Regrettably, the Romans never conducted a poll of world public opinion during the Roman Imperium. But had they done so, the collective view of the various subjugated and neighbouring tribes might have been summarised: “We can’t bear those arrogant Romans, with their flashy chariots, aggressive foreign policy and brash modern militarism. We will tweak their snooty Roman noses at every opportunity. On the other hand, we just love that Roman culture and technology: the roads are splendid, the wine’s delicious and the baths are heaven. We quite like learning to read and write, too.”

That is also, broadly speaking, the global attitude towards the modern hegemon, the United States, as revealed in a comprehensive survey published this week by the independent Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press. The poll of 38,000 people in 44 countries found that favourable impressions of America have declined sharply in recent months. Unsurprisingly, resentment is most acute in Muslim countries, but in the past 12 months the percentage of respondents with a positive view of America dropped 22 points in Turkey, 17 in Germany, and eight in Britain. Much of the world sees America as vain, aggressive, unheeding, ignorant of world problems and increasingly oblivious to the disparity between rich and poor.

Majorities in almost every country say they resent the spread of US influence, yet most also admired its culture and technology. Outside Muslim countries, the superpower is seen with a profound ambivalence. More than half of all Canadians, for example, believe the spread of American culture is bad, but three-quarters simultaneously approve of American films, music and television. Enthusiasm for America is declining worldwide, but given that the US is preparing for a war opposed by majorities in every country save Britain (where opinion is evenly split, according to this poll) it is still remarkably popular: in 35 out of the 42 countries surveyed, a majority still approves of the US.

Salman Rushdie recently argued that America is facing “an ideological enemy that may be harder to defeat than militant Islam: that is to say anti-Americanism, which is taking the world by storm.” This poll, however, suggests a more complex and contradictory picture, in which anti-Americanism is fuelled by resentment of Washington’s foreign policy but offset by deep reserves of goodwill, emulation and envy.

There is a residual Neo-Marxist train of thought which holds that anti-Americanism in general, and the attack on the World Trade Centre in particular, herald the beginning of the end of global capitalism, part of an ineluctable process in which the oppressed countries will rise and overthrow the capitalist behemoth. The most powerful objection to this thesis, as Lee Harris points out in a recent article for Policy Review, is that it relies largely on wishful thinking, the unscientific utopianism that Marx himself so vigorously eschewed.

Classical Marxism holds that the workers eventually inevitably overthrow their capitalist oppressors. In the latter half of the 20th century, as it became apparent the proletariat within capitalist societies were getting steadily richer and more placid, this was adapted to argue that the true conflict was between American capitalism and the rest of the world. In Harris’s words: “Both the workers and the capitalists of the advanced countries became the oppressor class, while it was the general population of the less advanced countries that became the oppressed.”

So are September 11 and the new anti-Americanism evidence of a global revolt against American capitalism? Hardly. The World Trade Centre attacks did not undermine American capitalism but rather increased political unity within it, provoking a more bullish internationalism. The notion that al-Qaeda’s insane perversion of Islam represents revolution of a kind Marx would have recognised is mere fantasy.

Increased America-bashing is not evidence of some economically driven uprising by the poorest countries against the richest one, but a sign that the US is not handling its hegemonic status well. George W. Bush’s response to the Pew report was disquietingly trite: “We’ve never been a nation of conquerors; we’re a nation of liberators.” The President has so far done a mediocre job of demonstrating this to, say, the people of Turkey, where eight out of ten oppose American use of its bases for strikes on Iraq.

The most significant finding of the survey was that across the world few people are concerned by the existence of only one superpower, but many feel that the power is not being used to address world problems, or even to listen to them. Global respect and resentment of America are equally strongly reflected in the numbers, and the link between them is great but unmet expectations.

The US has ridden out waves of global antipathy before — in the 1940s the French National Assembly voted to ban Coca-Cola entirely, and anti-Americanism was rather more extreme during the Vietnam War than it is now. It will ride this one too, particularly if Washington continues to seek global co-operation rather than the brittle, take-it-or-leave-it attitude that characterised the first phase of the War on Terror.

Hegemony, from the Greek word for leadership, is the ascendancy of one power within a league. The Greeks and Romans knew that power lay in balancing resentment and respect in a wider world, and Virgil and Horace were among the world’s first, great spin-doctors, selling Roman leadership far beyond Rome. “So massive was the effort to found the Roman nation,” wrote Virgil. America’s growing unpopularity will be stopped and reversed when a greater effort is made to persuade the world’s myriad Coca-Cola drinkers that the Pax Americana, for all its flaws, is still the best pax around.

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