Images of the World in the Year 2000: A Comparative Ten Nation Study 9783110805321, 9789027975515

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
List of participants in the Year 2000 project
List of abbreviations and explanations
PART I Introduction
1 On the future, future studies and future attitudes
2 Optimism versus pessimism
PART II National samples compared
3 The future: A forgotten dimension
4 The future: A dimension being discovered
5 Data, methods, interpretations: A discussion
6 Replication on a nation: The Federal Republic of Germany
7 Replication on a youth group: The students
8 The Japanese image of the future
9 Opinions' shift in time
PART III The social background of the images
10 Images of the woman and the family
11 Age groups and the future
12 War and peace as conceived in various social group
13 Social strata and attitudes towards peace and wa
14 Social position and the image of the future
PART IV The content of the images
15 Homology of predictions and wishes
16 The powerful, the powerless and the future
17 Knowledge of military alliances
18 Young believers in a world state
19 Social structure and ideologies of peace
20 Intranational and international social position and peace attitudes
21 Images of other people's images
PART V Conclusions
22 The future : Forgotten, and to be discovered
PART VI Appendix
23 History and organization of the Year 2000 project
24 The basis and background of data interpretation
25 Description of the Indian sample
26 Social position, dogmatism and social participation as independent variables
27 The Year 2000 questionnaire and the marginals of 11 nations
28 List of questionnaire items with abbreviations used
29 List of project publications
30 Short biographies of the authors
Index of names
Index of subjects

Citation preview

Images of the world in the year 2000

Publications of the European Coordination Centre for Research and Documentation in Social Sciences

7

Mouton The Hague - Paris

Images of the world in the year 2000 A comparative ten nation study Edited by H.ORNAUER, H.WIBERG, A.SICINSKI, J.GALTUNG

Humanities Press Atlantic Highlands N.J.

Mouton The Hague - Paris

Published 1976 in the United States of America by Humanities Press Inc., Atlantic Highlands N J . ISBN: 0 391 00647 9

ISBN: 90 279 7551 5

( M o u t o n

' ^

Ha6Ue)

© 1976, European Coordination Centre for Research and Documentation in Social Sciences, and Mouton & Co. Printed in the Netherlands

Preface

In 1966, the first draft of the questionnaire for the survey presented in this book was made. It is an edifying thought that it has been possible, since then, to muster the considerable amount of international cooperation that has been necessary to carry out interviews in a great number of countries, and to establish a not too hierarchical division of labour, finally resulting in a joint book. The list of authors represents East and West, both in the global and in the European sense. It is obvious, therefore, that the reader is not confronted with a homogeneous book, but let us add immediately that this is not an apology on our part. On the contrary, we consider precisely this to be an achievement, and a rather rare one at that: It is not very often possible to examine what happens when scholars with different theoretical and other perspectives sit down to work with the same data, and it is our hope that the reader will - at least to some extent - share the fascination, and challenge, we experienced in trying to assemble a book from the plethora of contributions received. On the other hand, we have to be aware of the fact that the data analysed and interpreted in this book were obtained through a survey. Surveys have obvious strengths and weaknesses. They may tell us something about what is in people's minds, very little about what is in the back of their minds or deep down in their subconsciousness, and nothing (or next to nothing) about structural relations not reflected in their consciousness at all. Thus it goes without saying that the survey method is only one out of many available to the student of human society in general and its future in particular. More precisely, the survey method is so person-oriented and attitude-oriented that it is a poor method for the exploration of structure-oriented theories, such as the Marxist approaches to the understanding of human society. This bias was clear from the very beginning and does not reflect any opinion as to which perspective is more valid.

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It should also be clear that the editors have not regarded it as their task to press some common perspective upon the different contributions, neither in terms of theoretical orientation nor technique of analysis, nor in terms of traditional academic disciplines. Apart from aiming at achieving some degree of homogeneity in certain formal respects, it was our privilege to assist the different authors, by a stimulating and open discussion, in expressing their views and in presenting their conclusions - nothing more. Nor would any such pressure have been successful if anybody had made such an attempt at all. The present project has been different from most other comparative projects on an international level by being, in a sense, highly democratic in nature. Each nation financed and carried out its own data collection, and all decisions about who was to be in charge of what parts of the common work were consequently the outcome of discussions inter pares. There is no reason to conceal that this led to many difficulties for some of the participants due to the problems associated with keeping a project running over several years. There is no reason for us to anticipate here the chapter on the history and organisation of the project by going into the details of the various stumblingblocks it was necessary to negotiate; suffice it to mention here that we feel that the very structure of the project has been a precondition for its heterogeneity which - in turn - we claim as a merit. The European Coordination Centre for Research and Documentation in Social Sciences had precisely the function that its name implies; and when mentioning Johan Galtung as project director, it should immediately be added that coordinator or moderator would have been more adequate descriptions. It is necessary to mention the price we had to pay for this democratic procedure as well as for the considerable number of co-authors, and the heterogeneity of the group of people who contributed to this volume. This price was the time necessary for completing our book. There are good reasons to suspect that opinions on some problems surveyed in 1967/68 have undergone substantial changes since then, but, on the other hand, we believe that the bulk of our more general conclusions is still valid and important. The presentation of the project in the following chapters is to a large extent a mirror image of the state of the social sciences in Europe with all its good and bad aspects. Probably none of the original project participants would have dared to be so pessimistic as to anticipate that the project would take that much time to complete, nor so optimistic as to anticipate that the successful cooperation of researchers from so many countries would eventually result in a joint book such as the one presented

Preface

VII

here. Needless to say, we would not have succeeded without the organisational framework of the Vienna Centre which, at times, was the only point of reference in the flow of changing participants and interests. The authors presented in this book could no doubt be classified in many different ways. Two groups of very recent standing are also found among them: Future researchers and peace researchers. Several of the authors would place themselves in one, or both, of these groups. The editors did not consider it necessary to divide contributions according to these two aspects, the more so, since they regard these aspects as inseparable. The reader will certainly find out for himself which aspect was stressed by which author. A few words may well be appropriate regarding the organisation of this book. First of all, it should be pointed out that one type of article or chapter is almost completely missing: The 'national report', with the exception of the two non-European nations, Japan and India, and the Federal Republic of Germany, who joined the project too late for the comparative analysis. But even in two of these three cases the contributions include comparative aspects. Of course, each national team was free to write about and publish findings concerning its own nation (see the list of publications). But the research reported here is trans-national in the sense that it is comparative. Whenever possible this is done with all ten nations, but it was considered necessary to give some additional information on the two Asian samples in order to put the European bulk of the study in perspective; and the report about the replication of the study in the Federal Republic of Germany was included as an indirect effort to tap a possible influence of time. Secondly, it should also be pointed out that the study is inductive and exploratory, not deductive and verifying-falsifying. The study was not carried out according to a set of preconceived, generally shared ideas, hypotheses, theories, or perspectives. On the contrary, each team, and even each researcher, was asked to see to it that the questionnaire contained what he was particularly interested in, and these interests were diverse, if not necessarily divergent. One may agree or disagree with the approach chosen, and since there are merits and demerits to both types of studies, an approach combining elements of both is probably recommendable in general. But in the realities of a large cross-national study this changes to some extent, for the simple reason that there is no generally acceptable theoretical framework. The only way of obtaining a consensus would have been by recruiting like-minded researchers from like-minded nations - and that price we did not want to pay. Since the study was to be carried out on a basis of equality, no theoretical perspective was superimposed on anybody in order to achieve an artificial,

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'shared' approach. For that reason it also goes without saying that views expressed by one author are not necessarily shared by others - and it also goes without saying that we have discussed and modified our views over the years, in the light of criticism and suggestions. However, we did not consider complete consensus in the interpretation of the data as a significant goal. Much more significant was the goal of having each author or team of authors select a subject of special interest and pursue it according to his or their own inclinations. Therefore, the ultimate responsibility for each contribution rests with its author(s). The book is divided into five main parts according to a very simple scheme. The first and the last part purport to offer what introductions and conclusions would generally be expected to give to a reader: Reflections on the intellectual framework within which the study is located, and some afterthoughts, not in the form of a summary, but as an effort to add perspectives on the basis of the findings. These findings then, are reported in the three other parts. Part II is devoted to the marginals - a misnomer for what actually turned out to be the most meaningful way of analysing the data: Using 'nation' as the basic variable. The reader will find two interpretations of the marginals, partly diverging - and a discussion between the two authors. Many of the issues brought out in that discussion are familiar to social scientists. Some, however, relate to the particular area of future studies only. In addition to this there are chapters on the replication of the study in an additional country, that is the Federal Republic of Germany; on a special group of respondents, that is students; there is also a report on the Japanese sample; and finally, a comparison of the present study with its predecessor, the Images of a Disarmed World study. Part III focusses on independent variables. These chapters aim at the study of the impact of the social background on the images, using sex, age, class and social position in general as ways of bringing the social background into focus. Part IV focusses on the dependent variables. In this part there is more in-depth analysis of the content of the images and less focus on their social distribution, although the latter is certainly also found in most of the chapters. In fact, some chapters might as well have been included in Part III, but the classification in the table of contents is the best we could think of. Part V presents some conclusions and reflections. The reader who is interested in hearing more about the history, the organisation and the methodology of the study or who would like to have some details on the data collected is requested to consult the

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Appendix. In this last part of the book we have not only included the standard questionnaire but also the percentages for all countries. The reader who is not quite convinced that he would like to read the entire book from the beginning to the end, and in that order, might find it useful to start with the chapters giving the analysis of the marginals and their discussion. Hopefully this would whet his appetite and, equally hopefully, this little guide to the book might give him some idea as to where to turn to satisfy his interests. Let it only be added that if there is one thing the authors hope for, it is some kind of feedback from readers, perhaps also some query about non-published aspects of the data - including enquiries about how to do secondary analyses. One remark should also be added about the language of this present book. The editors did not consider it their major task to pay too much attention to the literary style of the various contributions written in English by the authors. With the help of Mr. Franz Drahos, Vienna, the contributions were 'language-cleaned' so as to eliminate evident mistakes of grammar and style, but the aim was always to keep as close to the original as possible in order to avoid the danger of changing the meaning the authors wanted to give their texts. The reader should keep in mind that only one of the 23 authors has English as his mother tongue, and that the authors, as well as the editors, are social scientists and not linguists. Therefore, we hope that to the readers will also apply what has always applied to the project participants: That the discussion about the scientific content will be more important than its formal presentation. As to the usual acknowledgements, we felt that the whole list would be too long to justify burdening the preface with it. Instead, the reader is referred to the acknowledgements made by our fellow authors which will thus serve a double function.. Let us only present here those acknowledgements which will not be made by individual participants. First of all, the thanks of all authors and editors go to our anonymous respondents in the various participating countries, without whose cooperation the whole study and the presentation of its results in the present book would not have been possible. Secondly, we thank all interviewers, technical assistants and students who helped collecting and analysing the data. We appreciate the help and the hospitality of those participants and those responsible institutions of their country who made possible the various project meetings and thus contributed in an important way to the communication between the project participants. Furthermore, we would like to express our thanks to those scientific institutions which - to some extent - put their computer facilities at our disposal for the preparation or execution of the data processing necessary for the comparative analysis : The Institute for Advanced Studies,

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Vienna; the University of Essex, the University of Lund and the University of Oslo. Our warm thanks also go to our colleague David Matthews who was of invaluable help in 'cleaning' the data of the ten countries before their being deposited in the Survey Archives at the University of Essex. He also prepared the final version of the marginals in the Appendix. The multilateral communication between the project participants and between the editors, was also aided by grants from the Nordic Cooperation Committee for International Politics, Including Peace and Conflict Research and from the Norwegian Councilfor Research in the Sciences and Humanities (NAVF), Oslo. We finally gratefully acknowledge the help of Mrs. Annie Lennkh, who successfully coordinated the project in her capacity as a research secretary of the Vienna Centre from 1966 to 1968. Vienna/Lund Warsaw/Oslo

H. Ornauer/H. Wiberg A. Siciriski/J. Galtung

Contents

Preface by the editors List of participants in the Year 2000 project List of abbreviations and explanations

v xm xv

PART I: I N T R O D U C T I O N 1. On the future, future studies and future attitudes, by Johan Galtung 2. Optimism versus pessimism, by Andrzej Sicihski

3 23

P A R T II: NATIONAL SAMPLES C O M P A R E D 3. The future: A forgotten dimension, by Johan Galtung 4. The future: A dimension being discovered, by Andrzej Sicihski 5. Data, methods, interpretations: A discussion, by Johan Galtung and Andrzej Sicihski 6. Replication on a nation: The Federal Republic of Germany, by Thomas Kutsch and Helmut Ornauer 7. Replication on a youth group: The students, by Hakan Wiberg 8. The Japanese image of the future, by Takashi Inoguchi and Kinhide Mushakoji 9. Opinions' shift in time, by Andrzej Sicihski

45 121 163 171 185 217 237

P A R T III: THE SOCIAL B A C K G R O U N D O F THE IMAGES 10. Images of the woman and the family, by Eva Bartova 11. Age groups and the future, by Hakan Wiberg, in collaboration with A leksander Lutyk, Dorota Mycielska and Andrzej Sicihski

255 279

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12. War and peace as conceived in various social groups, by Karel Kara and Jan Rehdk 13. Social strata and attitudes towards peace and war, by Jacek Kurczewski 14. Social position and the image of the future, by Johan Galtung

317 355 381

PART IV: THE CONTENT OF THE IMAGES 15. Homology of predictions and wishes, by Teresa Konwicka 16. The powerful, the powerless and the future, by Knud S. Larsen 17. Knowledge of military alliances, by David Matthews, Periti Joenniemi and Volevi Arosalo 18. Young believers in a world state, by Kjell Skjelsbaek 19. Social structure and ideologies of peace, by Volevi Arosalo 20. Intranational and international social position and peace attitudes, by Ake Hartmann and Knud S. Larsen 21. Images of other people's images, by Andrzej Sicihski

403 421 441 475 503 529 549

PART V: CONCLUSIONS 22. The future : Forgotten, and to be discovered, by Johan Galtung, Helmut Ornauer and Hàkan Wiberg

561

PART VI: APPENDIX 23. History and organization of the Year 2000 project, by Helmut Ornauer and Hàkan Wiberg 24. The basis and background of data interpretation, by Helmut Ornauer 25. Description of the Indian sample, by Bishwa B. Chatterjee 26. Social position, dogmatism and social participation as independent variables, by Kees van der Veer 27. The year 2000 questionnaire and the marginals of 11 nations, prepared by David Matthews and Helmut Ornauer 28. List of questionnaire items with abbreviations used 29. List of project publications 30. Short biographies of the authors Index of names Index of subjects

589 601 613 621 637 703 711 715 719 723

List of participants in the Year 2000 project*

Institutions Czechoslovakia Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Prague

Main researchers

Eva Bârtovâ Karel Kara Miroslav Soukup Vaclav Stupka

Finland Peace Research Institute, University of Tampere

Eino Hosia Pertti Joenniemi

Great Britain Institute of Sociology, University of Essex

Robin Jenkins David Matthews

India Department of Psychology and Education, Gandhian Institute of Studies, Varanasi Japan Institute of International Relations Sophia University, Tokyo

Bishwa B. Chatterjee Sheo S. Singh

Kinhide Mushakoji

* Countries and researchers in alphabetical order. Only the names of those researchers are given who have (also) contributed to the multinational project in other ways than in writing a contribution to the present book. The institutions listed are those the researchers were connected with during most of their activity on the project.

List of participants

XIV

Institutions

in the Year 2000 project Main researchers

Netherlands

Polemological Institute, University of Groningen

Peter Boskma Fenna van der Burg

Norway

International Peace Research Institute, Oslo

Johan Galtung (Project director) Âke Hartmann

Poland

Group of Social Prognoses, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw

Jacek Kurczewski Andrzej Sicinski

Spain

Public Opinion Institute, Madrid

Salustiano del Campo Juan D.Nicolas José Torregrosa

Yugoslavia

Institute of Sociology and Philosophy, University of Ljubljana

Katja Boh

In the Federal Republic of Germany the national study was carried out by the Institute for Comparative Social Research in Cologne, the responsible researcher being Thomas Kutsch. Student

surveys:

Federal Republic of Germany, Walter Jaide (Hannover) Great Britain, Robin Jenkins (Colchester) New Zealand, Jack Shallcrass (Wellington) Sweden, Herman Schmid (Lund) USA, Andrzej Sicinski (Ann Arbor)

List of abbreviations and explanations

1. In all the tables throughout the book the countries and the corresponding samples are abbreviated according to international licence plates: National samples: CS D (FRG) E GB IND J

Czechoslovakia Federal Republic of Germany Spain Great Britain India Japan

N NL PL PLp SF YU

Norway Netherlands Poland (main survey) Poland (pretest) Finland Yugoslavia

S

Sweden

US

United States

Student samples: Ds GBs NZ

Federal Republic of Germany Great Britain New Zealand

2. Other abbreviations : NA DK AR

No answer Don't know Acceptance ratio

categories of reactions of respondents

XVI

C c P p M

List of abbreviations and explanations Center (international) center (intranational) Periphery (international) periphery (intranational) Middle position

in chapters dealing with social position theory

3. If not otherwise indicated correlation coefficient always means Pearson's Product-Moment correlation coefficient r, and rank correlation coefficient means rho (Q). 4. Nation and country are used by the authors synonymously, they are interchangeable. 5. The questionnaire and the raw percentage data are presented in the Appendix. If an author refers to a certain question in his text he uses the number given to this question in the Appendix.

PART I

Introduction

1

JOHAN GALTUNG

On the future, future studies and future attitudes

1. ON FUTURE STUDIES IN GENERAL

This study is about images of the future, or more precisely, of the magic 'Year 2000'. This immediately raises a number of queries that bring to the surface a number of assumptions on the relation between the future that will once come into being, and the type of data this kind of study can give us. Many of these assumptions are negative: They are about the type of conclusion we do not think one can make from this study. Some of them, to be spelled out in the subsequent section, are slightly more positive. But here some views on the nature of future studies in general will be presented. There is of course no direct and simple link between what people think will happen and what eventually will happen. This is not because 'people', in general, are unable to tell or because experts may do better due to their specialized insight. It is rather because of the dialectical nature of change in human society: Contradictions are resolved and arise, they emerge on the social surface, work themselves out - but the total system is so complex that predictions, except in a very gross sense, seem beyond human capability. But this may also be a wrong way of stating the situation. The point is not that prediction is difficult because social systems are complex. It may perhaps be better to say that prediction may be meaningless, for a prediction that rules out certain possibilities and includes others (as any prediction will have to do) may give rise to counteracting and transcending forces - self-denying as well as self-fulfilling. What 'experts' add to this, e.g., when they are used as oracles in Delphi sessions, 1 is specialized and more complex insight and biases. But their predictions assume a lot of stability in the future human and non-human environment. For instance, they usually assume that society will still be interested

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Johan Galtung

in the type of activity their speciality is concerned with. Even more briefly: A continuity is assumed for all predictions with some degree of precision denying that the predictions may themselves make a society transcend itself and lead to a qualitatively different society. Individuals cannot foretell the future, nor can experts, and we do not think that social scientists can look at these data and glean from them insights that will tell us what the future will be like either. There are many reasons for stating this. One of them is what has already been said: Any prediction may, in a human society, be self-denying, including predictions as to how it may be self-denying, at any level in the hierarchy of predictions this would lead to. Another is, of course, that verbal responses to an interview-guide are a very insufficient basis for the understanding of social dynamics. This is not because these verbal responses may not accurately reflect the underlying attitudes - our study is neither worse, nor better, than most other studies in this regard. Nor is it because attitudes are not necessarily translated into action. But it is simply because human consciousness, in any human being, has limited awareness of all the social forces that are 'objective' in the sense that they operate regardless of whether they pass through human minds, are recorded, and even made so explicit that they can be registered by an interviewer equipped with an adequate interview guide. Societies are neither transparent, nor are they quite opaque. Consciousness of structural factors, for instance, is usually low in societies governed according to liberal principles - but it is not completely absent. Society and human consciousness, individual as well as collective, condition each other more than they determine each other. There are 'objective' social forces with a certain Naturgesetzlichkeit, but hardly so well understood, nor so immutable as some Marxists claim. Nor is subjective consciousness so powerful as some liberals claim. Man is somewhere between God and termite, and the future of human society takes shape according to principles somewhere between those underlying the Act of Genesis and termite society. Man has neither the freedom of God - His insight in sufficiency - nor is he condemned to the 'freedom' of the slave, the termite - the insight in necessity. He is somewhere in between, and it is difficult to tell whether over time he becomes more like God or more termite like. 2 Reports from Man's consciousness tell us something, but certainly not all, and certainly not enough. But if we cannot, directly or indirectly, come to any absolute, mutatis mutandis prediction about the year 2000 with this study, or with other studies for that matter, what then can we do? Is there any value in the study at all? One way of answering this is to say that in a sense it is more a study of the present than of the future. It is a study using attitudes,

On the future, future studies and future attitudes

5

expectations, hopes and anxieties concerning the future, particularly the year 2000, as a method that may permit us to understand better the present. What people say they think and hope for the future is conditioned by past experiences and present realities, not by a future not yet there; hence it should serve as a diagnostic signal from various nations and social positions, and add to our insight about international and social structure. But then one may object: If one really wants to study the present, why not rather ask people questions about their fears and hopes for today ? One reason is that this has been done very often, and there seem to be good arguments for also using the future as a projection screen. People may well say that the present is good, that it offers them opportunities, and yet have a dim view of the future. In fact, one of the most challenging questions that can be asked and to some extent answered by our data is precisely: Who are most optimistic concerning the future, those who have a better or a poorer present? It is not a priori obvious what the answer might be. Those who are on the top of the domestic pyramid in a nation itself at the top of the world pyramid of nations might project their feeling of success, of having arrived, collectively as well as individually, develop a feeling that they cannot help growing further, into an increasingly satisfactory future. But they may also feel that their position is not stable, and/or that the future has nothing more to offer, that the limit has been reached, that their heads are against a ceiling with no opening. Here data can to some extent, and will, tell. Whatever is the answer to that type of question, it is obvious that it will colour the present. In that sense the future does condition the present: The view of the future throws some light on the present, however much that view in turn may be conditioned by past and present circumstances. And that light is, in turn, reflected into the near future since images condition what people do now, and that, in turn, will condition in near future. And in that sense this is nevertheless a study of the future, but not of the year 2000, only of the years immediately ahead of us. The future emerges, it is already there, in people's minds, in the contradictions of objective factors, in all the dynamic factors that condition our existence. Man is not a slave of these conditions, nor is he completely free, he is conditioned, not determined. The future opens up for us like a cone; the further out we come, the more latitude will there be: 11 time

. n7 . space of possibilities

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Johan Galtung

For termite society there is only one trajectory of development: replication of status quo. For God any future, and hence any trajectory, is possible. These are the situations of the total slave and the total master respectively. Man is in between - he is a short-run slave, but a long-run God - or at least so we conceive of him here. Thus, for the year 2000,the latitude, or at least what one could call the 'potential latitude', is considerable. But the degree of coupling over time in social systems is also considerable, leaving us with little reason in general to believe that tomorrow will be much different from today. Among the factors conditioning how it will be different, or similar, are the attitudes of people with regard to the present and the future, and more insight in these attitudes may help us understand better social processes of deep significance. Some points in that connection will be developed in the next section. But does not this just mean that we are back to predictions again only with a short time span? No, neither these data, nor any other data we could imagine about past or present render themselves to crystal gazingat least not if the predictions should also be made public. All that we, perhaps, may be able to say is that, given these attitudes and a number of other conditions, it is likely that there will be this or that short-run outcome. In other words, we can make conditional, as opposed to absolute, predictions. We cannot say that these conditions, among them the very attitudes, will not themselves change. All we can say is that if they remain the way they are, then some societies may, for instance, run their heads against this wall, some other societies against that wall. But how good such guesses are is another matter, and we repeat: The bulk of this study is about the present - using projections on the year 2000 as a tool. But there is one exception to this, and that perspective will be treated in the next section. To conclude: When we are studying the images of the world in the year 2000 with population samples from several nations it is not because we think we shall be better able to forecast what the world in the year 2000 will be like the more people we include in the samples and the more nations, not to mention the more representative the samples of people and nations are. Rather, as mentioned, we use the future as a focus in order to learn something about attitude structure and social structure, and above all about people today in various nations in the world. We want to know how they conceive of the future, how they relate to the future, what the future means to them if anything at all. We see the future as a dimension of mankind's existence: We live in the present, but past experiences - individual as well as collective - and future expectations and hopes form a back-drop against which the present is

On the future, future studies and future

attitudes

7

seen. We would like to know more about how the future enters, where it enters and how expectations and hopes mingle and blend in different groups and nations. Not because one thinks an unpredictable future is nevertheless by some process reflected through the consciousness of the thousands of persons interviewed and extracted from that collective consciousness and brought on to the printed page through the operations of a team of survey analysts. It is not the future that shapes the consciousness, but the consciousness that shapes the future. Hence one would like to know more about that consciousness, how it is structured, how it is distributed in the social and international structure, how it is shaped in other words, and how it might possibly be released into action or inaction. 2 . ON THE ROLE OF ATTITUDE RESEARCH IN FUTURE STUDIES

In principles, data on attitudes collected here and now constitute a very limited basis for empirical extrapolations and theoretical speculations. The range of variation from country to country in the year 2000 study is considerable, indicating how dangerous it would have been to extrapolate findings of one country to other countries - and also indicating how unwarranted it would be to extrapolate from the year 2000 study to nations not included in the study, and particularly the nations not located in the general matrix of the design. Thus, a survey like ours carried out in the Peoples' Republic of China, possibly also if carried out in the United States and the Soviet Union, would probably have given very different results, and, as is brought out in the Indian sample, the whole survey is relatively meaningless in countries or districts at the lower end of the conventional technical-economic scale of development. Similar limitations apply to extrapolations from attitudes to behaviour. Some people tend to feel that a criterion of validity in an attitude study lies in concrete behaviour, and particularly in concrete behaviour now. If people show concern for the future in their attitudes, positive or negative, then that concern should somehow be reflected in behaviour patterns today if it is more than a mere verbal reaction. Those who expect a world war to come relatively soon and to affect their country in an irreversible manner should behave differently from those who do not entertain such visions, etc. However, we disagree with that stand. The human mind is more free to imagine than the human body to act. The mind can move relatively freely along the time dimension, the body cannot. Behaviour is conditioned by what is socially possible, and most people are tied and bound by existing role structures that prescribe not only what is legitimate, but also

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what is possible. The human mind can make dashes into the future and bring back visions of enthusiasm or despair, but for the human body to implement this in action the future must, to some extent, already be here, built into social reality.By this we do not mean that a person who predicts nuclear war in the year 2000 cannot take action before, say, the year 1999. It is rather that the type of action he can take is extremely limited by the type of society and world we have today, a world where, for instance, it is given to extremely few individuals to act within roles which have a direct bearing on world affairs. O f course, there is a scope for spontaneous action, for non-structured activity, but we would not use that as a criterion of validity of an attitude. The pessimist who builds his private nuclear shelter will be considered a crank, or overprivileged, even by those who share his fears and his economic means - he will not be seen as prudent. Rather, the criterion of validity of a verbal reaction in an interview study might be whether that speech reaction would be repeated in similar situations, e.g., in day-to-day conversation at a common-sense level, at work, in the family, among friends. If it is, then an attitude study is indicative of a climate of opinion that may not be directly related to behaviour, or at least not in any simple way, but constitutes a structure in its own right, a part of the social ethos. A s such it both constrains and directs future behaviour, but on this we can only speculate with the kind of data at our disposal..We do not know the speech reactions of our respondents in other social situations, but we have no particular reason to assume that they would be different in any systematic way from what the present study reveals. Let us now simply assume that our data are valid in this modest sense and bring in the general problem of extrapolation in time from the data. Even, as we have argued in the first section, if we cannot predict the future of human society at all (except in very gross terms and for very short ranges only); even, as we have argued here, if we cannot predict future behaviour of the individual respondent from his attitudes towards the future, and not even his present behaviour for that matter, is there nevertheless the possibility of predicting future attitudes? A n d what would be the implication of such predictions? That one can to some extent predict present attitudes from other present attitudes is generally assumed in social science; there is overwhelming evidence to the effect that attitudes come in clusters. But in this particular study, even prediction of present attitudes from other attitudes seems problematic because so many correlations are so low. However, in our view this is not a sign that this questionnaire is invalid, or that the questionnaire is in general a wrong instrument. Rather, it is a finding in its own right, a sign of lack of crystal-

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lisation, an indication that the future has not become an issue structuring, even polarising, men and the minds of men. We shall return to this important point below, and in the concluding chapter. But lack of crystallisation today does not necessarily mean lack of crystallisation tomorrow, nor does lack of crystallisation today militate against the possibility of making predictions of attitude distributions in the future from attitude distributions today. But it is obvious that any such prediction would be of the conditional type, with a number of ceteris paribus assumptions; it would not be a prediction of the absojute kind valid under mutatis mutandis assumptions. More particularly, since any such prediction will have built into it an element of extrapolation, it would probably be insensitive to events, i.e., to sudden, dramatic changes that restructure societies and people's thinking about societies. One might object that one should be able also to predict the attitudinal reactions to such events, but that objection does not take into consideration the point made in the introduction: A society may transcend itself. In any society there are certain invariances, certain 'laws' that serve as bases for prediction and extrapolations. But the laws of a new society are not only unknown, but also unknowable - that is what makes the society new. Thus imagine that a major eco-catastrophe takes place, e.g., in the form of lack of oxygen, a very high level of overpopulation, a much higher level of poisoning in water resources than today, or a nuclear catastrophe. In such cases new social forms would emerge and to attempt to predict attitudinal patterns in such societies would be foolhardy. But under the assumption of what Herman Kahn calls a 'surprise-free world' something may perhaps be said about future attitudinal structure. But the problem is how to do it, how to arrive at diachronic conclusions on the basis of synchronic data. And another problem is whether this is at all important or interesting. But let us start with the more technical methodological issue. One way of doing this, is, of course, to collect diachronic data. With data about attitude distributions not only from several points in space, but from several points in time, extrapolations might be made under ceteris paribus assumptions. There are certainly many methodological problems involved: 1. Which extrapolation formula to use: Linear (which one is tempted to do if one has only two time points) or curvilinear, and in the latter case, which one? 2. The problem of comparability: Should the stimuli (the questions) be the same so that a trend analysis is possible, or should also the sample be the same so that a panel analysis becomes possible? More funda-

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Johan Galtung mentally, does 'same' at different periods of time, which means in different contexts, mean identity, or should both stimuli and sample undergo some variation in order to control for some changes that one would not like to have reflected in the data?

