State Dept, Aliens, and Constructivism, OH MY!

I kinda wish we had discussed our visit to the department of state in class or at some point, so I’ll share with you what I thought briefly. I must admit that I didn’t know a lot about what the department of state did before we went, so in this way it was an informative and enlightening experience. It’s pretty cool that we have such a huge and impressive network of people from our nation that deal with diplomacy. Without them, our country probably would not hold such great power because our extensive international relations give us indisputable authority in the world community. However, when Gregg Sullivan was discussing some of what he does for his job I found myself debating the ethics of his role. Did any of you? I have a problem with people pushing their ideas and beliefs on others, regardless if the other people mind or not. It struck me that some of his techniques used were similar to propaganda… his entire job is to get people to like the United States by forcing ourselves on them. Why can’t we just let them form their own opinions? If they don’t like us then there is probably a reason behind that that we should address before we force all of our programs and education on them. I do believe that it’s important for us to help other countries through education and various programs, but there is a fine line that we need to be careful not to cross. I firmly believe we shouldn’t be pushing ourselves on others, but simply focusing on helping only when help is asked for.


Moving on, class on Friday was pretty all over the place… aliens here, aliens there. One thing that PTJ asked but I never had a chance to respond to was whether or not we could actually take our analysis of aliens landing on the white house lawn and apply it to real world politics. I am going to be bold by saying that we cannot. Although it was an interesting situation and some parts of our responses are applicable, discussing aliens completely alienates this situation from reality. It comes down to the fact that we have no previous history with aliens to gauge how we would interact while we will have substantial history with any hypothetical human attacker/invader/peace-comer (whichever way you want to think about it) that would influence our response. Therefore in real world politics, we would have this history to rely on. Along these same lines, we can identify more easily with other humans and identity plays a huge role in interaction, according to constructivists. We would react differently to humans than to extraterrestrial beings… bottom line. It’s interesting to relate aliens landing on the white house lawn to a human invasion, but in reality there are so many differences between the two because of identity and lack of previous relations that the response from our government would be fundamentally dissimilar. So, it’s hard to say that our analysis of an alien landing could actually be compared to world politics.


My opinion on constructivism as a whole is positive… I think it’s a great way to view world politics. I’m not so convinced how realistic it is, though, since there are so many important points that it doesn’t address. But putting that aside, I’m really into social psychology and I think that if you bring it down to that level of interpretation you can pretty much explain everything and anything… ever! There’s so much gray in constructivism, so much up for interpretation and creative analysis unlike the black and white of realism and, in some ways, liberalism too.