Abstract
The divergent national identities and foreign policy preferences that were articulated by political elites in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine were also shared by their respective societies. However, unlike members of the political class, mass publics did not necessarily view foreign policy as an important issue. This was hardly surprising. Foreign policy, it had already been established, was normally of marginal concern to mass publics in the Western democrades as well, at least according to the ‘Almond-Lippmann consensus’ that was dominant throughout the post-war period.1 As Gabriel Almond put it in the foundational study, published in 1950, ordinary citizens had ‘formless and plastic moods which undergo frequent alteration in response to changes in events’; their ‘characteristic response to questions of foreign policy [was] one of indifference’; and the attitude to world politics, even of policymakers, was based on a ‘lack [of] intellectual structure and factual content’.2 The veteran journalist Walter Lippmann was equally sceptical. Ordinary people, he wrote in his classic Public Opinion, were too absorbed in the business of daily life to pay much attention to public affairs, and they depended on a flow of information that had to be simplified for them by others in a process that he described as the ‘manufacture of consent’.3 Indeed, for realists, it was positively undesirable that the society as a whole should play a role of any consequence in foreign policy, in that they ‘reason[ed] more often than not in the simple moralistic and legalistic terms of absolute good and absolute evil’ while statesmen had to take the ‘long view’.4
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Gabriel A. Almond, The American People and Foreign Policy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), pp. 53, 69.
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), pp. 30, 248.
Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, revised 5th edn (New York: Knopf, 1978), p. 153. For another celebrated realist, E. H. Carr, public opinion between the wars had been ‘almost as often wrong-headed as it was impotent’ (The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939. An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1939), pp. 50–51). Public opinion had been ‘destructively wrong at the critical junctures’, Lippmann wrote elsewhere, and it was a ‘dangerous master of decision when the stakes are life and death’ (Essays in the Public Philosophy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955), p. 20).
Milton J. Rosenberg, Sidney Verba and Philip E. Converse, Vietnam and the Silent Majority: The Dove’s Guide (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 36.
See Michael Dimock and Samuel Popkin, ‘Political knowledge in comparative perspective’, in Shanto Iyengar and Richard Reeves, eds, Do the Media Govern? (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), pp. 217–224.
Shanto Iyengar et al., ‘Cross-national versus individual-level differences in political information: a media systems perspective’, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, vol. 20, no. 3 (August 2010), pp. 291–309, at p. 300.
Adam J. Berinsky, In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 208, 208–209, 210.
Ole R. Holsti, American Public Opinion on the Iraq War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), in a necessarily provisional judgement, finds that survey evidence on the state of public opinion played a ‘very limited role in the policy-making process’ but that this was not to say that the administration was ‘indifferent’, while surveys themselves showed a ‘growing public disenchantment’ (pp. 142, 147).
This was ‘perhaps the best supported empirical hypothesis that contemporary International Relations can offer’ (Chris Brown, Understanding International Relations (London: Macmillan and New York: St Martin’s, 1997), p. 225).
NATO membership was another issue that was regularly placed before a national electorate. In Spain, the incoming Socialist government in the 1980s agreed that NATO membership would be determined by a national referendum, which took place in 1986; there was a referendum in Hungary on NATO membership in 1997, which was also supportive. For a comprehensive review, see Matt Qvortrup, ed., Referendums around the World: The Continued Growth of Direct Democracy (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2014).
See Public Opinion Survey Residents of Ukraine, carried out for the International Republican Institute by Rating Group Ukraine, at http://www.iri.org/sites/default/files/2012%20July%2023%20Survey%20of%20Ukrainian%20Public%20 Opinion%2C%20May%2011-June%202%2C%202012.pdf, last accessed 7 March 2013 (fieldwork took place between 11 May and 2 June and the number of respondents was 1200). In another formulation, Ukrainian public opinion was described as ‘divided, passive, and not terribly concerned with foreign affairs’ (Victor Chudowsky and Taras Kuzio, ‘Does public opinion matter in Ukraine? The case of foreign policy’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, vol. 36, no. 3 (September 2001), pp. 273–290, at p. 274).
Ole R. Holsti, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, revised edn (Ann Arbor: University of Michingan Press, 2004), p. 298.