However, such efforts to try to extrapolate from a time interval in the past to a time point in the future does not look very convincing. It is very mechanical and non-dynamic and does not reflect in its simple extrapolationism any internal dynamics in the society. It looks at the surface of the society, registers some changes, but assumes a basic internal consistency and constancy. To bring in only one point: There is an underlying assumption that the issues will be the same in the future; that what is a basic, salient issue today will also be so in the future. Everybody knows that assumption to be wrong. An attitude with regard to, say, the confrontation between the two nuclear superpowers meant something completely different in the early sixties, when this was possibly issue number one to very many Europeans, from what it means in the early seventies when it competes with a higher social consciousness in general, a concern with the environment, with Western and Eastern European integration and with what is (wrongly) called North-South problems for the attention of the human mind. 3 This means that the issue is embedded in a completely different attitudinal environment, and any extrapolation on any single attitudinal dimension becomes much too atomistic to reflect such complexities. Actually, this type of problem is probably much more important than how many time points one has observed in the past. Obviously one needs more than one to base one's speculations on ; synchronic data alóne do not yield any trend that can serve as a basis for some extrapolation. But even the trends may be highly misleading, and besides, we have only synchronic data anyhow. But there is another way out which is much more helpful. Instead of trying to answer such problems as 'if 20% are optimistic with regard to personal/domestic/global future today, how many will be optimistic tomorrow?', the problem might be 'if men are more optimistic than women, what will be the situation tomorrow?' In other words, instead of a simple quantitative problem a more complex qualitative problem where attitudes are related to structural variables, synchronically, and some theory about the internal dynamics of attitude distributions in social structure is made careful use of. Obviously, the result will depend on what aspect of the social structure one takes as a basis for such speculations about the dynamics of attitude distributions. Generally, one might distinguish between two types of approaches. First, there is the obvious idea of using age and mobility of

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the respondents; second, there is social position. Let us explore these two possibilities. Future time can be brought into most synchronic studies through the age of respondents, but certainly not in an unproblematic way. If we would assume that people do not change their attitudes, that attitudes once acquired are nearly impossible to lose, and that people bring them with them through life, then it would be simple. This may not be a more unwarranted assumption than many other assumptions made in extrapolationist future studies, but it has its own problems. If one divides the sample in cohorts according to the decade in which they were born, extracts from one synchronic study the attitude distribution typical for each cohort, then there is still one unsolved problem: what about the new cohorts? One may get around that problem by saying that most societies are governed by the people born in one or two particular decades, now about 40 to 60 years old, and that the important thing to know for any future decade is the dominant attitude of the people who will then be in power. The people who by that time will constitute 'youth', will have attitudes that cannot be ascertained today, since they would at most be children, and no basis would exist for inferring their attitudes. However, nor does it generally matter very much: Unless children and youth have real power they would only constitute an attitudinal context of minor significance. This is not an unreasonable approach, but it should probably not be used at the level of a single attitudinal item, only at the level of an attitudinal cluster, a syndrome. It is probably not too unreasonable to assume that each generation (cohort, decade) has a particular mental set, a paradigm with which the world is interpreted, and it may well be that mental set is the result of particularly dramatic events that took place when the generation was in its most formative years, say, between 15 and 30. A generation that was hit in this period by the Second World War will tend to see what happens afterwards in that particular perspective; a generation that was similarly hit by the Indo-China wars will see subsequent events in the light of that particular phenomenon, and so on. Thus, each generation will proceed further into life, along the time dimensions, with a particular type of 'brain damage' resulting from an over-exposure to a certain type of social phenomena that may have created a highly relevant sensitivity at the time, but may also cause basic blindness to other types of phenomena. 4 This type of analysis, based on the idea that yputh brings with it into adulthood and power the values and perspectives they had when they were young, can possibly be made more sophisticated with a number of additional measures. More particularly, instead of siifoply assuming that

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young people will take their attitudes with them into power and that people in power will take their attitudes with them into the grave, one could also look at the differentials between 'power people' and 'young people' today and assume that something of that differential will also be found tomorrow. In other words, instead of merely seeing each generation as being shaped by external events, one can also see generations as shaping each other in all internal social dialectics. Each power generation will create its own counterpoint among the young, and this may give some basis for predicting what counter-generation will emerge later if the present young generation is able to retain its perspectives when it becomes a power generation. Obviously, more detailed data about mobility patterns may be of value here to predict which youth get into which power positions with which attitudes. Then, there is the possibility of proceeding on the basis of another assumption, viz. that the young generation in fact does not bring with it its values, but changes values with changing position and that the young generation will become relatively similar to the present power generation once they arrive at that age and that position. Obviously, if this hypothesis were true, if mankind were always what Margaret Mead refers to as 'post-figurative', 5 human society would not undergo such drastic changes as it seems to do, since it is hard to deny that attitudes not only reflect but also play a role in many of these changes. Moreover, this approach, and the preceding one based on inner social dialectics, both belittle the impact of external events of a dramatic, even traumatic nature. But they are still useful in providing the analyst with some guidelines, some reference points around which the future attitude distribution is likely to be located. There would be one reference point of maximum change where the future power generation has a value distribution identical with the present young generation, and there would be another reference point of minimum change, where the future power generation will be identical with the present power generation. However, if this leads to a very large range of prediction, then it may certainly be objected that it is no prediction at all, only a way of stating possibilities. But that is not necessarily an objection, since this is more or less what future studies should be anyhow as opposed to laying the future in the straitjacket of a single point prediction. Moreover, the minima and the maxima are not necessarily very different: It may be that there is no age differential, that the attitude is uncorrelated with age. In this case one prediction may be that there will be no change in attitudes either - but a better prediction may be that external events will sooner or later force some changes in the attitude distribution, driving some powerful attitudinal wedges between the

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generations. And external events may, indeed, also come about even where there is already such an age difference present and have all kinds of consequences. In short, there is not that much safe ground on which to stand if extrapolation is the goal. Now let us turn to the second approach: An effort to predict future attitude distributions using structural variables other than age and mobility. We shall then refer to these other structural variables generally as 'social position', preferring in this section to be unspecific when it comes to the exact operatipnalization of that term. It can be onedimensional and would then probably be based on occupation, or it can be many-dimensional as in the Social Position Index to be discussed later 6 - which in this connection would have the weakness of including age, already discussed above. To arrive at any diachronic implication from synchronic data theory is obviously needed, and a theory in this connection would have as its assumption that future attitudinal distributions to some extent can be predicted from present attitudinal distributions, using social position as an independent variable. To be more specific, the general theory would be that the center (people with a high social position) in general exerts much more influence on the periphery as far as attitude is concerned than vice versa. Again, speaking in general terms, this will mean that new attitudes will have a tendency to start in the center, then more gradually spread towards the periphery, and then accumulate in the periphery at the same time as there is a certain decrease in the center. An attitude is digested, so to speak, by the social organism. Added to this comes the second assumption, viz. the Marxist idea that the ruling ideology is the ideology of the ruling group. If an attitude is over-represented in the center, then we assume that it is much more likely to be or become a majority view than if it is over-represented in the periphery. In the latter case, it may have been the majority view or perspective, but now it is on the way out. There is an obvious exception to this: Very new attitudes that have just started being formed in the center may not yet have been processed and propagated sufficiently in society at large to have become majority attitudes. And there is also, of course, the possibility that an attitude may be over-represented in the periphery and still be a majority attitude because it has not yet decreased sufficiently. But we would then nevertheless assume it to be on its way out. According to these hypotheses attitudes would be classified according to whether they are over- or under-represented in the center: In the former case we would generally predict an increase for that particular attitude, in the latter case a decrease. If the attitude is already highly over-

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represented in the periphery we would even assume a relatively rapid decrease, or at least that the attitude would be a relatively insignificant one in shaping social behaviour at large. The latter point is actually the most important one in connection with this approach. The approach will not enable us to say in any precise terms what the attitude distribution will be when. This one might perhaps do, given the age dimension approach mentioned above. Provided the attitude distribution on age is sufficiently well known from good surveys, and the present and future age distribution in society is also sufficiently well known from good demographic research, it would merely be a question of combining the two types of information. But in the social position approach there is no theory as to the speed of the social digestion process for any particular item or attitude or issue, not even for one issue area as opposed to another. What one can say is in more qualitative terms: The significance of a certain attitude depends not only on how many hold that attitude but on who holds it. This is not elitism in the traditional sense of the word, focussing on particular occupational positions in the society. The social position concept used here is more complex. But there is no reason for denying that there is an implicit elitism in the entire approach, since those who score high on the Social Position Index (if that approach is taken) would be seen as dominant in the society at large - in general.7 The prediction would simply be that an attitude over-represented in the center is more likely to increase whereas an attitude over-represented in the periphery is more likely to decrease. In short, a simple, qualitative prediction. This approach can then, of course, be combined with a more general group-interest approach. One might study attitudes held by various groups in society, groups in the center as well as in the periphery (economically, politically, culturally speaking), and then try to speculate on changes in the power distribution between these groups. In the age dimension approach above, it has been assumed that age is the only basis for reallocation of persons, particularly into and out of power positions. In other words, it has been assumed that a society is a very stable one as far as class composition is concerned, only that the personnel changes. Similarly, in the social-position approach outlined above it has been assumed that centers and peripheries will be defined pretty much in the same way tomorrow as today, that they differ in their attitudes so that there is a differential on which to base predictions, and that new attitudes enter society in the center and are gradually disseminated from there. In this third approach that we are here indicating, the assumption would be that there may be a revolt from the age and social position periphery against this type of dominance, that, for instance, students and/or the

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working class may come into power and bring with them into power positions completely different values and perspectives. To predict an event of that type in any precise sense seems to be an effort to predict the unpredictable, and to pretend to know what their attitudes would be after takeover, seems to be to pretend to know the unknowable. However, just as for the age-group approach one might reason within the two limits set by two very different assumptions: 1. The new power group will retain the values it had before. 2. A new power group, once it is in power, will take over the values of the old power group. Again, just as obviously as above, both assumptions are too simple to be correct but also too reasonable to be completely wrong. There is ample scope for a synthesis between these methods, for they certainly do not exclude each other but might to some extent supplement each other. Thus, we would assume the dominant pattern under normal conditions in a society to be regulated by the center-periphery hypothesis, with that part of youth in the social center (well educated, living in cities, very often students and so on) playing a particularly important role in forming its own generation, its own age group. But we would also assume youth to be susceptible to pressure from the more fully-fledged center, and perhaps more so the closer they come in age to that center. There will be a pattern of convergences, an adaptation, an adjustment towards the attitudes held by the people leaving power positions, but not complete identity. At the same time the social context will be different; the social experiences will be different. Hence, there will always be the possibility of a discontinuous rupture with the past, particularly if the convergence between those who arrive and those who leave has been brought so far as to make the total society too rigid, too unadaptable to changes in internal and external circumstances.Let us now try to approach this general issue from a different angle. So far we have assumed partly that attitudes move with persons through time and social space, partly that attitudes move from person to person, also through time and social space, but more particularly, from higher to lower positions along some social position dimension. But as these processes take place, and we assume that they do take place under normal conditions in societies, the society as a whole also moves, with persons and attitudes, in time. The future unfolds itself; distant future becomes near future, near future becomes immediate future and immediate future becomes the present. And as this happens what formerly were non-issues become issues, and ideas about their solution become more crystallised, possibly polarising not only men, but also the minds of men.

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To take a concrete example: the pre-determination of the sex of one's own offspring. Somehow this does not yet seem to have become an issue like the awareness of pollution and a possible future eco-catastrophe. Its character as a non-issue might be expected to imply two things: It does not (yet) polarise people, which means that it has a low correlation with variables that indicate position in the social structure, and it does not (yet) polarise the minds of people, which means that it has a low correlation with other attitudes. But as this particular possible future innovation becomes more concrete, more realistic, we would, in general, assume that it would be captured in a differential way by different groups in the social structure. The innovation should have very different implications for men and for women, for instance, and this should sooner or later be reflected in their attitudes. When the item is a non-issue, still nonrealistic, attitudes towards it will probably be more conditioned by personality variables such as general time perspective, perhaps also general level of knowledge, than by group belonging. We would also assume it to be less influenced by other attitudes since its belongingness in a remote future places it on a relatively white or blank area in the person's cognitive map. Later on that area may be more richly structured, and to the extent this is the case the person in question will be embedding the attitude in a cluster of other attitudes. Actually, the attitude mentioned even may be the first in the cluster and serve as a nucleus of crystallisation for the other ones. This is important for the arguments we have presented above for two reasons, one pertaining to the age hypothesis and the other to the social position hypothesis. As to the age hypothesis we would assume in general that as an issue becomes more realistic different generations will react differently to it. The generational gap and generational conflict enter into the picture, and, in general, the younger generation will be more able to accomodate the issue because their cognitive m a p will be less structured. The older generation may have an overloaded cognitive map, insufficiently flexible to accomodate a qualitatively new issue in a qualitatively new way. But this means that the attitude will be reinforced by group belongingness, and if in addition it is reinforced by being integrated into a cluster of attitudes, it will to some extent be frozen into the mental set of that generation. This will increase the probability that the younger generation will bring with them that attitude, or at least the salience of the issue, as they become older, since it is no longer a question of an isolated attitude held by isolated individuals but of a cluster of attitudes, a syndrome, shared by a relatively well-defined group. Second, this also relates to the social-position dimension in a possibly

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important way. Since we assume in general that the future first impinges on the center and then gradually is communicated towards the middle and periphery positions, we would also assume, in general, that the level of crystallisation will be highest in the center. The center will perceive a future issue in a context and polarise into those who have a certain set of attitudes and those who have a set of the opposite attitudes. But this means that as time moves on the center will not only communicate certain attitudes but also clusters and profiles - total cognitive styles for that matter. The center will not only communicate its favourable attitude to X, but also the idea that 'if you are in favour of X then you must also be in favour of Y; you cannot be pro-X and contra-Y'. In more operational terms, not only percentages but also correlations will spread from the center towards the periphery. In conclusion, then, let us summarise as follows. It is not impossible to arrive at reasonable projections about future attitude distributions. Rather they are highly tenuous, to say the least. To explore this, let us use an analogy from physics: The physicist who knows the distribution of temperature in a closed system, and some crucial properties of all the parts of the system, should be able to say something about the temperature distribution after some time. Thus, to the extent the system consists of solid bodies he would work with formulas for the conduction of heat; if the system contains liquids he would add the possibility of heat transfer by convection; and if there are gaseous components heat transfer by radiation would be of major significance. Social systems are similar in some respects: Conduction is here called diffusion, attitudes pass from person to person; convection would correspond to the way in which attitudes are disseminated through mobility of persons; and radiation would be all the various forms of mass communication. In a very frozen, stable, technically undeveloped society there would only be diffusion along the social position gradient and some transfer of attitudes through some mobility. In a highly mobile, boiling rather than frozen, and technically developed society there would be much more complex processes of conduction and convection, for instance, because of the high level of mobility - geographical and social - not related to age. And in addition there would be mass communication. In short, our principles for inferring something about future attitude distributions would work better, it seems, in the former type of society; in the latter type the processes are too complex, and the future of mass communication, form and content as well as its impact, is beyond any type of prediction. Nevertheless, the two methods indicated, and particularly the socialposition method, may serve to develop a baseline for some speculations that may be meaningful, although for the present rather than for the

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future. An effort in that direction will be carried out in Chapter 14. Let it only be said here that in order for such speculations to be of any interest the empirical data have to exhibit some differentials along the age or social position axes. If the distribution is simply flat, then only very static conclusions can be arrived at. Since such conclusions are a priori unreasonable, for attitudes are known to be in a state of flux in modern societies and the societies in our sample are all more or less 'modern', this is in and by itself unreasonable. But if the conclusions can be more dynamic, stating that there will be an attitude change in such and such a direction, then some more interesting speculations can be arrived at, particularly about the interrelation between changing attitude distributions and probable future events. And this brings us to the major difference between the physical system of the analogy and the social systems of this analysis: The latter are certainly far from closed systems. They are open in any number of respects: There may be external and internal 'events' (as any discontinuity in a social process is referred to), but more fundamentally, each person, each member is an open system. It is given to human beings to generate, to create, spontaneously, not unpatterned at the aggregate level, but often highly unpredictable at the individual level. And that leads us to the more basic question touched upon earlier: Are these efforts to speculate about future attitude distributions really important or interesting at all? Certainly not in the sense of being able to foretell - as already pointed out. But they are of importance, and they are interesting, when they are contrasted with reasonable expectations as to some aspects of the objective future. Unwarranted optimism and unwarranted pessimism will both have their consequences. Thus, if a population seems to feel that science will bring more and more benefits and solutions, and the attitude distribution is such that there are good reasons to expect that the subjective future will look even more optimistic in the years to come, whereas at the same time there are good reasons to believe that more science will bring with it considerable costs and problems (in addition to benefits and solutions), then this finding is important. It is important because disappointments for which a society is unprepared may have paralyzing, and even highly retrogressive effects. If on the other hand the distribution is such that there are reasons to believe that the population will turn more pessimistic, or less optimistic, when it comes to the general orientation towards science, then there is less cause for any alarm except if and when the pessimism takes command and also has a paralyzing effect, because it becomes unwarranted pessimism. Such attitudes usually have a certain locking-in effect: The person will start looking around for evidence to support his basic

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emotion, and in a complex society there will always be sufficiently complex evidence around to give rich material for confirmation satisfactory to his psyche. A simple analogy: If a person is driving his car on a road that leads to an abyss, is delighted about the drive and looks as if he may become even more euphoric, then there is some cause for alarm - and it is not manipulatory social technology to shout a warning. If, on the other hand, he has such a dim view of the dangers of the traffic that he prefers to stay away from any road, leading to abysses or not, then there is also some cause for alarm, particularly if he seems to become even more of a pessimist with time. So this is where the time dimension we have tried to introduce enters: Are there signs that the attitude distribution will become more, or less, adequate for the objective reality likely to emerge? To this it may be objected that we know nothing for certain about 'objective reality' in years to come, which is true. But only the fool would infer from the circumstance that the probability of something occurring in twenty years is not 1.0 that one should overlook completely probabilités of, say, 0.9 or even 0.6 for that matter. And there may also sometimes be good reasons for saying that the probability is relatively high. Thus, if nation A declares that its goal is to 'develop' along the road already travelled by nation B and in addition seems, in fact, to do so, then it is not unreasonable to assume that the problems of nation B will also accrue to nation A, sooner or later - together with the possible benefits of the development. But just as there may be a 'problem transfer' from B to A, not in the sense that the problem leaves B and enters A but in the sense that any nation in that particular region of a development trajectory will have the same problems, there may also be an 'attitude transfer'. Some of it will not be a transfer but an endogenously created subjective reaction to the objective reality of the problem, but some of it may also be a simple diffusion of attitudes from one nation to another. For just as there are centers and peripheries within nations there are also centers and peripheries between them - for instance defined by means of developmental indicators, and some of the theory for attitude dissemination may also hold between nations. Thus, the populations of less developed nations, or at least the centers of these populations, the elites, may start worrying about problems that certainly are not theirs because these are the worries of the center nations. This may be good, as a mental preparation for things to come. But it may also be bad, because of the locking-in effect mentioned above, and because of the irrealism involved, the dangers of excessive cosmopolitanism, of seeing problems as central because they are the problems of central nations instead of directing the attention to the basic contradictions of one's own nation, today. Above all it may be harmful because it is one more factor leading people to focus

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on a single trajectory of development, that already pursued by others, instead of mapping out new paths of social transformation. Clearly, in order to work with this type of analysis one needs the type of double perspective that our data can offer, at least in principle: Centerperiphery analysis within as well as between nations. And this is exactly what will be explored later. Suffice it here to say that for this type of analysis to yield something of any interest there must again be some differentials in attitudes, if not within at least between nations. And that brings us back to the point of departure: The study was carried out in the present. Like all other attitude studies it is a way of gaining insight in present social reality; the only place where the future comes into the picture is in the wording of many of the questions. The individual respondent does not know the future, the sample in one nation does not know it, the total aggregate does not know it. N o r does the analyst looking at the data know it. But guided by the data and some theory he can arrive at some educated guesses about forces that will be active in the future, about their interrelations and contradictions, and he may derive therefrom some insight into actions to engage in now, on the basis of certain value assumptions. If such action is engaged in, for instance a detachment of a country from the conventional trajectory of development in order to create its own (like the case of China), then social reality is already changed and certainly unknowable on the basis of this kind of data. But even if nothing is done the openness of social systems is such as to make prediction impossible, except in societies as static as termite societies. So, where do we stand - is there not a contradiction between, on the one hand, saying that the future is unknowable and unpredictable and, on the other hand, saying that nevertheless, there is something to glean from these data about the future? The contradiction is apparent rather than real and hinges on the complex semantics of words like 'predict', etc. All we can do is to stand here in the present and look into the future with some data on the subjective future, some speculations about their dynamics, some further speculations about the dynamics of the objective future - for instance speculations guided by the center-periphery principles within and between nations - and then engage in some speculations about the interaction between the dynamics of subjective and objective futures. This we can do, and we can derive some conclusions, even some implications for action that would seem to be better founded than if we did not have those data. But these are conclusions about the present rather than about the future; they are conclusions about things to be done now, for it is now that the basis for the future is laid, not at some future stage.

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NOTES 1. The Delphi technique is based on expert panels, with each expert estimating when in the future he thinks a certain event (such as an innovation, or an internal/external war) will take place - including the possibility of answering 'never'. If the dissensus is not too high, the average of the answers given is considered a 'prediction'. 2. For more on this, see Johan Galtung, 'Why study Utopias?', mimeographed paper. 3. Wrongly, because the conflict is between classes and groups rather than between countries, and these classes and groups on either side of the conflict border are usually both in North and in South. 4. See Helge Hveem. 5. See Margaret Mead: Culture and commitment. Doubleday, 1970. 6. See Chapter 14, Chapter 26. 7. We emphasize 'in general' - obviously, there are conditions under which the periphery will prevail. One such condition is that the periphery gets sufficiently well organized, as was the case in the Norwegian referendum September 1972 concerning European Community membership.

A N D R Z E J SIC1NSKI

2 Optimism versus pessimism

1. ANALYSIS OF CONCEPTS

In analysing the images of the future, we find them inseparably linked with the concepts of 'optimism' and 'pessimism'. In the present research project, too, many answers returned by young respondents in various countries are described by the authors of some chapters in terms of optimism and pessimism, and in some cases this dimension becomes fundamental for the analyses made. So it seems worth while examining these two concepts more closely both for the needs of our research project and for possible further studies dedicated to ideas of the future. The concepts of optimism and pessimism share the fortune, or rather the misfortune, of many other terms which have wide application both in scholarly language and in everyday parlance but lack precision and whose meanings are not clearly defined. Let us begin with those definitions which are found in modern dictionaries. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English has the following entries: 'Optimism, n. doctrine, esp. as set forth by Leibniz, that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds; view that good must ultimately prevail over evil in the universe; sanguine disposition, inclination to take bright views.' 'Pessimism, n. tendency to look at the worst aspects of things (cf. optimism) ; doctrine that this world is the worst possible, or that all things tend to evil'. Similar definitions are to be found in dictionaries of other languages, and they are good examples of the ambiguities and semantic conglomerations connected with the two terms in question. It seems that the following three criteria of differentiation in understanding these terms are most essential:

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1. the type of pessimism or optimism, 2. the temporal reference of optimism and pessimism, 3. the 'material versus 'personal approach. Ad 1. Optimism/pessimism is defined either as a view of the 'nature' of the world, or evaluations of certain well-defined events, phenomena or facts. In the former case we may speak about'metaphysical or doctrinal optimism/pessimism, and in the latter, about 'concrete' optimism/ pessimism. Ad 2. Optimistic/pessimistic evaluations may be held independently of time (i.e., lack temporal reference); or they may refer to the past, present, or future: Table 1. 1 Time-oriented' optimism/pessimism Period of time being a basis for the comparison

Evaluated period of time Past

Present

Future

Past

1 'timeless'

2 'presentoriented'

3 'futureoriented'

Present

4 'pastoriented'

5 'timeless'

6 'futureoriented'

Future

7 'pastoriented'

8 'presentoriented'

9 'timeless"

In fact, these possibilities are not at all of equal importance. But at least theoretically we may speak about 'timeless' (cells 1,5,9),1 'past-oriented' (cells 4,7),2 'present-oriented' (cells 2,8),3 and 'future-oriented' optimism/pessimism (cells 3,6).4 It is the last case that we have mainly dealt with in our study. Ad 3. In some cases we are using the terms optimism and pessimism to describe the matter (contents) of a given view or statement while in other cases we are more interested in a characterisation of the person who holds such a view or is the author of such a statement. These two approaches might be termed 'material' and 'personal', respectively, in a less artificial language they simply denote the distinction between 'optimism' ('pessimism') and 'optimist' ('pessimist'). Further complications arise due to the fact that in the case of personal

25

Optimism versus pessimism

concrete optimism/pessimism we have to do with two fairly different situations. Sometimes we refer to a person's optimism/pessimism having in mind such person's opinion on a single, specified event. In other cases we mean precisely a person's fairly general tendency specifically to evaluate certain events and facts. The main distinctions made so far can now be tabulated as follows: Table 2. Scheme for classification of Temporal reference

optimism/pessimism

Evaluation

Material approach

Personal approach

positive/ negative

Metaphysical/concrete type

Metaphysical/concrete type (general/specified)

+

optimism

optimism (optimist) pessimism (pessimist)

None —

pessimism

+

optimism

Past —

+

pessimism

optimism

Present —

+ Future —

pessimism

optimism (meliorism) 5 pessimism (pejorism)

optimism (optimist) pessimism (pessimist) optimism (optimist) pessimism (pessimist) optimism (optimist) pessimism (pessimist)

This tabulation reveals some of the ambiguities of the terms 'optimism' and 'pessimism' and, accordingly, 'optimist' and 'pessimist', both in everyday language and in literature on the subject. (One could add that different approaches are, to some extent, connected with different disciplines.) But at least two more issues must be mentioned here to bring out fully all the semantic complications involved. First, a possible contradiction between 'good' and 'best', and second, the relative nature of what is 'good' and 'best' and what is 'bad' and 'worst'.

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The first problem we will touch on in the next section. As far as the second problem is concerned, let us give an example. In 1939, Hitler expected to dominate the world hoping to be successful in carrying out his plans. Yet in everyday language we would not be inclined to call him an optimist. In the language of those peoples who were threatened with annihilation in 1939 Hitler's anticipations would even have been termed as marked pessimism as to the future course of events; of course, from the point of view of Hitler himself and his group, the term 'optimist' would certainly have been used. This example illustrates two problems. First, we have to consider the relative nature of evaluations when we define what is, or is not, 'optimistic' and 'pessimistic'. These evaluations depend on whose benefit one has in mind, on what system of values one accepts (of a 'judge', of a social group, of a society) and on the context of the evaluated situation or event (because of the cases of situational meaning of'good' and 'bad'). Secondly, the example above reveals the important consequences of the distinction, as made above, between describing an opinion as optimistic or pessimistic and describing a person as an optimist or a pessimist. It might happen that we would arrive at the apparently paradoxical formulation that a person who is in favour of a certain state of things and who believes that this state of things will materialize would be called because of his viewpoint - an optimist, whereas his expectations would be termed pessimistic. Consider, for instance, a paranoiac who strives to construct a device that would destroy our globe, who hopes that he will succeed in his plan and who enjoys the idea because, in his opinion, the destruction of our globe would be good for some reasons. The simple fact is that we resort to different criteria of evaluation when we use each of these two terms.

2 . OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM IN PHILOSOPHY

Let us now consider the relationship between the distinctions of meanings current in everyday usage and philosophical theories. As known, the two terms in question were coined no so long ago. Optimism is the older of the two. Its classical formulation as a definition of a way of thinking is due to Leibniz, who, however, did not use the term himself (it occurred only in 1737 in an analysis of Leibniz's views). The term was popularized by Voltaire who offered a criticism of optimism in his novel Candide ou Voptimisme, published in 1755. Pessimism appears nearly 100 years later. Classical pessimism as a way of thinking was worked out by Schopenhauer, who first used the term

Optimism versus pessimism

27

in 1819 (apparently independently of Coleridge who used it in 1815).6 This late appearance of the two terms is interesting in itself if we consider that both in current opinions and philosophy, manifestations of the opposition between optimism and pessimism can probably be found throughout the history of mankind. In the history of European philosophy Plato and Aristotle may serve as early examples of the opposition between pessimism and optimism: The former sought in the world of ideals refuge from the evil to be found in the real world, whereas the latter was consistently optimistic. The marked 'asymmetry' of the classical definitions of optimism and pessimism, due to Leibniz and Schopenhauer respectively, an asymmetry which recurs in works by other authors, is very characteristic and important for the analysis made in this paper. This is what W. Tatarkiewicz, the eminent Polish historian of philosophy, says on the subject: 'First, for Leibniz the world was "the best of all possible worlds", although it was not just good, and good in all details; for Schopenhauer, it was just bad, and bad in all details, although he did not claim seriously that it was the worst of all possible worlds. Next, Leibniz spoke about the world and Schopenhauer about the unhappy world; the former spoke about the dominance of good over evil (even if good be associated with suffering), the latter spoke about the dominance of suffering over happiness. Finally, the underlying argumentation of the two attitudes differed in each case: Pessimism was referring mainly to experience, whereas optimism was referring mainly to reasoning, that reasoning being sometimes at variance with experience.' 7 It seems interesting to point out this 'asymmetry' (to use Tatarkiewicz's term), as it shows that the ambiguity of the terms optimism and pessimism has its analogue, or perhaps even its origin, in the sphere of philosophical ideas. Hence it is of no use to refer to philosophy in order to settle which of the current meanings of these terms is 'correct' and which have possibly distorted the original proper interpretations of the two terms in question. In other words, when formulating the issue 'optimism versus pessimism' as a research problem we cannot refer to philosophy as a source of clarification that would help us in deciding to reject some of the occurring meanings and to accept the others as the correct ones.

3 . RESEARCH PROBLEMS

While the ambiguity of the terms optimism and pessimism is quite obvious after all, it is striking that systematic analyses of these concepts are

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Andrzej Sicihski

almost exclusively based on the 'material' point of view. Philosophy, ethics, and the history of philosophical and social ideas have been much concerned with the issues of optimism and pessimism.8 It is different when it comes to the 'personal' point of view, i.e., to describing people and their opinions in terms of optimism and pessimism. If we consider how current these terms are in everyday language and how frequently they occur in scholarly works (without any closer definitions) then we are struck by the lack of any systematic reflection on the problem in studies in social psychology. Hence it is worth while examining (personal) optimism and pessimism as a subject matter of empirical studies. As starting point we adopt those conceptual categories that are characteristic of the sphere of research with which we are concerned, viz., the concepts of opinion and attitude. Opinion studies When we speak about optimism/pessimism or an optimist/pessimist, we may think first of all of a person's opinion or opinions. 9 An opinion may be said to be optimistic or pessimistic either on the basis of the criteria of values accepted by the author of that opinion, or from the point of view of the criteria accepted by a person who evaluates it (a 'judge'). In the former case we might term it an internally optimistic/pessimistic opinion, and in the latter, an externally optimistic/pessimistic one. In her contribution to this volume T. Konwicka called them 'subjectively' and 'objectively' optimistic, running perhaps the risk of being criticized for a careless use of the term 'objective' (cf. pp. 403 ff). How can we decide whether a person's opinion is optimistic or pessimistic, and whether it is at all to be described in terms of optimism and pessimism? We shall analyse this issue in the case of internal optimism/pessimism because this is more interesting than the other case (and moreover, the results can, mutatis mutandis, be applied to an external evaluation of opinions). First of all, we may be interested in opinions which express metaphysical optimism/pessimism. We would analyse them by resorting to general questions about opinions on the nature of the world, the dominance of good over evil (or vice versa), the evaluation of the trend of changes in the world, etc. As mentioned above such questions may have no temporal reference, or they may refer to a certain period (a point) of time. Hence, we have to study past-oriented, present-oriented and futureoriented metaphysical optimism/pessimism.

Optimism versus pessimism

29

Further, opinions may be treated as optimistic/pessimistic when they pertain to specified fields, situations, events, facts, etc., and are thus manifestations of concrete optimism/pessimism. But in accordance with what has been said earlier, we must make a distinction between general and specific optimism/pessimism: a) generalized opinions that express a person's satisfaction/dissatisfaction with his way of life or with his present living conditions or his prospects for the future, or analogous opinions on the situation and prospects of one's family, country, etc., and b) opinions that express a person's satisfaction/dissatisfaction with specified singular facts. In empirical studies the first type of opinions is assessed by questions about general satisfaction which are sometimes interpreted as referring to one's feeling of happiness. As to the second type of opinions questions are asked about specified issues, for instance about one's job satisfaction. Both types of opinions may be asked directly, or may be formulated and posed so that they enable us to evaluate inferentially the respondent's optimism/pessimism. 10 In other words we may ask directly about an absolute or about a relative synthetic evaluation of a given fact; 11 but we may also infer optimism/pessimism from answers to questions about the characteristics of a certain state of things or about what a person believes to be desirable. These different ways of ascertaining concrete optimism/pessinlism related to the present or to the future 12 will be tabulated and illustrated with examples mainly from our project. The Table 3 appears to cover if not all, then at least the most important and most interesting groups of questions, answers to which may be described as optimistic or pessimistic opinions. 13 Empirical studies could provide examples of all these types of questions, even though the answers returned are not always described as optimistic or pessimistic. Examples of interpretations in other terms, such as satisfaction, have been given above, without, however, covering the full range of such descriptions. Attitude studies In our interpretation, the concept of attitude14 is more comprehensive than that of opinion. In consequence, when speaking about attitudes, we have to widen the scope of our discussion of the notions to include at least two theoretical questions and a methodological one: 1. Is it legitimate to speak about optimism or pessimism as a certain property or characteristic of a given person, a property which leads to an

30

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Table 3. How to ascertain optimism/pessimism ( examples for possible questions)

in opinion

Sicihski

studies

Types of questions

Temporal reference

General optimism/pessimism

Specific optimism/pessimism

Direct questions Absolute synthetic evaluation"

present

D o you evaluate the situation of your country as good?

How do you evaluate the results of the latest U N session?

future

D o you think that your country will develop, in the next ... years, in the desired direction?

D o you think that the United Nations will play an essential role in the evolution of international relations (and how?)

present

Is your situation today better than it was ... years ago?

Are the effects of your professional activity better now than when you started working?

future

Do you think that the international situation ... years from now will be better than today?

D o you think that the present disarmament talks will yield results?

Relative synthetic evaluation b

Inferential questions' Perception of a state of things

present

(Questions concerning general opinions) : D o you think that young people contribute to shaping you country's policies? (Questions about the most important factors in a given field) : W h a t are the most significant events you read a b o u t in today's newspaper?

future

D o you think that the political influence of young people will increase? What do you think will be the difference between the year 2000 and today?

