Anti-Americanism

Anti-Americanism, Americanophobia or anti-American sentiment, is dislike, fear, or hostility toward the United States or the American people and their culture, business practices and technology, or the policies of their government, especially the foreign policy practices of the United States. Common contemporary negative stereotypes of Americans include the assertions that Americans are: aggressive, arrogant, ignorant, overweight, poorly dressed, obsessed with making money, too moralistic and also too materialistic, liberated and obnoxious. Other criticisms originate from a perception that the US military acts as "the world's policeman". Political scientist Brendon O'Connor of the United States Studies Centre suggests that anti-Americanism cannot be isolated as a consistent phenomenon and that the term originated as a rough composite of stereotypes, prejudices and criticisms toward Americans or the United States, evolving to more politically based criticism. French scholar Marie-France Toinet says use of the term "is only fully justified if it implies systematic opposition – a sort of allergic reaction – to America as a whole".

Andrei Markovits

Andrei S. Markovits is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author and editor of many books, scholarly articles, conference papers, book reviews and newspaper contributions in English and many foreign languages on topics as varied as German and Austrian politics, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, social democracy, social movements, the European right and the European left. Markovits has also worked extensively on comparative sports culture in Europe and North America.

Biography

Early years

Andy Markovits was born in October 1948 in the west Romanian town of Timişoara. He was raised as the single child of a middle-class Jewish family, speaking German and Hungarian at home. In school he learned Romanian, and from his early childhood he was tutored in English—later in French as well. Thus, his multilingual identity dates back to his childhood as well as the polyglot part of the world where he grew up. At the age of nine, he and his father emigrated from Romania, first to Vienna and then to New York, the two cities that would play the most important roles in his upbringing. Between 1959 and 1967, he spent the school year—September through June—in Vienna; and the summer months in New York.