Radicalism

Sergiu Mişcoiu

Oana‐Raluca Crăciun

Nicoleta Colopelnic

Radicalism, Populism, Interventionism. Three Approaches Based on Discourse

Theory

Cluj‐Napoca

The Publishing House of the Foundation for European Studies

EFES

2008

On the first cover: Goya, El sueño de la razon produce monstruos (1799) Cover designer: Radu Gaciu

Motto: “The fact that every object is constituted as an object of discourse has nothing to do with whether there is a world external to thought, or with the realism/idealism opposition. An earthquake or the falling of a brick is an event that certainly exists, in the sense that it occurs here and now, independently of my will. But whether their specificity as objects is constructed in terms of ʹnatural phenomenaʹ or ʹexpressions of the wrath of Godʹ, depends upon the structuring of a discursive field. What is denied is not that such objects exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could constitute themselves as objects outside any discursive condition of emergence.” Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso, 1985, p. 108

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CONTENTS

About the Authors.....................................................................................ix Introduction............................................................................................... 11 Discourse Theory and Political Contestation. An Inquiry Based on an International Research Project ......................................................... 14 L’Europe rebelle – an international research project ....................... 15 Discourse Theory and Politics ............................................................. 17 Discourse Theory and L’Europe rebelle ............................................ 20 Conclusions ............................................................................................ 29

The New Populism. An analysis of the Political Discourse of Front National and Lijst Pim Fortuyn............................................................. 31 Conceptualizing discourse................................................................... 33 Hegemony and antagonism................................................................. 36 Approaching “Critical Discourse Analysis” ..................................... 43 The emergence of FN and LPF as Radical Populist parties ............ 46

Bearing a fascist identity...................................................................... 47 Assuming a racist identity.................................................................... 52 Assuming the populist identity from the ideological point of view..... 63 Radical populist identity ...................................................................... 66

Conclusions ............................................................................................ 68 The Discursive Road form 9/11 to Operation Iraqi Freedom .......... 70 The Discursive Approach: Preliminary Remarks............................. 71 9/11 and “the War on Terror”.............................................................. 76 Operation Iraqi Freedom...................................................................... 97 Conclusions .......................................................................................... 119

Bibliography............................................................................................ 121

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Table of Figures Figure 1: Ernesto Laclau, Creation of discursive hegemony .............. 39

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About the Authors

Sergiu Mişcoiu is a Lecturer of Political Science at the Faculty of European Studies, ‘Babes‐Bolyai’ University in Cluj‐Napoca, Romania. In 2006, he obtained his PhD degree in Political Science at the University of Paris‐Est Marne‐la‐Vallée (France) and his PhD degree in History at the ‘Babes‐Bolyai’ University. His main research interests are the constructivist and the alternative theories applied to the nation building processes, to the radical political participation and to the political dynamics of the European public spaces. He published two books (Le Front National et ses répercussions sur l’échiquier politique français 1972‐2002, in 2005 and Nation Formation. A Social Constructivist Approach, in Romanian, in 2006), co‐edited two international volumes (Issues of Democratic Consolidation in Romania, in 2004 and Perceptions and Attitudes of the ‘Babes‐Bolyai’ University Students in the European Union, in Romanian, in 2007), and he is the author of thirty articles published in Romania, United Kingdom, France and Moldova. Sergiu Miscoiu is also the Acting Director of the Centre for Political Studies and International Relations, a reviewer for Freedom House’s Annual Report Nations in Transit, the Editor‐in‐Chief of the Academic Journal Studia Europaea and a chronicler for Radio France Culture.

Oana‐Raluca Crãciun studied International Relations European

Studies at ‘Babes‐Bolyai’ University in Cluj‐Napoca, Romania. In 2008, she obtained her BA degree with the thesis Making Sense of Immigrants and Muslim Immigrants in France and in the Netherlands. Presently, she is enrolled at Leiden University, the Netherlands, where she follows a master’s programme in Public Administration European Governance. She is particularly interested in the role of discourse in making politics matter and she intends to enlarge her research area to ways of improving the discourse on promoting the European identity.

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Nicoleta Colopelnic studied International Relations European Studies at ´Babes‐Bolyai´ University in Cluj‐Napoca, Romania. In 2008 she obtained her BA degree with the thesis From 9/11 to the Intervention in Iraq: an Analysis based on Discourse Theory. Presently she is enrolled at ´Babes‐Bolyai´ University in Cluj‐Napoca, where she follows a master’s program in Multicultural Studies. Her main interests are the alternative approaches to international relations, the discursive identification of the Other and Orientalism.

Introduction

Sergiu Mişcoiu

Since the beginning of the 1970s, the emergence of the so‐called ‘alternative approaches’ has generated a series of continuous debates about the scientific pertinence of the ‘neophyte’ disciplines that were more or less willingly included in the area of the non‐traditional sciences. Discourse theory does not make an exception and, moreover, seems to have been a permanent subject of dispute, mainly for three reasons.

First, Discourse Theory was built on the bases of Postmodernism, even if its most recent developments appear less and less relativist. It shared with Postmodernism the same mistrust in meta‐narratives and the same vision on the flexibility of truth.1 Thus, Discourse Theory was always subjected to contestation coming from the scientists who rejected the postmodernist assumptions and methods.2

Then, Discourse Theory, and, especially its two first generations, put the linguistic approaches as their methodological fundaments. The linguistic approach was by that time the only option, as the new discipline was trying to create a critical difference and to challenge in this way the structuralist establishment of that time.3 But along with audacity comes vulnerability: by sticking to the linguistic area, Discourse Theory was placed at most at the margin of social sciences, as a mere supplier of ideas concerning the modes of production of words, phrases, texts and speeches, and far from the scientific core that it aspired to.

1 See Jean‐François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 2 Starting with Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism. A Marxist Critique, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, pp 8‐13; 35‐40. 3 A pioneering work that backs this argument is the one of William Labov. See William Labov, “The Logic of Non‐Standard English” (1969) in The Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader, New York: Routledge, 2000, pp. 456‐466.

Introduction 12

And finally, there has been a sizable amount of uncertainty concerning the autonomy of this discipline, especially as, since the 1990s, Discourse Theory has made rather successful efforts to broaden its scope to the ensemble of the social, cultural and political spheres. Even if Discourse Theory has become a school of thought in the traditional sense of this concept, its opponents claimed that there was no common base for some extremely atomised interdisciplinary and inter‐paradigmatic approaches, such as those of Discourse Theory.

Far from being a manifesto in favour of Discourse Theory or a collection of empirical attempts to cement the vacillating bases of a less solid discipline, this book is a critical assessment of Discourse Theory’s added value in explaining some crucial processes that influence nowadays national and international relations. We are neither in the case of an adulatory collection of articles that bring an homage to the everlasting wisdom of a certain discipline, nor in the presence of a volume that wishes to discredit a theory just because some of its assertions are simply incompatible with the prior findings of the authors. Rather, our intention is to test and, if necessary, to remodel various propositions of Discourse Theory as a result of their confrontation to three different types of political situations. As a consequence, the book is built upon three contributions that concentrate on the application of discourse theory in three different cases. An extensive bibliography that gathers the sources used for the ensemble of these contributions may be found at the end of this volume.

Sergiu Mişcoiu’s article discusses the opportunity of applying Discourse Theory to the study of the radical anti‐system movements. For that, he employs as case‐studies the subjects of an international research project that he co‐managed, L’Europe rebelle. Step‐by‐step, he analyses the capacity of Discourse Theory’s insights to bring a new perspective on the basic militants’ motivations to join the ‘rebellious’ movements and to act against the post‐1989 Romanian political system.

The contribution of Oana Raluca Crăciun aims at rendering understandable the contribution of Discourse Theory to the study of Radical Populism. As case‐studies, she employs the emergence of two far‐right European political parties, the National Front in France and the List Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands. By putting forward both the advantages and the disadvantages of using Discourse Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis in these two case‐studies, Oana Raluca Crăciun shows to what

Radicalism, Populism, Interventionism. Three Approaches...

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extent it is necessary to connect insights from various disciplines in order to analyse controversial phenomena.

Nicoleta Colopelnic’s article is based on the discursive construction through time of the idea of ’Orient’ in the view of the ‘Westerners’ and studies the way in which this construction was used in order to back USA’s decision to intervene in Iraq, in 2003. For that, she corroborates the assumptions of Discourse Theory with those of Social Psychology and those of Cultural Theory, and applies this interdisciplinary ensemble on some critically important ideological constructions during the co‐called ‘War on Terror’, like George W. Bush’s representation of the ‘Axe of Evil’.

Perhaps the main contribution of this book is that it shows that Discourse Theory could provide not only some theoretical advancement but also some determinant tools for the empirical research. At the same time, this book also intends to show the limits of those discursive approaches that consider the social sphere as being a simple extension of the linguistic interrelationships and do not take into account, at least as a side‐device, the scientific methods of some other disciplines.

Discourse Theory and Political Contestation. An Inquiry Based on an International Research

Project

Sergiu Mişcoiu

Ignored for a long period of time, the phenomenon of contestation has made its return among the main research interests on the occasion of the celebration of the May 1968 upsurge. But between 1968 and 2008, contestation has changed its nature and its appearance. The place of the mass movements who openly contested power has been taken by the quasi‐sectarian units or the informal pressure groups whose actions are generally a strange combination between violent sabotages and meticulous constructions of parallel worlds.

This contribution attempts to evaluate the explicative added value of discourse theory to the study of the Romanian rebellious movements.1 In the first part, I will briefly expose the framework of the research project L’Europe rebelle (a joint project of the Universities Paris‐Est Marne‐la‐Vallée, France, and Babes‐Bolyai, Cluj, Romania).2 I will concentrate on the Romanian component of this project and try to highlight the specific aspects of the individuals and of the movements who belong more or less to the world of the anti‐system contestation. Then, I will investigate the framework of discourse theory in order to filter the elements that will be applied in the case studies of the Romanian rebels. In the third section, I will evaluate the contribution of the above‐selected theoretical elements to the

1 In order to avoid some possible misunderstandings, I will use different quotation marks for the metaphors that I will use and for the words used by the subjects of my interviews. Thus, I will respectively use italics for my metaphors and ‘single quotation marks’ for those used by the interviewed. 2 The title chosen for the project was meant to be both descriptive and teasing. In this article, I will use the words rebel and rebellious in a rather metaphoric sense and in connection with the title of this project and not necessarily to describe an imminent upsurge.


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understanding of the phenomenon of contestation in nowadays Romania. In this sense, I will try to show how the main assumptions of discourse theory could be applied in the analysis of the Romanian contestation phenomenon and I will provide significant examples: far left and far right, Anarchists, revolutionaries, ultra‐orthodox militants etc. Finally, I will draw the main conclusions concerning the merits and the limits of discourse theory in approaching the Romanian contestation movements.

L’Europe rebelle – an international research project The research project L’Europe rebelle is the result of a collective

reflection of an international group of experts gathered within the Laboratory « Espaces Ethiques et Politiques » of the University Paris‐Est Marne‐la‐Vallée.3 The main objective of this project is to identify the reasons behind rebellious activism in three European countries having different cultural traditions – France, Poland and Romania.

During the first stage of the project, the team established the criteria for selecting the rebellious population that will be studied. At the beginning, the team has chosen about twenty rebellious political movements which seemed to be relevant for this approach. Finally, the area of the only political movements was enlarged to the ethnic, social and religious groups, provided that at least one of the activities of those groups was the contestation of the actual political system or at least of one of its elements. As for the methods, and, implicitly, as for the expected results, the team opted for the semi‐directed interviews and for the analytical monographic studies.

The team has also decided that the interest of this project was to provide a multidisciplinary understanding of the reasons behind the political involvement of the anti‐system activists. The subjects’ selection was made by following three criteria. First, the subjects have to be contemporary rebels, meaning individuals whose actions aimed to question, to radically change or to suppress the present political realities. Thus, the former rebels, and especially the antifascist resistants and the 3 The General Manager of the project L’Europe rebelle (The Rebellious Europe) is Professor Chantal Delsol, whereas the Research Manager for Romania is Dcotor Sergiu Miscoiu.

Discourse Theory and Political Contestation. An Inquiry… 16

anticommunist dissidents, are excluded from this project. Even if the former dissidents could have constituted an important resource for the case‐studies on Romania and Poland, the team considered that the coherence of the project resided especially in the transversal analysis of the phenomenon of rebellion against nowadays democratic systems. In this way, we have excluded all the individuals who contested a totalitarian system or a certain political system prior to the democratic transition in Central and Eastern Europe.

The second criterion concerned the quality of the subjects as activists within their groups, associations, parties or networks. As we considered that researchers have already extensively studied the leaders of the radical or extremist political movements, we decided that one of the most original aspects of this project would be its focus on the basic activists. Thus, our studies concentrated on the paths of the simple militants who constitute the fundamental structures of the rebellious movements and not on the carriers of their leaders.

The last criterion was diversity. As a quantitative research based upon a precise sampling procedure was not the purpose of this project, the only means that could have ensured the extension of the range of cases was the variety of the subjects’ typologies. According to this third criterion, the chosen militants and, consequently, the movements held for this research, should be nationally unique. So, we have approached a single neo‐fascist Polish militant, a single Romanian ultra‐orthodox activist, a single French Anarchist, and so on.

From the methodological point of view, this research supposes the following rationale: the inquirer makes a half‐guided interview with the chosen militant and, based on the interview, he or she writes the monographic study. The interviews cover the ensemble of details that could clarify the reasons and the modalities of the subjects’ involvement in the activity of rebellion: aspects related to the familial life, to the professional evolution, to the friend circles, to the various reports with the political and social spheres, to the paths of the value systems construction. The essential part of the monographic study has to concentrate on the analysis of the subject’s militant activity and on the perspectives of his or her political involvement. Finally, if necessary, the inquirer could add a chapter with some precisions concerning the nature, the history, the ideology and the activity of the respective movement.


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L’Europe rebelle started in May 2007 and ends in December 2009. By the end of this project, a collective volume about the phenomenon of rebellion in Europe will be published.

Discourse Theory and Politics

The shakings that took place in the seventies within the scientific community allowed the emergence of the postmodern and of the poststructuralist approaches. Discourse theory belongs to the family of these alternative approaches, meaning that it contributed, in successive stages, to the dismantlement of the great convictions held by the pre‐existing scientific framework.

If the starting point of discourse theory was the work of Michel Foucault4 and Jacques Derrida5, literature discusses about the existence of three generations of this school of thought. The first two generations were rather tributary to the genuine visions and concentrated on the linguistic and semantic aspects of discourse, in a narrow sense.6

On a contrary, prompted by the weakening of the classical ideologies after the end of the Cold War, the approach of the third generation has been intimately related with the apprehension of politics. Two of the most salient representatives of this generation, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe7, have concentrated on the study of the discursive representation of the power relations, mainly on the constitution, confrontation, destruction and restructuring of the dominant networks of

4 For a synthesis of Foucault’s view on discourse, see Michel Foucault, “L’Ordre du Discours” in Michel Foucault, Philosophie. Anthologie, (Anthologie établie et présentée par Arnold I. Davidson et Frédéric Gros), Paris: Gallimard, 1999, pp. 61‐79. 5 Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence, Paris: Seuil, 1967, especially the chapter « L’écriture, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines », pp. 409‐428. 6 Norman Fairclough, the founder of Critical Discourse Analysis, is one of the most salient representatives of the second generation. His main concern was related to the approach of the linguistic techniques used by speakers in their efforts to impose a certain conclusion if the contradictory debates. See Norman Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis, London, Longman: 1995. 7 See, especially, Ernesto Laclau, Grammaire de l’émancipation, Paris: La Découverte, 2000 and Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism, New York: Routledge, 1996.


power through the dynamics of the discursive placements, displacements and replacements.

Grosso modo, discourse theory is based on an anti‐essentialist ontology and anti‐foundationalist epistemology.8 In the first place, the adepts of discourse theory consider that there is no pre‐existing and self‐determining essence of the world. Religion, capitalism, class struggle, rationality or, more recently, the global warming theory are as many false essences that pretend to offer a final explanation of mankind destiny. Following Foucault and Lyotard, the discourse theorists see behind the efforts deployed to achieve a unique and final representation of the world the desire to establish a political hegemony. The purpose of discourse theory is to search for the deepest consequences of the absence of a Centre capable to structure and to manage the world.

Secondly, the epistemology of discourse theory is rather relativist. Its starting point seems to be Richard Rorty’s idea according to which the existence of reality does not guarantee the existence of truth.9 Truth seems to be conditioned by a truth regime, which, as Foucault put it, is co‐extensive with power itself. The claim of an absolute truth has to be abandoned once and for all. Discourse theorists show that truth is elastic and ephemeral and depends of the truth regime that holds the rules for assessing the truth claim of a certain sentence. That is why we cannot have the necessary means to declare that a statement is true per se, but we can only have the possibility to measure its alleged truth consistency in relation to a certain context and to our own perception of the outer world.

For discourse theorists, the application of these two premises necessarily results into a polymorphous system of relations, within which the identities of the actors are always established via interaction. Thus, identity construction through the discursively analyzable social interactions becomes the essential object of discourse theorists. The central idea of discourse theory is that identity is constituted by subject’s self‐determination in relation to its non‐identities, or, in other words, to the identities of the others. This operation is quasi‐discursive, meaning that we produce (and we consciously or unconsciously reproduce) descriptions and

8 See David Howarth, Jacob Torfing (ed.), Discourse Theory in European Politics. Identity, Policy and Governance, Palgrave: Macmillan, 2005, p. 13. 9 See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge: University Press, 1989.

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analyses which allow us to identify ourselves in relation to the outer world. This way, discourse is both the creator and the alterator of identity, as, trough the mechanisms of representation, it invisibly and temporarily establishes the social positions and places occupied by individuals and groups. The domain of politics is the first to be concerned by this discursive constraint, as its way of functioning is based on the permanent negotiation of the principles of government.

Discourse theorists have been trying to apply their hypotheses in various fields of political science and politics. However, it seems that they succeeded only in a limited area of subfields, including the study of extremist and radical politics. The reasons of this explicative predilection of discourse theory towards radical politics are numerous.

In the first place, the resurgence of the European far‐left and far‐right parties coincided with the emergence of the third generation of discourse – at the beginning of the 1990s. The new waves of political extremism – revolutionary Trotskyism, French, Italian and Dutch far‐right parties, anti‐globalization movements, etc – were taken by the researchers of this third generation as case studies for their ongoing theoretical works. Then, discourse theory looks for explanations that are exterior to the area of the mechanic determinations of the social world, whereas the most of the analyses based on social determinism have failed to offer a satisfactory explanation for the emergence, the evolution and the decay of radical and extremist movements. And, finally, discourse theory was able to include and to make understandable the multidimensional aspects of extremism and radicalism, by combining linguistic and semantic approaches, insights from social psychology and from behaviourist sociology and methods inspired from political anthropology.10

10 An example of the discursive approach of radical politics is Ernesto Laclau’s, On Populist Reason, London: Verso, 1997.

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Discourse Theory and L’Europe rebelle To summarize, it is convenient to use the idea of Jacob Torfing11,

according to whom the approach of discourse theory may be synthesized in five key‐points. In the next pages, I will try to investigate the way in which these five key‐points have been used both as research hypotheses and as analytical tools within the framework of the project L’Europe rebelle. For each of these points, I will offer relevant examples extracted from the empirical studies conducted under our research project, in order to assess the degree of pertinence of the discursive approach in evaluating the phenomenon of contestation in Romania.

1. The first point is that social practices take place in an environment

dominated by specific discourses that have themselves their own historical background. What it is said today bears the burden of what was said yesterday and determines what will be said tomorrow. The evolution from one dominant discourse to another takes place through the liberation of signifiers; as they become free, these signifiers are to be chained in a series of new logical continuums. In this context, some of the free signifiers become nodal points, gathering the various representations of reality in a coherent ensemble, but bearing the legacy of their prior meaning and configurations.

In the case of our research project, the identification of the discursive environment in which the subject formation took place was one of the essential concerns of the team. Moreover, we were interested in finding the free signifiers that have allowed the constitution or the reconstitution of the nodal points capable to support the emergence of a new discursive framework for social action.

Here, the case of L.F. is probably an appropriate example. Briefly, L.F. is a researcher from Timisoara who participated to the upsurges that resulted into the violent regime change of December 1989, but who was banished from the leadership of the new regime in the first months of 1990. He is the co‐founder of an NGO that fights ‘against the enslavement of

11 Jacob Torfing, “Discourse Theory: Achievements, Arguments, and Challenges” in David Howarth, Jacob Torfing (ed.), Discourse Theory in European Politics. Identity, Policy and Governance, Palgrave: Macmillan, 2005, pp. 14‐17.

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Romania and of the whole world by the forces of Evil, the extraterrestrials and their allies, the Franc‐Masons and the Jews’.12 He spends his energy in co‐financing TV shows, in organizing reunions and in printing books, leaflets and some sporadic journals.

In his case, studying the initial discursive environment in which he was educated contributed to the understanding of the fact that his attitude towards the social world has been the consequence of his family legacy (both his father and his grand‐father were fascists). When, after 1989, the chaos of transition was producing a whole vacuum of values and models, L.F. progressively replaced various elements of this legacy in the core of his convictions. Some free signifiers – such as ‘divine justice’, ‘national cause’ or ‘moral revolution’ – proliferated in a society that seemed to have turned once and forever the page of communism without having been able to build its own system of values. L.F. captured step‐by‐step these empty signifiers, correlated them with significant excerpts of the fascist familial legacy and denounced a hypocritically religious society, meaning a society where the political system was totally corrupted and ‘infiltrated by the twilight forces’. The result was the gradual emergence of a half‐paranoid character, dominated by the will to establish an ideal order through a crusade that he would lead as one of the archangels.