We raise some of these issues in our first chapter (pp. 21–29). Particularly relevant discussions include Ilya Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy: Nationalism and Leadership in Poland, Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
Iver B. Neumann, Uses of The Other: ‘The East’ in European Identity Formation (Manchester: Manchester University Press and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and
Ray Taras, ed., Russia’s Identity in International Relations: Images, Perceptions, Misperceptions (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).
For a comprehensive review of survey findings in the early postcommunist years, see Matthew Wyman, Public Opinion in Postcommunist Russia (London: Macmillan and New York: St Martin’s, 1997); there are more analytically oriented discussions in
James Alexander, Political Culture in Post-Communist Russia: Formlessness and Recreation in a Traumatic Transition (Basingstoke: Macmillan and New York: St Martin’s, 2000), and
Ellen Carnaghan, Out of Order: Russian Political Values in an Imperfect World (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). Cross-national survey research including but not limited to East European countries has meanwhile become increasingly feasible: for an inventory, see
Kazimierz M. Slomczynski and Irina Tomescu-Dubrow, ‘Representation of post-communist European countries in cross-national public opinion surveys’, Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 53, no. 4 (July–August 2006), pp. 42–52.
Richard A. Krueger, Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for Applied Research, 2nd edn (Thousand Oaks, CA, and London: Sage, 1994), p. 238. There is a substantial methodological literature: for representative recent discussions see for instance
Rosaline Barbour, Doing Focus Groups (Thousand Oaks, CA, and London: Sage, 2007),
Monique M. Hennink, International Focus Group Research. A Handbook for the Health and Social Sciences (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and the comprehensive collection that is brought together in
Graham R. Walden, ed., Focus Group Research, 4 vols (Thousand Oaks, CA, and London: Sage, 2012). There is also a (somewhat derivative) Russian-language literature, which includes
S. A. Belanovsky, Metod fokus-grupp (Moscow: Nikkolo-Media, 2001) and
O. T. Mel’nikova, Fokus-gruppy: metody, metodologiya, modelirovanie (Moscow: Aspekt Press, 2007).
Popular orientations towards foreign policy issues are considered in Neil Munro, ‘Which way does Ukraine face? Popular orientations toward Russia and Western Europe’, Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 54, no. 6 (November–December 2007), pp. 43–58, and
Nathaniel Copsey, Public Opinion and the Making of Foreign Policy in the ‘New Europe’. A Comparative Study of Poland and Ukraine (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). The implications of Ukraine’s cultural diversity for its geopolitical choices are spelled out in, for instance,
Larissa M. L. Zaleska Onyshkevych and Maria G. Rewakowicz, eds, Contemporary Ukraine on the Cultural Map of Europe (Armonk, NY and London: Sage, 2009).
Kubicek, for instance, found age, changes in income (but not incomes themselves) and location to be statistically significant predictors of foreign policy orientations in Ukraine (Paul Kubicek, ‘Regional polarisation in Ukraine: public opinion, voting and legislative behaviour’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 52, no. 2 (March 2000), pp. 273–294, at p. 282). Earlier work by the present authors has also suggested that age, as well as education, location, economic circumstances and gender, makes a difference (
Stephen White, Ian McAllister and Margot Light, ‘Enlargement and the new outsiders’, Journal of Common Market Studies, vol. 40, no. 1 (March 2002), pp. 135–153, at pp. 143–144), and (in Ukraine) language or cultural factors (
Stephen White, Ian McAllister and Valentina Feklyunina, ‘Belarus, Russia and Ukraine: East or West?’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, vol. 12, no. 3 (August 2010), pp. 344–367, at pp. 355 and 358–359).
‘Poslanie Federal’nomu Sobraniyu Rossiiskoi Federatsii’, Rossiiskaya gazeta, 26 April 2005, pp. 3–4, at p. 3. On ‘Soviet nostalgia’ more generally see Stephen White, ‘Communist nostalgia and its consequences in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine’, in David Lane, ed., The Transformation of State Socialism. System Change, Capitalism or Something Else? (London and New York: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 35–56, and
Stephen White, ‘Soviet nostalgia and Russian politics’, Journal of Eurasian Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (January 2010), pp. 1–9.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Stephen White and Valentina Feklyunina
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
White, S., Feklyunina, V. (2014). Mass Publics and Foreign Policy Preferences. In: Identities and Foreign Policies in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137453112_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137453112_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43213-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-45311-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political Science CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)