Global Communications, International Affairs and the Media Since 1945

Philip Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134818051
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In Global Communications, International Affairs and the Media since 1945 , Philip M. Taylor traces the increased involvement of the media in issues of peace and especially war from the nineteenth century to the present day. He analyzes the nature, role and impact of communications within the international arena since 1945 and how communications interacts with foreign policy in practice rather than in theory. Using studies which include the Gul War and Vietnam, Taylor details the contemporary problems reporting while at the same time providing a comprehensive historical context.

1
INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS AND FIREFIGHTERS INTERNATIONAL POLITICS SINCE 1945

The atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 heralded the arrival of a completely new era in international relations in which the framework of political decision-making about issues of war and peace was to be radically different from any period which went before it. Many questions remained about the weapons which had helped to end the Second World War, not least of which was, would they be the cause of World War Three? They undoubtedly communicated a message, the significance of which would become of concern to all human beings. The inevitable proliferation of such destructive technology, especially following the Russian acquisition of the bomb in 1949, meant that in future, wars—at least those between nuclear states—were increasingly unlikely to yield ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in the sense that victory or defeat had been traditionally understood. But out of this realisation there gradually emerged some hope that surely no side would initiate a nuclear strike if, in so doing, it invited its own destruction.

This question hung over the post-war period for almost fifty years. During that time it lay at the heart of thinking about security, defence and diplomatic affairs, and it permeated every aspect of political and social life. But it did serve to concentrate the collective mind, so in that sense it created a systemic bi-polar framework, an order of sorts, around which international events could be not only conducted but also viewed by those observing them. The problem was that this was a framework built on fear. No one who was sentient during this period was untouched by this fear of ‘the bomb’. It was not an irrational fear; quite the reverse in fact. But the rationalisation of the knowledge of what such weapons could actually do in light of the fact that they could not be uninvented led to the simultaneous formation of structures for their nonproliferation as well as for justifying their continued possession by nuclear powers. Such justification was essential because, in any nuclear conflagration, for all the later talk about battlefield nuclear weapons, it would be the general public who would constitute the ‘front line’. And if the Second World War had been a ‘Total War’, in which the domestic and military theatres had become substantially intertwined, such interdependence would be nothing compared to what global thermonuclear confrontation would bring. In other words, regardless of what had been said about it in the past, one message of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that henceforth public opinion really would matter. How, therefore, events were reported and perceived became a critical consideration for politicians, diplomats and soldiers as they went about their business under increasing public scrutiny.

This was essentially the psychological background of what came to be known as the Cold War. Looking back, it is hard to appreciate that this fortyyear- long war, this ‘balance of terror’, was something more than merely the twentieth century’s equivalent of a ‘Great Game’ between the superpowers. But the existence of nuclear weapons, combined with their possession by ideologically antithetical regimes, prompted new rules for international relations in which the control, manipulation and dissemination of information about the other side constituted a permanent and highly bureaucratised ‘fourth dimension’. Too readily dismissed as ‘propaganda’ by scholars, this dimension was not only important in and of itself, it informed the entire environment in which politics, economics, diplomacy and warfare were conducted between 1949 and 1989.

DRAWING THE BATTLE-LINES OF IDEOLOGICAL WAR

It was a dimension in which both psychology and the language of discourse counted for a great deal. During the 1930s, the policies of the Western powers had lacked an appreciation or an understanding of psychology, especially in their dealings with Hitler and Stalin, which frequently put them at a disadvantage and enabled them to be wrong-footed on numerous occasions. These lessons had been learned by the late 1940s when it was realised that dealing with Stalin required not only a psychological understanding of the man but also a strategy for influencing the other side psychologically. Within this context, language assumed an active and highly potent role in defining such concepts as ‘peace’, ‘disarmament’, ‘deterrence’, even of ‘independence’ and ‘liberation’. For the West, a central point which impacted on all other elements of international affairs was their entire concept of ‘freedom’. The Atlantic Charter of 1942 had outlined the fundamental principles for why the Anglo-American wartime partnership was fighting: freedom of movement, freedom of thought, freedom of religion and freedom to vote. These were the Four Freedoms. The problem was that they were then fighting in partnership with a Soviet Union whose notion of freedom was determined more by the concept of collective responsibility to the achievement of a Marxist-Leninist state than by an emphasis on individuality. Once the common enemy had been defeated, therefore, such fundamental differences resurfaced, especially in the end-ofthe- war conferences at Yalta and Potsdam. Then, as relations between the former wartime allies deteriorated into Cold War over the question of freedom for the peoples of Eastern Europe, the issue of freedom of thought became a burning issue, and extended into significant international documents relating to freedom of information.

