The Evolution of International Communication as a Field of Study
In this chapter, Gary R. Weaver traces the development of international and intercultural communication studies through his professional development and the growth of the International Communication Program at American University in Washington, D.C. He begins his essay by underlining the importance of researching and understanding culture in international relations and international communication. He describes the contributions of systems theory, the Frankfurt School scholars, and cultural anthropologists such as Margaret Mead to the emergence and evolution of international communication as an interdisciplinary scholarly field since World War II. Weaver also offers a persuasive critique of the dominant “ethnocentric” paradigm, which is predicated on the assumption that the development of all other countries should be the process of assimilation into U.S. European American culture. He warns against the resurgence of the old paradigm as exemplified by Samuel Huntington’s thesis of “the clash of civilizations.” He concludes his essay by underscoring dialogical relationships among cultures that require us to communicate with people rather than to people.
As one of the founding faculty members of our International Communications program at American University, I have seen this field of study emerge from the writings of a handful of scholars with academic interests as diverse as political science, communications, international relations, anthropology, international and national development, and area studies.2 At American University, our graduate degree program in International Communications began in 1969 with perhaps five or six courses, taught by only two or three professors in the School of International Service. These early courses focused on international relations, propaganda and persuasion, and what was then known as communication and development.
By 2004, American University had increased its offerings to over 66 courses in International Communications, with approximately 1,500 graduate and undergraduate students enrolled in those courses. We now have over 19 full-time faculty members and at least 19 or 20 part-time or adjunct faculty members.
Thirty-five years ago, degrees in international communications studies did not exist, nor were there journals or academic associations in this field. Most of us could easily name the dozen or so scholars or books we considered essential for courses in the field. Today there exist at least four or five major academic associations with an impressive body of literature and research that includes hundreds of books and dozens of professional journals. Thousands of graduates have earned master’s degrees in International Communications, in addition to the well over 100 Ph.D.s at American University alone. Indeed, development of the field of International Communications has grown enormously in three and a half decades, and your university has assumed the leadership in Asia.
One of the difficulties I have in trying to explain the evolution of the field is that for each of us, it is a little bit different and very personal. While some of us are international relations scholars, others are political scientists, sociolinguists, or communications experts. Some of us are primarily researchers while others are teachers, trainers or practitioners. This means that while there is a rich amount of rigorous academic research and theory that has accumulated over the years, there is also a very practical and applied component to the field. International Communications is truly interdisciplinary, a mixture of many different areas of academic inquiry. Indeed, there are few characteristics of this field which are absolutely unique to one particular area of scholarship. Rather, what is unique about the field is the particular mixture of disciplines from which it draws, and which it can draw together. We are always asking questions as to why a negotiation went badly, why people fight wars, what aid is needed for developing countries, and so on and so forth.
The 1960s and the Birth of a Field of Study: International Communications
But when did this field really get started? For me, it was during the 1960s when I was working on my Ph.D. in International Relations at American University. It was during this era that the field of International Communications really exploded. But then, as you may remember, the whole world seemed to be exploding. We Americans continued fighting a Cold War that began in the 1940s. In the 1950s we fought a war that ended in a stalemate in Korea. Throughout the 1960s we fought the Vietnam War—the longest war in American history. It cost over a million and a half dollars an hour to fight, it lasted over a decade, and there was no victory for the United States.
At home we were torn apart by civil disorder. Students were protesting against the war in Vietnam and fighting for the civil rights of minorities. In 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated. In 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated. In 1968, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. It was an era of enormous turmoil.
As a young man at that time of history, I was involved in all of this. I was trying to understand, “What is this madness?” It was very difficult. I was studying international relations yet found that my courses simply were inadequate. And to be very honest with you, I became very disillusioned with the macro approach to international relations. There was a war going on in Vietnam that no one could adequately explain; no one could explain why my friends were dying in that war. So I became disillusioned with the macro approach to international relations. My studies simply seemed too far removed from the real world. And, yet, I was finishing my Ph.D., working on my dissertation, and when you get to that point, you say, “What the heck, I guess I will finish it.” And, obviously, I did. But, again, to be honest, I was not happy with the field of international relations. I did not think it answered the serious questions. I realized that you could not explain the Vietnam War with traditional studies. It was not World War I or World War II with classic European states in conflict. This was an entirely different culture. In fact, you could not talk about either the Vietnam War or the Korean War without talking about culture. But in international relations, nobody talked about culture.
