ANTI-AMERICANISM IN EUROPE….A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS….So which European country is the most anti-American? Inquiring readers want to know.

Bill Sjostrom at AtlanticBlog has a post today summarizing Eurobarometer 58, a poll of European attitudes toward America. Basically, they asked five questions and asked if America played a positive role in each area or a negative role. Bill has a table posted with responses to all five questions by country, but it’s hard to make sense out of it. So in my continuing effort to annoy Steve Verdon by taking fuzzy statistics and massaging them to make them even fuzzier, I stuck the numbers in Excel and came up with a single number for each country so we could rank the entire continent. It’s this kind of simplistic pandering to the lowest common denominator that has gotten me where I am today.

(How did I do it? Well, each question has a certain percentage of respondents who are pro-America and a certain percentage who are anti-America and I just figured the difference. For example, if 30% are pro and 20% are anti, the score for that question is +10. Do that for all five questions and then figure the average. Easy!)

So here are the overall scores for the 15 surveyed countries:

  1. +14.1: Ireland

  2. +2.4: Italy

  3. -3.6: Denmark

  4. -7.6: Finland

  5. -8.2: Germany

  6. -10.8: Great Britain

  7. -12.4: Belgium

  8. -12.6: Portugal

  9. -14.4: Sweden

  10. -15.2: Netherlands

  11. -18.4: Austria

  12. -19.2: Luxembourg

  13. -23.4: Spain

  14. -30.4: France

  15. -50.4: Greece

Surprise! Greece hates us the most, and by a whopping margin. The French are a distant second, so they better get on the stick if they want to retain their reputation.

And Great Britain isn’t our biggest admirer, Ireland is. In fact, the Brits come in a dismal sixth, one notch behind the hated Germans.

Interesting note: every country except Ireland and Denmark had an overall negative impression of America’s role in promoting peace, but, oddly, all but two countries (Spain and Greece) had a positive impression of our role in combating terrorism. On the other hand, every single country had an overall negative impression of our role in fighting global poverty and our role in protecting the environment. Even our pals the Irish didn’t support us there.