This also explains, at least in part, why the U. Congress has mandated the State Department each year to tally and present a list of voting practices in the United Nations, not only on those overall votes in plenary session, but also those votes of strategic importance to the U.
Yet, such definitions say nothing about the sources of such actions and statements. Other scholars take a more complex view of anti- Americanism and conceptualize it as a form of prejudice, in which views toward the U. Yet, such definitions do not explain how individuals are able to change their attitudes toward the United States over time.
Other scholars define anti-Americanism as an attitude, based on feelings within the context of fluid, intersubjective social relationships and the ongoing updating of information about what the U.
Yet, a complex characterization of anti-Americanism is difficult to operationalize. Most of the data on anti-Americanism are packaged in the form of survey research data from a number of polling organizations e. Yet, as a baseline, the wealth of data available in the form of cross-national public opinion surveys is formidable. By administering comparable or similarly worded questions over time, we accumulate a powerful database on favorable attitudes toward the United States.
The use of aggregate-level public opinion data reaches far back to the beginnings of modern survey research e. In Great Britain, favorable attitudes toward the U. In France and Germany, public sentiment toward the U. Russia and Turkey also witnessed a steady erosion of popular support for the U. Russian attitudes toward the U. Turkish attitudes toward the U. It is useful here to look at recent major events within the UN. On the one hand, perhaps states such as Russia and France were simply acting according to their own best interests, independent of pro- or anti-American sentiment, as neorealists would suggest.
On the other hand, perhaps states were reflecting at least in part public attitudes back home. This seems to be what the world witnessed when the U. This argument rests on the assumption that public opinion matters, particularly in democracies: that political elites generally consider and enact the will of the public.
A large body of literature substantiates this claim. Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson find statistical evidence that public opinion has a significant driving impact on elite decision making within the United States. If such elites are not mindful of what others think and believe, then their political survival may be in jeopardy. State Department targets each year and lobbies for within the United Nations. Among these lobbied votes and overall plenary votes are several types of issues that the UNGA typically considers—those pertaining to the economic embargo of Cuba, arms control, the Middle East, human rights, and free trade.
This relatively small number is characteristic of lobbied votes for most years in which data are available. The embargo against Cuba recurs the most frequently amongst U. According to the U. Voting coincidence percentages for Security Council members were high, with most resolutions Could anti-American sentiment predict how nations vote in the UN, particularly on issues for which the U. This brings us to the following hypothesis: H1: There is a positive relationship between public approval of the United States within a given country and the level of voting coincidence that country shares with the U.
In , the UNGA adopted resolutions in plenary session, 37 percent of which it did not adopt by consensus, comparable to previous years. By shifting from lobbied votes to overall non-consensus votes, we view soft power and anti-Americanism in a somewhat different light. Perhaps countries that are relatively pro- or anti-American tend to vote apart from the U. This leads to our second hypothesis: H2: There is a positive relationship between public approval of the United States within a given country and the level of voting 8 It could be objected that the U.
For instance, if the French public is relatively anti-American, will that influence the U. Will American diplomats shrug off the French knowing they are anti-American to begin with?
Alternatively, will this inspire American diplomats to lobby the French even more aggressively? In practice, this endogeneity effect does not seem to operate, as the U. State Department lobbies every UN-member state, independent of pro- or anti-American sentiment, based on the issue at hand. State Department also identifies overall plenary votes in terms of issues dealing with arms control, human rights, and the Middle East, which we can easily test to assess variation in types of issues of importance to the United States.
This leads to hypothesis H3: H3: There is a positive relationship between public approval of the United States within a given country and the level of voting coincidence that country shares with the U.
Finally, for H1, H2, and H3, we should consider a multiplicative impact of regime-type and favorable opinion toward the United States, such that, public opinion matters in all regime types, but even more in mature democracies. To this extent, there is an interaction term between regime-type and favorable opinion toward the United States: H4: If a given country has a strong democratic form of government, public opinion should have a greater impact on its UN votes, other things being equal.
Competing Explanations Even if we observe a positive correlation between global attitudes toward the U. In particular, we must consider two competing explanations. Because the U. If, for instance, the U. Perhaps UN member-states vote in accordance with their security links, exclusive of pro- or anti-American sentiment. Public antipathy toward the U. One concern may involve the consistency and quality of the methods used by Pew and USIA in collecting these data.
Do all of the surveys include respondents taken from random samples? In both instances, Pew and USIA drew random samples from each country of interest, typically from to 1, respondents.
