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 Business News | September 2006 
Mission: To Reconcile America and the World
 Corine Lesnes - Le Monde
| | According to a study effected in the spring among adolescents from thirteen countries, not a single American business figured among their favorite brands. |
Keith Reinhard arrives from Berlin. Deplaning at Newark Airport, near New York, he believes he detects some progress. The immigration agents seem less sinister than usual. "I saw a few smiles. Including from the ones who take fingerprints."
Keith Reinhard is a famous ad man from Madison Avenue. Former president of the ad agency DDB, he has founded an association to attempt to stem the anti-Americanism that has won over the planet: Business for Diplomatic Action.
One of the association's initiatives is to make the United States' ports of entry more welcoming. Walt Disney and Loews are working to brighten up the locales. Immigration ramrods are beginning to receive training. "If people come to cross the border and visit the country, they hate us less," Mr. Reinhard thinks.
To restore the United States' image, the ad man believes in business rather than government action. All the more so, since, as the association's vice president, Thomas Miller, says openly, the American government is no longer a credible messenger: "It says something. In the rest of the world, people don't believe it."
Officially created in 2003, Business for Diplomatic Action now counts representatives from McDonald's, Microsoft and Exxon. Business circles are worried. They do not escape from the decline in the United States' image. According to a study effected in the spring among adolescents from thirteen countries, not a single American business figured among their favorite brands. Nike has been supplanted. The three top brands cited are Sony, Adidas and Nokia.
The argument that anti-Americanism is essentially political while people consume American holds less and less true. "There's a cooling toward American popular culture," Mr. Miller observes. "More and more people are turning toward their local culture."
The United States no longer figures as one of the three top countries young people want to live in or visit, either. It's been supplanted by Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada. "People go where they're welcomed," Miller says. "The world has seen us in the process of closing our doors."
In 2005, Business for Diplomatic Action produced a "World Citizen's Guide," with a $250,000 grant from Pepsi. The accent is on respect for the local culture. The visitor must feel he is an ambassador. The "American who speaks loudly" is invited to disappear in favor of a discreet tourist who does not display his opinions, much less his religion. He is warned: "You are not in Kansas any more." Look out: "Even everyday life is likely not to be the way it is at home." The visitor reads the press at his own risk and peril. "If you watch the news, you will realize that not everyone holds the United States in the same high regard."
According to Thomas Miller, the decline in the United States' image had begun before September 11, 2001, because of too rapid globalization. "We said to ourselves: We won the Cold War. Everybody loves us."
The next presidential election in 2008 will not put an end to the problem. "We will probably not succeed at getting the world to love us again," deems Cari Eggspuehler, director of the program and a former State Department official. "But we hope to return to having the United States be respected."
As for Keith Reinhard, he places his hopes in the universities, which are among the rare American institutions to escape new international dislike. "It's not linked to an individual. It's a question of the power we have as a nation to bring progress where we can." He corrects himself: "To bring progress in the sense desired by the recipient, of course." |
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