Optimism versus pessimism

31

Table 3 (continued) Types o f questions

Temporal reference

General optimism/pessimism

Opinions on what should (not) be or on what is the most (un)desirable

Specific optimism/pessimism A

B

D o you think that y o u n g people should have political influence/do you want them to have it? D o you evaluate positively or negatively the facts you mentioned as the most important ones?

a. This category includes questions about a person's self evaluation, found in many surveys. b. This category of questions, or, to put it strictly, the group of general questions, includes Cantril's self-anchoring scales. c. Obviously, inferential questions ought to be matched both semantically and as to their type ( A or B). In many studies, in fact, the question b is not asked, as the researcher believes he knows the value system of his respondents.

attitude, manifested, among other things, in that person's opinions on various issues? 15 If so, then 2. What is the scope of such an attitude? Is it possible to find one concept to cover most of what we have called 'optimism'/'pessimism' or do we need more? In particular, which interpretations of optimism/pessimism, as described above, would be covered by it and which would not be related to such an attitude? For example, is it possible, as we believe, to be a kind of pessimist and a meliorist? 3. How is an optimistic attitude to be studied? By means of what types of questions, what kind of correlations between different types of optimism/ pessimism? These problems, while interesting and presumably important, have not been sufficiently studied so far, nor have they, to the present writer's knowledge, been formulated in & general manner as a programme of research on the optimism versus pessimism issue. The research methods used in this field are usually very primitive. The procedures most frequently used to find out whether a given person is an optimist or a pessimist 16 are the following: - a person is classed in a given group on the basis of a single direct question; - he is so classed on the basis of a set of direct questions (the interrelations between different types of scales, e.g., an additive scale, a Guttman scale);

32

A ndrzej Sicihsk i

- he is so classed on the basis of inferential questions (one or more pairs of such questions). There is no need to argue that the credibility (i.e., both validity and reliability) of the classification of one's attitude on the basis of a single question is very small or nil, the more so as widely differing categories of questions are taken to tap optimistic or pessimistic opinions. A genuine research problem appears when we investigate correlations between answers to a number of questions, especially questions from those various categories singled out above. An analysis of such answers might be used in order to define tentatively the scope of an optimistic/pessimistic attitude. While not aspiring to outline a general plan for such research we would like to point out certain issues which will become manifest in the analysis of the problem under consideration. When comparing answers to direct questions pertaining to one and the same issue, but pertaining to its present and future aspect, we may, theoretically at least, obtain one of the following cases, which are labelled below in a somewhat arbitrary manner: Table 4. Scheme references

of optimism/pessimism

for

combining the

temporal

Opinions concerning the future optimistic pessimistic Opinions concerning the present

optimistic

full optimism

deferred pessimism

pessimistic

deferred optimism

full pessimism

It seems interesting to find out how far these two temporal references (in the cases of both absolute and relative synthetic evaluations) are essential for the definition of an optimistic/pessimistic attitude and hence whether the term suggested in this chapter can in fact be useful in an analysis of such an attitude. 17 Further, while we still confine ourselves to direct questions, it is worth while investigating relationships between absolute and relative synthetic evaluations (these relationships may hold both for questions about the present and the future). Here, again theoretically, we may have to do with six cases (Table 5). One of the questions which arise in this connection if whether the categories form a scale and, if so, how they are to be located on that scale.

Optimism versus pessimism

33

Table 5. Scheme of optimism/pessimism ations

for combining absolute evalu-

Relative evaluations There will There will be a change towards the be no change better worse

Absolute evaluations

positive

static optimism

consistent optimism

evolutionary pessimism

negative

static pessimism

evolutionary optimism

consistent pessimism

Note: The labelling of the categories in only tentative.

Let us consider an example. 18 Suppose that in a survey questionnaire we have posed the question whether 1) a person evaluates the present economic situation in his country as good (absolute synthetic evaluation, temporal reference: the present), and whether 2) the economic situation in the respondent's country five years from now will be better (relative synthetic evaluation, temporal reference: the future). At one end of a hypothetical scale of optimistic-versus-pessimistic attitudes we would certainly place those who would answer both questions in the affirmative (good now, still better in the future), i.e., those who are consistent optimists. At the other end of the scale we would place those who would answer both questions in the negative (bad now, still worse in the future), i.e., those who are consistent pessimists. It is less obvious how we are to place the remaining answers: Are those who answer the first question in the affirmative, but do not expect any change for the better (static optimists) more optimistic than those who answer the first question in the negative, but expect a change for the better in the future (evolutionary optimists)? It seems that the former respondents would have to be classed as more optimistic than the latter (and correspondingly for the pessimists), but this assumption would require an empirical verification in many given situations. Important problems also emerge when we come to analyse inferential questions. This interesting approach has been worked out by Teresa Konwicka in Chapter 15 (pp. 404 ff). According to her proposal, agreement between an answer to a question about the description of a state of things (type A questions in Table 3 above) and the corresponding opinion on what should be (type B questions) might be taken as an indicator of optimism. For instance, we would call an optimist a person

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Andrzej Sicihski

who thinks that the political influence of young people in his country will increase in the future, and at the same time thinks that young people should have such influence, and also a person who thinks that such influence would decrease in the future and at the same time thinks that young people should not have such influence. 19 The term 'pessimist' would accordingly be applied to a person whose expectations and wishes would go in opposite directions. This kind of inference about a person's optimism/pessimism seems to be of a special importance, as it allows us to pose some interesting questions, e.g., as to what values tend to be connected with optimism and what with pessimism. This approach seems also to be a more objective method of determining whether a person is an optimist/pessimist, rather than doing so on the basis of direct questions, especially if the inference is drawn from a comprehensive set of questions.20 But even in this case an essential problem does arise: What are the sources (the origin) of the convergence between how facts are perceived 21 and how they are evaluated, positively or negatively? Three different cases are possible: a) The way of perceiving facts (as understood in this chapter) is independent of their evaluation (independence of expectations from wishes). b) Convergence is due to the fact that the way of perceiving facts is in some way affected by the evaluation (a case of wishful thinking). c) Evaluations are modified by the way of perceiving facts, due to a person's adjustment (adaptation), possibly a manifestation of his feeling of resignation (a kind of fatalism). Still these distinctions do hardly appear to undermine the very method of defining optimism/pessimism but merely point to different sources of what may be said to be an attitude of optimism/pessimism. The last issue to be mentioned here - but probably the most important one when it comes to a study of optimistic/pessimistic attitudes, and therefore also the most interesting one - is that of finding out possible correlations between the types of optimism and pessimism singled out earlier, both between the various kinds of concrete optimism/pessimism and between concrete and metaphysical optimism/pessimism. Only such an analysis can shed light on the usefulness of the terms 'optimism' and 'pessimism' in scholarly works, on the scope of optimistic/pessimistic attitudes, and on the best methods of assessing such attitudes. A more systematic study of these problems might be useful in analysing problems emerging both in social psychology and the study of social ideologies.

Optimism versus pessimism

35

4. ON THE THEORETICAL USEFULNESS OF THE CONCEPTS 'OPTIMISM' AND 'PESSIMISM'

Now that we have demonstrated the ambiguity of the terms 'optimism' and 'pessimism' and pointed out some of the possible approaches intended to find out empirically attitudes of optimism or pessimism (in one of the senses adopted above) we ought to raise the most essential issue, namely that of the theoretical usefulness of the concepts in question. It is not, however, the intention of the present writer to settle that problem in the concluding remarks here. Such a task would go beyond the needs of this chapter, which is only to demonstrate, as convincingly as possible, the usually disregarded complexity of the analysis of sociopsychological facts in terms of optimism versus pessimism, even though these terms often occur in scholarly papers, especially in publications concerned with the future (including the analysis of the present survey). Moreover, the theoretical usefulness of the terms in question could be reasonably discussed only in the light of further studies designed to order and to integrate the knowledge we have acquired so far as a result of rather scattered studies with the various interpretations of optimism and pessimism. Yet, without undertaking such a major and, presumably, promising task we shall try to speculate a little on the theoretical aspects of pessimism and optimism. Thus the following is to be treated as a sui generis introduction to more penetrating studies which are worth carrying out. First of all we have to pose the question: What is meant by the theoretical usefulness of the two concepts in question. It seems that a distinction is to be made between at least two issues: In the first interpretation, we would have to find out whether the optimism/pessimism variable can usefully function as a variable at the theoretical level of the language of social science, the language in which universally valid theorems of social facts are formulated. In the second interpretation we mean a different problem, namely the theoretical fertility of the said concepts and their usefulness for the formulation of certain hypotheses about social facts, for the perception of new relationships between facts, etc. The satisfaction of the latter condition does not presuppose the satisfaction of the former. The assessment of the concepts of optimism and pessimism from the point of view of the first interpretation of the term 'theoretical value' is not possible as long as we have not undertaken a systematic attempt to use these concepts in a theoretical analysis of social facts, and to the present writer's knowledge no systematic studies of that problem exist.

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Sicihski

Taking into account the existing scattered analysis in which these terms occur we may only presume that the optimism/pessimism-variable, in any of its fixed meanings, may be useful in theoretical statements about individuals rather than about societies since, as it seems, that variable may have different meanings and play different roles in different social systems. The theoretical status of the terms in question will also depend on their interpretations (as listed above). Let us first consider the fertility of the concepts of optimism and pessimism. To do so we list some selected examples of analyses in which both concepts have been used. First of all, the concepts occur in the analysis of the present survey where they seem to have three functions: a) as an abbreviated characteristic of strictly defined opinions, b) as an independent variable the importance of which is either explicitly substantiated or merely assumed, and c) as a variable used to explain certain attitudes or types of behaviour. The two latter types of analyses often co-occur in one and the same study. This classification will now be illustrated with examples. Ad a: In his marginal analysis Galtung says that pessimism with respect to science prevails in those countries which are advanced in science and technology, whereas less-developed countries seem to be largely optimistic about science. This is an abridged formulation of his observation that in the countries A, B . C . . . people are more enthusiastic about the opportunities provided by the development of science, whereas in the countries P, Q, R . . . they are less enthusiastic about it. It is a matter for a possible further analysis to explain why these expectations are greater in some countries than in others. On the whole, however, such a use of the terms optimism and pessimism does not reveal any theoretical aspirations. 22 Ad b: The most characteristic examples in that respect are the studies made by H. Cantril, especially in his Patterns of Human Concerns, where he analyses personal, anticipatory, relative optimism. His studies make it possible to look for the factors conditioning optimism and pessimism (in the sense which follows from the research procedure that uses Cantril's 'ladders'), and also to single out certain specified aspects of optimism and pessimism. The procedure worked out by Cantril has also been used in our study. Special attention to the optimism/pessimism variable has been drawn by K.S. Larsen (in chapter 16, p. 433 ff), who demonstrated that the optimism of persons with a high social position is better shaped, as they believe that they will be able to control future events.

Optimism versus pessimism

37

A different procedure has been used in the aforementioned study, by T. Konwicka, who analysed the optimism/pessimism-variable as the degree of the homology between the forecasts and the wishes concerning specified phenomena. She also formulated a set of hypotheses on the sources of such a homology, its dependence on one's sense of being able to influence the course of future events, and inclination to wishful thinking, the type of issue in question and certain social (age, membership in social organizations) and personality variables (self-appraisal, satisfaction with one's status, etc.). Analyses of optimism/pessimism as an independent variable can be found in many other studies; this covers analyses making use of Cantril's procedure as well as those which make use of other methods. We would also be inclined to include in this group certain studies which do not use the terms 'optimism' and 'pessimism', but are concerned with analysing attitudes which should be covered by one of our interpretations of the concepts of optimism and pessimism. 23 To sum up, it may be said that such analyses sometimes shed some interesting light on the complexity and number of factors conditioning favourable and unfavourable appraisals of certain social facts, in particular the appraisals of the trends of changes. The concepts of optimism and pessimism thus prove useful in describing a set of such appraisals in specified situations and make it easier to describe the groups under investigation in more general terms. So far, however, they have not yielded any general statements of the origin and conditioning of the attitudes of optimism and pessimism. A d c : In the third function, i.e., as an explanatory variable, the concepts of optimism and pessimism have not played any major theoretical role in the social sciences either. They occur mainly as components, and not the most important ones, of other concepts, to which essential importance is ascribed. Consider two examples, both reflected rather marginally in the analyses of the results of our investigation. First, the studies of authoritarianism, beginning with The Authoritarian Personality by Th. W.Adorno et al. (New York, 1950), followed by, e.g., Rokeach's studies in The Open and Closed Mind (New York, 1960), have resulted in singling out authoritarian pessimism (which has admittedly been interpreted in various ways). This notion includes such elements as a total denial of the present and a Utopian vision of an ideal future (or past), a negative appraisal of human nature, and the image of the world as a sui generis jungle. Such external, metaphysical authoritarian pessimism usually co-occurs - because of a person's fear to reveal his anxiety - with self-declared optimism, in particular with a highly

38

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Sicihski

favourable self-appraisal and emphasis on one's own attainments (subjective, concrete, generalizing optimism). 2 4 The concepts of optimism and pessimism also occur in theoretical analyses of the differentiation of social status in terms of the 'center' and the 'periphery'. In his article on 'Foreign Policy Opinions as a Function of Social Position' (1964), Johan Galtung formulated certain hypotheses connected with such a differentiation. Among other things, he found more subjective optimism (both concrete and metaphysical) in the center, combined with a greater diversity of opinions. 2 5 But although elements of both Rokeach's and Galtung's theory have been included in the analyses in the present book they have not yielded any coherent and essential new results concerning optimism and pessimism (in an operational sense). Another interesting approach was used by Scott, 26 who analysed stereotyped perceptions of social facts, in particular of international issues. The relevance of his study is indicated by his conclusion that ' . . . the data indicate the presence of a generalized optimism-pessimism variable that may color one's views of the world. Not that either pole of this dimension is necessarily realistic; replies to some of the questions seem to range all the way from wishful thinking to unrestrained gloom. The fact that such an attitudinal dimension appears at all suggests that personality variables may be operating in many instances to detract from the objectivity of international images'. All this seems to indicate that adopting optimism/pessimism as an independent variable was less useful than treating it as dependent variable. But this may be due to the fact that practically no systematic studies in which that variable would play an essential role have been undertaken so far.

What would then be the preliminary hypotheses based on the results obtained thus far and on the distinctions introduced above and concerned with the 'theoretical' (in the first sense of the term) usefulness of the optimism/pessimism variable? First of all, it seems worth while to undertake systematic studies intended to test the probably most important hypothesis about the usefulness of the concepts optimism and pessimism, namely the answer to t h e question whether it is legitimate to speak about a lasting trait in individual attitudes which is manifested as an opposition 'optimism versus

pessimism'. Such a trait would presumably be most clearly manifested as the said homology between one's wishes and expectations (with the consideration of the extreme cases, in which some people tend to perceive

Optimism versus pessimism

39

and expect what they wish, whereas others tend to perceive and expect what they do not wish. Should investigations confirm that we are entitled to describe individuals in such terms (regardless of the subject matter to which wishes and expectations refer), and should we succeed in discovering adequate methods of finding such traits, we would have a very valuable instrument of predicting certain systems of values and certain types of behaviour. This would be of considerable importance for future-oriented research. In particular, should it turn out that the above hypothesis is true, we could formulate further hypotheses, namely those concerned with the consequences of the 'optimism versus pessimism' attitudes. Here are some examples '. 1. Should a person's attitude according to an optimism/pessimism scale be known it would be possible to predict his behaviour (on the assumption that people tend to act in accordance with 'self-fulfilling prophecies'). 2. We might expect the optimists to be more active, especially in a way which tends to control events, and the pessimists to be more passive, in particular to abstain from specific types of behaviour. 3. In decision making we might expect the optimists to tend to maximize gains and the pessimists to minimize losses. 4. We might expect the pessimists to tend to be more conservative. 5. We might expect the optimists to be more resistant to stress. 6. We might expect the optimists to have a stronger feeling of happiness. Another interesting set of hypotheses would refer to the determinants of optimism/pessimism. The first question to be answered would be how far that characteristic is inborn, and how far learned. We would next have to analyse the conditioning of learned optimism (or pessimism) by psychological and/or social factors. It was not our intention to outline such a research programme here. We just wanted to substantiate the opinion that research of this kind might yield results making it possible to formulate certain new statements both about individuals and societies, especially from the cross-cultural point of view. NOTES This contribution was elaborated within the framework of studies made by the Group of Social Prognoses, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. I gratefully acknowledge the valuable comments on my analysis by participants in a seminar held by Professor Stefan Nowak at the Institute of Sociology of Warsaw University.

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Andrzej

Sicihski

I have made use of many of these comments in Section 4 of this chapter. I am also much indebted to Mr. Jan Kaminski of the Group of Social Prognoses, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, who elaborated a stimulating paper on 'The Optimism-Pessimism Dimension and Its Interpretations in Literature on the Subject'. 1. As an example of metaphysical optimism, we may take here Candide's conviction that our world is the best of all possible worlds; and of concrete optimism, a person's conviction that he always experiences the best thing possible in given circumstances. 2. Certain views held by historians and/or by the general public about past events may exemplify this category. 3. Sometimes it could be difficult to distinguish this type from the 'timeless' optimism/ pessimism. 4. Metaphysical optimism here would be the conviction that the world is constantly improving and heading in a good direction; and concrete optimism, the conviction that certain future events will take a desirable course. 5. The term meliorism is used to define optimism as a doctrine focussed on the trend of changes (especially the future changes), however, it is much less common than the term optimism (it is to be found mainly in English-language works). Analogously, pejorism is introduced here as an alternative to pessimism. 6. The term meliorism, mentioned above, was coined even later, in the second half of tht nineteenth century, to denote convictions that it will be possible to attain a higher degree of well-being and to advance toward universal happiness (the term was used by Spencer among others). 7. W. Tatarkiewicz (1965), O szcze'iciu (On happiness), Warsaw, pp. 386-387. 8. Many issues of objective optimism and pessimism also have not been sufficiently analysed. For instance, it would be worth while to examine the relationship between concrete and metaphysical optimism (the same applies to pessimism), if only because of the present-day controversies between optimistic and pessimistic evaluations of technological progress. 9. An opinion is used here in the sense of a judgment concerning a controversial issue (matters of facts as well as evaluations). 10. In the first case we ask the respondent to evaluate a given situation or fact. In the second case we deduce (infer) such an evaluation from some indirect question pertaining to this situation or fact. 11. Relative, i.e.. related to another period of time or to another situation or fact. 12. We ignore the past as temporal reference, being less important for our project. It is necessary to add that only some of the questions presented in the table have been taken from the questionnaire of the present survey. Most questions taken from other studies have been included for heuristic reasons. 13. We have disregarded one category of opinions, where the question directly refers to the classification of a given person as an optimist or pessimist: Instead of asking person A questions intended to show whether his opinions are optimistic or pessimistic, we may ask persons B, C, D whether, in their opinion, person A is an optimist or a pessimist. We may also ask person A about his self-evaluation as to the categories optimist/ pessimist. 14. We here adopt the following definition of attitude: A person's attitude is the totality of his relatively permanent, emotionally charged ideas about the world, or specific objects (situations), and the totality of his dispositions, determined by his knowledge and emotions, to behave in a specific way. 15. Or, put it another way: Do we need more theoretical concepts dealing with generalized relations between predictions and expectations, hopes and wishes, satisfactions, perceptions, etc.?

Optimism

versus

pessimism

41

16. If we disregard the cases in which the label 'optimist' or 'pessimist' is interpreted only as referring specifically to a certain issue, these procedures are often used to define a person's attitude as optimistic or pessimistic. 17. The suggested terms are based on the assumption that reference to the future carries more weight as a manifestation of a person's attitude than reference to the present. But empirical research might, of course, indicate that the opposite is true, or that such a combination of evaluations is not interesting. 18. We here confront questions concerning the present with questions concerning the future because this case seems to be the most interesting one of all possible combinations; but - obviously, two present-related questions could as well be confronted, as could two future-related ones. 19. We have used here a future-oriented question (type B), but other types could be used as well. 20. A more sophisticated analysis, which describes certain degrees of optimism/pessimism, as used in the chapter by Konwicka, is also possible. 21. This terms is interpreted broadly, referring to the perception of facts as well as ideas about the future. 22. The same applies to the present writer when he says, in the chapter on 'Opinions' shift in time', that both in Norway and in Poland pessimism concerning international peace has increased between the two surveys. This is merely a brief form of stating that the number of persons who expect war has increased. Similar examples can be found in many studies; this is perhaps the most frequent use of the two terms. 23. Some examples may be given: J. Robinson and Ph. S. Shaver (1969) in their Measures of social psychological attitudes (Ann Arbor), list the results of the numerous studies of the feeling of satisfaction and being happy (i.e., subjective, concrete, generalized, presentoriented optimism) and point to the positive correlation (as revealed by American studies) between optimism, on the one hand, and being married, social status, (and its components such as income and education), self-appraisal, social activeness, on the other, and to its negative correlation with age. In this handbook we also find descriptions of other measures that are related to some aspects of optimism/pessimism, for example misanthropy, faith in people, trust in people. In his paper 'Industrial man' (The American Journal of Sociology, July 1960) A. Inkeles singled out the 'mastery-optimism' complex, i.e., positive expectations as to the future based on one's belief in the possibility of controlling one's environment. This is subjective, metaphysical, and anticipatory optimism. Inkeles ascribes to it a greater value in more industrialized countries and claims that it increases with social status. Another set of factors, namely 'optimism and trust', was singled out by E. L. Struening and A.H.Richardson in their paper 'The factor analytic explanation of the alienation, anomia and authoritarian domain' (The American Sociological Review, Vol. 30, October 1965). In that case we have to do with subjective, present-oriented optimism, which correlates positively with authoritarianism. Note also that the categories optimism and pessimism are not to be found in many lists of scales and indicators (such as the quoted handbook by J. Robinson and Ph. R. Shaver (1965) and D.C. Miller (1964), Handbook of research design and social measurement (New York) and occur marginally in other lists (cf. Ch. M. Bonjeau, R.H. Hill and S.D. McLemore, 1967, Sociological measurement, San Francisco). 24. This is fairly obvious. When we have to draw conclusions about optimism or pessimism from statements made by respondents in a survey we encounter a broader problem (for that very reason previously disregarded): The possible discrepancy between the opinions (values) actually held and those which are believed to be 'obligatory' and hence declared.

42

Andrzej

Sicihski

25. Galtung's hypotheses about greater optimism (and also activism and realistic thinking) in the center have been confirmed on the basis of data from the three nation study (c/ N.W. Halle, 'Social position and foreign policy attitudes', Journal of Peace Research, 1,1966). 26. W.A. Scott, (1966), 'Psychological and social correlates of international images'. In H.C. Kelman (Ed.), International behaviour: A social-psychological analysis, New York; in particular, p. 89.

PART II

National samples compared

JOHAN G A L T U N G

3

The future: A forgotten dimension

1. INTRODUCTION

In this study close to 9,000 people were asked close to 200 questions; that gives a total of somewhat less than 1.8 million answers to register, to code, to punch, to tabulate, to analyze, to comment on. A good portion of this concerns the future. But as 1.8 million answers they tell us nothing. Like the millions of decisions made by drivers and pedestrians at a busy intersection in a major city, they show no pattern when they are just heaped together. They have to be organized to make sense, at least to make the kind of sense we are willing to accept. Thus, decisions and responses can be neatly organized as belonging to the same persons, they can be ordered sequentially, they can be seen from different angles. Often a little distance is needed to see the major trends. Down in the midst of the noise, the screams, the honking of the horns, the nervous restlessness, traffic looks very different from the way it appears from the top of the tallest corner building, as a neat stream of cars and intermittent waves of pedestrians, obeying the laws of hydrodynamics. For this study we need that tall corner building, just in order to get some first rapid view of what is going on before we dip down into the turbulences and eddies. It is like peeking out of the window on a snowy and windy winter day: The snow is drifting in all directions, and the only clear pattern seems to be a no-pattern; yet, it is useful to possess the knowledge that ultimately the snow has a tendency to settle down and carpet the ground, even on the most windy of such winter days. To develop this knowledge, however, the eye has to be trained on something, on the ground rather than on the drifting snow. The vantage point to be used here is simple and conventional, known technically as marginal analysis comparing the nations. We could have chosen sex, age, class; we could have grouped all 9,000 together; anything could have been done for this first investigation into the data. When

46

Johan Galtung

'nation' is chosen as the crystal, the prism for a first refraction of the beam of information contained in our data, this is not simply done for administrative reasons. It is also because nations, whether one likes it or not, are among the most important categories dividing mankind, and even dividing them into actors - which age and sex do not, and class does only occasionally. Hence, one would intuitively expect this to be a useful vantage point from which to study the data, at least in order to see where the snow is drifting, if not exactly for discovering the law of gravity.

2 . SOME REMARKS ABOUT THE DATA

We shall start with a quick look at the data; at their weak and strong points. A number of tables will be presented in the pages to follow, and unless otherwise stated they will be based on the sample sizes given in the Appendix. (If a question was not asked in a country then this is indicated in the table by a dash in the column of the country. In some cases we are using data from the Polish pilot study, PLp. The reader interested in more details is referred to Chapter 24 and pp. 637 ff). Altogether, close to 9,000 people were interviewed in ten countries. What are, from a purely methodological point of view, the weaknesses and strengths of these data? The shortcomings are numerous, and we would like to point out some of them before we mention what, to our mind, is their strength. First of all, it should always be borne in mind that this study has all the weaknesses of any public-opinion survey. It is questionable to what extent a survey is an approach to social reality at all. We know well that only a very limited segment of social reality is ever captured by the human mind and made explicit enough to come out as a response to a question; the question may distort; the answer may be unrepresentative even of the respondent himself; it may be wrongly recorded and the way all these responses are put together in a statistical analysis may add further to the mystification introduced. The study also shares all the shortcomings and difficulties of cross-national studies: Ten nations, extremely different in social structure, in exposure to world events, at all kinds of development level, etc. are compared - well knowing that these ten nations are by no means a random sample or even a meaningful sample of the nations of the world. In addition the samples from India and Yugoslavia are not national samples and the Indian sample is also some kind of an elite sample. We should actually write 'Elite Sample, Uttar Pradesh' and 'Slovenia' each time we write India and Yugoslavia, and we ask the reader to keep this in mind.

The future : A forgotten dimension

47

All this is in a sense further aggravated by the circumstance that many of our questions are dealing with the future. The future is so vague, so unstructured. It offers so few anchoring points for the human mind that one cannot help feeling that the vagueness of the subject matter as well as the weakness of the method hardly can add up anything that can stimulate our thinking about the relationship between attitude and social structure in general and with regard to the future in particular. And then, in many countries the data were collected before the youth revolts really started in Europe in the spring 1968 - and in some countries even thereafter. Since these youth revolts obviously had to do with power over the present as well as over the future, and with the mental framework in which the future should be envisaged, one might certainly say that a better approach to understanding of the future might have been to study these revolts, the underlying ideology, the societal and mental forces brought into action and crystallized in one country after another, rather than to study population samples where such factors and forces easily wash out. We shall not deny the validity of these allegations. But the purpose of this study is not to understand the future. We believe, as already stated, that the future cannot be understood in terms of past or present. It can only be understood in terms of itself. The future is the product of countless human acts; it is not something to be extrapolated from past and present trends. If that were the case human societies throughout history would be much more static than they are. Even when there are common features in some external characteristics the differences in meaning attributed to what superficially looks as the same human pursuit in different societies, at different times, may be more significant. History tells us of basic discontinuities in societies over time, and if these discontinuities could be predicted they would not be basic; only systemimmanent, not system-transcending. And, at this point, we permit ourselves to be less modest about the study. It is after all the first large-scale, international comparative study dealing with so many aspects of the future, personal, domestic and international. As usual, had we known what we know now, partly as a result of looking at our own data and indeed as an outcome of events around the world between the first exploratory steps in 1967 and today, we would have proceeded differently - but in that we do not deviate from what is customary in social science research. On the other hand, we shall not try to hide ourselves behind the usual formula that 'this is only an exploratory study'. We want to use the study not only to explore what is unknown, but also to test hypotheses that have a certain standing in various theoretical frameworks, and to elaborate them further. In other words, we want to proceed with the usual mixture of deductive and

48

Johan

Galtung

inductive methods, with no claim to finality, nor with excessive modesty as to the implications of the study. Let us then turn to the basic variable in this chapter, nationality. There are ten of them, and the question is how they can best be grouped together so as to facilitate analyses. Here are some attempts to this effect : Table 1. Different

Technical-economic development

Economic system

Military alignment

typologies

of the nations in the sample

Higher

Lower

GB, J, N, NL, SF

CS, E, IND, PL, YU

Market economy (capitalist)

Central economy (socialist)

E, GB, IND, J, N, NL, SF

CS, PL, YU

West

Non-aligned

East

GB, N, NL

E, IND, J, SF, Y U

CS, PL

The development division is not unproblematic, and we would have preferred to bring the italicized nations together into a middle group, if we could have afforded to work with a trichotomy. First, it should be kept in mind that we are here dealing with Slovenia: Yugoslavia as a whole would have gone unqualifiedly into the lower category. Second, we have deviated from the order defined by GNP/capita in the middle of the sixties by putting Japan into the higher category and Czechoslovakia in the lower, even though Japan has a lower GNP/capita than Czechoslovakia. The reason is partly that Japan has a much higher G N P (the highest by far in the sample of nations), partly that the rate of growth (the highest in the world at that time) also somehow should enter into the picture, and partly because of the tremendous emphasis of that particular nation on governmentally coordinated technical-economic growth. 1 In other words, we feel that it belongs more in that category - but the decision can certainly, and will be, disputed later. If in some analyses we should look only at the European nations, then one obvious typology might be as in Table 2. Why do we have so many nations in the 'more developed. Western European' corner? For the simple reason that this is where this type of social science research is more easily carried out; not because of any

The future:

A forgotten

49

dimension

particular methodological necessity to include that many nations of one type. Table 2. Division of European nations

More developed Less developed

Western European

Eastern European

GB, N, NL, SF E

CS PL, YU

Attention should also be paid to the three underlined cases under 'economic system', which would also merit a category of their own, 'mixed economy', when we heed the strong elements of central planning in India and Japan, as well as the remarkable aspects of decentralization in the Yugoslav economy. Finally, there is the military division of the time when the samples were taken. The members of the major alliances, NATO and WTO, are clear enough and the same goes for India and Yugoslavia. Spain and Japan have pacts with the US, as has Finland with the Soviet Union, and that makes them all ambiguous. Still, since neither of these pacts defines the parties as allies in the same sense as in the big treaties, they should all count as non-aligned, especially Finland. Other divisions can also be imagined, but we shall prefer to present them as the need arises, relative to concrete analyses. The basic point is that we do have, within our small sample of nations, sufficient variety to bring in a differential that can be put to analytical use. Let us imagine that the study had only been extended to the four nations in the upper left hand corner of Table 2: In that case the variation would have been minimal. Of course, with a more limited topic than 'Images of the World in the Year 2000' that might have been fully legitimate, and there are many comparative studies that are based on even less variation. But for our purpose we need an image that reflects more of the diversity of mankind, and the present sample could have been much worse. It could also have been better, for instance, including the two superpowers and China. But there is variety within Europe, and there are two non-European nations serving as a check. So, instead of reaching for the moon, we shall try to make do with what we have. For what we have has a sufficient dispersion for one type of conclusion: If something holds true for all eight European nations, then in all probability it also holds true for most of the other European

50

Johan Galtung

nations. Even though nothing can be said about the world future consciousness from these data something may be said about Europe.

3 . A NOTE ON AGGREGATE ANALYSIS

We then proceed to the analysis of the marginals by comparing nations, and in that connection a methodological note is needed since we are comparing collectivities (aggregates), not individuals. In other words, we are comparing distributions of answers, not answers, and that immediately raises the question of how two or more distributions should be represented so that they can be compared. Most distributions of answers to our questions are of the following kind:

positive answer middle answer, uncertain, undecided negative answer D K , NA SUM

(yes, agree)

% d%

(uncertain) (no, disagree) (don't know, no answer)

100%

How can one give in the best way a concentrated, yet faithful, expression of the information such a distribution contains? Of course, one can always compare 'a' for the ten nations, or 'b'. But the difficulty is that none of them, alone, tells the total story. In one nation for instance, there may be 50% in favor and 40% against, in the other nation 50% in favor and 10% against, the rest undecided. In the first nation there is an excess of 10% positive, in the second of 40% among those who are reported as having made up their mind. This difference is important. To reflect the excess of positives over negatives the following measure, which is the arithmetic mean value, could be used: a —b 100 But is it reasonable to evaluate the excess relative to the total sample? Should those who have not made up their mind really be permitted to count as much as those who have? In other words, are these two distributions really equivalent?:

The future : A forgotten

dimension

51

Nation A 55 45 0 10

Nation B 15 5 80 10

a —b 100

.10

.10

a —b a + b

.10

.50

a b c + d a —b

Since we do not think they are equivalent one more measure has been suggested. In the last line we have evaluated the excess relative to those who have made up their mind, a + b. Nation B then comes out as much more positive because the notion to withhold clear expressions of attitudes is corrected for. If it is not corrected for, then both a and b will tend to be lower (because c and d are higher), and as a result of that the degree of positiveness inherent in the sample does not find its clear expression. Different tendencies in nations to use evasive answers have now been corrected for, and this is what the mean value fails to do. On the other hand, a and b are expressions of the size of the reservoir of positive and negative attitudes, respectively. In the example just given there are almost four times as many positives to draw upon in nation A as in nation B, and this may be important, for instance, in international action. This is true, but from the point of view of trying to understand the factors that condition attitudes, rather than mapping out possible consequences of the distribution of attitudes, it seems more reasonable to look at the balance between positive and negative answers. Good arguments can be given in favor of both approaches, however, which means that the best approach may be to make cautious use of both. But in general the acceptance ratio (AR): acceptance ratio =

K a + b a

will be used because it uses almost all information in the distribution (it does not differentiate between c and d). But we shall sometimes have occasion to bring in other aspects of the distributions, particularly where 'uncertain' seems to be a meaningful answer. And for the complete distribution the reader can always look at the marginals given in the Appendix. In this connection it may also be mentioned that conventional tests of statistical significance will not be used. This is not because the samples

52

Jnhan Galtung

are not drawn according to the simple random model, or according to the same random designs in all nations. Where this is concerned the sampling is neither better nor worse than in most other studies of this magnitude. The reason for not using statistical significance tests 2 is mainly that we are searching for patterns of differences rather than for single differences, and no statistical tests exist that mirror the complexity of such comparisons. Moreover, the differences encountered are usually so big, and additionally the samples so large, that there is no doubt about the statistical significance anyhow - had the samples been drawn and the comparisons been made in ways simple enough to correspond to what has been developed in mathematical statistics. In short, the argument is not that we fail to live up to the norms of statistics, but that statistics fails to live up to the realities of survey research.

