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EXAMINATION OF THE EVOLVING RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN IDEOLOGY AND SOVIET FOREIGN POLICY REQUIRES THE ANALYSIS OF SYSTEMATIC CONNECTIONS BETWEEN SOVIET DOMESTIC POLITICS AND CHANGING FOREIGN POLICY CONCEPTS. THE NEW THINKING IN SOVIET FOREIGN POLICY ADVOCATED BY MIKHAIL GORBACHEV AND HIS ADVISORS CANNOT BE GRASPED WITHOUT AN UNDERSTANDING OF SOVIET IDEOLOGICAL TERMS OF REFERENCE. NEW THINKING DOES NOT DENOTE DE-IDEOLOGIZATION. RATHER, GORBACHEV'S FOREIGN POLICY EFFORTS INDICATE A MODIFICATION OF THE FUNCTIONS PERFORMED BY IDEOLOGY. THESE MODIFICATIONS HAVE BEEN PROMPTED BY CHANGES IN THE INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENT AND BY A REASSESSMENT OF DOMESTIC PRIORITIES.

"This paper offers an account of ideology in terms of social meanings. Such meanings - constituting a cultural technē - are public, conflicting, and fragmented; yet because they guide our practices, they frame our agency and identities. A cultural technē is ideological when it perpetuates unjust subordination; ideology critique offers liberating alternatives"--

Analyses of the political and ideological transformation of Hizbullah.

The Lebanese Shi'ite resistance movement, Hizbullah, is going through a remarkable political and ideological transformation. Hizbullah was founded in 1978 by various sectors of Lebanese Shi'ite clergy and cadres, and with Iranian backing as an Islamic movement protesting against social and political conditions. Over the years 1984/85 to 1991, Hizbullah became a full-fledged social movement in the sense of having a broad overall organization, structure, and ideology aiming at social change and social justice, as it claimed. Starting in 1992, it became a mainstream political party working within the narrow confines of its pragmatic political program. The line of argument in this dissertation is that Hizbullah has been adjusting its identity in the three previously mentioned stages by shifting emphasis among its three components: (1) from propagating an exclusivist religious ideology (2) to a more encompassing political ideology, and (3) to a down-to-earth political program.