Even the ambition is gargantuan. Only an American pollster such as the Pew Research Centre would contemplate asking 38 000 people in 44 countries (speaking 63 languages and dialects) what they think of the United States.
Only a superpower would try to take the world’s temperature thus. The trouble is — when you hold its thermometer up to the light — the reading that comes back says this power isn’t so super after all.
Take just a few out of thousands of figures compiled in What the World Thinks in 2002. Nineteen countries with data available for comparison showed antipathy to the US on the rise and goodwill draining away. Favourable ratings in Western Europe, pretty consistently, were down 5% or 6% over the past three years. That turned to 22 percentage points in Turkey and 13 points in Pakistan. Just 6% of the Egyptian public has a favourable view of the US.
Is the spread of American ideas good or bad? In Britain 50% say bad. But this soars to 67% in Germany, 68% in Russia, 71% in France — and rampant hostility the moment you get near the Middle East. Try Turkey at 78%, Pakistan at 81% and Egypt at 84%.
Does the US ”consider others: not much/not at all?” Fifty-two percent in Britain sign up on this line. But that’s 73% in Canada, 73% in South Korea, 74% in Japan, 76% in France.
Do you reckon American policy towards President Saddam Hussein is driven by getting its hands on Baghdad’s oil? Forty-four percent of Britons agree; 54% of Germans; 75% of French. Would you let the US use your bases to attack Iraq? Eighty-three percent of Turks say no.
But maybe the most chilling question of the lot was reserved for Muslim respondents only. Did they approve of suicide bombing in defence of Islam? Seventy-three percent in Lebanon said yes. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? But what about the 43% in Jordan, the 44% in Bangladesh, the 47% in Nigeria, the 33% in Pakistan? And in Indonesia (including Bali)? Twenty-seven percent said yes.
Those are hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people with a totally different take on what constitutes terror. This is alienation on the grandest scale.
Now, of course, polls are only polls, a sampling through the autumn, which can change with the seasons. And, of course, 44 countries don’t represent the whole world.
Some places — like Saudi Arabia — aren’t hot on publics with any opinion. Some places — such as Uzbekistan — appear to have gone overboard for smiling Americans bearing suitcases full of dollars. And, as with any survey of this complexity, there are counterflows. We quite like American movies, music and such. We benignly prefer a world where the US is the ”only superpower” — and 53% of Russians say this ”makes the world a safer place”.
Yet it would be crazy to airbrush these findings away. They don’t show a surge of sympathy and support over the months since September 11. Precisely the reverse. They don’t show trust and identification with American aims or American leadership. Rather the opposite. And the perception gap yawns ever wider.
Only 20% of Americans think the US doesn’t consider other countries much or at all. Eighty percent of Americans believe it’s good to see US ideas and customs spreading round the globe.
Here — very solemnly, indeed glumly — lies the rub. A moment of profound disillusion, waiting to happen. A moment when phrases about the ”world’s only superpower” turn dusty on the lips.
We tend to talk of American hegemony as though it were established by force of arms. Tanks, planes, marines — and the cash to drive them on. That is the obvious fount of power. It is also the language of the politicians who sit in Washington. They take their physical dominance seriously; they have means of enforcing their policies and their ideologies — with or without outside assistance.
This isn’t — before the steaming e-mails from points west begin flooding in — a matter of criticism. President George W Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney didn’t hide their beliefs from the electorate in 2000, or even last month.
Their reaction to the destruction of the World Trade Centre has, in reality, proved pretty measured. They absolutely clearly have most — though not all — of the American public with them, for the time being at least. But there’s a terrible limit to all this.
The only superpower may, for a while, seek to ignore the rest of the world while it makes its plans and gives its orders. It may deride the distant wimps, wets and fanatics who decline to join the dance. It may enfold itself in a cocoon of grieving and determination. That is understandable.
It is also, though, totally at long-term odds with that bit of the American psyche that needs to be liked and respected, which needs the dream of a shining city on the hill to which peoples around the world aspire. An open society. A society that travels, cares, enjoys the fruits of globalisation — and has no long-term means of shucking away unwelcome messages.
Open societies could grow closed in the teeth of the Cold War. They could demand obeisance with menaces. But the picture that Pew — an American institution — paints for the US comes without menaces attached. It is one of hearts and minds being lost, of allies flaking away, of nations like Japan, Korea and Italy beginning to cross to the other side of the street. Can a ”superpower” deal with such distrust and dislike? No: not if it needs to be loved. — Â