Great article by James Caesar on the intellectual Genealogy of Anti-Americanism.   Unfortunately this URL (http://thepublicinterest.com/current/article1.html) looks FAR from permanent so I'm going to quote / summarize somewhat liberally here. 

The thrust of Caesar's article is that anti-Americanism as a philosophy is neither new nor unfocused but has instead been a fixture of European intelligentsia's attitudes towards the New World practically since the days of the colonies.  As an organizing principle, Caesar contends it's perhaps the strongest unifying thread across Western Europe:

...According to the French analyst Jean François Revel, "If you remove anti-Americanism, nothing remains of French political thought today, either on the Left or on the Right." Revel might just as well have said the same thing about German political thought or the thought of almost any Western European country, where anti-Americanism reigns as the lingua franca of the intellectual class.

Caesar provides a fascinating analysis of the "Anti-American" arguments across 5 phases through modern history.   3 of these arguments date to the early 1700s and 2 are more coincidental with the emergence of America on the national scene:

• The "Natural" degeneracy argument - popular in the 18th and early 19th centuries;  believe it or not a fascinating and often serious topic of discussion between Jefferson / Franklin and their intellectual contemporaries across the pond (probably a precursor to today's nature vs. nurture debate).

  The thesis 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.

• Romantic vs. Rationalistic debate -- European intellectuals contended that the founding enlightenment principles of the American revolution (commerce, freedom, rugged individualism, and so on...) created a society that's boorish, vulgar, and unrooted in community.  Much of this can be argued as "should the state let man be" vs. "should the state help man become something better" - where the idea of "better" was inspired by the writings of Rousseau and Heine

  The romantics' interpretation of America owed something to the French Revolution, which inspired loathing among conservative philosophers such as Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre. The French Revolution was seen as an attempt to remake constitutions and societies on the basis of abstract and universal principles of nature and science. The United States, as the precursor of the French Revolution, was often implicated in this critique. These philosophers' major claim was that nothing created or fashioned under the guidance of universal principles or with the assistance of rational science - nothing, to use The Federalist's words, constructed chiefly by "reflection and choice" - was solid or could long endure.

• Racial impurity -- that the great American melting pot was a net negative and reduced overall survival fitness.

  The core of racialist theory was the idea that the various races of man - with race understood to refer not only to the major color groups but to different subgroups such as Aryans, Slavs, Latins, and Jews - are hierarchically arranged in respect to such important qualities as strength, intelligence, and courage. A mixing of the races was said to be either impossible, in the sense that it could not sustain biological fecundity; or, if fecundity was sustainable, that it would result in a leveling of the overall quality of the species, with the higher race being pulled down as a result of mingling with the lower ones.

• The Empire of Technology -- whereas Romanticism vs. Rationalism merely pointed at America as a place with no soul, the technology argument couples in America's rapacious capitalism with Marxist polemics to usher in a new type of philosophical imperialism -- America is now a creeping infection:

  The fourth stratum in the construction of anti-Americanism was created during the era of heavy industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. America was now associated with a different kind of deformation, this time in the direction of the gigantesque and the gargantuan. America was seen as the source of the techniques of mass production and of the methods and the mentality that supported this system. Nietzsche was an early exponent of this view, arguing that America sought the reduction of everything to the calculable in an effort to dominate and enrich: "The breathless haste with which they [the Americans] work - the distinctive vice of the new world - is already beginning ferociously to infect old Europe and is spreading a spiritual emptiness over the continent." Long in advance of Hollywood movies or rap music, the spread of American culture was likened to a form of disease. Its progress in Europe seemed ineluctable. "The faith of the Americans is becoming the faith of the European as well," Nietzsche warned.

• Finally, the issue we are most familiar with now that we're in the 21st century - rampant consumerism.  Caesar presents it in a very interesting philosophical light

  In creating this symbol of America, Heidegger managed to include within it many of the problems or maladies of modern times, from the rise of instantaneous global communication, to an indifference to the environment, to the reduction of culture to a commodity for consumption. He was especially interested in consumerism, which he thought was emblematic of the spirit of his age: "Consumption for the sake of consumption is the sole procedure that distinctively characterizes the history of a world that has become an unworld.... Being today means being replaceable." America was the home of this way of thinking; it was the very embodiment of the reign of the ersatz, encouraging the absorption of the unique and authentic into the uniform and the standard.