Andrei S. Markovits > Quotes

“By examining these settlers’ decisions about agricultural, architectural, and cultural policy, Cronon demonstrates persuasively that one of their primary goals was in fact “to reproduce the mosaic of the Old World in the American environment.”10 Indigenous fauna and flora were to be replaced by European imports; cows, pigs, and horses to supplant beavers, bears, and buffalo; and wheat and rye to substitute for maize and acorns. Despite the fact that these decisions were detrimental to the health of these settlers (European architecture was ill-suited to the American climate, and native foods were far more productive than imported grain crops), they perversely insisted upon this doomed experiment of re-creating Europe in America. This fear of “Americanness” thus was paradoxically linked with the earliest phases of European expansion into the New World.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“The rancor against Europe in American mass public opinion is of a completely different magnitude from anti-Americanism in Europe. In American politics and society, Europe is—if anything—a sporadic and insignificant element of the public discourse.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“Domestic Manners of the Americans was an enormous success in Great Britain because the book used every stereotype of cultural inferiority and crude materialism imputed to the New World as a way of making the Old World feel better about its own identity in relation to the United States.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“underline the cultural wealth of Europe as compared with America’s supposed cultural wasteland, Simone de Beauvoir compared the French ball game pétanque with bowling. Boules or petanque is played in the shadows of majestic trees on a village square, where the unevenness of the ground is part of the game. Bowling is played in lifeless, sterile halls, where perfect spheres race at rapid speed across millimeter-perfect lanes toward completely identical plastic figures, in order to be sent back to the players by machines.82”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“For its critics, America thus represented polar opposites but at the same time was also squarely in the middle, signifying the banal and mediocre, associated with notions like “stupefying” and “dreary.” In the late eighteenth century, it was the unimaginative small towns of New England; in the nineteenth century, it was the deplorable social conditions in the industrial metropolises like Chicago and New York; in the twentieth century, it was life in America’s suburbs, and finally the dullness of the shopping malls and exurbs. With a way of thinking going back to the eighteenth century at least, America was not only alien and different to European observers, but also inferior. This contradictory trope of modernity as barbarism is a constant of negative European perceptions of America.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“As if to confirm the difference between Korean and European anti-Americanism, Salman Rushdie sees parallel patterns in the difference between the anti-Americanism of the Muslim and European worlds. The former, according to Rushdie, chiefly enlists political reasons for its antipathy to America, but the latter is anti-American in its essence and entire behavior: These days there seem to be as many of these accusers outside the Muslim world as inside it. Anybody who has visited Britain and Europe, or followed the public conversation there during the past five months, will have been struck, even shocked, by the depth of antiAmerican feeling among large segments of the population. Western anti-Americanism is an altogether more petulant phenomenon than its Islamic counterpart and far more personalized. Muslim countries don’t like America’s power, its “arrogance,” its success; but in the nonAmerican West, the main objection seems to be to American people. Night after night, I have found myself listening to Londoners’ diatribes against the sheer weirdness of the American citizenry. The attacks on America are routinely discounted. . . . American patriotism, obesity, emotionality, self-centeredness: these are the crucial issues.”37”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“Originally, anti-Americanism was an ideological value supported by educational elites and the aristocracy, while less well-to-do and underprivileged Europeans demonstrated sympathy for America by emigrating there.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“This leads to a third new factor in European anti-Americanism—the “Judaization” (Verjudung) of America and the increasingly strong overlap between anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. This phenomenon, too, is not completely new. German, but also other continental European, anti-Semites and haters of Britain have been united since the eighteenth century by a preoccupation with the “small shopkeeper mentality” of “perfidious Albion,” a theme that lent itself easily to anglicized America. The kind of modernity that was becoming ever more successfully represented by the United States and Great Britain (and that thus appeared ever more threatening) was attributed to a Western liberal and Judaized “merchant commercialism” (Handlertum) that was opposed by a cultured German “heroism” (Heldentum).”