Ottoman Algeria in Western Diplomatic History with ... - Bibliothèque

2. Anti-Algerian Attitudes in early American Diplomacy
Early in the 19 th century, the French political philosopher Alexis de
Tocqueville (1805-1859) examined the functioning of the administrative and
political institutions in the United States. When noting their influence on the
habits and manners of the American people, he criticized certain aspects of
American democracy:
All free nations are vainglorious, but national pride is not displayed by
all in the same manner. The Americans in their intercourse with
strangers appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of
praise. The most slender eulogium is acceptable to them, the most
exalted seldom contents them; they unceasingly harass you to extort
praise, and if you resist their entreaties they fall to praising themselves.
It would seem as if, doubting their own merit, they wished to have it
constantly exhibited before their eyes. Their vanity is not only greedy,
but restless and jealous; it will grant nothing, while it demands
everything, but is ready to beg and to quarrel at the same time. 75
No other words could paint so brilliantly the American concept of ‘new
diplomacy’ at practice. What Tocqueville observed in the early 1830s had
already been in the making during the last quarter of the 18 th century. Within
less than a decade from the declaration of independence, the American early
sniveling and greedy diplomacy grew some teeth and turned quarrelsome
before cloaking itself in plain aggression. From Lamb’s petty huckstering at
Algiers to Adams and Jefferson’s aggressive stands, American diplomacy made
a giant jump from cunning begging to a shrewdly knitted plan for a naval attack
on Algiers.
75 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Translated by Henry Reeve, vol. 2, 4 th ed. (New
York/Boston: C. C. Little & J. Brown, 1841), p. 238.
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