As a result, Americans once harbored some goodwill toward Iraq and Saudi Arabia just as it had positive feelings toward Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in an earlier era, said Ido Oren, a UF political scientist and author of the book “Our Enemies and Us” (Cornell University Press).
“Look at how our image of Saudi Arabia has changed since 9-11,” Oren said. “Were women not ill-treated in Saudi Arabia before 9-11? Were elections ever held before 9-11? Was the political system any more democratic before 9-11? The answer is ‘no’ to all of the above.
“Saudi Arabia’s image has darkened considerably in the American media against the backdrop of the hijackers being from Saudi Arabia,” he said. “It’s not that Saudi Arabia has changed, but how we view it has changed.”
Similarly, Saddam Hussein generated a more positive U.S. impression in the 1980s when Iran and Iraq were at war and Iran was considered the greater Satan, Oren said. “It would be interesting to revisit news coverage from that period and see whether he was represented as a brutal dictator the way he is today,” he said.
President Woodrow Wilson, who launched the United States into World War I to make the world safe for democracy, praised Prussia’s efficient bureaucracy in a textbook he wrote as a political scientist 30 years earlier, Oren said. And as late as 1934, Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf” received a favorable review in the American Political Science Review, which praised the Fuhrer for his “most enlightened comments on the theory of the state and the nature of government,” he said.
“We may think that no respected political scientist could have said in the 1930s that Nazi Germany has positive lessons to teach us,” Oren said. “But when you go to the bookshelves of the library and actually thumb through all these yellowing journals, you see that fairly prominent people did write such things.” These political scientists pointed out the Nazi regime was not without positive achievements, especially in the area of public administration, and said Americans could learn from these, he said.
America’s image of a foreign country depends on whether it has a nonconflicting relationship with that country, Oren said. What has evolved into a generally favorable U.S. view of Germany since the end of World War II could disappear with a growing rift between the two countries over the issue of war with Iraq, he said.
“If we continue to drift apart, we could see the return of a more negative image of Germany in American social science,” he said.
During the early 1990s, when the Cold War ended, there was an initial euphoria about the collapse of the Soviet Union and the coming to power of Boris Yeltsin, a strong advocate of democratic government, Oren said. “Almost invariably when Russia was depicted, the most popular term was a ‘nascent democracy,’ which although not full-fledged, was always portrayed in very favorable terms,” he said.
By 1995, during the crisis in the Balkans when the United States and Russia did not see eye-to-eye on Bosnia, the term democracy was used much less often, Oren said.
“That’s where you can see the beginnings of a more negative, darker depiction of Russia in the American press,” he said. “The regime’s image becomes dimmer, not necessarily because the regime has changed but because it’s less friendly to us.”
Similarly, our views of Japan have fluctuated with the state of American-Japanese relations, Oren said. Japan is either viewed as a democracy like the United States, or as a formal democracy that in reality is controlled by a bureaucracy, he said.
If concerns about nuclear arms proliferation in North Korea swell, it could drive the United States closer to Japan, another Korean adversary, Oren said. “Then the view that Japan is a democracy like us will continue to be the conventional view,” he said.
In many ways, Oren said, the book is a critique of the political science profession, which has not taken a good look at itself. “There’s very little literature in political science that examines in a critical way our own professional history and reflects upon our purpose,” he said. “I think the debate about these questions is overdue.”
Bruce Cumings, a history professor and member of the Committee on International Relations at Chicago University, said Oren had written a “fascinating and provocative” book.
“His courageous and clear-minded account of the socially and politically constructed foundations of American political science is a critical milestone in the developing critique of the discipline, and should be widely read,” he said.