To See Ourselves as Others See Us: How Publics Abroad View the United States after 9/11

Chapter 3. How Publics Abroad View Americans and American Society

chapter 3 How Publics Abroad View Americans and American Society The evidence presented and analyzed in chapter 2 reveals that publics abroad have indeed become increasingly critical of the United States and some of its major foreign policy undertakings during the years since the September 11 terrorist attacks. For many of those taking part in the international surveys, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 appears to have been a major catalyst for unleashing anti-American opinions. An unanswered question is whether the critical views are largely con‹ned to the U.S. government and its foreign policies. Are anti-American judgments largely focused on what the United States does? Alternatively, do such negative opinions of this country extend much further to include the American people and important features of American society and its major institutions—what the United States is? Effective policy analysis depends on information about both what a country is and what it does. Sole reliance on the latter may leave one’s assessment excessively dependent on the zigs and zags of recent events. Focusing exclusively on what a country is tends to cast the analysis in concrete, with little room for considering the possibilities of genuine change rather than merely tactical maneuvers. Cognitive dissonance theory suggests that there may be a tendency for negative judgments about American foreign policy to spill over and color other aspects of the United States. Alternatively, are publics abroad able and willing to make more-nuanced judgments in which they can simultaneously hold both negative and positive opinions about the United States? The discussion that follows probes polling evidence in four broad cate64 gories. The ‹rst examines judgments about the American people and some rather general descriptions of American society (tables 3.1–3.4). The following section examines how publics abroad rate some speci‹c American institutions such as democracy, religion, science, popular culture, and business (tables 3.5–3.9). Tables 3.10–3.12 focus on the extent to which publics abroad would welcome the spread of American ideas and institutions to their own countries and whether those who immigrate to this country experience an improvement in their lives.An underlying question in this and the previous chapter is to what extent publics abroad judge this country on the basis of what the United States is and what it does. A Pew survey in 2002 asked respondents whether differences between their countries and the United States arise from different values or policy differences. The ‹ndings presented in table 3.13 bring the chapter to a conclusion. the american people and society The results summarized in chapter 2 indicate a fairly clear but not universal pattern of increasingly critical judgments of the United States by publics abroad, especially after the issue of Iraq took center stage in world politics, but it remains an open question whether such views extend to all aspects of this country. There are presumably some respondents who, having expressed critical views of the United States and its foreign policy, also believe that the American people and its institutions are without any redeeming features, just as there are Americans who hold similar beliefs about China, Iran, Cuba, or any number of other countries. Do they constitute majorities or at least signi‹cant minorities , or are most publics abroad able and willing to make signi‹cant distinctions among the many and varied features of the United States? Those taking part in six of the seven Pew Research Center international surveys were asked to express their opinions not only about the United States and its foreign policy undertakings but also about “Americans.” The results, summarized in table 3.1, reveal a widespread tendency for favorable assessments of the American people to outstrip those of the country as a whole. To be sure, in many cases positive views of the American people declined somewhat during the ‹ve years spanning the Pew surveys, but the magnitude of the decline paled in comparison with the trends revealed in table 2.1. Among NATO allies, solid majorities exceeding 60 percent of the publics in Great Britain, France, Germany , Poland, Canada, and the Netherlands consistently expressed favorable views of Americans, even in the three most recent studies (2005, 2006, and Americans and American Society / 65 2007). Recall that these same surveys revealed growing disenchantment with the United States and many of its foreign policies. The responses of the...