–Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own–
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fifty years ago, a pair of American writers published a novel that trained a critical spotlight on U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. The book, by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick, became a bestseller and its title, “The Ugly American,” turned into an enduring label.
It’s been a dual-purpose label, first primarily pasted on inept American officials abroad and later on the kind of traveler who would irritate the natives with boorish manners and garish clothes, feeding anti-American sentiments around the globe.
Will they disappear, or fade, after the United States elected as its next president a black man who has described himself as a citizen of the world? The euphoric international reaction to Barack Obama’s victory suggest that America’s star will shine more brightly, at least temporarily, than it has in decades.
As Obama put it in his victory speech: “A new dawn of American leadership is at hand.”
Within minutes of the results, American television viewers were treated to what have become rare images from abroad: large crowds happily waving - rather than burning - American flags.
Cheers for a charismatic young man who said his election showed that “America is a place where all things are possible” came from countries where a similar feat is a difficult to imagine. A French president of Algerian extraction? A Turk as German chancellor? A prime minister of Pakistani descent running Britain? A Moluccan in charge of the Netherlands?
“Everywhere I’ve been this year - from Jerusalem to Japan to Colombia to Italy and back again - I’ve heard people essentially say that America is an overweight white plutocrat who is not only out of touch with the world but also shows no signs of wanting to grow closer to it,” the British writer Pico Iyer said in an essay in Time magazine.
The image, he said, was unfair but potent.
What better antidote to the idea of an out-of-touch overweight white plutocrat than a rake-thin black president who says he wants to “build new bridges across the world” and is seen by many as the incarnation of “cool.”
PRESIDENTIAL IMAGE-MAKING POWER
There are already voices who say the global goodwill Obama now enjoys cannot last and that there are limits to what a president can do to change the United States’ image. True enough, but there is no better example than President George W. Bush of a U.S. leader’s tremendous power to affect perceptions.
The speed with which he managed to turn almost universal sympathy for the United States after September 11, 2001, into almost universal detestation was remarkable. By 2004, goodwill had evaporated so completely that a British mass circulation newspaper, the Daily Mirror, marked Bush’s re-election with a front page that showed a picture of the president over the headline “How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?”
No such rebukes for the American electorate in 2008. What was remarkable in 2008 was how quickly Americans abroad sensed a change of mood. On the night of November 4, American expatriates posted jubilant messages to social networking sites like Facebook saying it was cool to be American again.
Some expressed relief at no longer having to pretend to be Canadian, a long-time ruse to avoid being stereotyped. It is particularly popular among Americans of backpack-travel age and among those traveling in areas where anti-American sentiment runs particularly high.
Numerous opinion polls have tracked the steady decline of America’s image. One, in April 2008 by the BBC and the University of Maryland, found that people in 23 countries saw the United States’ influence in the world more negatively than that of North Korea. Hello, Washington, you have a problem!
Almost all the surveys point to foreign policy — the war in Iraq, the scandal of the Abu Ghraib prison, Guantanamo — as the principal reasons for disenchantment. While that front has been static, private organizations have launched various initiatives to tackle the image problem on a more personal level.
The non-profit organization Business for Diplomatic Action (BDA), for example, has distributed more than 200,000 copies of its “World Citizen’s Guide” to corporate travelers, with 16 tips that are a mirror image of the behavioral patterns that earned Americans a boorish reputation in the first place.
BDA’s founder, advertising executive Keith Reinhard, is convinced that “our collective personality is one of the causes of anti-Americanism. We are seen as loud, arrogant and completely self-absorbed.”
Fifty years later, that echoes a character in “The Ugly American”: “A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land…They are loud and ostentatious. Perhaps they are frightened and defensive; or maybe they are not properly trained and make mistakes out of ignorance.”
Another job on the president-elect’s long list of things to change.
(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)
(Illustration by Brice Hall)
Do you want to contribute to The Great Debate? Please send your ideas to debate@thomsonreuters.com.
