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Anti-Americanism in Central America, unlike the outbursts of anti-Americanism in the Islamic world, is fueled not by religious fanaticism or anti-Western political or social conviction. America and Americans and the social and political values they symbolize are often extolled and sometimes just as routinely denounced. From the beginning of Central American independence in 1821, isthmian political aspirants, idealists, opportunists, revolutionaries, and social conservatives have found in America's political tradition an example for Central Americans to emulate but ultimately came to regard Americans, along with other outsiders, as an intrusive threat to isthmian culture. Those who ascribe the modern outbursts of anti-Americanism that reverberate not only in Nicaragua—for obvious reasons—but, to our astonishment, in Honduras, El Salvador, and even in the most pro-American country in the region, Costa Rica, to the determination of the Reagan administration to bring down the Sandinista government and the economic and political dislocations wrought by an isthmus at war overlook the deeper causes of this hostility.

Anti-Americanism consists not of opposition to particular policies but of "persistent patterns of gross criticism of the main values of the U.S. Constitution." It is a historic attitude of the ruling classes in continental Europe, to whom every American success meant a failure of their own, of either prediction or achievement or both. Ordinary Europeans have generally admired the United States, to the point of migrating there. Americans have not reciprocated with anti-Europism, perhaps because of Europe's nonexistence as an entity and the waning weight of its components. Today, anti-Americanists damn the United States if it does and if it does not, for U.S. security, economic, and cultural policies. They resent the American conversion of the primacy of foreign policy into the primacy of domestic politics. Anti-Americanism will diminish, however, as the procedures of American domestic politics spread over the world.

Is anti-Americanism one of the last respectable prejudices, or are accusations of anti-Americanism a way to silence reasonable criticism of the United States?Is the recent rise in anti-Americanism principally a reaction to President George W. Bush and his administration, or does it reflect a general turn against America and Americans? Have we moved from the American century to the anti-American century, with the United States as the 'whipping boy' for a growing range of anxieties? Can the United States recapture the international good will generally extended towards it in the.

Throughout the twentieth century, journalists, politicians and academics have used the term 'Americanization' to assess the global impact of the USA's rise to the status of a world power, and to make sense of the dramatic and bedazzling social changes brought about by industrialization and urbanization. European intellectuals have rarely resisted the temptation to use 'America' as shorthand for 'modernity': across the Atlantic, European observers believed, it was possible to learn and see what their own societies would look like in the future. Complaints about the Americanization of Europe – or the world – could easily be turned into outright anti-Americanism, i.e. a radical and reductionist ideology which made the USA responsible for all the ills of society, be they economic, political, or cultural. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the following rift in transatlantic relations gave the history of European perceptions of America a new impetus. Among the large number of studies devoted to the history of 'Americanization' and anti-Americanism that have been published in recent years, several monographs, based on original research, promise new insights and deserve close attention.

Examines the character of European, particularly French, anti-Americanism, arguing that it is less a critique of the United States than a response to the recognition of European, indeed, all Occidental, weaknesses and foibles.

The anti-American rhetoric which suddenly emerged in Western Europe's intellectual discourse during the showdown of the Second Gulf War in 2002–3 is more than a political act. The new patterns of antagonism are symptoms of a process of cultural emancipation that commenced in the 1990s. Surprisingly, the rationale behind the growing demise of the project of Americanization which dominated the Cold War is a critical examination of Europe's entanglement in a postmodern culture industry and its global markets. In the aftermath of unification, Germany's cultural scene has been meticulously scrutinized by its own intellectuals, who perceived the cultural imperialism of the USA as a threat. To some extent based on anti-American traditions that originate in Germany's period of Romanticism, contemporary intellectuals are acting as the guardians of the cultural values of so- called 'Old Europe'. However, it will be argued that the appraisal of the political and cultural intimacy of both continents will not only result in a schism but will also foster new and exciting transatlantic liaisons.