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The Anti-American Century: A World History 1898 - 2001 Print E-mail

PD Dr. Philipp Gassert

Philipp Gassert's project aims at historicizing global anti-Americanism. It places the historical critique of all things American within the framework of the three competing modernities (liberalism, communism, fascism) that resonated most strongly in twentieth-century Europe, but also in Asia and South America. Together with the Soviet Union, the United States of America often played the role of Europe’s most significant other. The understanding of what it meant to be European often rested on a rejection of things supposedly American.
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American observers of European anti-Americanism such as Russell Berman and Andrei Markovits have therefore argued that anti-Americanism grew into a powerful pan-European ideology over the course of the twentieth century. It became “an emotional, potent, and real moment of European identity formation.”

While American liberal democracy, communism, and fascism repelled or frightened many European liberals and conservatives, all three also held great attraction for Europeans. They also had a powerful impact throughout the world. American liberal democracy thus served as much as an inspiration as an enemy image. As the examples of the fascist movements of the 1930s, the anti-colonial struggles of the decades after 1945, and the left-wing student revolts of the 1960s and 1970s demonstrate, Anti-Americanisms more often co-existed alongside cultural Americanization than not. This project stresses the tension between embrace and rejection that made American modernity such a powerful issue throughout the “Anti-American century.”

By looking at anti-Americanism as ideology and practice, on a methodological level this study combines cultural, social, and transnational approaches to history. Since the Spanish-American War of 1898, Anti-Americanism has figured as an almost universal (albeit very differently understood) signifier. It has lost that role in the years since 9/11. Therefore it can serve as a connector to explore the modernities that shaped the twentieth century. Anti-Americanism provides an excellent analytical tool to write a world history of an epoch that has just passed.