Page 195 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

policies and international relations. The focus is on military conflict
situations, from the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s to the
Gulf War of 1991. 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 commercial
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 performance inevitably has resonance
for the domestic audience. Hence, the success of governmental efforts
to control media image can make an important contribution to wider
political success.
There is one further sense in which communication about the
international 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
Gorbachov brought it to an end, relations between the Soviet
Union and the capitalist powers were, with some exceptions which
we shall discuss 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 into,
full-scale military conflict, or ‘hot war’. While the phrase is usually
applied to the period between the end of the Second World War

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