“The Anti-American Century?” by Ivan Krastev, in Journal of Democracy (April 2004), 1101 15th St., N.W., Ste. 800, Washington, D.C. 20005.

The anti-Americanism now so much in vogue around the globe is not simply a response to the Bush administration or the war in Iraq, and it’s not a passing phenomenon either, says Krastev, chairman of the board of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, in Sofia, Bulgaria. It has various sources, comes in different guises, and has arisen in an age when democracy and capitalism are without powerful ideological rivals. Anti-Americanism has become a conveniently empty vessel into which can be poured all sorts of anxieties and discontents. “People are against America because they are against everything—or because they do not know exactly what they are against.”

To Islamic fundamentalists, America embodies a hateful modernity; to Europeans, America, still clinging to religious faith and capital punishment, is not modern enough. In the Middle East, America is accused of hostility to Islam; in the Balkans, of being pro-Islamic. “The United States is blamed both for globalizing the world and for ‘unilaterally’ resisting globalization.”

What’s new is not anti-Americanism as such, but the fact that “blaming America has become politically correct behavior even among America’s closest allies.” The French pattern of anti-Americanism, expressed by elites in search of legitimacy and the young in search of a cause, has become common throughout Western Europe. There, the elites challenge America as a way to buy public support for making the welfare state more market oriented—better able to compete with America.

In Eastern Europe, however, the reformist elites have sided with the United States, because blaming America only strengthens the local anti-democratic opposition, foes of capitalism. “Lacking any positive vision for an alternative future,” they see anti-Ameri­canism as a way to attract protest votes from the disenchanted.

The U.S. response to anti-Americanism has been aggressive promotion of democracy, though in return for their support in the global “war on terrorism,” the United States reserves comment when certain less than fully democratic regimes brand their domestic opponents “terrorists.” That may possibly undermine democratic movements in some countries. But in many places, those who favor democracy and capitalism have opposed the rise of anti-Americanism. Perhaps America’s best strategy for countering anti-Americanism in the world lies less in trying to export democracy than in bolstering its homegrown proponents.