America’s Most Important Export

Don Eberly and Joseph Loconte

The Upside of Globalization

We’ve heard a lot recently about the problem of anti-Americanism. The Pew Research Center produces surveys every year that announce, almost as a mantra, a widespread “disillusionment with American values.” Its latest report, released last month, found more of the same. Majorities surveyed in such countries as Pakistan and Turkey, for example, consider the United States as “more of an enemy” rather than “more of a friend.”

This narrative of global America-loathing, however, is a profoundly misleading story. The fact is that American ideals and institutions are highly popular in many areas around the world, especially in the developing world. A major part of the reason is the advent of globalization—the twenty-first century carrier of America’s democratic vision.

There are real downsides to globalization, including the export of trashy popular culture, a disregard for environmental concerns, and a lust for consumption. But the most constructive aspects of U.S.-led globalization are the features most urgently needed in the developing world: private enterprise, the rule of law, social trust, respect for individual rights, pluralism, and good governance. In this sense, the problem for the world’s poor over the past half-century has been too little, not too much, globalization.

These concepts are being embraced in some of the most impoverished and unlikely parts of the world. From Brazil to Rwanda to India to Indonesia, the American model of civil society offers a compelling vision of political and economic empowerment. Indeed, America’s vibrant independent sector—its charities, congregations, advocacy groups, community organizers, and small businesses—is the envy of the world. In short, Tocqueville’s America is going global.

Nevertheless, a rival school of development theory, led by economists such as Jeffrey Sachs, continues to focus mostly on top-down, government-driven “official development assistance.” Measuring America’s compassion in the world exclusively by traditional government aid, this school accuses the United States of being miserly toward the developing world.

Such thinking places too much trust in grandiose government schemes and not enough in the grass-roots, private-sector initiatives that are actually improving the lives of the poor. America’s private sector—both its civic and entrepreneurial power—is increasingly functioning as a “force multiplier” for social and political development. Wherever this sector engages internationally, it bypasses sclerotic hierarchies.

Equally remarkable is the dramatic rise worldwide of local civil society. Homegrown entrepreneurs and community leaders are speaking with their own voice—and in a different language than those who presume to speak for them. Despite United Nations proclamations to the contrary, the most important economic and political reformers are not wandering the halls of the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank seeking standing with government-aid agencies. They are laboring at the village level, where they are partnering with American businesses, entrepreneurs, and NGOs of every imaginable kind.

These organizations form the lifeblood of what Anne Applebaum, writing recently in Foreign Policy, described as “aspirational” societies. Inspired by American dynamism, such societies seek economic opportunity, social mobility, and more accountable government. In India, for example, the people most likely to hold favorable views of America are young, relatively wealthy, and better educated. The reason is obvious. A growing number of younger Indians have had the opportunity to work with U.S. companies and investors. “The poor in India are still untouched by globalization,” Applebaum writes. “But the middle and upper-middle classes—those who see for themselves a role in the English speaking, America-dominated international economy—are aspirational, and therefore pro-American.”

A similar process is at work across much of Africa. The Bush administration’s Global AIDS Initiative gets bipartisan praise for its investment in combating the AIDS pandemic, principally in sub-Saharan Africa. Through the Agency for International Development, billions of taxpayer dollars have funded anti-retroviral drugs and the creation of entire health-care systems. Often forgotten, however, is the indispensable role of faith-based and community organizations—congregations, clinics, hospitals, orphanages—in delivering assistance and battling the effects of the pandemic.

Perhaps it comes as no surprise, then, that in nine of the ten African nations recently surveyed by the Pew Research Center, favorable views of the United States were the rule—and strongly so. In countries such as the Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda, positive attitudes about America are double those in most European countries—anywhere from 61 percent to a high of 88 percent. All of these countries expressed strong support for “American ideas about democracy.” When African states are asked if they like “American ways of doing business,” roughly three fourths of them say yes.

In areas torn apart by conflict or natural disasters, the work of community and church-based groups to bring about reconciliation and social stability is crucial. Rwanda, devastated by genocide in 1994, is slowly becoming a nation-building success story. Visionary political leadership is surely part of the reason. Yet the great tasks facing Rwandans—peacemaking and ethnic reconciliation—lie largely beyond the capacity of governments to achieve. They are being performed mostly through the quiet efforts of community and church-based groups indigenous to Rwandan society. Bishop John Rucyahana, for example, whose family suffered unspeakable atrocities during the genocide, is building orphanages and promoting ethnic reconciliation.

 

Meanwhile, the salient influence of American civil society—particularly its great philanthropic tradition—is visible in the world’s most populous Muslim nation: Indonesia. [For background on this tradition, see the Trinity Forum curriculum Doing Well and Doing Good.] As director of private-sector coordination for tsunami reconstruction at the State Department, Don worked with NGOs, humanitarian workers, and volunteers who arrived by the tens of thousands following the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck Indonesia and other nations in the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004.

The U.S. government played an important role, yet most of the tsunami relief delivered by the United States came from people working through the private sector. Indeed, the response of ordinary Americans, who mobilized on a truly massive scale, marked a dramatic shift in how emergency relief and international development are being conducted. Teenagers, university students, congregations, relief groups, businesses, web-based companies, celebrities, sports teams—all sponsored fundraising projects or sent volunteers into the region. Private giving hit record levels. About $350 million arrived via Internet donations in the first month following the disaster. Indeed, the private-sector response of $2 billion far exceeded the $657 million in public funds appropriated by Congress.

Such charitable efforts not only rescued thousands of lives, but they also continue to bear fruit in the wider political culture. In Banda, Aceh, Indonesia—one of the most corrupt and conflict-prone regions in Asia—several hundred U.S. and international NGOs are now collaborating with local leaders and organizations to promote political reform, modernization, and conflict resolution.

Despite its philanthropic track record around the world, the United States is criticized by foreign aid advocates for being stingy in its foreign assistance. Their remedy for poverty is the transfer of income to poor nations—no strings attached. Meanwhile, the anti-globalization movement sees only a rapacious America and its multinational corporations scouring the earth for easy profits and displaying little regard for the poor, their cultures, or even the sovereignty of their nations.

The United States, however, has followed a different path in its approach to poverty, relying more on private charity and economic growth than on large amounts of government aid. It is a deeply ingrained American virtue.

Critics of U.S. aid policies tend to ignore the dynamic work of community and faith-based organizations in tackling the problems of drug abuse, crime, and poverty. These neighborhood organizations bring a set of values and human resources typically lacking in government approaches. They are highly motivated, radically entrepreneurial, sacrificial, and mission-driven. A public-school principal, for example, reflecting on the commitment of church-based volunteers to her neediest children, offered this confession: “I’m an old lady and I’ve been in education for thirty years, and I’ve never seen anything like this.” Many U.N. bureaucrats and anti-poverty activists, if they were candid, would say the same.

Too many political leaders and pundits see the world only through the prism of America’s shortcomings. They consider anti-Americanism an incorrigible and permanent condition of the international community, for which the United States alone is responsible. Yet there is another story to tell—the countless ways in which American-style civil society is creating better conditions for the poor and transforming their attitudes about the American ideal.  

Don Eberly is a Senior Fellow with the Trinity Forum, a former senior Bush Administration official, and author, most recently, of The Rise of Global Civil Society: Building Communities and Nations from the Bottom Up. Joseph Loconte, a senior fellow at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, served as an informal advisor to the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives from 2001–2003.

Features, Global Culture, Public Square, Society, Wed 16 Jul 2008