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“There can be no doubt that anti-Americanism has become a kind of litmus test for progressive thinking and identity in Europe and the world (including the United States itself). Just as any self-respecting progressive and leftist in Europe or America, regardless of which political shade, simply had to be on the side of the Spanish Republic in the 1930s, antiAmericanism and anti-Zionism have become the requisite proof of possessing a progressive conviction today.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“Moreover, using America and Americanization as a convenient bogeyman to garner points in an internal conflict that has nothing to do with America certainly is not confined to Germany.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“To understand the gap between a generally positive or romantic view of the New World’s scenic expanse and the constant demonizing of America’s culture, politics, and population—of “Americanism”—it is important to recall that America at the time was perceived as a very real political threat simply because of its appeal to the German populace. In Karl May’s day, “Germany sent waves of immigrants to the United States, where they were subject to great assimilatory pressures that rendered them lost resources to the newly united German nation-state.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“Antipathy and aversion to America thus became a solid component of the elite discourse in Europe long before the United States emerged as a global power.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“Anti-Americanism is an emotion masquerading as an analysis, a morality, an ideal, even an idea about what to do. When hatred of foreign policies ignites into hatred of an entire people and their civilization, then thinking is dead and demonology lives. When complexity of thought devolves into caricature, intellect is close to reconciling itself to mass murder.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“Indeed, they bear responsibility for having created a situation in which anti-Americanismhasmutated into a sort of global antinomy, amutually shared language of opposition to and resistance against the real and perceived ills of modernity that are now inextricably identified solely with America.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“Such criticisms of America and the American way of life focused specifically on countering popular myths about abundance, ease of life, and freedom, insisting that “America is anything but a paradise . . . one has to work a lot harder than in Germany to get anywhere.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“In the field of politics, therefore, the European Left fears American power much more than does the Right. It is the other way round in the realm of culture; there, the Right is much more worried than is the Left.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“we are to believe major press outlets in France, the Americanization of French society has been far-reaching, relentless, and totally to the detriment of whatever the case may be. We encounter the Americanisation of French and European accounting practices, the constitutional system, electoral campaigns, the growth of single family clusters outside metropolitan areas, the use of credit cards, urban and suburban planning, sports, films, music, language, habits. Even the world of Parisian haute couture seems to have been bastardized by “a violent Americanization of taste.” And of course antonymy in this all-around evil of Americanisation prevails.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“Above all, Marx emphasized and admired the progressiveness of bourgeois America against feudal Europe.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“The lack of understanding by the Germans, but not only the Germans, for Anglo-Saxon traditions and American reality is an old story. —Hannah Arendt”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“But where it differs markedly from “classical” prejudices—such as anti-Semitism, homophobia, misogyny, and racism—is on the dimension of power. Jews, gays and lesbians, women, and ethnic minorities rarely if ever have any actual power in and over the majority populations or dominant gender of most countries. However, the real existing United States does have considerable power, which has increasingly assumed a global dimension since the end of the nineteenth century and which has, according to many scholarly analysts and now as a commonplace, become unparalleled in human history with the passing of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“For the author of this novel about suffering, death, and spiritual loss, the dilemma of Germans who immigrated to America did not have to do so much with assimilation or dissimulation, but rather with social ethics and identity. The loss of German and the acquisition of American values struck Kurnberger as proof of the corruption of the self, and of the final destruction of a positive and communal premodern, precapitalist identity by the very incarnation of evil: “Yankeeness” (Das Yankeetum).25”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“And my friend and colleague Hans Weiler, an outstanding expert on comparative university and educational policy, long-time professor at Stanford, and the founding rector of the innovative Viadrina University in Frankfurt an der Oder, repeatedly told me how careful he had to be about expressing his reform proposals so that they would not be seen as American, which would have led to their being stigmatized a priori and not taken seriously. It was not so much that the proposals themselves elicited resistance, but rather the fact—or even the mere suspicion—that this might be an instance of something “American.