I also realized that domestic and international issues were interrelated. You could not divide the two. Yet few scholars of international relations were making the linkage. In fact, in my graduate courses, it was quite common to force a distinction between the national and international in academic disciplines. In the classroom, if you talked about the Vietnam War in the context of domestic turmoil—student demonstrations and civil rights marches—professors would say, “Define your level of analysis.” Well, what did they mean? They meant, “Keep the domestic out of the international.” “Keep the cultural out of international relations.” “You do not mix these things together.” I went from one extreme to the other as if they were polar opposites—the macro to the micro, the international to the domestic, the universal to the particular, and the nation-state to the individual. Of course, I began to realize that we have to mix these things together to truly prepare students for dealing with the world in which they were living.
In the 1960s I studied at the Psychoanalytic Institute in Mexico, where one of my professors, Dr. Erich Fromm, had a tremendous influence on me. He was one of many psychologists who were members of the so-called Frankfurt School.3 Fromm could easily consider psychiatry and international relations in the same sentence. He was a Marxist, psychoanalyst, humanist, and a critical thinker who wrote books such as May Man Prevail and Escape from Freedom. While he dealt with the big issues that impacted the entire world he also wanted to understand the individual.
During my graduate studies, I worked as a counselor at a residential treatment center for emotionally-disturbed children. Although the majority of the children were white Americans, we also had many African-American, European, Asian, and Latin American children. It dawned on me one morning that many of the children who were culturally different from white mainstream Americans often were diagnosed as having psychiatric problems, and yet many of their problems were also a matter of culture or race. They were not American or white. Furthermore, they were often viewed as “well” or “cured” when they acted like white middle-class American children.4 Anthropologist Margaret Mead was correct—behavior is relative to the culture. While extremely aberrant behavior may be unacceptable, it certainly cannot be fully explained unless it is examined within the context of culture.
It dawned on me then that one cannot get away from the international. The international and the domestic must come together somewhere, and where it came together is in the area of international communications. International communications allows us to authentically combine all of these levels of analysis, to ask the big questions, but also to deal with the individual. It has the breadth and depth that makes me feel comfortable as an academic. In fact, the first book I wrote was a book on revolution. It was called The University and Revolution5 and it got me in a lot of trouble because it was fairly controversial and dealt with very emotional national issues. In addition, many authors in the anthology were very high-profile activists. It was about the Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements, but was also about trying to understand them from an international and cross-cultural point of view.
International Communications as a Field of Study Within International Relations
At American University, and in many other universities in the United States, the evolution of the field of international communications has always been firmly established in the area of international relations.6 I believe that international communications must be connected to international relations and international economics. These disciplines go together and reinforce one another. We have always viewed international communications as part of international relations, because it first originated as an area of inquiry in World War II propaganda studies and cybernetics theory, and later in post-World War II studies of communication and economic, social, and political development. In fact, the systematic training of diplomats and their families for relocation overseas first took place in the United States, at the Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute (FSI).
In the 1950s, many of the seminal authors and thinkers in the area of cross-cultural and inter-cultural communications were on the staff at FSI. These include scholars such as Edward Hall, Edward Stewart, and Glen Fisher.7 As a sociolinguist and anthropologist, Edward Hall worked at FSI, taught a short time at American University, and then finished his career in Washington, DC at the National Institute of Mental Health. Edward Stewart,8 who has taught all over the world, including in Japan, was also at FSI at that time along with Glen Fisher.9 There were many, many other seminal thinkers who were involved in international diplomacy and trained diplomats to work and negotiate overseas. This is where the first systematic body of literature on cross-cultural training began, along with the literature that later came out in the 1960s with the creation of the Peace Corps. This was all in the 1950s and early 1960s, a time when we were expanding our training of American business people who were working overseas.
A great deal of money was invested by the Department of State, Department of Defense and, most importantly, the American business community, to gather research on how we could most effectively train our people for working overseas. The Peace Corps found that in many years the premature return rates of volunteers was over fifty percent. Additionally many businesses were concerned about the drop-out rate of Americans in Japan and other countries which often ranged from thirty to fifty percent. Training people to understand other cultures and the process of cross-cultural adaptation seemed to dramatically reduce these drop-out rates. Indeed, many cross-cultural trainers claim that it costs less money to train thirty business people for working overseas than to bring one back home.
World War II: Systems Theory and the Evolution of International Communications
During World War II we were concerned with propaganda. Our notion of propaganda was fairly primitive—strictly stimulus and response. Send out a message and it ought to produce a reaction. But, this was not very sophisticated or effective. We also found during World War II, as we were working with sonar and radar, a whole new area of scholarship—cybernetics10—which was the basis for modern communication and information systems studies. For example, to shoot down a moving plane, you must anticipate where the plane will be when the projectile strikes. Aiming a gun accurately requires information about the speed of the plane, the velocity of the projective, and so forth. This information must be received by the gunner to allow him to continually adjust the gun. Radar provided this feedback for gunners to more effectively shoot down airplanes. Sonar provided the same information for adjusting the course of torpedoes.
