The Limits of Global Compassion
Ever since the United States sent 28,000 there has been talk about the "CNN factor" soldiers to Somalia in 1992 to avert mass in foreign policy—that is, the influence of starvation in that unhappy African country, TV images of the suffering of distant innocents on the public and thus on policymakers. The CNN factor is real, but not all it’s cracked up to be, argues Orwin, a political scientist at the University of Toronto.
Without TV, he says, the starvation in Somalia and the tribal slaughter in Rwanda would not have made much impression on the publics in the Western democracies; nor would the "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia have elevated Bosnia to the summit of foreign policy concerns. No national interests are at stake, Orwin observes. "The widespread response to them has... been ‘humanitarian,’ and has been stimulated largely by televised images."
But such compassion for people suffering in remote corners of the "global village" is likely to be extremely tenuous. It is generally based only on feelings of common humanity, without more specific shared identities (such as being fellow Americans or fellow anticommunists) to reinforce them. "To find, as the Good Samaritan did, a single victim by the roadside is one thing," Orwin notes. "To confront a succession of them on television, widely scattered around the globe, is something else. Our humanitarian impulses may fire, but they will also tend to sputter."
Because humanitarian intervention is not based on pressing national interests, he points out, its viability "depends very much on the perception of it at home. Here too the role of television is both crucial and ambiguous." Underscoring "the ruthlessness of an oppressor" on TV may well provoke more indignation with him and evoke more compassion for his victims, but "it also highlights the risks inherent in continued intervention."
"It is hardly surprising," Orwin says, "that the responses of Western governments to the Balkan war have deferred" to the ambivalence about intervention that viewers feel. When a high official of one European country was asked, off the record, why his government neither intervened in force in Bosnia nor refrained from intervening, but instead intervened ineffectually, he explained "that such was the policy dictated by the CNN factor." Western governments, Orwin observes, wanted "their interventions to be [tele]visible, while avoiding [tele]visible losses."
It is possible that television’s influence will diminish in the future. Ironically, Orwin points out, the medium’s constant stream of disturbing images from around the world may eventually have the effect of inuring viewers to distant suffering.
__"Distant Compassion" by Clifford Orwin, in The National Interest (Spring 1996), 1112 16th St. N.W., Ste. 540, Washington, D.C. 20036.__
This article originally appeared in print