Recess roundup: embassy squabbles, leaked conversations, Chinese economy
A Beijing to Britain bonus briefing
Hello,
In the summer of 1960, Russian-American psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner visited the Soviet Union. Tensions between America and the Soviets were ratcheting up at an alarming speed, and although Bronfenbrenner was primarily in the country to visit laboratories and universities, he naturally ended up speaking to a wide variety of Russians from all different walks of life, deliberately striking up conversations with whoever he could. What he heard and saw alarmed him deeply. A year later, having returned home to America and as the peak of the Cold War approached, he published a short essay: ‘The Mirror Image in Soviet-American Relations: A Social Psychologist's Report’, which introduced the theory of Mirror-Image Misperception. This refers to when a society or power judges and analyses another society or power through its own values, prejudices and measurements, which significantly impacts the strategic decisions that a country makes. For those looking for a pithier summation of Mirror-Image Misperception, the ever-reliable Mark Twain provided the following: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
In his essay, Bronfenbrenner described his experience in the country as “deeply disturbing”:
“what frightened me was not so much the facts of Soviet reality as the discrepancy between the real and the perceived. At first I was troubled only by the strange irrationality of the Soviet view of the world--especially their gross distortion of American society and American foreign policy as I knew them to be. But then, gradually, there came an even more disquieting awareness--an awareness which I resisted and still resist. Slowly and painfully, it forced itself upon me that the Russian's distorted picture of us was curiously similar to our view of them--a mirror image.”
Mulling over the disconnect between the perception versus reality of how each power saw the other, Bronfenbrenner worried that because both the United States and the Soviets were already looking for the worst in the other, their views became “self-confirming.” Notably, in an observation worth pondering half a century later as China’s economy receives closer scrutiny, Bronfenbrenner observed “Internally, the communist system can justify itself to the Soviet people far more easily in the face of an external threat than in times of peace.”
As Parliament is still in recess, this week’s briefing is shorter, rounding up key stories and strategies from around the world that should matter to British policymakers and FTSE100 leaders.
— Sam Hogg, Editor