4 . THE CONCERN FOR THE FUTURE

Let us then start our overview with a basic dimension: The concern for the future. In the first questions people were asked to what extent they were thinking of the future of their country and of the whole world. If we collapse the two positive answer categories ('very much', 'some') and the two rather negative answer categories ('a little', 'not at all'), we get the acceptance ratios shown in Table 3. Table 3. Do you think much about the future? E

CS Of your country -.17 Of the whole world -.07 World-country World-country, % difference, positive answers Rank order. AR-differences Rank order, % differences

GB

-.37 -.32

IND

J

(AR)

N

NL

PL

SF

-.31 -.34

-.27 -.34

-.03

-.07

-.19 .07

-.35

.57

-.12

-.53

-.58

.31 -.26

-.31 -.19

-.36 .17

-.43 .15

YU -.26

.10

.05

-.39 -.04

4

2

7

-13

-11

12

7

0

-2

3

3

5

7

10

9

1

2

6

8

4

4

6

2.5

10

9

1

2.5

7

8

5

In this table we have presented the results both in terms of acceptance ratios and in terms of percentage differences. As seen from the last two lines the results are about the same (rank correlation 0.85), which

The future : A forgotten dimension

53

indicates that although acceptance ratios, and differences between them, may be said to be a more accurate measure their use will in general yield about the same results as if percentages or the mean value were used. What, then, does this table tell us? One very basic thing: The concern for the future is not overwhelming. Except for India we find that every single ratio is negative, and the particular result from India can probably be explained in terms of the elitist character of the sample. So this is the first finding: The tendency to think about the future is poorly developed, as to 'your country' as well as to 'the whole world'. Second, if we disregard India in this connection, Japan is the most future conscious (or least future unconscious) country in the sample, then follows Czechoslovakia. We knew that in advance: The economically fastest growing country in the world would necessarily induce in its population a sense of time as something clearly equipped with a forwardpointing arrow, and this seems to be reflected in the data. But there is an important difference between Japan and Czechoslovakia, and this is the third point: Whereas the future consciousness of Japan is only national, the future consciousness of Czechoslovakia is also international. This of course tallies very well with the general impression of Japan as an autonomous country, literally speaking an island, 3 and with Czechoslovakia as a country highly subject to the circumstances of its international environment, in the very heart of Europe. Its concern for the future cannot be restricted to itself alone. As can be seen from the third and fourth lines of the table only two of the countries, India and Japan, show much more concern for 'your country' than for 'the whole world'. From this one should not deduce anything about an Asian versus a European attitude to the future. A more correct interpretation would probably be in terms of seeing India as a self-sufficient subcontinent - self-sufficient in problems, that is - and of Japan as self-sufficient in problems as well as in many other things. According to that type of thinking the smaller the country and the more integrated in its surroundings, the more should the world overshadow the country, and the two small nations Norway and the Netherlands conform to that picture. This may also indicate that there is a Northwestern factor operating here, that socialist countries and developing countries in Europe are less open to the world penetration and more self-centered in their future orientation. It also looks as if Great Britain has not overcome a certain tendency to see herself in a similar light. However, in a sense a better indicator of how much the year 2000 means for people is the question of whether it is perceived as 'far away in the distant future' or 'rather close, in the near future'. Closeness might

54

Johan Gal lung

indicate some sense of reality, a feeling that 'die Zukunft hat schon begonnen', 4 whereas a tendency to see the year 2000 as distant should indicate some kind of lack of reality, haziness, vagueness. And here we find the extremes are Japan and Norway - a finding that will reappear several times in this analysis. That countries used to dynamism and planning like Japan and Yugoslavia should rank high on this dimension is perhaps not strange, but why Norway? Table 4. Is the year 2000 far away or close?

AR in favor of 'close' Rank Rank of AR for thinking about the future 'of your country'

CS

E

GB

IND

J

.30 4

.09

.02

.34

8

9

2.5

3

7

6

1

(AR) N

NL

PLp

SF

YU

.50

-.06

.18

.21

.15

.34

1

10

6

5

7

2

8

9

5

10

2.5

4

To answer this we would have to look at more data, but let us only indicate at this point that it may have something to do with being a nation which on the one hand is not autonomous in setting its own goals (because it is essentially imitating other rich nations) while on the other hand it has already to some extent arrived; it is rich. 5 This may have left the population with a vague feeling that the future is neither threatening nor satisfactory; and that the future has no particular structure since there is neither autonomous goal-setting, nor any over-riding problem. If we now compare the tendencies of thinking of the future and of feeling that the future is 'close', it becomes evident from lines 2 and 3 of Table 4 that there is a high correlation between the two. We therefore feel entitled to state the following as a major finding: Future consciousness in this sense is best developed among the non-European and the socialist nations, and least among the Western European nations. We call it a major finding because it indicates a theme that is recurrent indeed: For some nations the future has more reality than for others, and it seems to have least reality for the capitalist nations that also have the higher level of technical-economic development. And this immediately poses a question: Is the lack of future awareness a result of taking the future for granted, or is it more the consequence of a feeling that the future is far from simple, far from evident, even threatening? The answer to this can and should be put in terms of both - and we shall soon see that the data indicate where

The future: A forgotten dimension

55

the point of gravity in the mixture of possible answers to that type of question should be located. If we now turn to the degree of exposure to the future, given in Table 5, we notice immediately that although there seems to be quite a lot of exposure to the problem of the future from the mass media, it has not yet penetrated to the level of interpersonal talk - all these percentages (except for the Indian elite sample) are fairly low. In fact most nations show some kind of tendency towards increasing exposure from 'talking' via 'radio and TV' to 'newspapers and books' - but this is a rather common phenomenon and not a particular characteristic of exposure to the future. It is important in connection with the future, however, for it shows how unrealistic any attitude-change model based on only diffusion and mobility, leaving out mass communication and particularly its content, would be. Table 5. Exposure to thefuture - at least weekly (%)

Talking Radio, TV Newspaper, books SUM Exposure rank

CS

E

GB

IND

J

N

36 67 61

22 32 29

31 55 57

72 75 82

12 27 27

164 2

83 8

143 3

229 1

66 10

NL

PLp

SF

YU

34 53 55

25 45 44

23 38 41

26 29 17

29 43 46

142 4

114 6

102 7

72 9

118 5

To get a crude measure of the total level of exposure, we added up these percentages and ranked the nations (lines 4 and 5, Table 5), and the result is a ranking very dissimilar to the two rankings in Table 4. Future consciousness andfuture exposure evidently do not go hand in hand, at least not at the aggregate level. But these are all relatively trivial results from standard survey questions, with standard survey answers. It becomes more interesting when we look at the content of the concern. Some obvious open-ended questions were asked: What do people think will be the difference between is the worst thing that could happen? The results are given in a highly the year 2000 and today, what is the best thing that could happen and what abbreviated form in Table 6. In spite of all the crudeness of content analysis of the answers to an openended question, the similarity in answer pattern is impressive. All

Johan Galluni;

56

European nations show high consensus about the worst that could happen, and much more so than for the best. Visions of a pessimistic nature seem by and large to be better developed than optimistic visions. And it is quite clear that the major difference is seen in terms of 'technical progress' more particularly in terms of äutomation. In other words, for the nations in our sample the future seems somehow to be synonymous with a technological future. The future is seen in technical terms, not in terms of culture, human enrichment, social equality, social justice, or in terms of international affairs.

Table 6. The difference between the year 2000 and today (%) CS

E

GB

IND

J

N

NL

PL

SF

YU

More automation, technical progress and development 57

34

33

23

47

49

46

44

49

40

Higher standard of living

12

14

13

2

15

7

6

18

5

11

54

29

53

25

41

58

57

-

43

64

5

6

4

4

26

2

6

-

6

6

Nuclear or non-nuclear war

85

67

73

28

37

87

81

-

78

90

Unemployment, mechanisation

2

4

2

6

40

1

10

4

1

Difference:

Best thing that could happen:

World peace, disarmament, united world More automation, less work Worst thing that could happen:

—

But when people are asked to state what they hope for most or fear most in the future, then the world penetrates into the domestic system and even more so than it did in Table 3: Answers in terms of peace and war dominate completely. There is one exception: For Japan the domestic implications of automation reach up towards the world peace level when it comes to the best thing that could happen, and even reach higher than the nuclear or non-nuclear war level when it comes to the worst thing that

The future: A forgotten

dimension

57

could happen. Thus, the Japanese seem even more than others to see the future in technological terms, both positively and negatively. Whether this is because technological dimensions are very strongly on their minds, or because the international system somehow does not exist, remains to be seen. So far we may take the safe, agnostic position of granting some validity to both points of view. In general this means that the future of mankind is expressed in technological terms, possibly because it is conceived of by minds that have been trained to think about the future mainly in terms of technological 'progress'. We think this is in itself a very interesting finding. The question was unstructured, and the questions preceding it had not prepared the mind particularly for technical answers; nevertheless, this is what we get. Or, rather, this is what we get as long as we ask a purely cognitive question. The moment evaluation is brought in all the emotions attached to the international sphere also enter. And the most important aspect of this finding is the type of answer that is not given: In terms of human enrichment and social equality, in short, in terms of, for instance, social futures. From this one cannot infer that only the technical-economic not the socio-political aspect of development is on people's mind. People may also think in terms of social future but regard it as unchangeable. But it seems more probable that they have only been trained to think technologically and have no other types of thoughts as a response to the stimulus 'future'; or have at least not been trained to express any other thoughts. And this will then become self-reinforcing since no one will be stimulated by others to think about social futures. This shows up clearly in the entire debate on environment, the ecological issue: It is usually perceived in technological rather than in social terms. 6 Of course, a major reason for this is that people are used to the idea that 'there will always be a technological solution'. Whether this really has worked in the past may be discussed, but this is at least what people seem to believe and our findings seem to indicate that this faith is then projected into the future.

5. THE ATTITUDE TO SCIENCE

Let us now pursue this topic further, by investigating in more detail what seems to be the general attitude towards science held by these samples. And here we are in the good position that we have two sets of questions: Whether the respondents think that in the year 2000 scientific knowledge will make this or that possible, and whether they would like

58

Johan Galtung

scientific knowledge to make this or that possible. It was hoped that by comparing the answers concerning seven possible innovations some insight might be obtained about the attitude to science in the ten nations, and particularly to the role of science in the future. Let us start with the prediction question, and then proceed to the evaluation question (see Tables 7 and 8). The first thing that strikes one looking at the figures in Table 7 is the relatively high level of general belief that science will make things possible. Of the total array of 70 acceptance ratios, 48 were positive; i.e., of those who had an opinion there were in 69% of the cases more people who felt science would make it possible than there were people who felt this was beyond the reach of science, at least before the year 2000. The distribution of belief and disbelief on topics is clear: The disbelief in science focuses on the ability to decide in advance the personality of one's child and to organize the world so that there will be no wars. One might object that in the first case there is possibly a carry-over from dislike to disbelief. But that should not be the case for the problem of organizing the world so that there will be no wars. Thus we are more inclined to believe that both are genuine expressions. It looks as if the popular conciousness and disbelief here reflect the general ranking of sciences in terms of their effectiveness: On top come engineering and medical sciences, on the bottom psychology and peace research, with some other sciences in between. There is certainly nothing surprising about this distribution of disbelief: It may be a relatively accurate reflection of what is actually going to happen. It may perhaps, however, also be said that the most recent 'advances' in the biological sciences, the possibilities of mind-control, and in general the biological (bio-chemical) revolution have not yet been adequately reflected in the popular consciousness. More interesting is the distribution of nations on items, for here Japan is by far the most skeptical one. The Japanese share the faith of the others in the possibility of finding a cure for cancer and of going to other planets - where the latter is concerned they are even number one. What seems to be reflected in the data is a certain one-sidedness when it comes to the Japanese conception of what scientific knowledge will make possible: It is particularly heavily concentrated on non-social, non-personal aspects of science. Science seems to be conceived of as concerned with nature only, and to be able to do almost anything in that realm. But science seems, in their minds, to be effectively barred from entering the other two realms, society and man. Is this because of a particular interpretation of 'science' in the direction of the very hard sciences alone, or is it due to latent anxieties, or both? As usual 'both' is the safe answer. But let us see whether the data on evaluation of scientific achievements

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The future: A forgotten dimension

can shed some light on this. Table 8 gives the same type of data as Table 7, but this time the question is whether the respondents would like scientific knowledge to make this or that possible. We now want to focus on the resistance to science; or better science skepticism, which is much lower than science disbelief (86% positive ratios this time). However, two of the items are not very good for our analysis since very few respondents would say openly that they are against finding a cure of cancer or against a way of organizing the world so that there will be no wars. As far as the latter is concerned we notice that the highest resistance to this type of research is found in India and Japan, a finding that should be related to what we saw in Table 3: A certain tendency for these two countries to let the nation prevail over the world in their minds. For European nations that see 'world' as dominating 'country' in an increasingly interdependent and shrinking system, this type of response would be less meaningful, for world order becomes even more of an absolute need the closer and more threatening events outside the national borders appear to be. If we now delete these two items we are left with five items with which to penetrate more deeply into the data to test a very simple hypothesis which suggests itself by all we have said so far: The higher the level of technical-economic development of the country, the higher the science skepticism. For this purpose it seems quite reasonable to proceed in a simple manner and make use of the division of our ten nations into two groups, more and less developed nations, given in Table 1 (with comments) : 1. The more developed countries: Great Britain, Japan, Norway, Netherlands, Finland. 2. The less developed countries: Czechoslovakia, Spain, India, Poland and Yugoslavia. Table 9. Relation between level of development and science skepticism

More developed Less developed Yule's Q

Sex of child

Personality

Economy

Weather

Planets

high

low

high

low

high

low

high

low

high

5

0

5

0

5

0

5

0

4

1(J)

0

5

0

5

0

5

0

5

1 (YU)

4

1.0

1.0

1.0

1.0

low

0.88

62

Johan Galtung

As to the responses we simply took the acceptance ratios and divided the ten nations in the five highest on skepticism (lowest ARs) and the five lowest. The results are as follows (see Table 9): The data seem to fall relatively neatly into the predicted pattern, particularly for the second item. For the question about economic development the data were tied so that we had to let the third decimal decide the matter, and for the data on inter-planetary travel the Japanese, who according to this hypothesis should show skepticism on the contrary proved to be quite enthusiastic: 85% were in favor, as one more expression of Japanese technological (as opposed to scientific) euphoria. What then, does this general and clear finding seem to imply? In short, it might perhaps be formulated in one sentence: The countries with a high level of technical and scientific development seem somehow to say 'so far, but no further'. It is as if science skepticism sets in at a certain level. For the less developed countries rather there seems to be considerable science enthusiasm, a general faith in the idea that science not only will make things possible but also should make things possible. There is little evidence in the data to show a growing concern about the lessapplauded conseq uences of science that seem to dominate the minds in richer nations. We mentioned that Czechoslovakia was a borderline case in the development level classification, and this also shows up in the two questions relating to one's off-spring: Czechoslovakia falls in the lower group (less resistance) where the ratios are concerned, but is not among the lowest in that group. We mention this because it seems to indicate that it is not so much the form of government or economic system that is decisive in this respect, but rather the general level of exposure to science. Or, perhaps better expressed, how long and how deeply science and technology have penetrated into the societies. Thus, if we had formulated the whole study in 1970, we would no doubt have included questions about pollution and man's relationship to his environment. It may well be that what we see in these data (from 1967/68) is a first indication among the respondents of feelings in this connection, in an embryonic form that later on came out much more fully. But there is also another factor at work. The highest resistance figures have to do with deciding the sex of one's child and deciding in advance the major feature of the personality of one's child. The skepticism here is probably related to a feeling that there should be an inner sphere around man, a sphere of privacy into which science should not penetrate, where perhaps chance should reign rather than external forces imposed from the outside. One might have expected a priori that highly Catholic countries like Spain and Poland would feel this anxiety par-

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63

ticularly strongly, but this seems not to be the case. On the contrary, they fall in the category of low skepticism, or what we have called science enthusiasm. In fact, Spain and Poland, with extremely different regimes but yet not too different when it comes to the level of development seem to follow a rather parallel course through this jungle of percentages. In short, we feel that it is warranted to conclude so far that there is a science skepticism, that it is particularly focussed on the inner sphere of human existence and particularly pronounced in the nations most developed in terms of science and technology. It is demonstrably not invariably true that the more science and technology, the more enthusiam, leading to an accelerating race in the development and application of science. Rather, less developed nations seem to be in a state of innocence, even enjoying the bliss of innocence, and this is behind some of their optimism - no doubt blended with a feeling among some people in these nations that 'we shall master the problems of science better than others'. Thus, optimism may be the optimism of realistic hope rather than of naivete or repression of anxieties. But however that may be, science attitudes seem to be correlated with the level of technical-economic development rather than with the type of socio-economic system. For, although the most socialist states in the sample of nations, Czechoslovakia and Poland, exhibit considerable science enthusiasm, this seems also in general to apply to Yugoslavia (Slovenia), the elite sample from India (Uttar Pradesh) and the far-from-socialist Spain. Roman Catholicism does not seem to play much of a role either: Neither Poland nor Spain show signs of resistance to science penetrating the inner spheres of life. This may be because there is no explicit Catholic doctrine against such development yet, and hence no polarization of the population along religious lines relative to such issues. People's minds seem to be segmentalized on this issue, putting religion and science in different compartments. But more will become known about this when the role of religion is explored later on.

6 . THE ATTITUDES TO DOMESTIC FUTURE

We now want to further explore the relation between development level and image of the future by asking a more general question: Does this pessimism/optimism apply not only to the development of science but possibly also to other aspects of the domestic future? Our questionnaire permits us to study this question in some detail since we asked so many questions about the domestic future; more precisely, twenty 'think will happen' questions and eight 'hope will

64

Johan Galtung

happen' questions. (In the tables to be presented below, these questions are referred to by 'catch-words'. Their full text is given in the Appendix, p. 703 ff.). Of course, it is mainly the former we can use in this connection, and only if we think it is quite obvious what is the pessimistic and what is the optimistic answer. Actually, these twenty items were chosen so that they distribute themselves on five aspects of the domestic (as opposed to international) future, viz., intrapersonal, interpersonal, family, social ills and social structure items. We shall present all the data, and in this order, but as we shall also see, our major hypothesis cannot be meaningfully tested on more than twelve of the items. Unfortunately, these questions were not asked in Britain so this important hypothesis cannot be given as complete a test as we would have liked. 7 6.1 Intrapersonal items The respondents' reflections on the intrapersonal future are mirrored in Table 10. If we first focus on the hope part of the table it is quite clear that international opinion (and national as well) is divided. This is particularly true when it comes to religion where the acceptance ratios show considerable variation, from a maximum for Spain to a minimum for Czechoslovakia. Actually, the data make very good sense when judged by more commonsense impressions: An educated guess 8 would be that the most religiously oriented nations in the sample should be Catholic Spain and Poland (with socialist ideology making considerable inroads on the religious sentiment), Protestant Norway and Finland, and the mixed Netherlands. As one little element of validation this one is relevant, but not really necessary. More interesting than validation is the exploration of new ground by contrasting the above result with the hope that by the year 2000 people will be more interested in inner experiences than today. Here the level of consensus is actually quite high with seven nations showing acceptance ratios above .80. From these seven nations five reach ratios of even .90 or more. Does this not contradict what we just found for religion, with resistance in Japan. India. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia? No, these are two different things, and the nations that reject 'religion' and accept 'inner experiences' - which obviously may mean many different things to different respondents - are Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Japan (see bottom line of Table 10). We note this in passing for it seems to indicate a search for something that may be as age-old as mankind itself, but according to the samples in these countries (institutionalized) religion is not seen as sufficiently able to cater to this need. 9

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Johan Galtung

66

If we now turn to the think part of the table we know already that there is too little consensus in connection with 'belief in religion' and 'interest in social success' to enable us to know what is a pessimistic and what is an optimistic answer. The same must also apply to 'interest in material things', since it is not obvious whether it is 'good' or 'bad'. That leaves us with two items where the classification of the answers should be unproblematic enough to test our optimism/pessimism hypothesis, but we also add 'inner experiences' to see how it divides the nations. The results are shown in Table 11.

Table 11. Relation between level of development andpessimism/optimism intrapersonal future Happy

More developed Less developed Yule's Q

Inner experiences

Enjoy work

-

optimist

pessimist

'optimist' 'pessimist'

optimist

pessimist

1(J)

3

2(J.SF)

2

0

4

4

1(PL)

3

2(IND,PL) 5

0

0.85

0.20

1.0

We have indicated the names of the 'deviant' nations so that the test of the hypothesis can be better evaluated. Let us first note that in the three cases where a 'more developed' country deviates by being more optimistic, the country is Finland or Japan - which were precisely the countries counted as borderline cases in the upper category. Therefore, we do not have a strong invalidation of the general hypothesis, since these exceptions are in line with the general trend predicted: The higher the development level, the lower the optimism. But they do show us that much depends on where we place the dividing line between 'more' and 'less' developed. The item 'inner experiences' would have contradicted our hypothesis completely, but then it is not a test because of the ambiguity. Thus, of the four deviant cases, two are Japan and Finland - mentioned above; and the remaining two are India and Poland that according to the corresponding hope-item showed the lowest level of consensus concerning the value of being interested in inner experiences. This may, no doubt, affect the classification of the individual Indian and Polish respondent as

67

The future: A forgotten dimension

a pessimist or an optimist sufficiently to throw doubt on the categorization of the nation as a whole. On the other hand, it seems difficult to believe that people would be seriously against happiness and the ability to enjoy work, so we conclude that the hypothesis holds up relatively well. But it may be worth while just to look a little at the other items in Table 10 that could not be used to test the hypothesis. Thus, it is quite clear what people in all these nations see as the general future ethos: Less interest in religion, with only Spain holding out to some extent; more interest in material things, like cars, etc., and more interest in social success. This is the general picture. If one then compares the nations there is no clear pattern. In a sense this actually serves as indirect support of the general hypothesis: Only when the items have a clear evaluative perspective do they really discriminate between more and less developed nations. This is important because the opposite finding might lead one to believe that there could be some other factor at work, like the tendency to choose the first alternative mentioned, response set, etc.; but there does not seem to be any such general tendency either; the only reasonably clear pattern seems to be the one we found. 6.2 Interpersonal items There are only two items that fall into this category, and they seem so obvious where their value aspect is concerned that we did not ask any corresponding hope-items (see Table 12). Table 12. What do you think - interpersonal items (AR in favor of'more') CS Think will happen: Kind to each other .16 Interest in good friends .80

E

GB

IND

J

N

NL

PL

SF

YU

.25

-

-.59

-.73

-.43

-.43

-.03

-.18

-.23

.56

-

-.06

.05

.10

.25

.16

.54

.29

The pattern is relatively clear, and in agreement with the general hypothesis (see Table 13). 6.3 Family items Here we have a larger variety of items, three 'think-items' and two

Johan Galtung

68

'hope-items' to be precise, and they yield more material for exploring the hypothesis further (see Table 14). Table 13. Relation between level ofdevelopment andpessimism/optimism interpersonal items Kind to each other

G o o d friends

optimist

pessimist

optimist

pessimist

More developed

1(SF)

3

2 (SF, N L )

2

Less developed

4

1 (IND)

3

2(IND,PL)

Yule's Q

0.20

0.85

Table 14. What do you think and what do you hope -family items (AR in favor of'more') CS

E

GB

IND

J

N

.83

.87

NL

PL

SF

YU

.89

.84

.82

.91

.83

-.58 .86

-.08 .76

-.51 .68

-.19 .81

-.46 .70

-.28 .

.11

-.60

-.06

.26

.85

.95

.98

.91

.64

Think will happen: .66

.93

-

-.19 .29

-.60 .76

-

-.48 -.14 .74 .89

Sexual freedom

.16

-.18

-

.73 -.62

Attachment to families

.33

.73

-

Sexual freedom Attachment to families Divorce Hope will happen:

-.28

.95

Again, let us start by looking at the hope-items. Keeping in mind that this is a sample of young people, 15 to 40 years old, it is in a sense surprising that they do not hope for more sexual freedom. Only Czechoslovakia, India, Netherlands and Yugoslavia show positive ratios here. Is this because these nations are particularly repressive at this point, whereas the other five nations have tasted the fruits of sexual freedom and found them wanting - at least relative to their standards? At a very intuitive

The future: A forgotten dimension

69

level of analysis this seems to make sense for the most nations with a strong, puritan morality that has recently been challenged and partly broken down in what seems to be an accelerating process. Unfortunately, we do not have more data to explore such hypotheses further at this level of analysis. As to 'attachment to families' there is more consensus: Whereas many people around the world seem to want more sexual freedom, they do not seem to want a loosening of the family ties. Only the Indians, and to some extent Czechs, have inclinations in this direction; the others show close to consensus in hoping for strong family ties. But when it comes to prediction they are all relatively similar: They think there will be more sexual freedom, and there will be less attachment to families. To this should be added, as a deduction from these two statements that they all expect more divorce. With some minor exceptions there is remarkable consensus on these three items. Clearly, it is not so easy to test our hypothesis on these data, since the evaluation of the answers is unclear and dependent on the value-scale held by the individual respondent. But let us just look at them for what they are, as we did in Table 11. Table 15. Relations between level of development and pessimism/optimismfamily items

More developed Less developed Yule's Q

Sexual freedom

Attachment to families

Divorce

more

less

more

less

more

less

4 1(E)

0 4

3 KCS)

1(N) 4

3 1(E)

1(NL) 4

*

**

0.85

* IQI = 1.0, direction not defined ** IQI = 0.85, direction not defined

We have to discount the tables for sexual freedom because of the extreme dissent revealed in Table 14 as to whether sexual freedom is good or bad. As to the other two we feel, with some doubt, that there is sufficient value consensus, and both distributions confirm the hypothesis nicely.

70

Johan Galtung

6.4 Items concerning social ills In this category we have four items that were considered so unequivocal that we did not ask the corresponding hope-question. The results were as expressed in Table 16.

Table 16. What do you think - social ills (AR in favor of 'more'J CS

E

-.32 .28 .26 -.01

-.28 .47 .76 .28

GB

1ND

J

N

NL

PL

SF

YU

.40 .80 .66 .74

.26 .75 .85 .83

.39 .49 .87 .70

.00 -.19 .25 .55 .67 .73 .09 .29

.34 .72 .79 .68

Think will happen : Unemployment Mental illness Narcotics Criminality

-

.06 .62 .68 .59

The items are formulated in such a way that they should offer a particularly good opportunity for testing the hypothesis, and the results seem to be in general conformity with that idea (see Table 17). The correlations are not perfect, but the general trend is again quite clear. However, the differences between more and less developed nations should not mask the generally high level of pessimism where social future is concernced: Out of the 36 ratios only four are negative, three of them relating to unemployment - indicating a very high level of pessimism where these important social aspects are concerned. In general, unemployment, mental illness, use of narcotics, and criminality seem to be important parts of the image of future society, and more so the more developed the nation. 6.5 Social structure items Finally, we have five items that in one way or another relate to the social structure of future society in general. The results are shown in Table 18. As usual, we start with the hope-items (for two of them there were no corresponding 'think'-items). There is some consensus, if not overwhelming, to the effect that there should be more women in leading positions. As to living in cities the hopes divide as one would expect: The four more developed nations are against and the five less developed nations are in favor - both 'hoping' from their respective positions on the degree-of-urbanization scale.

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As far as the question is concerned whether people will have manual jobs, the distribution of hopes shows quite similar features. The general consensus is that people should have less manual jobs, but the degree of enthusiasm varies considerably from one nation to the other: From Norway which actually has a slight preponderance of people who hope for more manual jobs, to Czechoslovakia, India and Poland who all seem to look forward to a non-manual future. The correlation is almost perfect from our point of view (see Table 19).

Table 19. Relation between level of development and pessimism I optimismsocial structure \

More developed Less developed Yule's Q

Hope will live in cities

Hope people will have manual jobs

more (optimism)

less (pessimism)

more (pessimism)

less (optimism)

0

4

3

1(SF)

5

0

1(E)

4

1.0

0.85

In this case we use two hope-items to test our hypothesis. How can we do that when the hypothesis is about development-pessimism? Only because we feel we can accept the underlying assumption that most people will predict that people will in fact to a larger extent live in cities and to a lesser extent have manual jobs, since these are so far such extremely clear world trends. Therefore we venture to define as a pessimist a person whose hopes are contrary to these trends. As we see, the distribution is almost exactly as predicted. Let us then turn to the think-items. None of them can be used to test the hypothesis since it is not obvious for any of them whether the future people see is one of hope or fear when they make their predictions along these dimensions. But we notice that people in general think there will be more similarity (exception: Netherlands), less inequality (exception: Japan and Yugoslavia), there will be more women and young people in leading positions (no exceptions, but then this is also rather obvious since any change would seem to be in that direction, away from old-male dominance) - and, there will be more leisure (India does not agree with

The future: A forgotten

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dimension

this - but that may be because 'leisure' and 'unemployment' are not sufficiently well kept apart in that question). Actually the four most developed nations are also the nations that think most in terms of a future dominated by leisure. This seems natural for nations with a relatively high level of technical-economic development but is no test of our hypothesis since there is no evaluation involved here - at least none that we know of or can easily infer. 6.6 Conclusion Concluding our survey of the outlook on domestic future, we shall order our tests of the basic hypothesis, 'the higher the level of technicaleconomic development, the higher the level of science skepticism and development pessimism', in terms of increasing correlation:

Science skepticism .20

.85

Mental illness Friendship Narcotics

Happiness Kindness Divorce Unemployment Criminality Manual jobs

Interplanetary travel

Control Control Control Control

.88

1.00 »•

Development pessimism

sex personality weather economy

Yule's 0

Enjoy work City life

Out of 16 tests of the hypothesis 6 received perfect confirmation, 8 quite strong confirmation whereas 2 were not confirmed. Thus, the data seem to overwhelmingly support this following conclusion: Technical-economic development is not reinforced by growing optimism, but rather seems to lead to growing skepticism and pessimism. Expressed in different words: If one should judge on the basis of these data, then one could say that the people living in the most developed countries as far as technology and economy are concerned do not seem to feel that they are at the threshold, at the beginning of a new, great era. On the contrary, they rather seem to reflect a feeling of being at the end of something, of moving into a corner, without seeing any clear escape. This is then supplemented by the impression that people in the less developed countries, socialist or not, have exactly the opposite conception: They seem to feel that they are at the beginning of something, of an era full of promises, and meet the future with much more confidence. In conclusion one might ask whether we could not carry the hypothesis

74

Johan Galtung

a little bit further and make for finer discriminations. Since we have the measures of skepticism and pessimism with two decimal places, and also all kind of indicators of technical-economic development, would it not be an idea to use more refined measures of correlation? We feel rather disinclined to accept this since all the variables we have used are dubious both where validity and reliability are concerned. But we can do something else to explore the hypothesis: We can count the number of times a nation deviates from a general pattern of confirmation. This gives the result that Norway is as reliable a pessimist as Czechoslovakia is a reliable optimist (no deviations); then follow Poland (1 deviation) and Spain, India, Japan and the Netherlands (3 deviations each). So far the number of deviations is much below the number of tests (16), but the numbers for Yugoslavia (5) and for Finland (8) are somewhat high. On the other hand, they are also borderline cases as far as classification in terms of development is concerned.