The modern theory of communications and information came from applied physics. Here again, we see the interdisciplinary nature of international communications. Radar and sonar— both cybernetics information systems which emphasize feedback to correct the course of a projectile or torpedo—became the basis for modern communications theory including the field of international communications.
A brief definition of any cybernetics system might be that it is simply a group of elements which are interconnected by communications links and the whole operating as one to reach a goal. The sender, encoder, medium or channel, decoder, receiver and feedback are linked together and can easily identify any breakdown in the system. When we know where a breakdown occurred in a particular part or link between parts of the system, corrections can be made to restore communications or make the system more efficient. More importantly, we can use feedback to strengthen the intended message to insure that the receiver attributed the same meaning to a message as intended by the sender. This is a much more sophisticated understanding of communication than the earlier stimulus-response model.11
We also began to see the evolution of the nation-state and the interrelationships between states as systems. No longer was international relations seen as diplomatic history within the humanities. With a systems approach international relations was seen as a social science. Approaches such as historical sociology, (e.g., Karl W. Deutsch, Stanley Hoffmann, John H. Herz), belief systems theory (e.g., Ole R. Holsti, Robert C. Tucker) and national image theory (e.g. Ralph K. White, Robert Jervis, Kenneth Boulding, Urie Bronfenbrenner, Jerome Frank), were all part of the behavioral approaches and theories which are basic to the field we now call international communications.
I taught at the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka in 1986, and helped to create their first graduate program in international relations. All of my colleagues on the faculty were historians. I was the only social scientist. In Sri Lanka at that time international relations was part of the humanities. We Americans have never really seen it as an area within the humanities in terms of research or study. Instead it is viewed as a social science area of study and research where we concentrate on human behavior and the process of human interaction. Now, of course, we include the humanities—we must. But that is not where we focus our attention. I would argue the reason we have done this is because of a reaction to the old realist and idealist schools of thought in international relations that existed in Europe. Behaviorism, and especially systems theory and historical sociology, were major contributions made by international communication scholars to the field of international relations.
After World War II, scholars of international relations were confronting some very pragmatic and practical questions: How did World War II come about? How can we prevent another World War from ever happening? How can countries like Japan, which were devastated by the war, be rebuilt? And how do we help newly emerging nations become vibrant democratic nation states with strong and growing economies? At the same time that we were trying to answer these questions, the world was confronted with the Cold War and atomic weapons, which again raised questions about national sovereignty, the economic and political development of nations and the international system of nations.
The very nature of these questions, we now realize, requires international communications to be an interdisciplinary social science field of study within international relations, and also for it to be a much applied area of inquiry. This is the why I enjoy this field. I found that international law was stimulating and intellectually challenging, but it was also highly theoretical and philosophical. Much of it was simply fiction. Laws of the sea, commerce, and even some laws of war were useful, but international law could not explain or prevent war. The countries that were powerful made the laws while the less powerful obeyed. International relations theory was also very abstract and impractical. It certainly could not answer the more practical or applied questions regarding World War II or the post-war era. You can see how I, and many others, became very, very disillusioned with the field of international relations.
How did World War II happen and how do we prevent another world war? Even before the war, anthropologist Ruth Benedict claimed that each culture had a particular style or way of unifying its many parts into “patterns”12 which shaped the behavior of individuals. These patterns were often created by common child-raising practices. This was a rejection of a pure historicist interpretation and an integration of many different approaches. Her culture and personality theory combined psychoanalytic, historical, sociological and philosophical theories to explain behavior. To a certain extent, this was an early systems approach.
During and after World War II, many anthropologists wrote scholarly pieces about national character to help explain the behavior of Germany and Japan.13 Many of these works were fairly superficial and ethnocentric, but they were part of the early literature that later become central to studies of culture and identity, culture and personality theory, psychological anthropology, and cross-cultural communications.
Post-World War II
“How did Hitler do it?” “What are the psychological dynamics of fascism and anti-Semitism?” Many of the early psychological researchers who raised these questions in the United States came from World War II Europe. As early as 1941 psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote his famous book, Escape from Freedom,14 to explain the appeal of fascism and authoritarianism in certain cultures. In 1950, Theodor Adorno and his colleagues examined the authoritarian personality15 and in 1960, Milton Rokeach wrote about open and closed-mindedness.16 These scholars would be included in the Frankfurt School of critical thinkers, all of whom were asking the question, “How did Hitler do it?” and “How can we prevent this from happening again?” A tremendous part of this investigation involved attempting to determine how you motivate people to fight a war and engage in interpersonal cruelty based upon national, ethnic, racial or religious differences.