The central idea of this first argument of discourse theory – the existence of a discursive burden in the present but also of an equally heavy burden of the past – proved to be useful in determining the reasons of L.F.’s actions only if one can assess to what extent the freeing of certain signifiers was the cause of this character’s antisocial reaction and not the actual events (such as the divorce, the failure of his inventor brevets, or the banishment from public life). The conjunction of these two types of explanation (discursive and mechanic) seems to be more appropriate for approaching the case of L.F.

2. The second point of discourse theory holds that discourse is

constituted via hegemonic struggles for imposing a political leadership and for articulating the meaning and the identities. Hegemonic combats are far from taking place in neutral, conscious and isolated battlefields. Rather they are the results of an everlasting series of sequential and chaotic efforts. 12 I conducted the interview with L.F. in August 2007, in Timisoara.


The success of these efforts depends of the individuals’ propensity to opt for those identity yardsticks that are sufficiently strong to maintain and reinforce some articulations of meaning and, above all, the temporarily dominant articulation. Discourse theory posits that the articulations that succeed in offering a believable reading key for the interpretation of major events become hegemonic. For creating and maintaining such articulations, we use the ideological totalisation, a process through which discourse is structured in several nodal points.

Within the frame of L’Europe rebelle research project, this idea was applied in analysing rebellious activism as an endless search for an articulation capable to fix the social world in a unique and final discourse. The ideological totalisation showed itself through the progressive constitution of the world of the rebel, a world that is generally ‘good’, ‘just’ and ‘fair’ and contrasted in this way with the real world.

To illustrate this idea, it is appropriate to study the case of M.D., a painter from Bucharest and a cofounder of an informal NGO that activates for ‘the development of the Lesbian identity’. She acts against ‘the marginalisation and the submission of women’ and preaches a world where ‘men become dispensable’.13 M.D. claims to have a ‘full Lesbian identity’ and participates to the actions of ‘combat against disinformation by the establishment’. Nevertheless, she is against Feminism and against the GLBT14 movements that she considers ‘soft and responsible for an altered image of the human essence’. She left her family and broke with all her former friends for living with her ‘girlfriends’ in a marginal neighbourhood in Bucharest.

In the case of M.D., the hegemonic struggles took place between Ultra‐Orthodoxy, Anarchism and radical Lesbianism. Radical Orthodoxy lost when M.D. became aware that there was a ‘tremendous gap between theory and practice’ within this religion. Between Anarchism and radical Lesbianism, she chose the latter, as its integrative discourse ‘suited [her] very well’. Lesbian radicalism presented at least two majors advantages. The first was that it concentrated on a component that made the difference between M.D. and the others, namely sexual orientation. And the second was that it gathered in a compact ideological ensemble nodal points that

13 Interview taken in February 2008, in Cluj. 14 Gay‐Lesbian‐Bi‐Trans.


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were essential for the young rebel: the denunciation of women’s marginalisation, the social identification based on the sexual orientation and the struggle for ‘gendered justice’.

In brief, discourse theory explains that M.D. translated the free signifiers partly recomposed in a discursive articulation in her own language and chose, according to her own capacities, the version which seemed the most adequate. She got in this way to the idea of the ‘Lesbian identity’, that she constructed herself by using the nodal points which were victorious in the struggle with the other signifiers. However, one may ask himself if there has really been a combat between discourses having hegemonic claims or if rather M.D. has not invented herself the idea of a hesitation between several currents, as such an idea would have legitimised her final choice. Moreover, it is probable that her status of a sexual minority member in a homophobic society left her little room for selecting the main criteria for joining a radical movement. But this objection would be valid only if we would assume that her sexual orientation itself has not been the result of the adoption of a certain identity‐based discourse, but the determinant of that very discourse.

3. Thirdly, discourse theory explains that hegemonic articulations of

meanings and identities are based on the emergence of social antagonisms. All the doctrines based on the ideological totalisation suppose the idea of the existence of the Other, as a yardstick for structuring the identity and the principles of the inner group. Thus, alteration (or, in other words, the invention of the Other) supposes by itself the identification of a non‐Us which, in the context of social and political competition, becomes an adversary whose nature and dimensions are representable through discourse. In order to give a sense to our own identity, the Other is excluded and, within social antagonism, confronted. His identity structures our identity but at the same time opens the way for the dismantlement of Our‐selves, as it offers an alternative to our identity.

The determination of what is contained and what is not contained in our identity becomes in this way essential for our perspective of the world and for our manner to perceive the political. This determination becomes understandable through the imaginary construction of political


frontiers, which are merely or not at all trans‐passable in the case of the extremist and radical collective identities.

For L’Europe rebelle, the reasons of the action of contestation are based on the belonging to the groups that associate the ‘non‐rebels’ with the ‘evil order’ and to its consequences. The ‘rebels’ create untranscendable frontiers between their own group and the establishment; these frontiers define the two types of identity by placing them in a context of antagonism that is perceived to be natural.

Let us see a concrete example that illustrates this third proposition of discourse theory. G.A. is a former apparatchik of the fourth echelon of the Communist Party in the Mehedinti county.15 He fought against the ‘coup d’Etat’ in 1989 and, paying the bill of his attitude, held his convictions all over the transitional period. First, he joined the Socialist Party of the Workers, presided by an ex‐minister of Ceausescu. In 1995, he left this party in order to join the Romanian Socialist Party, a small and radical clique dominated by former Communist cadres. In spite of his age (75 in 2008), G.A. does not hesitate to ‘continue the combat’ by publishing articles in Neo‐Communist newspapers, by distributing leaflets, by participating to the annual commemorations of Nicolae Ceausescu’s birthday and by organising reunions with the ‘comrades’ of his neighbourhood. Within this latter activity, he came with the idea to gather a ‘small brigade of comrades’ that issued in 2007 a Proclamation of the Communist State, a ‘samizdat’ manifesto, published in such a way that ‘the CIA wouldn’t notice’.

In the case of G.A., social antagonism was fed by the refreshment of a Neo‐Stalinist ideological discourse that was strong enough to overwhelm all the other possibilities to read the prior and the post‐1989 events. The identification of the Other has already been perpetrated during the Communist regime, when the revenge against the ‘bourgeois’ and then the permanent agitation of the danger of ‘restoration’ have provided the main object for the ideological struggle. After 1989, the balance of power between Us and Them has been reversed. The discursive inscription of the ‘New Regime’ as a follower of the Other made possible the reconstitution of the political frontiers, this time with more passion and virulence. The associations operated by the National‐Communist press of the time

15 Interview taken in September 2007, in Drobeta‐Turnu‐Severin.


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(Capitalism‐transition‐Liberalism‐poverty‐betrayal‐corruption) redrew the imaginary links with the past and prompted the reactivation of G.A. as a militant. In his case, as the militant action was less and less effective, political frontiers merged with the material boundaries: the discursive linkage between the ideal Communist order and the very limit of the small neighbourhood he was living in engendered a materialisation of ‘people’s power’ projection, and the latter led to the Proclamation of the Communist State.

However, in addition to the explanations offered by discourse theory, it is obvious that the determinants of G.A.’s socialisation are also responsible for the radicalisation of his discourse and for his decision to undertake some rather spectacular actions. Among these determinants, the conservation of the network of former local Communist activists played a crucial role in the preservation of the old ideological line. But such conservation would have had few chances to resist in the absence of a discursive totalisation operated by important segments of the radical press, especially in the early 1990s, a period when a sizeable number of former Communists have regrouped around Ion Iliescu and bent to the ‘social market economy’, namely to business. It was the high degree of radicalism of the discourse based on the antagonism between the passed idealised order and the present denounced one that nourished G.A.’s opinions and actions.

4. The fourth assertion of discourse theory regards the

dismantlement of the discursive orders. A discursive system dislocates when it unsuccessfully tries to bring credible explanations to the new developments that happen in the actual world. Dislocation takes place under the ‘destructive’ action of the other discursive systems which aspire to hegemony by attempting to capture the signifiers freed by the formerly dominant system while agonising. The apprehension of a set of publicly vocal free signifiers and their coherent ideological totalisation give to a certain discursive system decisive chances to win over the others.

In our case, competition among many virtually hegemonic discursive systems is an essential trait of transition. In the light of this idea, rebellion is the result of the violent integration of a set of principles and values abandoned after the fall of the Communist discursive macro‐system.


Thus, our team was interested in studying the ways in which the fall of the dominant discursive systems was related to the integration of our subjects in the rebellious movements.

M.I. offers a good illustration of this idea. Born in Iasi, in a family of intellectuals, he was first a spoiled child and then a real ‘burden’ for his family: during high school, he started to drink and to take drugs and, as a student, he failed his exams and had to repeat the first year.16 Since 2005, M.I. has joined an Anarchist movement and participated to the activities of two NGOs ‘animated by some sages whose names have to remain unknown’ and financed ‘from abroad’. In addition to the activity of ‘ideological dissemination’ of Bakunin’s works, the Anarchist movement of Iasi made a salient public appearance when it attempted to boycott the NATO Summit, organised in Bucharest, in April 2008. M.I. took part to this event in order to fight against ‘State persecutions and police terror’.

M.I. decided to join the Anarchist movement when he realised that the entire political system was based on ‘lies meant to conceal its real totalitarian nature’. Failing to explain to M.I. why the passage from Communism to democracy required a transitional period, the democratic discursive system lost in his view its hegemony and was replaced by a virulent anti‐paternalist discourse having an Anarchist flavour. For M.I., free signifiers, such as ‘freedom’, ‘individualism’, ‘self‐management’ or ‘emancipation’ became more coherent if they were integrated in the radical and rebel discourse than if they were drowned in the ocean of the signifiers produced by the official discourse. In his own words,

“At first, I believed the promises of freedom and peace. But everything fell down when I realised that neither transition, nor the so‐called Europeanization were leading to an entirely free society. It was the other way around!”

In this case, discourse theory explains that the fall of a holistic and supported by a repressive apparatus discourse opened the way for a merciless war between the discursive systems that had hegemonic tendencies. The Post‐Communist hegemonic discourse, based on the democratic rhetorical repertoire, did not succeed to maintain the

16 Interview taken in May 2008, in Iasi.


27

encapsulation of numerous signifiers, partly captured by the rival discourses, including the Anarchist one. Allegedly, M.I. followed, more or less consciously, the plot presented here‐above, by discarding the official discourse and by adhering to radical Anarchism. One may criticize the credit that this approach gives to the self‐determination capacity of subjects when they choose their preferred discursive universes. Once again, we can imagine that M.I. has joint Anarchism to openly defy his family rather than to compensate the absence of a coherent system of values. Moreover, behind his militant involvement, there are perhaps the seduction of the game of contestation and the need for integration, and not the incorporation in a certain discursive universe. However, the last point of discourse theory, presented here‐below, will provide some supplementary counter‐arguments to this objection. 5. Finally, discourse theory holds that the dislocation of a certain discursive horizon is strongly connected with the emergence of the split subject. As a consequence of subject’s failure to achieve a fully integrated identity, he or she is always in a process of search for an identification that offers the illusion of the complete integration. Politics is a field where the promises concerning the realisation of a common welfare may be widely understood as a perspective for acquiring a full identity. According to Slavoj Žižek, the failure of the final identification generates the dramatisation of the search for identity.17 It may lead to a choice in favour of some of the most radical discourses, which promise the immediate achievement of a full identity. But as these radical discursive systems fail at their turn to accomplish this promise, they feed the dislocation of responsibility: the Others are always responsible for the failure of a full identity’s achievement. This way, the perpetual creation and recreation of discourses in which the excluded from the inner group are guilty for the absence of a fully integrated identity become indispensable. For our research project, it was useful to determine the lacking identity or the lacking identities of the subjects, to understand the discursive mechanisms through which the rebels joined the groups that promised the reconstitution of their identities and to depict the processes of responsibility 17 See Slavoj Žižek, ‘Invisible Ideology: Political Violence Between Fiction and Fantasy’ in Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 1, Issue 1, February 1996, pp. 16‐18.


dislocation and the objects of these processes, the Others. In the most of the cases, the act of rebellious integration was by itself a form of guiltiness’ deviation, as the search for a remedy for the particular situation of each subject passed through the identification with a group that was more capable to find convenient scapegoats. It was precisely what happened in the case of D.P. 18 Born in 1965, in a formerly Greek‐Catholic family in Oradea, he was the first to be baptised in the Orthodox religion, in a time when the Greek‐Catholic church was dissolved by the Communist regime. The two identities of his family – the Catholic and the Orthodox – have peacefully cohabited under the Communism, but have violently clashed after 1989, when the issues of the restitutions that the Orthodox Church had to make to the Greek‐Catholic one openly emerged. The young technician, who has been three times unsuccessful in his efforts to be admitted at the Polytechnic University in Cluj, found himself thrown in the middle of religious and political quarrels. Since 1993, he has paid a lot of attention to the inter‐religious debates and collected, at the beginning, the arguments that were favorable to the Catholics. He ended up by converting to Greco‐Catholicism and by actively fighting what he called the ‘Orthodox Church‐Party‐State’. But he had a hard time to get accepted by the traditional Greek‐Catholic communities in Oradea, who feared, in his own words, ‘the infiltration of spies’. As a result of the frequent scandals that took place in his parish council especially during the periods when he was temporarily unemployed, D.P. started to distance himself from the Greek‐Catholic circles. Moreover, he started to frequent a radical orthodox association and reconverted to his native religion in 1998. Since then, he has remained a simple militant of this group; the main objective of this association is ‘to return to the traditions and to purge the Church of the Communists and of the Secret Service agents’. Since 2003, this association has militated for the instauration of a ‘National Orthodox State’, governed by a diarchy composed of a lay President and of the Orthodox Patriarch. In 2008, D.P. and his comrades acted against the election of the new Patriarch of the Orthodox Church: his association has openly criticized the main three candidates, but did not propose an alternative to them.

18 Interview taken in July 2008, in Oradea.


29

D.P.’s hesitations with respect to his confession and the ultra‐radical manner in which he joined a marginalised Orthodox sect are consonant with the psychoanalytical theory of the split subject. Traumatised by his professional failures and by the inter‐religious conflict that destroyed his family, D.P. firstly tried to identify himself with a religious, moral and political discourse that preached, in a nutshell, the restitution of the pre‐1945 realities. But, as he has not been accepted by a Greek‐Catholic community whose collective habits and personal requirements were too hard to cope with, D.P. recovered his Orthodox identity and blamed his ‘Catholic heresy’ for its situation in which he found himself. Within the radical Orthodox movement, he identified himself with a faction that started to attack the high Orthodox hierarchy. For D.P., the fault for the ensemble of his failures always comes to the Others. Consequently, he took the care to build a protective fence against Them. As a final example, the failure of his last marriage attempt was due to the manner in which his former would‐be wife has been indoctrinated by the ‘Papists and the Ortho‐Papists’. Discourse theory seems to be capable to explain the social and political behaviour of this character, provided that the thesis of the split subject (which rather comes from social psychology) is fully integrated in its theoretical framework. For the moment, the inclusion of this thesis within the ensemble of discourse theory remains problematic, because the search for the completed identity does not necessarily take place in the interior of a certain discursive universe and rather depends of a series of factors that is endogenous to the immediate social relations. However, one may argue that the social and the discursive are themselves co‐substantial…

Conclusions If the research question posed at the beginning of this article was if discourse theory brought a certain contribution to the understanding of the phenomenon of contestation, the answer could not be negative. There is no doubt that discourse theory provides a remarkable analytic tool and that it offers a valuable alternative to the monist traditional approaches. However,


on a more accurate level, is discourse theory sufficient to analyse the reasons of the political involvement and of the militant actions of those common individuals who chose to join some Romanian rebel movements? At a first glance, the response to this second question would rather be negative. An overarching argument in this sense would be that, as opposed to the contestation phenomena in the other two countries held for this research – France and Poland – the rebellious action of the Romanians is far more individualised and thus less susceptible to be schematised within some clear political patterns and profiles. Nevertheless, if we take into consideration the fact that discourse theory is far from claiming that it is by itself alone capable to approach general political phenomena, this negative answer could be challenged. In fact, discourse theory takes the discursive paradigm as a framework that gives the possibility to integrate open and multidisciplinary explanations. It is precisely its conclusion on the disappearance of a regulatory centre of the social sphere that opens the way to the negotiations between several readings of the world which require the corroboration of data and interpretations proposed by all the social sciences. The contestation of the democratic order remains, in the case of Romania, a marginal phenomenon. However, the end of the post‐transitional period, marked by Romania’s accession to the European Union, allowed for a certain relaxation of censorship and self‐censorship over the voices that opposed the actual political system and its principles. Moreover, the multiplication of the European networks which contest the establishment has provided a supplementary impetus to the similar organisations of the former Communist countries. In this context, discourse theory could bring its contribution to the analysis of the mechanisms that allowed the naturalisation of the anti‐system action at the level of the European public spaces. But this contribution should not ignore the motivations of the basic militants’ direct actions and the fact that this demarche requires some interdisciplinary approaches. The research project L’Europe rebelle could contribute to the complex results that are obtained in these types of scientific laboratories.

The New Populism. An analysis of the Political Discourse of Front National and Lijst Pim Fortuyn

Oana‐Raluca Crăciun

Machiavelli, one of the most influential political theorists, whom Bernard Crick and others have called the most worthy humanist and distinctly modern,1 provided us with a comprehensive understanding of power and authority. These two concepts co‐exist because whoever has power has the right to rule.2 Since power is central to political rationality, activity, or decision‐making, the political elites use it in order to gather support from the public opinion. One way of doing this is through discourse because as Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida and many others have indicated, communication is at all times already penetrated by power3. Moreover, this view recognizes conflict as being something natural, as opposed to Habermasian conception, which has its roots with Plato via Kant and which considers that consensus seeking and freedom from domination4 should guide our communicative process. The only form of power which Habermas considers legitimate in the ideal speech situation and communicative rationality is the force of better argument,5 which provides a rational basis for the organization of society.

1 Bernard Crick , “Preface” and “Introduction” to Niccolò Machiavelli, in The Discources, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983, pp. 12, 17. 2 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 3 Bent Flyvbjerg, “Ideal Theory, Real Rationality: Habermas versus Foucault and Nietzsche”, in The Challenges for Democracy in the 21st Century, School of Economics and Political Science, 2000, p. 5. 4 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987, p. 295. 5 Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990, p. 198.

The New Populism. An analysis of the Political Discourse… 32

As history has demonstrated, Habermas’ ideal theory and discourse ethics are not viable in a world where rationality is many times overlooked and replaced by rationalization in the struggle for domination. Instead, an analysis of discourse that acknowledges the struggle over ideas as the essence of politics and decision‐making should be implied.6 According to this framework, the world is experienced by people in different ways, in accordance with their interests, positions, needs, preferences, and the way they define these depends on how choices are presented to them and by whom.7 Moreover, discourse should be regarded as a catalyst for collective action, as an element that holds together a particular community while it discredits and rejects another community. In other words, discourse can be viewed as having the power to mobilize symbolic resources providing collective forms of identification.8

This chapter examines the growth of new radical populist parties in France and in the Netherlands and the manifestation of ethnic and religious dominance in their anti‐immigrant, anti‐Muslim discourse. The investigation is carried out from a multidisciplinary and comparative discourse analytical approach. This contribution attempts to establish a link between the theory developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe ‐ that explains the process of identity formation through discourse ‐ and Critical Discourse Analysis ‐ that studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context.9 In other words, this study seeks to examine the nexus between the manner in which the identity of the parties National Front and Pim Fortuyn List was shaped and their discourse ascertaining and reproducing ethnic and religious dominance.

The examination of the connection between these two theories facilitates the understanding of the electoral success of FN and LPF. Despite the fact that FN and LPF engaged in politics in two different moments, both parties reached their peak in 2002. For instance, Le Pen qualified for the

6 Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making, New York: W.W. Norton, 2002, p. 10. 7 Idem. 8 Chantal Mouffe, “The “End of Politics” and the Challenge of Right‐wing Populism”, in Francisco Panizza (ed.), Populism and the mirror of democracy, London: Verso, 2005, p. 80. 9 Teun Adrianus van Dijk, “Multidisciplinary CDA: a plea for diversity”, in Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, London: Sage, 2001, p. 325.


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second round of voting, after he had defeated Lionel Jospin, and LPF won 26 (17%) out of 150 seats in the lower house of parliament, becoming the second largest party.

Before discussing the actual political phenomena, I will firstly clarify the notion of discourse. Secondly, I will briefly introduce the Theory of Hegemony developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and I will emphasize the process in which the populist identity is created by subsuming the other heterogeneous identities. Then, within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, I will explain a number of discourse devices that will be used to explore the connection between the use of language and unequal power relations.10 In the forth section, I will empirically test the viability of the theory of Laclau and Mouffe by showing the manner in which FN and LPF acquired radical populist identity. Here, I will also try to show that their electoral growth owes to the radical rhetoric adopted in disputing the ability of their political opponents to govern. In the end, I will draw the main conclusions concerning the discursive strategy employed by these two parties to antagonize the French and the Dutch towards immigrants and Muslims and to win votes, at their expense.