7 . OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM: THE CANTRIL ITEMS

We shall now approach the same general topic from a different angle, focussing more on general pessimism/optimism. In our questionnaire the Cantril ladders were also included as a general method to gauge optimism/pessimism. This 'instrument' gives the respondent a chance to place himself on a ladder with 9 (in the original, 11) rungs - and he is asked to indicate his position from the worst possible to the best possible, for himself, the country and the world; at present, 5 years ago, in 5 years, and in the year 2000. Let us look at some of the data obtained when the respondent is asked to rate his own country. To simplify we calculate ratios based on the percentage that placed their country on rungs 1-4 and on rungs 6-9 (see Table 20). There are many ways of reading this table, and most of them give interesting results in full agreement with the hypothesis already developed. First, most nations show perceptions of amelioration: The ratios are increasing from 'five years ago' via 'today' and 'in five years' to (year 2000). But only for six nations are the ratios monotonically increasing with no dips at all. And which are the six nations that show no dips? They are exactly all the less developed nations in the sample, but then also Japan, although in a less pronounced manner. Britain, the Netherlands and Finland all look back to better pasts - and Norway (as the only one) also looks forward to a worse future. Thus, one more confirmation, or rather one more detail, of our general image: The developed nations now

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Johan Galtung

feel they have reached the ceiling and are hitting their heads against it; for the developing nations, socialist or not, development will go from bad via good to even better in an uninterrupted flow. Look at Norway; and compare it with Spain! Second, to explore this in more detail let us look at the steepness of this gradient into the future, not only at its shape. We again get the same impression : It can serve to distinguish between developed and developing nations. A simple measure of the steepness can be arrived at by calculating differences between the ratios for two time points, and then study how these differences rank the nations. The results are given in Table 20 and can also be summarized in tabular form (see Table 21). Table 21. Development level and domestic optimism (perceived differences in standing of one's country) Year 2000 five years ago

Year 2000 today

high

low

high

low

high

low

More developed Less

0

5

2(SF,GB)

3

1(SF)

4

developed

5

0

3

2(E,YU)

4

1(E)

Yule's Q

1.0

0.39

In five years today

0.88

The general tendency is more than clear enough. However, it is interesting to note the deviant cases. Finland appears to have a population viewing years of tremendous progress right ahead, just as Spain appears to be of the opinion that this progress has already taken place. It will continue, but what happened in the preceding short time interval was already dramatic. Therefore Spain ranks number 1 in the third line from the bottom in Table 20 (and Finland number 9). In addition to Spain ..it is two of the socialist nations and Japan that report the greatest recent development - which may be said to be an accurate perception. Actually, the negative rank correlation between the magnitude of the perceived j u m p in the past and the perceived j u m p into the future is only -.43. Thus, at the aggregate level these are rather independent perceptions. In short, our item-by-item findings are confirmed by this more global Cantril measure, and the conclusion seems rather firm: There is such a thing as development fatigue. The type of development we know in our nations is not endlessly self-stimulating. The appetite does not grow

The future : A forgotten

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78

Johan Galtung

with increasing consumption. On the contrary, appetite may diminish with consumption, and only he who as yet has consumed relatively little will retain his optimism. The more developed were probably once as optimistic as the less developed are today, but however that may have been, this is certainly no longer the case. Let us then carry this test of our general hypothesis still a little step further. So far in this section all our questions have had to do with images of the 'domestic future', ending with how the respondents feel their own country "stands'. But are the feelings strong enough to penetrate down to the individual level, down to the level of the person himself and his own future? In other words, do they have the same perspectives at this level, or do they somehow detach the person from the national condition, feeling that regardless of whether their country may go up or down, they themselves are free and can pave their way towards a reasonable level of well-being, at least in the year 2000? To explore this, and we did not really have any firm hypothesis in advance, we looked at the corresponding Cantril items for the person himself. The results are shown in Table 22 which is actually quite interesting and leads to several conclusions. First of all, if we look statistically at Table 22, focussing on where the respondents place themselves today, then there is a perfect correlation between development level and personal satisfaction; as can be seen from the first part of Table 23. Table 23. Development level and personal optimism (present level and perceived differences of 'personar standing) Today

More developed Less developed Yule's Q

Year 20005 years ago

Year 2000in 5 years

Today-5 years ago

high

high

low

high

low

high

low

5

0

0

5

1 (J)

4

1 (GB)

4

0

5

5

0

4

1 (YU)

4

1 (PL)

1.0

1.0

0.88

low

0.88

But, and this is the second point, the moment we change from the static to the dynamic perspective and look at changes from one point in time to the other, the less developed countries shoot up again and exhibit the

The future: A forgotten dimension

79

greatest differences. And this cannot be explained entirely in terms of the developed countries having less rungs on the ladder to move on. There is still space to move on the ladder, and it also works backwards, where there is ample space on the ladder, as can be seen from the second part of the table. The steepness of the prediction gradient for the future, first taking the total interval Year 2000 - 5 years ago, and then the final interval, Year 2000 -in 5 years (the middle sections of Table 23) - or any other interval - is clearly correlated with the development level. In short, a typical example of how things look different when we use the future rather than the present as a projection screen for the respondents. Had we used only the present our conclusion would have been simply that the nations that are best off are also the most satisfied. And the conclusion would easily have been 'more development, more satisfaction', which would then shade into 'more development, more optimism'. Moreover, and this is the third point to be derived from the table, when we look at the perception of what is going to happen in the more distant future, between the year 2000 and the coming 5 years, four of the ten nations even show downward dips, and these nations are all among the more developed. The level of pessimism for the Norwegian sample towards the end of this century is particularly pronounced, as the corresponding level of optimism for the Indian sample. But at this level of analysis we are unable to say why this is the case. In a sense this rounds off the picture we have drawn, and it also shows a remarkably high level of correlation between nation perspective and individual perspective. It may be argued that this is only the result of some type of response-set: The Cantril items are so similar that the individual does not really discriminate between the stimuli he receives; he answers the same way whether it is supposed to deal with his country or himself. But if this were the case we should also get the same results when we look at the third Cantril scale on the questionnaire, the questions relating to 'where do you tKink the world stands?'. This will be reported later; suffice it here only to say that, though the answer pattern is similar, we find some differences. When we compare the acceptance ratios for all three Cantril scales we are inclined to conclude that: The person seems to feel that his personal well-being is more the result of what happens to his country than of what happens to the world as a whole. To pursue this theme further let us look at how some questions designed to tap feelings of personal autonomy and alienation discriminate between the nations. One of the questions was whether people thought their own future would be determined largely by what they themselves make of it, or 'by external circumstances over which you have little control'. Another question was whether they thought they had too little,

80

Johan Galtung

enough or too much influence on the public affairs of their country. The questions relate to the present and probably tap a part of the general attitude that is underlying how people rate their own situation today. Hence we would expect the feeling of autonomy to be related to our basic variable the level of technical-economic development, with the highest level of reported feeling of autonomy for the more developed countries. Our findings are reflected in Table 24. Table 24. Feeling of autonomy

(AR)

E

GB

1ND J

.37

.54

.83 .12

.43

-.40

.03

'Enough' and 'too much' vs. 'too little' influence -.65

-.70 -.40 -.28

-.55 .03

-.17

-.76

.04 -.19

Autonomy score Rank

-.65 -.03 8 6

.26 -1.16 2.5 10

.07 - . 0 5 5 7

CS Future determined by 'self vs. by 'external circumstances'

-.20

-.85 9

.05

N

.26 .28 .15 1 4 2.5

NL

PL

SF

YU

.14

There are two deviant cases: The Indian sample reports a high level of autonomy perception, and the British sample a low level - otherwise the hypothesis holds true (Q = 0.88). The two socialist countries in the sample, Poland and Czechoslovakia, are remarkably low on the absolute values on this variable, together with Spain. This again indicates that ideology, economic systems or political regimes may not be so important in shaping people's definition or their own situation, as objective levels of development and, perhaps, feelings of relative deprivation. In stating this we are not saying anything about how realistic or unrealistic the perceptions of the respondents are. Our study is about perceptions of reality, not about the social reality itself. And one possibility is that people in the socialist countries have a more realistic perception of their powerlessness than people in the other nations who may, objectively, be as much or even more alienated.

8. GENERAL FUTURE PHILOSOPHY

We feel that we have some idea as to where the various nations stand when it comes to how they view their own future perspectives, both as a country

The future: A forgotten

dimension

81

and individually. But so far we have mainly tried to see these perceptions of the future in the light of the social structure of the country. Without spelling it out we have vaguely assumed that there is something in connection with being technically and economically developed that somehow backfires. Possible intervening variables between development level and development pessimism will be explored later. What we want to do here is to try to throw into the picture another type of variables which evidently also relate to the future: What one might vaguely call 'general future perspectives' entertained by the national samples in the light of other attitudes, not only in the light of internal social structure or of the structural position of their particular nation in the world. For this purpose the respondent were exposed to two 'instruments' with ten questions each, the first one dealing with general future philosophy and the second one with what one could refer to as polarization/ dogmatism-orientation. They are closely related since one's view of the future and how the future will or may come into being will be closely related to how polarized one thinks a struggle to achieve the future will be or would be. However, we shall deal with the two instruments separately in the order mentioned above, and start with the items dealing with general future philosophy. (For the exact wording of the items for both sets of statements see the Appendix, pp. 706 ff.). For the first set dealing with general future philosophy the results are shown in Table 25. Frankly speaking we did not have any hypothesis in advance, so the first thing we did was to start with a searching expedition to see whether by chance the items would fall into the pattern to which we are now accustomed. We picked out the five highest scores and counted the number of less developed nations among them. That number is reported in the right hand column of the table. As we see we get the number 2 for six items and the number 3 for four items, in short, a clear non-pattern. Maybe other wordings would give different results, but 'general philosophy' does not seem to be related to development level. There are, of course, findings for individual nations, some of them worth reporting. Thus, it is hardly surprising that Catholic Spain is the nation that emphasizes the importance of the after-life more than any other nation. Not only is it the only nation having a positive acceptance ratio for that item, it is .76 points ahead of number 2, India. But Spain is also on top when it comes to the other mechanism of postponement of gratification: The emphasis on the success of one's children, although it is here closely followed by the Netherlands. From these two items one would certainly draw the conclusion that the Spanish to some extent would be willing to sacrifice the present for the

Johan Galtung

82

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86

Johan Gal tung

with anything that is put in a questionnaire, just as we have corrected for the tendency to give the answer 'uncertain' by using acceptance ratios. However, explorations in this direction do not indicate that this would change the general impression. And on the other hand, whatever might be the reason for agreeing, agreement is nevertheless expressed - and that is what we are after. This finding does in a certain sense shed some light on the general idea of liberalism in the sense of having an 'open mind': It may simply be an expression of uncertainty, rather than openness, of confusion, of the lack of goal-setting enjoyed by those with basic goals satisfied. To what extent this can be said really to be the case will obviously also have to be explored at the individual level. But then it may be argued that the individual-level interpretation is socially and politically much less important than the collective-level interpretation just given. 10. PERSPECTIVES ON WAR AND THE PROSPECTS OF THE WORLD

As we have seen from Table 6 the general tendency for our sample is to see the domestic future in terms of technology, and the international future in terms of war and peace. This is not to say that there are not also other perspectives considered by the respondents, but these are the dominant perspectives as revealed by open-ended questions. Since we have already looked into the domestic future, particularly focussing on the technological component, we shall now deal with the international future as seen by the respondents, and focus particularly on war and peace. And the first question is a trivial one, a question asked in many surveys during the post-war period: Will there be war, or will there be peace? More precisely, we asked people in the ten nations to indicate what they thought would be most likely in five years, in ten years and in the year 2000 -'world war', 'more armament', 'about as now', 'partial disarmament', and 'total disarmament'. The results are given in Table 27, and as usual we concentrate the answers into what this time should be referred to as 'optimism ratios' by discounting the middle answers and DK, NA, and collapsing the more peaceful, and the more bellicose, perspectives. There are several observations that can be made in connection with this table. First of all, there is obviously both short-run pessimism (negative ratios) and long-run optimism (positive ratios). Only very few of those who have given the pessimist answers for the coming five years have indicated that there may be world war, but very many think in terms of'more armament'. Since by now that five-year period has already passed, it is already safe

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The future: A forgotten

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189

Replication on a youth group: The students

sample depends only on education and student status, then it should disappear if we use the students in the national sample, rather than the whole national sample, for the purpose of comparison; and if the difference depends only on nationality, then it should remain unchanged in such comparison. In order to obtain the groups best comparable to our student samples, we would ideally select the group that has an education of 13 years or more, and that has the position of'student, apprentice'. Since that group would be too small in some countries, we will have to accept one of the two compromises in Table 2. We have preferred the second compromise for the following reasons: 1. It excludes people who no longer have student status. 2. It gives us an age distribution better comparable to the student samples. 3. In the group selected on the basis of the second compromise a considerable proportion of those who are not actually university students will very soon go to a university. In the sequel, we shall take our point of departure in the marginal analyses by Galtung and Sicinski, in order to see how the student samples relate to selected parts of their findings. The order of exposition will, in its outline, be that of Galtung.

2 . CONCERN FOR THE FUTURE

If students are more likely to play an influential role in the future than today's youth in general, does this also mean that they show more concern for the future? Table 3 appears to indicate that this is the case. Table 3. Do you think much about the future ? (AR) Ds

GBs

NZ

US

Of your country Of the world

.40 .57

-.21 .36

-.15 .29

.36 .41

World-country World country, "„

.17 7

.57 28

.44 22

.05 2

Table 3 should be compared with Table 3 in Galtung's analysis (p. 52)

190

Hakan Wiberg

and with Table 6 in Sicinski's analysis (p. 130). The following conclusions offer themselves: 1. The students rank high on future consciousness: The Federal Republic of Germany and the United States of America are higher than any national sample except India on the first question; New Zealand is higher than all except India and Japan; and Great Britain's student sample is higher than all except Czechoslovakia, India and Japan. On the second question, each student sample exceeds each national sample, with one exception only: India ranks higher than New Zealand. It is notable that five exceptions out of eight stem from the Indian sample. From the data on education it is clear that this sample belongs together with the student samples in this respect, even if its members do not share the student status. There are no data on age or occupation of the Indian sample, so we cannot decide where it belongs in these respects. 2. Not only are the student samples more world-minded than others in the sense of thinking more about the future of the world, they also tend to show a greater preponderance of the world over the country in this respect. The percentage differences are compatible with all of Sicinski's hypotheses (exception: GBs). It is the two post-1968 student samples, the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States of America, that think more about the future than anyone else: This is probably what most people would guess. On the other hand, it is not trivial that the post-1968 samples do not rank as high on relative world-mindedness as do other student samples. It might perhaps be understood against the background that one of the (often implicit) ideas gaining ground in 1968 was 'Injustice and conflict begin at home'. Whereas previously the radical groups among the students often condemned their country for having too little to do with the world (in terms of contacts and aid), the radicals of 1968 condemn their own country for having too much to do with the world (in terms of imperialistic exploitation). ,0/ .

Table 4. Exposure to the future - at least weekly (

'

° )

Ds

GBs

NZ

US

Talking

49

56

28

50

Radio, TV

61

37

58

54

Newspaper, books

55

61

54

57

165

154

140

161

Sum

Replication on a youth group: The students

191

The students also appear high on exposure to the future, as indicated by Table 4, when compared with Galtung's Table 5 (p. 55). There is another interesting feature in the picture given by the tables in this section: Our students show a high degree of future consciousness, in spite of being citizens of nations that are all highly developed. So, in spite of these students belonging 'objectively' to the Western European context, we do not find their minds there to the extent that one would expect from Galtung's analyses. In order to get a rough idea of where the differences reported so far come from, we have also studied the data of the 'constructed' students from seven of the national samples (CS,E,GB,J,N,SF,YU).That is, from each of the nations, we selected those who had at least 11 years of schooling and belonged to the category 'student, apprentice', comparing the figures with those for the whole national samples. In each case, the 'constructed' students think somewhat more of the future of their country (mean excess: + 14 AR points) and of the world ( + 19 AR points) than does the corresponding national sample; but our 'real' students are still considerably higher. Making 28 pairwise comparisons between 'real' and 'constructed' students, we find the 'real' ones thinking more about their country in 23 cases (mean excess: + 32 AR points), and thinking more about the world in 28 cases ( + 5 0 AR points). This may indicate that education is very important for future consciousness, since it is by no means enough to go from our national samples to the 'constructed students' in order to find the same values as among the 'real' students, even though the 'real' students would be expected to be low on future consciousness by virtue of their nationality. This latter expectation by Galtung still gets some support from the five exceptions: They are all due to Czechoslovakia, Japan and Yugoslavia. Thus, when we control for student status to some extent, some national tendencies are found that were otherwise hidden. Concerning the difference 'world-country', the 'constructed' students hardly differ from their 'mother' samples (mean excess: + 5 AR points), and they differ in both directions. Great Britain's student sample and New Zealand still exceed all the 'constructed' students, whereas the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States are not distinguishable from them. The question 'Is the year 2000 far away or close?' reveals a pattern similar to that above. In all cases except Norway do the 'constructed' students see the future as closer than their 'mother' samples (mean excess: + 15 AR points). We compared the 'real' students, first with the national samples, then with the 'constructed' students:

192

Hakan Wiberg

'Real' student samples

National samples that see the future as closer than the 'real' students

'Constructed' student samples that see the future as closer than the 'real' students

Ds GBs

J All except GB and N

CS, J, Y U All except N

NZ

J

CS, J, Y U

US

CS, (IND), J, Y U

CS, J, Y U , SF

Once more, when to some extent controlling for student status, we find our 'real' students appearing more 'West European' than initially. Where, then, does future consciousness come from? Does it come from exposure to the future? Galtung has pointed out that there does not appear to be any clear relationship between exposure to the future and future consciousness, and our data do not disagree. For on the one hand, the 'constructed' students are more exposed (talk + see + read) to the future than their 'mother' samples, except in Japan and Czechoslovakia. But on the other hand, the picture analogous to the presentation above looks as follows: 'Real' student samples

National samples that are more exposed to the future than the 'real' students

'Constructed' student samples that are more exposed to the future than the 'real' students

Ds GBs NZ US

(IND) (IND), CS (IND), CS, GB, N (IND), CS

N CS, N CS, GB, N N

Thus, our 'real' students rank higher on future consciousness and on exposure to the future than most other national or 'constructed' student samples. But on exposure they were surpassed both by some nations ranking high and some nations ranking low on future consciousness.

3 . ATTITUDES TO SCIENCE

Science is an aspect of the future that might be expected to be more familiar to students than to youth in general. The general picture emerging from a comparison of Table 5 with Galtung's Table 7 (p. 59) shows even more extreme differences. The students share the belief in future achievements of natural science concerning cancer and weather; and in the case of the sex of one's child,

Replication on a youth group: The students

193

TableS. Do you think that in the year 2000 scientific knowledge willmake it possible ... (AR) Ds 1. To decide in advance the sex of one's child 2. To decide in advance the personality of one's child

GBs

nz

us

.76

.88

.78

.76

-.03

-.11

-.39

-.36

3. To cure dangerous diseases like cancer

.89

.91

.95

1.00

4. To decide in advance the economic development of a country

.56

-.30

.21

.32

5. To organize the world so that there will be no wars

-.74

-.73

-.73

-.70

6. To decide in advance what the weather will be

.31

.37

.78

.64

7. To go to other planets

.94

.64

.64

.92

we see that each student sample believes more in this than does any national sample. On the other hand, social technology is not believed in: The students occupy the lower ranks in respect to economic technology, and as for peace technology, each student sample is considerably more pessimistic than any national sample. One possible explanation for this, proposed by Sicinski for the national samples, is to see the low degree of belief in the future achievements of social sciences as reflecting an insight in the limited possibilities of social science to affect social structures by itself. Galtung's thesis on science skepticism appears to be strongly supported. To submit it to a more formal test, let us note that our four student samples all come from countries that are higher developed than any of Galtung's five 'less developed' countries. Therefore, we should expect each student sample to exhibit a lower acceptance ratio than any 'less developed' country in the 20 pairwise comparisons we can make (15 for the last item). The results of these comparisons are given in Table 7. Let us also have a look at the individual items to throw some light on the controversy between Galtung and Sicinski. That we find less enthusiasm for science among the students than in the 'less developed' countries is abundantly clear from Table 7; but is it also justified to speak about skepticism? When we calculate the differences between hopes and expectations, a rather complicated picture emerges in Table 8.

194

Hakan Wiberg

Table 6. Would you like scientific knowledge to make it possible in the year 2000 ... ( AR) Ds

GBs

NZ

US

1. To decide in advance the sex of one's child

-.08

.05

-.23

-.14

2. To decide in advance the personality of one's child

-.71

-.56

-.64

-.70

3. To cure dangerous diseases like cancer

.92

.91

.95

1.00

4. To decide in advance the economic development of a country

.93

.68

.85

.84

5. To organize the world so that there will be no wars

.83

.74

.84

.94

.41

.40

.80

.65

.64

.77

6. To decide in advance what the weather will be 7. To go to other planets

Table 7. Comparisons of hopes for scientific samples vs. CS, E, IND, PL, YU.

.60 no data

achievements : Student

Issue

No. of pairs confirming Galtung No. of pairs disconfirming Galtung Total No. of pairs

Sex of child

Personality

Economy

Weather

Planets

20

20

20

20

14

0

0

0

0

20

20

20

20

1 (NZ-YU) 15

For four items, the differences between the students and the national samples are rather clear. But how are we to interpret these differences if we do not allow the risk of the ecological fallacy to deter us from making an attempt? The difference concerning wars appears to be attributable to the science disbelief Galtung speaks of. The other three all concern technological consequences of natural science, and here it appears that the phrase 'science skepticism' is adequate, at least for items 1 and 2, even if it is used in an absolute, rather than in a relative sense, i.e., to describe not only differences between nations but also the state of individual nations.

Replication on a youth group: The students

195

Table 8. Approval and anticipation of future scientific achievements (AR for 'like' - AR for 'think') •

1. To decide in advance the sex of one's child

Ds

GBs

-.84

To decide in advance the personality of one's child -.68

NZ

US

Mean/ Mean/ student national samples samples

No. of cases where difference is higher for students

-.83 -1.01

-.90

-.90

-.15

0/40

-.45

-.25

-.34

-.43

.29

1/40

To cure dangerous diseases like cancer

.03

.00

.00

.00

.01

.06

1/40

To decide in advance the economic development of a country

.37

.98

.64

.52

.61

.40

31/40

1.57

1.47

1.57

1.64

1.56

1.13

31/40

To organize the world so that there will be n o wars

To decide in advance what the weather will be To go to other planets

.10

.03

.02

-.04

.03

.45

1/40

-.29

.18

.13

no data

.01

-.12

22/30

So the over-all picture of the students' attitudes to science is rather gloomy: They tend to predict the scientific achievements that they do not like, and do not believe in the possibility for the achievements that they do like. Or to put it in an exaggerated form: The group from which the future scientists will be recruited is disillusioned with science, seeing it either as dangerous or as futile. So we should not be surprised if it revolts against the present institutions of science. Is this something characteristic of the capitalist societies to which our students belong, or should we expect the same trends in the highest developed of the socialist nations? The future will tell.

4. ATTITUDES TO DOMESTIC FUTURE

At the first glance, the student data do not tell us anything dramatic about differences between students and youth in general concerning domestic futures. Here, too, we have made pairwise comparisons between the student samples and the five 'less developed' national samples for

196

Hakan Wiberg

the items that Galtung uses to tap optimism/pessimism. According to him, we should expect the Federal Republic of Germany, New Zealand and the United States to be more pessimistic than the five countries. Table 9 casts some doubt over this. Table 9. Comparisons of optimism for some domestic futures: Student samples vs. CS, E, IND, PL, YU (No. of comparisons confirming Galtung's hypothesis; AR in brackets) Think will happen

Ds

NZ

US

Sum

Happy Enjoy work Kind to each other Interest in good friends Divorce Unemployment Mental illness Narcotics Criminality

5 (-.14) 5 (-.13) 4 (-.54) 1 (.70) 1 (.42) 3 (.06) 2 (.39) 4 (.79) 3 (.54)

5 (-.09) 4 (.07) 3 (-.06) 2 (.38) 1 (.66) 5 (.49) 3 (.59) 3 (.73) 3 (.33)

2 (.36) 4 (.16) 2 (.13) 2 (.47) 1 (.34) 0 (-.32) 0 (.22) 1 (.65) 0 (-.02)

12 13 9 5 3 8 5 8 6

Ratios of confirming comparisons

28/45

29/45

12/45

69/135

If any clear pattern emerges here at all, it is not an extrapolation from Galtung's pattern. Not only is the ratio 69/135 almost exactly the one we would expect from a random distribution, the highest developed of all our countries turns out to be rather clearly in the opposite direction of what we would predict from such an extrapolation. It appears safe to conclude that our data do not support the idea that students have a more well-defined image than others of where the future leads. We may also arrive at this conclusion by looking at the 'about as now' answers, as Sicinski does in his marginal analysis (p. 133 ff.). In this comparison, some interesting conclusions suggest themselves. 1. There is quite a high degree of agreement between the students and the rest about what features of reality are most stable over time and which ones are less stable. If we rank our 20 items in the list of domestic futures according to the average percentage 'about as now' in the national samples, and then do the same ranking according to the average percentage 'about as now' in our three student populations, we get a rank correlation of rho = .73. In no case is the rank difference greater than 8, and only in five cases is it higher than 5. 2. On the other hand, there is considerable disagreement as to how

Replication on a youth group: The students

197

stable different features are. Whereas Norway's average of 25% 'about as now' answers is particularly high among the national samples, we find 25% in New Zealand, 28 % in the United States and even 31 % among the German students. In this sense, the future appears to lack a direction for our students. Here, they contrast strongly to India, which had only 11 % 'about as now' answers. This contrast is well in agreement with Galtung's argument: The greatest extent of change in the future is seen by the educational elite in the least developed country, and the smallest extent by the educational elite in the highest developed ones. 3. Another aspect of this lack of direction also appears when we go through the predictions item by item. Mostly, the student samples as a group do not deviate clearly from the nine national samples. When they come out as more extreme in either direction in more than 20 pairwise comparisons out of 27, what they predict is a future that is less structured than now, at least in terms of our present structures: Religion and family will dissolve, leisure will increase, there will be increased opportunities for such present underdog groups as youth and women. In other words, the freedom of individuals and the possibilities for mobility will increase. 4. That the direction of the future, if at all visible, is only a negation of the present may have something to do with a lack of maps for it. The hopes of the students are often less well-defined (on the aggregate level) than the hopes of youth in general, and in some cases their hopes are defined by what they do not want. Other results from the domestic future section of the questionnaire show that the students are still rather positive to the family, but less so than youth in general. Together with the urbanized nations, they reject life in cities. They reject manual jobs almost as much as Czechoslovakia and Poland. Whereas all other samples are positive to social success, the student samples are all negative. This finding may be somewhat difficult to interpret without going into the complicated semantics of that expression. However, since two of our samples are English-speaking, we would tend to interpret the last difference as the students' rejecting traditional goals, without any new goals being distinctly visible against the background that our questionnaire provides. To summarize the picture of the specific domestic futures: Such a pessimism as Galtung sees in the developed countries is hardly visible among the students. This may reflect a lesser degree of 'real' pessimism, but it may also reflect that the future is less structured, both in terms of hopes and predictions, so that the notions of optimism and pessimism become more ambiguous. Therefore, to say anything about optimism and pessimism, we will rather have to refer to the individuals' own terms, either by looking at homology between wishes and predictions on the individual, rather than the aggregate, level

198

Hakan Wiberg

(as does Konwicka, pp. 403 ff.), or by taking these terms for granted but unanalyzed, as in the Cantril items. Here, we restrict ourselves to the latter method. Table 10. Where do you think your country stands? (Cantril items, AR calculated as in Galtung's Table 20) Ds 5 years ago Today In 5 years In year 2000 Year 2000 - 5 years ago Year 2000 - today Year 2000 - in 5 years Today - 5 years ago In 5 years - today

GBs

NZ

S

US

-.28 .15 .42 .48

.09 -.46 .04 .46

.49 -.19 .35 .56

.79 .75 .75 .70

.14 -.05 .29 .61

.76 .33 .06 .43 .27

.37 .92 .42 -.55 .50

.07 .75 .21 -.68 .54

-.09 -.05 -.05 -.04 .00

.47 .66 .32 -.19 .34

When optimism/pessimism is measured in this way, the student samples very clearly fall into the pattern described by Galtung: They predict progress but see the present as a dip, sometimes quite deep. The exceptions are interesting: The monotonic progress seen by the German students is also found in the national sample from the Federal Republic of Germany; and whereas Norway expects a worse future, its neighbour Sweden even approaches a worse future from a better past. The two Scandinavian nations, then, really give an impression of having arrived: The problem for the future is to keep what they have got now, and they are not sure of being able to do even that. What it is that they have got is not so easy to say; but a comparison with the United States student sample suggests that it can hardly be technical-economic development only. The comparison of different time points also substantiates the idea of development fatigue, which would predict our student samples seeing a lower rate of progress in the future than do the 'less developed' countries. As a matter of fact, with the difference 'year 2000 - 5 years ago', all the student samples lie considerably below the 0.95, which was the lowest range among these countries. The same relation holds for 'year 2000 today' in 21 cases out of 25, the exceptions being New Zealand - Spain and Great Britain's student sample - Czechoslovakia, Spain, Yugoslavia. Finally, except for a tie between Spain and New Zealand, we find the students lower in all 25 comparisons concerning 'in 5 years - today'. These results might be a sign that the Cantril items are better indicators

Replication on a youth group: The students

199

of optimism/pessimism than the specific futures, at least in our case. Let us therefore also regard the Cantril items for personal position in order to see whether they exhibit similar features. Table 11. Where do you think you personally stand? (Cantril items, AR calculated as in Galtung's Table 22) Ds

GBs

NZ

S

-.08

.38

.29

.36

-.13

Today

.39

.72

.56

.78

.72

5 years ago

US

In 5 years

.84

.89

.84

.93

.89

In year 2000

.82

.86

.76

.78

.91

Year 2000 - 5 years ago

.90

.48

.47

.42

1.04

Year 2000 - today

.43

.14

.20

.00

.19

-.02

-.03

-.08

-.15

.02

Today - 5 years ago

.47

.34

.27

.42

.85

In 5 years - today

.45

.17

.28

.15

.17

Year 2000 - in 5 years

Again, the extrapolations from Galtung's analysis are quite tenable. All student samples place themselves higher for 'today', and lower for 'year 2000 - today', than all the five countries lower on development. They are also lower on perceived progress in every other time period, in totally 89 comparisons out of 100. (And 9 of the exceptions are due to the Poles having felt so little improvement in the last five years, and the American students so much.) Furthermore, on the measure 'year 2000 - in 5 years', all except the US students show the downward dips characteristic for the Western European countries. So the replication is really quite good and once more tends to indicate that we get a better perception of optimism/ pessimism with the Cantril items than with the specific domestic futures, at least on the aggregate level. Going to one specific aspect of the personal future, we would expect the student samples to exhibit a high degree of perceived autonomy. First, according to Galtung's generalization, they should do so by virtue of their nationality; and second, the fact that they are in a privileged situation should somehow be reflected in the data. Comparing the less developed nations and the student samples (except the United States for which there were no data) as to whether they see their future as mainly determined by 'themselves' or by 'external circumstances', we find more

Hakan Wiberg

200

perceived autonomy among the students in 19 cases of 20 (exception: a .01 difference India-Sweden) and calculating Galtung's autonomy score, in 18 cases of 20 (India and Yugoslavia exceed the Federal Republic of Germany). For the more developed countries, the expectation is still supported but not so clearly. On the question just mentioned, Japan goes against the expectation by exceeding all student samples, which in turn exceed all others; and on the autonomy score, the Federal Republic of Germany is the exception by being lower than all the national samples, who are in turn lower than all other student samples.

5 . PERSPECTIVES ON THE INTERNATIONAL FUTURE

The student samples, like the national ones, see war as the worst and peace as the best thing that could happen in the year 2000, even if they are somewhat less decided than the national samples here. D o they also make the same predictions as the latter? Table 12. Will there be war and armament - or peace and disarmament? (Optimism ratios, AR calculated as in Galtung's Table 27)

In 5 years In 20 years In the year 2000 Year 2000 - in 5 years

Ds

GBs

NZ

S

US

-.10 .21 .29

-.54 .33 .61

-.72 -.12 .24

-.65 .36 .52

-.42 .30 .55

.39

1.15

.96

1.17

.97

In every case, the student samples exhibit the same pattern of short-run pessimism and long-run optimism as Galtung found in the national samples. The magnitudes do not differ remarkably from the national samples, except for a tendency among the students to see more improvement over the years than do the others. We find some striking differences from the national samples, as we calculate Galtung's War Pessimism Index (c/. p. 87). The question whether the nation will be able to stay out of war or not sorts the student samples as it should: Sweden together with the non-aligned nations, and all the others with the aligned ones. But when we compare the values of the War Pessimism Index (D: 1.78, GBs: 1.00, NZ: .77, S: .38, US: 1.54) with the table above and Galtung's Table 27, we see that Sweden is extremely optimistic in all respects, and the German students even more extremely pessimistic in all respects. Here Galtung's idea that 'the more

201

Replication on a youth group: The students

pessimistic one is, the more necessary is it to become an optimist', is in error. We have no explanation for the German students, who do not differ very much from the German national sample in this respect (cf. Chapter 6, p. 177 ff.). As for Sweden, it may be that war has somehow ceased to have a reality since 1815, when Sweden was at war the last time, or rather that war is something that happens to others. Regarding the acceptance ratios for the question whether man can learn to avoid war, we find another clear deviation from Galtung's generalizations, according to which we should expect the student samples to be on the pessimistic side. We get the following figures: D : .59, GBs: .09, N Z : .52, S: .49, US: .54. Only the British students belong where expected. Moreover, it does not seem that the exceptions are due to education, since the average increment is only .05, when we go from the national samples to the 'constructed' students in these samples. On the other hand, we cannot ascribe the optimism of the students to age either, since a cross tabulation with that variable revealed rather small differences between different age groups; furthermore, these differences went in different directions in different countries. Finally, an explanation in terms of some specific property of the university milieu would be upset by the figures for Great Britain as well as for New Zealand. Thus, we find no simple explanation for the deviation. Table 13. Could you imagine any value, goal or ideal that could justify a war? (AR)

Without nuclear weapons With nuclear weapons

Ds

GBs

NZ

S

US

-.62 -.94

.21 -.80

-.13 -.74

-.28 -.66

-.13 -.85

Comparing these figures with Galtung's Table 29, one might get the impression that students tend to be more bellicose than youth in general. Keeping the class composition of the students in mind, this would be in line with the findings by Kara and Rehak (Chapter 12) that the middle class is somewhat more prone to imagine such values than the working class. But the same reservation applies: This might just be a result of the middle class having more training in reasoning about abstract values than the workers. To check this assumption, we compared the national samples with the 'constructed' students in them, and found that the latter were more prone (mean excess: + 17 AR points) to imagine such values. As one more set of specific futures, let us consider how the three major structural conflicts in the world are perceived by the students.

