Wokeness across Europe: The Diffusion of Ideas in the Age of Social Media

• In Event: Poster Session: Middle East and North African Politics & Posters on Europe
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Posters on Europe

Abstract

In recent years, a number of socio-political ideas have rapidly crossed national and linguistic boundaries. One of the most striking examples of this pattern is “wokeness”, and the associated “wokeism”. The notion of being “woke”, with its origins in African-American vernacular English, has been around for decades. However, it did not come to wider public attention until the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, and really took off internationally only after the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Yet already by 2021 and 2022, right-leaning politicians in a number of European countries highlighted “wokeism” as an important domestic problem.

To give but two examples, France’s Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer has made a “campaign against wokeism” a key part of his agenda as well as a significant electoral strategy (https://www.politico.eu/article/macron-education-minister-jean-michel-blanquer-anti-woke/), while Dutch Justice Minister Dilan Yeşilgöz has argued that wokism threatens the democratic rule of law (https://www.vvd.nl/hj-schoo-lezing-door-dilan-yesilgoz-zegerius/). Such weaponization of a term that just two years ago was not even on the political radar screen in these countries poses several important challenges to our existing theories of cross-national diffusion of ideas and concepts.

In this paper we focus on two of these challenges: the unprecedented speed of the diffusion, and the direct adoption of a foreign term, instead of coining a more locally resonant version. Both, we argue, are inextricably linked to the rise of a globalized discourse on social media, and each prompts a rethinking of established theoretical insights about diffusion.

In particular, the globalized discourse of social media has virtually eliminated the impact of language barriers on the speed of diffusion (contrast Lynch 2015), while the speed at which this discourse changes has increased the incentive for political entrepreneurs to appropriate foreign ideas almost unchanged, with little modification for the domestic context, largely bypassing the assessment (Della Porta & Tarrow 2012) or learning (Simmons et al. 2006) stages.

The paper develops the argument by drawing on a wide variety of sources, ranging across trends in Google searches, Twitter data, coverage in the traditional media, and statements or speeches by politicians. By examining the diffusion of “wokeism” and related terms into a range of European contexts — specifically, the UK, France, Spain, and the Netherlands — with varying linguistic distance from English as well as different discursive opportunity structures.

Authors

• A. Maurits van der Veen, College of William & Mary

• Erik J. Bleich, Middlebury College