The dog that did not bark: Anti-Americanism and the 2008 financial crisis in Europe

ABSTRACT

The financial crisis that erupted in September 2008 seemed to confirm all the worst stereotypes about the United States held abroad: that Americans are bold, greedy, and selfish to excess; that they are hypocrites, staunch defenders of the free market ready to bail out their own companies; and that the US has long been the architect and primary beneficiary of the global economic system. So the crisis had an enormous potential for deteriorating further the global image of the United States, already at an all-time high during the George W. Bush era. Yet anti-American sentiments did not surge worldwide as a result of the crisis, neither at the level of public opinion, nor at the level of actions and policy responses by foreign policy-makers. This article explains why the dog did not bark and reawaken anti-Americanism in the process. The central argument is that this potential anti-Americanism has been mitigated by several factors, including the election of Obama, the new face of globalization, and the perception of the relative decline of US power coupled with the rise of China, which suggests that the ‘post-American’ world may be accompanied by a ‘post anti-American’ world, at least in Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-Americanism
• China
• financial crisis
• globalization
• Obama
• United States

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2009 IPSA, SASE, APSA, ISA and CES conferences, as well as at the IEP Rennes, the Copenhagen Business School, the University of British Columbia, the Hong Kong Institute of Science and Technology, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Princeton University. Many thanks to Giacomo Chiozza, Renaud Crespin, I. Mac Destler, Charles Doran, Andrei Markovits, Romain Pasquier and Richard Wike, as well as three anonymous reviewers, for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. Thanks also to Marina Henke for research assistance.

Notes

1. Public opinion surveys did not begin in Europe until later in the 1930s, so one cannot measure the evolution of attitudes towards the US then.