The Transformation of American Political Culture and the Impact on Foreign Strategy

PAN Yaling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032184388
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000519990
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the interplay between political culture and diplomatic strategy in the U.S., revealing the transformation of American political culture and its impact on the country's foreign strategy.

The theoretical pivot of this study is an analysis of the dynamics of political culture and the mechanisms of the interaction between political culture and diplomatic strategy. Given this premise, the core chapters revisit the historical transformations of American political culture and analyze the responses and countermeasures taken to attempt to reverse the perceived decline in American hegemony during the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, factors interwoven with security, economic, and institutional crises. The discussion describes the landscape and evolution of contemporary American political culture and the correlated adjustments of U.S. global strategy over the course of the twenty-first century. Given the myriad of challenges and political legacies left by its predecessors, the author gives a pessimistic prognosis of the prospect of resolving America's political plight by the Joe Biden administration.

The title will be a valuable reference for academic and general readers interested in American politics, U.S. diplomatic strategy, and international relations.

1

Values–institution–behavior

How do political culture and foreign strategy interact?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003254539-2

I. Introduction

After the series of terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, columnist George F. Will wrote that

the nation’s decade-long holiday from history came to a shattering end. After about a half-century of war and Cold War, Americans came to feel, understandably, that the world was too much with them, and they turned away from it. What happened Tuesday morning, and can happen again, underscored the abnormality of the decade.¹

For sure, Mr. Will believed that ‘such acts as yesterday’s do not threaten America’s social well-being or even its physical strength’.² Several years later, one may draw an opposite conclusion that the 9/11 terrorist attacks proved to be the igniting event for the decline of U.S. hegemony. It was the 9/11 attacks that undermined the geographic advantage that the United States had enjoyed for more than 200 years to guarantee immunity from direct attack on its territory. And President George W. Bush launched the ‘global war on terror’ which squandered the American fiscal surpluses left by President Bill Clinton and further led to the economic meltdown marked by the subprime mortgage crisis in 2007 and the global financial crisis in 2008. In other words, Americans suddenly found that the world today is no longer that in their memory, following the ‘hot war’ that lasted for half a century and then a quite short ‘vacation’ thanks to the victory of the Cold War. Americans are now rather confused because the world has become a strange place: Domestically, political polarization made the crisis of the American democratic system far more dangerous than imagined.³ In the meantime, the transformation of the international system initiated by the end of the Cold War has been complicated by the relative decline of American hegemony, the rise of emerging powers, rapid proliferation of nonstate actors, great awakening of public political awareness, and a variety of other global challenges. A ‘holiday syndrome’ has thus come out, with the United States of America now becoming a ‘United States of Fear’ more out of fear for the future.⁴ From this perspective, it is not surprising that Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election by often using threatening rhetoric to keep his base excited for more votes.

How did the United States become a ‘United States of Fear’? What does this imply for U.S. domestic politics and foreign strategy? Obviously, these questions are not easy to answer. As the old saying goes, there are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people’s eyes. However, it is necessary for us to go beyond superficial phenomena to look into the ongoing transformation in the United States, as well as its possible impact on American domestic politics and foreign strategy. Concretely speaking, how did the mentality and identity of Americans alter in their country’s ‘holiday syndrome’?

In this book, the author attempts to examine the historical evolution and future projection of U.S. foreign strategy, given the transformation of American political culture. Although there is already a rich literature on political culture and its evolution, most of it focuses on how political culture develops from the traditional form to the modern one, or simply explores how it ‘progresses’; meanwhile, little literature deals with the potential transformation within the traditional or the modern forms of political culture. Despite the fact that a number of categories can be found within the traditional or modern forms of political culture, those at the same level of development are presumably regarded as components of a fixed composition. Consequently, what such a composition of political culture means for foreign strategy seems to be quite ignorable. Nevertheless, the author contends that almost all types of political culture are in constant evolution, albeit not always in a progressive or upgrading manner from traditional to modern forms. More often than not, in a composition of political culture, these components at the same stage of development reconstruct themselves under certain conditions.

This book does not intend to evaluate the study of the evolution of political culture from traditional to modern forms, but rather to examine another rarely scrutinized issue: the possible transformation of various categories of political culture at the same level of development, and in particular, the ‘internal’ or ‘horizontal’ transformation within a specific form of political culture without any fundamental ‘progress’ or ‘upgrade’. In the scope of this discussion, the author argues that the stability of political culture itself comes from the relative stability of the combination among its components in a given period. Nonetheless, with various impacts from home and abroad, this combination may undergo significant changes and lead to the ‘internal’ transformation of political culture. As a result, those components that previously dominated the decision-making process may change, ending up with any shift of foreign strategy. It is worth mentioning that the shift of foreign strategy will also give feedback to the transformation of political culture, as foreign strategy practices of one country (the sender) will inevitably lead to the adjustment of foreign strategy of targeted countries, which confirm or falsify the very basic assumptions behind the sender’s foreign strategy, namely the basic configuration of the sender’s political culture. Be it right or wrong, such feedback would either cement or shake the sender’s diplomatic positions, thus further shaping the transformation of its political culture.