Moreover, to discourage bias against the United States government, third parties administered all USIA polls, such that the survey respondents had no awareness of the originating pollster. Furthermore, variation on the question wording within both Pew and USIA surveys was minimal over time by country. Please use this card [Hand Card] to tell me your feelings about various countries.
First, what about the U. Typically, one would use the Correlates of War COW 14 dataset in constructing such a measure, yet because I require alliances up to the year and COW includes data only until , I construct my own measure. Countries that share an alliance with the U. Agency for International Development, food aid from the U. Department of Agriculture, and humanitarian e. State Department. Incidentally, the non- random nature of the sample I examine several dozen countries out of a total of roughly two- hundred , in addition to the results of a Hausman test, preclude me from using a random effects model.
For every one percent increase in favorable attitudes toward the United States, the predicted increase in voting-coincidence with the U. This suggests that a ten-percent increase in approval of the U. Moreover, the relationship is statistically significant at the. This supports our first and central hypothesis. At the same time, the model suggests that the relationship between U.
This is a curious finding, as the power of the purse can in many cases yield substantial leverage. Perhaps the reason why the receipt of U. If the U. Agency for International Development, the curtailment of which may present significant domestic and bureaucratic challenges.
Secure in its prior experience and ongoing understanding that the abatement of such aid would be morally and bureaucratically unthinkable, counties cast their votes in the UN independently of their prevailing views toward the U. The second competing explanation—if a country shares a military alliance with the U. If a country shares a security alliance with the U. This is a robust and significant finding, but appears counter- intuitive: why should an ally of the U.
What could explain this? Finally, in terms of lobbied votes, the interaction of regime type and attitudes is statistically insignificant. Whether a country is a strong or a weak democracy, regime type has no salient impact on the extent to which a given country casts its vote, at least on those votes for which the U.
Why does public opinion not have a stronger impact among mature democracies, as our model would predict? One explanation may lay in the fact that in some non-democracies, political elites occasionally encourage anti-American sentiment, the aggregate effect of which may dampen the impact one would expect to see between attitudes and voting alignment within mature democracies.
Because of this, the impact of mature democracies on favorable attitudes that we would expect to see instead appears minimal. The results thus far support our first hypothesis. To further examine whether favorable attitudes toward the U. Table 4 illustrates the relationship between favorable attitudes toward the U. For every one-percent increase in favorable opinion toward the U. This suggests that a percent increase in favorable attitudes toward the U.
Moreover, this is significant at the. Whether or not the U. Here again, there is a significant negative relationship between the presence of security alliance and voting alignment, with a nine-point decrease along the y-intercept if a country is allied with the U. Finally, for overall votes, there is a statistically significant interactive effect between regime-type and favorable attitudes. If a country possesses a mature democracy, then the coefficient slope of the regression line increases by.
At least with respect to overall votes within the UN, those countries that are mature democracies have a steeper slope in how favorable attitudes are predictive of voting alignment.
Finally, let us observe the relationship between global attitudes toward the U. With regard to arms control, every one-percent increase in favorable attitudes toward the U. For human rights, for every one- percent increase in favorable attitudes toward the U. The smallest voting increase occurs on issues regarding the Middle East: for every one-percent increase in favorable attitudes toward the U.
All of these findings are statistically significant. At the same time, for two of these three issue types, there is a positive and significant relationship between alliance and plenary votes in alignment with U. For arms control, countries that share a security alliance with the U. For issues pertaining to human rights, those countries that share in a security alliance with the U.
It would thus appear that countries that are allies of the U. Finally, the interaction of regime-type on favorability is not statistically significant in any of the three cases, suggesting that regime-type does not matter, at least not for an attitude as polarizing as anti-Americanism.
The results of the fixed-effects regression model provide robust evidence confirming the hypothesis that anti-Americanism has serious, deleterious consequences for UNGA votes. A Eurobarometer poll found that a majority of Europeans believes that Washington has hindered efforts to fight global poverty, protect the environment, and maintain peace.
Such attitudes undercut soft power, reducing the ability of the United States to achieve its goals without resorting to coercion or payment. Skeptics of soft power Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld professes not even to understand the term claim that popularity is ephemeral and should not guide foreign policy.
The United States, they assert, is strong enough to do as it wishes with or without the world's approval and should simply accept that others will envy and resent it. The world's only superpower does not need permanent allies; the issues should determine the coalitions, not vice-versa, according to Rumsfeld.
But the recent decline in U. It is true that the United States has recovered from unpopular policies in the past such as those regarding the Vietnam War , but that was often during the Cold War, when other countries still feared the Soviet Union as the greater evil.
