Adventures in hegemonism

Making the most of our new-found guarantee of summer funding, grad students in the humanities and social sciences will be scattering from Jersey this June like roaches following the Orkin man's annual visit to the Graduate College. We will wile away the weeks until September in a mind-boggling variety of exotic locales, from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, all in the name of "research." A couple of experts on Latin America I know hope to use their time in Rio to co-author a conference paper on the economics of fabric-minimization in thong-based Brazilian beachwear. My plasma physicist pals will be studying the effects of hydration on T-shirt opacity in Ibiza. I, for one, look forward to spending a few weeks in Amsterdam to polish a project entitled, "Gadamer's Munchies: Toward a Dialogical Her-meneutics of White Widow." We'd be sure to have a great time, except for one small problem: Everyone hates us.

No, by "everyone" I don't mean the undergrads who tend to think of grad students the same way they think of the sticky film that coats the tap room floor in the Tiger Inn: Most of the time, they're too drunk to notice us, but when they do it's with a decided sense of disgust. Heck, by "us" I don't even mean grad students in particular. I mean all Americans. Or, as an editorial in the German newsweekly Der Spiegel recently put it, "the snarling, ugly Americans." And by "everyone," I mean everyone else, from the British to the Botswanans. If U.S. tourists in London, Tokyo or San Jose are hoping for their host countries to welcome them with open arms this summer, they had best lower their sights and be satisfied with open hostility, tempered only by the grudging acceptance of our hard currency.

Hatred of Americans is, of course, nothing new. The French were already practicing anti-Americanism as a semi-official national pastime decades, if not centuries, ago. My mother likes to tell the story of how, when she was visiting Paris during a major rainstorm in 1969, the locals would accost her angrily, blaming the inclement weather on America's recent landing of a man on the moon. Yet despite the long history of inexplicably xenophobic meteorology both in France and elsewhere, things have become particularly bad in recent months. As with that arsenilicious tang you've just noticed in your drinking water, it's the Bush administration that's too blame.

With the Cold War long gone and with the world's one remaining superpower bestriding the earth like Rome in the days of Russell Crowe, now might seemlike a good time for adopting a relatively non-confrontational foreign policy. No one is in any doubt that we're the most powerful nation around right now, perhaps the most powerful nation ever. There's absolutely no reason to go rubbing the lesser nations' faces in it, people. Yet the Bush administration is moving forward with a missile defense shield that won't block anything other than the progress of international good will, provoking China with clumsy and conflicting language on the delicate issue of Taiwan and reneging on environmental commitments like the Kyoto Global Warming Protocol as if they weren't worth the recycled paper they're written on.

As two American citizens, including a Princeton grad alum, still languish in Chinese prisons without being charged with any crime, I'm not about to argue that America shouldn't maintain itself as a strong, unyielding voice for democratic and humanitarian values worldwide. Yet Colin and Condi's oafish unilateralism alienates our allies as well as our enemies, making it all that more difficult to defend these values. As if to drive this point home, a successful campaign on the part of the Western European democracies has recently resulted in the United States losing its seats on two critical United Nations committees: the International Narcotics Control Board and the Human Rights Commission. As a result, such eminently enlightened regimes as the Pakistani military junta, the slave-owning theocracy of Sudan and Jorg Haider's Austrian government now have seats denied America in international debates on human rights, while the Netherlands has a greater voice than we do in debates on drugs. Sure, the latter of these facts is kinda cool (and will surely form an integral part of my Gadamer project), but the former is downright disturbing.

While we were all expecting Bush to pursue such counter-productive domestic policies as a budget-busting tax cut and the conversion of the Arctic landscape into something resembling that along the Jersey Turnpike, the failures of his big-name foreign policy team come as something of a surprise. Let's hope that they're just the result of a new administration fumbling its way into the world, a possibility made plausible when one remembers that Clinton's crew suffered from some initial international awkwardness as well. More importantly, let's hope that Dick, Donald and the gang get their act together before I leave for Europe. After all, Amsterdam brownies make you paranoid enough without having to face the possibility that everyone in the coffee shop hates you.

(Michael Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu)