Ideological Camps Research Articles

Prince Wan Waithayakon’s Attempt for Rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China at the 1955 Asian-African Conference at Bandung

Abstract After the end of the Second World War, newly emerging nations were being divided up geopolitically into ideological camps – the so-called “Free World” led by the United States and the ‘Communist Bloc’ under the leadership of the Soviet Union. At the same time, there was rising demands for self-determination by national leaders who did not wish to commit exclusively to either ideological camp, as they perceived this to be a form of neo-imperialism. A leading group within this third way of thinking was the Colombo Group. In the midst of this intense three-way struggle, post-war Thailand under the leadership of Premier Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram was heavily influenced by the US in the earliest stages of the Cold War. In the attempt to renegotiate and re-balance Thailand’s position in the heightened political tension of the region, the premier sent the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prince Wan Waithayakon, to represent Thailand at the Asia-Africa Conference – initiated through the cooperation of the Colombo Group earlier in May 1954 – in April 1955. At this conference Prince Wan exercised independent diplomacy by meeting and negotiating with the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in an attempt to re-balance Thailand’s relations with world powers in both the Free World and the Communist Bloc. This meeting would have significant ramifications for Thailand’s diplomacy throughout the Cold War and has impacted the kingdom’s relations with the People’s Republic of China up to the present day.

Dialectic icons: controversial public figures as emotional catalysts in contentious political discourse

This article introduces the concept of dialectic icons: public figures who feature in contentious and polarising political discourse. The inflammatory quality of dialectic icons and their role as highly mediated symbols of conflict creates long-lasting emotional energy among audiences, who cluster in ideological camps as a response. However, these audiences can also actively and directly engage in and shape these discourses, particularly through social media. Examples of the public discourse about quarterback-turned-activist Colin Kaepernick’s anthem protests illustrate how the controversiality, newsworthiness, interactivity and visibility of dialectic icons ultimately contribute to social polarisation. By focusing on dialectic icons as proxy battlegrounds for public audiences, this article establishes a useful concept for gaining fresh insights into collective meaning- and truth-making processes.

Stage Concept of the Golden Calf Dance in Myroslav Skoryk Opera "Moses"

The authors of the article considered the peculiarities of the stage interpretation of the vocalchoreographic component in Myroslav Skoryk's opera "Moses", namely the scene of worship before the Golden Calf. Two productions of this opera, which took place in Kyiv and Lviv, were analyzed. The relevance of this plot is due to the appeal to works of a parable direction in the fateful period for mankind, times when one has to choose one's own path on the basis of the spiritual treasury of Christianity - the Bible. The essence of the dance before the Golden Calf is a kind of echo of ancient Egyptian honors performed before the sacred Apis bull and Assyro-Babylonian religious rites dedicated to the god Baal. The characteristic signs of the pagan ritual of worshiping the Golden Idol, their manifestation in an orgiastic, passionately seductive dance with the excitement of the winefueled imagination of the crowd, driving it to frenzy and immoral acts, are proven. In order to create an artistic and holistic performance, it is necessary to synthesize oratorical features (the leading function of the choir, symbolic-generalized interpretations of events with their static-slow-motion unfolding) with operatic specifics (dynamic directing, bright scenography, expressive musical dramaturgy). The article notes the logic of the dance mise-en-scene with the ballet appearance from the choristers who are opponents of Moses, the ballet dancers gradually shed their clothes, and the audience watches the transformation of a religious ceremony into an orgy in the Lviv opera version. The Lviv version differs from the Kyiv version in that the latter has an interpretation of the idolatry scene with a weakly expressed conflict between the two ideological camps due to a simplified miseen-scène of introducing the ballet into the dance action without delineating its affiliation with Moses' opponents. The conformity of the stage solution of the dance of the Golden Calf in the Lviv and Kyiv versions of the opera to the creatively reinterpreted ancient pagan cult of fetishization of wealth and power is proven. Attention is focused on the logic of mise-en-scène in the Lviv version of the play, and on the psychologization and personification of the characters' images in the Kyiv version. The need for complex integrated studies of the use of ancient cult rituals in opera performances with the synthesis of historical, cultural, theological, ethical-aesthetic, socio-psychological, art-based foundations of the existence of a certain ethnic group in the conditions of the development of civilizational processes is predicted.

Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular. By David A. Hollinger

For much of the twentieth century, white American Protestants were divided into two ideological camps. Evangelical Protestants resisted the civil rights movement, feminism, and religious and racial pluralism. Ecumenical Protestants, in contrast, welcomed these developments because they viewed ethnoreligious pluralism as a positive good. Those two ideological camps within Protestantism still exist, but ecumenical Protestant denominations have experienced such steep membership declines over the past half-century that evangelicals have been able to redefine the word “Christian” as synonymous with “evangelical” and write ecumenical Protestants out of the story. And with the decline of ecumenical Protestantism, secular Americans have become the leading champions of the racial and religious pluralism that ecumenical Protestants of the mid-twentieth century played a role in shaping. David A. Hollinger’s Christianity’s American Fate explains why ecumenical Christianity declined even as its political causes succeeded, why white evangelicals became the leading ideological party in American Christianity, and why this religious shift reshaped American politics.

The Impact of Social Groups on Social Movements in Hong Kong

The phenomenon of communal social groups in Hong Kong in recent years cannot be underestimated. The sense of group in Hong Kong has its roots in the struggle over identity, which has led to the emergence of different ideologies in Hong Kong society due to external pressures to articulate multiple identities. Based on ideology, the first social group emerged in Hong Kong society before 1997, and after 1997, group consciousness in Hong Kong was also influenced by the subject of Liberal Studies 2009. With the understanding and popularisation of plenty of current affairs, students organised their social group as a methodology to participate in social movements and exert their influence. They believe that Hong Kong's social problems are rooted in political conflicts. To address the new challenges posed by external political factors since 1997, a new generation of young people in Hong Kong has begun to practise their civic engagement through social groups, which has led to a series of social movements, which have gradually formed the basis for mobilisation of Hong Kong's social activities, making the boundaries between the different ideological camps in Hong Kong's social activities more distinct, and forming a clear-cut mechanism for social movement cooperation.

The politicized pandemic: Ideological polarization and the behavioral response to COVID-19

In a representative sample of the U.S. population during the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic, we investigate how prosociality and ideology interact in their relationship with health-protecting behavior and trust in the government to handle the crisis. We find that an experimental measure of prosociality based on standard economic games positively relates to protective behavior. Conservatives are less compliant with COVID-19-related behavioral restrictions than liberals and evaluate the government's handling of the crisis significantly more positively. We show that prosociality does not mediate the impact of political ideology. This finding means that conservatives are less compliant with protective health guidelines - independent of differences in prosociality between both ideological camps. Behavioral differences between liberals and conservatives are roughly only one-fourth of the size of their differences in judging the government's crisis management. This result suggests that Americans were more polarized in their political views than in their acceptance of public health advice.

A South Asian neutral power in the United Nations: India’s peacekeeping mission on the Korean peninsula (1947–1955)

The end of World War II (1939–1545) by Germany’s (May 8) and Japan’s surrender (August 15) brought a major socio-political transformation in the colonialised nations of Asia. The independence of the Korean Peninsula from the Japanese imperialism was not smoothly implemented for a peaceful settlement. Rather, the ideological camps of communism (=socialism) and democracy (=capitalism) dominated in the region, which became the hub of the Cold War in the late 1940s and the 1950s. The local citizens confronted the political conflict for the unified Korea. The US allied with the UN, turning against North Korea and its socialist allies. Meantime, India emerged in the UN for the Korean issues. Then, how did India, the new international leader, involve the process of the post-colonial unification (1948–1950) with the major powers (the US, the Soviet Union, China and the UK)? What about the position of India during the Korean War (1950–53)? How can one interpret India’s policy on the POW repatriation issue (1953–1955)? This paper explores the non-military initiatives of the South Asian country as a ‘neutral power’ through the cases of India’s authority within the United Nations (Temporary) Commission on Korea (UN(T)COK), the 60th Parachute Field Ambulance (PFA), and Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission (NNRC) and Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission (NNSC). This paper argues that the soft diplomacy of India strategically established the foundation of a peacekeeping mission on the Korean Peninsula (1947–1955) even though the politico-historical relationship with the Soviet Union and China frequently caused serious misunderstands for South Korea.After all, India was not even three years old at the outbreak of the conflict (Korean War). It also had extremely difficult domestic problems, a hostile Pakistan on its flanks and the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—a potential threat … Still, India was the largest and most vocal Third World country not embedded in the emerging Cold War alliance structure, with Nehru the champion of anti-imperialism and neutralism (Barnes, 2013b, p. 265)

Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transforming Catholicism through the Music of Third-Republic Paris, by Jennifer Walker

<i>Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transforming Catholicism through the Music of Third-Republic Paris</i>, by Jennifer Walker

Agrarianism in Agricultural Education: A Narrative Study

Agriculturalists can be divided into broad ideological camps with differing value sets. While many different groups exist, there are two primary ideological groups: (1) conventional or agrarian populists and (2) non-conventional or neo-agrarians. Agricultural education students’ values about agriculture shape how they will work in their future classrooms, schools, and communities, as well as how they will interact with students and community members. The purpose of this narrative study was to describe undergraduate agricultural education students’ conceptualization of their values about agriculture. The findings from this study highlighted the polarization of ideologies in American agriculture. The agricultural education students’ conceptualization of agricultural values was largely conventional. Some students formed conventional agriculture values as they grew up, while other students experienced a change of their values towards conventional attitudes while in college. Students’ responses to others with differing values ranged from indifferent to negative. These differences indicate a real challenge for post-secondary agricultural educators. Students have the right to maintain their own values in agriculture, however they must be able to work with others who have differing values. Research is needed to evaluate effective ways to help students learn how to work with people who have differing agricultural values.

Katkov: Moscow Publicist at the Church Gates

From the onset, the traditional image of the prominent Russian conservative of the second half of the 19th century, the famous founder of the Moscow Vedomosti newspaper M. N. Katkov as a “defender of traditional values” was questionable. Representatives of various ideological camps: Westernist liberals, Slavophiles and nationalists from the editorial board of the Novoye Vremya newspaper were united in viewing him as a smart opportunist, who had chosen a convenient time for supporting the government to forward his personal ambitions. Despite the fact that speeches in defense of the Church could indeed be heard in Katkov’s journalism and his publications, in many ways they occupied rather an instrumental place in the system of his ideological views, which was far from the fi rst and which was repeatedly noted at the time by both Slavophiles and church traditionalists per se, such as T. I. Filippov and K. N. Leontiev. In this respect, Katkov came to be rehabilitated by Soviet historiography, which in a simplifi ed form argued the unity of “the liberal” and “the conservative” periods of his activity. This simplistic and ideologized image of Katkov is still present in modern research. Post-Soviet, especially conservative-minded, authors often tend to present Katkov as a consistent monarchist guardian and a no less consistent Orthodox conservative. And yet, Katkov’s political ideology assumed the transformation of Russia into a centralized and homogeneous national state of the European type, in which there could be no place for status in statu. Maintaining the unconditional loyalty to the Orthodox Church, at the same time the Moscow publicist denied its political subjectivity. By his propaganda of “the Russian Catholicism” and “the Russian Judaism”, Katkov came to be the fi rst one in the Russian conservative tradition to separate the Russian national identity from religion as such and Orthodoxy in particular.

GENOMIC POLITICS AND EQUALITY

GENOMIC POLITICS AND EQUALITY

Holding a position: Public opinion as cognition in a disorganized field

I develop a theoretical model of the relationship between the macro-structure of political communications and the micro-structure of individuals’ political attitudes. This model conceives of public opinion as a field of competition, where positions correspond to stances on issues, and are occupied both by individuals and by major political actors who compete over their support via political communications. Individuals attend to these communications to better develop their political attitudes. Since a large volume of interdisciplinary work suggests that reliably answering survey questions is an acquired cultural competency that requires substantial training to achieve, I use survey response reliability as a key measure of this enculturation. This points me to a concrete question: do patterns of survey response reliability suggest that competing ideological camps focus on the same issues? To answer this, I develop a formal latent class model of position reliability and estimate it with the 2008-2010-2012 General Social Survey panel. I find that more popular positions are generally reported more reliably than less popular ones, as would be expected if ideological camps predominantly focused on issues where they had an advantage.

