The United States as Viewed by Other Nations

ONE of America's favorite indoor sports has long been that of hearing its virtues praised and its shortcomings listed by recently arrived lecturers from other continents, who might be regarded as secularized or expurgated editions of the itinerant hell-fire evangelists of earlier days. In view of this long and honorable tradition, it would be foolhardy to attempt here to catalogue all the profound and piddling, the sentimental and cynical, judgments which have been passed on America. Instead, it might be useful to trace briefly some of the ways in which other peoples form their opinions of the United States, then to outline some of the methods by which these opinions have been or could be studied, and, in passing, to sketch some of the main ideas of America held by in other parts of the world. In times like the present it is especially important to know what think of America, but more particularly, by what processes of reflection and feeling they form these ideas. We are engaged in a great effort to win friends and influence people on a world-wide scale. In our somewhat too spectatorlike attitude toward the events which are reshaping the world, it is easy to forget that statesmen and propagandists elsewhere are similarly trying to guess the effect of certain events, or of certain gestures and symbols, upon America or groups of Americans. Although the Japanese-Axis Pact was made primarily to intimidate and confuse the of the United States, it is plain that the Axis managers of psychological warfare were mistaken in their forecast of the American reaction. Among our own people, with none of the German experience of two-front wars and no memory of national catastrophes associated with them, the main reactions were resentment and a sharper vigilance. The element of self-portrayal usually plays a greater part in judging other than an accurate knowledge of the persons or nations judged. But such national judgments, though they show a surprising persistence from generation to generation, are by no means unchanging

Economics · International trade · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Academic Freedom and Politics