The Use and Evolution of Stories as a Mode of Problem Representation: Soviet and French Military Officers Face the Loss of Empire

Experimental work on modes of problem representation (Sylvan, Diascro, & Haddad, 1996) has found that the story model of Pennington and Hastie (1986, 1988) is a helpful construct in understanding how people reach decisions when dealing with questions of foreign policy. Here, a modified version of the story model is applied to statements by military officers in the Soviet Union and in France, representing the situations they face before and after the loss of Eastern Europe and Indochina, respectively (Charlick-Paley, 1997). Both baseline stories and those after the losses of empire are examined to test the hypothesis that when a military experiences the loss of its state's empire, officers will formulate a new story that justifies the change in its status, and that this new story will motivate new patterns of civil-military relations in the post-imperial era. The hypothesis finds general support, and stories are found to be a useful vehicle in understanding differences between groups of military officers. An analysis of how officers' stories change over time yields intriguing results as to how mutable stories are and which elements of a story are most likely to change first. In particular, expansion of the level of a goal is found to be a representational response to the political stimulus of loss of empire.