World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [123]
Along with many other market-dominant minorities around the world, Americans are often accused of being “greedy,” “selfish,” and ungenerous, especially given our spectacular wealth. European governments frequently point out that America’s foreign aid budget is a much smaller percentage of GNP than that of other OECD countries.
10 Further, what foreign aid we provide is often given on the condition that it be spent on U.S. products or consultants. (Japan is just as guilty of this as we are.) Moreover, the U.S. government is quite willing to make exceptions to our embrace of free trade for our own benefit; our farming subsidies enrage even our Australian allies. American rebuttals to these charges are, by now, also familiar. What government in the world isn’t self-interested? What country has done more for the rest of the world than America? Who bailed out Europe in the Second World War?
It is important to stress, however, that in some respects the analogy between market-dominant minorities at the national level and America as a market-dominant minority at the global level is imperfect. For one thing, at least from an internal United States perspective, Americans are not a single “ethnicity.” On the contrary, from our own point of view America is the quintessential multiethnic country, a self-proclaimed mosaic or melting pot. In addition, the “rest of the world” is not a single self-perceived “indigenous majority,” in the same way that, say, blacks feel that they are “indigenous” in South Africa as opposed to whites.
On the other hand, ethnicity in any context is always a highly subjective and artificial phenomenon. This is true even in South Africa, where, at first glance, ethnic lines seem to be particularly stark. In fact, South African “whites” include diverse peoples of British, Dutch, and German Jewish origins. South Africa’s whites are viewed as (and view themselves as) a single “ethnicity” only against the background of the country’s predominantly “black” majority, which itself is made up of numerous different African tribes, speaking mutually incomprehensible tongues. Nevertheless, the fact remains that, as a matter of general perception, the major social fault line in South Africa today is between blacks and whites and, moreover, that whites are widely viewed as a market-dominant “outsider” minority, wielding egregiously disproportionate economic power vis-à-vis the country’s indigenous majority. America occupies much the same role at the global level.
We are viewed by the rest of the world as one “people”—and for that matter, a “white” people. As one U.S. Department of Justice official put it, “with all acknowledgment to Colin Powell and Norman Mineta, the world surely thinks of our ‘face’ as white.” More fundamentally, all over the world, American products, companies, and investors are viewed as “outsider” threats to the legitimate “indigenous” society. America’s geographic separation is no bar to this perception of Americans as a global market-dominant minority. On the contrary, most market-dominant minorities—among them the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Lebanese in West Africa, Indians in East Africa, and whites in South Africa—are all the more resented precisely because of their “insular” self-segregation. Indeed, America’s increasingly restrictive immigration policies are another source of hostility for the rest of the world.
But America is unusual, compared to other market-dominant minorities, in numerous additional ways. As well as being an economic superpower, America is the world’s preeminent military, political, and cultural power. As a result, global anti-Americanism reflects not only our market dominance, but also our military unilateralism, our foreign policy, and our cultural “hegemony”—all of which have provoked intense resentment in many quarters. Yet even in these respects, America’s position is surprisingly