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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