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“Anti-Americanism, like any other prejudice, is an acquired set of beliefs, an attitude, an ideology, not an ascribed trait. Thus, it is completely independent of the national origins of its particular holder. Indeed, many Americans can be—and are—anti-American, just as Jews can be—and are—anti-Semitic, blacks can—and do—hold racist views, and women misogynist ones.7”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“In the imperialistic discourse of Germany at that time, the slogan Volk ohne Raum (a people without land) came into popular use. This phrase expressed a sort of self-identity otherwise unknown among the imperial powers, one that provided a specifically German variety of motivation for the general, Europe-wide antipathy toward America. Behind the pathos of Karl May and other contemporary Germans concerning the boundlessness of the American land lurked a secret wish to possess a country so big. These desires were of course to remain unfulfilled (indeed, America seemed to be colonizing Germans, more than Germans America), adding particular bitterness to the fact that so many of their fellow Germans chose to go to America. For many Germans, this emigration was more than a simple loss. It was treason.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“Both camps are fused in their rejection of American culture as inauthentic, with the Left viewing this above all as a consequence of America’s commercialism and capitalism, and the Right seeing it as the outcome of America’s supposed lack of history and tradition, in other words, as a result of Americans’ not having the profundity, intellectualism, and that indispensable mixture of education and character formation Germans call “Bildung.”43 If to the European Right America’s main evil lies in its excessive egalitarianism and racial permissiveness, then to the Left it is America’s inequality and racism that are its hallmarks.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“Because they write ‘harbor’ instead of ‘harbour’? Then one would have to attribute a language of their own to the Austrians for saying ‘Sessel’ when they mean ‘Stuhl’ [for chair] or turn ‘Januar’ [January] into ‘Janner.’ Because American slang is spoken differently from British slang? That’s true, but in both countries the standard languages are about as identical as ‘Austrian’ and German.”27 What is “American” supposed to communicate to German readers? An accent? But then writings by an author from Glasgow would have to be titled “from the Glaswegian” or those by a writer living in Manchester as “from the Mancunian.” John Lennon’s books would have to be graced with the formulation “from the Liverpudlian” and those by Woody Allen with “from New Yorkish” or, to be more precise, “from the Brooklynese.” If it’s not about accent, is the criterion perhaps geography? Then Germans would have to use “from the Canadian” or “from the New Zealander”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“In spite of the enormous number and thematic variety of these publications, there was something of a thread running through them: the desire to use America as a vehicle for Germans to understand their own identity. To be sure, this did not differentiate Germans from any other group of Europeans. Nonetheless America, due to the unusually large number of German immigrants, and Germany’s own particularly tortuous relationship to nationhood and questions of unity, became particularly embroiled in the conflict-laden process of German state and nation building throughout the nineteenth century and thus was implicated in the construction of German identity.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“It is not my intention to diminish genuine grievances, but rather to make it clear that the concept of “Americanization” (or even “American conditions”) is used as a label, a stigma, and adds little in terms of explanation or analysis. How and why is the increase in stress in Europe “American”? What exactly is “American” about this? Have American firms introduced these trends into Europe? Is it really more stressful to have a job with Ford in Cologne than it is with Volkswagen in Wolfsburg? There are many problems that cry out for discussion here, and many issues that need to be illuminated. But blaming everything on “Americanization” is, of course, easier and (above all) much more popular. “Americanization” becomes a complacent shorthand expression that, while doing nothing to explain complex processes, goes a long way toward offering everyone concerned a welcome bogeyman.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“In current German usage, the concepts “Americanization” (Ameri-kanisierung) and “American conditions” (amerikanische Verhaltnisse; amerikanische Bedingungen) almost invariably stand for something negative, bad, and above all threatening, something that absolutely has to be avoided or—if the European patient has already contracted this ailment—somehow needs to be alleviated or diminished.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

“There are also specific cultural fetishes and phobias unique to France. No European country pursues so rigid a linguistic policy as France, a nation that has always viewed its language as both an antiAmerican and an anti-English bulwark.”
― Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America