Conceptualizing discourse

Until now, the notion of discourse has been mentioned in different stances but without being offered any comprehensive explanation. What does discourse refer to? Many authors have tried to grasp the nature of discourse and to encode it in a definition in order to serve their theoretical purposes. Therefore, some of the conceptualizations around this idea are illustrated in the attempt to underline the features they have in common. Kress described discourses as being systematically organised sets of statements,11 to which Parker added a purpose of constructing an object.12 Hollway, by stipulating the concept of meaning ‐ a particular network of

10 Delia Marga, Repere în analiza discursului politic, Cluj‐Napoca: Efes, 2004, p. 171. 11 Gunther Kress, “Linguistic processes in sociocultural practice”, in ECS806 Sociocultural aspects of language and education, Victoria: Deakin University, 1985, pp. 6‐7. 12 Ian Parker and John Shotter, Deconstructing social psychology, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 191.


meanings, their heterogeneity and their effects ‐ attached the substance that was missing from the previous definitions of discourse.13 Also in relation to meaning, Davies et al. stated that discourse is a multi‐faceted public process through which meanings are progressively and dynamically achieved.14 The emphasis on rhetoric and semantic strategies ‐ discernible clusters of terms, descriptions, common‐places and figures of speech often clustered around metaphors or vivid images and often using distinct grammatical constructions and styles ‐ is provided by Potter et al.15 The next conceptualizations are meant to penetrate the societal and political realm. Fairclough sees it as a form of social practice, rather than a purely individual activity or a reflex of situational variables,16 whereas Widdicombe considers discourses as products and reflections of social, economic and political factors, and power relations.17 The regulatory fashion of discourse is stressed in the Burman’s definition ‐ socially organised frameworks of meaning that define categories and specify domains of what can be said and done.18 Last but not least, Ramazanoglu adds a very important aspect regarding the endless and ongoing process of shifting the rules through discourse ‐ historically variable ways of specifying knowledge and truth.19 An interesting example in this regard is given by Dirk Nabers who says that materializations like street, house, car, but also, president, prime minister and member of parliament, are consequences of past speech and/or preceding discourses. This means that whenever there is an alteration in discourse those materializations not only lose their prior meaning but their identity changes also.20

13 Wendy Hollway, Subjectivity and method in psychology: gender, meaning and science, London: Sage, 1989, p. 38. 14 Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harre, “Positioning: the discursive production of selves”, in Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, no. 20(1), 1990, p. 47. 15 Jonathan Potter, Margaret Wetherell, Ros Gill and Derek Edwards, “Discourse: noun, verb or social practice?” in Philosophical Psychology, no. 3(2), 1990, p. 212. 16 Norman Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992, p. 3. 17 Sue Widdicombe, “Identity, politics and talk: a case for the mundane and the everyday”, in Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger (eds.), Feminism and discourse: psychological perspectives, London: Sage, 1995, p. 107. 18 Erica Burman, Deconstructing developmental psychology, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 2. 19 Caroline Ramazanoglu, Up against Foucault: explorations of some tensions between Foucault and feminism, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 7. 20 Dirk Nabers, “Crises, hegemony and change in the international system: A conceptual framework”, in GIGA Research Programme: Transformation in the Process of Globalisation, no. 1(50), 2007, p. 27.


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Relying on these definitions, there can be identified four aspects which are commonly encountered when the notion of discourse is explained. Firstly, it consists in a coherent system of statements produced on a regular basis with the purpose of constructing effects. Secondly, the link between statements and effects is provided by meaning which is conveyed in a manner that serves a certain purpose. Much of the time, the meaning is less evident and it has to be read into those statements. Thirdly, it is a social practice that tailors the medium that generates it. Finally, the dispersion of meaning is possible through power,21 and it also encapsulates a temporal aspect because discourses are progressively and dynamically achieved over time and within particular contexts of power relations.22

The understanding of discourse in general is helpful when analysing political discourses because they preserve the main characteristics discussed above. However, the conflict is more vivid in political discourses. That is why they are usually labelled as a specific form of conflicting discourses.23 The latter refers to the discourse of a party in conflict directed to the other party, who is the opponent, and who can respond in turn with another conflicting discourse. The object is the Other whose discourse must be ilegitimized and rejected. The addressee is not always the opponent and this is available especially in the case of political discourse where the recipient is the public.

Furthermore, political discourses are predominantly argumentative, oriented towards persuasion. This need for persuasion can be attributed to the impossibility to explain the choice for a policy decision using scientific methods. Therefore, political decisions are not the reflection of the inherent and universal truth derived from the world of facts and postulated by positivists. They are rather the result of the struggle to create meaning throughout the policy process in which political elites attempt to convince others to share the meaning they attribute to particular events. Since the scientific methods are left in subsidiary, what matters is the power of better arguments, but not from the Habermas’ point of view, because as it will be later seen, rhetoric, interests and power distort the ideal communication. In

21 Michel Foucault, The archaeology of knowledge, London: Tavistock Publications, 1972, p. 38. 22 Catriona Macleod, “Deconstructive discourse analysis: extending the methodological conversation”, in South African Journal of Psychology, 32(1), 2002, p. 22. 23 Delia Marga, Repere în analiza discursului politic, pp. 9‐14.


short, the argumentation performs a joint task, which on the one hand, implies persuasion, because political actors employ arguments to bring others around to their position and on the other hand, it entails justification, since the same politicians try to legitimize their decisions with respect to the public interest.24

Due to the fact that political reasoning is contingent rather than scientifically rigorous, it follows that rhetoric is present in the argumentative process. Drawing upon Cicero’s reflections, we understand rhetorical displacement as the process through which a literal term is replaced by a figurative one.25 Political actors use rhetoric also when they want to secure the adherence of the audience by appealing to emotions and authority. Other devices used in political discourses are rhetorical questions. They strengthen a claim that is made by forcefully inviting an intended answer and thus preventing the opposite answer that is in the line with the opponent’s arguments.26

Rhetoric dominates the political discourses analysed in this chapter, and consequently, it will be further discussed in the next sections.

Hegemony and antagonism

The centrepiece of the writings of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the most representative authors of the third generation Discourse Theory, relies on two concepts: hegemony and antagonism. They encapsulate the entire process in which a party acquires the populist identity through discourse.

For these authors, as well as for Post‐Structuralists, the social reality is discursive. They argue that ontologically, the world exists independently of the observers’ mind but we get to know it under certain descriptions which bear a certain meaning.27 The access to meaning is facilitated by

24 Giandomenico Majone, Evidence, Argument, and Persuasion in the Policy Process, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, p. 2. 25 Ernesto Laclau, La raison populiste, Paris: Seuil, 2008, p. 89. 26 Ineke van der Valk, “Right‐wing parliamentary discourse on immigration in France”, Discourse and Society, no. 14(3), 2003, pp. 330. 27 Colin Wight, Agents, Structures and International Relations. Politics as Ontology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 27.


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language. So, language is a channel through which objects meaningful to us are socially constructed.28 For instance, in 2007, the Paris suburbs riots existed as events and involved physical acts in certain definite locations in space and time. However, whether these violent acts were constructed as gangrene and participants associated with scum (racaille) and rabble (foule) depended upon the nature of the discourse that was triggered by these events.29 In other words, the condition of possibility made the existence of that discourse possible but it was not the cause of it.

Referring to Laclau and Mouffe’s interpretation, the social is a discursive space because nothing societal is outside the discursive.30 Even if the importance of meaning in creating the social reality was ascertained, the question regarding the prevalence of some meanings over others is still opened. Here, Ruth Wodak provides us with an explanation centred on the notion of power.

“Language indexes power, expresses power, is involved where there is contention over power and where power is challenged. Power does not derive from language, but language can be used to challenge power, to subvert it, to alter distributions of power both in the short and the long term.”31 Put differently, the discourses of the powerful agents overcome the

discourses of those less powerful and thus, the former gets to impose its meaning.

Following the Post‐Structural line of reasoning of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue that another distinguishing feature of the social is uncertainty rather than structural determination. This uncertainty leaves space for politico‐hegemonic

28 Dirk Nabers, “Crises, hegemony and change in the international system: A conceptual framework”, p. 6. 29 World News BBC, Dozens injured in Paris rampage [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7114175.stm], October 15, 2008. 30 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso, 1985, p. 107. 31 Ruth Wodak, “Critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis”, in Jef Verschueren and Jan‐Ola Östman (eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2006, p. 4.


articulations [which] retroactively create the interests they claim to represent.32 Since the social is undetermined, the identities inside it are also incomplete and rely on the constant movement of differential relationships.33 This means that an identity is forced into filling the structural gaps through identification,34 or in other words, identification can be seen as the struggle of a subject to gain full identity.35 Consequently, the subject is no longer considered the source of meaning but, instead, as just one more particular location within a meaningful totality.36

Laclau, inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure who claims that there are no positive terms in language but differences, brings into play the logic of difference and opposition by arguing that identity is constituted by its difference from an infinite number of other identities.37 This implies that all principles and values governing an identity receive their meaning according to this logic.38 For instance, identity is tied to a specific content, such as gender, ethnicity, religion, culture, history, nation or region, and becomes what it is by virtue of its relative position in an open structure of differential relationships.39

The incompleteness of the subjects’ identities is linked to a political contestation over signifiers (demands) and, at the same time, it is a pre‐condition for the creation of any hegemonic process. Laclau, in Constructing Universality,40 uses the following model in order to clarify the way hegemonic articulation works:

32 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, p. xi. 33 Ibidem, p. 95. 34 Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen, Discursive Analytical Strategies. Understanding Foucault, Koselleck, Laclau, Luhmann, Bristol: The Policy Press, 2003, p. 52. 35 Dirk Nabers, “Crises, hegemony and change in the international system: A conceptual framework”, p. 19. 36 Ernesto Laclau, “Discourse”, in R. E. Goodin and P. Pettit (eds.), A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993, p. 433. 37 Ernesto Laclau, La raison populiste, p. 86. 38 Dirk Nabers, “Crises, hegemony and change in the international system: A conceptual framework”, p. 19. 39 Ibidem, p. 20. 40 Ernesto Laclau, “Constructing Universality”, in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (eds.), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, London: Verso, 2000, pp. 281–307.


39

expaditemcomdi

41 TSausigprosigimsou(scpsyinipefix42 EDe

D1,D2,D3,D4 ‐ Signifiers

F ‐ Frontier

T ‐ Excluded element

Ө ‐ Blank space (gap)

≡ ‐ Equivalence

Figure 1: Ernesto Laclau, Creation of discursive hegemony

Starting from the premise that the social structure entails the istence of void spaces (gaps), Laclau illustrates the manner in which, rticular signifiers (demands),41 D1, D2, D3, D4, and so on, acquire fferent positions within that structure. One of the signifiers, D1, has porarily succeeded in fixing its meaning to a nodal point, a centre of mand, from which attempts to dominate the other signifiers.42 This

scursive process is known as the creation of hegemony. The constellation

he notion of signifier (stream of sounds or acoustic image) was coined by Ferdinand de ssure, the founder of Structural Linguistics. In relation to the signified (concept), the nifier constitutes the sign, which is the fundamental unit of linguistic analysis. The blem with the Saussurean project is the strict isomorphism between the signifier and the nified. This means that only one concept can correspond to each stream of sounds, plying that there cannot be any distinguishable difference between the concept and nd. A response to the failure of this project comes from three directions: semiology ience of signs in society) and more specifically, the work of Roland Barthes, the choanalytic current inspired by Jacques Lacan and the deconstructionist movement tiated by Jacques Derrida. Grosso modo, all these authors argue that a signifier cannot be rmanently attached to a particular signified and thus, the meaning is only temporarily ed to a centre of command. rnesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical mocratic Politics, p. 113.


by which a certain particularity assumes the representation of a universality entirely incommensurable with it, is what [we] call a hegemonic relation. In other words, the notion of particularity is identified with totality. This identification is highly politicized because it creates a continuous inner tension renewed every time when a new particular signifier tries to identify with the whole. The hegemonic identity becomes the order of a void significant which tries to fill up the totality impossible to attain. As it can be seen, the totality is rather a horizon, than a fundament.43 However, the condition of possibility of totality presupposes the existence of the exterior, which draws the limits of the system (F).

The problem is whether that exterior, which lies beyond the totality of differences, is another difference or we deal with something more complicated than this. Well, the response provided by Laclau is that the exterior constitutes indeed a difference but it is neither neutral nor allowed by the components of totality. On the contrary, it is an excluded element (T) which functions according to the logics of equivalence and antagonism.44 This means that, with regards to the excluded element, all the different identities are grouped together in chain of equivalence. The linkage between them is the common rejection towards the excluded identity. Whereas equivalence highlights the community effect of a perceived common negative or enemy, the community is constructed in non‐antagonistic terms within the logic of difference that can eventually lead to the formation of collective identities.45 Put differently, while the logic of antagonism accentuates difference, the logic of equivalence subverts it.46 The tension between equivalence and difference provides the conditions for the emergence of the social.

The construction of the social depends also on the emergence of an empty or a floating signifier.47 Laclau defines the notion of empty signifier as an indistinct signified with no conceptual content or the plenitude constitutively absent.48 Empty signifiers are terms that can have different meanings and can thereby serve to unite disparate social movements.

43 Ernesto Laclau, La raison populiste, pp. 89, 144. 44 Ibidem, p. 88. 45 Dirk Nabers, “Crises, hegemony and change in the international system: A conceptual framework”, p. 20. 46Ernesto Laclau, La raison populiste, p. 88. 47 Ibidem, p. 87. 48 Ibidem, p. 119.


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Examples of empty signifiers are order, justice or democracy. On the other hand, floating signifiers can assimilate different meanings depending on the nature or topic of the discourse. For instance, expressions such as freedom, equity or equality are floating signifiers. Whereas, an empty signifier takes the limits of the void for granted, the floating signifier allows for the possibility of dislocation of those limits.49 Still, the difference between them is only minimal.

For the purpose of this work, the function of floating signifiers is epitomized in the next example. According to Deborah Stone, equity is considered the goal which all sides try to attain in a distributive conflict.50 The Right may perceive equity differently from the Left, when enhancing a policy concerning the distribution of social benefits for unemployed immigrants. For instance, a centre‐right wing party would provide courses for professional re‐qualifications of unemployed immigrants, as equitable solution, whereas a left wing party would consider equitable to provide social assistance for unemployed immigrants. In other words, one side considers that it is equitable for indigents to have the means necessary to overcome unemployment while the other side believes that it is equitable to have a re‐distributive policy that gives to the unemployed the resources (money, housing) they need to survive. Concluding, it can be said that only a floating signifier can loose its specificity while it subordinates its meaning to different political objectives.

Relying on the organic crisis (a term borrowed from Gramsci), [a] conjuncture where there is a generalized weakening of the relational system defining the identities of a given social or political space, and where, as a result there is a proliferation of floating elements,51 Laclau and Mouffe illustrate the way a floating signifier acquires universal meaning and by fixing its particular meaning to a nodal point. Therefore, they assume that the existence of unsatisfied social demands makes possible the transformation of isolated democratic demands in populist demands through a relation of equivalence. This becomes possible only if the relation of equivalence is crystallized in a certain discursive identity which represents the link as

49 Ibidem, p. 157. 50 Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making, p. 39. 51 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, p. 136.


such, and not the constituencies.52 In other words, while initially, the equivalence chain was mediating between particular demands, to which it was subordinated, now it became autonomous, reversing the relation of dominance. Therefore, when a particular demand (signifier) acquires popular centrality it detaches from its original concept and it assumes the identity of the equivalence chain, becoming hegemonic.

More specifically, if we suppose that inside a social order there are several unfulfilled demands such as unemployment, criminality and insecurity, a populist discourse would attempt to fix the meaning of insecurity, for instance, to a nodal point, which, on the one hand, would combine the other demands (unemployment and criminality) in a chain of equivalence and, on the other hand, it would substitute the entire chain to that nodal point.53 Therefore, we say that insecurity, which was once part of the chain of equivalence, gained popular centrality through discourse and became hegemonic. This process would not have been possible if the populist discourse had not divided the social order in two antagonistic camps, those who suffer the consequences of unsatisfied demands (e.g. the French people, the Dutch people) and respectively, those who are to blame for causing or not solving them (e.g. the immigrants, the Muslims, the ruling coalition).

The preservation of the centrality of the popular demand and thus, of hegemony, depends, on the one hand, on the identification of a threatening outside and on the other hand, on the content of the signified which has to be kept vague. Correspondingly, as much as a signifier enlarges the sphere of the signified, integrating a longer chain of unsatisfied demands, as less intensive it becomes, and therefore, the hegemony is preserved.54

The same logic can be applied when explaining the manner in which a party acquires populist identity. However, this matter will be later discussed in this chapter.

52 Ernesto Laclau, La raison populiste, p. 106. 53 Combination and substitution are terms used by Ernesto Laclau in the work Philosophical roots of discourse theory, [http://www.essex.ac.uk/centres/Theostud/papers/Laclau%20‐%20philosophical%20roots%20of%20discourse%20theory.pdf], October 15, 2008. 54 Ernesto Laclau, La raison populiste, p. 118.


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Approaching “Critical Discourse Analysis”

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a qualitative research methodology which critically analyses the relation between language, ideology and society in both domestic and global arenas.55 It emerged in the late 1980s as a programmatic development in European discourse studies led by Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, Teun van Dijk, and others. As Ruth Wodak mentioned, CDA cannot be viewed as a holistic or closed paradigm [because its studies are] multifarious, [and] derived from quite different theoretical backgrounds and oriented towards very different data and methodologies.56 Although CDA has different modi operandi and directions, there can be identified four mainstream approaches to CDA: critical linguistics, the socio‐cultural approach, the discourse‐historical approach and socio‐cognitive approach. All these frameworks provide a critical attitude regarding the effects of the ethnic domination in the modern social relations analyzing opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control as manifested in language.57 CDA research enterprise is not limited only to uncovering and criticizing social inequality but it actually seeks social change through critical understanding,58 and it aims to provide guidelines for [better] human actions.59

CDA has its roots in Social Theory. In this regard, its advocates sustain that discourse is a social phenomenon which shapes the social reality and at the same time it is socially conditioned.60 Moreover, there can 55 See Christopher Hart, Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Science: Analysing Strategies and Structures in Texts on Immigration and Asylum Using Evolutionary Psychology and Cognitive Linguistics, [http://www.hartcda.org.uk/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/chapterone.cda.pdf], October 29, 2008. 56 Gilbert Weiss and Ruth Wodak, “Introduction: Theory, interdisciplinarity and critical discourse analysis”, in Gilbert Weiss and Ruth Wodak (eds.), Critical discourse analysis: Theory and interdisciplinarity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, p. 12. 57 Ruth Wodak, “Critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis”, p. 4. 58 Teun Adrianus van Dijk, “Principles of critical discourse analysis”, in Discourse and Society, no. 4(2), 1993, p. 252. 59See Ruth Wodak, “The discourse‐historical approach”, in Ruth Wodak and M. Meyer (eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis, London: Sage, 2001 pp. 63‐94. 60 Jan Blommaert and Chris Bulcaen, “Critical discourse analysis”, in Annual Review of Anthropology, no. 29, 2000, p. 448.


be displayed two theoretical tracks, one inspired by the Foucaultdian thinking which deals with power and ideology, and the other following Giddens and Habermas to an extent, attempts to overcome the structural determinism.

Within the framework of CDA, I will explain some discursive categories used to express or influence beliefs about minorities and immigrants. The purpose of this explanation is to highlight the role of these discursive devices in the electoral success of the parties Front National and Lijst Pim Fortuyn.

1. Referential strategies are employed to construct and oppose two

different camps, the in‐group and the out‐group. The in‐group is positive represented while the out‐group is portrayed in negative terms. The most important semantic structure manifesting a referential strategy is the pronoun. When referring to the in‐group actors it is used the first person plural (e.g. we, us, our), whereas, the out‐group actors are referred to the third person plural (e.g. they, them, their).61

2. Semantic moves are usually encountered in discourses about immigrants and minorities in the form of disclaimers. They illustrate the possible contradiction between positive self‐presentation and negative Other‐presentation. Political actors use disclaimers in order to avoid being openly against the Muslim minority, for instance. The typical disclaimers are apparent denial (Nothing against, but...), apparent concession (They are not all bad, but...), apparent empathy (They have difficulties, but...), apparent ignorance (We do not know, but...), apparent excuse (We are sorry, but...), reversal (blaming‐the‐victim story), and transfer (We have no problem with them, but the constituencies...).62 The denial strategies are easy to study because they usually appear as but‐clauses.

61 See Maria Sedlak and Ruth Wodak, “We demand that foreigners adapt to our lifestyle: Political discourse on immigration laws in Austria and the United Kingdom”, in Combating Racial Discrimination, Berg: Oxford, 2000, pp. 217‐237. 62 Teun Adrianus van Dijk, “On the analysis of parliamentary debates on immigration”, in Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak (eds.), The semiotics of racism: Approaches in critical discourse analysis, Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2000, p. 92.


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3. Argumentation is frequently used in political discourses because it helps politicians to persuade the public and to gain adherence and votes. Moreover, argumentation resolves a difference of opinion by means of exploring the relative justification for competing standpoints.63 However, sometimes argumentation is misused by politicians. They intentionally break the accurate argumentation rules and employ fallacies that appeal to the common sense. Usually, fallacies are employed to de‐legitimate the opponents by oversimplifying and exaggerating their intentions and actions, by appealing to pity and by launching personal attacks. Examples of fallacies are: argumentum ad hominem, argumentum ad misericordiam, straw man fallacy, slippery slope fallacy.64

4. Rhetoric, as a form of argumentation, is used in political discourses because it carries out a persuasive function. On the other hand, it plays an important role in ideological manipulation because political actors use rhetorical means such as metaphors, hyperboles, euphemisms, rhetorical questions to manipulate the meaning of the social representation of in‐group and out‐group.65

5. Topos is an argumentative device and it has the origins in the

classical argumentation theory of Aristotle. Literally, it means place or in the

63 Frans H. van Eemeren, Rob Grootendorst and Tjark Kruiger, Handbook of Argumentation Theory: A Critical Survey of Classical Backgrounds and Modern Studies, Dordrecht: Foris, 1987, p. 218. 64 Ineke van der Valk, “Right‐wing parliamentary discourse on immigration in France”, pp. 320, 328. 65 A metaphor is an implied comparison which uses a word that denotes one kind of object or idea to describe another; a hyperbole is a figure of speech in which statements are exaggerated with the purpose to evoke strong feelings or to create a strong impression; an euphemism is the substitution of an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant. The most frequent metaphors used in politics are living organisms, machines, containers, diseases, natural disasters and wars; the negative characteristics of the out‐group are stressed by hyperboles while the euphemisms are meant to minimize the negative aspects of the in‐group. For further explanations, see Ineke van der Valk, “Right‐wing parliamentary discourse on immigration in France”, p. 100; Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making, p. 148.


words of Erasmus, seat of arguments.66 Van der Valk, referring to Anscombre, describes topoi as general principles that support an argument without themselves constituting the argument itself.67 All in all, topoi are socially shared beliefs linked to traditions or authoritative sources such as religious texts used as argumentative tools by politicians because they have increased persuasion powers.