The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass

The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass

Cultural Liberal and Conservative Mobilizing Potential and Political Participation in Post-Communist Countries

While the social-cultural conflict has been examined at the level of sociopolitical actors, less is known about how this division operates at the level of ordinary citizens and their participation in politics. Using originally collected nationally representative public opinion surveys, this study connects the ideological cultural dimension of politics and citizens’ political participation in five post-communist countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. Specifically, the article (1) maps the mobilizing potential for culturally liberal and conservative issues; (2) examines the profile of people (sociodemographic characteristics, political attitudes, democratic norms, and membership in organizations) in these two camps; and (3) demonstrates how the mobilizing potential of the two ideological camps translates into actual types of political participation (voting; protesting; petition signing; and Internet activism). The analysis shows relatively high mobilizing potential for culturally liberal issues in five post-communist countries and a relatively weak link between culturally conservative mobilizing potential and civil society engagement.

Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America

Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America

The Hostile Mediator Phenomenon

Abstract Rival partisans tend to perceive ostensibly balanced news coverage as biased against their respective sides; this is known as the “hostile media phenomenon” (HMP). Yet complaints of hostile bias are common in contexts besides the media (e.g., law enforcement and academia). Does a process similar to the HMP occur outside the context of news coverage? And do perceptions of political bias in different contexts share certain similarities? This paper proposes that the HMP is a specific case of a more general hostile mediator phenomenon, where rival partisans perceive various public institutions and organizations that are expected to be neutral as biased against their respective sides. The paper starts by presenting a theoretical framework according to which partisans’ bias perceptions are affected by the threat to the power and status of their ingroup posed by a mediator’s actions. Evidence from three studies (total N = 4,164) shows that members of rival ideological camps in Israel perceived the Israeli attorney general and the Israeli police to be biased against their respective camps. An additional study (N = 2,172) shows that both Democrats and Republicans perceived the social network Facebook to be biased against their side. Moreover, an embedded, pre-registered survey experiment buttresses the causal claim that ingroup-threatening information increases perceptions of hostile bias. The implications of these findings for our understanding of people’s bias perceptions, as well as for citizens’ trust in public institutions and democratic stability more generally, are discussed.

Polarization Over Vaccination: Ideological Differences in Twitter Expression About COVID-19 Vaccine Favorability and Specific Hesitancy Concerns

Vaccine hesitancy has been a growing public health issue, but during COVID-19, understanding vaccine hesitancy and promote vaccine favorability takes on a troubling immediacy. With the growing political polarization on scientific issues, the COVID-19 vaccine-related sentiment has recently been divided across ideological lines. This study aims to understand how vaccine favorability and specific vaccine-related concerns including possible side effects, distrust in medical professionals, and conspiratorial beliefs concerning COVID-19 vaccines were articulated and transmitted by Twitter users from opposing ideological camps and with different follower scopes. Using a combination of computational approaches, including supervised machine-learning and structural topic modeling, we examined tweets surrounding COVID-19 vaccination ( N = 16,959) from 1 March to 30 June 2020. Results from linear mixed-effects models suggested that Twitter users high on conservative ideology and with a standard instead of large follower scope tend to express less favorable vaccine-related sentiments and talk more about vaccine side effects, distrust of medical professionals, and conspiracy theories. There is also an interaction effect where liberals with large follower scope expressed the least amount of distrust of medical professionals, whereas extreme conservatives expressed greater distrust for health professionals, regardless of their follower scope. Finally, structural topic modeling revealed distinct topical focuses among liberal and conservative users. Theoretical and practical implications for leveraging social media in effective health communication practice were discussed.

