Week 5 - Rhetorical Coercion Practices vs. Coercion

In our departure from a discussion of the Cold war era our breakout group briefly described emerging patterns between different actors and ways in which ideas or interests were conceived. During that time period Scott suggested that missions were driven by ideas based actions and that individual actors made interest based maneuvers.  We also discussed how interests and ideas were operationally defined across the following respective cases: The United States Dollar dispensing with the formalities of the gold standard, the Atomic Bomb in Hiroshima, the Apollo Soyuz Missions, and the Construction of the Aswan Dam. Kim speculated that the general goal for the US economy during the transition from the gold exchange standard might have been a combination of the two. Within the realms of the Bretton Woods Conference and the establishment of the International Monetary Fund, many leading countries at the conference sought to define currency value, maintain monetary control, and to curb deflation. From an ideological standpoint the US economy might have been catalyzed by ideas based decisions to maintain confidence by preventing the federal reserves from restricting domestic markets. Thus, America had effectively constructed a new ideology based on the challenges that stemmed from a damaged economy: The Great Depression. Certainly there were repercussions from an interest-based perspective, but I would argue that those factors designated certain outcomes that were influenced by interest-based decisions. The outcomes and predetermined social circumstances dictated our decision making process in each of these cases whereby the general goal of major actors were based on an amalgam of power negotiations and rhetorical coercion practices.

We struggled with the concepts. In some cases, interests seemed to outweigh ideas and in others the individual actors were driven by ideas. In each of the cases implicitly demonstrated that certain patterns materialized out of idea-value orientations. When we considered the different configurations of actors and each one's tendency toward conceiving thins as ideas or interest it was decided that these factors contributed to hard boundary negotiations: Time, evidence of Competition (or collaboration), and evidence of a failing regime.  The idea was that there had to be some parameter or a movement that existed before these events were carried out in order to accommodate newer conditions.