“Just like Dunkirk”: How Governments Engineer a Sense of Victory amidst Defeat

• In Event: Victory and Defeat in War

Abstract

It is generally assumed that citizens have a rather clear-eyed understanding of how their country has fared in a conflict. A country has won, lost, or is in a stalemate. However, I argue that how citizens “feel” about a conflict’s outcome can be manipulated. Their sense of loss can be mitigated, and in some cases even reversed, through propaganda. Governments utilize what social psychologists call “social creativity” strategies in constructing the narrative around a defeat. They “spin” it into a victory, so to speak. I elaborate on ten of such strategies: reversing the value associated with the retreat; redirecting attention to another dimension of comparison with the adversary; to another out-group for more positive “downward” comparison; “blasting” at the adversary; portraying a retreat as compliance with some desirable norms; re-categorizing at a superordinate level the national in-group vis-à-vis the adversary; “basking in reflected glory” through another out-group; engaging in undue optimism in future conflicts with the adversary; redirecting attention to past successes against the adversary; and contextualizing a retreat over a longer time-horizon. I demonstrate how these strategies were at work even in a case where the outcome was clear-cut: India’s defeat in its border war with China in 1962.

Author

• Seanon Wong, Chinese University of Hong Kong