In the post-World War II/Cold War era, especially throughout the 1960s, we were also interested in development theory—the economic and political development of a nation, a region, or the international system of nations.17 They were concerns that have always been a major component of international communications. Today, at American University and many other universities, we offer graduate degrees in both international development and in international communications. They are treated as separate academic areas under the umbrella of international relations. However, back in the 1960s, development and international communications were the same areas of inquiry.
Many of the early theorists in international communications—Daniel Lerner,18Lucien Pye,19 Wilbur Schramm,20 and many others—were interested in questions such as, “How can we help emerging nations develop into vibrant nation states?” “Do they have to follow the same path as the Western World or is there another path that they might follow?” I’m sad to say that in those early books, we argued for the so-called dominant paradigm. It was simply a matter of how to help all other nations be like the United States through a process of assimilation or cloning. It was assumed that developing nations necessarily must follow the same path as the United States and adopt American values. Newly emerging nations must industrialize and urbanize, creating a large middle class where most attain a certain level of education. If they follow these steps then, all at once, they will be a modern nation-state. People in many emerging nation-states responded to these books and theories by saying, “When you say modernize, you really mean Americanize.” Early international communications and development theory was quite ethnocentric, but it was also very applied and a direct consequence of World War II.
Harvard, the University of Chicago, Columbia University and others were conducting sponsored research projects and programs in international communications. Perhaps the most famous was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in their Center for International Studies.21 As early as 1952, the Ford Foundation gave $875,000 to fund a four-year study to “examine the interchange of words, impressions and ideas that affect the attitudes and behavior of different people towards each other.”22 This four-year program aimed to increase scientific knowledge in the field of international communications that would today be seen as cross-cultural communications studies. The underlying intent of this research was practical and useful—”not only to the scientist but also to government officials in their efforts to preserve peace and promote understanding, in line with the burgeoning Cold War tensions.”23
Here we see the beginning of another aspect of international communications—the examination of policy—national policy towards development and international communications. The 1952 MIT Planning Committee issued a report, establishing the goals and strategies of the program. This document was the United States’ first attempt, after World War II, to systematize and organize international communications. Thus, many in the United States would say the Ford Foundation’s work at MIT really brought together the intellectuals in this field. At that time, it was Harold Lasswell, Paul Lazarsfeld, Hans Speier, and others, who were examining some of the real, applied problems being observed by both the business and policy communities.
But here again we encounter the problem of ethnocentrism. As mentioned earlier, international communications in the United States in those early years was very ethnocentric, and this extended into the research at MIT. MIT at that time had David McClelland, who wrote the famous book, The Achieving Society.24 McClelland was concerned with testing Max Weber’s theory that if you have a capitalist economy with people whose values cause them to focus on the future, the immediate family, and delayed gratification, and they value hard work as individuals, you will have economic development in that nation and, in addition, it will probably be democratic development. If you read Weber carefully, I would argue that Weber was arguing that if the whole world was Protestant we would have no problems—all nations would have high rates of economic growth with democratic and capitalist economies. This strikes me as just a little bit ethnocentric. But McClelland was testing Weber’s theory, and he appeared to very scientifically examine literally hundreds of thousands of records and testing results. He used all kinds of scientific tools to determine whether there was a high need for achievement, or, on the other hand, if you valued and placed a priority on relationships, then there was a high need for affiliation. McClelland argued that these two drives are inversely related. An increase in one necessarily means a decrease in the other. Basically, what McClelland was arguing was that you are wasting your money, and your time, trying to help a nation that does not have these values develop economically and politically.
Here we can see how culture was beginning to play a role in the MIT studies. And how scientific was McClelland? Not that scientific. He looked at doodles and color preference. For example, if on Saturday morning, you picked out a red or yellow shirt to wear, instead of a blue or green shirt, McClelland interpreted this to mean that you had a high need for affiliation. You liked bright colors that would overwhelm you as the individual. But if you picked out a green or a blue shirt or blouse to wear, then you had a high need for achievement. You like to stand out in contrast to your rather drab clothing. McClelland would have said, “Look at the world! In Africa, they paint their houses pink and bright green and yellow. They like bright colors and warm relationships. And come to London and everything is gray and brown. And this explains why the British were so driven to achieve and yet with cold relationships.” Well, again a lot of the scientific study was not that “scientific.” But it appeared to be scientific and people took McClelland very, very seriously. And again, these studies came out of MIT. You can see why the rest of the world was getting very nervous with the kind of research we were creating.
