After the 9/11 attack, a wave of sympathy for the United States quickly receded and gave way to blame. In France and other quarters of Europe, it was said that the Americans had brought this violence upon themselves by inhabiting a "cowboy" country whose corporations manipulated world markets and whose riches were acquired at the price of Third World impoverishment.

This book reveals how the concept of 'anti-Americanism' has been misused for over 200 years to stifle domestic dissent and dismiss foreign criticism.

Korea, 2002. The capital is the scene of huge anti-American protests, the U.S. flag torn to shreds, an American taken hostage and forced to make a propaganda statement, and cyber-attacks on the United States. Pyongyang? No--Seoul, capital of U.S. ally South Korea Americans think of South Korea as one of the most pro-American of countries, but in fact many Koreans hold harsh and conspiratorial views of the United States. If not, why did a single U.S. military traffic accident in 2002 cause hundreds of thousands of Koreans to take to the streets for weeks, shredding and burning American flags, cursing the United States, and harassing Americans? Why, too, the death threats against American athlete Apolo Ohno and massive cyberattacks against the United States for a sports call made at the Utah Winter Olympics by an Australian referee? These are just two of the incidents detailed in David Straub's book, the story of an explosion of anti-Americanism in South Korea from 1999 to 2002. Straub, a Korean- speaking senior American diplomat in Seoul at the time, reviews the complicated history of the United States' relationship with Korea and offers case studies of Korean anti-American incidents during the period that make clear why the outburst occurred, how close it came to undermining the United States' alliance with Korea, and whether it could happen again. "Anti-Americanism in Democratizing South Korea" is recommended reading for officials, military personnel, scholars, students, and business people interested in anti-Americanism, U.S.-Korean relations, and U.S. foreign policy and military alliances.

Ever since George Washington warned against "foreign entanglements" in his 1796 farewell speech, the United States has wrestled with how to act toward other countries. Consequently, the history of anti-Americanism is as long and varied as the history of the United States. In this multidisciplinary collection, seventeen leading thinkers provide substance and depth to the recent outburst of fast talk on the topic of anti-Americanism by analyzing its history and currency in five key global regions: the Middle East, Latin America, Europe, East Asia, and the United States. The commentary draws from social science as well as the humanities for an in-depth study of anti-American opinion and sentiment in different cultures. The questions raised by these essays force us to explore the new ways America must interact with the world after 9/11 and the war against Iraq. Contributors: Greg Grandin, Mary Louise Pratt, Ana Maria Dopico, George Yudice, Timothy Mitchell, Ella Shohat, Mary Nolan, Patrick Deer, Vangelis Calotychos, Harry Harootunian, Hyun Ok Park, Rebecca E. Karl, Moss Roberts, Linda Gordon, and John Kuo Wei Tchen.

Negative views of the United States abound, but we know too little about how such views affect politics. Drawing on careful research on post-Soviet Central Asia, Edward Schatz argues that anti-Americanism is best seen not as a rising tide that swamps or as a conflagration that overwhelms. Rather, "America" is a symbolic resource that resides quietly in the mundane but always has potential value for social and political mobilizers. Using a wide range of evidence and a novel analytic framework, Schatz considers how Islamist movements, human rights activists, and labor mobilizers across Central Asia avail themselves of this fact, thus changing their ability to pursue their respective agendas. By refocusing our analytic gaze away from high politics, he affords us a clearer view of the slower-moving, partially occluded, and socially embedded processes that ground how "America" becomes political. In turn, we gain a nuanced appreciation of the downstream effects of US foreign policy choices and a sober sense of the challenges posed by the politics of traveling images. Most treatments of anti-Americanism focus on politics in the realm of presidential elections and foreign policies. By focusing instead on symbols, Schatz lays bare how changing public attitudes shift social relations in politically significant ways, and considers how changing symbolic depictions of the United States recombine the raw material available for social mobilizers. Just like sediment traveling along waterways before reaching its final destination, the raw material that constitutes symbolic America can travel among various social groups, and can settle into place to form the basis of new social meanings. Symbolic America, Schatz shows us, matters for politics in Central Asia and beyond.

This book interrogates the nature of anti-Americanism today and over the last century. It asks several questions: How do we define the phenomenon from different perspectives: political, social, and cultural? What are the historical sources and turning points of anti-Americanism in Europe and elsewhere? What are its links with anti-Semitic sentiment? Has anti-Americanism been beneficial or self-destructive to its “believers”? Finally, how has the United States responded and why? The authors, scholars from a multitude of countries, tackle the potential political consequences of anti-Americanism in Eastern and Central Europe, the region that has been perceived as strongly pro-American.

In his analysis of Europe's ambivalence toward jihadist terror and the spread of aggressive Islamism, with particular emphasis on the European responses—or lack thereof—to this violent anti-modernism, Russell A. Berman describes how some European countries opt for appeasement and apologetics, whereas others muster the strength to defend their way of life and stand up for freedom. He describes a complex continent of different nations and traditions to further our understanding of the range of reactions to Islamism.