There's only so much a president, or American expatriates, or private public diplomacy groups can do to change anti-American feelings. It seems to me there's a good bit of resentment and envy that simply stems from the fact the the U.S. is powerful and its citizens rich, by comparison to others. It's the price to pay to be part of an empire. The Brits in their heyday were unpopular, too, as were the Romans. Not to speak of citizens of the late Soviet empire, compared with whom Americans were seen as free-spending angels, even clad in Hawaii shirts.
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To listen to some of y’all… You would think America was the Messiah himself come to grace the rest of the world with it’s presence and magnanimosity.
America has obviously done a lot of good, but it has also done a lot of bad both internally and externally. I don’t need to get into a laundry list, just study up on your history of the last century. Accept that, and don’t think the world owes you anything.
The “ugly American” moniker comes from the very arrogance that you see in some of the posters here. “We’re better than you, we are superior, ya da, ya da”. But America isn’t. It’s just another place, with different people, good and bad, and different paradigms. Having committed in its history many of the same atrocities that you find everywhere else.
It’s about time that Americans woke up to the reality that there are 180+ nations on this planet. The colonial mentality (or pirate, depending on your viewpoint) of snatch everything for ourselves has got to cease. We’re one race, the human race, on one isolated planet. If we don’t work together, then the status quo will continue. And it’s impossible to work together with a bully who is also a megalomaniac.
The visualization I get is of piglets at their mothers teat. They will kill each other to stay on that teat. Sorry, but it’s time to share for the better of the human race.
I’ve never heard of a European having to pretend to be someone else while traveling in the states to prevent harassment or worse. So who’s acting rude and/or boorish again ?
It’s easy to criticize the actions of the US. Anytime you want to jump in and help solve some of the worlds problems feel free. We could use a break anyway. By the way, how’s that whole Iran thing coming along ?
Bush will be out of office in a couple of months and all of the worlds problems will disappear. I’ve got to go, my Unicorn is calling…..
I have lived in the US for 8+ years, having lived in a couple of countries in Europe. My experience is that, despite the odd bit of loudness and sometimes lack of style, Americans are the sweetest and kindest people I have met. Their openness and accessibility - from road sweepers to the president - is something others should aspire to.
People of the world generally showed sympathy to the US after the September 11 terrorist attack. When the Bush administration fought to uproot the terrorist sanctuary in Afghanistan, the Americans loomed as heroes. But when they fought Iraq, accidentally removing Iran’s rival in the region, the act was seen as foolish. With this, President Bush further intensified the already simmering anti-American sentiments over the world. This even led to an absurd hatred towards anything that is related to American, anything related to English, even to the English language. Teachers of English in countries like Vietnam have felt it. I hope with Obama administration, change will come on many respects.
Wonderful commentary, and very true. It has been such an embarassment to be an American! I never lie about where I was born, but it has always helped to clarify that I’m in total disagreement with the policies of Bush and Co. Our foreign policy and economic relationships have been devastating for billions, but it is not only ours that is this way… the same predation is shared silently by pretty much all of the “rich” countries of the world, (UK and the rest of the EU, and Japan take note), whose lack of natural resources has forced them to create unjust, corrupt and damaging commercial relationships with larger, resource-rich nations in order to maintain the standard of living and diet many of us enjoy. The constant political and economic meddling that Latin America and Africa are subject to behind the scenes also emmanates from Eurasia and Canada (where is Barick based???) This I believe is a greater evil that the boorishness of our personalities, and I hope the election of Obama will herald a more just arrangement and sharing of resources for the planet, coupled with a commitment to conservation and protection of the Earth’s natural environment.
I think that using the term “ugly American” as a reference to American travelers with “boorish manners and garish clothes” is at best naïve and perhaps an insult to one’s intelligence.
I have lived in the US for a number of years and I grew up in a country that receives millions of tourists every year. Some people behave badly sometimes. Claiming that American are somehow more offensive to natives than others is simply untrue and unfair. It also means that one misses the point. This is the secondary and inconsequential definition of the term, which, I would argue, was invented by the US media to draw attention from the primary and quite consequential one.
