Remember the 'Maine'

...What makes Spain different is its emergence as a young democracy and also a new middle-class society...

...From whence this knowledge...

...During a recent stay in Madrid I had occasion to visit my local video store on a regular basis...

...For him it was a society lacking in proper hierarchies and awash in vulgar and meaningless consumption—not to mention under the control of Freemasonry, the all-purpose bugaboo for reactionary Catholics in the 1930s and ’40s...

...In light of what my academic friend told me, I could not help thinking that if all one knew about the United States came from Hollywood, one would imagine a country constantly in turmoil over race and class, corrupt to the core, and above all extremely violent...

...I refer not only to fi lms made by Michael Moore (who is, obviously, hugely popular in Spain) but by mainstream Hollywood directors and writers...

...The left has an even longer bill of particulars, starting with the bases agreement with Franco in 1953, which supposedly rescued him fi nancially in a moment of extreme crisis...

...A man of the moderate left—a Socialist of the Felipe Gonz?lez school, rather than that of Zapatero/Moratinos—Ca?o has made a serious and courageous effort to understand a phenomenon which is not necessarily his cup of tea...

...Not surprisingly, he is the only major (or minor) European chief of government who has never had a face-to-face meeting with President Bush...

...Spain was excluded from the Marshall Plan for reasons which most left-wing Spaniards would surely approve...

...This is a point developed in some detail by Alessandro Seregni in El Anti-Americanismo Espa?ol...

...To be sure, what I have just said about American movies would probably be true for a majority of the countries of the world...

...Spain is heavily dependent on North Africa and the Middle East for its supplies of oil and natural gas, and has a growing Muslim population of its own...

...Ca?o is a veteran journalist, deputy editor of the country’s fl agship daily El Pa?s, and a former correspondent of that paper in the United States...

...Spaniards lack the optimism and sense of possibility that are part and parcel of American culture, and given their history, they are not likely to acquire it...

...Not that it stops many of them from indulging in an orgy of consumerism of their own, as anyone who has ever visited a Spanish shopping mall on a Saturday can attest...

...The United States, with its penchant for military adventures and crusades for democracy in the Middle East, is viewed with extreme discomfort...

...Americans as people are disliked by 51 percent of Spaniards (as opposed to 35 percent in France, 26 percent in Germany and 21 percent in Great Britain...

...The French resent the loss of their cultural, linguistic, and political infl uence, particularly in areas where they once exercised unquestioned sway...

...Spanish banks are backing many enterprises in Latin America, and Spanish fi nance has penetrated the far corners of the earth...

...No one wants to rock the boat...

...One could even argue that the kind of stabilization plan which the United States and the World Bank demanded of Franco in the late 1950s laid the groundwork for the growth of a middle class and the successful transition to democracy a generation later—even if this was not Washington’s conscious intention, an argument admittedly not likely to impress many on the Spanish left...

...Of course, not all Spaniards are intensely political, and much of the dislike of the United States feeds on other sources as well...

...The most interesting conclusion Ca?o reaches in his book is that anti-Americanism in Spain arises primarily out of the fact that “the United States has never done anything for Spain”—that is to say, unlike the French or Italians, its people have no history of liberation from dictatorship or foreign occupation, or even signifi cant foreign aid...

...The two countries may never be outright enemies...

...The Italians are still angry at us for the Marshall Plan (no good deed goes unpunished) and are irritated that our foreign policies allegedly threaten what is left of their dolce vita...

...Luis Rodr?guez Zapatero, announced the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq the morning after his election in 2004, Mark Falcoff, resident scholar emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, is at work on a book about the Hispanosphere...

...Although happy to take American aid, Generalissimo Franco regarded the United States with contempt...

...As in most European countries, in Spain, dislike of the United States is a sentiment found on both sides of the political spectrum...

...The same could be said of the Eisenhower visit...

...But even in the diffuse way we use the term for nation-states, they will probably never be friends...

...Its diplomats played an important role in resolving civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador...

...its subliminal message has been absorbed by several generations, including one or two not even born at the time...

...When its prime minister, Jos...

...Even so, his views on Iraq (and what is more to the point, on the United States) came far closer to refl ecting the opinions of ordinary Spaniards than that of his distinguished predecessor, Jos...

...In other surveys where respondents are invited to freely characterize Americans, the three words most often used are “greedy,” “arrogant,” and “violent...

...To be sure, neither the Clinton nor Bush administration (nor, for that matter, their predecessors) is blameless for this state of affairs, but the point is that it would probably exist even if all of them had governed with perfect wisdom...

...Thus, an otherwise excellent book ends on an unsatisfactory note...

...I suppose,” he added, “the reason for that is that young Spaniards think they know the United States without having ever been there...

...Moreover, for Franco, as for many Spaniards raised in a military or naval environment, the loss of Cuba and the Philippines in 1898 remained an open wound, and although happy to jail, torture, exile (and occasionally execute) his own Communists, the Caudillo pointedly maintained full relations with Cuba’s Fidel Castro as a means of exacting revenge for his country’s humiliation at the hands of the United States...

...No doubt Zapatero, who had been running behind in the polls until a few days before the election, hugely benefi ted from a string of coordinated terrorist attacks on commuter trains in Madrid a few days before the election...

...The fact that Allen embodies a very specifi c New York Jewish sensibility— and, therefore, might not appeal to widespread popular taste in the United States—is a nuance that probably most Spaniards miss...

...Spaniards have no context whatever...

...When asked about American infl uence— which is to say, the spread of American customs and ideas in their country—Spaniards registered the highest rate of rejection: 76 percent, some 4 points higher than France, and 6 percent higher than Germany...

