ABSTRACT
In 1980, the British comedian Rowan Atkinson, in a sketch entitled ‘The Devil’ performed during his one-man show in Belfast, played Lucifer welcoming sinners to their new home in Hell. After running through a list of reliably dubious categories – bank managers, thieves, adulterers, lawyers – his biggest laugh came when he asked, after a suitably prolonged pause, ‘Now, Americans: are you here?’ (When performing the same show in Boston a few years later, an equally heartfelt burst of applause from his American audience greeted his substitution of ‘Americans’ with ‘the French’.)
If expressions of antipathy towards America and Americans display a remarkably long historical pedigree, the international response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have generated a new level of academic and popular commentary on ‘anti-Americanism’.1 The term itself is now so ubiquitous as to be part of the language of contemporary international politics although, like that other much-used term, ‘legitimacy’, it remains difficult to define. Although some scholars argue that the phenomenon ‘finds its most sophisticated intellectual expression in the West in France’,2 if recent empirical surveys are to be believed anti-Americanism is evidently a global phenomenon. References to anti-Americanism, however, though frequent across the political spectrum, rarely seek to examine its fundamental character beyond assertions that – if it exists – it has ultimately either been ‘born in the USA’ because of US arrogance or thrives outside the United States because of non-American mendacity, resentment and unthinking enmity.
