World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [126]
Nowhere is this more plain than in France, where the interplay between Americanization and anti-Americanism has produced something of a national existential crisis. In the 1960s, French authors were already churning out books like René Etiemble’s Parlez-vous franglais? (1964) and Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s Le défi américain (1967). The former called for a campaign to save French culture from “the American ‘air-conditioned nightmare.’” The latter started the publication L’Express to offer a French-language alternative to America’s Time and Newsweek.
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Today, with the United States now the world’s sole economic, political, and military superpower, the “American problem” has assumed unprecedented proportions, constantly in the news. Many have suggested that French anti-Americanism is principally a preoccupation of French elites, who, in culture, diplomacy, and politics, writes international historian David Ellwood, look “ever more beleaguered, overtaken and outpaced by the appeal of American dress-styles to their children, of fast-food to their youth, and of Hollywood to their cinema audiences.” “The government, and the elites, realize that culture, writ large, is a battle that they’re losing,” observes Alain Franchon, an editorial writer for Le Monde. “They’re very jealous of America’s power to seduce. When faced with that you have to fight, even if you risk looking ridiculous.”
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The French political class is certainly fighting. In a phrase-coining moment, Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine recently declared that France “cannot accept a politically unipolar world, nor a culturally uniform world, nor the unilateralism of a single hyperpower.” (The term has stuck; now all of Europe calls the United States “the hyperpower.”) Vedrine echoed former president Mitterand’s famous statement in October 1993 that no single country “should be allowed to control the images of the whole world. What is at stake is the cultural identity of our nations, the right of each people to its own culture.” A few months earlier, Mitterand’s minister of culture, Jack Lang, had attacked Jurassic Park as a threat to French national identity. More recently, Lang has argued that if France’s cultural heritage is not “to dwindle into insignificance, economics and culture should learn to live together in France.” Calling for a new Ministry of External Cultural Relations, Lang wants “more energy, more openness, more international operations by French television channels and a whole-hearted build-up of a European identity ‘of imagination, youth, and spirit.’” Else, “the Old World could remain frozen in the shadow of American culture. . . .” Meanwhile, Le Monde routinely criticizes an America “whose commercial hegemony menaces agriculture and whose cultural hegemony insidiously ruins culinary customs, the sacred gleams of French identity.”
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In a recent, particularly acerbic essay called “Toujours l’antiaméricanisme: The religion of the French elite,” David Pryce-Jones states that ordinary French people on the street don’t have time for the “neo-Napoleonic” “inferiority complexes” of the French elite. “An American almost anywhere in France is virtually certain to receive a friendly greeting, and to hear praise for the latest Spielberg movie, and perhaps even for Euro-Disneyland, that genuine cultural freak.”
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But as with any ethnonationalist movement targeting a market-dominant minority, it is difficult to know the extent to which French anti-Americanism is an elite-generated phenomenon as opposed to a reflection of bottom-up popular sentiment. Certainly not all French agree with José Bové, who became something of a national hero