The ugliness is in the American foreign policy and the devastating effects it has had on some countries and their people (e.g. middle east, south east Asia, south central America etc.) Historically, it is not worse (or uglier) than the policies or previous superpowers or empires such as the Soviet Union, Great Britain, the Byzantine and Roman empires, or any colonial or imperial power for that matter. But it is as ugly.
For example, consider the Iraq war. This is a war made so that corporations like ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Halliburton and others could rob a nation and its people form their natural resources. If one has no ethics and no morality, it is actually brilliant to use the American tax-payer to finance a war, to use the American army to deliver it, and, at the end, reap all the benefits. As it was explained to me in private conversations shortly before the war, there were two cases; “either the US forces would be seen as a liberator or there would be insurgency and a prolonged war of attrition. In the first case, we get the oil with great privileges and low pricing. In the second case, the price of oil would be driven much higher and we would have large gains because we have deposit and drilling rights and we operate on percentages anyway.” (Note that ‘we’ in the quoted text refers to the US oil industry — not the US oil people.)
Adding to the mix an immoral vice president who only answers to the oil magnates and executives, a president who is not astute enough to comprehend the forces around him, complicit and hypocritical public media, and citizens who have been thus blindfolded and hoodwinked so they could not see through the administration and their lies and deceptions (democracy in the middle east, weapons of mass destruction, aluminum tubes from Nigeria, and other flying green donkeys), the war in Iraq became yet another instance of the “ugly American” reality — perpetuating the term. The worst part is that such wars may make certain corporations wealthier, but they leave the US citizens and everybody else poorer, they aggravate the situation in Middle East, they take the region (including Israel) closer to catastrophe, and they have a human cost of genocidal magnitude — which is unjustifiable, inexcusable, unconscionable and criminal. Now that is what I call UGLY.
I’m impressed by canuk’s fair-mindedness and educated by his experience. I’ve also found that when I’ve lived within the US, good international news on the networks or cable is very hard to come by, strangely despite the fact we have more news channels than you can count. I’ve always listened to the BBC, on short wave if I had to. Happily, nowadays, the BBC web site is just a mouse click away, as is Reuters.
There are ugly Americans. Also ugly Canadians and ugly Europeans. The world has its share of boorish, violent, ugly people. In this, there is no shortage.
But most people are decent and well-meaning. This is what the world sees in Barack Obama. There is no shortage of good people, and good leaders will tap into that positive energy.
It’s time to put America’s best face forward.
You’re Welcome. groovgal, Tammie and Bob are prime examples of the Ugly American. As an Embarrassed American, I apologize for them.
One can only wonder if the Europeans were concerned and overwrought when over 50% of Americans voted for an Administration that was in conflict with the European governments and public opinion. Was their a general hand-wringing then and there that Americans thought so little of the positions of the Europeans? Did their public debate turn to how to get governments elected to fall in line with American opinion?
Probably not and correctly so.
Most of the world used to see American interests in their countries dominated by large American corporations. In the last wight years they’ve come to identify America through the unilateralism of the Bush doctrine.
And they saw at least half of the American public agreeing with Bush.
To swing American policies 180 degrees will be a tall order. To live in the global community requires compromise and trust of allies and even wary trust of your competition e.g. Russian, China, and even Iran.
Coupled with Obama’s new vision of America and every American acting as a goodwill ambassador overseas, at least it can be a strong beginning.
Why does everyone get so concerned with what Europeans think?
Do we have our own standards of behavior or are we enslaved to theirs? While everyone likes to be liked, most people would say that self-respect is more important. At any particular time we may be right or wrong on Iraq, Iran, Darfur, etc. Do we judge the correctness of our actions by our standards or the standards of others? Should not our opinion matter most?
If others agree with us great, but they’re not always going to.
The faddish obsession with foreign opinion polls is strange and probably indicates that for the first time Americans are developing an inferiority complex that once was the province of the post-war Europeans.
As a Canadian who has lived in the US I have some experience of both cultures.