I also think that much of the early research had more to do with how to communicate Western ideas to people in the third world, rather than how to communicate with people in the third world. To be honest, we were not looking at communications in terms of cross-cultural or international communications until much, much later. It was much more persuasive communication than dialogical communications back in those days.
After World War II, a great many sociologists and anthropologists were concerned with how the US could best assist countries to develop economically and politically. Concern about culture entered into these efforts. For example, Margaret Mead, one of my heroes, was commissioned by UNESCO in the 1950s to study what happens when you introduce technological change to non-Western cultures. In those days, there were two basic theories. One theory was if you bring technology from one culture to another, you will destroy the culture. In our popular culture, this was the theory that was represented in the television show Star Trek’s so-called Prime Directive, which was that members of the spacecraft crew should never interfere with the development of an alien society. The belief was a version of Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s philosophy of the “noble savage.” If the crew gave people on another planet anything from their culture, such as more advanced technology or knowledge, then they would be altering and potentially destroying the other culture.
The other school of thought was that if you bring technology to all areas of the world, it ultimately will benefit everyone. It will decrease infant mortality rates, increase productivity, and generally improve the quality of life for all. Well, the United Nations asked Margaret Mead to determine what would happen if one introduced technology to different areas of the world. The response was her famous study called, Cultural Patterns and Technical Change.25 This study, I think, is one of the finest examples of applied anthropology and international communications. She discovered that a village is a system, much like an atom. An atom is a system. If one takes an electron from one atom, and shoots it into another atom, there are one of three impacts on the receiving atom: it can absorb the new electron and change the composition of the atom; it can reject the new electron without being altered at all; or it can destroy the atom. In order to know what would happen, one would have to know what electron is being introduced, how it is being introduced, and what the composition of the atom is. If we know all of this, we can predict the outcome, but we will not know the result for certain until the electron is actually introduced.
Margaret Mead discovered that the same thing is true when technical change is introduced to a culture. If you introduce a transistor radio in one village; it has no impact at all. People play it until the batteries wear out, and then discard it, or maybe set it aside, never to be thought of again. In another village, the same transistor radio all at once informs people that they could have voted in the last election and that there are economic opportunities they did not know about previously. The transistor radio, in this other culture, can have tremendous impact, and might even destroy the culture. And yet still, in another culture, the transistor radio can help people find out how they can decrease infant mortality or how they can be more involved in the economic and political system. This would benefit the entire village. Thus, what Mead concluded is that we have to take a systems approach. We have to look at cultures as systems and consider technology as a form of communications, as if somehow the technology itself communicates. And here again, from my point-of-view, we have an excellent example of the interdisciplinary and applied nature of international communications.
The field today has gone far beyond propaganda, cross-cultural communications training, and international negotiations and conflict resolution. It has gone into many new areas that no one even considered 35 years ago. Rapid advances in modern telecommunications have expanded the areas of concern to now include national and international communications policies and the economics of international communications. In fact, all of our students must take courses in international economics and the economics of telecommunications. Furthermore, all undergraduate students in the School of International Service at American University are now required to take a course in cross-cultural communications.
We now see the impact of the mass media, especially the Internet and its effects on international conflict. No longer do terrorists simply blow up buildings, or themselves. They easily convey images of the beheadings of prisoners around the globe with an impact that is just as dramatic as blowing up a building in New York City. We have quickly realized the dramatic impact modern telecommunications is having throughout the world. For example, in Iraq today, the combination of modern telecommunications and beheadings has tremendously impacted American foreign policy. If you ask me about the future, I would say the field of international communications will continue to grow as there is greater interaction between people. Increasingly we will become more aware of other cultures and our own. As a result, our own culture will become more important to us.
Let me explain this, because it is an interesting problem. Many of you have read the writings of Samuel Huntington. Huntington wrote the book, The Clash of Civilizations. Samuel Huntington, who is at Harvard University, was a Cold War realist. He was a product of the real politik school. And basically, that school of thought said your neighbor will attack you because that is the way humans are, and the only way to prevent an attack is to have a dog bigger than your neighbor’s. Huntington was a part of the Realist school of thought that saw human beings as being preprogrammed to some extent to respond to this deterrence model of dealing with conflict. This school of thought was closely identified with the various policies of the Cold War. When the Cold War ended, Dr. Huntington could not write any more books so he came up with a new enemy: civilizations. His definition of civilization is very close to what you and I would call culture. He claimed the world could be broken down into seven civilizations, maybe eight.26 He is not sure Africa really has a civilization. And interestingly enough, the civilizations break down in terms of religion and racial types.