6. Instead of using the concept of topos, Deborah Stone speaks about narrative stories which she describes as widely shared, often unspoken explanations, and so much taken for granted that we are not even aware of them.68 For instance, she illustrates the story of decline that implies a continuous decadence of the out‐group in the eyes of the in‐group that results in the rejection of out‐group’s physical presence. Another story is that of helplessness and control which acknowledges the existence of a bad situation and the impossibility of the ruling elites to deal with it. In spite of these problems, “there is hope” and this is in the power of the radical populist elites. The conspiracy story is an alternative of the helplessness and control story and it reveals the “harm” which is deliberatively caused by the out‐group. By using these stories, the populist elites want to pinpoint the fact that they are not only able to cut the harm but also to punish the culprits.

The emergence of FN and LPF as Radical Populist parties

Ernesto Laclau defines populism taking into account its form rather than its content. In this sense, populism does not belong to a type of movement with a particular social base and a certain ideological orientation; it behaves according to a political logic that explains the process of social change according to the logic of equivalence and difference and to the

66Francis Goyet, “Les diverses acceptions de lieu et lieu commun à la Renaissance”, in Christian Plantin (ed.), Lieux Communs, topoi, stéréotypes, clichés, Paris: Editions Kimé, 1993, p. 415. 67 Ineke van der Valk, “Right‐wing parliamentary discourse on immigration in France”, p. 319. 68 Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making, p. 137. See also pp. 139‐145.


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construction of a common enemy.69 The weakness of this frame of reference is that it gathers under its umbrella different and often contradictory ideological positions. However, the weakness is also the strength because it offers a reasonable explanation concerning the impossibility to label the new radical parties, as FN and LPF, according to the classic left‐right division. In line with this explanation, I argue that FN and LPF are radical populist parties because they embraced in their political discourse diverse political beliefs that were unified by their opposition to Muslim and immigrant community. At the same time, each ideological orientation of a party is one of its multiple identities which are subsumed to the hegemonic identity once they become equivalent in their rejection towards the excluded community.

Bearing a fascist identity One of the multiple identities subsumed to the populist identity of

FN is the fascist identity. According to Sternhell, a fascist party is an extreme‐right party identified in a specific period and organized around Führerprinzip (strong leadership).70 In this definition, the term extreme‐right does not refer to political practices as particular types of mass movements, but to ideology, which implies that the extreme‐right parties have to show the ideological characteristics of the pre‐war fascist movements in order to be labelled as such.

According to this definition, FN can be considered a fascist party. This party was animated by fascist movements commonly known in the interwar period such as Ligues d’extrême droite (Far right leagues) and Benito Mussolini’s fascist party. However, its main point of inspiration was the doctrine of the Croix de Feu ligue (Cross of Fire league), which employed two distinct visions of France: la France profonde (the real France) and la

69 Ernesto Laclau, La raison populiste, p. 141. 70 Meindert Fennema, “Populist parties of the right”, in Jens Rydgren (ed.), Movements of exclusion: Radical right‐wing populism, Dartmouth: Nova Scotia Publishers, 2004, p. 6.


France d’en haut (the imaginary France), two vague principles which were easily manipulated by Le Pen in his discourses.71

On the other hand, there are authors who argue that the history of fascist parties could be traced back to leftist movements. The foundation of this explanation lays on the anti‐materialist creed of fascists members. Fascists blamed the liberalist doctrine for encouraging the creation of a materialist society in the detriment of the national solidarity. However, they were neither pro‐Marxist because they saw the fragmentation of society into classes as an element that inevitably leads to the destruction of the nation. The fascist doctrine could be rather considered ambivalent because it proclaims the power of synthesis between nationalism and socialism.72 This duality is epitomized in the statement of the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley: If you love your country you are national, and if you love your people you are socialist.73 Despite the fact that fascist claimed to subordinate the individual to the people and implicitly to the nation, the individual was in fact subordinated to the ruling elites.

The anti‐materialism is also a trait of FN. In its political statements FN preached the negative consequences of the material interests of private multinational companies and of the open market policies undertaken by the French state, and it directed its critique towards those who obtained unfair gains from corruption and other practices damaging for society. The anti‐materialism of FN is also systematized in the five core values:

“[…] l’amour de la patrie, l’amour de la terre et du travail,

l’honnêteté, le respect d’autrui, le sens de la famille […].”74

[…] patriotism, love of the land and labour, honesty, respect for others, the sense of family [...]

71 Sergiu Mişcoiu, Le Front National et ses répercussions sur l’échiquier politique français, 1972‐2002, Cluj‐Napoca: Efes, 2005, p. 66. 72 Meindert Fennema, “Populist parties of the right”, p. 9. 73 Zeev Sternhell, “Fascist Ideology”, in Walter Laqueur (ed.), Fascism: A Reader’s Guide, Berkley: University of California Press, 1976, p. 321. 74 See Discours de Jean‐Marie LE PEN à Lyon, [http://www.frontnational.com/doc_interventions_detail.php?id_inter=66], October 27, 2008.


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After clarifying the ideological positioning of fascist parties, I will turn back to the other important aspect of the definition issued by Sternhell, the concept of strong leadership. The powerful leader demands total commitment of the other members and their active involvement. The internal organization of a fascist party is characterized by rigidity and the leader disregards the democratic principles of decision making. In consequence, the right to question the decisions taken at the top is suppressed.

The figure of Le Pen and the way he rules the party prove, once again, the fascist heritage of FN. The scandal between Le Pen and Bruno Mégret brought to the surface the interdiction to question the political strategy of the party established by its leader.75

According to Fennema, the political axiom of fascism implies that people are naturally different and thus, they have different social positions.76 The social inequality as a result of naturally born differences is not restricted to fascist ideology only, being rather a characteristic of the radical right in general, as it will be seen when the issue of racialism is discussed.

Besides the biological differences which set people apart, fascism also postulates the natural differences between nations. Therefore, the theme of ethnic nationalism was frequently undertaken in the fascist discourse. Ethnic nationalism is the expression of the nation which has a soul and is entitled with a common destiny.77 It is different from the civic nationalism because the nation, in this case, is the expression of the political contract between the people and the sovereign, a contract which can be

75 The conflict arose due to the different visions regarding the strategy of the party for the European Parliament elections in 1999. In fact, Mégret pleaded for the reformation of the party, which meant the abandonment of the old extremist orientations in favor of a traditional Right political discourse which could ensure the possibility for new alliances. The dispute ended with the victory of Le Pen who proved for the second time his unshaken position inside the party. Despite the fact that Mégret named his faction Mouvement National Républicain (National Republican Movement), in 1999, he fought for the legal right to use the name Front National. His demand was repelled and Le Pen managed to keep the name of the party. 76 Meindert Fennema, “Populist parties of the right”, p. 7. 77 Ibidem, p. 8.


denounced if the people feel that they are not adequately represented by the sovereign.

In the discourse of FN, the ethnic nationalism alternates with the political nationalism and, depending on the context, one may be stressed more than the other. The ethnic nationalism is emphasized in the frontist discourse when Le Pen refers to the universal character of the French language which must be preserved: protéger la langue française en France et assurer son expansion à l’étranger (protect the French language in France and ensure its foreign expansion).78 This quotation clearly indicates the perceived superiority of the French nation that has the duty to pass its language to other foreign populations.

The civic nationalism takes the shape of ethnic nationalism under the slogan la France pour les Français (France for the French).79 This message suggests that the belongingness to the French nation has to be based on lineage and on the inborn right of membership. Therefore, those who do not belong to the ethnic community should be excluded. However, FN does not exclude the right to acquire the French nationality through naturalization. The party included in its previous electoral programme, under the reform of the law of nationality (réforme du droit de la nationalité), the conditions that would have been sufficient in order to obtain the French nationality.

“Lancer une réforme du droit de la nationalité, en supprimant notamment la binationalité et l’acquisition automatique de la nationalité (celle‐ci ne serait alors automatique que si l’on est de père ou de mère français). L’acquisition dépendrait alors de critères reposant sur la bonne conduite et le degré d’intégration.”80

Launch a reform of the law of nationality suppressing the double

nationality and the automatic acquisition of citizenship (which would not be automatic unless there is a French father or mother). The

78 Sergiu Mişcoiu, Le Front National et ses répercussions sur l’échiquier politique français, 1972‐2002, p. 59. 79 Elaine Sciolino, Le Pen submits just enough signatures, March 14, 2007, [http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/14/news/france.php], October 29, 2008. 80 See FDA Le magazine de Jean‐Marie Le Pen, Les 5 grand chantiers du quinquennat Le Pen, Paperback, April 2007.


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acquisition would depend then on the criteria based on good conduct and on the degree of integration.

Taking into account the previous examples, we may assert that the

fascist’s ethnic nationalism does not fold into the idea of ethnicity as labelled by FN. Since fascism postulates the nation based only on ius sanguinis, FN conceives the membership to a nation based on ius soli too. Still, the party chooses to deliver messages with an ethnic nationalist connotation to voters because they have a precise target (against immigrants), are intelligible and they are touching upon a sensible issue concerning the voters’ actual existence as French. Furthermore, the strict criterion of belongingness to the ethnic community, put forward by the fascist doctrine, is replaced in the frontist discourse by two vague standards which have to be met in order to become a French national. These are good conduct and degree of integration. They were intentionally picked up because they can have different interpretations depending upon the intentions of the speaker. For instance, the degree of integration is hard to measure even though strict indicators are employed. Knowing language and being aware of the history of France does not make someone French. Consequently, good conduct can be interpreted subjectively and can be used as a benchmark either for rewards or for punishments.

Concluding, we may say that FN does have a fascist identity because it borrows a number of themes from the fascist discourse and it undertakes several fascist principles. On the other hand, the fascist identity is not the only identity of FN because the party’s political discourse integrated other elements inconsistent with the fascist doctrine. For instance, the party did not reject the democratic means of governance. It even claimed to be more democratic than the political establishment by mentioning, quite often, their preference for more direct mechanisms of democracy:

“[…] nous engagerons par voie référendaire les grandes réformes

indispensables au renouveau national et au printemps de la France […];[…] les Français seront invités par référendum, à approuver le


projet de loi autorisant le gouvernement à prendre toutes les mesures visant à arrêter, puis à inverser les flux migratoires[...].”81 […] we will begin by referendum the major reforms essential to the

national renewal and spring of France […];[…] the French will be invited by referendum, to approve the bill authorizing the government to take all measures to stop and then to reverse immigration [...].

Assuming a racist identity

The racist dimension of LPF and FN is identified under their opposition towards immigration and immigrants, especially those of Muslim origin. Van der Valk, referring to Moscovici, defines racism as a complex, multifaceted system of domination and exclusion that produces social inequality between different ethnic groups.82 Racism was reproduced in the discourse of these parties through the representation of a distorted image of the entire group of immigrants. They were stigmatized and portrayed as a threat to the wellbeing of the French and Dutch people.

The manifestation of racism is influenced by the changes in the economic, political, and socio‐cultural conditions. Since the fifties, the Racialist Theory has been experiencing a shift in the core principles, departing from the theoretical considerations based on bio‐genetic race superiority towards the incompatibility based on cultural characteristics. In other words, the biological racism has been replaced by cultural racism. However, the change was not radical because the new type of racism is using biological arguments for explaining the cultural incompatibility.83 Therefore, cultures, nations, or religions are represented as homogeneous and rigid entities, incapable to change because of the inbred characteristics.

81 See Le programme de gouvernement de Jean‐Marie Le Pen (2007) [http://www.lepen2007.fr/pdf/Programmejmlp2007.pdf], October 30, 2008 and FDA Le magazine de Jean‐Marie Le Pen, Les 5 grand chantiers du quinquennat Le Pen, Paperback, April 2007. 82 Ineke van der Valk, “Right‐wing parliamentary discourse on immigration in France”, p. 313. 83 Meindert Fennema, “Populist parties of the right”, p. 13.


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In line with this reasoning, Barker considers the new racism as pseudo‐biological culture and the race as the attribute of culture, ethnicity, or religion.84 Barker introduces also the principle of otherness as explanation used to legitimate the racist practices:

“It is part of our biology and our instincts to defend our way of life,

traditions, and customs against outsiders not because these outsiders are inferior, but because they belong to other cultures.”85

Rephrasing, the principle of otherness acknowledges that it is natural

and even fair to exclude those who belong to other cultures simply because their cultures are different. The entire mechanism of exclusion is based on a positive presentation of the in‐group which is systematically paired to a negative presentation of the out‐group. The out‐group is represented as culturally deviant and threatening and their mere existence is considered to infringe upon the very essence of the in‐group cultural inheritance, values, and identity. This logic is adopted by Le Pen when he makes multiple references to the threat that Islam is posing to the in‐group (the French), primarily referred to as we, us and our. The positive self‐presentation of the French is further contrasted with the negative Other‐presentation of Islam when the frontist leader mentions the superiority of the Western civilization and Christianity to which France is part of. The Islamic state, as the incarnation of the power of religious elites who hamper the political life by imposing their own religious law and the dominance over the women, is considered in antithesis with the French laic state that does not tolerate the interference of religion in domestic affaires.

“[…] Il [l’ Islam] s’agit d’éradiquer de notre univers spirituel et

intellectuel tout ce qui nous rattache à la civilisation occidentale et chrétienne […] L’islam est bien plus qu’une simple croyance. C’est une théocratie qui est à la fois religion, état et système de gouvernement: “La religion islamique ne fait pas de distinction entre le pouvoir temporel et le pouvoir religieux ; bien au contraire, elle les associe et

84 Martin Barker, The New Racism. London: Junction Books, 1981, p. 23. 85 Martin Barker, ‘Het nieuwe racisme [The New Racism]’, in Anet Bleich and Peter Schumacher (eds.) Nederlands Racisme [Dutch Racism], Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1984, p. 78.


les confie à l’état” [L]es normes sociales et des comportements [islamique] ne sont, ni de près, ni de loin, compatibles avec notre civilisation, notre conception de l’homme, nos traditions juridiques.”86 […] It [Islam] works to eradicate our spiritual and intellectual

universe everything that links us to the Western civilization and Christianity […] Islam is much more than just a belief. It is a theocracy that is religion, state and system of government: “The Islamic religion does not distinguish between the temporal and religious power; quite the contrary, it involves them and entrusts the State” [T]he [Islamic] social norms and behaviours are neither close nor far consistent with our civilization, our conception of man, our legal traditions. Along with the principle of otherness, there are other two important

mechanisms framed by Crandall that are used to justify discriminatory practices: “attributive” approaches and “hierarchical” approaches.87 While the former approaches establish who caused the problems, and thus who has to be held responsible, blamed and excluded, the later approaches justify the goodness, the naturalness, and the necessity of social hierarchies.88 The naturalness of the superiority that French have over the immigrants is expressed straightforward by Le Pen in the next quotation:

“Il est normal que les Français dans leur propre pays aient une

priorité sur les étrangers. Les Français héritent d’un patrimoine en naissant, conquis par le travail et le sacrifice des générations précédents, ils ont donc un droit particulier dans leur propre pays […].”89 It is normal that the French in their own countries have a priority

over foreigners. The French inherit inborn assets conquered by the

86 See Jean‐Marie Le Pen, “Le cri du Muezzin”, Identité, no. 6, 1990. 87 Christian S. Crandall, “Ideology and Lay Theories of Stigma: The Justification of Stigmatization”, in T.F. Heatherton, R.E. Kleck, M.R. Hebl and J.G. Hull (eds.), The Social Psychology of Stigma, New York and London: Guilford Press, 2000, p. 129. 88 Ibidem, p. 133. 89 See FDA Le magazine de Jean‐Marie Le Pen, Les 5 grand chantiers du quinquennat Le Pen, Paperback, April 2007.


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work and sacrifice of previous generations; they have, thus, a particular right in their own countries […].

The hierarchical thinking does not necessarily imply that the perceived inferior races and cultures have to subordinate to the superior ones. The hierarchy is rather established because it justifies why some receive special treatment whereas others are excluded. For example, Le Pen introduced the principle of préférence nationale (national preference) to ensure that the French people are the only beneficiaries of the social assistance provided by the State and that the social benefits are redistributed to them only.

“Supprimer les “pompes aspirantes” en réservant les aides sociales diverses et les allocations familiales aux seuls Français et en réinstaurant, dans le cadre de nouvelles dispositions législatives, la préférence nationale pour les prestations sociales.”90 Suppress the “suction pumps” by reserving the various welfare

aides and family allowances only to the French and reinstating, under new laws, the national preference for the social benefits.

As well as Le Pen, Fortuyn also favoured the exclusion of immigrants by advocating the ban on immigration and the preferential grant of refugee right. However, unlike Le Pen, who stated that illegal immigrants should be placed in transit camps before being expelled with a special train to their home countries, Fortuyn did not manifest such extremist views regarding the illegal comers. Even so, his opinions were racist in the sense that he denied the civil rights of Antillean youths, considering them illegal immigrants, despite the fact that Netherlands Antilles is part of the Dutch kingdom. In his opinion, only those who were born and raised in the Netherlands should be considered Dutch citizens:

“Ik zeg: iedereen die hier binnen is, blijft hier binnen. Ik wil niemand zijn burgerrechten ontnemen. Het zijn onze Marokkaanse rotjongens, daar kunnen we koning Hassan niet mee opschepen. We hebben ze zelf binnengelaten, dan zullen we het ook zelf moeten

90 Idem.


oplossen. Voor Antilliaanse jongeren wil ik een uitzondering maken. Die zijn hier illegaal binnengekomen; nou, hup terug. Maar als je hier geboren en getogen bent, heb je burgerrechten [...]”91 I say: everyone who has been here can remain here. I will not deny

anybody’s civil rights. They are our Moroccan bad boys, and we can not shift responsibility to King Hassan. We let them enter, making it our own problem to solve. For Antillean youths, I would like to make an exception. They entered here illegally; well, they can go back. But if you’re born and raised here, you have civil rights [...]

The anti‐discriminatory legislation and the social restraints forced

racist parties to convey the bluntly and violent racist messages into more subtle and indirect forms of social domination. They evade the explicit reference to racism by replacing the biological argumentation with the biological rhetoric. For instance, the leaders of FN used rhetoric devices, such as hyperboles (le carré diabolique de la destruction, la menace mortelle) and metaphors of war, water and disease (la bombe, le génocide culturel, les pompes aspirantes, l’extinction biologique), in order to hide the racist content of their discourse, but at the same time, to create an image of “the future of agony” that France is expecting to have. The protagonists of this doomsday scenario are the immigrants and euromondialists lead by the French ruling elites:

“[…] dans le carré diabolique de la destruction de la France, menée

par les politiciens de l’établissement, après ‘l’extinction biologique’ de la France, ‘la submersion migratoire’, ‘la disparition de la Nation’, s’ajoute le quatrième côté, le ‘génocide culturel’. ”92 […] in the diabolical square of the destruction of France led by the

politicians of the Establishment, after ‘the biological extinction’ of

91 Frank Poorthuis and Hans Wansink. De islam is een achterlijke cultuur [Islam is a backward culture], de Volkskrant, [http://www.volkskrant.nl/den_haag/article153195.ece/De_islam_is_een_achterlijke_cultuur]November 5, 2008. 92 See Three hundred measures for the French renaissance [300 mesures pour la renaissance de la France], [http://www.frontnational.com/doc_id_immigration.php], November 5, 2008.


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France, ‘the migratory submergence’, ‘the disappearance of the Nation’, a fourth side is added, the ‘cultural genocide’.

Denials and victimization are also used as tactics to avoid being

openly racist. Both Le Pen and Fortuyn denied that immigrants and Muslims could be victims of a stigmatized stereotypical thinking, maintaining instead that the natives were those discriminated by immigrants. Le Pen blamed immigrants for being a danger to the French identity and prosperity. The metaphors and the hyperboles were employed to create fear and anxiety, and thus, to motivate people to support restrictive and anti‐immigration policies:

“La présence et le développement, année après année, de colonies de peuplement, confortées par des dispositifs législatifs et sociaux très favorables et une délirante propagande de préférence étrangère, baptisée ʺlutte contre le racismeʺ, sont pour notre identité nationale une menace mortelle : ils modifient en profondeur la substance même du peuple français.” 93

The presence and development, year after year, of the colonies of people, reinforced by the social and legislative devices very supportive and a delirious propaganda of foreign preference, baptised as “fight against racism” are for our national identity a deadly threat: they change in depth the very substance of the French people.

Fortuyn used disclaimers to negate the hatred for Muslims and

highlighted that, on the contrary, the Dutch were unfairly treated by Islamic immigrants. He claimed that the Dutch had been the victims of Islamic discrimination and crime and clearly stated that the backward Islam had been a hindrance to the development of the Netherlands and even more, a restraint to the human rights and freedoms. Moreover, he said that the Netherlands underwent the process of emancipation of homosexuals long time ago and their identity had been accepted in the public sphere. But with 93 See FDA Le magazine de Jean‐Marie Le Pen, Les 5 grand chantiers du quinquennat Le Pen, Paperback, April 2007.


Muslim immigrants, these people were again seen obliged to hide their sexual orientations (homosexuals are less than a pig).