The Origins of European Security: the Factor of Neutrality in the early 1970s

The article continues to explore a topic of «Sources of European Security».The author analyzes the role of personalities, processes and factors that have influenced the modern European security system, sustainable and variable elements of the transformation of the European segment of international relations. On the basis of documents from the Swiss Federal Archives, this article highlightsthe position of Switzerland and, in some cases, Austria before the start of the substantive discussions of the agreed agenda at the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). The 1970 Moscow Treaty between the USSR and the Federal Republic of Germany and the start of the CSCE process led to the Soviet Union abandoning its longstanding attempts to establish cooperation between the great powers in parallel with the UN structures.The Foreign Minister of the USSR Andrei Gromyko warned against this. Subsequently, the role of the small and medium-sized countries in the two ideological camps increased. The overall picture of interstate relations became more complicated. It is therefore no coincidence that the CSCE is treatedcontroversially in historiography. Considering that transformations are associated with continuous forms, positions, and mechanisms that have been tested over time, the author makes hypotheses and recommendations at the end of the article.

Public History: a New Discovery or a Forgotten Antiquity?

To answer the question of what is public history, let's turn to its origins. The emergence of academic history in the nineteenth century, now called official, was associated with the separation of history from other fields of knowledge. At that time, it was believed that without a professional historical education, it was impossible to be an erudite and intelligent person, and to tell the past objectively and truthfully. Otherwise, these stories would resemble myths and fairy tales.&#x0D; Over time, history gradually became a scientific discipline, as well as an ideological science, as its primary task during the rapid kaleidoscope of changes in various political regimes was to educate ideologically savvy professionals for state-building. Thus, historical science was formed during the creation of nation-states and affirmed the national identity of different social and ethnic groups that formed one nation. What prompted recent history to approach man as the object of study? In our opinion, interest in man - a phenomenon of any civilization has existed since Hellenic times, and in the era of authoritarianism and totalitarianism has been replaced by interest in power and strength. Such a change, unfortunately, led to the tragic consequences of the First and Second World Wars.&#x0D; The disproportionately heavy burden of the tragedies of the Second World War and the emergence of new threats to world security in the bipolar period forced two opposing ideological camps to understand the need for dialogue, finding common ground and finding consensus in peace building. The Helsinki process began, and cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union deepened in strategic areas: space and high technology. Security levers have been strengthened, and a regional security structure, the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE / OSCE), has been established in the European dimension.&#x0D; Civilizational exchange contributed to the growth of education of the population, the deepening of the intellectual component of society. At the center of the state and history was an intelligent man – Homo Sapiens, who felt his significance for the world, history and the future. World wars have forced historians to rethink the meaning of life, its fragility and vulnerability. And the deep political, economic, and social world crisis of the 1970s drew the attention of historical science to the person. Oral history, new social history, public history, etc. appeared. The philosophical and social sciences began to study individual social groups – women's society, religious communities, working and student youth, etc. With the growth of interest in the person, the interest in history as it is, without ornaments and artificial exaggerations, the history of ordinary people and places, increased.

A tale of two hashtags: An examination of moral content of pro‐ and anti‐government tweets in Turkey

AbstractDuring the campaign period of the 2018 Presidential Election in Turkey, there was a burst in the number of tweets posted by both pro‐ and anti‐government Twitter users. Both sides started their own hashtags and reached a total of 2 million tweets in only one day. We analyzed the content of 186,554 tweets from two opposing ideological camps to test the predictions of Moral Foundations Theory, which suggests that liberals and conservatives endorse different moral foundations. We scored each side's level of emphasis on different moral foundations using the Turkish Moral Foundations Dictionary and compared the two groups. Results revealed that the supporters of the conservative government in Turkey were more likely to endorse care, loyalty, and authority foundations of morality, as compared to those who oppose the conservative government. In addition, the general moral emphasis was higher in the tweets of the pro‐government group. Being one of the first studies investigating the moral content of political tweets in a non‐WEIRD context, the current study yields important findings regarding the external validity of the Moral Foundations Theory's predictions in different cultures.