Hakan Wiberg

202

Table 14. What will happen to the three major structural conflicts? (AR in favour of'will disappear' + 'peaceful coexistence'; in brackets number of national samples that are more pessimistic) Ds

GBs

NZ

S

US

Relations between capitalist and socialist countries

.25(9)

.39(9)

.17(8)

.40(9)

.47(9)

Relations between rich and poor nations

.02(1)

•30(6)

.53(9)

-.33(0)

.37(8)

Relations between different races in the world

.38(9)

-.15(0)

.17(2)

no data

no data

It appears that the conflict between the capitalist and socialist blocs is less real, less important, to the students than to the other samples. Whereas the national samples see this conflict as equally or more threatening in comparison with other conflicts, this is not the case with the students. With them, other conflicts tend to push the bloc conflict from a central position in their minds. The dominant conflict appears to depend on national factors: For the German and the Swedish students it is the rich-poor conflict, for the students in Great Britain and, in a sense, for New Zealand, it is the race conflict. The explanation for the Swedish position might possibly be that development aid was very much of an issue in these years; Great Britain might extrapolate from her own experiences, etc. Let us finally try to get a picture of the students' synthetic evaluation of the international future, as given by the Cantril items. Table 15. Where do you think the world stands? (Cantril items, AR as calculated in Galtung's Table 20. In brackets No. of national samples with lower AR)

5 years ago Today In 5 years In year 2000 Year 2000 - 5 years ago Year 2000 - today

Ds

GBs

NZ

S

US

-.81(0) -.83(0) -.50(1) -.05(0)

-.54(1) -.64(0) -.15(0) .53(1)

-.24(7) -.56(2) -.16(0) .23(0)

-.76(0) -.71(0) -.54(0) -.01(0)

-.72(0) -.70(0) -.27(0) .30(0)

.76(2) .78(7)

1.07(5) 1.17(7)

.47(0) .79(3)

.75(2) .70(1)

1.02(5) 1.00(7)

One possible explanation for this could be sought in the findings on

Replication on a youth group: The students

203

concern for the future: The students are considerably more oriented to the world than the national samples and might therefore be expected to know more about it. In the global perspective, all our samples of both kinds (except India) belong to the 'haves' rather than the 'have-nots', so a higher level of concern for the rest of the world might be expected to lead to a more negative outlook. The picture in Table 15 gets even more puzzling when we try to find some explanation for the students' strong anticipation of improvement. Here, the simplest idea might be that younger people are prone to see the world as more changeable; but this would not be true. When breaking six national samples (CS, E, GB, N, SF, Y U ) down into high, middle and low age, we find the opposite tendency: In four cases the high age group expects more improvement over the next five years than those of low age, and in all six cases it exhibits a steeper gradient from now till the year 2000. Thus, introducing age does not help us to find an explanation.

6 . HOW CAN PEACE BE ACHIEVED?

To get an idea about the relative positions of the student samples, we compare their peace philosophies with the range and the mean of the national samples. When Table 16 is compared with Galtung's Table 33 (pp. 97 ff.) some features become very visible. First, it is extremely obvious that the students are much more skeptical about peace proposals than the national samples: Where the latter exhibit only 13 % negative ratios, the figure for the students is 45 %. This skepticism is fairly uniformly distributed among the student samples and distinguishes them very clearly from any national sample. Or, to put it into another condensed figure: Whereas the overall average of acceptance ratios for the national samples is .50, it is only .07 among the students. This finding was to be expected for three different reasons. On the one hand, the students all belong to the group of status quo oriented nations in the world, which tend to be less likely to endorse peace proposals according to the finding in Galtung's marginals. Furthermore, they are all highly educated and should therefore be expected to show the skepticism of the sophisticate (cf. Arosalo, pp. 519 ff.). Finally, we would expect the gloomy outlook on the possibilities of science to create peace to reflect itself in a more pessimistic stand on many peace proposals. Having now found the conclusion from all the different arguments to be correct, we must proceed to ask which of them counts most. Is the peace skepticism of the students a product of conservatism or of sophistication?

Hakan Wiberg

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310

Hakan Wiberg

clearest case, i.e., Table 17, we see that the ranges of Japan, Britain, Spain, Czechoslovakia and Norway do not overlap each other. Second, let us attempt to get a summary overview by condensing Tables 17, 18, and the three tables we have not presented, into Table 19 by calculating, for each issue and nation, increase over age as defined above. The table thus gives the first-order derivatives of these five attitudes and the right part of the table shows the correlations between these derivatives. Looking at the upper half of the table, we see that Yugoslavia is the only country which is quite 'consistent' in the sense that higher age leads to both higher appreciation of the older generation and to being less hopeful about the young generation and to conceding less realism to the younger generation. All the others exhibit mixed patterns, out of which the Japanese one might be the most interesting: There, increasing age leads to an increasing appreciation of both generations. This is more precisely expressed in the lower half of Table 19, where we see that increasing appreciation of the older generation appears to be a generalized attitude (QAB = .64), and increasing appreciation of the younger generation another (QCD = 70), but that the correlations between these attitudes are close to zero. Summarizing the data of this section, it would appear fair to say that there is hardly a sign of a generation gap, even though we specifically look for one. It may be that we have looked through the wrong glass, but the maximal justifiable conclusion from the tables seems to be that there is a generation difference in some cases; anything stronger than that would be an overdramatization. Let us finally approach the question from another angle. It may be that we have still missed the chance of finding a generation gap, since we have looked too much on details instead of looking at our data from a distance. There is one more problem that should be tackled. We have seen that some nations, e.g., Spain, have shown a tendency to have very flat distributions in several cases. On the other hand, we would expect Spain to show such a relative tendency, since its sample is the greatest one. Therefore, if we want to compare the effect of age in different nations, we have to keep the sample size somehow under control. In order to give a general generation gap, if there be one, a maximum chance to become visible, we have looked at the absolute values of the differences between different age groups concerning the questions we have referred to in the tables or the text. We have calculated the mean of these absolute values for each nation. This definitely means exaggerating the gap, since differences that go against a general trend are added to,

Age groups and the future

311

rather than abstracted from, the differences going in the main direction. Furthermore, since one might argue a priori for the generation gap expressing itself in monotonie trends as well as in J curves (with the youngest age group still sharing the attitudes of its parents), we have calculated the mean absolute differences between age group IV and age group II, as well as between IV and I. The results are given in Table 20. Table 20. Mean absolute differences between age groups

Number of questions

CS

E

GB

J

N

26

26

15

26

NL*

26

PL

SF

19

26

YU

26

Mean of 1 I-IV|

7.1

4.2

7.5

7.8

6.5

-

6.2

4.8

10.5

Mean of III—IV|

5.8

3.6

6.1

5.0

7.0

-

3.5

5.4

8.5

Rank

1 I-IV|

5

1

6

7

4

3

2

8

Rank

|II-IV|

5

2

6

3

7

1

4

8

3

1

4

2

7

5

8

6

Rank of sample size (Max. : 1)

Note: The means are calculated from the questions 1/44,1/48-57, II/9-13,11/15,11/52-54, and 111/29-34, or from a subset of them. * These age groups were not available separately.

Bearing in mind that the differences are exaggerated, it does not appear too strong a judgment to say that the generation gap is non-existent in our data. Without having made a detailed statistical analysis, we still assume that a great part of the figures in Table 20 can be accounted for as results of random variations; and one should be entitled to demand more in order to diagnose a generation gap. But let us at least have a look for national variations by establishing which nations deviate far from expectations based on sample size, say, by at least three steps in rank. The comparison between age groups II and IV reveals Poland and Finland as havingflatter distributions than normal, but no nation to be exceptionally steep. If, instead, we compare I and IV, we still find Finland (and, to some extent, Norway) to be relatively very flat, and here Japan shows an unexpected steepness. In other words, Japan would be the most promising field for anybody wanting to locate the generation gap by means of other questions and other statistics; Finland would appear to be a boring country in this respect.

312

Hakan

Wiberg

7. CONCLUSIONS

We have to repeat once more a conclusion already spelled out in different other connections: The ideas often advanced by journalists about a youth revolt and a youth culture find very little support in our data. It is true that we do find differences between age groups that appear to occur over the Northern part of the world, but these differences are mostly such that would be expected between different age groups at more or less any time. For example, it is not easy to see under what circumstances it would be astonishing to find the older groups less confident than the younger about being able to shape their personal future, or to find the younger groups being more enthusiastic about sexual freedom for the young generation. But we find at least one tendency which recurs in some different cases and which is, furthermore, not self-evident from the armchair's perspective: The younger groups are more pessimistic about the future of the world in different respects. This may square well with the fact that it is often the young who are most active in sounding the alarm: About the nuclear threat, imperialist wars, destruction of the environment, etc. Still, that may require one more premise in the explanation, i.e., that the pessimism is tacitly accompanied by the same proviso Lewis F. Richardson adds to his conclusions about arms races, namely, that 'this is what is going to happen, unless somebody stops to think'. It should also be stressed once more that nationality, or factors associated with it, appear so much more important than age in accounting for variations in the thinking about the future. We have tried to capture two of these factors: Development and socio-economic system, and in some cases the cleavages have been along these axes; often, they have not and then we have abstained from following the track further by going into historical traditions, etc. As a final note, let us just hint at the possibility that we have problematized the issue the wrong way, by expecting intergenerational differences and making their explanation the main task. Because it may well be that the other approach would have been more fruitful: Searching for the homogenizing mechanisms within countries that make the generations as similar as they are. For, after all, this is the conclusion of this study, even though it has not been designed to look for these mechanisms. And this also has some consequences in terms of Galtung's discussion (p. 9 ff.) of the possibility of making diachronical conclusions from synchronic data. If we want to divine something about trends of future change, the question is: 'Are there any differences between age groups that appear to be differences between cohorts rather than between generations?' Reviewing our meagre findings from this point of view,

Age groups and the future

313

we would be inclined to regard the issues of sexual freedom and of fatalism as being more of the generation type. That, by and large, leaves us with one candidate as to cohort differences: The pessimism of young people as to the future development of the world, both in general terms and in terms of war and armament. Still, apart from the multidimensionality of pessimism, there is one problem with this finding from the extrapolation aspect: Not that it permits no extrapolation, but that it permits two contradictory ones. For on the one hand, the pessimistic cohorts may become extra cautious when they come into power, working more devotedly than those presently in power at safeguarding the world from the dangers perceived, but, on the other hand, this pessimism may also increase the risks of war precisely by leading to the conclusion that war is unavoidable anyhow, so that it is better to prepare for it. Thus, the study of the impact of age on attitudes does not really appear to provide us with an instrument for foreseeing the future, and it is our hunch that this would not have been very different if we had used some more genuinely sociological categorization than physical age, nor by including age groups of still higher age into the samples. In other words, we believe that the future is not yet sufficiently real to polarize between age categories. Maybe it will become so one day; and that will then make it more foreseeable. But the time is not yet ripe.

NOTES This chapter started as an empirical draft (Sections 2,3, and parts of 6) by Aleksander Lutyk and Dorota Mycielska, and a theoretical introduction (Sections 1 and 4) by Andrzej Sicinski. The Polish contributions to the chapter were produced within the framework of the Group of Social Prognoses, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences. Warsaw. 1. 2. 3. 4.

M. Ossowska (1967), 'The concept of generation', The Polish Sociological Bulletin, 1. S.M. Eisenstadt (1956), From generation to generation, London. H. Schelsky (1958), Die skeptische Generation, Berlin. It may be objected that these facts are artifacts resulting from there being nine nations but only four age groups. To check this, one may reshape the tables by creating four artificial nations, e.g., (Czechoslovakia), (Poland, Yugoslavia), (Great Britain, Japan, Norway, Finland), and (Spain); or (Czechoslovakia, Poland), (Yugoslavia, Spain), (Great Britain, Japan), and (Norway, Finland). For each 'nation', the table values are defined as the means of the values for the real nations belonging to the 'nation'. The facts discussed remain, i.e., the maximal differences between two age groups belonging to the same 'nation' tends to be considerably less than the maximal difference between two 'nations' belonging to the same age group, even in those tables where there are clear age differences. 5. A more, but not completely systematic exposition of the argument is given below.

314

Hakan

Wiberg

By monotonicity we mean that, Xk being the attitude value of age group k, one of the following statements, is true: X, > X„ > X,„ > X„ or < X„ < X,„ < X„ This would be too strong an element in a criterion, since the a priori probability of a relationship in a given nation being monotonic in a given direction isJ; = '/2J (actually slightly more, since we allow ties), and therefore very small for several nations exhibiting monotonic relationships. As a possible way of arriving at a more precise definition of what we shall mean by close to monotonic. we start by introducing a terminological proliferation by saying that a relationship is almost monotonic if the extreme age groups are also extreme in different directions regarding the attitude, that is if Xl > Xu and X, > Xul and Xn > and Xm > X„ or Xf, > A",, and > X,„ and X„ > X, and X,„ > X„ quasimonotonic, if both the younger groups exceed both the older ones, or vice versa, i.e., if Xi > and X\ > Xjv and X u > X m and X u > X n or 11 > Xi and .Jfiii > X u and Xrv > Xi and Xn > A"n Clearly, if a pattern is monotonic, then it is almost monotonic as well as quasimonotonic. (We ask forgiveness for this linguistic clumsiness.) There is no logical implication from being almost monotonic to being quasimonotonic, or vice versa. In order to have a common technical term for the different cases that we comprise under a, we finally call a pattern semimonotonic, if it is either almost monotonic, or quasimonotonic, or both. Next, we should say something about 'most' nations. Here, the important idea must be 'in so many nations that a random effect is unlikely'. This can be formulated more precisely, at least if we assume that, for every nation and every variable, any pattern (e.g., A" ii > X, > Xi\ > Xm) is a priori equiprobable to any other pattern. On this assumption of equiprobability, the a priori probability p for the event 'monotonic increase in nation N' is 1 in 4!. i.e.. V2J (or actually slightly greater, sonce we include ties; but that will not be very disturbing). The probability for exactly m nations out of n having this event is

and the probability for at least m nations out of n having it is

j=m P ( m , n , p ) can therefore, i.a., be used as a test of significance, and that aspect of it can be used for rendering conditions a and b more precise. In order to do this, two things remain. First, we must do the same calculations for the other cases : p takes the value '/12 for almost monotonic increase, \ for quasimonotonic increase, and s/24 for semimonotonic increase. Second, it remains to fix some arbitrary limiting value of Pfm, n, p) and demand that a distribution has to be less likely than that to deserve attention. Taking p = .05 as that value, we can define condition b more precisely in the following table:

315

Age groups and the future

Number of nations out of n which must show a monotonically (almost monotonically, etc.) increasing relationship between age and an attitude in order for the a priori probability to be less than .05: n = 8

n = 7

n = 6

Monotonic

2

2

2

At least almost monotonic

3

3

3

At least quasimonotonic

4

4

4

At least semimonotonic

5

4

4

Since this table would also serve as a table for the required number of decreasing relationships, that almost takes care of parts a and b of our criterion. The stress is on 'almost', since in most cases we shall only be interested in those relationships that go in the same direction in all countries. Therefore, we shall not permit the relationship to clearly go in the opposite direction in any country, whereas we shall tolerate that it goes in no clear direction in some countries. It remains to add one more part to our criterion, corresponding to c. A reasonable minimal requirement appears to be that the maximal difference between two age groups in a nation with at least a semimonotonic pattern reaches some fixed value, and that this applies to all such nations. Let this fixed value be 10 percentage points or 15 AR points. Even so, some minor details remain to be taken care of if we wanted to state an absolutely rigid criterion; but we feel that this would hardly be worthwhile, and therefore prefer to discuss them in the empirical context. 6. N.E. Cutler (1970), 'Generational succession as a source of foreign policy attitudes', Journal of Peace Research, 1, 33-48. 7. The post-1945 war trends are described in I. Kende (1971), 'Twenty-five years of local wars', Journal of Peace Research, 1, pp 5-22.

KAREL KÀRA/JAN &EHÀK

12

War and peace as conceived in various social groups

1. INTRODUCTION

In this chapter some aspects of the complex problems of war and peace are discussed from the viewpoint of Marxist sociology. The issues of the new position taken up by war and peace in the consciousness of mankind cannot be summed up in a short article.1 Here we intend to examine only the extent to which this new position of war and peace is reflected in the consciousness of people in countries having different social systems and in individual social-class groups. In this study we draw, on the one hand, from the theoretical startingpoints laid out in an article by Karel Kara (1968), and, on the other hand, from the data of the research involved. The present contribution follows the line of two articles of the authors, published in 1971 and 1972, in which both the limitations and possibilities of the data applied and the methodological problems of the research have been pointed out. 2 It goes without saying, that, in this chapter, we are unable to present a fully exhaustive analysis of factors influencing ideas about war and peace, the attitude towards them as well as their position in the value scale of people. Yet, considering the factor of the people's social-class position to be of essential significance, we deal with it preferentially. For the sake of elucidating the given problems in their entirety, however, an analysis of further factors - age, sex, education, etc. - as well as an ascertainment of the intensity of their influence upon both positive and negative attitudes to war and peace would be required at a future stage of data analysis.

2 . METHODOLOGICAL COMMENTS

The data subjected to the present analysis do not entirely answer our

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purposes. In view of the fact that the aims of the given research do not fully coincide with our own, we lack the possibility of making detailed investigations concerning our topic. This is why the approach to our task is, in part, that of a secondary data analysis. Even if we cannot consider the selection of questions as being quite an optimum for our purpose, we hold that valuable information is stored herein which might prove useful within the scope of the Marxist sociological view of the problem of war and peace. In evaluating the position of war and peace in the consciousness of people, we are concerned not only with the opinions of people (i.e., a passive view of these two categories) but also with ascertaining the attitudes to war and peace (i.e., an element of activity, involvement which necessarily projects itself in the attitude). However, no detailed analysis of this type could be made on the basis of the data available. Therefore we try to obtain the attitudes to war and peace indirectly, by interpreting replies to some selected questions. The attitude is characterized by having its own specific intensity, great or small, which varies with individual persons. This involves not only the problem of determining its orientation (i.e., positive, negative or neutral) but also its strength, with the help of special measurements. In this chapter we attempt to cope with this task at least partially by analyzing the relative frequencies of replies in the separate groups. From the questionnaire used in the Year 2000 study, the following were selected to serve as indicators of peace-oriented thinking. They were also meant to throw light upon the new position of war and peace in the consciousness of people and upon the people's attitudes to war and peace. (The numeration of questions refers to their original order in the questionnaire). Question No. 1/16: 'If you try to imagine the year 2000 in the best possible light, what do you think would be the best thing that could happen T Originally, this was an open-ended question and the replies were classified a posteriori, i.e., after data collection. For our purposes, the original ten categories were dichotomized: 1. Replies directly containing the postulate of peace or some phenomenon unambiguously connected with it: World peace, disarmament, world without wars, control of atomic and nuclear weapons, united world, world government; 2. Other replies: E.g., more equality among people, more automation, more leisure, more religion, etc. Question No. 1/17: 'If you imagine the year 2000 in the worst possible light, what do you think would be the worst thing that could happen T From the original categories (obtained similarly as in question No.

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1/16 from the open-ended question), a dichotomized variable was again formed: 1. Replies: Extermination, nuclear war, war and more violence; 2. Other replies: Famine, unemployment, economic depression, death, personal disease - and other response categories, some of them with very infrequent replies. Question No. 1/67: ' Would you like scientific knowledge to make it possible to organize the world so that there will be no wars? The original categories (yes; uncertain; no; do not know; no answer) were dichotomized as follows: 1. Yes 2. Other replies This question was included in the questionnaire primarily for inquiring into the attitudes of the public to science; since, however, it involves a content element of peace-oriented thinking, we use it also in our analysis. Question No. 11/16: 'Could you imagine any value, goal or ideal that could justify a war without nuclear weaponsT Question No. 11/18: 'Could you imagine any value, goal or ideal that could justify a war with nuclear weapons?' The original categories of both the questions were again regrouped: 1. Yes 2. Other replies In the following parts of this chapter, attention will be devoted to the analysis of the single questions, to their possible interpretation and main limitations. The basic problem to be coped with in any comparative research is the comparability of categories for individual populations. Hence the actual purpose of our dichotomization was to ensure the best possible comparability of the variables, in particular for the different countries. The groups defined in terms of the variable 'Occupational position' (Question No. 111/64) are of basic significance for our analysis. For comparability's sake, however, we have left out some of the categories and slightly modified the values of the variable we introduced. The reason for taking this step was the incomparability of individual categories for the different countries involved. In analyzing the data, we are also concerned with comparing the working class and other population components. In the table summarizing the data in this manner, the group of unskilled workers and that of skilled workers have been fused; the second group (middle class), however, includes also apprentices who cannot be separated (in the categorization of research data, apprentices belong to the same group as students). Another methodological problem was involved by the variables 'In-

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come of the respondent' as well as 'Income of the respondent's household' (questions No. 111/72 and No. 111/73). The values of these variables were to be established as quartiles of the whole population of each national sample. Since these coding instructions have not been followed by all project participants the categorization, however, has proved little reliable for our analysis. Replies received in the categories 'Do not know', 'Uncertain' and the category 'No answer' represent another of the methodological-theoretical problems involved. We come across this problem particularly in comparing the countries with different cultures and customs having a different political and social situation. Without a detailed knowledge of all these aspects of the population it is extremely difficult to interpret the percentage of individuals belonging to these categories. For the comprehension of our data analysis we have to make clear whether the calculated answer percentages relate to the whole population or to subgroups included in the national samples, or whether, on the other hand, we refer to the groups formed by regrouping of the original categories. In presenting a detailed categorization of the variable 'Occupational position', we take into consideration the percentages relating to the original size of the whole sample and its subgroups. In the modified variable 'Social class' (workers/middle class) we relate the percentages to the reduced sizes. This approach has been chosen with the intention of throwing more light on the structure of our data. (This also explains the seeming contradiction between various percentages presented in the tables.) All the modifications of the original categorization of the variables were inspired by our endeavor to increase the comparability of data and results, as well as by the effort to form new derived variables more efficiently rendering the aspects of peace-oriented thinking. The data analysis was carried out in two stages. Since we studied the relation between three background factors (occupational position, personal ihcome and income per household) and attitudes towards peace and war grasped by five questions, we obtained fifteen different combinations for each of the countries whose research data were available to us. The first stage consisted in evaluating the contingency tables including original unmodified values of the respective variables. In each country Guttman's coefficient of prediction XB was calculated for every combination. This coefficient, in a certain sense, expresses the association among the respective variables, i.e., the relation between the information stored in the values of one variable for predicting another variable, and the ability of predicting its values without being acquainted with the first variable. Almost unambiguously the coefficient showed the values 0 or

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numbers of the order 10"3. This is in agreement with the hypothesis stating that the separate categories of occupational position do not differ in their values in peace issues: The modal category of choice is common to all groups (or to a great majority of them). In consideration of some of its qualities, the above measure may be considered as very rough. This is also why another, more subtle, prediction coefficient was in addition applied in the first stage of the analysis. This coefficient, however, is considerably more complex as regards its calculation but presents a most suitable measure of a one-way association: It is Wallis' coefficient of weighted prediction T b . 3 The matrix of the coefficients Tb did not contain an absolute majority of zeros as in the first case, but the maximum order of values was 10 -2 , i.e., they were so negligible that they unambiguously confirmed the aforesaid hypothesis. Thus it may be declared as statistically established that individual groups do not significantly differ from one another in modal choice. This also applies to weighted prediction, so that we may also speak of a proved statistical independence between occupational position and the level of income on the one hand and peace oriented thinking on the other. This regularity may be evidenced in all the countries. These results enable us to accept the hypothesis that across countries the analyzed subgroups of population do not differ from one another as regards their attitudes towards peace and war.

The second stage which is presented in this text consisted in considering the relative frequencies of pro-peace replies and their comparison, and in the search for factors potentially influencing the level of these frequencies. For this purpose, the two-way analysis of variance for binomial experiments was used, one input being the respondent's social-class position, and the other the country to which he belongs. The variable under examination is the relative frequency of responses to the chosen indicator of the pro-peace attitude. The method is based on Reiers01's work 4 and enables us to test the main row effects and the main column effects, as well as the interaction within the table. The basic hypothesis is the homogeneity of all the sub-samples arising from the interaction of occupational position and country. In case this hypothesis proves invalid, we try to explain the heterogeneity either by the difference among countries or by the difference among individual groups, or else by the interaction - i.e., by the simultaneous effect - of 'country' and 'occupational position' which are subject to change in various combinations. In each table, the test characteristics with their degrees of freedom are introduced. These statistics distribute according to a x 2 distribution. 5 At the same time, we are interested in the possibility of discovering - in

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case the interactions shown in the table had been statistically proved at least the structure of frequencies in the individual countries which would correspond to the hypothesis concerning their arrangement. This is why we have also introduced in the tables Kendall's coefficient of concordance of rank-order W, which, too, was computed. 6 It was used for rank-ordered relative frequencies of social groups for each country. High value of W would reveal the similarity (homogeneity in statistical sense; concordance of ranks) of rank patterns concerning social groups for participating countries. In all the cases a = 0.01 was uniformly chosen as the significance level. Since, in the individual countries concerned, the data collection was based on quota sampling, we cannot be sure whether our estimates are not biased. The method used by us is based on the assumption of a simple random selection in the separate categories which, of course, has not been strictly fulfilled. However, this assumption should not be too unwaranted for the sake of information, the standard sampling errors are also mentioned in the tables, calculated on the assumption of a single random selection in each group. Besides the variable 'Occupational position' both income variables were used in our analysis. But because of the above-mentioned coding error, and the ambiguity of income as a variable, the respective tables have not been introduced in the present text. For income is a variable depending on many other factors and the final word cannot be said before carrying out further analyses of these joint influences. In any case income is closely connected with occupational position and therefore similarity in frequencies may be viewed from this aspect. Nevertheless, it may be mentioned that our conclusions concerning the variable 'Income' were very similar to those concerning the variable 'Occupational position'.

3. LIMITATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES OF THE EXAMINED DATA SEEN FROM A MARXIST STANDPOINT

For people unfamiliar with Marxism or acquainted only with its vulgarized form the question may arise whether the ascertained results are in harmony with Marxist theory on social development in general, and with the theory of peace and war in particular. These problems must be considered as having two aspects which can be described by two questions: 1. Are the ascertained facts in harmony with the Marxist conception of society and its development?

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2. How, in accordance with Marxism, should a member of a class or a social-class group reply in order to harmonize his reply with the interests of the respective social-class group; and what are, in comparison with this, the actual answer patterns found? 7 Ad question 1: A specific type of social-class structure corresponds 8 to a certain type of production relations, i.e., ownership relations. The most important factor protecting ownership relations in the class societies is political power; this is concentrated in the hands of the ruling class which uses it to safeguard its class interests. Various classes or social-class groups have their own specific interests for the defense and justification of which they create their own specific ideology. The reflection of economic and political interests of the respective class or social-class group in ideology is neither direct nor mechanical but is realized in a very complex way. In spite of the fact that the respective classes or social-class groups form the basic content of each ideology, and that this ideology is inseparably linked with the historical conditions under which it has originated and under which it operates, it must be regarded as a subjective creation, and, as such, it also depends on the abilities and qualities of its creator or creators. From the Marxist point of view, the ideology of the working class is essentially different from that of all the other classes.9 This is caused by the specific position of this class in the mode of production and in society, as well as by its objective historical interests that are in harmony with the interests of the other workers and, in substance, coincide with all-social interests. This specific position of the working class makes it possible and necessary for its ideology to become a scientific reflection of reality, lacking the character of false consciousness. The ideology of the working class is Marxism-Leninism. Marxism did not originate simultaneously with the working class but was gradually introduced into the workers' movement. The ideology of the 'working' class that existed prior to the origin of Marxism was based on a one-sided emphasis on the immediate interests severing them from the objective historical interests of the working class; this ideology has survived in various forms until our time. Thus the infiltration of scientific ideology into the consciousness of the working class is a process still under way; this means that it has penetrated into the consciousness of only a certain part of the workers, and that the extent and range of its acceptation is not the same in all cases. The ideology of the working class is extraordinary both in extent and in content and cannot be expected to penetrate fully into the consciousness of all members of the class. On a certain level this can be mastered only by a small part of the class whose

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substantial majority takes over this ideology of its own predominately through the doctrine of strategy and tactics verified by practical experience. 10 Although the problems of war and peace play a considerable part in the existing doctrine of strategy and tactics of the workers' movement, it is the problem of revolution, of the conquest of power and of building up socialism, that continues to be its basic components. Hence the attitudes to war and peace under research cannot be a criterion in determining workers' knowledge of class ideology but only of partial moments relating to these problems. The process of the infiltration of Marxism into the consciousness of the working class depends on the degree of the maturity of objective conditions and upon subjective agents, their knowledge and their capability of introducing these findings into the consciousness of the working class. It is a very complex process in which an extraordinarily important role is played by immediate and long-term interests of the working class and their mutual relation. The majority of the working class tends to place immediate goals before long-term ones to which it is indifferent and fails to see that the attainment of some immediate goals need not always be in harmony with its long-term interests. Marxism conceives the immediate and long-term interests of the working class and of the other workers in dialectical unity and contradiction, and considers the attainment of immediate goals as a means for realizing its objective long-term interests, while the long-term interests play a decisive role in this relation. The one-sided orientation to immediate interests, i.e., their overestimation or absolutization, is a factor which - in periods more or less deprived of the possibility of a simultaneous solution of these two aspects - considerably impedes the infiltration of Marxist ideology into the consciousness of the working class and also significantly helps to conserve non-socialist ideology in part of the working class. From what has been said it is evident that the ascertained frequencies of the attitudes analyzed in our contribution - whatever their nature may be - can in no case be considered as contradictory to the Marxist theory of society. (On the contrary, a deeper analysis of them will demonstrate their full accord with this theory.) As shown by the above analysis, the Marxist conception does not assume that the relation between the objective position of a certain class or social-class group and certain attitudes is automatic, and that, always and everywhere, these attitudes may be directly derived from the objective position of the respective classes. The significance of the ascertained results lies in that they enable us to discover how far the respective ideas about war and peace are reflected

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in the consciousness of people living in countries with different socioeconomic systems in general, and of the separate classes and social-class groups in particular. Ad question 2: Let us now consider, from the Marxist point of view, the extent to which the ascertained frequencies of attitudes to war and peace are in accordance with or in contradiction to the objective interests of the respective classes or social-class groups. In solving these problems, it must be borne in mind that relations of Marxism to violence, war or peace are a priori neither negative nor positive. War and peace may play either a positive or a reactionary role. Violence, war and peace are no ends in themselves but only means for attaining certain progressive goals. The justification of using violence or war is inseparably linked with the question of the inevitability and adequacy of the sacrifices made for attaining the historically progressive goals pursued. In connection with the development of military technique which has almost reached the level of the possibility of exterminating all mankind, it is necessary to distinguish between the attitudes to war without nuclear weapons and those to war of the nuclear type. First of all, we shall consider the problems under examination from the viewpoint of war without nuclear weapons. The frequencies of the attitudes to war of this type may be examined on the basis of the question whether the respondents imagined a value justifying a war without nuclear weapons. The ascertainment of attitudes to such a war, held by the different classes or social-class groups from the viewpoint of their class interests, must not be confused with ascertaining adequate class attitudes of different classes to a justified or unjustified war. In the case of studying the attitudes of various classes to war without nuclear weapons it must be borne in mind that, if these attitudes were in accordance with the interests of individual classes or social-class strata, they should, in all cases, support values for the defense of which it is, under certain conditions, 'justified' to wage a war of this kind. It goes without saying that this attitude to the 'justification' of defending some values by means of war - which is common to all classes or social-class groups - will depend on different values in the different classes; in consequence of this fact, the different classes will assume different attitudes to wars of different types, since 'justification' will have its specific class content in each class. The same applies to these attitudes in both capitalist and socialist countries. The attitude to the 'justification' of war - even if it is based on the class interests of the respective class - must not be confused with the viewpoint conceiving the justification of war as being in harmony with all-social progressive interests. Hence the conception of 'justification' prevailing

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in the respective classes independently of whether it is in accordance with their class interest or not, must not be confused with the concept of justification in the proper sense of the word. If a certain class or social group uses war to enforce its class interests, which, however, are in contradiction to progressive all-social interests and, from that point of view, are subjectivistic, this war is unjustified. War, however, is justified if used by a class to assert its class interests, which, in substance, coincide with the all-social progressive development tendencies, and if this war is an inevitable and adequate sacrifice in asserting these interests. In studying the problems of attitudes to the 'justification' of a nonnuclear war, it must be borne in mind that, during the last decades, the position of non-nuclear war has also significantly changed. In the present world where war waged with conventional weapons may also endanger world peace and, under certain circumstances, grow into a world-wide thermonuclear conflict, the justification of conventional war cannot be seen apart from this fact. This is why Marxism, even if it considers the use of conventional war, waged to attain just and progressive goals, to be justified under certain conditions, does not separate it from its potential consequences. The new position of non-nuclear war has penetrated in some form or other even into the consciousness of people and represents an important part of the ideologies of individual classes and social-class groups. Apart from other aspects of the matter, the significance of the data of this study lies in the fact that they not only enable us to find out, at a certain level, to which extent the attitudes towards conventional war meet the interests of the respective social-class group, but also make it possible to ascertain the extent to which these new moments have entered into the people's consciousness. Of a somewhat different nature are the problems relating to war with nuclear weapons and to creating a world in which there would be no more wars. Let us now consider these problems in more detail. As has already been pointed out, in investigating the interests of individual classes and social-class groups it is necessary to distinguish between their immediate and long-term interests. In the case of the working class, the problem of its long-term interests must be examined also from the aspects of its ultimate goal, i.e., communism, or of its less-distant goal, e.g., socialism. From the Marxist point of view, the ultimate goal of the working class is to create a world communist society. In order to attain this goal, it is necessary to go through a number of developmental stages. In some of these stages, the interests of certain classes may converge, in others they may diverge.

