7
and Russian states are forced to find a balance of interests in such very complex and counter-
intuitive issues of their internal and external geopolitics.
The political elite and the media of Western countries, pursuing the goal of uniting civil society
in the face of the threat of global terrorism, purposefully shape images of the enemy of democracy,
global terrorism, the axis of evil, the haven of terrorists, etc. And now the active promotion of the
"culture of abolition", including the one that is applied to Russia, actively continues the three-
hundred-year tradition of Russophobia and the fight against everything Russian. Russophobia has
acquired in the West not just a domestic nature, but has become a state policy, a mobilizing factor
of the "collective West", revives the era of block confrontation of the "Iron Curtain" era. However,
the "image of the enemy" as such, as a social phenomenon, is not only a legacy of the Cold War era
and
an achievement of the present, but has long-lasting and specific domestic political traditions
with reference to the countries studied (the United States and Great Britain). It is easy to figure out
the political goals and mechanisms created by the stimulators of the emergence of the "image of the
enemy" in the geopolitics of these two great powers of the world. These include the efforts of the
United States to create an image of the enemy on the eve of the NATO war against Serbia, as well
as before the invasion to Iraq; the actions of some American politicians to form the image of hostile
"they-groups", etc. Therefore, it becomes relevant for historians to study the process of forming the
image of the enemy in the first turbulent decades of the 20th century in general and, above all, as it
was done in the USA and Great Britain in particular, and especially in the aspect associated with
the aggravation of the "Armenian problem" at that time, to which insufficient attention is still paid
in modern historical science.
However, it should be noted that the intensification of globalization processes in the modern
world objectively, according to the laws of dialectics, gives rise to an equally powerful opposite
process – the growth of ethno-national movements, which makes the geopolitical picture of the
modern world very motley and diverse. And the first signs of this phenomenon appeared already in
the first two decades of the 20th century – the time of the activation of radical national movements
in Europe, including the Ukrainian national movement, the destruction of the last ancient European
empires (Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman) and the subsequent
formation of a number of
European national states (first of all, according to "14 points" of the US President W. Wilson's
Doctrine, April 1917). So, the study of the manifestations of this very significant phenomenon in
the geopolitical sense of shaping the "image of the enemy" in the period under study on the
material of the history of the United States and Great Britain, in particular in the aspect associated
with the heightened Armenian problem, is of great scientific importance.
In this context, it should be noted that any "national issue" or "national problem" (the definition
depends on the conceptual apparatus chosen by one or another researcher) includes the problem of
national self-determination of a particular people, the question of which is actualized in world
geopolitics at one time or another. This may be as a desire to create their own national state (it was
in this plane that the Ukrainian national question arose during the First World War (1914-1918) and
thereafter), or a desire to remain within the state in which the people were before, but to have their
own national–cultural autonomy or other forms of national-cultural expression. It should be noted
that the "Armenian problem", the aggravation of which emerged precisely at the time studied,
generally belonged to the second type of national problems, while having its own specifics.
For a long time, the consolidation of peoples took place according to the "us/them" antithesis. It
should be noted that in the process of any kind of interaction between states and peoples, certain
ideas about other countries are formed, well-established images and stereotypes are created. This is
a very complex phenomenon, as well as the mechanisms of its formation,
including the subject,
object, circumstances of formation, forms of interaction, etc. Naturally, the conditions of armed
confrontation between states are extreme situations not only in the relations of countries and
peoples, but also in their mutual perception, which also obeys certain laws. An armed enemy,
bringing
death and destruction, is perceived by the population in a fundamentally different way
than a partner in the field of economics, culture, science, education. Stereotypes of the perception
of the peoples of the peaceful period during the military confrontation inevitably transform into the
image of the enemy, especially if the state purposefully influences its population by means of
8
propaganda. Since the beginning of the 20th century, world history has been extremely saturated
with wars and armed conflicts, when unprecedented development and dissemination reached the
media, as well as technologies of influence on both the consciousness and the subconscious of
people. It is not by chance that the "image of the enemy" – as an ideological
and psychological
construct - took a significant place among the numerous phenomena of mass consciousness in the
20th century. The consciousness of American and English societies at all their levels was no
exception.
In the human, historical and even philosophical aspect, the United States and Great Britain are
related substances. According to the American researcher John Ryder, American society, especially
in the early stages, was formed on the basis of British Puritanism, which were reflected in the
idealistic works of James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. According to Ryder,
the studies of British philosophers John Locke, Isaac Newton, John Wise and Jonathan Mayhew
greatly influenced
political traditions, especially foreign policy (See: American Philosophy.
Introduction. – M., 2008. – p. 576, p. 31). This is both the paradox and the regularity of the
development of the so-called Anglo-Saxon foreign policy tradition, which has come a long way
from the opposition at the ideological level of the American colonies and its former metropolis,
through the competition of the new doctrine of Woodrow Wilson and the British plan of Edward
Smets to reform the Atlantic empire, which was proposed by the ideologists of American foreign
policy after World War II, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski (Kissinger G. Diplomacy. –
M., 1997. – 848 p.; Brzezinski Z. A large chessboard. M., 2000. – 256 p.).
According to a significant cohort of researchers, it was the United States that became the force
that pushed Britain after World War II, and reached the point where complete criticism and
rejection of the ideas and approaches of the former colony were replaced by copying and imitation.
During the First World War and in the first post-war years, especially during the settlement of the
Armenian problem, the United States almost for the first time in world politics had the initiative to
resolve the Armenian issue and was almost the main country where a large-scale and effective
propaganda campaign was launched to form the image of the enemy-the German and the enemy-
the Turk.
Dostları ilə paylaş: