The United States Is Exporting Its Social Movements (and Its Social Problems)
Both U.S. protests and radical movements are going global.
As college protests continue to roil American campuses from coast to coast — and, thankfully, as some college administrators are figuring out how to defuse tensions — the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World noticed a Washington Post story by Mohamad El Chamaa and Adela Suliman about how students outside of the United States are starting to mobilize, inspired by protests in the United States:
Students across the Middle East and globally are downing their pens, ditching class and joining in with pro-Palestinian protests in solidarity with a wave of campus protests that have swept across the United States in recent weeks.
From Kuwait to Lebanon, in Egypt and Ramallah, students have occupied central locations on campuses and on Monday and Tuesday waved placards calling for an end to the war in Gaza and divestment by their universities from companies that do business with Israel.
Similar protests have taken place at Sorbonne University in Paris and elsewhere, including Italy, Britain, Canada and Australia, as the global student demographic piles pressure on administrators and governments almost seven months into the war. Some of those protesting said they were directly inspired by U.S. students.
“Palestine wasn’t initially their thing, but now they are doing more than we are, and [we] felt ashamed and that we should do more,” Ali Tayyar, a student organizer at Lebanon’s American University of Beirut, said at a protest Tuesday. “We needed to at least show some support for our friends in the U.S.”
That WaPo story was from early in the week, but the trend is continuing unabated. In France, for example, Politico’s Victor Goury-Laffont reports that, “Police forced out a pro-Palestinian group which staged an occupation overnight at Sciences Po in Paris, a top university known as a breeding ground for France’s political elite…. in echoes of the U.S., pro-Palestinian student movements are organizing across France, with blockades and encampments being set up on university campuses amid an increasingly tense environment as Israel’s monthslong war on Hamas in Gaza drags on.” NPR’s Willem Marx reports that protests have spread to Mexico. CNN reports that the protests have spread to Australia as well.1
This is the second time in the last four years that U.S. protests have gone global. Back in 2020, the George Floyd protests inspired similar protests in Toronto and London and Berlin and Milan.
As a political scientist, this kind of contagion effect is fascinating. Studies of policy diffusion from the United States were very popular two decades ago, but less so now. It is not hard to find arguments that U.S. hegemony is on the decline. An implicit corollary to this assumption is that American soft power. If two protest movements go global from the United States in the past five years, however, that points to a more durable form of soft power than had previously been understood.2
Unfortunately, as Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware warned last fall in Foreign Affairs, other U.S. movements have also had contagion effects:
The spread of homegrown American conspiracy theories, beliefs in racial superiority, antigovernment extremism, and other manifestations of hate and intolerance has become such a problem that some of the United States’ closest allies—Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom—have designated both American groups and citizens as foreign terrorists….
Far-right violence today is increasingly fueled by a deadly combination of ideology and strategy imported from the United States. The “great replacement” theory, which claims that nonwhite individuals are purposefully being brought into Western countries to undermine the political power of white voters, got its start in France, but this kind of thinking has long been a fixture of American white supremacism. These days, it is making its way into mainstream rhetoric in the United States and is acquiring an increasingly international audience. These American extremists have also adopted from Marxism the strategic goal of “accelerationism,” meaning hastening the collapse of society by fomenting chaos and bloodshed. The United States’ exportation of these two ideas is radicalizing men and women across the globe, prompting foreign governments to take steps to protect their citizens….
The dark shadow of the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol has also inspired others similarly seeking to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power in their countries. Earlier this year in Brazil, a mob motivated by grievances similar to those of the Trump supporters in Washington sought to emulate the January 2021 rioters by storming their capital city’s government center in hopes of overturning an election outcome. Their preferred candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, watched the events unfold on television from his self-imposed exile in Florida. The United States’ stature as a pillar and exemplar of democracy had been overtaken by the Trump administration’s election denialism playbook. Bolsonaro’s supporters even sought guidance and advice from senior former White House officials, including the former senior Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
From a U.S. foreign policy perspective, I suppose it is noteworthy that U.S. social mobilization can still have global effects. It is a reminder that even non-governmental actions in the United States have foreign policy externalities. Sometimes that can lead to social mobilization elsewhere.
Unfortunately, the export of far-right extremist views is also a thing. Which is a reminder that U.S. soft power can lead to the export of more malevolent, sectarian U.S. viewpoints as well.
Concerns about the protests spilling over into anti-Semitism have also gone global.
