International and Global Communication
CM2001
Course material: all readings through Canvas
This summary includes:
Fukuyama, F. (1989. The End of History? The National Interest, (16), 3-18.
Huntington, S. (1993). The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72(3), 22-49.
Hobbs, R. (2020). Propaganda in an Age of Algorithmic Personalization.
Johnson B. (2009). Science Fiction Prototypes.
Snowden, E. (2021). Why do conspiracy theories flourish? Because the truth is too hard to
handle.
Weiss, B. (2020). Bari Weiss’ Resignation Letter.
Auge, E. (2002). Hollywood movies, Terrorism 101.
Shaheen, J.G. (2000). Hollywood’s Muslim Arabs.
Bates, D. (2006). To inform and persuade: Public relations from the dawn of civilization.
Powers, S. & Kounalakis, M. (2017). Can public diplomacy survive the Internet? Bots, Echo
chambers, and Disinformation.
Qarjouli, A. (2021). Al Jazeera exposes ‘political strategy’ behind Emirati-funded film The
Misfits.
Goudsouzian, T. (2021). The battle for Narrative in Afghanistan.
Ganor, B. (2002). Defining terrorism: is one man’s terrorist another man’s freedom fighter?
School of International Futures. (2020). Futures Manifesto.
Leiserowitz, A., Maibach, E., Rosenthal, S.A., Kotcher, J., Bergquist, P. Ballew, M.T.,
Goldberg, M.H. & Gustafson, A. (2020). Climate change in the American mind: November
2019.
Lectures
Written by: Esmée Lieuw On
ESMEE LIEUW ON 1
, Week 1: The Worlds We Live In
Fukuyama: The End of History
• The best known propagator of the notion of the end of history was Karl Marx → he
believed that the direction of historical development was a purposeful one determined
by the interplay of material forces, and would come to an end only with the
achievement of a communist utopia
• This concept of history as dialectical process – beginning, middle, end – was
borrowed from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• According to Hegel, man a collection of more/less fixed ‘natural’ attributes
• The state that emerges at the end of history is liberal insofar as it recognizes and
protects through a system of law man’s universal right to freedom, and democratic
insofar as it exists only with the consent of the governed.
• For Kojève (man who tried separating Hegel’s study from Marx), this so-called
“universal homogenous state” found real-life embodiment in the countries of
postwar Western Europe. But this was only to be expected.
• For human history and the conflict that characterized it was based on the existence of
“contradictions”: primitive man’s quest for mutual recognition, the dialectic of the
master and slave, the transformation and mastery of nature, the struggle for the
universal recognition of rights, and the dichotomy between proletarian and capitalist.
But in the universal homogenous state, all prior contradictions are resolved and all
human needs are satisfied.
• For Hegel, the contradictions that drive history exist first in the realm of human
consciousness (i.e., on the level of ideas – ideas in the sense of large unifying world
views that might be best understood under the rubric of ideology)
• All human behavior in the material world, and hence all human history, is rooted in a
prior state of consciousness—an idea similar to the one expressed by John Maynard
Keynes
• Failure to understand that the roots of economic behavior lie in the realm of
consciousness and culture leads to the common mistake of attributing material causes
to phenomena that are essentially ideal in nature.
• Two major challenges to liberalism:
1. Fascism = seeing the political weakness, materialism, anomie, and lack of
community of the West as fundamental contradictions in liberal societies that
could only be resolved by a strong state that forged a new ‘people’ on the basis of
national exclusiveness
o Destroyed as living ideology by WWII
2. Communism = within liberal societies there was a fundamental contradiction,
unresolved within its context, that between capital and labor
o As a result of the receding of the class issue, appeal of communism in
developed Western world is lower since WWI
ESMEE LIEUW ON 2
, • The power of the liberal idea would seem much less impressive if it had not infected
the largest and oldest culture in Asia – China.
o Communist China created an alternative pole of ideological attraction, and
as such a threat to liberalism
• Gorbachev’s coming to power is a revolutionary assault on the most fundamental
institutions and principles of Stalinism, and their replacement by other principles
which do not amount to liberalism per se but whose only connecting thread is
liberalism
• If fascism and communism are no longer challenges to liberalism, we have religion
and nationalism that could be possibilities
o Revival of religion attests in some ways to the broad unhappiness with the
impersonality and spiritual vacuity of liberal consumerist societies
o Nationalism (and other forms of racial and ethnic consciousness) is not a
single phenomenon but several.
▪ There is a widespread belief among many observers of
international relations that underneath ideology is a hard core of
great power national interest that guarantees competition + conflict
between nations
Huntington: The Clash of Civilizations
• It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not
be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among
humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.
• Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal
conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different
civilizations.
• Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase in the evolution of conflict in
the modern world.
• In 1793, as R. R. Palmer put it, “The wars of kings were over; the wars of peoples had
begun.”
• These conflicts between princes, nation states and ideologies were primarily conflicts
within Western civilization, “Western civil wars,” as William Lind has labeled them.
• In the politics of civilizations, the people and governments of non-Western
civilizations no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism
but join the West as movers and shapers of history.
• During the cold war the world was divided into the First, Second and Third Worlds.
Those divisions are no longer relevant. It is far more meaningful now to group
countries not in terms of their political or economic systems or in terms of their level
of economic development but rather in terms of their culture and civilization.
• A civilization = the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of
cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other
species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history,
religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people.