Dr. Huntington has taken us back to the Crusades. He is absolutely convinced that the Chinese Confucian cultures will manufacture arms, sell arms to Muslim nations, which will then be used to attack the West. Again, it is the old Realist point of view, and you and I know that that is absurd. Christians have been good at killing each other for hundreds of years, so why should we stop killing each other and all at once turn against Muslims? Just as communism was never a monolith, we cannot talk about a civilization being a monolith. The Chinese can sell arms to anybody; business is business. In my opinion it has nothing to do with defeating the West. But Huntington’s theory became very, very popular. He gave us a new enemy, someone to fear. His theory was almost confirmed by the attacks on the World Trade Center. Even President Bush used the word “crusades.” The rest of the world, however, objected saying, “No, no, you cannot say that—you cannot use that reference.”
Huntington’s theory identifies multiculturalism as being a threat to the United States. But he defines multiculturalism as separatism. Of course, all of us know that multiculturalism does not mean separatism. He published a new book last year, Who Are We?27 In it he claims that recent immigrants coming to the United States—by which he means Mexicans—refuse to assimilate. Now, as a technical matter, he is using the word “assimilate” incorrectly; he means “acculturate.” He means they do not want to learn English nor do they want to fit in. However, there is no evidence to support that. Ninety-seven percent of all Americans speak English. Mexican immigrants want their children to learn English. The problem is that they would also like to keep Spanish. Huntington thinks keeping the Spanish is “un-American.” Huntington has become very popular because he is reflecting a school of thought in the United States that appeals to a certain segment of the population. His school of thought has had a very dramatic impact on the world, but I think we, people in the area of international communications, can easily counter Huntington and show the many weaknesses in his theory.
One point on which I agree with Huntington is that as the world shrinks and we increasingly interact with other cultures, the cultural differences are going to become more important. Cultural differences are not going to go away. I think one of the reasons this field of study is bound to become more significant is not just because we are interdisciplinary, applied, and so forth, but because the current nature of the world, with all its modern technological advances, necessitates expertise in this area.
When people stay in their own culture, surrounded by those who look like them, who share their values, beliefs and world views, then they will take their own culture for granted. They do not think about it very much because there is nothing to challenge it. But when they have to interact with those who are culturally different, they become more consciously aware of their own culture. The irony is that the way to find your own culture is to leave it.
For example, the highest-paid jazz artist in the world used to be Fela Kuti.28 He was from Nigeria. Fela once said he did not know what it meant to be an African until he left Africa. I think this is true of everyone. Believe me, we have Japanese students coming to the United States who are more Japanese when they return home than they were before they spent time in the United States. They discovered their own culture by being away from it. As the world shrinks, as we begin to interact on increasingly personal levels, the differences are not going to become less important. They are going to become more important. We interculturalists are going to be in business for a long, long time. And this is true not just internationally; it is also true domestically.29
As nations begin to interact, I think they also become more consciously aware of themselves, of their own culture. I think it is, in part, this increased consciousness that has led to the increase in nationalism in most countries in the world. It just may be the most powerful ideological force in the world today. On the other hand, we do have people like Samuel Huntington writing books about conflicts of civilizations—a return to the old paradigm that argues that if you are going to develop, you have to be Western. Well, there are many cultures, like Japan, that took the position, “Yes, we would like your expertise; yes, we would like some of your money. But no, thank you, you can keep your culture.” The response of the West has traditionally been, “Whoa, it is a package deal. You cannot have that expertise or capital investment without taking the culture as well.” And Japan, among others, said, “Of course, we can. We will take what works for us, and leave what does not work for us; we do not have to take your culture. If you do not like it, do not do business with us.” Well, that was a dramatic change for the United States. And so, the old paradigm died.
In fact, in the United Nations at that time, we had the New World Information and Communication Order Debate (NWICO Debate). American University was listed as one of the top ten universities in the world concerned with the NWICO Debate. What many countries were saying in that debate was that the United States has controlled the flow of information around the globe and that many of the experts, many of our journalists knew nothing about other cultures. Therefore, when the U.S. would inform the rest of the world about what was going on in various cultures, the events and the subjects of their reporting became distorted because they did not understand the culture.
