Anti-Americanism and the American World Order

4. Testing the Soft Power Thesis

chapter four Testing the Soft Power Thesis Introduction As we have seen, attitudes towards the United States are far from homogeneous . Ordinary people elaborate a variety of opinions that reflect their individual assessment of the United States, its society, and its international political behavior. Taken at face value, that evidence challenges some of the most widely held arguments about the diffusion of popular anti-Americanism, and it indicates that the appeal of U.S. ideals persists even amidst sharp disagreement over the course of U.S. policies. The findings in Chapter 3 indicate that the popular sentiment about the United States in the Middle Eastern region is qualitatively different, as it appears less responsive to the appeal of the soft power of American polity and culture. This chapter probes deeper into the findings discussed in Chapter 3 by analyzing the relationship between two frames: the attitude towards U.S. culture, society , and political system, on the one hand, and the attitude towards U.S. foreign policies, on the other. This distinction—which we may call the polity/policy distinction—is as often belittled as it is invoked in recent discussions of antiAmericanism (Ajami, 2003; Waterbury, 2003; Joffe, 2004), but it is rarely subjected to systematic empirical analyses that go beyond the politically charged overtones of conservative intellectuals and their liberal critics.35 More importantly , the relationship between popular views of U.S. policy actions and popular views of U.S. culture and society serves as an empirical battleground for Nye’s (2004) soft power thesis. First I describe the patterns of variation in popular sentiment about U.S. polity and U.S. policies. I analyze how the patterns in anti-American opinion are distributed across countries and how they differ across the sociocultural and policy dimensions. I then analyze the relationship between the polity and policy frames in the belief systems of the foreign publics in the Islamic world and in Europe. Specifically, I explore whether the relationship between attitudes towards U.S. 86 Anti-Americanism and the American World Order culture and society and towards U.S. policies exhibits the degrees of consistency that we expect from the soft power thesis.36 Description of the Data We will investigate the patterns of attitudes towards America in the mass public in eight predominantly Islamic countries—Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Kuwait , Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—and in six European countries—France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands , and Poland. The survey data for the Islamic countries are taken from the Ten Nation Impressions of America Poll, which was conducted on behalf of Zogby International in the spring of 2002 and included 5,345 respondents: 700 from Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia; 500 from Kuwait, Lebanon, and UAE; and 1,045 from Pakistan.37 The survey data for the European countries are taken from Worldviews 2002—European Public Opinion and Foreign Policy, a survey conducted on behalf of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (CCFR) and the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) in the summer of 2002 and which include 6,001 respondents, 1,000 in each the countries but France, where the number of interviewees was 1001. The Islamic Countries The respondents in the Zogby International survey expressed their feelings towards the United States in a battery of survey items capturing various aspects of the polity/policy distinction. With respect to the polity dimension, the respondents were asked to express their overall impression on six different aspects of America: (a) science and technology; (b) freedom and democracy ; (c) the people; (d) movies and television; (e) manufactured products; (f) education. With respect to policies, respondents were asked to assess their overall impression of six policies: (a) U.S. policy towards the Arab nations, (b) U.S. policy towards the Palestinians, (c) the American-led effort to stop ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, (d) the American-led effort to free Kuwait, (e) the American-led fight against terrorism; (f) U.S. policy towards Iraq. Responses were coded on a four-point scale ranging from “Very favorable” (1) to “Very unfavorable” (4). Intermediate Scale points were “Somewhat favorable” (2) and “Somewhat unfavorable” (3). Table 4.1 and Table 4.2 summarize the distribution of responses, distinguishing the percentage of respondents who ex- Testing the Soft Power Thesis 87 pressed at least a somewhat favorable opinion of the United States and the percentage...