ESMEE LIEUW ON 3
CM2001
Course material: all readings through Canvas
This summary includes:
Fukuyama, F. (1989. The End of History? The National Interest, (16), 3-18.
Huntington, S. (1993). The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72(3), 22-49.
Hobbs, R. (2020). Propaganda in an Age of Algorithmic Personalization.
Johnson B. (2009). Science Fiction Prototypes.
Snowden, E. (2021). Why do conspiracy theories flourish? Because the truth is too hard to
handle.
Weiss, B. (2020). Bari Weiss’ Resignation Letter.
Auge, E. (2002). Hollywood movies, Terrorism 101.
Shaheen, J.G. (2000). Hollywood’s Muslim Arabs.
Bates, D. (2006). To inform and persuade: Public relations from the dawn of civilization.
Powers, S. & Kounalakis, M. (2017). Can public diplomacy survive the Internet? Bots, Echo
chambers, and Disinformation.
Qarjouli, A. (2021). Al Jazeera exposes ‘political strategy’ behind Emirati-funded film The
Misfits.
Goudsouzian, T. (2021). The battle for Narrative in Afghanistan.
Ganor, B. (2002). Defining terrorism: is one man’s terrorist another man’s freedom fighter?
School of International Futures. (2020). Futures Manifesto.
Leiserowitz, A., Maibach, E., Rosenthal, S.A., Kotcher, J., Bergquist, P. Ballew, M.T.,
Goldberg, M.H. & Gustafson, A. (2020). Climate change in the American mind: November
2019.
Lectures
Written by: Esmée Lieuw On
ESMEE LIEUW ON 1
, Week 1: The Worlds We Live In
Fukuyama: The End of History
• The best known propagator of the notion of the end of history was Karl Marx → he
believed that the direction of historical development was a purposeful one determined
by the interplay of material forces, and would come to an end only with the
achievement of a communist utopia
• This concept of history as dialectical process – beginning, middle, end – was
borrowed from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• According to Hegel, man a collection of more/less fixed ‘natural’ attributes
• The state that emerges at the end of history is liberal insofar as it recognizes and
protects through a system of law man’s universal right to freedom, and democratic
insofar as it exists only with the consent of the governed.
• For Kojève (man who tried separating Hegel’s study from Marx), this so-called
“universal homogenous state” found real-life embodiment in the countries of
postwar Western Europe. But this was only to be expected.
• For human history and the conflict that characterized it was based on the existence of
“contradictions”: primitive man’s quest for mutual recognition, the dialectic of the
master and slave, the transformation and mastery of nature, the struggle for the
universal recognition of rights, and the dichotomy between proletarian and capitalist.
But in the universal homogenous state, all prior contradictions are resolved and all
human needs are satisfied.
• For Hegel, the contradictions that drive history exist first in the realm of human
consciousness (i.e., on the level of ideas – ideas in the sense of large unifying world
views that might be best understood under the rubric of ideology)
• All human behavior in the material world, and hence all human history, is rooted in a
prior state of consciousness—an idea similar to the one expressed by John Maynard
Keynes
• Failure to understand that the roots of economic behavior lie in the realm of
consciousness and culture leads to the common mistake of attributing material causes
to phenomena that are essentially ideal in nature.
• Two major challenges to liberalism:
1. Fascism = seeing the political weakness, materialism, anomie, and lack of
community of the West as fundamental contradictions in liberal societies that
could only be resolved by a strong state that forged a new ‘people’ on the basis of
national exclusiveness
o Destroyed as living ideology by WWII
2. Communism = within liberal societies there was a fundamental contradiction,
unresolved within its context, that between capital and labor
o As a result of the receding of the class issue, appeal of communism in
developed Western world is lower since WWI
ESMEE LIEUW ON 2
, • The power of the liberal idea would seem much less impressive if it had not infected
the largest and oldest culture in Asia – China.
o Communist China created an alternative pole of ideological attraction, and
as such a threat to liberalism
• Gorbachev’s coming to power is a revolutionary assault on the most fundamental
institutions and principles of Stalinism, and their replacement by other principles
which do not amount to liberalism per se but whose only connecting thread is
liberalism
• If fascism and communism are no longer challenges to liberalism, we have religion
and nationalism that could be possibilities
o Revival of religion attests in some ways to the broad unhappiness with the
impersonality and spiritual vacuity of liberal consumerist societies
o Nationalism (and other forms of racial and ethnic consciousness) is not a
single phenomenon but several.
▪ There is a widespread belief among many observers of
international relations that underneath ideology is a hard core of
great power national interest that guarantees competition + conflict
between nations
Huntington: The Clash of Civilizations
• It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not
be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among
humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.
• Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal
conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different
civilizations.
• Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase in the evolution of conflict in
the modern world.
• In 1793, as R. R. Palmer put it, “The wars of kings were over; the wars of peoples had
begun.”
• These conflicts between princes, nation states and ideologies were primarily conflicts
within Western civilization, “Western civil wars,” as William Lind has labeled them.
• In the politics of civilizations, the people and governments of non-Western
civilizations no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism
but join the West as movers and shapers of history.
• During the cold war the world was divided into the First, Second and Third Worlds.
Those divisions are no longer relevant. It is far more meaningful now to group
countries not in terms of their political or economic systems or in terms of their level
of economic development but rather in terms of their culture and civilization.
• A civilization = the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of
cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other
species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history,
religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people.
ESMEE LIEUW ON 3
