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Atlantic Community, Atlantic World: Anti-Americanism between Europe and Africa
David Chidester
| A recent editorial in a South African newspaper made the surprising proposal that U.S. President George W. Bush should receive the Nobel Peace Prize, but only on the ironic basis that his administration's military adventures had given war a bad name all over the world. "Not since Adolf Hitler," the editor Ferial Haffajee observed, "has a world leader done so much to tarnish the reputation of war and warmongering."1 So, there is one international vote of support for President Bush, which he might welcome, if he does not mind being compared to Hitler. |
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One of the casualties of September 11, 2001, I feared, would be the death of irony. As a rhetorical strategy, irony dwells in the play of incongruity, in strange mixtures and unexpected juxtapositions, which evoke surprise. Irony undermines the stability of polarizing dualisms—good and evil, us and them—that have been central to recent U.S. foreign policy. As Rob Kroes observed, "on both sides of the Atlantic," such dualisms have only "sharpened differences and divisions" between Europe and America. Irony gives rise to thought, but dualisms are deadly for thinking and for international relations.2 |
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In his reflections on European anti-Americanism, Rob Kroes called attention to the current crisis in the "Atlantic community."3 I want to broaden our transatlantic scope by including Africa. Very briefly, I want to suggest that the "Atlantic community," a phrase derived from political studies that assumes common interests, needs to be embedded in the "Atlantic world," which has been explored in cultural studies to evoke a shared history—although shared differently—in transatlantic relations of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. In the short space available to me, I want to broaden our scope, in this way, only to suggest that the political and the cultural cannot be easily separated in our attempts to understand responses to America. |
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When Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill drafted the Atlantic Charter in 1941, Africans noticed that they were being left out of the Allies' vision of a postwar world of freedom. In South Africa, a committee of twenty-eight Africans, under the leadership of the African National Congress (ANC), published a point-by-point response to the Atlantic Charter in Africans' Claims in South Africa, demanding that colonized people in Africa and elsewhere "shall not be excluded from the rights and privileges which other groups hope to enjoy in the post-war world." That publication was not only responding to the "Atlantic community," but it was also anticipating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It concluded with a fully developed bill of political, social, and economic rights.4 |
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What threatened human rights in the postwar world? Addressing a meeting of the ANC in 1951, Nelson Mandela warned about forces in the world, "at the head of which stands the ruling circles in America," which were waging military and psychological warfare designed to incapacitate people through fear so they could not think. Those global forces, Mandela noted, were "prepared to go to war in defense of colonialism, imperialism, and their profits." But they were also prepared to engage in psychological terrorism. As Mandela observed, those American-led forces were "determined to perpetuate a permanent atmosphere of crisis and fear in the world. Knowing that a frightened world cannot think clearly, these groups attempt to create conditions under which the common men might be inveigled into supporting the building of more and more atomic bombs, bacteriological weapons, and other instruments of mass destruction."5 |
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