Full disclosure: it could be that soft power is on my mind because I just finished reading Joseph Nye’s autobiography.
Thanks Daniel. The media (not you) have portrayed the protests as illegitimate, a sideshow, a joke. Both parties are indistinguishable. Am I the only one who finds this ominous?
"It is a reminder that even non-governmental actions in the United States have foreign policy externalities."
I would submit this has been influential on US foreign policy and caused friction with foreigners for a *very* long time before now. Non-governmental actions in the United States have irked, befuddled, and outraged select foreigners for 50-80 years, and many of them, being unfamiliar with the American model of pluralism, or being solely consumed with the effects on themselves, are (or were) unwilling, unable to see non-governmental actions in the US as separate from US policy, or are (or were) unwilling to care about the difference.
*The* original and classic example of non-governmental action in the United States with foreign policy consequences was support of a *minority* of American Jews for the pre-Israel Zionist movement. Groups that lacked majority Jewish congregational or institutional consensus support, or American public consensus support, or institutional support from foreign policy bureaucracy, through passionate commitment, fundraising, direct action including arms smuggling and volunteering, including law-breaking, were able to support the Zionist settlement enterprise [alongside other Jewish supporters in other parts of the international diaspora and occasional non-Jewish donors], and provide meaningful support during the Israeli War of Independence.
This was counter to US law and its *arms embargo* on both the Zionist Yishuv and Israel in the Israeli War of Independence and 1st Arab-Israeli war and result in prosecutions of some arms smugglers for neutrality act violations. I'm uncertain if anyone faced prison terms, but Al Schwimmer who smuggled aircraft (and started Israeli Aircraft Industries) was stripped of his civil rights by the Court by 1949, with them only being restored by Bill Clinton in the late 90s.
The US even after the end of that first war and wartime embargo, still had no legal government arms sales to Israel until the Kennedy Administration sold air defense missiles in 1962, and the Johnson Administration sold all-purpose fighter aircraft in 1966 (still undelivered by June 1967's war). Israel got its most advanced and standardized arms for the 1948 war from Czechoslovakia - duly approved by Stalin's Soviet Union, and its arms in the 50s and 60s from West Germany, France, and Britain.
Yet from 1948, probably 1945, through 1967, Arab governments and publics probably put blame for the creation, worsening, and prolongation of the Zionist and Israel *problem* first and foremost on the USA over any other foreign country. Even though the USSR also supported the partition resolution in the UN, even though it de jure recognized Israel first, and even though its Czechoslovak ally gave the best and probably most decisive arms package to Israel for its first war.
Americans interacting in the region and with its people probably could have explained all this, and could have pointed out the fine distinctions between official government policy - no US military aid most of this time, limited economic aid on the same basis as everyone else gets, the lion's share of *US dollars* going to Israel coming from private groups and weapons being illegal black market surplus.
I doubt that would have done much assuaging. To somebody who is facing a problem, for the Arabs it was Israel, anything another guy fails to do to stop it, might as well be something they are doing on purpose, with malice. Their retort would be, "If you Americans really cared about your relationship with Arabs you have stopped this funding and smuggling. This private activity and fundraising could never happen without the connivance of the US government. Zionists could never advertise without government approval. If you *really* didn't want Zionists to have American WWII surplus planes you would have given Schwimmer more than just a slap on the wrist, or you would not have arms embargoed *our* armies."
Fast forward to the 1990s and 2000s - there is no convincing any authoritarian leaders that international and western pro-democracy NGOs, are *not* an arm of western government policy, and that "color revolutions" are western intelligence manufactured events and campaigns, and not grassroots, spontaneous events.
And, the plethora of non-state, societal influences in the USA and western countries does dilute central control and responsiveness of its diplomacy. A country Washington is negotiating with can try to get off its sanctions list for one issue, WMD or terrorism, but find itself back on its sights for another - human rights, suppressing an internal uprising, threatening endangered species. Or even if US government is taking no part, being effected by economically relevant boycotts over any such niche causes.
Actually, the plethora of American civil society groups and their multiple demands for a better world created a fatigue in a lot of the Global South and Global East for American liberalism as much as American hawkishness, with many Global South leaders anticipating the more straightforwardly transactional Trump might be simpler and easier to deal. It was mainly the other First World nations with their own "do-gooder" civil society sections that were most offended by Trump's victories over liberals.