History repeats: anti-Americanism redux.

ONCE upon a time, anti-Americanism was scientific. Now it's merely ubiquitous.

Or so at least it seems to an American who travels abroad--especially if he's President Bush, whose visit to London set off still more expressions of anti-American sentiment and, even worse, heavy-breathing lamentations from pundits inside and outside the U.S.

As they and many others have noted, often with unseemly relish, the warm international feelings that bathed the U.S. in the days after Sept. 11, 2001 ("We are all Americans," read the famous headline in Le Monde the next day) have gone poof.

An international poll, conducted last February by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, measured the ill feeling as it existed even before the Iraq war. In Italy, only 34 percent of respondents had a favorable view of the U.S.; in France, the number was 31 percent; in Germany, 25 percent; and so on through Europe down to Spain, 14 percent and Turkey, 12 percent.

In the same poll, this loathing oddly coexisted with the majority opinion that Iraq would be better off if the U.S. removed Saddam Hussein from power. Since the war, the anti-American poll numbers have only grown worse. An American scans the numbers and wonders: Where does the loathing come from?

It's a good question. Yet much here isn't as it appears. That post-9/11 international sympathy for the U.S., so fondly remembered by some, required no time to dissipate, suggesting that perhaps the warm feeling was merely a momentary reversal of a much stronger and longer-lasting tendency in the opposite direction.

Consider, for instance, the famous Le Monde editorial. It was scarcely the pro-U.S. valentine it has often been taken to be. While not blaming the U.S. for the terrorist attacks, it nevertheless tied them to American "cynicism," and it floated the possibility that Osama bin Laden was himself a creation of bungling, short-sighted U.S. intelligence operatives. Three months later, the editorial's author, Le Monde Editor Jean-Marie Colombani, published a book seething with orthodox anti-Americanism.

Anti-Americanism is in fact much older than some of its practitioners might expect, a phenomenon that dates from long before the U.S.'s emergence as a world superpower. It is older, in other words, than George W. Bush.

In a dazzling essay in the academic quarterly Public Interest, University of Virginia historian James Ceaser traced anti-Americanism--which he defines as the notion that "something at the core of American life is deeply wrong and threatening to the test of the world"--back to its surprising origins.

Anti-Americanism even predates the U.S., Ceaser discovered.

In the 17th and early 18th centuries, he writes, the cutting-edge scientific view held that "due chiefly to atmospheric conditions, in particular excessive humidity, all living things in the Americas were not only inferior to those found in Europe but also in a condition of decline."

Anti-Americanism has continued to evolve with the times, though its essence remains unchanged. Nowadays, for European thinkers of both right and left, the U.S. stands for modernity--and especially for modernity's terrifying spawn, global capitalism. Indeed, Ceaser points out, "Americanization" is a near-perfect synonym for "globalization."

Though he doesn't say so explicitly, Ceaser tries to understand anti-Americanism in order to refute it. But this may be harder than it looks.

For one thing, the original theorists of anti-Americanism, the racists and the royalists, were right: The influence of the U.S. was, by their lights, disastrous, as it eventually helped undo what they most prized. Today's European intellectuals may likewise be correct to see in Americanization a threat to their own cultural status as well.

More important, as Ceaser notes, anti-Americanism has become so deep-rooted that it now resembles a religious faith--too well developed to be a mere prejudice but too reflexive and slippery to be a testable theory.

Watching the statue of Bush pulled down in London, perhaps even Ceaser would agree: Anti-Americanism is no longer a proposition that will be susceptible to reasoned debate.

Andrew Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.