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?
Reality--Jihadi protests on US campuses.
Drezner-- Whatabout white supremacy?