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The victory of the world socialist revolution is a necessary and inevitable step towards this ultimate goal. Its basic task is to solve the main contradiction of this process, i.e., that between labour and capital. The process of realizing world socialist revolution has taken place and will do so in a number of stages, each of which involves its own main contradiction. 11 The main contradiction of the whole process and those of each of its different stages do not necessarily coincide. In the case when the main contradiction of the whole process does not differ from the main contradiction of a specific stage, then the main contradiction of this stage becomes a secondary contradiction with respect to the main contradiction of the process. However, all the various contradictions are being solved simultaneously with solving the main contradiction, whereby the substance of the given phenomenon is also subject to change. In view of the possible consequences of a thermonuclear world war, it is the antagonism between the people of the whole world and a small handful of aggressive monopolistic, imperialist and militaristic circles that has become the main contradiction of the present developmental stage of this process. For the sake of solving these problems in harmony with the Marxist conception, it would be most desirable to find out how this main contradiction of the given stage is reflected in the consciousness of different social classes and social-class groups (the working class, poor and middle farmers, landowners and estate owners, small and middle bourgeoisie and the monopolistic big bourgeoisie). The research instrument offers only a limited possibility in this respect. Neither does it put us in a position to determine the extent to which this objective conception of war and peace has penetrated into the consciousness of the above-mentioned social-class groups whose interests lie in the realization of measures leading to world security and to a world without war, nor does the research supply the possibility of making sure whether a differentiated attitude exists on the part of the members of the monopolistic big bourgeoisie, and, if so, of what nature it is. The fact that part of the social-class groups embodies that particular aspect of the main antagonism of the present stage, which represents the threat of war involving the possibility of its transformation into a thermonuclear world war, cannot be conceived in the sense that these groups deliberately aim at attaining their goals by means of a world nuclear conflict. Such an intellectual procedure would imply a considerable degree of primitiveness. A thermonuclear world war would threaten even their own biological existence and would lead to a destruction of the world that would affect their own class interests. Therefore, even in the case of these groups, the attitude to nuclear war will always be co-deter-

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mined by the problem of their own biological survival. This in turn implies that the consequences of such a war would be at variance with their own interests. If, therefore, some members of this group happened to be directly oriented towards such a war, their conception would be decidedly subjective. The specific position of a certain part of monopolistic groups is, among other things, also caused by their being in direct connection with the production of thermonuclear weapons, and the prohibition of this production, the realization of general and complete disarmement might considerably affect their economic-class interests. This, moreover, is supported by the fact that these groups, as well as some ruling and militaristic groups furthering the imperialist or power goals of their countries, are pursuing or enforcing a policy which impedes the consequential realization of international co-existence. Though the research instrument does not put us in a position to answer in an ideal way the questions posed above, it facilitates, however, the investigation into some aspects of the problems involved. The multinational project enables us to study the attitudes of a part of the population - aged 15-40 years - embodying that aspect of the main contradiction of the present stage in whose objective interest is the removal of obstacles barring the way to world security and to the elimination of the threat of a nuclear conflict. The research data enable us to make such an analysis thanks to the fact that the social-class groups (the respective part of the monopolistic big bourgeoisie) whose class interests involve the contradictory conception of these problems represent only a negligible part of the population inhabiting the countries under examination, and that, if some of their members were included in the national sample, its nature would not be changed by this circumstance. These facts further indicate that the obtained frequencies of replies to questions relating to pro- or contra-peace attitudes of this type should, on the whole, be identical in all cases provided that the replies of the members of the respective classes or social-class groups are in harmony with their objective interests, and provided that the pro- or contra-peace attitudes are not ascertained in relation to other values. The same applies to comparing the attitudes held by the whole population and by its different sub-groups in capitalist countries with those held in socialist countries. Here, too, it holds true that - in consequence of the fact that the national representative sample in the capitalist countries practically includes only those class groups in whose objective interest is the positive attitude to peace questions of this kind - the frequencies of these attitudes should, in substance, be identical. The significance of the research data lies, besides other things, in that they help us to ascertain the extent to which this objective aspect of the

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class position of the individual classes and social-class groups is reflected in their consciousness - both within the respective countries and within groups of countries having different socio-economic systems. In judging the degree of progressiveness of peace-oriented thinking in the individual classes and social-class groups, it is of extraordinary importance to elucidate its relation to other values. However, this research does not enable us to solve this relevant aspect on an adequate level, although this very aspect might help us to throw light upon these problems in connection with its more substantial and deeper implications. In evaluating the attitudes to war and peace it must be remembered that, in all the classes and social-class strata, war and peace represent only one of the many aspects of their class-interests' problems. The relation of this aspect to the other aspects of their class interests varies with the different social-class groups. In all the classes and social-class groups, the problems of war and peace will always be in connection with a certain socio-economic system or with some components adequate to a certain type of this system. If the questions of war and peace were studied in relation to other values- e.g., socialism, victory of the socialist revolution, building up or preserving democracy, independence, capitalism, preservation of religious freedom - substantial differences should appear in the frequencies of pro- or contra-peace attitudes, provided that these attitudes are in harmony with the interests of the respective classes. This conception, bringing the problems of war and peace in connection with the most substantial aspects of the interests of classes or social-class groups, might enable us to form a somewhat more adequate idea about whether the class consciousness of different classes or social-class groups, both within individual countries and within groups of either capitalist or socialist countries, is in harmony with their class interests. In view of the fact that this task did not coincide with the aims of the research, this question cannot be adequately answered on the basis of the data obtained.

4. PRESENTATION OF EMPIRICAL RESULTS

4.1 Attitudes to the organization of a world without wars The objective position of war and peace in the structure of social phenomena is one aspect of these problems, while their other aspect is the reflection of this reality in the consciousness of people. Consequently, the objective position of war and peace must not be confused with the people's value system. As a rule, the value system developed by people is

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not a scientific reflection of reality but is primarily of an ethical, ideological and psychological nature. This implies that people do not share the same system of values, and that, consequently, different individuals, different social groups and different social systems acknowledge different hierarchies of values, which in turn leads to a different evaluation of the possible consequences of war and peace. The question of what people think of a thing and what values they attach to it must not be confused with the question of the real nature of this thing. Hence it is obvious that for finding the objective position of war and peace it is not sufficient to become acquainted with the values ascribed to them by particular social groups, social and ideological systems or individual scholars, but their actual position must be known. On the other hand, of course, the subjective evaluation is of great practical significance, since it is tantamount to the political attitude adopted towards war and peace and may decide the destiny of mankind. This section deals with attitudes assumed by various social groups to the peaceful organization of the world, and their comparison among countries having different socio-economic systems. We are primarily concerned with the information about whether the respondent expresses himself explicitly in favour of peace or against war. His statements on this aspect, expressed in accordance with the hierarchy of his value system, are of lesser interest for us. The first question subjected to analysis is the desire for scientific knowledge to make possible the organization of a world without wars. In Table 1 we present the relative frequencies for 8 national samples. Table 1. ' Would you like that in the year 2000 scientific knowledge will make it possible to organize the world so that there will be no warsT (%) CS

E

GB

J

NL

N

SF

YU

98

93

97

71

95

96

94

98

2. Uncertain

1

1

1

19

2

2

2

2

3. No

0

1

2

5

2

2

4

1

4. DK, NA

1

5

0

6

1

0

0

0

1. Yes

This question, of course, involves a number of disadvantages, the most relevant of which is a strong content element which is in agreement with scientific knowledge and its role both in the present world and in future. The question, however, is problematic even in its essence. It is true that

War and peace as conceived in various social groups

331

science may significantly contribute to the acceleration of social development and thus also to the formation of a world without wars, but it can present no solution as regards securing permanent peace. However, in spite of these limitations which must be pointed out for the sake of a critical conception and evaluation of the ascertained results, these data contain a considerable amount of information. The empirical data shown in Table 1 clearly indicate the extent to which the objective fact of the issue of war and peace, being one of the basic issues of our time, has penetrated into the consciousness of the populations under study. One may even go further and may expect that the positive attitudes manifested here are not only characteristic of the investigated age group but are shared by an overwhelming majority of the population living in countries with different social and economic systems. The number of European countries examined is so high that it justifies the assumption that almost all the population of Europe is in favour of organizing a world without wars. Let us now consider the attitudes to a peaceful organization of the world with the help of science separately for different social groups (Table 2), as well as for the working class in comparison with the middle classes (Table 3). The applied procedures of testing the hypotheses revealed no differences in the attitudes of the social groups under examination. This, of course, does not imply that this ascertainment is absolute, that certain differences among the groups are necessarily absent. In each research a certain degree of inaccuracy arises either in consequence of sampling errors or in the course of the field work, or eventually also in consequence of the deviation due to quota sampling. If the above-mentioned data are to be evaluated correctly, all oversimplification which might lead to false consciousness - to underestimation or overestimation of the data obtained - must be avoided. A correct evaluation of pro-peace attitudes lies in making their dialectical connection with each other and with other social phenomena our conceptual starting-point. In evaluating the aspects of peace, we must keep in mind that the prevention of a thermonuclear world conflict is an essential pre-condition for realizing the progress of the world. Since the prevention of a world war tragedy largely depends also on the attitudes of the wide population masses to war and peace, the ascertained results must be evaluated very positively. These results also testify to the fact that the relevant aspect of the objective conditions of the contemporary phase of progressive development in the world has, in various forms, entered into the consciousness of a substantial part of mankind.

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5. CONCLUSIONS

As was stated in Section 3, it was expected that pro- or contra-peace attitudes of different classes and social-class groups, as revealed by the research instrument used, should not substantially differ. These expectations were due to the fact that attitudes to war and peace have not been examined in relation to certain relevant social values and that the respondents' social-class structure in the capitalist countries is of a particular type. Our hypothesis was also based on the assumption that these attitudes are in accordance with the interests of the classes and social-class groups under examination. The significance of the ascertained frequencies of pro- and contrapeace attitudes helps us to determine the extent to which this aspect of the interests of the respective classes and social-class groups has penetrated into their consciousness. The results arrived at in all countries are of a markedly peace-oriented nature and indicate that both fear of nuclear war and the desire to create a world without wars are almost universally shared with a relatively great intensity. On the basis of this finding, the conclusions may be drawn that this type of pro-peace attitudes, being in harmony with the objective interests of all the investigated classes and social-class groups, has, to a greater or lesser degree, penetrated into the consciousness of almost all the members of the examined social-class groups. The investigation into the pro- or contra-peace attitudes of this type, carried out in the way referred to above, leads us to conclude that the social-class factors affect the pro-peace attitudes of all the social-class groups in the same direction and that, due to this, a tendency to the convergence of attitudes of this type exists in all the social-class groups under study. Tendencies of a convergence of pro-peace attitudes of different classes and social-class groups exist even in the case of war without nuclear weapons. Although the ascertained frequencies of attitudes to war of this type testify to absolutely pacifistic tendencies in a great part of the population in the countries under study, they have to be evaluated in the context of the new position of war in the present world where even local war may. under certain conditions, develop into a thermonuclear conflict. Our assumptions were also confirmed that, if differences in pro-peace attitudes existed, they would be predominantly determined by the factor 'country', i.e., the socio-economic peculiarities of the countries involved: In general the differences in peace-oriented attitudes were greater between whole countries than between social-class groups within the different countries examined.

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terms of trade, and the respondents do not know - or do not want to know - so much about the political stituation of Italy. If anything, the Norwegian view of Italy is one of communists and strikes. 12 Norway's knowledge of the USA is in fact higher than in all other countries but its knowledge of some other countries is still higher. But much more interesting than these individual exceptions are the opposite bloc dyads that have lower knowledge than we might expect. It will be seen that with a few exceptions the opposite-bloc country referred to is a small or middle one. The two major exceptions are Great Britain and the Netherlands with poor knowledge about the Soviet Union. We find it very interesting that in all NATO countries knowledge about the Soviet Union is relatively poor; the Soviet Union ranks 11 for Great Britain, 6 for Netherlands and 8 for Norway. It may indicate the way in which NATO countries, especially during the cold war, were very much aloof from the rest of Europe and followed isolationist policies. Apart from these exceptions, knowledge about the big countries in the opposite bloc is good, but knowledge about the smaller countries is relatively poor. This is a further confirmation of the stereotypes discussed above. 3 . WHAT PEOPLE DON'T K N O W : THE DISTRIBUTION OF INCORRECT ANSWERS

To get an insight into the distribution of incorrect answers we first calculated the means of incorrect answers over all nine sample countries regarding each country whose alignment or non-alignment had to be indicated. As suggested by the data of Table 8, ignorance seems to be an interesting variable of its own. Of the NATO countries included in the list, Italy, Netherlands, Denmark and Norway are those most incorrectly perceived as non-aligned. Amongst the Warsaw Pact countries such clear differences do not exist, and, in general, incorrect answers are distributed here quite randomly. Evidently, the role of the non-aligned countries is the most interesting; as in the case of incorrect placements, all the non-aligned countries - with the exception of Yugoslavia - are placed more often in the NATO group than in the Warsaw Pact. It seems to be more the ideological than the military dimension which is on the minds of many respondents and which seems to serve as a basis for placing the non-aligned countries in military blocs which protect the respective ideology. 13 To investigate more closely the perceptions of the non-aligned countries in the list, as well as the sources of error, we calculated average percentages of incorrect knowledge separately for each respondent country.

Knowledge

of military

Table 8. Average percentages List °f evaluated countries NATO

461

alliances of incorrect

answers

Country placed incorrectly into : NATO US D GB I NL DK N F

Non-aligned

Warsaw Pact

Non-aligned

-

Warsaw Pact

(47)

5 4 3 14 13 14 14 20

1 5 1 3 2 2 3 2

E CH S SF YU

23 13 23 18 4

-

3 2 2 5 32

CS PL SU

4 3 5

7 3 5

Table 9. Average percentage countries Non-aligned countries put incorrectly into:

NATO

NATO

GB

of incorrect answers regarding the

non-aligned

Non-aligned

Warsaw Pact

NL

N

E

SF

IND

YU

CS

31

19

17

7

11

7

16

16

Warsaw Pact

15

16

15

5

10

3

2

4

Total

46

35

32

12

21

10

18

20

Putting the non-aligned countries into NATO as opposed to the Warsaw Pact is the most common type of error. In more detail, errors are higher in the NATO countries (Great Britain, Netherlands and Norway) in assigning the non-aligned countries to either bloc. This is despite the fact that in general the level of knowledge in these NATO countries is quite good as we have seen in Table 1. This could be explained if persons from these countries would feel more obliged to give the impression that

462

David Matthews/Periti

JoenniemijVolevi

Arosalo

they are knowledgeable, compared with persons in the non-aligned countries. It could be that persons belonging to important nations, because their nation is active in international affairs, feel that they ought to have this knowledge when challenged. However, we have previously argued that ethnocentricity in big nations has the effect of reducing knowledge about the rest of the world. The two points together explain the high proportion of errors. At the individual level we have also found clusters of errors for certain sample countries. That is, an individual who gets one particular country wrong in the list, is also likely to get another related country wrong. The analysis was made using a non-metric multivariate scaling technique. 14 For the British sample there is just one large error cluster - Yugoslavia, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden and Finland. It is likely that if a person gets one of these countries wrong (or right) he will get all the others wrong (or right). This same cluster appears for the Czechoslovak sample, where there is also a smaller N A T O cluster - Norway, Netherlands, Denmark and Italy. This NATO cluster also appears without Italy in the Indian and Yugoslav samples. The only other major error clusters appear for the Dutch sample and comprises the pro-West non-aligned countries. Errors in the other samples tend to be independent of each other, so that a person in Finland who gets Spain wrong will not necessarily get Italy or Netherlands or Yugoslavia wrong. In general, errors that relate to Yugoslavia or Spain are often independent of other errors across most of the samples. Knowledge about France is of this kind also, but here this may be just due to the ambiguous position of France. Often Sweden and Finland appear together in error clusters as do Norway and Denmark and to a lesser extent Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands. These results confirm, independently and in more detail, those discussed before about knowledge of the blocs and knowledge of the non-aligned countries taken together (Table 5). 15 These findings indicate that there is a tendency for 'all or nothing' knowledge about the non-aligned nations in Great Britain, Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands. When people in these countries know about one non-aligned country they tend to know about others, but a considerable proportion of the respondents have no knowledge about any of these countries. In comparison, for respondents in the other samples and especially in Spain, Finland and Yugoslavia, when a person knows about one of the non-aligned countries, he may not know about the others. We have already argued that a country may get international identification through joining a military alliance. Individuals in such countries are likely to identify more with the foreign policies of their own governments than individuals in countries with a weaker international identification,

Knowledge of military alliances

463

where the political identification of the individual within the country is more likely to affect which countries he is interested in. Consequently there will be less homogeneity of knowledge within such countries.

4 . THE ANALYSIS OF SUBGROUPS: SOCIAL STRUCTURE, PERSONALITY, VALUES AND EXPECTATIONS IN RELATION TO KNOWLEDGE

We will consider first differences within the samples due to personality, social position and education. Rokeach in his study of dogmatism was concerned with the structure of an image rather than with its content. Although the knowledge questions being examined here are questions about content, the emphasis in the analysis of the differentiation of knowledge, is on the structure of this differentiation. Thus Rokeach's concepts of open and closed minds are very appropriate for understanding the structural effects of personality on knowledge. One fundamental variable in Rokeach's approach is the person's ability to differentiate information from the source of information and to evaluate each on its own merits. This variable in the extreme describes the essence of the open rather than the closed mind. We would generally expect people of high knowledge to be able to do this, but this does not imply that all people of high knowledge are able to do this. Inability to differentiate information from source of information, Rokeach 1 6 argues, may lead to contradiction in the belief-disbelief system. For, if information from certain sources is accepted without question, and, if this information implicitly contains contradictions, there will be no motivation for the person to resolve these dilemmas. Indeed, the person will not see any dilemmas since his mind is segmented. In addition, the closed-minded person will show a greater rejection of the disbelief system than will the open-minded person. Also his differentiation of the disbelief system will be relatively poor, and, in particular, knowledge of the disbelief system will be poor. To translate these ideas into testable hypotheses is particularly difficult. The questions we are considering have not so much to do with beliefs or belief systems but knowledge. We might suppose that either the respondents know which alliance a nation belongs to, or otherwise, they would say that they don't know. However, the erroneous answers of Section 3 indicate that in several cases, the majority of the sample are guessing, without certain knowledge, and they are guessing wrongly. It is possible that this guessing indicates the nature of their belief or disbelief system. If a person believes in the strength of the Western alliance and in the justification of the Western capitalist system and is also

464

David Matthews/Periti

Joenniemi/Uolevi

Arosalo

convinced that the people in the socialist countries would rather live under the Western political and economic system, it is not likely that he will believe that his own alliance, NATO, is larger than it really is? Is it not possible that he will associate all doubtful countries with the Western alliance? To the extent that one aspect of a person's disbelief system is the political system of the opposing political bloc or possibly the political system of both blocs for persons from the non-aligned countries, and to the extent that knowledge of military alliances reflects knowledge about particular subsystems, we should be able to predict from Rokeach's theory that the major difference between persons with open rather than closed minds would be in their knowledge of countries outside their own bloc. We would expect the closed minded to have relatively low knowledge of the opposing bloc and of the non-aligned countries and also that this knowledge might reflect segmentation of the disbelief system. Thus, one example could be that closed-minded persons in Great Britain would see Sweden as a member of NATO rather than non-aligned due to the kind of mechanism discussed above. We could also predict that a closedminded person in Great Britain would see Yugoslavia as being a member of the Warsaw Pact, being in this case unable to distinguish differences amongst the socialist countries. Also, he is more likely to have a polarised conception in seeing all countries as members of either one bloc or the other. Before testing these ideas of the effects of dogmatism, we will first consider how social position and education might affect knowledge. Galtung's theory of social position views a society in terms of a concentric model, consisting of a decision making nucleus, surrounded by the centre, which in turn is surrounded by the periphery. Communication, social participation and knowledge of international relations are all high at the centre and low at the periphery. It is argued that the way opinions are held by the centre and the periphery will differ as a consequence of this. The centre person tends to be a gradualist, whereas the peripheral person tends to be an absolutist. Diffusion of new beliefs and opinions will generally originate in the centre and after some time-lag reach the periphery. New beliefs taken up by the periphery will generally have to be taken up by the centre- although often in some modified form and then in this modified form diffused to the periphery if they are to be accepted universally in the society; otherwise they are likely to be rejected by the centre and fade away with time. From this theory, therefore, we would expect the centre firstly to have a high level of knowledge about military alliances and secondly, the differentiation of this knowledge to reflect very closely the current

Knowledge o f military alliances

465

interests of the nation as determined by the fairly small decision-making nucleus. Conversely, the periphery would have a low level of overall knowledge, which may be differentiated reflecting past interests of their country rather than current interests. For example, in the British sample, we might expect the low level of knowledge about the Soviet Union to be due mainly to the periphery, reflecting the accepted beliefs at the height of the cold war: The isolationist policy. We might also predict that historical and cultural ties, language links and alliances in the two world wars should be more important to the periphery in affecting their differentiation of knowledge, and conversely the centre should regard current strategic issues, trade and current international politics as more important. Lastly, the effect o f f o r m a l education on knowledge of military alliances was examined. Again we would expect positive correlations relatinp education to better all-round knowledge and again - as with socia position - would expect these relations to reflect the current interests and alliances of the respondent's own countries. However, unlike the case of social position there are fewer mechanisms through which we might expect people of high education to differentiate their knowledge in accordance with national interests. For example, the young with high education will be subject to much weaker social pressure to make their allegiances in accordance with those of their country than those in more established positions. So we would expect any relation with national interest to be weaker than that due to social position. In particular, we might expect education to discriminate amongst the non-aligned countries better than dogmatism and social position. We have tested these ideas in several ways. Firstly, we calculated correlation coefficients between each of the variables and knowledge indices for NATO, the Warsaw Pact and for the non-aligned countries, for each country separately. We did not find any clear pattern here, so the tables are not presented. For all samples social position and education correlated positively with knowledge and dogmatism negatively. Also correlations between the knowledge indices and dogmatism and social position were higher than those for education. This is expected from the above discussion but we are more interested to see the effects on the differentiation of knowledge. However, the main test for the ideas is presented in Table 10. The samples were trichotomised for each variable, and percentage differences were calculated for each variable for each country in the list. The five countries for which we found the biggest percentage difference in knowledge scores are indicated for each variable and each sample nation.

466

David Matthews!Periti

Joenniemi/Uolevi

Table 10. Differences in knowledge scores due to dogmatism (D), position (S) and education (E) List of evaluated countries NATO

Nations of respondents GB

US D GB I NL DK N

NL

N

E

DSE

SF

E

SE D DS E

E D

IND

YU

S E DS D

Warsaw Pact

D

S

E

1

2 2 1

1 2 1 2 1 2 1

4 1 1

4 6 3 3 2

6 3 3 2

4 4 1

5 4 2

1 1 S

DSE E

E CH S SF YU

D DSE

CS PL

SE DE S

SU

CS

S

F Nonaligned

social

Numbers of

DS S E

Arosalo

D DSE SE

DSE

D DSE DSE DSE S

E

D SE

DSE DSE DSE

D DSE DSE DE

DSE

DE DSE DS

SE DSE

DSE DSE DSE DSE

2 1 1 6 3 4 2 5 4 1

Note: T o have all variables in the same direction as to their content, dogmatism has been reversed: Thus high-D (closed mind) is taken as the lowest group, while low-D (open mind) is taken as the highest group.

It can be readily seen that the pattern does not obviously follow the argument presented above although there are some points of interest. It is very noticeable that the dogmatic in the aligned countries have relatively poor knowledge of Spain. Also, social position discriminates in Great Britain for knowledge of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Soviet Union, and in Netherlands for Italy, in Norway for Sweden, in Spain for the U S A and Great Britain, in Finland for Sweden, in Yugoslavia for the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy and Czechoslovakia and in Czechoslovakia for Yugoslavia. The interesting point is that in all of these cases except Great Britain — the Soviet Union, the country referred to is in the top five (out of the selected countries) with respect to trade with the sample country. So the results are rather negative for dogmatism and education, and, apart from some relationship between being of high social position and good knowledge of important trading partners, there does not appear to be a very clear result with social position either. W e might ask with

Knowledge of military alliances

467

respect to dogmatism whether this finding contradicts Rokeach's theory. However, the assumption that an individual identifies with the political system that his nation belongs to is clearly oversimplified, and maybe it is the untenability of this assumption that leads to the negative results. We would conclude that social structural variables and personality affect only the overall level of knowledge within a country and do not noticeably affect, in this case, differentiation of knowledge within the country amongst different social strata or personality types. Instead, we would suggest that beliefs and values are more likely to affect the content of knowledge. Earlier, we have indicated the importance of the political identification and values of the individual in affecting which nations he might identify with, thus affecting his knowledge about these countries. Unfortunately, since questions about political identification were not asked in this study for most sample countries, we have to confine any further discussion to values concerning war and expectations of international conflict. These variables were taken together in a regression analysis to find out if there were any interaction effects operating. However, we did not find such effects. Instead, as can be seen in Table 11, conflict expectations interact only weakly with knowledge. The question relating to disarmament has no relation to knowledge for any of the sample countries. This may be because hopes or fears about disarmament are related more to optimism or pessimism, or to values about war, than to knowledge, or more likely, because disarmament prospects are not very clear at present. However, there is a clear relation between high knowledge and believing that differences between East and West in Europe will eventually disappear. Current trends in international affairs support this proposition but do not support the proposition that major powers are willing to disarm. On this basis, the findings indicate that the respondents with good knowledge about military alliances also have good knowledge on wider political issues. The relation between knowledge and values concerning peace and war is more interesting but appears contradictory. Respondents thinking that in order to obtain peace countries should be members of military alliances tend to have low knowledge, whereas those envisaging a value, goal or ideal that would justify conventional war tend to have good knowledge. There are two methodological problems here of both response set and articulation, 17 which together may cancel out any substantive findings. The only other evidence we have concerning political values for the British and Finnish samples does indicate, however, that a person's knowledge tends to be related to those nations that he identifies

468

David Matthews/Periti

Table 11. Linear predictors analysis)

Joenniemi/Uolevi

Arosalo

of knowledge (Results of a regression

Predictor variable

Direction

Nations of respondents GB

NL N E SF I N D YU CS

1. Social structure Social Position Education (no. of years) Sex Age Size of town Income

High High Male Old City High

Activity and exposure Member of political organisation Number of memberships Spoke at meetings Talk about future See/hear about future Read about future Think about future country Think about future world

Yes Several Yes Very much Very much Very much Very much Very much

+

"T

+ +

+ + +

+ + + + + + + + + — o +

+

o o o o o o o +

o

o o o o

o

+ + +

+ + +

o o o + o

—

—

+ +

+ + + + + + + + +

—

o

+

o + o

o T + o + + o o o +

+

+

+

—

—

+ + + +

o + +

+

—

—

—

—

—

+

+ + +

+

+ + +

+ + +

+

+

—

+ + +

+ +

Personality Dogmatism Conflict

Open mind

expectations

War or disarmament in 5 years Disarmament Relations between East and West War

o o o o o

o

O

—

—

—

—

+

+

+ +

o

—

o o o

—

Values Military alliances for peace Justify conventional war

Agree Yes

+

+

o

Note: The above variables were grouped for the regression analysis as follows: (i) the social structure variables and personality; (ii) talk, see/hear, and read about the future; (iii) conflict expectations and values; (iv) think country and think world; (v) organisation and meeting questions. + positive predictor (beta coefficient > .1) O no clear relation (.1 > /> > -.1) — negative predictor (ft < -. 1)

with both in relation to left-right politics and also to the extent that a person justifies war. The other findings of Table 11 do not require much comment. Those that talk or read about the future and those that think about the future

Knowledge of military alliances

469

of the world tend to have good knowledge. However, in conjunction with the above, seeing or hearing about the future on television or radio without reading or talking about the future tends to lead to poor knowledge, as - in some samples - does thinking about the future of one's country. 5. A DISCUSSION: INTERNATIONAL STRUCTURE, SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND KNOWLEDGE

Our images of the world are very much influenced by who we are, where we live and how we think. Of the factors influencing these images we would first like to consider the effect that the international power structure has on the relevance of knowledge or information. The big powers, through their political and economic influence and their military strength, are able to influence what events are regarded as important throughout the world. Their nuclear strength makes other countries take notice of their policies. Since they, in addition to this, tend to be in a central position in regard to communication and control its major channels such as the news agencies, it is not surprising that knowledge of international relations appears to be big power oriented, i.e., the big powers are the best known of those in our list of countries. What seems even more important is that powers such as the United States are in a position to legitimate the international role and foreign policy of smaller powers. This matter can be seen to be closely related to a finding already presented, namely, that smaller powers tend to get some identity in international affairs by joining a military alliance. Therefore it is quite understandable that military alliances with big power members have a certain attraction to smaller nations, which have difficulties in getting a well-known international identity by just keeping non-aligned. But this evidently begs the question as to why it is good to have a strong international identity. Especially in the case of non-aligned nations (for example Switzerland) identity means a certain security from violations of other nations; and in the case of small aligned nations an identification with a military alliance is in itself meant to provide increased security to its members. Also we argue that on the international scene identity means greater probability that the behaviour of the nation will be in accordance with the expectations of other nations. With this mind it seems not surprising to find that the non-aligned countries on the list tend quite often to be placed into the military alliances in question - mainly NATO - in the case of incorrect placements. On the other hand this also means that the respondents tend to overestimate the scope of the military alliances and not to see the third component or element in European politics outside the strict East-West

470

David Matthews/Periti

JoenniemijUolevi

Arosalo

ordering. The tendency that non-aligned nations are mostly taken for NATO-countries is seriously distorting the 'balance' between the alliances. Several interaction studies as well as voting studies in international organisations have confirmed that in general non-aligned nations in Europe tend to come closer to NATO than to the Warsaw Pact. It is therefore not very surprising to find that this 'overspill' can also be seen in factual data on memberships in military alliances. However, the extension of this 'pro-West' neutrality also into the field of military politics must be a factor of constraint in East-West relations. One very basic conclusion seems to be that social structural variables appear to effect mainly the overall level of knowledge of individuals within a country rather than the differentiation of this knowledge, but when comparing the marginals across all the countries, national, e.g., geographical, factors fairly strongly affect the differentiation of knowledge on international relations and the world structure. In general knowledge is more evenly distributed within than between countries. Within countries there seems to be some kind of equality as the general public is equally knowledgeable - or ignorant - but between nations there seems to be quite large differences. The complex question is: What causes these international differences? We have tried to answer this question in terms of the international structure of the flow of news, the international role of each country and the educational levels and media pervasiveness within each country. Homogeneity within countries may be explained by the fact that for almost all of the people sampled the knowledge will not be used in political action, i.e. in this context people are uniformly politically passive. It is by no means evident that people should have knowledge of international relations or other kinds of political knowledge. We do not presume that knowledge on these matters is something good in itself, and therefore it is proper to ask: Why should one have knowledge of military alliances, and what does it mean if one has? It is important to note that the knowledge being discussed is very elementary indeed. If a person in any of the countries included in the study is to have influence over others relating to foreign policy suggestions then he ought to have a fairly complete knowledge in this field. Even if all these countries are not 'fact oriented' to the same extent it may be argued that this kind of knowledge of international relations can be regarded as some kind of precondition or admission ticket to influence in foreign policy. It is therefore interesting to note that none of our major social structure groups showed any complete knowledge thus reflecting - besides scarcity of information and a lack of interest and motivation in acquiring it - the minimal participation of the general public in influencing foreign policy.

