Siberian Federal University 
- Issue
- Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences. 2014 7 (12)
- Authors
- Shakeel Siddiqui, Muhammad
- Contact information
- Shakeel Siddiqui, Muhammad:Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan Pakistan;E-mail:
- Keywords
- United States of America; Pakistan; Islam; international relations
- Abstract
Christopher Kremmer argues in his famous paper “American Empire: Politics and Culture in the 21st Century” that History will judge that America failed to define the nature of its new empire when it had the opportunity to do so after the end of the Cold War in 1991. It allowed bin Laden to define it for them. Meanwhile, the American emperor concentrated on settling a personal score with the leader of Iraq. (Kremmer, 2001) The new American empire, born in the ruins of the twin towers, Afghanistan, and Iraq has yet to be formally announced. This may be due to the child’s uncertain paternity. George Bush and Osama bin Laden can both credibly lay claims to be the father . . . as an empire, the US behaves much like other empires in the past. It’s often said that it is a reluctant empire . . . . Nevertheless, imperial thinking permeates its foreign policy, especially towards the Middle East.(Ibid) This paper investigates the perceptions of the United States in Pakistan. It distinguishes two types of attitudes, namely attitudes towards American culture and society and attitudes towards American policies. What is the image of the United States of America abroad? What opinion do foreign publics have of America, its citizens and its institutions, its ideals and its culture, its policies and its symbols? What attitudes do they have towards all things American? The main hypothesis that this paper seeks to test is whether attitudes towards America emerge as a consistent mind frame that manifests itself in a systematic patterns. Is anti-Americanism an ideational syndrome fostering a rejection of America on all its dimensions? Or is anti-Americanism a multi-faceted phenomenon, remarkable more for its ambivalent nature rather than its virulence? Seen in this perspective, the study of the image of America aimed at identifying whether different aspects of America are evaluated in a consistent manner, be that uniformly positive or uniformly negative, or whether patterns of inconsistencies populate the ideational reaction to America. Two dimensions are put under scrutiny in this study: a polity dimension, and a policy dimension. The first dimension refers to America as a societal, cultural, and political arrangement premised on freedom, opportunity, and individual achievement, while the second dimension is centered on the political actions the United States pursues in the international arena
- Pages
- 2000-2020
- Paper at repository of SibFU
- https://elib.sfu-kras.ru/handle/2311/16565
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).