Page 204 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition
P. 204

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

              The experience of the Cold War is perhaps the most significant
            example of the fact that contemporary international relations are,
            like domestic election campaigns and political debates, focussed
            on and projected from the channels of the mass media, and television
            in particular. Inter-state relations are negotiated by appeal to
            domestic and global public opinion, from which governments and
            international organisations such as the United Nations seek to draw
            legitimacy. As was noted in the introduction to this chapter, much
            diplomacy continues in secret, but the immediacy and scale of
            modern reportage of diplomatic affairs requires political actors
            always to consider the impact of their actions, and communications,
            on public opinion.



                       INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT AND
                        POLITICAL COMMUNICATION


            The Cold War was so termed because, thankfully, it did not involve
            direct military confrontation between the Western powers and the
            Soviet Union. However, many ‘proxy’ wars were fought in the post-
            Second World War period, in which allies of East and West
            respectively were pitted against each other. In the Angolan civil war,
            for example, the Marxist government was supported for many years
            by the Cuban and Soviet governments, who provided diplomatic
            and military assistance. The Angolan government’s opponents,
            UNITA, were, on the other hand, funded by apartheid South Africa
            and a rather murky coalition of Western intelligence and military
            bodies. Wars in the horn of Africa, central America and South-East
            Asia were also fought, with Western and Soviet involvement as
            ‘sponsors’. In addition to these proxy wars, in which the superpowers
            (and their respective allies, like Britain, France, Czechoslovakia and
            East Germany) more or less openly stood behind their favoured
            factions, many military conflicts were provoked by the fear, real or
            otherwise, of the other’s advance into jealously guarded spheres of
            influence. The Reagan administration’s support for the contras in
            Nicaragua, and its endorsement of death squad activities in Chile, El
            Salvador, Guatemala and elsewhere, was justified with reference to
            alleged Soviet ‘subversion’ of the region, directly or through its Cuban
            communist and Nicaraguan Sandinista allies. Grenada was invaded
            in 1983 on the grounds that American citizens on the island were at
            risk from Cubans. In this sense, many of the ‘hot’ wars of the
            post-war decades were rooted in underlying tensions between East

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