SOURCE: Hollander, Paul. “Western Europe.” In Anti-Americanism: Irrational and Rational, pp. 367-410. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1995.

In the following essay, Hollander details anti-American sentiments in Western Europe through the twentieth century, focusing on political, cultural, and social aspects.

I am one of the rare European intellectuals who has never been anti-American.

—Eugene Ionescu, 1985

I

European anti-Americanism has so far been limited to the Western half of Europe, to the countries outside what used to be the Soviet bloc. The absence of these attitudes in Eastern Europe helps us to understand their presence elsewhere.

The nationalism of Eastern European nations, although quite intense, has never been nurtured by a threatening image of the United States and thus could not stimulate anti-Americanism. The anticapitalistic ingredients of anti-Americanism have been similarly absent: Eastern Europeans—intellectuals and non-intellectuals—having been subjected to an official anticapitalism since the end of World...