It is also true that the United States' sheer size and association with disruptive modernity make some resentment unavoidable today. But wise policies can reduce the antagonisms that these realities engender. Indeed, that is what Washington achieved after World War II: it used soft-power resources to draw others into a system of alliances and institutions that has lasted for 60 years.
The Cold War was won with a strategy of containment that used soft power along with hard power. The United States cannot confront the new threat of terrorism without the cooperation of other countries.
Of course, other governments will often cooperate out of self-interest. But the extent of their cooperation often depends on the attractiveness of the United States. Soft power, therefore, is not just a matter of ephemeral popularity; it is a means of obtaining outcomes the United States wants. When Washington discounts the importance of its attractiveness abroad, it pays a steep price.
When the United States becomes so unpopular that being pro-American is a kiss of death in other countries' domestic politics, foreign political leaders are unlikely to make helpful concessions witness the defiance of Chile, Mexico, and Turkey in March And when U.
Some hard-line skeptics might counter that, whatever its merits, soft power has little importance in the current war against terrorism; after all, Osama bin Laden and his followers are repelled, not attracted, by American culture and values. But this claim ignores the real metric of success in the current war, articulated in Rumsfeld's now-famous memo that was leaked in February "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
The United States and its allies will win only if they adopt policies that appeal to those moderates and use public diplomacy effectively to communicate that appeal.
Yet the world's only superpower, and the leader in the information revolution, spends as little on public diplomacy as does France or the United Kingdom -- and is all too often outgunned in the propaganda war by fundamentalists hiding in caves. Between and , the budget of the United States Information Agency usia decreased ten percent; resources for its mission in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation, were cut in half.
By the time it was taken over by the State Department at the end of the decade, usia had only 6, employees compared to 12, at its peak in the mid- s. During the Cold War, radio broadcasts funded by Washington reached half the Soviet population and 70 to 80 percent of the population in Eastern Europe every week; on the eve of the September 11 attacks, a mere two percent of Arabs listened to the Voice of America voa.
The annual number of academic and cultural exchanges, meanwhile, dropped from 45, in to 29, in Soft power had become so identified with fighting the Cold War that few Americans noticed that, with the advent of the information revolution, soft power was becoming more important, not less. It took the September 11 attacks to remind the United States of this fact. But although Washington has rediscovered the need for public diplomacy, it has failed to master the complexities of wielding soft power in an information age.
Some people in government now concede that the abolition of usia was a mistake, but there is no consensus on whether to recreate it or to reorganize its functions, which were dispersed within the State Department after the Clinton administration gave in to the demands of Senator Jesse Helms R-N.
The board that oversees the voa, along with a number of specialized radio stations, has taken some useful steps -- such as the establishment of Radio Sawa to broadcast in Arabic, Radio Farda to broadcast in Farsi, and the Arabic-language TV station Al Hurra. But much more is needed, especially in the Middle East. Autocratic regimes in the Middle East have eradicated their liberal opposition, and radical Islamists are in most cases the only dissenters left. They feed on anger toward corrupt regimes, opposition to U.
Liberal democracy, as they portray it, is full of corruption, sex, and violence -- an impression reinforced by American movies and television and often exacerbated by the extreme statements of some especially virulent Christian preachers in the United States. Nonetheless, the situation is not hopeless. Although modernization and American values can be disruptive, they also bring education, jobs, better health care, and a range of new opportunities.
Indeed, polls show that much of the Middle East craves the benefits of trade, globalization, and improved communications. American technology is widely admired, and American culture is often more attractive than U. Given such widespread albeit ambivalent moderate views, there is still a chance of isolating the extremists. Democracy, however, cannot be imposed by force. The outcome in Iraq will be of crucial importance, but success will also depend on policies that open regional economies, reduce bureaucratic controls, speed economic growth, improve educational systems, and encourage the types of gradual political changes currently taking place in small countries such as Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, and Morocco.
The development of intellectuals, social groups, and, eventually, countries that show that liberal democracy is not inconsistent with Muslim culture will have a beneficial effect like that of Japan and South Korea, which showed that democracy could coexist with indigenous Asian values. As polls consistently show, many fear, misunderstand, and oppose U.
The world's leader in communications, however, has been inept at recognizing and exploiting such opportunities. In the advisory group's words, "to say that financial resources are inadequate to the task is a gross understatement.
The development of effective public diplomacy must include strategies for the short, medium, and long terms. In the short term, the United States will have to become more agile in responding to and explaining current events. New broadcasting units such as Radio Sawa, which intersperses news with popular music, is a step in the right direction, but Americans must also learn to work more effectively with Arab media outlets such as Al Jazeera.
In the medium term, U.
0コメント