The NWICO Debate was also a push against capitalism. The United States was taking a position that the free flow of ideas and messages across borders was like the free flow of goods and that the flow should never be restricted. Many countries, however, were saying, “No. If you control this flow of communication and media, then we will never develop. We will never be able to compete with the United States in getting our messages out there. Therefore, we have to have a free and balanced flow of communication.” So in the 1970s and 1980s not only was there a reaction to this old paradigm when it came to development, but there was also a push back against American capitalism, particularly in the flow of information. It was the conflict over this issue that primarily led to the United States’ withdrawal from UNESCO, though there were other issues as well.30
In addition to Huntington, other recent theorists are also taking us back to the old paradigm. The new version of David McClelland and Weber is Lawrence Harrison in his book, Culture Matters.31 Interestingly enough, Harrison also comes out of MIT. He and David McClelland knew each other.32 Harrison’s point of view is that nations must have progress-prone values if they are going to develop.33 The problem, as Harrison has posed it, is that many nations have progress-resistant values—values that resist economic and political development. What, then, are these progress-prone and progress-resistant values?
In Harrison’s analysis, the progress-prone values are Protestant values. These are values which place the greatest emphasis on the individual and those most closely connected with the individual. Thus, when you discuss the family unit, you are generally discussing only the nuclear family—a unit which might include grandparents, but will omit aunts, uncles, and cousins, the extended family. Harrison argues that the extended family, in fact, is counter productive because a person’s loyalty is to the family, not to the civic culture. You cannot have a civic culture when the majority of the people are more loyal to the extended family than to the civic culture. It would be like a country run by The Sopranos, a fictitious television Italian family in New Jersey, where they are wonderful with their children, but they are just a little corrupt. Loyalty to the extended family often becomes more important than following rules which are necessary to maintain a civic society.
Harrison also argues you have to be able to give up the past and look to the future. You have to be more secular and either not tied into a set of religious beliefs, or at least do not allow those beliefs to intrude into the management of the civic culture, of the state. You have to engage in delayed gratification, and Harrison, just like McClelland, argues that we can help countries do this. How? By changing their culture. And in order to change the culture, we begin with the children, because it is through them that the culture is perpetuated.
At one time the Government of Turkey hired David McClelland to run an experiment to see if you can teach Turkish school children American values.34 McClelland went to a village in Turkey and for a year or so taught traditional American values to their children. He told folk stories of working hard, being productive, delaying gratification, focusing on the future, and of all the action heroes in the United States. He went back to that village a few years later and he found that these children had become little capitalists—little entrepreneurs—and he reasoned that this could be done with the rest of the world. Many people in “the rest of the world” were not certain they really wanted their children to become entrepreneurs or capitalists. There was a strong reaction against McClelland’s work and theories.
However, do not make the mistake of assuming that this thinking and these types of theories are not still with us today. Indeed, the World Bank invited Lawrence Harrison to come to Washington and train school teachers from around the world to give their children values that are progress-prone. This type of training gives a different context to some of the reactions against the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Bank because many people around the world are saying, “This is the old paradigm.” This is not just American capitalism; it is American imperialism. In fact, there are some American thinkers in the United States who have actually written about the new American Empire.35
While our field is going forward, I also think there are forces that are simultaneously moving us in the wrong direction. But we international communications scholars at least can ask these questions: “Why cannot cultures develop without becoming American?” “Can American values, like individualism, actually be counterproductive?” And, maybe we Americans ought to question whether the whole world should be populated with cowboys.
I agree with one of the professors here at Aoyama University that there has to be a dialogue between all these different cultures. Only if there is a dialogue can we determine what values fit with specific cultures during a particular time to promote national economic development. It is not simply a matter of how to communicate to people, but rather with people, in a dialogical manner. In addition, the United States needs to be influenced by input from the rest of the world. I am not so sure that all of our values have served us that well. Many of them are perhaps counterproductive. If you earn $500,000 a year, but you don’t have a family, is that progress? If you are consuming an endless amount and variety of different products—is that a sign of success? What about the impact on the environment or the overall physical and social ecology? These broader questions can be asked by the field of international communications. And sometimes we are the only people who can ask these kind of interdisciplinary questions. So, in my opinion, this field will not only continue to grow, it must continue to grow.
Just as the graduates at any university today must be computer-literate (that is, they must be able to use the Internet and modern communications technology), I would argue that well-educated young people must be literate or competent in international communications and intercultural communications, regardless of their vocations, as diplomats, business executives, scholars, or physicians. They must have the skills and knowledge that are now basic to the field.
Notes
1.This article is based upon a keynote address to The 2005 Aoyama Symposium on International Communication on March 5, 2005. The symposium was organized by the International Communication Program, School of International Politics, Economics and Business, Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan.