Indeed, the fundamental reason why this became such a significant issue in the second half of the twentieth century is inextricably connected to the triumph of democracy over totalitarianism, chiefly at two points: first in 1945 with the defeat of Germany and Japan, and then in 1989 with the collapse of Communist control over Eastern Europe, to be followed two years later by the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself. One difference, of course, was that most people read about the former in the newspapers a day or two later. The latter was seen live on television around the world. This reveals the extent to which the media in a period of fifty years have transformed themselves from being observers of international events to actual participants in them. The speed at which world events came to be reported compressed the time and increased the pressure in which decision-making had to take place during this period. Moreover, the speed at which the international flow of information contributed towards the way these monumental events were being perceived by world public opinion became a much more significant consideration in the decision-making process than in any period before it.

In 1945, the defeat of Nazism and Japanese imperialism was accompanied by the victory of largely Anglo-American democratic ideology over Stalinism in the form of the creation of the United Nations. Regardless of American aspirations, the very idea of such an organisation could never have emerged from the Soviet Union, except perhaps as a front for activities designed to achieve goals other than those for which the UN was designed. This might seem an ungenerous comment but, thanks to revelations which have emerged since the opening of the archives in Moscow, it is not without foundation. The Soviets admittedly had good reasons to mistrust the UN. The creation of an international forum in which the international community could resolve disputes by negotiation rather than force had been tried before in the form of the League of Nations, from which the Soviet Union had been deliberately excluded (until 1934) and to which its principal exponent, the USA, had refused to adhere. But the Second World War would see the formation of a renewed effort with the five leading members of the victorious coalition (USA, USSR, Britain, France and China) holding the five permanent seats of the Security Council, each with a power to veto. It was here that the principal diplomatic squabbles of the Cold War would take place.

The Charter of the United Nations was significant in that it was taken as axiomatic that communications were inextricably connected with the Four Freedoms. And because the Cold War framework is frequently missing from scholarly works dealing with the post-war debate over international communications—just as the communications dimension is usually absent from the history of the Cold War—it is worth reconsidering the relevant documentation. The context needs to be understood in terms of two emerging superpowers with different views about how to achieve post-war concepts of universalism and collective security in world affairs as a means of assuring their own national security. In the United States there was a strong drive towards achieving universal cooperation, which was an extension of domestic philosophies. The Americans had in a sense been forced into the Second World War because they had abrogated their international responsibilities during the inter-war years through a policy of isolationism. Given that that had not worked, there emerged a widespread recognition that the United States should get itself involved in world affairs so that no one could launch a sneak attack on them, Pearl Harbor-style, again. This idealism was soon dashed, as it was realised that the Soviet former wartime ally had different ideas about how to achieve its own future national security and avoid a Barbarossa-style attack, in the form of the Red Army staying put on the German front line and ensuring that its lines of communication throughout Eastern Europe were also secure. In Washington, this looked more like self-serving expansion rather than national or collective security. In Moscow, American aid in west European and Japanese reconstruction through the Marshall Plan looked like encirclement. Besides, in the mounting anti-Communist climate of post-war America that culminated with the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the early 1950s, it didn’t take long for its enemies to point out that the Soviet concept of a universal peace was a Marxist-Leninist one which took the concepts of struggle and conflict against capitalism as axiomatic.

The preamble to the UN Charter reaffirmed ‘faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small’, while its very first article stated that the UN’s purposes were to include the development of:

friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace; to achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.¹

Its principal arm for achieving these goals was to be UNESCO, founded in 1946. The preamble to UNESCO’s constitution stated that its signatories,

believing in full and equal opportunities for education for all, in the unrestricted pursuit of objective truth, and in the free exchange of ideas and knowledge, are agreed and determined to develop and to increase the means of communication between their peoples and to employ these means for the purpose of mutual understanding and a truer and more perfect knowledge of each other’s lives.

Later that year, the General Assembly of the UN adopted Resolution 59 (I) which declared that ‘Freedom of information is a fundamental human right and is the touchstone of all freedoms to which the United Nations is consecrated; Freedom of information requires as an indispensable element the willingness and capacity to employ its privileges without abuse. It requires as a basic discipline the moral obligation to seek the facts without prejudice and to spread knowledge without malicious intent’ (emphasis added). To drive this point home, Resolution 110 (II) adopted in 1947 condemned ‘all forms of propaganda which are designed or likely to provoke or encourage any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression’ while Resolution 127 (II) of the same year called on members ‘to combat the diffusion of false or distorted reports which are likely to injure friendly relations between states’. Further resolutions identified the role of the mass media in contributing to the strengthening of trust and friendly relations amongst states.

