A Study Of African Leaders’ Overseas Study Experiences And The Alignments Of Their Foreign Policy With The United States ——An Empirical Research Based On Panel Data

In the post-Cold war era,global military confrontation is not an attractive topic of international politics anymore.A new round of global competition is unveiling in many fields.Under this circumstance,soft power has been highly valued by countries all around the world.To meet this challenge,both developed and developing countries start to strengthen their soft power through developing "education diplomacy" by attracting political elites from other countries.Previous theories and studies of international relations mainly focus on the variables at the systemic and country-level,ignoring the fact that individual decision-makers also play a significant role in foreign policymaking.However,within the small number of papers that have paid attention to leaders’ overseas study experiences,the dependent variables are mostly economic factors rather than political factors.Therefore,this study tries to exam how the overseas study experience affects African countries’ alignments of their foreign policy with the United States.considering that there is a high proportion of African leaders with overseas study experience and the relation with the United States is one of the most important foreign relations for African countries,this paper will mainly focus on African leaders’overseas study experience and its impact on their home country’s foreign policy towards the United States.To achieve this goal,this paper will build a database of all the African countries’ leaders who comes to power since 1960 through a large-scale data collection and previous studies.Firstly,this paper tries to exam whether there is correlation between African leaders’overseas study experience and their alignments with the U.S..This study uses the coordinate rate in the UN General Assembly to measure African countries’ alignments with the U.S..In addition,this study takes as control variables.This study will bring individual-level and country-level factors together as control variables,including the individual-level factors such as African leaders’ age,presidential terms,the way they coming to power,having military background or not,religion believes,and the country-level factors such as the country’s population,GDP,U.S.aid they received,the trade data（including importation and exportation）with the US and the level of democracy.The finding suggests that overseas study experience do have a significant impact on African leaders’ voting behavior.Leaders with overseas study experience have a significantly lower UN vote concordance rate with the U.S.than those who do not have overseas study experience.Secondly,this paper tries to exam how this kind of impact occurred.Traditionally,it is believed that there are lots of cultural differences between western and the eastern countries.Since values and norms can be acquired by living in a certain social environment for a period,students studying in different cultural background will also absorb the values and lifestyles of their target country.For this reason,this study divides African leader into four groups,including western country learner,eastern country learner,local learner,and those who have both western and eastern learning experience.The panel regression result indicates that which kind of country African leaders chose to study in is not significantly relative to the alignments of their foreign policy with the United States.In other words,both western country study experience and western study experience can lower African leaders’ foreign policy alignments with the U.S.,no matter which kind of target country they choose to study in.African leaders are somewhat less likely to align with the U.S.than those who do not have overseas study experiences,regardless of the nature of target country’s culture.Besides,there is no significant difference between studying in a western country and an eastern country.Thirdly,this paper tries to explore whether there are different effects among the countries with similar culture.For example,will there be any different influence among African leaders who study in the U.S.,UK,and the France?To answer this question,this study divides African leader into six groups according to their target countries,including leaders going to the U.S.,leaders going to the UK,leaders going to the France,leaders going to China,leaders going to other countries except the U.S.,UK,France and China and leaders studying at home.This study shows that leaders with experience of going to other western countries,such as UK and France,also have a significantly lower UN vote concordance rate with the U.S.than those who do not have overseas study experience.However,there is no such significant difference between US and the other western countries.In conclusion,overseas study experience do have a significant impact on African country leaders’ alignments with the U.S..It means that African leaders with overseas study experience have a significantly lower UN vote concordance rate with the U.S.than those who do not have overseas study experience,no matter what kind of countries they study in and what specific countries they study in.This result may show the following two effects of overseas study experience.The first one is the intellectual rationality brought by overseas study experience,which means going abroad can broaden African leaders’ horizons by increasing their knowledge.In other words,studying abroad can make leaders’ policy decisions more scientific,independent,and more rational than those who do not have overseas study experience.Moreover,it also suggests that studying abroad has a great influence on strengthening African leaders’ ethnic identity and patriotism towards their home countries,which encourages African leaders to adopt policies according to their own countries interests.Although education diplomacy cannot improve the African leader’s foreign policy alignment with the U.S.,it can help to improve African leaders’ intellectual rationality and national sentiment,cultivate responsible politic elites for African countries,which enables African countries matin a sustainable and independent economic growth.Equal and mutually beneficial international cooperation can be achieved only when African leaders make foreign policy and choose their own appropriate development path according to their own national interests instead of blindly "selling votes".For the target countries providing overseas education,only by fully considering the African countries’ interests and the African people’s feelings,putting practical plans that are beneficial to African countries’ development on the table,can a co-prosperity world be realized.