Anti-Americanism in Europe during the Cold War

In this chapter I focus on the image of the United States held by mass publics in Western Europe during the cold war, in particular on France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, not only because of their different national cultures and the rich set of long-term survey data available but also because each has been singled out by different authors as the most anti-American country in Europe. The evidence of mass anti-Americanism during the period between 1950 and 1970, in particular, has never systematically been analyzed. I base this chapter on a secondary analysis of a very rich, systematic, and underutilized stock of surveys collected between the 1950s and the 1970s by several institutions, most prominently the United States Information Agency (USIA) and the Eurobarometer. I have tried to convey a twofold message. The first message stems from the controversial nature of anti-Americanism, a concept looking for an empirical referent, rather than the opposite. To link one to the other, I narrowed its scope. I postulated, with the comfort of the indicators commonly used to measure it, that anti-Americanism is a psychological, emotional mood that helps us frame a set of phenomena and behaviors attributed to the United States. My second message is that anti-Americanism is mostly driven by our assessment of what Americans—or more appropriately the American government—do or what we think they do. And here, I would like to stress “we think.” The longitudinal analysis shows that, no matter how important events are, they only play a role to the extent that they interact with other attitudes and beliefs, and in this way they shape our feelings toward America.