The paradox of anti-Americanism is that it stems from the French, a civilisation with which we have little in common, writes Mervyn Bendle

The proposal for a new US Studies Centre in Australia should be welcomed ("Study centre to target anti-Americanism in Australia", HES, July 26). The proposal evokes two vivid childhood memories: my mother bursting into my bedroom, sobbing, "president Kennedy has been shot, he's dead", and the making of the nuclear apocalypse film On the Beach in Melbourne. Burned into my memory are the scenes of thousands of doomed Australian families singing a plaintive Waltzing Matilda on the banks of the Yarra as they picnic and play under the lethal clouds of atomic fallout. On one hand a future of hope, on the other of annihilation - and visions of the US were at the centre of both. Any assessment of contemporary Australian anti-Americanism must recognise this deep-seated cultural ambivalence in our attitudes towards the US.

In the early 1960s, the US led by the young president with his glamorous wife and young family represented a vision of the future that an increasingly affluent and suburbanised Australia could eagerly embrace, one of the reasons why the Victorian government erected a memorial to John F. Kennedy. His death cut this moment short and signalled the onset of a sinister era of political assassinations, presidential conspiracies and cover-ups. This created the space into which the widespread fears of global conflict and nuclear holocaust could find their freest expression. This was compounded by the intensification of the Vietnam War, leading to Australia's involvement as an ally in "someone else's war" and the introduction of military conscription. Ironically, prime minister Harold Holt's promise in 1966 to president Lyndon Johnson that we would go "all the way with LBJ", triggered the end of an era as city streets soon filled with anti-war protesters.

The baby boomers came of age during all this, and the attitudes towards the US that they formed in this period continue to dominate political debate and our culture generally. The present wars in Afghanistan and Iraq evoke these deeply rooted fears and suspicions, and these are not likely to be easily overcome. The problem was compounded by the takeover of radical and progressive thinking by French Theory. Initially, theories from both the US and Britain informed the intense debates of the 1960s, whether it was about war and peace, education, the workplace, sexuality, feminism, literature, music, film-making or the counter-culture.

By 1974 these were being swept aside as an entirely new radical discourse took hold, one that was militantly anti-American. Whatever its merits, this was characterised by a commitment to a theoretical opacity that denied access or participation to anyone outside a small number of university-based elites. These had only tenuous links to the masses of the Australian people whose character, nature, moral worth and future they nevertheless proceeded to determine theoretically.

The phobic anti-Americanism of this discourse reflected the identity crisis and cultural agonies of postwar French history. As Phillipe Roger shows in The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism, the US was perceived as leading a "conspiracy against intelligence" in promoting a mass market in popular culture that was beyond the control of the intelligentsia. The French Communist Party, ever opportunistic, placed itself at the head of this cultural reaction, denouncing everything American, including even comic books and cartoons, protesting vigorously against "cartoons that draw laughs from the tortures inflicted upon Donald the duck or Pluto the dog". Others complained of "a vast undertaking to pervert art and degrade culture". The US offered only a "mix of pornography, sadism and everything that calls up the baser human emotions".

Jean-Paul Sartre explicitly adopted a double standard in evaluating the respective actions of the US and Soviet Union, applying an "ideological kit that was a mixture of deliberate bias and justification of this bias". Eventually, "America" ceased to mean just a nation or a people and became a global abstraction, "a certain 'being-in-the-world' that had become planetary". This in turn reflected the influence of Martin Heidegger, who negatively compared American individualism to the organic community aspirations of the Nazis. This attitude continues to prevail.

For the French, existentialism served as the first line of resistance, but American culture quickly appropriated and assimilated this. The problem, it was alleged, was humanism, with its "bourgeois" emphasis on the individual, and in the end it was the self-proclaimed anti-humanism of structuralism, poststructuralism and postmodernism that carried the day, advancing far into the intellectual heartlands of the US itself, Australia and Britain, where, as "Theory", it continues to serve as the discourse of the intellectual elites dominating policy-making and education.

Consequently, we have a bizarre situation in which a great deal of contemporary anti-Americanism is informed by intellectual weapons designed to enhance the status of a fading French civilisation with which we share little. This blinds the Australian intelligentsia to threats that are very real while promoting a reflexive anti-American posturing that achieves little and encourages our enemies.

A much better alternative is to recognise that Australia and the US have their own intellectual traditions to draw on. These tend to be much more pragmatic and committed to empirical inquiry than Theory allows. Consequently, they promote the pursuit of factual understanding of complex situations instead of the politicised moralising that characterises so much intellectual commentary on the US and Australia's relationship with it.

Finally, it should be recognised that Australia and the US are very alike and that by studying the US we can come to a better understanding of ourselves. For example, we are frontier societies developing on a continental scale, we share liberal democratic political systems that we had to battle to put into place, and we are largely committed to free trade and against agricultural protectionism. We are egalitarian and global leaders in the ongoing enhancement of the rights of women and of our various minorities. We share an omnivorous appetite for new technologies and the transient delights of popular culture (and this is especially true among recent generations, for whom Theory has little resonance). Importantly, Australia and the US are the two most multicultural societies in the world.

Australia and the US share unique ties and these require a much more sophisticated form of analysis and understanding than they now receive. The proposed US Studies Centre couldn't come at a better time: it has much work to do.

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