II. Level analysis of political culture and its evolution

Although the thinking about political culture has a long history, the academic research of political culture has only a record of more than half a century. American political scientist Gabriel A. Almond first coined the concept of ‘political culture’ in 1956, making the study of political culture quickly become an important aspect of political science. Although Almond emphasized the continuity and change of political culture itself from the very beginning, the research on the change or transformation of political culture is mostly based on the hypothesis of ‘progress’, with a strong orientation of ideological confrontation. As a consequence, there has been little discussion, if not any, on the possibility of political culture transformation without any ‘progress’ or, more accurately, whether a particular political culture is likely to transform at the same level of development. For sure, such academic preference is also related to the dominant position of quantitative methods in the study of political culture. As an abstract and collective concept, political culture is difficult to understand through surveys at the individual level, and transformation of political culture is hard to observe or predict due to the diversity of individual attitudes. The author argues that the study of the transformation of political culture needs to be concentrated more on the change of political culture at the same level of development, which does not involve a fundamental evolution from traditional to modern formalities. Furthermore, more attention needs to be paid to how the change of a series of systematic factors such as material conditions, technological innovation, and institutional arrangement generate impact on the transformation of political culture.

2.1 Values–institution–behavior: three levels of political culture

Political culture is a special political, historical, cultural, and social phenomenon: It is the subjective and internal psychological embodiment of a specific political system and political structure as a whole. It is also a cultural accumulation of historical development or a subculture in a particular social and cultural system.

Political culture is an aspect of the culture formed by the citizens of a country over a long political life; it is a very important constituent element of the cultural system; and it has an important impact on a country’s foreign strategy and political system. In other words, political culture has an irreplaceable unique value for understanding the political behavior under the formal institutional framework and the special development model of a country in terms of history.

Nevertheless, like the concept of culture, there is no consensus on what political culture is. In his 1956 article ‘Comparative Political Systems’, Almond first argued that ‘every political system is embedded in a particular pattern of orientations to political action. I have found it useful to refer to this as the political culture’.⁵ Although such a concept quickly gained popularity, under the prevalence of behaviorism in the 1960s and 1970s, political culture was gradually regarded as a residual variable and lost its independent status. In the middle and late 1980s, the study of political culture was revived strongly. However, the debates about a range of aspects of political culture, including its very definition, connotation, types, and research methods, among others, are always there in both waves of research and are present even today. In sum, three levels of analysis have emerged from the literature, namely, political value, political institution, and political behavior, from a systematic level to a national level and then to an individual level.

The core element of political culture is political values. To a large extent, political culture refers to the political belief of a society—it is the product of both the collective history of a political system and the life histories of the individuals who currently make up the system, and thus, it is rooted equally in public events and private experiences. American political scientist Lucian Pye defined political culture as the composite of basic values, feelings, and knowledge that underlie the political process.⁶ Hence, the building blocks of political culture are the beliefs, opinions, and emotions of the citizens toward their form of government. Political culture, according to Lucian W. Pye, is shaped by the general historical experiences of a country and the private and personal experiences of the individuals. It is because the individuals first became the members of society and then of the polity. Political culture is gradually built on the cumulative orientations of the people towards their political processes.⁷ Political culture is composed of tendencies accumulated by individual people in the political process, including the status of social power and authority, norms of evaluating performance, and regulations of expression of acceptable public passions, among others.⁸ Therefore, political culture

may be defined as the basic values, beliefs, ideas, attitudes, and orientations that citizens of different countries have about their political systems. Political culture refers to core values, not ephemeral ones: whether people accept the basic premises of their political system (democracy, separation of powers, civil liberties, etc.), not whether or not one approves of disapproves on a daily basis of how well the president is doing his job. Clearly, political culture can vary greatly from country to country, with some countries having a democratic, participatory, and more-or-less egalitarian political culture; others being more elitist, top-down, and authoritarian.⁹

Compared with core values, political behavior is the most basic and common external manifestation of political culture. Political culture influences and even determines the political behavior of individuals and countries to a large extent. Political behavior is the externalization of political culture. The first wave of political culture research focused more on individual political behavior and tried to find clues to political culture. At that time, scholars mainly used the method of anthroposociology to divide social science research into five levels: individual, group, organization, community, social product, and social event. They mainly focused on the individual, group, and organization levels, but paid little attention to the national or even broader level. Obviously, this approach makes mistakes in the analytical level fallacy and reductionism. On the one hand, scholars try to use findings from lower levels of research to deduce conclusions for the higher levels; on the other hand, they use individual-level data to explain phenomena at the collective/systematic level.¹⁰ To a large extent, it was this methodological error that led to the decline of the first wave of political culture studies.

In between political values and political behavior is the political institution that connects the two. On the one hand, the political institution is also the externalization of political culture, while the political culture is the ideological concept supporting the political institution. On the other hand, the political institution is the basic framework of all kinds of political behaviors. Out of consideration of political interests and regime legitimacy, the state often provides its members with a framework composed of values (goals and principles), norms, and a structure of authority. In fact, this framework is the value and institutional embodiment of political culture, aiming at constraining the social and political life and shaping the politi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• Acknowledgments Page
• Introduction
• 1 Values–institution–behavior: how do political culture and foreign strategy interact?
• 2 Interactions between American political culture and foreign strategy: a historical survey
• 3 The security crisis: transformation started and President Bush’s containment strategy
• 4 The economic crisis: transformation unfolded and President Obama’s taming strategy
• 5 The institutional crisis: transformation at a crossroads and President Trump’s counterattack strategy
• 6 Escaping from the ‘cold civil war’? Future developments of American political culture
• Bibliography
• Index