Knowledge of military alliances

471

Finally, we would like to take up some future-oriented points in regard to world images and political knowledge. A factor that for certain can be expected to undergo changes even in the near future is the technical means and facilities for communication. On the basis of this assumption, what can be expected to happen to world images and what are the consequences of possible changes in these images? We think that, partly on the basis of the results of this study, it can be stated that technical changes in themselves cannot be enough to cause any radical change in existing world images in the near future. The patterns of differentiation tend to reveal that the social processes operating on the general public affecting their political knowledge are quite strong, and these phenomena, we think, are too pervasive for us to hope that they will disappear just by chance of a technical kind. However, even an improvement in the overall level of knowledge would probably mean less polarisation in the differentiation of knowledge. Possibly one could also make a case for improvements in the images of the world, i.e., development towards a more balanced and detailed world picture less dominated by big powers and military blocs. On the basis of the notion that young people tend to show weaker differentiations in their world picture, and that these differentiations are based less along national lines or are a result of geographical proximity, we would assume that this will be the trend for future development amongst the general public. It seems also reasonable to assume that in the construction of world images, political values at the individual level will play a much more central role than they do now. As we find in the study that national identities are in some cases overruled by political - other than national - allegiances, the trend could be towards less strong national identities in Europe. 6 . SUMMARY

Perhaps the major finding that comes from this chapter is that there are clear differences in how knowledge is differentiated in the different sample countries. These differences were explained by considering firstly why persons in certain countries should be better informed about international affairs than others. Explanations were offered at the personal and also at the social structure level and international level. Secondly, it was noticed that there was a general pattern of differentiation in the knowledge data - the big aligned powers were well known, the small aligned countries slightly less known and the non-aligned countries least known. Interaction effects between sample country and referent country were also noted, especially the generalisation that knowledge of the own alliance is better than knowledge of the opposing alliance which in turn is better

472

David MatthewsjPertti

JoenniemijUolevi

Arosalo

than knowledge of the non-aligned countries. Geographical proximity also appeared to be an intervening factor in explaining knowledge of neighbouring countries. When considering errors, we found a tendency to put non-aligned countries into NATO and for respondents of aligned countries to have an 'all or nothing' type of knowledge about non-aligned countries. To the extent that respondents did have polarised knowledge about the alliances of the countries discussed, these respondents were found in the aligned countries together with Spain. At the personality and social group level, we did not find that these variables had any clear systematic effects on the differentiation of knowledge but instead related to the overall level of knowledge. However, political allegiances in the samples, taken together with values concerning war tended to affect the differentiation of knowledge in that people appeared to have good knowledge about the nations they identified with politically if and only if the foreign policies of these nations coincided with their values on war. The last finding has implications for the future. For, if political values and identification affect the content of knowledge more than social structure within a country, then with improving communication channels, differentiation of knowledge could become less dependent on national channels of communication and social structure than it is now - provided people use these channels. This could lead to more pluralism regarding knowledge, concurrent with a more general value pluralism less dependent on national channels. Possibly, this would lead to a further breakdown of the power of the nation state. NOTES The work underlying this chapter was financed by a grant to David Matthews from the Nordic Cooperation Committee for International Politics, Including Peace and Conflict Research. 1. The respondents were in 1967 very concerned about nuclear war as can be seen in their answers to the open-ended question, 'What do you think could be the worst thing that could happen?' About half of the respondents from the aligned countries indicated nuclear war, but only a quarter in the non-aligned countries. Since the authors believe that world nuclear war as a result of a conflict in Europe is now unlikely, we would suggest that the different expectations noted above reflect military alliance propaganda and declared N A T O strategy in the aligned countries. 2. For example, the article by U. Bronfenbrenner (1961), 'The mirror image in SovietAmerican relations: A social psychologist's report'. Journal of Social Issues 17, 45^16. Or, alternatively, many studies mentioned in several chapters of H.C. Kelman (1965), International Behaviour, London. 3. When Americans ask other Americans about 'Russians', for example, implicit norms are operating that lead the respondents to think that the interviewer expects him to respond

Knowledge of military

alliances

413

in an accepted (i.e., stereotyped) way. By asking questions about military alliance in a non-evaluative context, we hope we are avoiding the assumptions that any stereotype exists. 4. The United States Information Agency has been interested in European nationals' evaluations and knowledge about NATO and the Warsaw Pact over a considerable period, from 1945-1965. They were especially interested in the effects of United States propaganda in Europe. Their data suggest that over some time there are considerable variations in knowledge of military alliances of up to 50 per cent. Our study is synchronic (August-December 1967), with the Indian sample slightly later (latter half of 1968), and we make the assumption that temporal fluctuations do not affect the arguments in any systematic way. See R. L. Merritt and O. Puchala (1965), Western European perspectives in international affairs, London. 5. In Great Britain it was also possible to answer that a country was both member of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. This slight anomaly has a negligible effect on the results. The knowledge questions were not asked in Japan. Data from Poland are from the pretest sample (PLp). 6. Data from K.Jacobson (1969). Sponsorships in the United Nations', Journal of Peace Research 3, pp. 235-257. 7. This is confirmed in the results by T. Varis (1970), 'Interest in information about the future in Finland'. In E. Hosia (Ed.), Future prospects of the youth, Tampere, pp. 174— 181.

8. In the study we have found it useful to place France neither into N A T O nor into the Warsaw Pact but into a category of its own. At the time of the interview France was on the point of withdrawing its commitment to NATO, but was still formally a member of the alliance. 9. R. Kvadsheim (1969), 'Divided nations in the international system', paper presented to the Third IPRA Conference, Karlovy Vary. 10. U. Arosalo (1970), 'The justification of war as seen by different power groups'. In E. Hosia (Ed.), Future prospects of the youth, Tampere, p. 168 ff. The relation between political allegiances, justification of war and knowledge about military alliance memberships seems also to hold true for labour and conservatives in Great Britain, but to a minor extent. 11. For a further discussion see Galtung/Holmboe-Ruge (1965), 'The structure of foreign news', Journal of Peace Research, February. 12. This is a point made by Norwegian participants to the study. 13. Considering the non-aligned countries on the list there seems to some extent to be a bias towards west-oriented non-aligned countries, and therefore one should also be modest in further conclusions on this point. 14. We carried out a non-metric multidimensional scaling starting from product-moment correlation coefficients in two ways: Firstly using a NATO-Warsaw Pact dimension - no matter whether the respondents were correct or not - and secondly using a correctincorrect dimension irrespective of whether the country on the list was a NATO or a Warsaw Pact country or did not belong to either bloc. Results are plotted in two dimensions where the stress coefficient ranged from .01 to .19. See J.B. Kruskal (1964), 'Multidimensional scaling by optimising goodness of fit to a non-metric hypothesis', Psychometrika, pp. 1-27. 15. It is interesting to note here that two different methods, namely partial regression analysis and non-metric scaling, produced the same kind of results. 16. M. Rokeach (1960), The open and closed mind, New York. 17. For the peace proposals there is a tendency to answer 'yes' to all the questions which is correlated with low social position (see Chapter 20). Also when faced with a question that may require elaboration the most educated only may respond positively.

KJELL SKJELSBJEK

18

Young believers in a world state

1. INTRODUCTION

The idea of a world state as one of the many approaches to peace is an old one in the history of human thought. Political and religious leaders have written of a world free from violent conflicts, where people would share in harmony the natural resources of the earth and unite against natural disasters rather than against each other. The unification of countries like Italy, Germany, Switzerland and the United States in spite of many internal strifes and civil wars gave support to the argument that as soon as all peoples, races, religions and ethnic groups came under the same government, wars would for all practical purpose disappear. Some regarded the fusion of all nations into a world state as the logical conclusion of a historical process in which smaller units gradually became integrated into larger ones. For the sake of peace, the continuation of this process should be stimulated. Etzioni, a proponent of this strategy writes: 'First, the lower level of consensus is attained by grouping a few states at a time; once the union of such groups solidifies, a more compassing union and a higher level of consensus is produced'. 1 The founding of the League of Nations and the United Nations is easily seen as steps towards the final goal, a world union. The idea of peace through a world state has found institutional expression in a number of national and international organizations. There are, for instance, the World Council for the Peoples World Convention, the World Federalist Youth, the International Registry of World Citizens, the World Peace through Law Center, and the World Association of World Federalists which in various ways promote the idea of a world government. Needless to say, there is disagreement both within and between these and similar organizations as to the exact nature of world government and the measures that should be taken to bring it about. The purpose of this chapter is not to discuss the desirability or the prob-

476

Kjell Skjelsbcek

ability of different types of a world state, although a more serious debate of different future world models is certainly needed. The focus here is not on the model as such, but on its potential supporters, how numerous they are, what resources they command and which factors can explain their belief in the world state peace strategy. In a sense, this is a voting study, except that there is no world party based on this particular idea, only a potential constituency and a number of interested organizations. It may be argued against voting studies that the insights they provide, can easily be utilized by party leaders for manipulation of their followers. The leaders will know which groups should be given special attention in order to increase the support for a candidate or a cause. On the other hand, the followers exercise some power over the various elites through voting studies and opinion polls, serving as mechanisms that indicate the limits of what is 'politically possible'. The present study may be of some direct use to activists in the world federation and world union movements, but their anonymous followers will benefit from it indirectly only, if at all. However, the study hopefully serves another purpose of being one step further towards a more complete mapping of popular support for different world models, and this mapping is useful for anyone who works to change the world social structure. A world model deserves attention only if it can be translated into a viable social structure, and one of the many prerequisites for that is that it has a sufficient popular base. No structure will serve everybody equally well, and it is consequently of great interest to know who benefits in which way. Different social groups, rightly or wrongly, anticipate different benefits. Unfortunately, the data do not permit a direct approach to the question of anticipated benefits of a world state, but we can at least find out who agrees and who disagrees with the assumption that one of the benefits derived from a world state is 'peace'. Those who disagree are unlikely to think that a world state as such serves their general interests. Before we start our analysis one short note on the methods employed here. They do not differ from those used in almost any analysis of survey data and do not warrant further comments, except for a brief definition and explanation of one measure, the agreement score. Most of the items in the questionnaire were propositions with which the interviewee could agree, disagree or say that he was uncertain. I assume that there is an underlying, continuous dimension, and that the trichotomization of the variables is a practical simplification at the cost of loss of information. This means, however, that one can compute a sensitive measure of central tendency even though there are only three categories on the ordinal level, and this measure, the agreement score, is defined as follows:

Young believers in a world state

All

(% agree — % disagree) x 100 % agree + % uncertain + % disagree Respondents, who for some reason have not answered a particular question, are excluded from the computation. For practical purposes, the agreement score is the difference between the percentage of persons who agree and the percentage of persons who disagree with the statements. The score ranges from + 100 if everybody agrees to — 100 if everybody disagrees. 2

2 . THE DEPENDENT VARIABLE: PEACE THROUGH A WORLD STATE

The interviewees were asked to express their opinion about twenty-five different peace proposals presented in a more or less random order (cf. Appendix p. 708 ff.). Proposal no. 25 is the following: 'To obtain peace, we must have a world state, with disappearance of national borders and with an efficient world government.' Let us compare this short statement with a more elaborate one describing the goals of the World Association of World Federalists (WAWF): ' . . . coordinate policies and activities of national organizations working for a World Federation having a defined sphere of jurisdiction, functioning through a legislature to make world law, a judiciary to interpret it, and an executive with adequate powers to enforce it upon individuals, associations and states; increase the clarification and understanding of political and other issues that have a direct bearing upon the development of a world community.' 3 There is one noticeable difference: The WAWF says nothing about the disappearance of national borders. The extent to which national borders should disappear is eagerly debated in the world federation movement where 'maximalists' and 'minimalists' take different positions. The above statement of objectives dates back to 1954, and many world federalists today like to stress that a future world state must be pluralistic, retaining national borders, while some vital functions, particularly those related to security, should be transferred to supranational organs. 4 This minimalist and pluralist strategy is most strongly advocated by the young federalists and their organization, the World Federalist Youth, or in other words, by the age group our questionnaire was administered to. It is therefore unfortunate that a maximalist position is implied in the respective peace proposal included in the questionnaire of the year 2000 project. It may have turned off some people that accept the general idea of a world state. This will depend, of course, on the extent to which

478

Kjell Skjelsbcek

people consider a minimalist world state as an end in itself, or only as a step in the direction of a maximalist world government. The maximalist and the minimalist positions are therefore not necessarily contradictory. On the other hand, I do think that people who agree with the proposition in the questionnaire are most likely to support the more limited measures suggested by the world federalist leadership and can therefore be considered part of the potential constituency of a world federation party. It is of course possible that there is a discrepancy between the opinions of the leaders of the world federalist organizations and the views of their followers around the world. Galtung has suggested that, as a rule, ideas about international relations and foreign policy are generated in the 'center' of a society and slowly disseminated to and accepted by the periphery', often in a more extreme and crude form. 5 If his hypothesis is correct-and there is ample evidence in support of it-we should expect less enthusiasm about the minimalist position among the followers than among the leaders of the W A W F and similar organizations. Among the followers we might still expect the old image of a world without national borders and with a world government. Then the item in the questionnaire would not be as bad as some of the leaders might think. 6 In any case, we cannot change the wording of the item and will just have to remember that many believers in a world state will be dissatisfied with it. The first question that should be answered is how popular the idea of peace through a world state is in the ten countries under consideration. Table 1 shows some interesting figures. Table 1. To obtain peace, we must have a world state, with disappearance of national borders and with an efficient world government ( %) CS

E

GB

IND

J

N

NL

PL

SF

YU

36

41

53

57

37

27

45

35

18

36

Uncertain

22

34

6

18

46

25

14

16

25

25

Disagree

41

25

40

25

16

48

41

35

57

40

Agreement-score

-5

16

13

32

21 -21

4

0 -39

-4

Rank of proposals

23

23

18

21

17

Agree

23

21

24

24

22

The last row contains the rank of the agreement score of this peace proposal relative to the twenty-four other proposals, and obviously it is not among the most popular ones. In two countries only, Japan and Great Britain, it is not among the five least acceptable strategies. There is no

Young believers in a world state

479

relationship between the rank of the peace proposal within a country and the agreement score for this country (cf. second last row), since the average agreement score across all peace proposals differs considerably from country to country. 7 People generally agree more than they disagree with peace proposals. This fact may be interpreted either as a strongly positive attitude towards any attempt at achieving peace, as a lack of sophistication or inability to distinguish between different peace proposals, as an attitude of acquiescence - that could have been tapped by a social acceptability instrument - or as any mixture of these three factors. When it comes to belief in a world state, there is a more balanced distribution of opinion than usual. Five countries have positive agreement scores - which means that more people agree than disagree - and four countries have negative ones. The two Asian nations are clearly on top. Then comes a group of three capitalist West European states. Below these are the three socialist countries that do not differ much from one another in having moderately negative agreement scores. One reason for this attitude perhaps is that, in a world state, the socialist countries would be in a minority position as they have been in the UN for so long. It is not unreasonable to suppose that a world government would have more capitalist than socialist traits. But it is also possible that the opposition to a world state in socialist countries is a rejection of Stalinist, centralized policies which they have experienced and to some extent denounced. Finally, the two Nordic countries in the sample are relatively pessimistic about the effectiveness of a world state with regard to peace. Participation in a world state would not give these countries great advantages. On the contrary, they would be forced to deal with remote and difficult problems in an institutional setting in which they would not have much of a say. Another factor that possibly could explain the differences in agreement scores is the activity of national world federalist associations. Such organizations exist in India, Japan, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Norway (and of course in several other countries not included in this survey). It is impossible to test these hypotheses with the present data. However, one general hypothesis, namely that countries with large populations are more positive towards the world state idea than less populous countries, can be more carefully examined. The underlying assumption is, of course, that in a world state the former would exert more influence than the latter. It may also be that people in populous countries are already more familiar with 'remote' and 'large-scale' government than people in smaller, more homogeneous countries. It turns out that the gamma correlation between the agreement scores and the size of the population is as high as .82 in this sample of ten nations, and this should be remembered although the sample is small and biased. 8

480

Kjell Skjelsbcek

3. BELIEF IN PEACE THROUGH A WORLD STATE AS A FUNCTION OF SOCIAL POSITION

So far we have compared countries and stated hypotheses about relationships between attributes of nations only. In the remaining part of this article we shall focus on individuals as the unit of analysis. However, nationality may be one of the crucial dimensions in explaining individual attitudes and behaviour, and the possible effect of this variable will therefore systematically be controlled for. First, some of the standard background variables will be introduced which express various aspects of the respondents' social position and which have been used with such success in many voting studies. 3.1 Sex The figures are shown in Table 2, and they are quite interesting. Table 2. Belief in peace through a world state as a function (agreement scores) Sex of respondents

CS

E

GB

IND

J

N

Female

-8

18

12

56

25

Male

-3

13

13

23

17

NL

PL

-22

2

-7

-20

11

7

of sex

SF

YU

-8 -31

0

In those three countries, where the idea of peace through world government receives most support, women outdo men in their enthusiasm. In Great Britain there is about equality, and in the seven remaining countries, men favor a world state more than do women. The variance across female samples is considerably larger than across male samples, and it is difficult to say why. However, Galtung's social-position theory may give us a clue. In all these countries, men have better education, more organizational experience and generally higher status than women. In other words, being a woman means having a more peripheral social position. According to Galtung's theory, people in the periphery gradually accept ideas developed and promulgated by the center. They do not only accept but overaccept the ideas in an extreme and absolutist form. I deduce from this that when an idea becomes popular in a country, women will to a larger extent than men 'vote with the majority'. Conversely, when a new line of thought is being introduced, or is on its way out, fewer women will pay attention to it. In order to put this hypothesis

Young believers in a world state

481

to an empirical test, we would need longitudinal in addition to crosssectional data. 3.2 Age There seems to be no relationship between age and the dependent variable except in Yugoslavia (Slovenia), but, unfortunately, data are missing from India and the Netherlands. In Slovenia the idea becomes more popular the older one is, at least up to the age of forty. Table 3. Belief in peace through a world state as a function (agreement scores) Age of respondents

CS

E

GB

IND* J

15-17

-2

14

26

—

N

23

of age

NL* PL

SF

YU

—

-4

-38

-15

18-23

-6

15

13

—

24

-16

—

-4

-42

-8

24-35

-8

17

13

—

21

-30

—

3

-37

-8

36-38

-2

12

5

—

22

-3

—

5

-45

-1

38—40

11

11

10

—

33

-2

—

0

-26

23

* Data on age were not available at all or not in this categorization.

We do not know what the 'older generation' thinks. The lower half of Table 3 does not look very exciting, but it can nevertheless be used to refute some hypotheses (that partially are contradictory): 1) that youth and immaturity accounts for adherence to such a 'simple' peace philosophy as the formation of a world state; 2) that age and experience leads one to accept the 'noble' concept of a union of all nations and peoples on the earth; or 3) that the whole idea is 'antiquated'. In general, a g e - a t least up to forty years - gives no clues at all when it comes to explaining why people take this or that position. The only exception is Slovenia, and even there the correlation is weak. 3.3 Education The respondents were asked how many years of full-time schooling they had, and the mean number differed, of course, considerably from country to country. It may be objected to using this variable that a large proportion of the interviewees were too young to have had a chance to receive

482

Kjell Skjelsbcek

higher education. However, I am interested in the possible effect of education in itself, as it has been established that in practically all countries there is no correlation between age and belief in peace through a world state. The data were grouped and presented in Table 4, showing that the relationship between the two variables varies from country to country. Table 4. Belief in peace through a world state as a function of education (agreement scores) E

GB

IND

J

18

12

(18)

(80)

42

-13

20

0

-30

-3

2

12

13

41

19

-27

-3

17

-36

-11

11-12

-18

22

5

40

20

-22

-4

-7

-50

-2

More than 12

-25

14

-11

27

15

-21

1

-4

-67

1

Years of full-time schooling of respondents

Less than 9 9-10

CS

N

NL

PL

SF

YU

Note: Figures in parentheses are based on raw scores below 30.

There is little doubt that in India, Japan, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and Finland, shorter education may be one cause why people believe more in a world state. If I had combined the two first lines, Poland would have been brought into the same category of countries, while Yugoslavia (Slovenia) would have shown the opposite trend: More support for a world state among those with longer education. There are, however, many arguments against such manipulation of data, and one should conclude that although, in most countries, there is a negative relationship between length of education and agreement with the world state peace proposal, in several of these the relationship is not monotonic, and in most of them it is weak. 9 3.4 Income This is a difficult variable to interpret in connection with persons in such a transient phase of life as the years commencing with fifteen. Students, for instance, have low income, but are in many other ways a privileged group. In addition, a student may or may not consider himself part of the household of his parents, and this varies from country to country. In order to make comparisons across national borders meaningful, the income distribution scale of each country was divided into quartiles and the

483

Young believers in a world state

respondents scored on the quartile to which they belonged. The results are presented in Table 5, and the picture does not differ much from the one found in Table 4. Table 5. Belief in peace through a world state as a function of income (agreement score) Monthly income of respondent's household

CS

E

GB

IND J

N

NL

PL*

SF

YU

First quartile Second quartile Upper half

- 2 - 2 -16

20 15 9

31 16 6

37 40 13

-23 - 7 -25

19 5 4

— — —

- 8 -38 -49

-12 2 - 2

(30) 20 21

* No data available Note: The figure in parentheses is based on a raw-score below 30.

The high degree of similarity is no surprise because income and education usually are highly correlated. The lowest income group is more for world government in those five countries that show the highest general enthusiasm for the world state idea, and there is also a noticeable negative relationship between the two variables in Finland. Once more there is a weak opposite trend in Slovenia. Although it definitely would be an exaggeration to state that the world state strategy is a poor man's ideology, in most of these countries the poor do have a higher propensity to agree with it. I shall return to the question of why this is so after having presented some other variables. 3.5 Occupation I shall next examine the impact of occupation and present the figures in Table 6. If we look which occupational groups produce the two highest agreement scores we find unskilled or skilled workers or housewives (and unemployed and retired persons) in 13 out of 16 cases (8 countries, 2 highest scores). In the Netherlands, students and apprentices show a disproportionate support for a world government. In Norway and Great Britain, executives and higher white-collar workers also show a relatively great interest in a world state, but the bases these agreement scores are computed from are so low that the figures are not very reliable. I venture the conclusion that the greatest support for a world state is found among people in low status occupations, but the differences from other occupations are small in most countries.

484

Kjell Skjelsbcek

Table 6. Belief in peace through a world state as a function of occupation (agreement score) Occupation of respondents

CS

Student, apprentice

- 6

14

5

—

21

-28

16

16

30

—

22

-10

Skilled worker

- 4

15

12

—

28

-28

Lower white collar

-21

10

10

—

14

-20

(8) -13

Higher white collar

-27

14

(29)

14

1

(9) 17

-26

-20

—

(-36)

Executive, independent

8

20

14

—

24

(0) -15

Unskilled worker

Housewife, unemployed

E

GB

IND* J

N

NL

PL*

SF

YU

15

—

-54

- 8

23

—

-12

- 5

—

-28

8

—

-69

-10

—

H8) -36

-18

-16 1

—

-63

-19

- 9

N o t e : Figures in parentheses are based on raw scores below 30. The two highest scores in each are in italics. * N o data available.

3.6 Organizational

activity

It is of course debatable whether this is a proper background variable. The answer will depend on which model one uses, and for our purposes it is reasonable to suppose that the attitudes towards a world state may be influenced by past experiences, including organizational activity. 10 Organizational experience is particularly interesting in this connection because a world state is, of course, nothing but a huge organization. Consequently, such experience may have an effect on a person's opinion about the possibility and desirability of a world state. The questionnaire contained one general question about how many organizations the respondent was a member of, and some special questions about membership in particular types of organizations. Table 7 shows that the relationship between organizational activity and belief in a world state depends very much on the kind of organization the respondent belongs to. In fact, the relationship is different for political and religious organizations in five of the nine countries. Presenting a table based on the total number of memberships only would therefore be highly misleading. In India, Japan and Yugoslavia there is a positive correlation between experience in political organizations and agreement with the world state proposal, while in all other countries the relationship is clearly negative. The relationship with membership in religious organizations were negative in India, Great Britain and Norway only, but some of the positive correlations in the other countries were very low. We know from other studies that organizational activity has a cumulative effect, i.e., member-

Young believers in a world state

485

ship in one organization increases the likelihood of membership in another, but religious activity in organizations seems to be an exception. According to Allardt et al. (1958),11 there was no covariance between religious activity and other kinds of activity among young Finns. The third variable in Table 7 is membership of the board of an organization (regardless of which type it may be). Except for Japan, Spain and Yugoslavia, there is everywhere a clearly negative relationship between having served in the board of an organization and a positive attitude towards a world state as a strategy for peace. In general there is no support for the hypothesis that organizational experience produces world state enthusiasm. As already noted in connection with other variables, Yugoslavia is different from most of the other countries. On the basis of the Slovenian sample alone I would not have been able to reject the hypothesis, but, on the contrary, would have thought that it could be verified. Table 7. Belief in peace through a world state as a function of membership in organizations (agreement scores) Membership in (of) a Political

CS

GB

E

IND

J

N

NL

PL*

SF

YU

-13

organization

No

- 1

17

19

-19

5

—

- 37

Yes, passive

-11

- 2

(-11) (31)

26

-30

0

—

- 54

4

Yes, active

-14

- 6

(-21)

47

48

-33

-

(-100)

20

—

- 41

Religious

14

30

(-38)

organization

No Yes

-11

15

14

33

19

-18

1

6

19

8

24

38

-44

14

2

16

11

33

21

-17

8

—

- 34

- 6

-10

17

2 1

20

-22

- 5

—

- 52

2

-

(22)

- 5 13

Board of oganization No Yes

-

1

Note: Figures in parentheses are based on raw scores below 30. * N o data available.

3.7 Summary The overall impression one gets from the preceding tables is that the relationship between social position and belief in a world state is negative and weak, but in no way negligible. In most countries, people with lower income and shorter education, who are engaged in low-status occupations

486

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and living in small towns or in the countryside do agree more with the peace proposal under study. Moreover, this belief seems to be negatively related to membership in organizations, which is not surprising because people with high status are more likely to have such memberships. The only status indicator that did not 'work' was age, although it seems that Yugoslavia (Slovenia) is deviant in this respect: The world state idea received more support among the older respondents in the sample. Sex is also frequently considered an indicator of social position or status. Interestingly, the relationship between sex and belief in a world state was far from uniform across the ten countries. Women were more often sympathetic to the world state proposal in countries where the general level of agreement was high, and vice versa. I have combined the different indicators of social position into a simple, additive index. 12 This index measures the social position of the head of the household, who may or may not be the respondent himself. It can be used to check my preliminary conclusion about the relationship between social status and belief in a world government. The marginals of Table 13 certainly confirm my previous findings. In Yugoslavia (and Poland) high-status people do believe more in peace through a world state than do low-status people. In Norway the correlation between the two variables is close to zero, and least agreement is found in the 'middle class'. In the remaining seven countries proponents of a world state would find more support for their ideas the lower the social strata. This finding is incongruent with the picture the world federalists give of themselves. In an article entitled 'Meet average federalist' in The Federalist (XII, 1, 1965) we read that a survey showed the average federalist 'clearly to be member of that exclusive elite sometimes called opinion movers, attitude builders, . . . , the leadership community, A number of factors can explain this difference from earlier findings. The survey referred to was done in the United States only, and that country may be different from the European and Asian countries in our study. Furthermore, our samples contained young people only, while the 'average federalist' is fifty-two. In addition, a less extreme form of global integration than the one described in our questionnaire may appeal more to people in higher social strata than to those lower down, other things being equal. Although all these factors may be at work, the best explanation, to my mind, is that there are considerable differences in general social status between leaders and followers in most social movements and organizations. The percentage of leaders is much higher among the subscribers to The Federalist than in the nation-wide population samples used in our study, and it was subscribers only who were approached with a questionnaire in the reported survey. It is therefore not inconceivable

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that the leaders of the world federalist movement are well-educated, rich, well-known and older people whose ideas catch on more among persons in the social periphery than among those in the social center. It is not easy to explain why there generally is a negative relationship between social position and agreement with the world state proposal. One possibility is that the statistical relationship is an artifact produced by the instrument used to measure opinion. Some people may agree with almost every statement they are confronted with, perhaps believing that there are right and wrong answers, and if there are such response sets, the researcher is unable to detect deep and genuine convictions. A reasonable hypothesis with regard to this study is that people in the social periphery are more likely than others to have response sets, i.e., to agree with all peace proposals because, for some reason, agreement is considered more socially acceptable than disagreement. I would like to point out, however, that there may be quite different reasons why some people agree with many proposals. Their conceptions of peace may be complicated ones, and their peace strategies mixtures of may kinds of efforts, some of which are listed among the twenty-five proposals. 13 Unfortunately, there is nothing in the questionnaire that can help us to distinguish this sophisticated attitude from the attitude of acquiescence described above. A simple, statistical control for the degree to which a respondent agrees with everything is not meaningful in sociological terms. Though this topic is dealt with in more details by Hartmann and Larsen in Chapter 20, it is interesting also to present data for overall agreement with peace proposals for the sake of comparison with the agreement on our specific proposal. Table 8. Overall agreement with peace proposals as a function of social position (agreement scores) Social position

CS

E

GB IND

J

N

NL

PL

SF

YU

Low Middle High

50 44 36

53 56 51

48 38 24

60 60 48

38 38 37

40 30 22

48 40 50

40 39 38

44 50 24

45 44 39

Total

44

54

39

52

37

32

42

39

40

44

Table 8 shows the mean agreement scores across all twenty-five peace proposals, and in most countries there really is a tendency towards less agreement the higher the social status of the head of the household. The tendency is most clearly pronounced in Great Britain, Czechoslovakia

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and Norway, but in the other countries it is very weak or absent. It is instructive to compare this table with the marginals in Table 13. Although the relationships between social status and agreement with the world state idea are in the same direction in most countries, there are sufficient differences in magnitude and curve shapes to refute the notion that overagreement alone can explain the major finding, namely that belief in peace through a world state is negatively related to social position. Assuming that there is a genuine association between social position and belief in a world state, there must also be one or more sociological factors that can account for it. I shall try to approach the problem along two different lines. First, one may hold that the central item in this investigation is more a description of a state ofpeace than of a means to reach this state. There is no indication of a first, practical step in the desired direction. According to Galtung 5 it is exactly this impracticability, this absence of pragmatism and gradualism, that is so typical of foreign policy opinions of members of the social periphery. Low education and little information explain a general ignorance about the complexities of international affairs and a lack of understanding of the many side-effects of a quick action to establish a world state of the kind described in the proposal under consideration here. This does not necessarily mean that a world state in itself is undesirable or impossible, but that the difficulties involved in transforming the present international system into a world state as envisaged in the proposal are enormous, and that these difficulties are less appreciated in the periphery. Furthermore, the lack of power experienced by these persons may lead to an endorsement of extreme measures in order to change the system as well as their own situation. To the extent the latter is the case, we should expect support from the periphery for a maximalist world state as proposed in the questionnaire. The second line of thought is longitudinal rather than cross-sectional and in no way inconsistent with the first line. As mentioned in the introduction, the general trend in the world federalist movement is towards a more minimalist position, which simply means less world state. Following Galtung's theory again, I should expect the 'obsolete' and more extreme version to be more popular in the periphery. For the sake of control we should have had an item expressing a less extreme form of world federalism also. If this theory holds true in all countries, the world state idea has relatively recently become accepted by the social elite in Slovenia. Regrettably I know too little about this region to decide whether this hypothesis is intuitively correct.

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4 . THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BELIEF IN PEACE THROUGH A WORLD STATE AND OTHER ATTITUDES

We now change from a sociological to a more psychological perspective and ask which attitudes frequently occur together with belief in peace through a world state. It now becomes even more difficult to distinguish between cause and effect. I do think that some attitudes are more fundamental than others, but in practice it is usually difficult to determine which one of two highly correlated attitudes is the more basic one. Nonetheless it is useful to locate clusters of attitudes on the basis of which it may be possible to make deductions about underlying and more fundamental dimensions. Furthermore, knowing which other attitudes a particular attitude is correlated with gives us greater insight into the content and structure of the latter. 4.1 Relationship with other peace proposals The correlations between peace through a world state and the other twenty-four peace proposals used in this study are presented in Table 9.14 Only 10 per cent of the correlations are negative, and this is a reflection of the tendency to agree rather than disagree with peace proposals that is so evident from the high positive agreement scores in Table 8. In addition, most of the correlations are very low which simply means that the idea of peace through a world state is a relatively independent and unique philosophy. For each country the five highest scores (in terms of numerical value) are italicized. Peace strategy 23, the adoption of a world language, ranks among the five most highly correlated proposals in all ten countries. This seems logical. The adoption of a world language would greatly ease communication between different peoples and groups and hence facilitate global integration, but is has never been part of the program of the world federalist movement. 15 It is also no surprise that there are relatively high correlations with peace proposal 24, the organization of a strong international peace-keeping force, (cf the citation of page 477). A world state of the kind envisaged in proposal 25 could hardly function without some kind of coercive power. Turning to proposal 22 I do not find what I have expected. The correlations between a proposal to improve the U N and the proposal to found a world state are so small as to be negligible, and in one country, Finland, it is even negative. This is particularly surprising in the light of the pronounced tendency among many world federalists to build on existing global institutions. It may be that the persons accepting our world state proposal are disillusioned with the U N and do not think it is worth trying to improve the organization. They may also think that the only

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