Page 196 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

DISCOURSES ON POLITICS 185

whom the US is, furthermore, polarized. The us/them positioning of the
United States versus other nations is most evident for the issue of SDI,
and it is often expressed in a general discussion of the role of the US vis-
à-vis other governments. There tends to be an unstated assumption that
the US must play a central role in world affairs; the explicit
conversation revolves around a questioning of that role. In some cases,
American intervention into the internal affairs of other countries is
addressed. One respondent wanted to see a decline in the role played by
the US in supporting various leaders, referring to the Shah of Iran,
Battista in Cuba, Franco in Spain: They’re all gangsters. They’re all
dictators, and we protect them.’ Other respondents were concerned with
America’s vulnerability and displayed mistrust not only of the Soviet
Union, but also of some smaller foreign powers:

I don’t know what we’re doing in Nicaragua, I don’t know what
that Iran-Contra was all about, it was such a mess. I think our own
enemies are some of the smaller nations that, like Iran, Iraq,
possibly some of the smaller than Russian countries that can bring
in small nuclear weapons and small planes or something.

The Danish interviewees, on the other hand, repeatedly
understand international conflicts as involving forces that are quite
distant and sometimes unidentified. While war and other military action
could affect them, interviewees may not align themselves with a
particular party to a dispute, instead contrasting ‘us’ with a ‘them’
which includes, for example, both superpowers. Summarizing a story
about east-west relations, an elderly man said:

It had to do with their Star Wars and all their militarization, and
that’s something which comes up every day, so after a while one
shunts it aside, it isn’t something we are very involved in…it’s
high politics, so it really isn’t something for us.

Collapsing different types of conflict, several Danish interviewees refer
to east-west tension overall as well as more localized conflicts such as
those in Argentina and El Salvador in similar terms, indicating a sense
of distance from both types of conflict. In the understanding of a
possible nuclear conflict, threatening their existence, the interviewees’
sense of distance may turn into a sense of impotence: ‘we can’t do
anything, you know, we’ll be destroyed.’