مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 علوم سیاسی

روابط بین الملل

violence Throughout the world, America has been and continues to be the promised land, the standard of human success, and the embodiment of the fulfillment of a broad range of human aspirations for prosperity, health, freedom, mobility, and the good things in life. That expanding image of American culture has been augmented today by television and by films. American culture is the dominant culture in the world. English is the universal language of the world’s middle class and, increasingly, of business, industry, and diplomacy. One result of the US dominance in entertainment and its delivery of culturally oriented messages are the comparisons, in most parts of the world, with what could be-the U.S. situation, and what is-the local situation. Information technology has led to a rise in global expectations and promoted a global homogenization of values and expectations.

Low-cost transportation allows the direct cultural injection of values into people, as tourists and, more deeply, as students. One consequence of American cultural imperialism we see is pathetically illustrated recently in Tiananmen Square. The plan of the old-guard Chinese leadership was to have their students go abroad and selectively pick up only the economically and technologically useful lessons from the West. Instead, the inevitable happened, they picked up the cultural messages as well, and on returning home became unacceptably culturally disruptive. The Tiananmen Square response is a classic, at least 150-year-old, Chinese response to the inability to separate the cultural from the technoeconomic intrusion of the West.

Together telecommunications and transportation have another more negative implication for collective violence. Cheap worldwide telecommunication makes planning, plotting, orchestration, and execution of plots simpler and flexible. Transportation costs are so low that, not only the materials, but the men of violence can move with ease from place to place. This is the core base of the expansion of terrorism. Expanding arms sales and the associated attempt to build alliances and, in the case of the United States, to dump obsolescent weapons to make room for new ones has made the U.S.A., U.S.S.R., and Israel the world’s biggest armories. The notorious Krupp pales in comparison to what we alone have done to arm the world. The availability of arms at ridiculously discounted prices, leads inevitably to their use and abuse. Declining legitimacy of governments and other authorities is pandemic. The situation in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe today is the clearest most recent example of this trend.