Neil Berry, Special to Arab News

LONDON — Even before US President George W. Bush began his saber-rattling presidency, America’s emergence as an imperialist hyperpower was widely seen as an ominous development. Now, following the ruthlessly pre-emptive US intervention in Iraq, concern about how America deploys its might is turning into a universal preoccupation.

It has been said that the relationship between the rest of the world and America is rather like that of somebody attempting to share a bath with an elephant: A truly hazardous undertaking. More than 10 years after the end of the Cold War, mankind is still struggling to come to terms with the fact that bipolar power has given way to unipolar power, with the United States occupying a position of unrivaled dominance which could well endure for decades to come. Not since the days of ancient Rome has the world witnessed such single hegemony.

Last week the BBC staged a live global debate on the theme “What the World Thinks of America.” Chaired by the BBC’s political editor Andrew Marr and billed as a “unique broadcasting event,” the debate drew on the views of a panel of experts in London plus contributions from political commentators all round the world; prominent among its innumerable participants were the Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat, the former Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto, the former British Minister Clare Short, and the former French Minister Jacques Lang. The same week also saw the publication in the London Daily Telegraph of a magisterial report on the “new American empire” by the paper’s veteran correspondent Adrian Turner. Based on Turner’s recent travels round the US and published in three dauntingly voluminous daily installments, the report was more concerned to reveal what Americans think of the world than what the world thinks of them.

Not only did the BBC debate and the “authoritative” Daily Telegraph investigation usefully complement each other, they also attested to the lingering British determination to be seen to be playing a key role in discussions of geopolitical issues. Britain may no longer have an empire, but the old imperial impulse to guide and instruct the human race has no more deserted its broadcasters and journalists than it has its present prime minister. (And what, by the way, did it say about the interminable national nostalgia for past glories that the BBC’s debate was held in the subterranean bunker in central London from which its philo-American World War II leader, Winston Churchill, directed the British effort to defeat Nazi Germany?)

Assisting Andrew Marr in his presentation of “What the World Thinks of America” was that most schoolmasterly of all British broadcasters, Peter Snow. Renowned for his obsession with statistics, Snow paraded a wealth of data illustrating what percentage of people in eleven countries were well-disposed toward the United States and what percentage were not. So copious indeed was Snow’s information that it came close to overshadowing the actual debate, which, with its plethora of speakers, ended up as little more than a string of soundbites (as typified by Jacques Lang’s pious hope that the US will one day acquire more wisdom.)

Snow’s statistics indicated that English-speaking countries are apt to be much better disposed toward the US than non-English speaking ones; they indicated, too, that while the United States is far from being universally loathed, the current American president fills human beings across the globe with unease, if not dread. A clear majority of people fear that Bush’s decision to invade Iraq has made the world a much less safe place, and that the United States is fated to reap what it has sown. Indeed, in Muslim countries the consensus is that the current US “regime” poses more of a danger to world peace than Al-Qaeda.

Perhaps the most telling of Snow’s findings was that the inhabitants of South Korea regard the United States as an even bigger threat to their country than their bellicose northern neighbor (a national perception rooted in the record of atrocious behavior by US servicemen toward Korean civilians.)

Yet if much of contemporary humanity is afraid of US militarism, few question the inevitability of an increasingly Americanized world. The inescapable fact is that the more obvious manifestations of American culture, its clothes, movies and fast food, have become the very stuff of global culture. Emphasizing his own belief that the future belongs to America, Andrew Marr concluded the BBC’s debate by stressing what is often forgotten: That the United States is still a young country — and one which, despite having only four percent of the world’s population, is now undertaking a good half of its scientific research and development.

What the BBC’s debate barely addressed was the extent to which America’s drive toward supreme hegemony is bound up with the growing penetration of global markets by US conglomerates. Since the collapse of the communist system in 1990, American big business has become, to a greater degree than ever before, the means by which the United States imposes its free market ideology on the world at large. It used to be said that trade follows the flag, but US imperialism has in many ways stood that old dictum on its head. And who can doubt that globalization is first and foremost an American phenomenon?

In his Daily Telegraph report, Adrian Turner described the unabashed messianic fervor with which American business schools and financial institutions are busy promulgating the message that US business practice is best — with the insidious implication that the American way in general is best. In the course of his travels, he met a former chief executive of the New York investment bank Goldman Sachs, who is about to take up a teaching post in Beijing where he will enjoy the sonorous title “Professor of Global Leadership”. And he talked to businessmen and politicians who cannot comprehend why anybody would wish to impugn America’s good intentions. In their eyes, the United States, with its commitment to democracy and free enterprise, epitomizes all that is noblest in the human project, and they reserve a special contempt for anti-American Europeans who — confronted by challenges like the crisis in Kosovo — are only too ready to appeal to the US for help.

The trouble is of course that American talk about free institutions and liberty of expression has all too often been so much self-serving rhetoric. If democratic values have been a conspicuous feature of US political and social culture, so too have state coercion and institutionalized intolerance of dissent, and since Sept. 11 those old American forces have been asserting themselves anew. Turner came across Americans who are privately horrified by the Bush administration but who admit that they are frightened to express their true opinions in public. Flying from New York to Atlanta, he fell into conversation with an American who confessed that he was reluctant to speak out in case he provoked someone into picking a fight with him and was therefore keeping his voice “kinda low.” Another American, Professor of Law Horst Hannum, told him in plain terms that Americans were currently being conditioned to accept that “any real questioning was unpatriotic and could easily be very dangerous in terms of careers and friendships.” Such testimony — which seldom finds public expression in the United States or Britain — is especially striking when encountered in so pro-American a newspaper as the Daily Telegraph.

The contributors to the BBC’s debate on the US had much to say about America the gung-ho militaristic hyperpower. Easily lost sight of, however, is the extent to which the United States of President George W. Bush has become a place of rampant fear and insecurity. It is not so much American power as the overstretched state of American nerves that is now the paramount cause for global concern. To be sharing a bath with an elephant is one thing; to be sharing one with a paranoid elephant is a more alarming proposition altogether.

-Arab News Opinion26 June 2003