Page 195 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 174

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
information management described in previous chapters now apply equally
to the sphere of international relations. For all governments, domestic and
global public opinion has become a key factor in the formulation and
execution of foreign policy and never more so than in the era of ‘the war
against terrorism’.
In this chapter we consider how governments, principally those of Britain
and the US in the post-Second World War period, have sought to manage
journalistic discourse about their foreign policies and international relations.
The focus is on military conflict situations, from the Vietnam War of the
1960s and 1970s to the former Yugoslavia and the Middle East. As we shall
see, the perceived importance of public opinion in shaping the outcome of
such conflicts has led their protagonists to develop sophisticated strategies
of public relations and media management, often involving the same com-
mercial companies and advisers employed to handle politicians’ domestic
campaigns.
In one key sense, of course, international relations are a domestic matter,
since a government’s conduct in this area can sharply affect its popularity
with the voters and hence its re-election chances. In the pursuit of a state’s
international relations, a government has the opportunity to perform on the
world stage, before a global audience of billions. The quality of that per-
formance inevitably has resonance for the domestic audience. Hence, the
success of governmental efforts to control media image can make an impor-
tant contribution to wider political success.
There is one further sense in which communication about the inter-
national political environment has consequences for the domestic debate.
Throughout the twentieth century, governments and ruling elites in the
business, military and media spheres have manipulated symbols and images
of ‘the enemy’ for domestic political purposes. The nature of ‘the enemy’ has
changed over time, but the basic principle underlying this communication
has been retained: that it is possible to mobilise public opinion behind
campaigns which, though ostensibly targeted on an ‘alien’ force, have
domestic political objectives. We shall begin this chapter with a discussion
of the century’s most sustained example of such a use of the media: the ‘Cold
War’.

EAST–WEST RELATIONS AND THE COLD WAR

Between 1917, when Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized control of the
Russian empire and the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev brought it to
an end, relations between the Soviet Union and the capitalist powers were,
with some exceptions which we shall discuss later in this section,
characterised by the term ‘Cold War’. Cold War signified a state of hostility
and tension which teetered on the brink of, while never quite tipping over

174