten harder. Anti-Americanism was an incomprehensible word for him—or comprehensible just long enough to absolve himself of it. As the French essayist Serge Halimi discovered and exposed in Le Monde diplomatique in May , individuals with ulterior motives are hiding behind this empty word, and their mission is to "intimidate the last rebels against a social order whose laboratory is the United States.

Never heard of it. Except as a fabrication, pure and simple. Since Sartre's day, this denial has been the obligatory preamble to any use of anti-American rhetoric. Halimi's article is only a typical example of a widespread rhetorical device: everything in it works by mirror image, from the accusation of intimidation, introduced to justify censorship of the undesirable word, to the imputation that the opponent uses a "tightly screwed-together binary logic" this masks the Manichean political views of the accusation itself.

The semantic objection is there only to set the polemical machine in motion. Now for a more methodological objection. Even if we admit that anti-Americanism exists and that its manifestations can be pinpointed, does that give us the right to turn it into an analytical category?

Given that "anti-Americanism" is part of the French "logosphere" and might even determine a certain number of attitudes and behaviors, does that mean we can raise it to the level of a concept? Doesn't that—wrongly—lend credence to the idea that America has an "essence" to which anti-Americans would thus be opposed?

We cannot address this objection without quickly examining the link it presupposes between "Americanism" and "anti-Americanism. At the end of the nineteenth century, Americanism meant, in the United States, a set of values judged to be constituent parts of a national identity, as well as the attitude of those who adopted them and attempted to conform their personal identity to this national ideal.

The expression, popularized by Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the twentieth century, was inseparable from notions like being " percent American"—as opposed to "hyphenated American. Its content, however, is vague, as Marie-France Toinet notes, quoting Theodore Roosevelt: "Americanism signifies the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and strength—the virtues that made America. Americanism's credo, though it kept its nationalist and even chauvinistic overtones, was thus coupled with another self-defining tautology: the American way of life, which was the material facet of the word "Americanism.

A narcissistic self-portrait and a slogan for internal use, "Americanism" would seem to be hard to export: yet America's power overflow pushed the term all the way across the ocean to Europe. One senior British official close to Johnson, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to describe government deliberations, told me that French diplomats spent so long listening to people in London who agreed with their view—that Brexit would see Britain sidelined in the world—that they failed to recognize what the U.

Read: Europe should drop the act on Afghanistan. Those close to Johnson argue that little has changed with the current French envoy, Catherine Colonna, who has remarkably scant access to those inside the British government, having chosen a strategy of outspoken Twitter criticism rather than quiet diplomacy.

Moreover, it was elbowed out of the way by an administration in Washington that was supposed to be instinctively hostile to Brexit Britain and more favorable to Europe. For Britain, AUKUS, in contrast, offers a concrete step to deepen its ties in the region, opening the way to closer relations with Japan, India, and others, and helps smooth the path to membership in the giant Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

It is legitimate to argue that France should have seen this coming. The French criticism nevertheless stings in Britain because it is clearly partially true.

Of course Britain has accepted the position of junior partner to the U. Few close to Johnson have any illusions about this. Brexit, in simple terms, was a choice to leave a club in which Britain was one of the three most important members though often a third wheel because of the Franco-German alliance driving the European project , in favor of being a mid-ranking power in a world where some are far more powerful.

But is France really so different? Germany now leads the bloc through its economic might, which means it is in some ways able to forge an even more independent diplomatic path than France. T here are, of course, real differences between Britain and France. Although it is too simplistic to claim that the former is individualist and Anglo-Saxon, and that the latter is collective and continental—the U. France is the inheritor of a great history, distinct from though deeply intertwined with that of its neighbor across the channel.

For France, this history is revolutionary, all-conquering, exceptional, yet nevertheless prostrate—particularly when it comes to the shame of collaboration during World War II. Also a former empire, the country sees itself as standing for reform over revolt, free-born liberties over abstract rights, and the glory of holding out against Nazism. How both countries see themselves and their place in history continues to shape their instincts to this day. Low context cultures are very task oriented and follow rules and standards carefully as opposed to the French that have fewer rules and structure.

From a communication standpoint, Americans would explicitly deliver a message whereas the French believe that unspoken communication is implicitly transferred through the exchange Machlachlan, Hofstede states that the French culture is one that accepts some degree of inequality. In terms of Uncertainty Avoidance, US culture seems to be more open to new ideas and innovations whereas the French require structure and planning and are less open to surprises. Long Term Orientation differences indicate that France is more pragmatic than the US where individuals strive for quick results in the work place.

So do the French really hate Americans? Or is it simply a question of different strokes for different folks? Sometimes a little bit of adjusting from each side goes a long way to mending cultural difference fences! Lebowtiz, S. August 1, Business Insider. Machlachlan, M. February 12, Moran, R. Managing cultural differences. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. I enjoyed your post and agree that cultural differences can lead to misunderstandings and stereotypes.

One point you made about Americans defining themselves by their profession struck a familiar chord for me. When traveling to Germany several years ago, one of the things I would ask my German cousins was, what type of work do you do?