On 10 December 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ‘as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations’. Designed overall to guarantee freedom, equality and human dignity, the declaration’s nineteenth article stated in addition that ‘everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers’. More honoured in the breach, especially in such places as Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, the southern states of America and (until 1994) South Africa, this document nonetheless provided the ideological framework by which the global community set its aspirations concerning the free flow of information. It also provided the yardstick by which heroes and villains could be defined in the climate of the Cold War.

But it did something else as well. By carving in stone the principle of universal freedom of information, ideas and speech, it highlighted the gap between theory and practice when advanced (First World) societies interacted with Communist (Second World) societies and with those of less developed countries (Third World or LDCs). History appeared to be on the side of the First World in providing not just the confidence to permit democratic processes to operate but also in the means (i.e. the media) by which they could operate. The simple fact of the matter was that more advanced countries had more advanced media systems through which the declaration of human rights could be applied. Moreover, this was very much a public stance. As the battle lines of the Cold War were being drawn in 1947–8, the USA, Britain and the USSR were all re-galvanising their wartime propaganda apparatus to serve post-war ends, including the creation of ‘black’ or covert organisations whose activities could only be said to have violated these high-minded objectives if it had been known at the time what they were up to.

This is not the place to rehearse the causes and course of the Cold War. It is, however, relevant to identify the degree to which the East-West confrontation was becoming a struggle for allegiances, not just in the developed world but globally. It was a battle fought out on a variety of fronts and, in so far as the media and communications were concerned, on a cultural as well as on a political level. Throughout the entire period, the struggle was portrayed as a genuine contest between different ways of life, between good and evil, and, as with all struggles, presentation to secure and maintain public support was critical, all the more so in a long ‘war’.

The Truman Doctrine of March 1947 identified the struggle as one between two seemingly incompatible approaches:

One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of personal liberty, freedom of speech and religion and freedom from political repression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and repression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedom.²

Walter Lippmann was especially alarmed at this; it appeared to him to be a rallying cry for trouble. He wrote: ‘a vague global policy, which sounds like the tocsin of an ideological crusade, has no limits. It cannot be controlled. Its effects cannot be predicted. Everyone, everywhere will read into it his own fears and hopes, and it could readily act as incitement and inducement to civil strife in countries where the national co-operation is delicate and precarious.’³ Lippmann found himself opposed by George Kennan who, under the pseudonym ‘X’, published an influential article in Foreign Affairs of July 1947 in which he argued that Soviet motives were fuelled by paranoia and messianic ideology. As has been pointed out, in the United States this debate ‘neatly reflected the clashing impulses in the country between divisive fears and conciliatory hopes’.⁴

Certainly the Soviet Union appeared to enjoy a considerable advantage in so far as competing ideologies were concerned, quite simply because, within its own borders at least, it allowed no competition. The Stalinist state was as ruthless in its suppression of opposition as it was rigorous in its control over the media, and thereby the people. Every journalist had to be a Party member and the operation of journalism, from the training of personnel to the granting of licences, was organised by the state. This tended to produce a loyal cadre who could be relied on when it came to the selection—and omission—of news. But if this self-censorship broke down, the Central Committee of the Politburo, the ruling body of the State, could exercise direct control through its censorship agency GLAVIT. The Politburo also appointed the head of the state-owned news agency, TASS, and of the national radio network, GOSTELRADIO, as well as the editors of the state-run newspapers Pravda and Izvestia. In other words, the Soviet government and the Soviet media spoke with one voice. They did not fight shy of the word propaganda and, even as late as 1988, the editor-in-chief of Pravda stated unashamedly: ‘our aim is propaganda, the propaganda of the Party and the state. We do not hide this.’

Nor did they hide the fact that propaganda abroad was a principal component of their foreign policy. The defunct Comintern was revived in 1947 as Cominform, to organise a world-wide onslaught orchest...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• Introduction—The Third Wave and the Fourth Dimension
• 1 International Communications and International Politics Since 1945
• 2 Brushfires and Firefighters: International affairs and the news media
• 3 Illusions of Reality
• 4 Mind Games
• Conclusion: back to the future
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index