...The honorable gentleman—I had never met him before—turned out to resemble a congressman as depicted in a Mel Brooks fi lm far more than most members of that august body do...

...A lot of water had passed under the bridge since then...

...Thus, the mixture of cultural inputs from the United States mixed together with episodes from Spain’s own recent history (or in some cases, its imagined history) combine to create an extremely negative image...

...the honorable member obviously needed to be brought up to date...

...Thus, there is a sense of precariousness about this new good fortune...

...This, in turn, has encouraged Zapatero and his foreign minister Miguel ?ngel Moratinos to continuously engage in a series of gratuitous insults to this country and its leaders...

...While Zapatero’s own standing in public opinion has declined somewhat since his assumption of power, Spanish attitudes towards the United States have, if anything, hardened since then...

...While George W. Bush is not admired anywhere west of the old Cold War borders, fully 71 percent of Spaniards have “no confi - dence” in him whatever, as opposed to 62 percent of the French, 46 percent of the Germans, and 42 percent of British respondents...

...But memories of dictatorship and the hunger years of the 1940s are still vivid, if not in the form of lived experience, then in the form of accounts passed down by traumatized older generations...

...Although I was supposed to be doing the briefi ng, he did most of the talking, often wandering off the subject at hand...

...he burst out...

...By this time I was losing patience and couldn’t help interrupting: “But Congressman,” I said, “France is only in the middle range of anti-American countries in Europe...

...At one point, and for no particular reason, he announced that he positively hated France...

...I didn’t sense any anti-Americanism in Spain...

...Some of the issues raised by his imaginary Spaniard are, no doubt, similar to those that would be fi elded by any Western European—the widespread ownership of guns, capital punishment, the existence of super-millionaires and the persistence of pockets of poverty, the lack of socialized medicine, and so forth...

...It is a member of both NATO and the European Union and its troops are actively participating in the war on terror in Afghanistan...

...From American fi lms, obviously...

...This aspect has been perspicaciously explored by Antonio Ca?o in Estados Unidos: Primer o Tercer Mundo...

...One cannot help objecting, however, that while we have “done something” for France and Italy, neither seems to feel particularly kindly towards the United States today...

...Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s unfortunate comment at the time of a failed military coup against the country’s nascent democracy in 1982 (“an internal Spanish affair”) has been trotted out endlessly, even though it had no impact whatsoever on the course of actual events...

...While relations may improve somewhat this year, when both countries will have the opportunity to change their governments, there should be no exaggerated expectations of things to come...

...The British are still smarting over our abandonment of them at Suez in 1956, and no doubt feel strongly (and perhaps justifi ably) about their inability to play an independent global role...

...Aznar...

...naval base in] Rota, I had a wonderful time...

...Quite apart from our real or imagined diplomatic and political missteps, for Spanish “progressives” the United States represents a model of individualism and the uninhibited pursuit of wealth, which offends their egalitarian sensibilities...

...An academic of my acquaintance, who teaches classes in which Spanish and American students are mixed together, told me that the latter complain to him that their Spanish contemporaries never ask them any questions about the United States...

...Spain is not the most important country in Europe, but it is not a negligible one, either...

...Why, when I was an 18-year-old Marine at [the U.S...

...he infl icted a grievous wound—not just diplomatic but military—on the cause for which the United States, Great Britain, and a dozen other countries were fi ghting...

...they may even cooperate on a limited number of projects...

...This must have been around 1961 or 1962, not long after the United States had signed a bases accord with the dictator Francisco Franco, and when the dollar/ peseta exchange was hugely favorable, even to a low-ranking enlisted member of our armed forces...

...While it is a fact beyond discussion that the standing of the United States has declined sharply in Western Europe in the past four or fi ve years, the case of Spain is particularly arresting, and largely supports my comments to the congressman...

...Every country has its narrative of what Washington did wrong, a story which becomes increasingly bitter as the European project reveals itself increasingly incapable of rivaling the power of the United States...

...One criticism that would be new to most Americans is our failure to adequately appreciate the fi lms of Woody Allen, who enjoys something of a cult status in Spain...

...It has the ninth largest economy in the world, and it is a publishing and media center for the second most widely spoken Western language after English...

...When asked whether it was President Bush or the United States that they particularly disliked, Spaniards registered the highest percentage who responded with “both...

...If you want to see a country that really hates us, you need to visit Spain...

...When these fi lms are shown in the United States, the local audience sees them for what they are: entertaining fantasies which may or may not have an element of truth to them...

...In a Pew Foundation survey, released in 2004, fully 73 percent of respondents there registered an “unfavorable” or “very unfavorable” opinion of the United States, compared with 60 percent in France and Germany, and 33 percent in Great Britain...

...He organizes his book in the form of a debate with an imaginary Spaniard, allowing the latter to pose the most common objections to this country, to which he offers balanced and sensible replies...

...It is no exaggeration whatever to say that today’s Spaniards have a higher standard of living and a more civilized political system than ever in their history, with the prospect of even better to come...

...Of course, every European country has its reasons for disliking the United States...

...The photograph of President Eisenhower (unwisely) embracing the dictator after his unprecedented state visit in 1959 has been reproduced in the Spanish press thousands, perhaps even scores of thousands, of times...

...Few Spaniards visit the United States each year...

...Although Spain has an excellent and expanding fi lm industry, American fi lms seem more numerous, and are probably also more popular...

...The Germans harbor a suppressed nationalism which cannot be openly confessed given their recent history...

...In other words, Spaniards by and large dislike the United States not merely for what it does, but what it is...

...in other words, our failure to be like them...

...Mari...