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9 Legacies of Anti-Americanism: A Sociological Perspective D O U G M C A D A M 251 Anti-Americanism is generally treated as yet another instance of American exceptionalism . Yet as the editors point out in the introduction, anti-imperial sentiments have a long history. The Roman Empire would surely have aroused fear, envy, and enmity among the peoples subject to or threatened by its rule. Even if we restrict ourselves to the contemporary world, anti-Americanism has been studied only rarely and then seemingly as a phenomenon unto itself. That is, it has not been seen as a specific, if extreme, example of any more generic social phenomenon. No doubt there are features of anti-Americanism that mark it as unique. At the same time, I think there are more general analytic lenses through which the phenomenon can be profitably observed. I will bring one such lens—the study of social movements or contentious politics—to bear on anti-Americanism in this chapter. Scholars of nonroutine or contentious politics seek fundamentally to understand the development of conflict relations between groups and the dynamics of emergent mobilization that trigger specific episodes of contention motivated by these perceived cleavages.1 From this perspective, it is useful to think of anti-Americanism as involving an “us/them” cleavage that, while variable across time and space, has the potential to set in motion specific episodes of reactive mobilization against the United States. When viewed in this light, anti-Americanism comes to resemble other political /cultural cleavages, such as those of race, ethnicity, class, and religion, that endure but only sporadically serve as the basis of widespread contention. I am extremely grateful to Bob Keohane and Peter Katzenstein, not simply for their extraordinarily detailed and insightful comments on several drafts of this chapter but for inviting my participation in this book project. I am also indebted to David Laitin, Cynthia Brandt, Mary Katzenstein, Ruud Koopmans, Mayer Zald, John Bowen, and Giacomo Chiozza for their helpful comments on the chapter. . McAdam ; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly . Viewing mobilized anti-Americanism as a specific kind of social movement encourages comparing such instances to other forms of contentious politics. In this chapter, I first briefly apply one influential account of movement emergence to the onset of organized anti-Americanism to see whether the former provides a useful framework for studying the latter. But my real interest is in thinking about a question that has been neglected both by social movement scholars and by those concerned with anti-Americanism. Specifically, what factors shape the subjective legacy of any specific episode of contention? How episodes are remembered powerfully conditions the prospects for future conflict. From a practical political standpoint, we should be as concerned with understanding how and why cleavages endure as with how they emerge in the first place. If, for instance, the antipathy toward the United States expressed in these episodes is ephemeral, the implications are obviously going to be very different than if anti-Americanism becomes a more or less permanent ideational feature of the countries in question. But to offer educated guesses about this crucial issue, we have to begin to compare cases with an eye to better understanding the factors and processes that shape the enduring subjective legacies of political conflict. Social Movement Theory and Anti-Americanism Over the past thirty years, the literature on social movements has grown tremendously , with a wide range of specialized topics coming in for attention. Still, the causal origins of contention remain the centerpiece of social movement theory. Understanding how and why movements emerge has preoccupied scholars at least since the origins of the social sciences. Among the more influential contemporary perspectives on the topic is political process theory.2 In its more static version, the theory stresses the importance of three broad sets of causal factors. The first is the level of organization within a given population; the second, the shared sense of grievance within that same population; and third, the objective shifts in the political opportunities or threats confronting the population. The first factor can be conceived of as the degree of “organizational readiness” within the group; the second as the level of “insurgent consciousness” among the movement’s mass base; and the third as a shift in the broader political environment that motivates action. The conventional argument is that movements tend to develop during times of destabilizing change, as wellorganized and...

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