WASHINGTON, Nov. 23 (UPI) -- Are European consumers going to punish American big business for the Bush administration's policies in Iraq and elsewhere? A massive new poll just released suggests that they will.
The poll carried out by the Seattle-based GMI market research organization presents the finding that one in five European consumers will avoid purchasing products and services offered by many U.S.-based companies as a direct reaction to what they see as the current unilateral nature of U.S. foreign policy and their anger over the clear re-election by a decisive margin of President George W. Bush.
The GMI World Poll was conducted a week after the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 2 and sampled 8,000 international consumers, including 1,000 each in the nations of France, Germany, Britain, Japan, Canada, China and Russia. It found that 81 percent of Germans, 73 percent of French people and 52 percent of Britons were displeased by the president's re-election. Nine out of 10 French and German consumers believed Bush to be an ineffective world leader and two-thirds of all European respondents believed the Bush administration's foreign policy was motivated by self-interest and empire-building.
Allyson Stewart-Allen, an international marketing expert who has lived in Europe for the past 17 years, told GMI the poll indicated that U.S. companies were likely to suffer significant loss of business in Europe over the next four years if these attitudes remain at their current levels or get even worse.
Indeed, the GMI poll reported that 30 percent of the German respondents who said they would boycott U.S.-made products said they would avoid purchasing Ford Motor Co. products and 42 percent of the same group said they would boycott any products made by General Motors. According to GMI analysts, the disparity between the two figures was probably explained by Ford's efforts in Germany to present itself as a German company.
The survey also indicated that the companies most likely to suffer in their European sales from the rise in popular anti-American sentiments were Marlboro cigarettes, American Express, United Airlines, McDonalds, GM and CNN News.
The levels of anti-American prejudice recorded in the survey indicate a level of hostility not seen in Western Europe since the height of the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1972. However, they appear to contain the potential for levels of prejudice and hostility that may far exceed the levels of the 1960s.
For although passions against the Vietnam conflict ran high in Europe nearly 40 years ago, they were mitigated by the very warm memories that older Europeans -- and many younger ones too -- had of liberation by the United States in the last year of World War II, the flood of Marshall Aid that re-floated the economies of half the continent from 1947 onwards, and in Germany's case, the heroic role the U.S. Air Force played in the Berlin airlift.
Also, in the 1960s, the United States was still widely seen as the protector of Western Europe against the threat of Soviet conquest, a feeling particularly strong in Germany where memories of the last major Berlin crisis in 1961 were still recent and vivid.
Nor was there any threat that the Vietnam conflict would raise gasoline and general energy prices in Europe 40 years ago. And there was no significant Vietnamese minority to either stir up popular support behind it or seek to intimidate the population of major European nations into opposing U.S. policies and punishing U.S. companies.
But today, virtually every major Western European population has a large Muslim minority, in the case of France, Germany and Britain numbering several millions in each. European consumers are already paying like their American counterparts far higher gasoline prices that the Iraq war, far from ending appears to have significantly boosted.
The GMI pollsters also concluded on the basis of their data that the new anti-American backlash was strengthening broad sentiment and support for a powerful, united Europe on the continent. Some 50 percent of the French and German respondents polled described their race not as white Caucasian but as European, the poll found.
Mitchell Eggers, chief pollster and COO of GMI described this finding as indicating an emerging European nationality that is being created by the continuing success of the European Union. But he added that it was also now being boosted by the developing European backlash against America.
Ironically, some canny U.S.-based corporations are already profiting from the anti-American backlash by developing subsidies or local brand products that do not appear to be American and even define themselves in contrast and competition to well-established American brands.
SPAM, or spiced ham, which is produced by the American Hormel Corporation, presents itself as a local product in European nations. And Ford has enjoyed increased success in marketing its Volvo, Jaguar and Land Rover brands. Volvo remains associated with Sweden and Jaguar and Land Rover with Britain.
The poll indicated that the results of this year's election greatly boosted broader anti-American sentiments because until then Bush was seen as an accidental leader who had squeezed in on only a hairsbreadth disputed vote four years ago because of the complexities of the U.S. electoral-college system.
However, Bush's clear victory in the popular vote on Nov. 2 has now established him as the choice of the American people. Therefore, the results of the poll suggest that future anger in Europe over his policies will no longer be simply focused on the man in the White House but, as happened during the Vietnam era, it will also be directed against the people he leads.