“Ik haat de islam niet. Ik vind het een achterlijke cultuur. Ik heb veel

gereisd in de wereld. En overal waar de islam de baas is, is het gewoon verschrikkelijk [...] Ja die islam, die zondert mensen af. Ze zien ons als een minderwaardig soort mensen. Marokkaanse jongens bestelen nooit een Marokkaan. Is u dat wel eens opgevallen? Wij kunnen wel bestolen worden. En ik natuurlijk nog dubbel, want ik ben niet alleen een christenhond, maar ook nog minder dan een varken. […] Ik heb geen zin de emancipatie van vrouwen en homoseksuelen nog eens over te doen. Op middelbare scholen zijn tal van homoseksuele leraren die vanwege Turkse en Marokkaans jongens in de klas niet durven uitkomen voor hun identiteit […].”94 I don’t hate Islam. I think it is a backward culture. I’ve travelled all

over the world. And everywhere where the Islam rules, it is terrible […] the Islam […] excludes people. They see us as an inferior sort of people. Moroccan boys never steal from a Moroccan. Have you ever noticed that? They are allowed to steal from us. And of course, they can steal from me even more, I’m not just a Christian dog, but I am even less than a pig. […] I do not wish to redo the emancipation of women and homosexuals again. There are many homosexual teachers in high schools that are afraid to reveal their sexuality because of Turkish and Moroccan youngsters […].

The strategy to minimize the socio‐political phenomena of

discrimination and racism is reinforced in the discourse of FN and LPF by the illegitimacy of the political opponents. The core of the argument meant to invalidate the policies of the ruling parties was based on the frequent use of topoi (socially shared opinions and commonsense conclusions about

94 Frank Poorthuis and Hans Wansink. De islam is een achterlijke cultuur [Islam is a backward culture], de Volkskrant, [http://www.volkskrant.nl/den_haag/article153195.ece/De_islam_is_een_achterlijke_cultuur]November 5, 2008.


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something). The topoi that were often part of the illegitimate strategy of these parties are:

Topos of complicity: The lobbyists of immigration (the euromondialists and the politicians of the Establishment) advocated collaboration, favoured (Islamic) immigration and tried to destroy the essence of the French identity. Implied conclusion: do not trust the lobbyists.

“Les lobbis de l’immigration prônent la collaboration: ils pensent pouvoir détruire l’essence de notre identité par une utilisation d’autant plus perverse de l’Islam qu’elle ne repose pas sur des valeurs religieuses, fussent‐elles islamiques.”95 Lobbyists of immigration advocate collaboration: they think they can

destroy the essence of our identity by using as much as pervert Islam which is not based on religious values, even if they were Islamic.

Topos of attractive legislation:

The immigration has been sustained by the same lobbyists through supportive social and legislative devices and a delirious propaganda. Implied conclusion: tougher legislation must be enacted.

“Le lobby immigrationniste a, en effet, su entretenir une législation attractive, fondée sur l’absence de distinction selon la nationalité.”96 The immigration lobby has, indeed, been able to maintain an attractive legislation, based on the lack of distinction according to nationality.

Topos of decline:

The Purple coalition had not dealt with the problem of the Islamic closed culture and the situation had worsened since 1993.

95 See FDA Le magazine de Jean‐Marie Le Pen, Les 5 grand chantiers du quinquennat Le Pen, Paperback, April 2007. 96 Idem.


Implied conclusion: the coalition must be changed if we want to preserve our culture and freedoms.

“Toen Paars in 1993 aantrad, had ik daar aanvankelijk grote verwachtingen van. Ik dacht: die gaan dat aanpakken, die gesloten cultuur. Dat is niet gebeurd. Integendeel. Het is veel erger geworden.”97 When the Purple coalition took office in 1993, initially I had great

expectations. I thought myself: they will address the issues of the closed culture. That didn’t happen. On the contrary. It became even worse.

Topos of abuse: The ruling parties abused the civil rights of immigrants by offering them bribe in change for their departure. Implied conclusion: we do not need such dishonest policies.

“Janmaat ging wel een stapje verder. Die wilde bevorderen dat mensen een enkele reis terug kregen. Dat zult u bij mij niet zien. Nou dat zie ik niet zo zitten. Daar moeten we maar eens even mee stoppen.”98 The ruling parties went a step further. They encouraged the policy to

give all the people a one way ticket back [without taking into consideration the civil rights]. You will not see that with me […] I do not agree with this. We have to stop this.

Each separate element of the strategy conceived to antagonize the

French and the Dutch people toward the immigrants and Muslims, the negative Other‐presentation, the denials, the victimization and the illegitimacy of the political opponents, was put together in a story of helplessness and 97 Frank Poorthuis and Hans Wansink. De islam is een achterlijke cultuur [Islam is a backward culture], de Volkskrant, [http://www.volkskrant.nl/den_haag/article153195.ece/De_islam_is_een_achterlijke_cultuur]November 5, 2008. 98 Idem.


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control. The natives portrayed as helpless because of the threatening immigration and Islamization, victimized and discriminated against by both the communities in question and the ruling elites are now able to see the wink of light at the end of the tunnel. With the “crisis” hitting the roof, the French and the Dutch civilization and civil peace succumbing under the pressure of ethnic conflict, Le Pen and Fortuyn reveal themselves as two strong leaders who are going to fight to save France and the Netherlands from decline.

“La présence sur le territoire français d’ethnies de plus en plus nombreuses, dont les membres privilégient souvent leur appartenance communautaire par rapport à leur assimilation au modèle français, pose à terme un problème de paix civile. En mêlant des hommes et des femmes d’origines ethniques et religieuses différentes, les ressortissants immigrés se trouvent déracinés, coupés de leurs traditions, tout comme les Français dans les quartiers immigrés se sentent étrangers dans leur propre pays. L’immigration est donc une source majeure d’insécurité.”99 The presence on the French territory of increasingly numerous

ethnicities, whose members often prefer the belongingness to their community in relation to their assimilation to French model, ultimately poses a problem of civil peace. By mixing men and women of different ethnic and religious origins, the resident immigrants find themselves uprooted, cut off from their traditions, like the French in the neighbourhoods of immigrants who feel strangers in their own country. Immigration is a major source of insecurity.

They portray themselves as the only politicians who can defend the

interests of the ordinary people, who can re‐establish the true norms and values and who can reconstitute the foundations of the Dutch and French culture.

99 See FDA Le magazine de Jean‐Marie Le Pen, Les 5 grand chantiers du quinquennat Le Pen, Paperback, April 2007.


“Je suis payé pour défendre les Français. Moi, je ne l’oublie pas. La nation, ce ne pas simplement un envie d’être ensemble, c’est aussi un sentiment d’appartenance, d’intérêt commun, de risque partagé.”100 I am paid to defend the French. I did not forget it. The nation is not

simply a desire to be together, it is also a sense of belonging, of common interest, of shared risk. “We willen het land teruggeven aan de mensen. De politiek moet de

burger uitnodigen mee te doen.”101 We want to give the country back to the people. Politicians should

invite the citizens to participate.

The semantic strategies of both parties have many commonalities but also differences. The “stories” were built up using fallacies (straw men fallacy, slippery‐slope fallacy, ad hominem fallacy) to invalidate the political opponents and rhetoric devices to increase the persuasive effects of the arguments. However, while Le Pen tried to ‘simplify and exaggerate’ the content of his messages in order to increase the impact on the public opinion,102 Fortuyn delivered more informed speeches sustained by clear evidence. Racist references were also signalled more in the discourse of Le Pen than in the discourse of Fortuyn. Whereas Le Pen acknowledged indirectly his racist views, Fortuyn was more preoccupied to deny them. The analysis of the use of language in LPF discourse showed nevertheless subtle forms of racism and discrimination.

In conclusion, we may say that despite the fact that these parties acted as racist both at the semantic and conceptual level trying to justify and legitimize the exclusion of immigrants and Muslims, their political

100 Idem. 101 Frank Poorthuis and Hans Wansink. De islam is een achterlijke cultuur [Islam is a backward culture], de Volkskrant, [http://www.volkskrant.nl/den_haag/article153195.ece/De_islam_is_een_achterlijke_cultuur]November 5, 2008. 102 Ineke van der Valk, “Political discourse on ethnic issues. A comparison of the Right and the Extreme‐Right in the Netherlands and France (1990‐97)”, in Ethnicities, no. 3(2), 2003, p. 195.


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programme was not entirely focused on the criminality of immigrants and on the Islamization of culture and identity. Therefore, we may ascertain that together with the racist identity, there are other identities assumed by FN and LPF through discourse.

Assuming the populist identity from the ideological point of view

Until now, the concept of populism has been framed in this chapter as a mechanism rather than an ideology that explains how the heterogeneous identities of a party come together in a chain of equivalence and subsume to a hegemonic identity while they carry on the common rejection towards an excluded element. In this sub‐section, I am though focusing on the concept of Populism as ideology because it contributes to the structuring of the last important identity, from the bulk of different identities, of LPF and FN.

Populism is a political ideology because it meets the necessary criteria to be labelled as such. Heywood defines ideology as a more or less coherent set of ideas that provide a basis for organised political action [...] intended to preserve, modify or overthrow the existing power system.103 We can extract from this definition three important aspects: underlying programmatic ideas (i) about the present order, (ii) about the ideal‐type of political arrangement, and (ii) about ways to maintain, challenge or denounce the status‐quo. Therefore, I argue that Populism matches these criteria because it claims to know the way the present order functions and it offers an alternative that it is portrayed as the only legitimate path to reach the ideal political arrangement.

A populist party appeals to vox populi by sustaining more direct forms of democracy and it criticizes the establishment for being elitist and for creating an institutional framework that hinders the transparency of the political decisions. According to this conceptualization, I argue that FN and LPF are populists because they refer to people as a unified corpus; they take an anti‐establishment stance by accusing both the government and the opposition of stealing the democracy from the people; and they strive to create more direct links between the people and those who share the political power. 103 Andrew Heywood, Political Ideologies. An Introduction, 3rd Edition, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, p. 43.


The reference to “the people” occurs heavily in both the discourse of FN and LPF. “The people” in the populist perception are a single unity, with no internal cleavages, ordinary as opposed to the elitist government or “political class”, and oppressed because of the arbitrary policies dictated by particular interests. When speaking about “the people”, both FN and LPF employed general terms such as the people, the citizens, as if they were referring to abstract entities. While FN was giving an explicit nationalist connotation, les Français (the French), nos compatriots (our compatriots), la nation (the nation), LPF was attaching to “the people” a civic connotation, de burger (the citizens). Although less frequent, the parties were referring to “the people” in a particular sense also (the entrepreneur, the patient, the farmer). However, these groups became representative for the whole through a rhetoric technique with the purpose to appeal to a broader audience.104

FN and LPF placed “the establishment” in direct opposition to “the people”. The anti‐establishment statements were often accompanied by the reference to the victimized people. The ideal‐type of democracy where the will belongs solely to “the people” is contrasted to the existing representative democracy that is practiced in corrupt institutions through abusive policies dictated by oligarchic interests. The target of the populist critique is not only the political elite but also bureaucracy, private institutions and media. Barney and Laycock say that the main purpose of these statements is to delegitimise established structures of interest articulation and aggregation.105

Despite the fact that in general terms the criticism was framed more or less in the same fashion, particular variation could be found also. For instance, FN shot its arrows well beyond the national boundaries, attacking Euro‐Atlantic political actors and institutions for interfering into French domestic affairs (e.g. les lobbis de l’immigration – the lobbyists of immigration). Le Pen denounces the whole French system of being corrupt because it favours back‐stage affaires and it practices political clièntelism. Ignoring any democratic accountability, les “dynasties bourgeoises” (the

104 The rhetoric technique is synecdoche that is understood as a figure of speech in which a whole is represented by one of its parts. 105 Darin David Barney and David Laycock, “Right‐Populists and Plebiscitary Politics in Canada”, in Party Politics, no. 5 (3), London: Sage Publications, 1999, p. 321.


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bourgeois dynasties) transmit the electoral mandates from father to son. The opinion formers (journalists, scientists) were also finger pointed for not showing the true face of the reality. The terminology used to discredit “the establishment” was general, les élites dirigeantes (the leading elites), l’établissement (the Establishment), les lobbis financiers mondialistes (international financial lobbyists), but also specific, directed to particular institutions or politicians. On the other hand, Fortuyn was more concerned with the malfunction of the system due to sinuous bureaucracy and intermediary structures that were disturbing the direct communication between “the people” and the elected and that were spreading the resources. LPF employed rhetorical figurae to express the discontent and to enhance the persuasion of the argumentation: De bezem door de doorgeschoten bureaucratie (Sweeping the bureaucracy that went too further).106 As we can see, the main difference between the discourse of LPF and FN is that the former is attacking less the “political class” and more the bureaucracy that flourished inside the public system. However, there were several references to the incompetence of the political elites (Paarse Coalitie – the Purple Coalition) to “westernize” the Islamic culture, considered as the Trojan horse of intolerance.107

To remedy the situation and to redeem the broken political system, FN and LPF sustained that the sovereignty should be placed back in the hands of “the people”. They intended to do this by means of direct democracy such as referenda, popular consultations, and even a reform of the electoral system. While LPF issued concrete proposals of institutional changes and direct election of mayors and the prime‐minister, FN used la voie référendaire (referendum) rather as a rhetorical mean than a democratic viable solution. However, both parties stressed that they are working for “the people” and they intend to make the process of decision‐making fully transparent.

All in all, we can observe from the previous analysis that all three elements of the populist ideology were present in the discourse of LPF and

106 See Verkiezingsprogramma LPF Hoofdpunten ‐ januari 2003 [The main points of the electoral programme of LPF – January 2003] [http://www.pimfortuyn.com/asp/default.asp?t=show&id=1432] November 6, 2008. 107 De Paars or the Purple is the nickname of a government coalition of social‐democrats and liberals. It is derived from the combination of the color of the liberals (blue) and social‐democrats (red).


FN. However, the degree of intensity differed from one dimension to the other. Moreover, Populism had been assumed more seriously by LPF since it managed to propose a coherent political action. In addition, their strategy was not focused solely on the disparagement of the political opponents and on the exaggeration of their human capacities to change the status quo. On the other hand, FN adopted Populism as a style of political communication and behaved more as a catch‐all people’s party.108

Radical populist identity The purpose of this last sub‐section is to show that the discursive

process in which an identity becomes hegemonic follows the populist logic. In other words, I want to illustrate that FN and LPF, by issuing a discourse against immigrants and Muslims, managed to fix their populist identity to a nodal point after it had reunited, in a chain of equivalence against the excluded element, all the other separate identities and it had incorporated the chain into its own identity.

The word “radical” placed in front of populist identity stresses the importance of the language used by LPF and FN in adopting the anti‐immigrant and anti‐Muslim stance. I preferred “radical” instead of “radical right” or “extreme right” because the latter would have implied a strict labelling in line with the Left‐Right division. According to Laclau, populism has an ontological necessity to express permanently the social division, and therefore, the void may be occupied by political signs radically opposed, not only belonging to the Right but also to the Left.109 For instance, the electoral programme of FN contained leftist policy proposals such as protectionnisme ciblé (targeted protectionism) with regards to certain strategic sectors and family aids for French only. On the other hand, the leftist themes were not extensively developed in the electoral programme of LPF. Though, with a socialist background and educated in the spirit of Marxist ideology, it is not clear what contribution Fortuyn would have brought to the Dutch political

108 See Jasper de Raadt, David Hollanders, and André Krouwel, “Varieties of Populism: An Analysis of the Programmatic Character of Six European Parties”, Working Papers Political Science, No. 2004/04, Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2004, p. 2. 109 Ernesto Laclau, La raison populiste, p. 108.


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life if he had been alive after the elections in 2002. In addition, these parties are rather reactionary that xenophobic because they criticize the political system for being technically incompetent and morally corrupt to deal with the immigration and integration and they do not reject in totality the immigrants and Muslims.

No identity is a‐priori and thus, it does not have a fixed location within the social structure. When a party emerges or undertakes a new theme in its discourse it is forced to identify within a specific location in the political structure by filling up a gap which exists there. This means that when immigration and “Islamization” became the core issues of FN and LPF’ programme, these parties had to identify within certain positions depending on their discourse at a given moment in time (e.g. FN ‐ fascist, racist, and populist identity; LPF ‐ racist and populist identity). When the social antagonism was expressed, the French, the Dutch versus les étrangers (foreigners), sans papiers (the documentless), les clandestins (illegal immigrants), de Islam (the Islam), the radical populist identity became hegemonic through the integration of the other heterogeneous identities in a chain of equivalence. The coagulation of the other identities did not imply the elimination of all differences. They continued to exist because what mattered was the perceived common enemy, which, in this case, was the immigrant and Muslim community.

Each identity is the expression of unfulfilled social demands. The fascist identity of FN is the exponent of ethnic clashes. The racist identity monopolized the unsatisfied social demands caused by the cultural incompatibility between the natives and the immigrants, especially those of Muslim origin. The populist identity outlines the gap between the citizens and institutional politics. The radical populist identity brought together the disconnected social demands and laid the blame on immigrants and Muslims for causing them. Once the “cause” of the problems had been identified, the radical populist elites portray themselves as the only legitimate politicians that could restore the country, the identity or the “government by the people, for the people”.

The populist elites preserved the antagonism by employing floating signifiers, concepts that can be found in all three types of discourses: fascist racist and populist. For example, insecurity was used in the anti‐immigrant argumentation because it could stand for unfulfilled social demands such as


unemployment (social insecurity) and high crime rate (physical insecurity). The immigrants and the Muslims were blamed for abusing laws and for embracing the physical violence. They were also accused for coming to France because the system offers them more advantageous unemployment benefits than the wages they could receive in their home countries. Therefore, the anti‐immigrant discourse apparently pertaining to the right‐wing was combined with themes that belonged to the left‐wing repertoire in order to attract voters who did not have a solid idea about their identity.

The electorate of these parties did not necessarily identified with any type of ideology, being it fascist, racist or populist. The empirical evidence shows that radical populist parties mobilized a large part of the electorate not because their policies were actually seen comprehensive and well founded but because they occupied the space left free by the lack of an alternative political discourse. This was possible because, as I said earlier, a large percentage of voters did not have fixed issue positions (fixed identities), so, their preferences could be induced through persuasive communication.

All in all, we can see that the radical populist strategy of these parties entails the passage from disconnected social demands to a universal one via the construction of a chain of equivalence and the creation of an external, antagonistic force. They coagulated the voters by shaping their dissatisfactions regarding to the presence of immigrants and Muslims in France and in the Netherlands.

Conclusions In this chapter I attempted to analyze according to Discourse Theory

the manner in which FN and LPF framed their radical populist identity. Grosso modo, the analysis indicated that although the radical populist identity is void of any ideological content, it does not necessarily imply that its components can not be the expression of ideologies. This means that both parties acquired radical populist identity by placing the heterogeneous identities (embodied in three different ideologies) in a chain of equivalence and by opposing the chain to an exterior element.


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However, the degree of radical populism differs from one party to the other. FN identified with all three components of radical populist identity (fascist, racist and populist) while LPF assumed only the last two identities. FN has a fascist dimension due to its affiliation to fascist movements, from which it borrowed a number of principles such as Führerprinzip, anti‐materialism and ethnic nationalism. These elements were not entirely preserved in the discourse of FN, being rather used as discursive strategies.

Another difference between the parties analysed is that FN scored higher on racist statements than LPF. The positive presentation of the in‐group (the French) and negative presentation of the out‐group (immigrants and Muslims) was highlighted through an excessive utilization of discourse strategies based on rhetoric that implied an increased level of persuasion and manipulation. On the other hand, the discourse of LPF showed more subtle forms of racism and discrimination.

A further differentiation between FN and LPF could be made also when the scale of populism was examined. While Fortuyn criticized the public sector and signalled the state of decline due to the purple years of inconsistent policies, Le Pen directed his critique mostly towards the Establishment. In addition, the general democratic rhetoric was missing from the discourse of FN.

In the end, I would like to acknowledge the fact that the social becomes a meaningful construction only through discourse but, at the same time, it is disrupted by dislocation and antagonism.

The Discursive Road form 9/11 to Operation Iraqi Freedom

Nicoleta Colopelnic

The aim of this essay is to render evident the discursive conditions of possibility of ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’. In order to do so, the approach will be implicitly a discursive one. Using this approach, world politics is explained by highlighting the discursive structures that make possible certain representations and certain identities for actors on the scene of international relations. Why are some actors read as danger? Who renders this reading possible and on what grounds? What I aim at revealing are the discursive structures that made the intervention in Iraq in March 2003 possible. In doing so, my starting point will be the events that took place on September 11, 2001, but we should keep in mind the warning that Edward Said makes in the 2003 edition of his book, ‘Orientalism’:

“Without a well‐organized sense that these people over there were

not like ‘us’ and didn’t appreciate ‘our’ values – the very core of traditional Orientalist dogma […] – there would have been no war”.1

So, this reading of the Other as danger, and the legitimization of

violence against it, draws upon discursive structures that were at hand before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Baring this in mind, I shall try to explain how such expressions as 9/11, ‘war on terror’, ‘Axis of Evil’ gained their meaning and how they made possible a certain identification of the actors involved.

