Kees van der Pijl has a new book out called Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq, but I haven't read this one, so I don't know if he has taken the analysis of the making of the Atlantic ruling class to the truly global stage.
> On
> the other hand, I'd think that, for that upper 20% in the south,
> paying to send them for free to US or other western universities
> usually does the trick more than having /Dallas/ and Coke in their
> daily lives.
Yes, but education is part of culture, perhaps the most important part of it, and it's been explicitly a tool in the making of US hegemony.
Education in or about the West, however, probably in itself doesn't promote US hegemony in the end. E.g., Jalal Al-e Ahmad -- the author of one of the most influencial criticisms of Westernization, Gharbzadegi [variously translated as Occidentosis, Plagued from the West, Stricken by the West, Westoxication, etc., published in 1962] -- was also a distinguished visiting fellow at Harvard, through a program initiated by Henry Kissinger no less, and a Persian translator of works by Camus, Sartre, Ionesco, Dostoyevsky, etc.
What's crucial is probably whether education, or ideology in general, promotes the idea that "[t]he country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future" (Karl Marx, "Preface to the First German Edition of Capital," <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p1.htm>), the essence of capitalist developmentalism.
> I didn't realize he even cited Schiller, but either way he definitely
> doesn't get the argument. Schiller was never really worried about
> culture per se. He was recording a concerted effort on the part of US
> military/industrial, diplomatic and TV/Radio administrators (and
> sometimes people who were part of more than one of these) to
> simultaneously promote America as the beacon of freedom and to promote
> American products (i.e. Coke, Proctor and Gamble stuff, etc.) using
> other American products (i.e. advertising in between episodes of
> Dallas or MASH or whatever TV show was being illegally beamed into
> foriegn airspace by pirate broadcasting stations). The long term goal
> was to maintain America's political and military hegemony--which is
> why the Pentagon was involved at all--but the communications and their
> industrial advertisers were interested in getting on board because it
> would help prepare a new generation of consumers in the developing
> world.
>
> One could fault Schiller for not doing enough on the ground research
> to see how much of this crap actually stuck to the wall, but to say
> his theory is wrong because people didn't completely buy into US
> propaganda efforts totally misses the point of his argument--and
> overlooks the continued use of these methods to try to maintain US
> hegemony (like the Arab language news station they tried to start to
> compete with Al Jazeera.) And since much of this was also related to
> on the ground development programs like the Peace Corps and USAID,
> it's hard to say which of these were absolutely not useful in
> cementing US hegemony, whatever their other stated goals (i.e.
> economic development) might have been.
For Omar Lizardo and others who think like him, US hegemony is not an important problem, nor is imperialism all that important a concept, hence their misunderstanding of the point of enquiring into cultural aspects of imperialism, I think.
> And, on your first note about the 20% of the ruling class of these
> countries, you are definitely onto something. All of the above--the
> communcations scholars as well as the people working in international
> development were inspired by administrative communications scholars
> like Katz and Lazarsfeld who had very scientific methods of figuring
> out how to, in the words of Chomsky, "manufacture consent." Their
> basic premise was that in order to get an idea to permeate into a
> society it wasn't enough to just project it via mass communication
> mechanism (it's worth noting that these were the first critics of the
> propaganda model but they were somewhat cynical since their real goal,
> working, as they did, for advertisers, was to figure out how to make
> propaganda more effective.) To get an idea to change a social
> practice, one had to find the opinion leaders of the community, get
> them to adopt the practice or ideological outlook and then, based on
> the endogenous social pressures of the local symbolic economy (I'm
> throwing in some Bourdieu here: they weren't that French) you could
> hope for a greater amount of "diffusion of innovations." Mass
> communication was, in this model, an important environmental factor
> and it would be legitimated more as previous innovations were adopted
> and accepted, i.e. as people began to identify less with their local
> cultural practices and more with those of the society from which the
> advertising and other forms of PR eminated. At least in principle.
>
> My point is that, whatever the division of labor of the dissemination
> of ideas, there was certainly the belief that getting the "opinion
> leaders" (and it doesn't matter in what way they "lead" the opinion,
> i.e. they might be in the kind of position they are able to actually
> tell people what they have to think, which really facilitates the
> diffusion process immensely) to buy in would be essential to
> legitimating the power base. The most cited germinal source for this
> theory is Lazarsfeld and Katz, but pollster Elmo Roper also had his
> own theory of ideas moving in concentric circles outward from the
> "Great thinkers" (about 0.001% of population) to the "Great Disciples"
> (about 0.01%) to the Great Dissemenators (about 0.1%) to the "Lesser
> Dissemenators" (about 10%) to the "Participating Citizens" (about 40%)
> to the "Politically Inert" (everybody else). The idea here is that
> the best way to change public opinion (or at the very least, legally
> acceptable practices) is to change the opinion of the opinion leaders
> (in Yoshi's estimation the top 20%).
Percentages of opinion leaders must differ quite a bit depending on levels of economic development, class stratification, etc. When I put down the ballpark figure of the top 20% in the South, I was thinking of various analyses of participants in the anti-Chavez "strikes." -- Yoshie