Mid-Air Collision Crisis

The crisis is a fascinating subject for inquiry based on social theory because it involved not only the individuals on the two planes (including the deceased Chinese pilot who apparently caused the collision--if we are to believe the American version), but also the two powerful nations of the United States and China. The crisis had a number of factors which are wide open to controversy, from the cause of the collision to the question of international territory to the issue of intelligence gathering. From the point of view of Simmel's, the crisis involves the essential factor of interaction on many levels--including the personal and the international. From the Marxist perspective, the conflicts abound, from political ideology to economics to questions of class.

On April 1, 2001, a United States intelligence gathering Navy EP-3 airplane was involved in a collision with a Chinese fighter jet. That is a fact accepted by all sides. At first, the Chinese tried to make the question of the location of the collision an issue, but since that opening salvo about sovereign aerial territory, the Chinese dropped that issue. It is also accept

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consideration the great movements of humanity which result from conflicts from the beginning of society. Simmel is far more concerned with small interactions between human beings and as a result "his writings are a texture of insights that never quite make a solid system." Simmel "never really pushes through to a sociological theory of the causes and effects of sociability," and his "payoff is aesthetic rather than sociological" (Collins and Makowsky, 1998, p. 162). These two theories are both useful in understanding the crisis in question. From the Marxist viewpoint, what is involved are the great historical and economic forces at play, while Simmel is interested in the human interactions at the microcosmic level. The problem with a Marxist analysis of the crisis is that it would likely be tempted to depict the confrontation as one between a communist system and a capitalist system. The problem is that while market considerations did indeed play a central role in resolving the conflict, those markets were just as crucial to the so-called communist side as they were to the capitalist side. The problem with any Marxist analysis of any matter in the 21st century is that markets are just as crucial to a communist or socialist so
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Approximate Word count = 2624
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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