1 Edward Said, Orientalism, London: Penguin Books, 2003, p. XV.


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The Discursive Approach: Preliminary Remarks Since its establishment as an academic subject, the field of international relations theory became more and more diverse, many new debates marking its evolution till this day. The many different theories tried to establish the main actors on the scene of international relations, their goals and the main patterns of their behaviour. The debate that goes on as we speak is one between the established traditional or mainstream theories, mainly Neo‐Realism and neo‐Liberalism, and the new alternative approaches to international relations. The main methodological dispute between the traditional and the alternative approaches can be reduced to two main issues: the ontological issue – is there an objective reality? – and the epistemological issue: can we know this reality? According to their answer to the ontological question, theoretical approaches can be divided into explanatory and constitutive:

“An explanatory theory is one that sees the world as something

external to our theories of it; in contrast a constitutive theory is one that thinks our theories actually help construct the world”.2

According to their answer to the epistemological question, the

theoretical approaches can be divided into foundational and anti‐foundational; this

”distinction refers to the simple‐sounding issue of whether our beliefs about the world can be tested or evaluated against any neutral or objective procedures”.3

An approach that is both constitutive and anti‐foundational, assuming that there is no reality outside the theory that can only seek to understand this “reality” and not to explain it, is known as Postmodernism. According to François Lyotard, Postmodernism refers to incredulity 2 Steve Smith, ”Reflectivist and constructivist approaches to international theory”, in John Baylis, Steve Smith, (eds.), The globalization of world politics: an introduction to international relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 226. 3 Ibidem, p. 227.

The Discursive Road from 9/11 to Operation Iraqi Freedom 72

towards metanarratives.4 These metanarratives are in fact theories that base themselves on foundationist claims. They claim to be objective and reveal an universal truth about human nature, or the social and political world, or about the nature of international relations. Postmodernism questions the claim that an objective truth is out there for us to explain, that a theory is neutral and all it does is discover rules and patterns of behaviour that are universally valid. The ´truth´ is not independent from the theory that explains it, because every theory establishes what matters as a fact and assumes that its claims are universally valid. According to Michel Foucault: ”We are subjected to the reproduction of truth through power, and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth”.5 Truth and power are not independent from one another. Thus, there is no ´objective´ truth, only ´regimes of truth´ that

“reflect the ways in which, through history both power and truth develop together in a mutually sustaining relationship. What this means is that statements about the social world are only ´true´ within specific discourses”.6

But the power‐knowledge relationship is not the only issue raised by Postmodernism, another one is the relationship between truth and language. “What is communicated about events is determined, not by the character of events themselves, but by linguistic figures or forms”.7 From this point of view, the claim of many theories that they represent reality is highly problematic. Jacques Derrida suggests two methods for uncovering the way through which a text is constructed based upon oppositions of terms that are naturalized and claim to represent reality. There methods are deconstruction and double reading.8 When it comes to the academic field of 4 Ibidem, p. 239. 5 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, p. 132, apud, Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post‐Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 78. 6 Steve Smith, op. cit., p. 240. 7 Kenneth J. Gergen, „Correspondence versus Autonomy in the Language of Understanding Human Action”, in Donald W. Winslow Fiske, Richard A. Shweder (eds.), Metatheory in Social Science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, p. 143, apud Pauline Marie Rosenau, Op. cit., p. 79. 8 Steve Smith, op. cit., p. 240.


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international relations theory, the main target of deconstruction and double reading were different concepts naturalized by the traditional approaches in explaining the behaviour of states. One of the most criticized theories to this day is Neo‐Realism.9 Often referred to as postmodern, discourse theories are those theories that using an inter‐disciplinary approach, aim at combining elements of linguistic analysis with main elements of social and political analysis, dealing especially with issues concerning social practice, identity, power and legitimation. These social and political issues are approached as discursive practices. From a linguistic point of view, discourse analysis refers to the analysis of certain texts. But integrating some social and political issues into this analysis led to the expanding of the field of discourse analysis to issues concerning identity construction, the process of political legitimation, the power‐truth relationship. A definition of the term discourse must come to answer several questions regarding the usage of language: who, how, when and why uses language? These questions outline the main issues that discourse theories are concerned with: identity, meaning, legitimation and power. Although in the beginning, the different theoretisations concerning discourse were more prone to the semantic and linguistic aspects, in time, the postmodern issues concerning the existence of an objective reality and an objective truth, the relationship between reality and language, and the construction of reality through language began to gain ground in discourse analysis. Discourse was defined as a social practice and its main issue was that of the forming and reforming of the object and subject through discourse. These developments in discourse theory are attributed to the important contributions of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Slavoj Žižek.10

9 See Richard K. Ashley, “The Poverty of Neo‐Realism” in Robert O. Keohane (ed.), Neo‐Realism and Its Critics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 10 See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, Archeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish; Jacques Derrida, Writting and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, Deconstrucția politicii; Ernesto Lacalau, New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time, Emancipations; Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Politica, The Democartic Paradox; Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology; Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left.


Michel Foucault explores the relationship between truth and power. According to him, the main difference between language and discourse is one concerning power: “we can, linguistically, say many things. Why do we, in fact, say some things and not others?”11 Discourse is defined as a practice that can be best understood if we analyse the relationship between truth, knowledge and power, inside what Foucault calls a ´regime of truth´:

“Truth is of the world; it is produced there by virtue of multiple constraints. …Each society has its regime of truth, its ʹgeneral politicsʹ of truth: that is the types of discourse it harbours and causes to function as true: the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true from false statements, the way in which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures which are valorised for obtaining truth: the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true”.12

A discourse is not something isolated, but it is a practice that

continuously forms and reforms its objects. To Jacques Derrida, discourse plays an essential role in the construction of the social and of social identity, and according to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, there is no extradiscursive reality:

“The notion of antagonism, central to their work, arises as the

experience of the limit of the social, but this limit is within the social, not beyond it: There is no beyond, no extradiscursive realm”.13 The discursive practices determine and constitute the social and

political structures, nothing being left outside discourse. Even social identity is determined by discursive practices. These discursive approaches own their development to a change in the view on language that led to the questioning of the nature of representation. Language does not merely reflect reality, but actually constructs it. Ferdinand de Saussure points to 11 Jenny Edkins, Poststructuralism and International Relations, London: Boulder, 1999, p. 46. 12 Michel Foucault, „Truth and power: an interview with Alessandro Fontano and Pasquale Pasquino”, in Patton M. Morris, (ed.), Michel Foucault: Power/Truth/Strategy, Sydney: Feral Publications, 1979, p. 46, apud Sara Mills, Discourse, New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 16. 13 Jenny Edkins, op. cit., p. 134.


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the way in which a word derives its meaning from its relation with other words. There are two kinds of relations that make up the system of differences that give a word its meaning: the contrast with other words and the position in sentences.14 The notion of difference elaborated by de Saussure is taken one step further by Jacques Derrida who, by using the notion of difference, tries to “to show how two opposing terms function within thought. The opposition relies on an illusion”.15 Language and discourse raise issues concerning power. Some discourses are more legitimate then other, they are given more credit. “Power is directly exercised and expressed through differential access to various genres, contents, and styles of discourse”.16 Not only this, but, the discursive practice also plays an essential role in identity construction. Starting with the anti‐essentialist view of socio‐constructivism “every collective [identity] becomes a social artefact”,17 that constitutes itself in the process of social interaction. But Postmodernism is the one that would pay more attention to the role of power in the process of identification, arguing that the construction of identities does not take place outside power relations, but in close connection to them. The process of identification actually refers to the interests and resources of the one that is making this identification. Thus the discourses that are available to us limit the ways of identification.

“Our identity therefore originates not from inside the person, but

from the social realm, a realm where people swim in a sea of language and other signs, a sea that is invisible to us because it is the very medium of our existence as social beings”.18

14 Jonathan Potter, Representing Reality: Discourse, Rethoric and Social Construction, London: Sage Publication, 2004, p. 70. 15 Jenny Edkins, op. cit., p. 68. 16 Teun A. van Dijk, Structures of Discourse, Structures of Power, p. 22, [http://www.discourses.org/OldArticles/Structures%20of%20discourse%20and%20structures%20of%20power.pdf], 5 March 2008. 17 Karen A. Cerulo, “Identity Construction: New Issues, New Directions”, Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 23, 1997, p. 387, [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2952557], 26 May 2008. 18 Vivien Burr, Social Constructionism, New York: Routledge, 2003, pp. 108‐109.


The postmodern subject does not have a fix, essential identity, and language and the social environment contribute to the construction of this identity. According to Ernesto Laclau “the constitution of a social identity is an act of power and identity as such is power”.19 Thus, identity is not perceived as something stable, as something that can be established once and for all. It is in a process of continuous formation and reformation through the language and power games that structure the social and political reality.

9/11 and “the War on Terror” A major event: 9/11

On the morning of September 11, 2001, two passenger planes crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, leading to their collapse and causing the death of approximately 3000 persons. Another passenger plane crashed into the Pentagon Building in Washington D.C, and yet a forth plane crashed near Shanks Ville, Pennsylvania. This was a “major event” that left a deep mark on the scene of international relations, changed the priorities when it comes to assuring collective security, and made the interventions in the name of the ”War against Terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq possible.

What turned 9/11 into a “major event”? The postmodernist analysis defined the event as one that marks the end of the post‐Cold war era and with it a paradigm shift.20 To be able to understand what turns 9/11 into a “major event”, we must, as Jacques Derrida suggests,

19 Ernesto Laclau, “New Reflections on the Revolutions of Our Time” in Ernesto Laclau, (ed.), New Reflections, London: Verso, 1990, pp. 31–32, apud Jenny Edkins, op. cit., p. 133. 20 Sharif M. Shuja, “The September 11 Tragedy and the Future of World Order” in Contemporary Review, 2002, p. 199.


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“distinguish between the brute fact, the impression and the interpretation. Of course, it is almost impossible to cut out the brute fact from the system that produces the information about it”.21

An event is not equal to the fact itself, but it also contains the

impression that the fact leaves.22 So, we can say that 9/11 is a “major event” because it left the impression of being a major event. According to Derrida, an event involves a certain perplexity, an acknowledgement of not understanding, of the fact that what just happens is situated somewhere outside our horizon of knowledge and comprehending. This is one reason why what happened on 9/11 is referred to by a simple calling of the date – September 11, 9.11, nine‐eleven – “a name, a date – it speaks of the unspeakable, acknowledging that we do not recognize: we don’t even know, we don’t know how to qualify, we don’t know what we are talking about”.23 An event brings about it a silence, a lack of a linguistic and conceptual framework within which we can define the fact as clear as possible. An event also involves a certain amount of surprise, a lack of foreseeing.

The facts that took place on the morning of 9/11 shattered more than steel buildings, they also shattered the entire post‐Cold War discourse. From this point of view, the 9/11 event was indeed a “major event”. Jacques Derrida notices that to be able to grasp the whole significance of the event, more that just a quantitative analysis is needed. The scale of material damage or of human loss cannot in itself account for the impression that what just happened is a major event. But, according to Derrida, 9/11 represents a different kind of threat, a threat to

“the whole system of interpretation, axiomatic, logic, rhetoric and also the concepts and evaluations that should enable us to understand and explain something like 9/11. I am referring here to

21 Jacques Derrida, „Autoimunități, sinucideri reale şi simbolice. Un dialog cu Giovanna Borradori”, in Jacques Derrida, Deconstrucția politicii, Cluj‐Napoca: Ideea Design & Print, 2005, p. 102. 22 Ibidem, p. 102. 23 Ibidem, p. 100.


the entire discourse that is accounted for in a massive, prevalent, hegemonic way in the global public space”.24

The post‐Cold War discourse was no longer suitable to account for 9/11. Besides all this, 9/11 is a major event because the target of the

´attack´ was the national territory of the United States of America, the state that following the collapse of the USSR remained the only hegemonic state on the scene of international relations. The role of the US in the post‐Cold War era was that of

“guarantor and tutor of the whole world order, the one, that ultimately is supposed to assure the credit in general, as well as when it comes to financial transactions, as when it comes to the language, laws, political or diplomatic transactions.”25 9/11 showed to the world that even this hegemonic power is

vulnerable, and by doing so it brought into disrepute the whole world political discourse for which the US war a guarantor. Moreover, the targets chosen for the “attack” were not random targets, but they were the very symbols of economic and military power of this sole world superpower, and thanks to globalization, mainly to the fact that the events were broadcasted live in every corner of the world, 9/11 acquired a global dimension.26 A whole new discursive framework must be used in order to account for this event by politicians and by political analysts as well.

Tragedy, crime, act of war: making sense of 9/11 The act of naming 9/11 has important consequences on determining the significance of this event and of fitting it in a certain discourse, as well as on the establishing the identity of those who were directly involved. As we mentioned before, the first reaction is that of being perplexed. 24 Ibidem, pp. 105‐106. 25 Ibidem, p. 107. 26 Roland Bleiker, ʺAestheticising Terrorism: Alternative Approaches to 11 Septemberʺ in The Australian Journal of Politics and History 49.3, 2003, [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5002025505], 3 March 2008.


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“The prevalent faculties, including reason, are confronted by their limits and reduced to impotency, for they are unable to grasp the event in its totality. The result is incomprehension, pain and fear, which expresses the gap between what was experienced and what can actually be apprehended by thought.”27

After the shock comes the attempt to name the event, to fit it into

some discursive framework. But who has the authority and the legitimacy to do such a thing, to give a name to the events of 9/11? According to Derrida,

“the dominant power is the one that manages to impose, to legitimize and even to legalize (because it is always a question of law), on a national or global scene, in a certain situation, the interpretation that suits her best”.28 Thus, the official reaction comes from Washington through the

voice of President George W. Bush. By naming this event the president (re)creates his role of leader: “when the president speaks, he governs”.29 Everybody turned his gaze upon President Bush to find out not only what happened but also what will happen next, what would be the official reaction “it was his role and the responsibility of his office to shape public opinion, to put events in perspective, and to set the nation on a sensible course of action”.30 The act of naming actually took place is a series of successive addressing of the president to his nation. The first remarks of the president defined the event as a tragedy: “Today weʹve had a national tragedy. Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country”.31 The first interpretation of the event is a pretty

27 Ibidem. 28 Jacques Derrida, op. cit., p. 116. 29 Sara Silberstein, War of Words, Language, Politics and 9/11, London: Routledge, 2002, p. 5. 30 Robert L. Ivie, Democracy and America’s War on Terror, Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2006, p. 127. 31 George W. Bush, „Remarks by the President after two Planes Crash into World Trade Center, Emma Brooker Elementary School, Sarasota, Florida”, 11 September 2001, in Sara Silberstein, op. cit., p. 18.


indefinite one and it dose not offer much information about its nature. It is a tragedy, it is yet unknown what is the nature of this tragedy, is it a crime that involves a certain course of action, or an act of war that brings about a very different course of action? The general public is assured that those responsible for 9/11 will be hunted down and punished, but there is no reference to the way in which this will be done. In the president address to the nation, that very day, a few things are sorted out and named: what was attacked was “our way of life, our freedom”, by a series of “evil acts of terror”, “acts of mass murder”, but even so, the general public is assured that “our country is strong” and that everything will get back to normal, the government and the economy, and that the main priority is the prevention of similar attacks; at the same time an action to find those who are behind these “evil acts” is on it’s way: “Iʹve directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice”.32 As it can be noticed the definition of the event that comes out of these statements are rather more towards the naming of 9/11 as a crime, it is true, a massive and unprecedented crime, but one that leads to an investigation to find those responsible and to bring them to justice, thus treating them as criminals. It must be mentioned that when it comes to the notions of war and crime, there is between them a distinction that is based on the way in which sovereignty is defined in the modern era. According to this, the notion of crime is closely linked to the monopole of violence that the state has, concerning its home affaires. A crime is a breach of this monopole, and its punishment is mainly about maintaining the security of the state on a domestic level. This concerns an effort of the state to protect its citizens from the violent acts of other citizens of the same state. The main way through which this is done is legislation and courts of law. The fight against crime, even when we are talking about international crime is assured by the state police that can cooperate with the police of other states. On the other hand the notion of war is connected to the sovereignty of a sate in the sense of its autonomy from other similar entities and, in the words of Carl von Clausewitz, “war is the continuation of politics by other

32 George W. Bush, “Statement by the President in his Address to the Nation”, 11 September 2001, in Sara Silberstein, op. cit., pp. 19‐20.


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means”,33 noting that it is about politics between states. So, war is something that concerns the foreign policy of a state. In the definition given to it by Clausewitz, the notion of war also implies a clear distinction between civilians and soldiers, a distinction that became very faint in the 20th century, especially when it comes to ethnic wars. The events of 9/11 were defined as being an act of war and not a crime, although until then terrorism, including international terrorism were dealt with as crimes. “On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country”.34 From all the interpretations that were at hand the one that was chosen was that of the act of war, the Pearl Harbor analogy being used very often. But the Pearl Harbor analogy had its limits, mainly because at Pearl Harbor, Japan, another sovereign state, attacked an American military base without any previous declaration of war. A series of distinctions that could be made in the case of the Pearl Harbor attack could not be made in the case of the 9/11 events. This was also evident in the fact that “The linguistic trajectory from the World Trade Center and the Pentagon began with silence. No state announced responsibility for the events of September 11.”35 But despite this it was clear that America had an enemy against which a global war would be declared. Another distinction that was shattered was the civilian – military distinction, because the targets of 9/11 were not military as in the case of Pearl Harbor. Something new happened on 9/11, something that would need new distinctions to make it comprehendible. Even if 9/11 was defined as an act of war we must ask ourselves as Derrida warns us

“Where do we draw the line between national and international, police and army, peacekeeping intervention and war, terrorism and war, civilian and military on a certain territory and in the structures that assures the defensive or offensive potential of a certain society?”36

33 R. B. J. Walker, “War, Terror, and Judgment” in Bulent Gokay, R. B. J. Walker, (eds.), 11 September 2001: War, Terror, and Judgment, London: Frank Cass, 2003, p. 78. 34 George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, United States Capitol, Washington, D.C.”, 20 September 2001, in Sara Silberstein, op. cit., p. 22. 35 Sara Silberstein, op. cit., p. XIV. 36 Jacques Derrida, op. cit., p. 116.


Why was 9/11 defined as an act of war and not as a crime? Because defining it as a crime supposes a certain course of action as a response, and defining it as an act of war supposes a completely different one.

“If terrorism is considered a criminal matter, the appropriate response is to gather evidence, correctly determine the culpability of the individual or individuals responsible for an incident and bring the perpetrators to trial.”37 Such a response is a rather a laborious one, requiring international

cooperation that can only be productive after some time passes. But keeping in mind the impression of a major event and the definition as an act of war, the response will be the calling up of a right to self‐defense and the declaration of a “war on terror”. Picturing 9/11 in the media The global dimension of 9/11 owns itself primarily to the broadcasting of the event across the world by the mass‐media, leading to the creation of a “global memory”38 and to a global representation of the event. The dimension of a major event was attributed to 9/11 also because of this “live” broadcasting of the facts across the world. A global public thus emerged, a public that lived this tragedy through their TV sets: “through media coverage that the day was primarily experienced and understood by its various cultural audiences”.39 The first role of mass‐media was to offer to the world public a set of images that became part of a “global memory”. 9/11 became a global event under the eyes of millions of viewers that watch in perplexity the collapse of the twin towers. Neither the scale of material damage, nor the number of victims did not determine the perception of the tragedy at a global level, because, as Jacques Derrida rightfully remarks:

37 Brian Michael Jenkins, op. cit., p. 216. 38 Stanley D. Brunn, “Introduction”, in Stanley D. Brunn, (ed.), 11 September and Its Aftermath: The Geopolitics of Terror, London: Frank Cass, 2004, p. 1. 39 Steven Chermak, Frankie Y. Bailey, Michelle Brown, “Introduction”, in Steven Chermak, Frankie Y. Bailey, Michelle Brown, (eds.), Media Representations of September 11, Westport: CT: Praeger, 2003, p. 4.


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“in a certain situation and in a certain culture, with the condition that the media echo does not come to dramatize the event, the killing of thousands of people in a very short time, can lead to less psychical and political outcomes, then the assassination of a single individual in a certain county, a certain culture, a certain nation‐state with an over‐equipped media”.40

This was the exact effect that those who organized the terrorist attack expected. Without the mass‐media, the global impact of 9/11 would have been much reduced in scale. “Terrorism, unlike conventional military target attrition, exercises dramatic power through the mass med1ia coverage it receives, rather more than it does through the number of casualties”.41 The representation power of the media is actually the dimension it is able to give to a certain event. Terrorism uses this power to attain its goal which is not as much the causing of material or human loss, but showing what it is capable of to a larger public, to the potential victims of a future attack. A terrorist act is a demonstration of might. By means of television broadcasting the whole planet witnessed this demonstration of might “radio, television and communications satellites gave the terrorists almost instant access to a worldwide audience, publicizing their cause and creating widespread alarm”.42 Western mass‐media, especially the American media generated a certain representation of the 9/11 events, giving priority to some interpretations and disregarding others. In this way, the viewers received a unitary, monolithic image of 9/11. The main characteristic of this image was the “blending information and entertainment in often highly problematic ways”.43 The main things that are emphasized are the spectacular, the heroic, the expression of emotions and feelings of those involved in the tragedy so the depiction of it can be as veracious as possible for the viewers. The main role of the media is to frame the event, to offer an

40 Jacques Derrida, op. cit., p. 118. 41 Deborah Staines, “Introduction”, in Deborah Staines, (ed.), Interrogating the War on Terror: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, p. 8. 42 Brian Michael Jenkins, op. cit., p. 210. 43 Roland Bleiker, op. cit.


interpretation that suits the viewers, to build a collective identity through the privileged narrative.

