Читать книгу Politisk psykologi - Группа авторов - Страница 4

The study of politics is often tied to catastrophe or world-changing events. For example, the experience of World War I caused many continental thinkers to revisit their understanding of society. Before the war, Europeans joined widespread pacifist movements, principally motivated by Sir Ralph Angell’s pamphlet, The Great Illusion. The extension of credit and the development of a system of finance made war futile, as capturing territory did not add to the wealth of a state. To Angell, war itself was made useless by commercialism. Peace would flourish, as competition between states took on an economic dimension.

Yet war did serve a purpose that pacifists ignored. According to Sigmund Freud, commercialism exacerbated the inherent contradictions of our psychology. Humans face a difficult balancing act if society is to survive. Individual desires – emerging from the id – must be tempered to maintain a functional society. “Civilization,” he wrote, “obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.” Over time, this suppression of innate human desire builds, threatening the seams of civilization. This rising sense of guilt (caused by the inability to satisfy our most base desires) is the “price we pay for our advance in civilization.” The following decline in mental faculty leads to the possibility of “neurotic” civilizations; of cultures maladapted to the demands of society and the possibilities for violence. War provides direction for the expression of these violent urges.

Unfortunately, the experience of WWI did not satisfy continental bloodlust; nor did it solve the inherent dilemma of society. And during the interwar period, Freud foresaw the violence that was to follow. Hitler’s rise to power alluded to a civilizational imbalance and a looming conflict on the continent. When Freud revisited Civilization and Its Discontents, he added a rhetorical question. He asks the reader to ponder the possibility of a balance between the demands of individuals to express their needs and the requirements of society to repress. Pessimistically, Freud ends his book by saying the balance was undecided and attempts to forge peace were up in the air, “But who can foresee with what success and with what result?”

After the war, many scholars attempted to refocus their study. Political theorists, economists, social scientists – each discipline realized their theories failed to predict that outbreak of war. Political psychology developed as a rival interdisciplinary approach, arguing that the discipline had strayed too far from human experience to make valid prediction. And like Angell and Freud, the history of political psychology followed the politics of the times. The experience of the Second World War motivated the first generation of scholars to explore the politics behind state behavior. And early theories followed Freudian thought, teasing out the connections between society and the citizen. The focus centered on how leaders convinced their populations to fight, via propaganda or nationalist myth. A second generation of scholarship added to this base by focusing more closely on the masses and their belief systems. Flush with new quantitative methods and new data (provided by opinion polling), scholarship tended to gauge the capacities of the democratic public, tracking the connection between the content of political beliefs and mass behavior, such as voting.

A third generation once again changed direction by focusing on the deviations from rationality. Rational choice theory dominated the study of political behavior in the second generation. But the failures of presidential leadership – Vietnam, Watergate, the Iran Hostage Crisis, for example – convinced scholars that decisions were often non-rational. Cognitive theories emerged as one possible answer behind these gaffes, integrating work on perceptions and misperceptions, information processing, heuristics and schema theory to international behavior. Works questioned the ‘super-heroic’ assumptions of rational choice, developing a behavioral account of decision.

A developing fourth generation flipped the focus back to mass behavior. The genocides and civil wars of the 1990s spurred work on identity and identity politics. Scholars realized cognitive theories are too abstracted from political reality. Humans are social animals, driven to satisfy the demands of their peers. As a result, work re-integrated mass behavior into explanations of politics. ‘Hot’ processes of cognition manifest motivated misperceptions, arising from emotion and attachment to a broader in-group.

This current generation of scholarship is particularly important for understanding the pressures and politics facing European states such as Denmark. International relations theory is particularly ill-suited for a world impacted by non-state actors and non-standard threats. For example, the war in Iraq, combined with the collapse of financial giants, weakened the American capacity to lead. The uncertainty of the international system grants more freedom of choice for Danish leaders. And to understand how current and future leaders will make sense of the world requires psychology. What motivates Danish security and economic strategy? What perceptions and motivations underlie state action? Scholars must examine the internal calculations and perceptions of those in power to understand how Denmark will make its way in a new international system.

Furthermore, political psychology enlightens a discussion of Danish regional politics. Where structural accounts attempt to understand the global constraints facing Danish leaders, the changing European identity provides another challenge. Members of the EU continue to face a dilemma. Benefits of economic and security integration are obvious on the continent and to compete in a future world requires a long-term readjustment of European relations via intergovernmental institutions. But this clashes with the need of states to retain their own individual sense of space, identity and national interest. Europeans, in general, laud and fear this dramatic redrawing of the continent. The Danish response to these widespread changes is tied to culture and social psychology. How will Denmark find a way to be distinct and similar at the same time? This balancing act will drive future Danish relations with the continent.

And finally, a psychological paradigm helps to explain the changing domestic environment. The recent backlash against unions represents a significant change in how Danes view the role of government. Dimensions of Danish political beliefs – from perceptions of fairness and equality, to understandings of identity and national myth, to evolving group identities -- have changed the internal political game. The tactics of government, of democratic competition and legislative logrolling, are connected to how Danes view the process. A perspective based around political psychology enlightens the effectiveness of strategies and tactics in a newly changed political environment.

Political psychology, as an academic and policy tool, is well-suited to provide answers for the future of Danish politics. Denmark is undergoing a transformation internationally, regionally and domestically. In these unique times, scholars must be reminded that social science is inherently the study of humans as political animals. As Heinz Eulau chides “a political science that ignores man is necessarily a very incomplete science of politics”. Our hypotheses are stronger and theories more robust, by exploring the innately human character of Danish politics.