maybe there’s hope for us after all

Good news for a change, according to the Boston Globe, which reports that “anti-Americanism is more varied and less widespread than you may think,” citing a new book [Anti-Americanisms in World Politics (Cornell University Press)] by international relations scholars Peter Katzenstein and Robert Keohane, who posit that “anti-Americanism is not a single, unitary phenomenon.”

Whew, that’s a relief!

Well, I’m not sure if it will make Rachel Sklar, over at Eat the Press, feel better—she’s a little queasy after reading in Newsweek that “we’re going to be hit again.” I’m kinda surprised that she actually believed that line of Cheney’s rather than the one usually delievers, when he says that the enemy is determined to hit us again. And I guess she didn’t read this most cogent summary of the challenges we face from two very different kinds of Islamist extremism. Oh well.

Back to the good news now. It seems that there are four different “strains” of anti-Americanism, some more worrisome than others:

The first, liberal anti-Americanism, appears in democracies like France or England. Here opposition to American policies often involves the charge that the United States is being hypocritical by not living up to its professed values and ideals — values its critics share. …

The second strain, social anti-Americanism, comes from critics of the United States who are staunch supporters of the social welfare state, and thus oppose American economic policy because it promotes laissez-faire ideals and erodes welfare state protections….

More dangerous, according to the editors, are the two remaining strains. Sovereign-nationalist anti-Americanism, which may be found in parts of Latin America and Asia, involves opposition to American geopolitical and cultural dominance on the grounds that they are threats to national identity and strategic interests, as can be seen in Chinese saber-rattling over Taiwan. Radical anti-Americanism, meanwhile, of the kind typically associated with Islamic fundamentalism, holds, according to Katzenstein and Keohane, that “America’s identity” must be “transformed, either from within or without.”

Interesting sociological perspective.