“To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem, definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described”.44

The first type of framing is the visual one that refers to the

collocations like “live”, “breaking news” that appear on the screen. A framing that was especially referring to 9/11 was that of “America under attack” used by CNN. This type of framing together with the stories of the survivors and the opinion of the officials that were broadcasted “helped transform an attack into an act of war”45 and helped build the collective identities, mainly the American identity of an attacked nation whose voice is the voice of the survivals and of those who condemn these attacks and reassure the viewers that something will be done to prevent other attacks like this from happening; it also implicitly helps build the identity of the Other, of those who committed these “cowardly acts”. But although the framing of the event was made in the terms of an act of war, the prevalent images that were broadcasted were of civilians and of civilian intervention forces, mainly firefighters and policemen. This only comes as a confirmation of the fact that the civilian‐military distinction in no longer a viable one. By confirming the interpretation of the event as an “act of war” the media also justified the response in whatever form it may come. The media and the official representation of the event lead to the creation of a certain collective American identity, a country that was united and supported the president all the way, and a president that was empowered to name the event and to establish a course of action; it also lead to the creation of an identity for those who committed those acts, the terrorists. 44 Robert Entman, “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm” in Journal of Communication 43, 1993, pp. 51–58 apud Amy Reynolds, Brooke Barnett, “’America under Attack’: CNN’s Verbal and Visual Framing of September 11”, in Steven Chermak, Frankie Y. Bailey, Michelle Brown, op. cit., p. 86. 45 Sara Silberstein, op. cit., p. 77.


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Creating identities: the rhetoric of evil The terrorist attacks of 9/11 brought the into the spotlight, although his face remained concealed at first. By naming the attack an act of war, America had an enemy. But what kind of an enemy? No state and no organization claimed the attacks. The enemy remained hidden. To be able to identify it, America first defined its own identity. Thus, the enemy would be the one who rejects all the values that America stands for. The official rhetoric can be resumed to the identifying of the Other as the “absolute evil”, whose actions cannot be justified by any means, and against which America had a duty to fight. Naming 9/11 an act of war leads to embracing of a certain vision of politics that works by the friend/foe dichotomy. This was identified as a main political distinction by Carl Schmitt in his Concept of Politics (1932), and it mainly refers to “the attribution of alienness and difference to an enemy such that extreme conflict is possible, in physical defence of the self”.46 The enemy poses such a threat to the way of life and the values of the self, because it is built as a stranger, the Other. Despite this, the enemy has the potential to become a friend, but it is a potential that never becomes reality, thus the enemy is a failed version of the self, “my enemy must, therefore, be someone who can attain the same level of civic meaning as me.”47 By conferring an absolute difference to the one who has the potential of being like myself, but fails, the enemy is cast outside the system of norms and values that belong to the self, and thus all violence against him is justified. Schmitt argues that “to invoke some higher claim behind war is to make the enemy an ʹoutlaw of humanityʹ, thereby preparing the ground for war against this stranger.”48 Because he is identified as being different the violence against him is justified, and because you can fight against him, he is an absolute Other. The act of naming 9/11 sets forth a process of identity building trough which a Self and an Other are created and antagonized. This process

46 Mat Coleman, “The Naming of ʹTerrorismʹ and Evil ʹOutlawsʹ: Geopolitical Place‐Making After 11 September”, in Stanley D. Brunn, op. cit., p. 94. 47 Nick Mansfield, “Under the Black Light: Derrida, War, and Human Rightsʺ, in Mosaic (Winnipeg) 40.2, 2007, [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5023293750>] 6 March 2008. 48 Mat Coleman, op. cit., p. 95.


of differentiation is fundamental for the identification process. The Self and the Other are represented as occupying antagonist positions leading to a polarization of the virtues attributed to the two. Moreover, the Other is identified as posing a threat to the very existence of the Self thus justifying the act of self‐defense. The discourse about the Other relies on the identification of the Other as the enemy who committed “an act of war” against us. The defining of 9/11 as an act of war determines the identification of America as a victim, an attacked nation. Before this victimization, a process of Americanization of the victims, takes place: “where an American ʹweʹ has conveniently buried the multiple nationalities and identities of those trapped in the World Trade Center towers, against the specter of ʹterrorismʹ”.49 On 9/11 the places of the terrorist attacks, especially New York, were identified with America itself, and the victims became American citizens as the president himself made it clear: “The victims were in airplanes, or in their offices; secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers; moms and dads, friends and neighbors.”,50 in other words they were co‐citizens, the attack against them being an attack against all Americans. Besides, the targets of the attacks were national symbols, a symbol of prosperity and a symbol of security, and what were attacked were the very “way of life”, the “freedom”51 and everything that America stands for. As a consequence the enemy is one that rejects such values as democracy and freedom which are at the very core at the American culture. The discursive construction of the American identity as a victim stands for its innocence. The behavior of the attacker cannot be justified by any means, because the victim is innocent. Giving the nation such characteristics as weakness, vulnerability, determine a feminine identification, and thus the masculine military action becomes necessary to compensate for the weakness of the victim and to prevent any further attacks.52 The reaction to the act of war is a masculine reaction that should concentrate on firm, decisive action, on a demonstration of might, on the

49 Ibidem, p. 93. 50 George W. Bush, “Statement by the President in his Address to the Nation”, 11 September 2001, in Sara Silberstein, op. cit., p. 19. 51 Ibidem, p. 19. 52 Stacy Takacs, “Terror TV: Challenging the Terror Paradigm in Post‐9/11 U.S. Entertainment Programing”, in Deborah Staines, op. cit., pp. 144‐145.


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exhibition of invulnerability and of the indestructibility of the nation, as opposed to a feminine response that would concentrate rather more on dialogue and compassion. The feminine‐masculine distinction, one which is deeply embedded in western culture, is used to justify the act of self‐defense that can only be a masculine one. Including the president’s identity is a masculine, patriarchal one, a father in which the nation, standing united as a victim, looks for comfort. This determines the invocation of the homeland model for whose defense the “father” must do anything that is necessary. The nation is united: “This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time”.53 America is at war. This road from victimization to the assurance that America will prevail is typical for the victimization process that took place. And for the nation to be at war, a scapegoat, an enemy was needed. For a victim to exist there must also exist a villain. Victimization supposes “the personification and ritual destruction of those powers that threaten the survival of community”.54 Victimization transforms the discourse about the Other in an “us‐them” dichotomy that

“function to constitute identities that personify good and evil: villainous subjects of ‘negative power’ (=terrorists) who must be fought and destroyed, and heroic subjects of “positive” power (=freedom‐fighters) who must kill and die in heroic struggles to defeat those evil powers”.55

The enemy is represented by these villains, the terrorists that committed such an abominable act against “us”. The enemy was identified as being a terrorist network, Al Qaeda,

“an enemy that identifies himself as being Islamic, a fundamentalist Islamic, even thought it does not necessarily represent the authentic

53 George W. Bush, “Statement by the President in his Address to the Nation”, 11 September 2001, in Sara Silberstein, op. cit., pp. 20‐21. 54 Michael Blain, “On the Genealogy of Terrorism”, in Deborah Staines, op. cit., p. 58. 55 Ibidem, p. 59.


Islam, and even though not every Muslim is ready to identify himself with it”.56

This identification of the terrorists as being the representatives of

the true Islam determines a differentiation from America’s perspective between “good” and “bad” Muslims, between those who really represent the Muslim faith, and those who in its name committed these horrible acts of terror. In his Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People on September 20th, 2001 President George W. Bush makes this differentiation:

“I also want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world. We respect your faith. Itʹs practiced freely by many millions of Americans and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself. The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them”.57 What takes place is a process of discursive identification of

Muslims. There are good Muslims, and bad Muslims who in fact betray Islam. But we must keep in mind that

“in the West, for instance, the image of the stereotypical terrorist contains strong Islamic and Arab features, and this long before 11 September. Islam has been constituted as the classical Other, encompassing people whose sense of identity and whose religious practices are so strange that they cannot be seen as anything else than a threat to the existing societal order”.58

56 Jacques Derrida, op. cit., p. 126. 57 George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, United States Capitol, Washington, D.C.”, 20 September 2001, in Sara Silberstein, op. cit., p. 24. 58 Roland Bleiker, op. cit.


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Islam has been constituted along the centuries as the Other against which the West could differentiate itself. Some elements of the orientalist discourse that determine a simplification, a monolithic and textual approach of the Orient as being inferior, uncivilized, traditional are still visible in the western discourse about Islam, as Edward Said shows in his book Orientalism published in 1978.59 To this stereotyped image of Muslim terrorism, the picturing of Middle East conflicts by the media and popular culture has a significant contribution. Terrorism was identified as the enemy. But terrorism is rather difficult to define. Moreover, it is by no means a new phenomenon. Is this a new kind of terrorism? The main issue regarding terrorism is that what for someone is terrorism, for someone else is liberation fight. But we we must keep in mind that power selects the interpretation that suits her best. Because of the difficulties in defining terrorism the international community adopted an approached that involved the defining of terrorist acts and tactics, rather than defining terrorism itself.60 Before 9/11 terrorist acts were considered to be in fact criminal acts, but after 9/11 the American discourse defines them as acts of war. We can argue that terrorism is not the one that changed dramatically, although changes did take place, mainly an internationalization of terrorist attacks, but that what changed is the paradigm of how to address terrorism. This new paradigm attributed a global dimension to the “major event” that was 9/11, thus marking a discursive shift in issues regarding world order and global security. The naming of terrorism offers to the state an enemy against which to protect its citizens, and even more, it brings into talk the issue of evilness.61 America’s official discourse placed terrorism alongside other incarnations of evil that it had to fight against. Terrorists are

“the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions – by abandoning

59 See Edward Said, op. cit. 60 Brian Michael Jenkins, op. cit., p. 214. 61 Mat Coleman, op. cit., p. 88.


every value except the will to power‐they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism.”62

By this placing of terrorism on the side of evil, America is asserting its mission to assure the world that this ideology of evil will not prevail, and that the values that America stands for, values of good, freedom and prosperity will prevail once more. U.S.A.´s response to the act of war committed against it is to “protect freedom”, to “bring the evildoers to justice” to give reassurance that this is “an era of freedom, here and around the world”, America is in a battle in which “God is not neutral”, a perpetual battle between “freedom and fear, justice and cruelty”, a battle in which America was always on the good side.63 “Americans perceive themselves to be an exceptional nation, a chosen people, destined to extend the fruit of freedom to an enslaved world”.64 The dichotomist good vs. bad discourse leads to a simplification of the enemy’s portrait and to the reduction of its identity to a single dominant trait, that of evilness, the caricature of the enemy, depriving him of any legitimization or justification for his action. In the same time, America’s portrait is also simplified, and reduced to the image of the freedom and justice fighter that leads to a legitimization of its actions. Those who committed the act of war against America were first viewed as cowards, and then as mad men – a rational human being would not be capable of such a horrible act, thus making terrorists irrational beings. The next step was the adoption of the rhetoric of evil. Those who committed these terrorist acts are in fact an expression of evil, of what is “the very worst of human nature.”65 There can be no justification for these deeds, and the sole motivation is hatred for all that America stands for, this leads to “attributing evil motives to evil deeds”.66 This discursive placing of the 62 George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, United States Capitol, Washington, D.C.” 20 September 2001, in Sara Silberstein, op. cit., p. 24. 63 Ibidem, p. 24. 64 Robert L. Ivie, op. cit., p. 125. 65 George W. Bush, “Statement by the President in his Address to the Nation”, 11 September 2001, in Sara Silberstein, op. cit., p. 20. 66 Robert L. Ivie, Oscar Giner, ʺHunting the Devil: Democracyʹs Rhetorical Impulse to War,ʺ in Presidential Studies Quarterly no. 37.4, 2008, [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5024109821], 3rd March 2008.


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enemy on evil’s side makes a complex analysis of the motivation behind these terrorist acts impossible. These acts are most clearly the expression of insanity and evilness, and thus they are incomprehensible and unjustifiable. And so, what you cannot comprehend you cannot negotiate with. You cannot have a dialogue with evil, you can only exterminate it. The Other, whose vision of the world is based on violence an fanaticism, is far too different from us so that a dialogue and hence a compromise could exist.

“On both sides of the divide, perpetrators of terror and counterterror draw upon a familiar vocabulary to reduce one another to demons that savagely massacre innocent people and thereby threaten to destroy all civilization. Each side marks the Other for eradication as subhuman, barbarian, insane, and wicked outlaws”.67

A mutual satanization of the enemy takes place. This justifies the war and the violence against it. The war on terror From the perspective of fighting against evil, a just war against terror can be argued for. The discursive placing of the other on evil’s side, and thus outside any possibilities of negotiation, leaves as an only option the declaring of a war on terror: to an act of war you respond on the same terms. Deterrence, the principle that worked so well during the Cold War, has now failed, as the 9/11 attacks have proven. To prevent any similar attacks a reaction is necessary, and this reaction is the starting of a “war on terror”. A declaration of war is a discursive act that uncovers a certain way of establishing meanings and a certain system of distinctions that make possible the existence of such a discursive act. We can even speak about a war paradigm when it comes to analyzing the possibility conditions of such a discursive act. Paradigms “function as an index to meaning, and therefore to the production and legitimation of related cultural forms and practices”.68 Even more, paradigms provide “conditions of possibility”69 for 67 Robert L. Ivie, op. cit., p. 135. 68 Deborah Staines, op. cit., p. 5.


discursive acts and practices. Placing terrorism into the war paradigm offers conditions of possibility for defining 9/11 as an act of war, as well as for declaring a “war on terror”.

“The war against terrorism ushers in a new paradigm, one in which groups with broad, international reach commit horrific acts against innocent civilians, sometimes with the direct support of States […]”.70

This is how President Bush describes the new paradigm of the war

on terror. This is a type of war against enemies of freedom who take innocent civilians as targets for their despicable evil acts. Furthermore, the enemy is not a sate, but a terrorist network with global reach. This determines a new way of thinking about both national and individual security. No place seems to be safe anymore. The war on terror is a global war, and even if some states can be pointed out as supporters of terrorist networks, the war on terror requires a global campaign. Borders cannot stop the infiltration of terrorist and cannot prevent terrorist attacks from taking place. “No geography, no ‘territorial’ designation is relevant, for some time, to localize the headquarters of these new technologies of aggression”.71 When it comes to terrorism, borders do not matter; the aggressor can be and strike anywhere. This global dimension of the terrorist threat extends to the ´War on Terror´; it means not only that the threat can be anywhere, but also that the answer to that threat can be anywhere:

“in the global war on terrorism the U.S. could target Al Qaeda suspects and kill them without warning wherever they are found. He indicated that included targeting persons on the streets of a peaceful city like Hamburg, Germany”.72

69 Ibidem, p. 6. 70 George W. Bush, Memo ´Re: Humane Treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees´, February 7, To the Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Attorney General, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, etc, 2002, apud Deborah Steins, op. cit., p. 2. 71 Jacques Derrida, op. cit., p. 113. 72 Mary Ellen O’Connell, When Is a War not a War? The Myth of the Global War on Terror, pp. 2‐3, [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=893822] 12 May 2008.


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At the basis of this distinction between war and terrorism, distinction that makes possible a war on terror, lays the differences between legitimate and illegitimate violence. The state is the only one that can claim the monopoly of the legitimate use of force, this fact relying on the concept of sovereignty: “from this claim that emerges the moral distinction between war (a legitimate act of violence perpetuated by a state) and terrorism (an illegitimate use of violence perpetuated by a non‐state actor)”.73 This distinction between war – a legitimate form of violence, and terrorism – an illegitimate form of violence, has important consequences on the identity of the terrorists. What are they? Soldiers or criminals? Thinking of terrorism in terms of the war paradigm leads to the identification of the terrorist as soldiers. This allows for the judging of terrorists in war tribunals instead of in civilian ones. But how must these “prisoners” be treated? Does the Geneva Convention concerning the treatment of prisoners of war apply to them or not?

“Arguing that these ʹcommitted terroristsʹ are not state agents but extraordinarily unusual nonstate actors whose very being permanently threatens the system of sovereign states, and thus that the prisoners are not covered under the terms of the Geneva Convention”, 74

the Bush administration considered some more or less abusive interrogation practices to be fully justified. Because of the discursive identification of the enemy with evil itself, the war against it is not just America’s, but it is a war of the entire free and civilized world. America is just one freedom fighter that must set an example to the rest of the world in the war against terrorism.

“This is not, however, just Americaʹs fight. And what is at stake is not just Americaʹs freedom. This is the worldʹs fight. This is civilizationʹs

73 Roland Bleiker, op. cit. 74 Mat Coleman, op. cit., p. 96.


fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom”.75

The war against terrorism is a war in the name of freedom, progress

and tolerance. The enemy is discursively placed as being an enemy of these values. But these values are beyond negotiation and compromise. In the battle between good and evil there can be no middle ground. This is why the world is divided into those who are on America’s side and those who oppose America and are thus on the terrorist’s side: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”.76 In the fight against evil there is no room for disagreement and critique. And there can be no neutral ground. This simplistic distinction between one side and the other has consequences when it comes to designating friends and enemies. Thus, states that are dealing with the problem of home terrorism and have a drastic policy toward it, declaring that they support by all means the war on terror, are America’s friends an allies, while other states are considered to be outlaws, either because they support terrorist networks – Afghanistan, or because they posses weapons of mass destruction – Iraq. This global polarization of sides – one, fighting terrorism, and the other supporting it – had the following consequence: “former global enemies became friends, as long as they supported a ʹwar on terrorismʹ; new enemies were created, some states (the ʹaxis of evilʹ) or those networks of terrorists which operate across state lines”.77 The threat posed by terrorism, a discursive construction, is perceived with such acuteness that a response is urgently needed. This response takes the form of some expression of the war paradigm in which terrorism is addressed after 9/11. Expressions of the war on terror can be

“visible in the bureaucracy of newly formed government bodies such as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. […] It is expressed by

75 George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, United States Capitol, Washington, D.C.”, 20 September 2001, in Sara Silberstein, op. cit., p. 25. 76 Ibidem, p. 25. 77 Stanley D. Brunn, op. cit., p. 3.


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the large military engagements of Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq) and Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan)”.78

Regarding internal affairs in the US, security became the main

concern of the government. Because terrorist can be anywhere, including among us, the government needed the appropriate tools to expose them and bring them to justice. Security would become the underlying principle of every action of the government. A first measure taken in order to increase homeland security was the tightening of border and airport control. The polarization between good and evil means that there is no room for dissent and “patriotism was reduced to inflexible conformity”.79 The clearest expression of this patriotism is the so called PATRIOT ACT (The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act), trough which terrorism is fought even at the price of giving the government the power to suspend certain fundamental citizen’s rights. This is possible by invoking a “state of siege”. Defining terrorist attacks as acts of war and fitting them into a war paradigm determines a “militarization of political life (as well as a politicization of the military) and a co‐extensiveness between war and politics”.80 The threat is perceived as omnipresent and thus special security measures are needed: “’Western democracies’ now characterize themselves as being under a state of siege, threaten everywhere, externally and internally by the specter of terrorism”.81 In a democratic suzerain state, the state of siege is closely linked to the state of war. The fragile balance between the suzerain power that grants security to its citizens and their individual rights and freedom can be disturbed only when something threatens the existence of the state that is the guarantor of this balance. Treating terrorism as a crime would not have made possible the invocation of a state of siege. Fighting terrorism incorporates also an economic dimension. To be able to carry this fight, economic security is needed: “Once we have funded our national security and our homeland security,

78 Deborah Staines, op. cit., pp. 6‐7. 79 Robert L. Ivie, op. cit., p. 156. 80 Saul Newman, Michael P. Levine, ”Terrible Terror: Security, Violence and Democracy in the War on Terrorism” in Deborah Staines, op. cit., p. 86. 81 Ibidem, p. 86.


the final great priority for my budget is economic security for the American people”.82 A first international expression of the war on terror was the intervention in Afghanistan in October 2001. Addressing terrorism in the war paradigm, and naming 9/11 an act of war made possible the invocation of a right to self‐defense and the starting of an armed intervention in Afghanistan. This intervention however was focused on “eliminating its most immediate means and agents”.83 The declared purpose of the intervention was eliminating the Al‐Qaeda headquarters in Afghanistan, as well as the overthrowing of the Taliban regime that supported this terrorist network. But this intervention was in fact a new sort of war, because the target was not the afghan state itself, but a terrorist network of global reach, and the Taliban regime, “the Bush administration declared war on Afghanistan and at the same time declared that the United States was not at war with the Afghan people”.84 The intervention in Afghanistan was an act of self‐defense. Something had to be done to respond to the act of war that was committed against America. But this intervention, although victorious did not mark the end of the war on terror, but merely its beginning:

“Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen”.85

82 George W. Bush, “President Delivers State of Union Address”, apud Robert L. Ivie, op. cit., p. 156. 83 Robert L. Ivie, op. cit., p. 151. 84 Drucilla Cornell, Defending Ideals: War, Democracy, and Political Struggles, New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 22. 85 George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, United States Capitol, Washington, D.C.”, 20 September 2001, in Sara Silberstein, op. cit., p. 25.


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Operation Iraqi Freedom From self‐defense to preemptive strike: rogue states and the “axis of evil” The war in Afghanistan represented a first materialization of the “war on terror”. But a victory in Afghanistan, the destroying of the Taliban headquarters and the overthrowing of the Taliban regime are but a first step in this global war on terror. The war on terror has “a permanent and indefinite character”,86 meaning that the enemy can be anywhere, and eliminating him involves more than a singular military action, it rather involves a campaign that can last for an indefinite period of time. The terrorist thereat determined a new assessment of security and of the right to self‐defense. What is a terrorist threat? First of all, as 9/11 has showed, it is a threat that cannot be contained or deterred. These two principles that worked so well during the Cold War, and that even after the collapse of the USSR did not seem to be obsolete, are no longer working. Terrorism cannot be deterred:

“Traditional concepts of deterrence will not work against a terrorist enemy whose avowed tactics are wanton destruction and the targeting of innocents; whose so‐called soldiers seek martyrdom in death and whose most potent protection is statelessness”.87

Against such an enemy who is hard to pinpoint, and who is discursively identified as irrational, a concept like deterrence that relies on a rational calculus of the enemy’s as well as one self’s military capacities cannot work. The problem that America is facing is how to deal with an enemy that cannot be deterred? How to contain an enemy that, being stateless, can be anywhere, including among ourselves. Besides, terrorism was but one manifestation of evil that America had to deal with. Another was represented by the so called rogue states and their weapons of mass destruction. The two threats are merged into a single one. Terrorists and rogue states are but different representations of the same evil. A 86 Saul Newman, Michael P. Levine, op. cit., p. 86. 87 National Security Strategy 2002, p. 15, [http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2002/nss.pdf], 20 May 2008.


demonizing process of both the terrorists and the rogue states takes place. “The devil, as an essential antagonist in the nationʹs cosmology, has had a long and notable history in national dramas playing the part of the enemy”.88 Fighting this devil‐enemy reaffirms America’s missionarism.

