Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Growing Apart?
- Introduction: Growing Apart? America and Europe in the Twenty-First Century
- 1 The Religious Divide: Why Religion Seems to Be Thriving in the United States and Waning in Europe
- 2 Value Change in Europe and North America: Convergence or Something Else?
- 3 On Different Planets: News Media in the United States and Europe
- 4 One Ring to Bind Them All: American Power and Neoliberal Capitalism
- 5 Spreading the Word: The Diffusion of American Conservatism in Europe and Beyond
- 6 Work, Welfare, and Wanderlust: Immigration and Integration in Europe and North America
- 7 Lost in Translation: The Transatlantic Divide over Diplomacy
- 8 The Atlantic Divide in Historical Perspective: A View from Europe
- Index
5 - Spreading the Word: The Diffusion of American Conservatism in Europe and Beyond
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Growing Apart?
- Introduction: Growing Apart? America and Europe in the Twenty-First Century
- 1 The Religious Divide: Why Religion Seems to Be Thriving in the United States and Waning in Europe
- 2 Value Change in Europe and North America: Convergence or Something Else?
- 3 On Different Planets: News Media in the United States and Europe
- 4 One Ring to Bind Them All: American Power and Neoliberal Capitalism
- 5 Spreading the Word: The Diffusion of American Conservatism in Europe and Beyond
- 6 Work, Welfare, and Wanderlust: Immigration and Integration in Europe and North America
- 7 Lost in Translation: The Transatlantic Divide over Diplomacy
- 8 The Atlantic Divide in Historical Perspective: A View from Europe
- Index
Summary
For decades, conservatives were frustrated by what they believed were international networks of leftist experts who preached and implemented schemes for government expansion. These ideas, “vetted” by authoritative sources, came to dominate the policy alternatives available to national policy makers. Because alternatives were filtered through advocates of an expanded state role, conservatives concluded that policy processes across the Western world – and beyond – were hard-wired for expansion. To reverse this bias, free-market actors with substantial resources and a “missionary spirit” sought to inject their ideas into the domestic politics of other states through investing in indigenous ideological allies' efforts at organization building and a global network to knit them together. By providing seed financing, these international network entrepreneurs hoped to overcome the risk of organizing around ideas that lack strong national roots or well-established, indigenous support networks.
More broadly, these agents have sought to create international social capital by connecting domestic actors to international networks that can provide relationships, organizational templates, sources of funding, examples of reform strategies, and evidence of their ideas' viability. By constructing a web of international social capital and by spurring the creation of organizations within nation-states that then can link to that web, conservative organizational entrepreneurs have reduced the costs of diffusing ideas across national borders. As their network increases in strength, agents at the nation-state level have more leverage to bring their state's behavior in line with their ideological goals.
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- Growing Apart?America and Europe in the 21st Century, pp. 136 - 169Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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