2.Dr. Hamid Mowlana was the founder and first director of American University’s program.
3.Many of the American theorists of the so-called Frankfurt School of critical thought were Jewish scholars who fled Nazi Germany. Fromm taught at the New School in New York City and later directed the Psychoanalytic Institute at the University of Mexico. Seminal books of the Frankfurt School would include Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Th eodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, Milton Rokeach’s Open and Closed Minds, and Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. In the 1960s, Marcuse coined the slogan “Make love not war.”
4.See Gary Weaver, “Facing the Crisis in Child Care,” Journal of Child and Youth Care Work, Vol. 4 (Summer 1988): 5–27 and “The Crisis of Cross-Cultural Child and Youth Care,” in Choices in Caring: Contemporary Approaches to Child and Youth Care Work, edited by Mark A. Krueger and Norman W. Powell, 1990, 65–103.
5.A political scientist, an economist, sociolinguist, journalist, and cross-cultural expert were included in this anthology along with university administrators and various black American and student activists. They all viewed this period of domestic and international conflict and turmoil as a political, social and cultural phenomenon. Gary R. Weaver and James H. Weaver, eds., The University and Revolution (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969).
6.Our International Communications program, within the School of International Service, has always acknowledged that it is a vital field of study within international relations. Students who do doctoral work at American University in international communications earn a Ph.D. in international relations, with an emphasis in international communications.
7.Edward T. Hall is one of the founders of the cross-cultural communications as a field of study. Among his most famous books are: The Silent Language (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959) and Beyond Culture (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976). His earliest books discussed the importance of nonverbal communications in all cross-cultural encounters.
8.Edward C. Stewart’s American Cultural Patterns: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (Chicago, IL: Intercultural Press, Inc., 1971) was also one of the founding texts of cross-cultural communications which considered how culture influences thought-patterns and basic values.
9.See Glen Fisher, Mindsets: The Role of Culture and Perception in International Relations (Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, 1988). He is currently emeritus professor at the Monterrey Institute in California. He has been a lifelong advocate of the viewpoint that cross-cultural communications studies belong in the area of international relations.
10.This term is derived from the Greek word for steersman (kybernetes). It was first introduced by the mathematician Norbert Wiener in his book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: The Technology Press; New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1948). Today, it includes social groups and individuals.
11.The so-called “stimulus–response” model is based upon classic Pavlovian behavioral psychology.
12.Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1934). In this text she used terms such as “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” to describe various cultures.
13.For examples of studies of Japanese national character, see Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1946) or Geoffrey Gorer, “Themes in Japanese Culture,” Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 2, No. 5 (1943): 106–124.
14.Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1941). Although Fromm is often labeled an existentialist or humanistic psychologist, he insisted that he was a psychoanalyst.
15.Theodor Adorno, et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York, NY: Harper, 1950).
16.Milton Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1960).
17.Much of this inquiry focused on strengthening states that were destroyed during World War II, helping newly emerging states, and examining the U.S. Cold War strategy to counter the appeal of Communism by enhancing nationalism.
18.Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1958).
19.Lucian W. Pye, Politics, Personality, and National Building (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1962) and Lucian W. Pye, ed., Communications and Political Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963).
20.Wilbur Schramm, Mass Media and National Development (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964).
21.Hans Speier and others, Research in International Communication: An Advisory Report of the Planning Committee (Cambridge, MA: Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1953).
22.Hamid Mowlana, “International Communication: The Journey of a Caravan,” Journal of International Communication, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2004): 7.
23.Ibid.
24.David McClelland, The Achieving Society (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1961.)
25.Margaret Mead, ed., Cultural Patterns and Technical Change (New York, NY: UNESCO, 1953).
26.Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs Vol. 72, No. 3 (Summer 1993): 22–23.
27.Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
28.Fela Kuti, jazz artist from Nigeria with works such as Zombie and Underground System to his credit.
29.In the United States, the population rate of increase among white Americans is zero. By 2040, the majority of Americans will not be white. The greatest rates of population increase in the United States are minorities and immigrants. We really are becoming a mixture of different cultures. And, we have finally begun to see the value of all these different cultures in the United States.
30.United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. In 1984, the United States withheld its contributions and withdrew from the organization. It rejoined in 2003.
31.Lawrence E. Harrison, Culture Matters (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000). He has also written a number of other books.
32.Author’s personal conversation with Lawrence Harrison.
33.Harrison, op. cit.
34.David McClelland, The Achieving Society (New York: Free Press, 1961). op. cit.
35.This is an approach that is usually referred to as that of neoconservatives or “neocons.” See Andew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy and Rodigue Tremblay’s The New American Empire.