25 Apr The Global Conversation about the Virginia Tech Shooting
Anne Applebaum has some interesting observations over at Slate about the global repercussions of the Virginia Tech shooting. While some of the foreign press coverage has (predictably) focused on the prevalence of guns and violence in American culture, some of the reaction overseas appears to have simultaneously transcended national differences and underscored the local nature of the loss:
This week Israel is mourning the death of Liviu Librescu, an Israeli engineering professor who threw himself in front of the killer to save his students. The Polish media focused on the death of Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, the French-Canadian married to a Polish professor of horticulture—as did the media in Quebec. Among the 32 people killed were natives of Peru, India, Egypt, Vietnam, and Indonesia. And, of course, the murderer himself was a citizen of South Korea.
The events of Sept. 11 produced a similarly international list of victims, but that was no surprise: One would expect that the World Trade Center, given what it was and where it was, would be full of people from all corners of the globe. One would not expect the same of a random lecture hall in Blacksburg, Va. Yet now it turns out that Blacksburg is not merely a member of some metaphoric “global village” like everywhere else, but that Blacksburg is rather a literal global village, with concrete links of kinship and citizenship all over the world. Whatever American community you touch nowadays, for good or for ill, there are international repercussions.
This new level of internationalism is something to consider in our national debates about immigration, education, or even foreign policy—not as an argument for or against anything, but simply as an existing fact that not all of us have properly internalized. It’s also something to consider when we ponder America’s oddly lopsided relationship with the rest of the world. As you read this article, America’s gun-control laws are being debated around the world, America’s mental-health system is being analyzed in a dozen languages. America’s local news is now the world’s local news. But somehow, I don’t think that our knowledge of the rest of the world is growing at a similarly rapid pace.
Among other things, Applebaum hits on something that I have been thinking about lately: How citizenship both underscores our separateness and reinforces our connectedness. I’ll have a bit more to say about this in the weeks to come. I’d be interested to hear how Opinio Juris readers outside the U.S. are reacting to the Virginia Tech tragedy.
Thanks for putting this in a global context, which is important for many reasons. Just one note, if I can be an historical curmudgeon, which is sometimes my role. This internationalism — “America’s local news is now the world’s local news” — is not new at all. The Little Rock crisis in 1957-58 was covered on a daily basis in many papers around the world, often on front pages. The same with the events in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963, when peaceful civil rights demonstrators were brutalized by Bull Connor’s police force. Lesser know events also became world media events, but were later forgotten. More recently, the 1992 conflagration in South Central LA after the Rodney King verdict was global news, as was the 2000 election controversy.
Looking at this issue in a broader historical trajectory can allow us to think about not only the ways domestic crises inform a global framing of “America,” but also how global perceptions of the U.S. affect American interests. There’s historical work on this in the context of the civil rights era.
Mary–
Thanks for those important historical addenda. I was living in South Asia when the LA riots took place, and concur with your assessment of that coverage. One difference between then and now, I think, is the access to the internet and the ubiquity of satellite television, which has significantly broadened the reach of the coverage.