Before the internet, when I was in the US I had to work hard to get more than superficial international news. Therefore, it was not surprising that most hard-working, time-pressed Americans lacked a global perspective. In spite of this lack, though, I found most such folks to be warm, hospitable and genuinely interested in my views as a Canadian.
It’s unfortunate that some Canadian anti-American rhetoric has found it’s way to the comments here. Most Canadians are not anti-American, though we have often wished that the US had more curiosity about their next door neighbour! (beyond ‘oot and aboot’ and wierd spelling LOL!)
The internet is making it much easier for Americans to be more international in outlook and millions are taking this opportunity to heart. This, plus the election of an intelligent President with a more inclusive, global outlook should, I hope, put the ‘ugly American’ stereotype to rest.
Every country has its ignorant, boorish members. Lets not let them become the definition of any nation’s identity.
I travel the world regularly, from Malaysia to Moscow and I, as an American, have always been treated very well in other countries. My hosts have taken me to exquisite places, from opera at the Bolshoi to hidden Hindu temples. The “meme” that Americans are looked upon in disfavor by others is a false liberal guilt construct. Quit trying to play it and face reality.
So far Obama is doing everything right. His organization is impeccable, he’s intelligent, and he is composed. After 8 years of any president we need a new direction. This is fundamental to our government, which is why we have term limits. The needs of the US are simple for 60,000,000 Americans to see. Unfortunately others are still stuck in the past, absorbed in nationalism, and totally paranoid. Get over it.
To all of you who are so superior: you’re welcome. You sleep under the blanket of the security provided by us, the ugly Americans. You’re so comfortable that you feel entitled to the safety we have given you, free of charge. All your snivelling and ungratefulness are even rewarded as we pump free food or cash into your lousy countries.
Ah well, the gravy train has hit the wall as our pathetic leaders have mismanaged things. So we shall see how brilliant and sophisticated you all are when we no longer protect and feed you.
Ingrates.
This is a prime example of being “out of touch.” You are merely restating what the outside world thinks of Americans in general. Who cares what the world thinks of Americans? The fact that we haven’t based our election on popularity in the past (until now) is what has made us the most powerful nation in the world. If our Founding Father’s had worried about what others would think of us when they went against main stream popular opinion we would still be confined to religious constraints of secularism. The idea that we have voted in a man who is a discredit to our American beliefs in general is a discredit to our nation! Supporter’s of this man will soon find that what they had hoped to accomplish will never come to light. Instead, he will further infuse this nation with more super highways to further attain his and the U.N.’s Agenda 21. If you wish to be blind by ignorance then this is your choice. It has been proven that only nations with capitalist beliefs thrive whereas socialist economies will be sucked dry! This man will fall into the ranks of Carter which isn’t good, but for us conservatives it is fantastic!!!! Because, he will not only ruin his chances for reelection in 2012 but we will take back the next two following terms for sure now! The world hasn’t seen ugly until they’ve seen exactly what Sen. Obama has in store for them.
I’ll be surprised if you actually post this since most of the liberal media chooses to sensor’s anything negative!
Quite proud to be an “ugly American.” And at least 57 million agree with me.
Hey Churchill
Envy of what???
that you are the only civilized country to cling to the death penalty
that you have a whole class of your society that is homeless
that more people have access to Disney land than decent health care
that your disgrungled citizens are more likely to shoot first ask questions later
You are right though - there are decent Americans, unfortunately for every one of those there are 10 who take any criticism as envy (I still havent figured out what I’m suppose to be envious of!!!!!!!!!!!!) and see anyone who criticises them as leftis/communist/pinkos
For the record I’m Canadian - We knew how arrogant you were for years….just took the rest of the world a while to catch up
You think you are an unbeatable Empire, so did Rome….beware the ides of March
The Canadians lauding their inherent superiority to Americans need to be reminded that they are spared many problems because they come from a dinky power with a small population, and they need to be reminded that things aren’t exactly great up north — witness the race riots in Montreal last summer(!), shoddy and bridges all over, and an oversold health system. What they do have, though, is a powerful provincial vanity, rising paradoxically from the most boring people on earth.