“The gravest danger to freedom lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology. When the spread of chemical and biological and nuclear weapons, along with ballistic missile technology—when that occurs, even weak states and small groups could attain a catastrophic power to strike great nations”.89

The issue of nuclear weapons proliferation is thus linked to the

issue of terrorism. On 9/11 terrorists have proved their capacity to carry forth such a devastating attack against the sole superpower of the world, which, despite its military capability and its secret services, was not able to protect itself from such an attack. The possibility that terrorist could acquire more deadly weapons from the so called rogue states, would now be taken into account. But what is a rogue state? First of all, these states are discursively positioned on the same side as the terrorists, as materializations of evil, with which you cannot negotiate, and which you cannot deter or contain: “deterrence based only upon the threat of retaliation is less likely to work against leaders of rogue states more willing to take risks, gambling with the lives of their people, and the wealth of their nations”.90 These rogue sates did not appear just after 9/11, but after this unprecedented terrorist attack, the threat posed by rogue states was merged with the terrorist threat, and was to be address in the war on terror paradigm. In the National Security Strategy 2002, these rogue states are defined as sharing some common features although different in other regards:

“brutalize their own people […] display no regard for international law,[…] are determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction, along with other advanced military technology, to be used as threats

88 Robert L. Ivie, Oscar Giner, op. cit. 89 National Security Strategy, p. 13. 90 Ibidem, p. 15.


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or offensively to achieve the aggressive designs of these regimes; sponsor terrorism around the globe; and reject basic human values and hate the United States and everything for which it stands”.91

There is an “us – them” dichotomization: the United States – rogue

states. The US stand for a certain set of ‘positive’ values like respect for its people, respect for international law, for fundamental human values. This set of ‘positive’ values are on the other hand totally disregarded and hated by the Other. Furthermore, rogue states share the same hatred for all that America and its allies stand for. From this point of view, the support that rogue states offer to various terrorist networks only comes as a confirmation of their vileness and for the fact that terrorism and these regimes are but two different materialization of the same evil, because, let us not forget that terrorists too hate America and all for what it stands. It is clear that this hatred they share will determine the two incarnations of evil to work together. Using the metaphor of absolute evil makes the merging of the two threats much easier, and it leads to the building of a monolithic image of the enemy, who, be it terrorist network or rogue regime, is irrational, cannot be deterred and its sole reason for action is hatred. Especially three states were considered as posing a major threat to America’s security and were designated as constituting a so called “axis of evil”: Iran, Iraq and North Korea. The usage of the collocation “axis of evil” in the State of the Union Address to Congress on January 22nd 2002 constitutes a “restructuring of the American understanding of the ’War on Terror’”.92 There is a redefinition of the threat to security, threat that no longer limits itself to Al‐Qaeda, but also incorporates a number of states that are considered to be an easy source of weapons of mass destruction for terrorists. The “axis of evil” metaphor is not a new one. It was first used in the 30´s, referring initially to the alliance between Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, which Japan joined later on. In the collective memory following the Second World War, the powers on the Axis remained as being an incarnation of evil, and the main “implication is that something

91 National Security Strategy 2002, p. 14. 92 Daniel Heradstveit, Matthew G. Bonham, “What the Axis of Evil Metaphor Did to Iran”, The Middle East Journal no. 61.3, 2007, p. 3.


must be done about them”.93 Defining an ‘axis of evil’ is on the same line of thinking as the discursive positioning of terrorism as the heir of all the murderous and totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. The dichotomist discourse situates America and its allies on Good’s side, fighting against a new reincarnation of Evil. The “axis of evil” is a “creative metaphor; that is a metaphor that is capable of giving us a new view of the world”94 by drawing on a set of perceptions that belong to the collective memory. There is an “axis of evil” that is a reincarnation of the Berlin‐Rome‐Tokyo axis. The metaphor has consequences on perceiving the relations between the states that make up this axis. Thus, North Korea, Iran and Iraq are more that isolated materializations of evil. They are allies. They make up a “conspiracy of evil”.95 Even though these three states do not make up an alliance in the proper sense of the word, they are discursively positioned in such an alliance of evil that must be confronted. Those who are on evil’s side are responsible for all its manifestations, be it weapons of mass destruction proliferation, or terrorist attacks. And this “axis of evil” metaphor also leads to the polarization of the world into two sides:

“If there is an axis of evil, that obviously places [President Bush] in the axis of good, and also means that anyone who disagrees with the policies he is advocating is placed on the other side”.96

Those who fight the axis of evil are necessarily on good’s side,

protecting civilization’s values. Identifying the enemy is closely linked to the identification process of the Self. In Chantal Mouffe’s words:

“to construct a ‘we’, it must be distinguished from a ‘they’ and that means establishing a frontier, defining an ‘enemy’…consensus is by necessity based upon acts of exclusion”.97

93 Ibidem, p. 2. 94 Ibidem, p. 1. 95 Ibidem, p. 6. 96 Laurie Goodstein, “A President Puts His Faith in Providence”, New York Times, February 9, 2003, [http://www.nytimes.com/] apud Robert L. Ivie, op. cit., p. 160. 97 Chantal Mouffe, „Democratic Citizenship and Political Community” in Miami Theory Collective, (ed.), Community at Loose End, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991,


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Nico Carpentier identifies a series of dichotomies that play a very

important role in the process of identification. The first series refers to characteristics of the Self and of the enemy: good/bad, just/unjust, innocent/guilty, rational/irrational, civilised/barbarian; the other series refers to the actions of the Self and those of the enemy: legitimate/illegitimate, necessary/unnecessary, last resort/provocative, limited effects/major effects.98 These dichotomies are defined as “floating or empty signifiers”,99 meaning that these signifiers do not have a fixed meaning, but are articulated during the conflict.100 They get their significance during the identification process and have a different meaning for the sides in conflict. Moreover, they can be claimed by both sides to define theirs and their enemy’s identity: always the Self will be good, just, and its action legitimate, while the enemy will be evil, unjust and its action illegitimate. The right to self‐defense that was invoked in order to attack Afghanistan would be transformed into a right to preemptive strike. This would be the new security strategy of the US: “To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively”.101 The USA invoked the right to self defense following the 9/11 act of war, and invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban regime and to destroy what is could of Al‐Qaeda. This was a strong reading of the right to self‐defense, according to which this right can be invoked only after an attack has taken place. A soft reading of this right says that “under certain circumstances, this becomes admissible even before an enemy has fired the first shot or sent his troops across the border,”102 but these p. 78, apud Romand Coles, „Liberty, Equality, Receptive Generosity: Neo‐Nietzschean Reflections on the Ethics and Politics of Coalition”, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 90, No. 2, 1996, p. 378, [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2082891], 2 June 2008. 98 Nico Carpentier, „Introduction: Strengthening Cultural War Studies”, in Nico Carpentier (ed.), Culture, Trauma, and Conflict: Cultural Studies Perspectives on War, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholary Publishing, 2007, p. 4. 99 Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso, 1985, pp.112‐113, apud Nico Carpentier, Op. cit., p. 4. 100 Nico Carpentier, op. cit., p. 4. 101 National Security Strategy 2002, p. 15. 102 Dietrich Murswiek, The American Strategy of Preemptive War and International Law, p. 6, [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=397601], 3 March 2008.


circumstances must be understood in a narrow sense. Mainly, self‐defense before the actual attack took place is legitimate, only if there is proof of an imminent threat to the state in case. A good example can be considered the attack launched by Israel against Egypt in 1967, when the Egyptian tanks were being positioned at the border with Israel.103 In the war on terror, the threat posed by terrorist networks and rogue regimes was discursively constructed so that is was perceived as an imminent threat to America’s security, and thus a preemptive strike against them would be justified. A first step in this direction was the 9/11 analogy:

“As was demonstrated by the losses on September 11, 2001, mass civilian casualties is the specific objective of terrorists and these losses would be exponentially more severe if terrorists acquired and used weapons of mass destruction”.104

Considering the scale of these attacks and the fact that it was not

foreseen or prevented, the elimination of the terrorist threat was to be pursued at any costs. The price of inaction was considered to be too high. The threat is imminent because the enemy’s wanton purpose is destruction. The more different the Other is from us, pushed into the sphere of the irrational and outside any possibility of dialogue, the more imminent is the threat he posses. Thus,

“in the case of ´rogue states´, the criterion of an imminent threat is now supposedly to be understood as the mere possibility that these might use weapons of mass destruction at some future point”.105 To remain idle and to react only after an attack has taken place is no

longer a viable option after 9/11. The threat is imminent and America must not wait to be attacked once more. A first strike did take place, and that was enough to change the security discourse, to determine the abandoning of principles like containment and deterrence and to argue in favor of 103 Franklin Eric Wester, ʺPreemption and Just War: Considering the Case of Iraq,ʺ in Parameters no. 34.4, 2004, [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5008625815], 3 March 2008. 104 National Security Strategy 2002, p. 15. 105 Dietrich Murswiek, op. cit., pp. 11‐12.


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preemptive action: “in an age where the enemies of civilization openly and actively seek the world’s most destructive technologies, the United States cannot remain idle while dangers gather”.106 Despite all the critics and by discursively constructing the terrorist – rogue regimes as an imminent threat, the US were able to invoke the right to preemptive action, especially considering that indolence could lead to a new 9/11. From the US’s perspective, the establishing of a new international norm of preemptive defense is a dangerous thing, because you can forsee the possibility of its abuse. President Bush made a declaration considering this: “The United States will not use force in all cases to preempt emerging threats, nor should nations use preemption as a pretext for aggression”.107 But the terrorist threat is one that the US must address. The exceptional role that it has taken onto itself, the role of protector of the civilized world and its values from the forces of evil, allows it to use preemptive strike to deal with this imminent threat. The Other is dual in nature: its existence is compulsory for the identification of the Self, but at the same time it constitutes a threat to the existence of the Self. The only option to avoid another 9/11 is to act now. Iraq: casus belli One of the rogue regimes that made up the ‘axis of evil’ that was identified as the greatest threat of all was Iraq. Dialogue or negotiation were considered to be impossible with a ruler that was demonized and discursively placed beyond reason and that could thus not be deterred or contained. A first preemptive strike will take place against Iraq. Iraq was discursively constituted as an imminent threat based upon two arguments: possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ties with Al‐Qaeda:

“the justification for going to war in Iraq is thus built on the recurring closeness and imminence of danger facing the American people, which this time stems from the alleged possession of WMD by the

106 National Security Strategy 2002, p. 15. 107 National Security Strategy 2002, p. 15.


Iraqi regime and, consequentially, by easy access to these weapons for terrorist groups such as Al‐Qaeda”.108After 9/11 the nature of the threat to security changed, and it was

now represented by the merging of two threats: terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. 9/11 did not create the proliferation of WMD threat and thus neither the Iraqi threat, but these attacks lead to a reconsideration of the WMD threat and its integration into the war on terror discourse:

“the Bush administration’s post‐9/11 case for war was a function of suddenly perceiving the presence of evil instead of any significant change or upsurge in Iraq’s status as a threat to world peace”.109

After the war in Afghanistan, the new ‘face of evil’ was Saddam Hussein. The war on terror, which is ultimately a battle between good and evil, supposes the elimination of these incarnations of evil. In constructing the Iraqi threat, the 9/11 analogy plays an important role. Although the link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 is not very clear, this was a major argument in the cassus belli for Iraq. In the words of George W. Bush:

“Saddam Hussein is a threat to our nation. September the 11th changed the strategic thinking, at least, as far as I am concerned, for how to protect our country. It used to be that we could think that you could contain a person like Saddam Hussein, that oceans would protect us from his type of terror. September the 11th should say to the American people that we are now a battlefield, that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist organization could be deployed here at home”.110 The possibility that the weapons of mass destruction owned by

Saddam could fall in the hands of terrorists transformed Iraq into a terrorist 108 Piotr Cap, Legitimisation in Political Discourse: A Cross‐Disciplinary Perspective on the Modern US War Rhetoric, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006, p. 3. 109 Robert L. Ivie, op. cit., p. 175. 110 George W. Bush, “Address at the National Press Conference” 6 March 2003, apud Piotr Cap, op. cit., p. 22.


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threat. The 9/11 analogy determines the necessity of self‐defense: “We learned a lesson: the dangers of our time must be confronted actively and forcefully, before we see them again in our skies and our cities”.111 Thus, although the September the 11th attacks did not create the Iraqi treat, they gave it an imminent dimension. The rhetoric of evil, used to define the terrorist threat, was extended to encompass the ’axis of evil’ to demonize Saddam Hussein and his regime, and to legitimize the use of force against him. The 9/11 analogy works inside of what Piotr Cap calls temporal proximization. Piotr Cap analyses the American legitimization discourse of the Iraq intervention, using the notion of proximization which he defines as incorporating three axes: spatial, temporal and axiological. Proximization involves the defining of an identity of the Self that is threatened by the Other, whose identity is established according to a dynamics on the three axes that could lead to a collision of the Other with the Self, thus threatening the very existence of the Self. The notion of proximization is useful in understanding the process of the discursive identification of the Self and the Other. Temporal proximization refers to a certain way of interpreting the consequences of past events so that it determines the central character of the current situation for the evolution of the public’s expectations and wishes.112 The interpretation of the current situation is made through the prism of the 9/11 events, so that an armed intervention to overthrow Saddam Hussein would be justified, although the link between Saddam and 9/11 cannot be undoubtedly proven.

“A historic date – September 11th, 2001 – is implicitly imposed to serve as an anchor for legitimization of the current actions which are construed as if they were undertaken in circumstances similar, or even identical, to those making up the retrospective basis for the analogy”.113

111 George W. Bush, “American Enterprise Institute, Washington DC” 26 February 2003 apud Piotr Cap, op. cit., p. 79. 112 Cap, Piotr, op. cit., p. 67. 113 Ibidem, p. 66.


Defining Iraq as a rogue regime has its roots in the way Iraq´s behavior was defined prior to 9/11: “The world has waited 12 years for Iraq to disarm”.114 During these 12 years, Iraq did not act as was expected of him by the international community: it refused to disarm and to respect the UN resolutions concerning it. Iraq’s attitude towards international law showed nothing but contempt:

“In a repeating pattern, Iraq is served notice with [UN] resolutions, agrees to them, and then breaks them.... There is no longer a credible way to envision any peaceful road to Iraqi disarmament”.115

After 9/11 this continuous refusal of Saddam to disarm can no longer be tolerated. The tolerant attitude toward Iraq is compared to the appeasement policy towards Hitler that did nothing too stop the outbreak of the Second World War. The preferred identification of Saddam was that of a ‘mad man’ that cannot be deterred or contained: “Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option”.116 This dictator, discursively situated on evil’s side, cannot be dealt with by rational means. In his deeds he only cares about his own whims. But, although the repeated human rights violations were used as part of the argument in favor of the intervention in Iraq, these were not considered to be the main casus belli, and will only be emphasized after the intervention was well on its way. The violations of human right were just one more element to confirm the rogue nature of the regime, and Saddam’s disdain for any regime of international law. Saddam is discursively transformed into a villain: “If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning”.117 The most powerful argument for the intervention was that of the possession of weapons of mass destruction by Iraq, and its refusal to

114 George W. Bush, “State of the Union Address” 28 January 2003 apud Robert L. Ivie, op. cit., p. 162. 115 Thomas M. Nichols, ʺJust War, Not Preventionʺ, Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs 2004, [http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/viewMedia.php/prmTemplateID/8/prmID/867] apud Franklin Eric Wester, op. cit. 116 George W. Bush, “State of the Union Address” 28 January 2003 apud Robert L. Ivie, Op. cit., p. 162. 117 Ibidem, p. 162.


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disarm. The collocation ‘weapons of mass destruction’ implies “conflating nuclear, chemical and biological weapons”118 making it much easier for the Bush administration to use the ‘weapons of mass destruction argument’ especially considering the fact that there was clear evidence that Saddam has used chemical and biological weapons:

“This dictator, who is assembling the world’s most dangerous weapons, has already used them on villages leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured”.119

Collocations like ‘the world’s most dangerous weapons’ or ‘weapons of mass destruction’ were used without distinguishing between the type of weapons ‐ chemical, biological, nuclear, and without any reference to the means of delivering these weapons: the fact that Saddam used them against his own people does not mean that he has the capability to launch them against the US for example. But on the other hand, 9/11 proved that distance or the nature of the weapon is irrelevant. The greatest threat was however considered to be the possibility that Saddam Hussein had reconstructed his nuclear weapons program. A very disputed argument used by President Bush to confirm the existence of a nuclear program in Iraq, was the claim that: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently bought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”.120 This claim that Saddam bought uranium from Niger, was investigated before 2002, and was found out to be groundless.121 But still the argument of a nuclear program going on in Iraq was not abandoned and it constituted along with the presupposed link between Saddam and Al‐Qaeda, one of the main argument for the intervention. According to Piotr Cap, what is at work here is the logic of spatial proximizatin that determines a movement closer to each other of the Self and the Other, and that leads to a transcendence of the physical distance: 118 James P. Pfiffner, “Did President Bush Mislead the Country in His Arguments for War with Iraq?”, in Presidential Studies Quarterly no. 34, 1, 2004, p. 29. 119 George W. Bush, “State of the Union Address” 28 January 2003 apud Robert L. Ivie, op. cit., p. 162. 120 George W. Bush, “State of the Union Address”, 28 January 2003 apud James P. Pfiffner, op. cit., p. 30. 121 Sara Silberstein, op. cit., p. 172.


“the phrase ‘’possessed WMD’, by being used repeatedly in the context of the Iraqi terrorist connections, has come to mean ‘possessed WMD capable of impacting the US’”122 The only way to assure Iraq’s disarment, and to eliminate the Iraqi

threat, is, according to the US, a regime change, because the rogue nature of this regime makes any dialogue or any peaceful attempt at disarming Iraq, futile: “regime change was a way, not an end, and the end of a disarmed Iraq was determined by the Bush Administration to be achievable only by regime change”.123 Possession of weapons of mass destruction and links to Al‐Qaeda were the two main arguments that transformed Iraq into a terrorist threat. This, along with the 9/11 analogy and the demonizing of Saddam contributed to the transformation of the Iraqi threat into a terrorist threat that had to be dealt with in the ‘war on terror‘ paradigm. This is why President Bush could say that: “The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001”.124 TV war The war on terror is a new kind of war that involves new ways of fighting. The Iraq intervention fits into the ‘’war on terror’ paradigm, not only regarding the case for war, but also regarding the means of war. First of all this is not a war against the Iraqi people, but one against Saddam Hussein’s regime:

“tonight I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq: your enemy is not surrounding your country; your enemy is ruling your country. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation”125

122 Piotr Cap, op. cit., p. 45. 123 Franklin Eric Wester, op. cit. 124 George W. Bush, May 1, 2003 apud James P. Pfiffner, op. cit., p. 27 125 George W. Bush, “State of the Union Address”, 28 January 2003, apud Robert L. Ivie, op. cit., p. 162.


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This is why the intervention will be called ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’; the rogue regime, and not the Iraqi people was the enemy that the US had to fight against. The Iraqi people are but a victim of this regime that tests its dangerous weapons on them. This clear distinction between the regime that must be overthrown and the people that are in fact victims makes this intervention seem like an operation of great, even surgical precision. Defining the operation in terms of precision would transform it into “one of the swiftest and most humane military campaign in history”.126 The language used for referring to the war is very technical, this creating the image of a “clean war”. The technical‐strategic language became the most accepted and the most credible and reasonable way to refer to security problems, determining a hygienization of the war image by using collocations like ‘clean bombs’, ‘collateral damage’, and keeping a safe distance from the grotesque reality of the conflict.127 This is not a classic war; it is in fact a series of surgical strikes aimed at a rogue regime in order to overthrow it. The weapons used buy the Coalition are deadly accurate. This is a war that also has as its purpose the liberation of the Iraqi people. Thus the representation as a clean war is essential. Besides, the credibility of the intervention must be maintained. The means must match the end to make this war for disarming Iraq a just war. Before the intervention began, the ‘intelligent’ US weapons were highly mediatized. These weapons allowed to, at least in theory, “target only the government and its loyal forces without devastating the cities and causing thousands of civilian casualties”.128 This was a new way of waging war. These surgical strikes would first hit Baghdad in order to ‘shock and awe’ the enemy.

“The whole purpose was to intimidate, not devastate, to stun the enemy, turning its soldiers and leaders into glassy‐eyed survivors, ready to surrender. That success would limit both civilian and military casualties and contain the destruction of property”.129

126 George W. Bush, October 7, 2003 apud Piotr Cap, op. cit., p. 44. 127 Roland Bleiker, op. cit. 128 Paul Rutherford, Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Marketing the War Against Irak, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004, p. 56. 129 Ibidem, p. 53.


The operation would be a demonstration of might but also of precision and of good intentions towards the Iraqi people. In all this, the Iraqi people were represented as having a welcoming attitude towards the coalition forces. Because Saddam’s regime was also an enemy of its own people, a surgical intervention to overthrow it would face no resistance from the Iraqi people. But at the same time, Iraq was construed as credible enemy by invoking its possession of weapons of mass destruction. This was also due to the discursive construction of Iraq as a real and imminent threat. The irrational nature of the regime meant that it was always possible that in a desperate act Saddam would use his dreadful weapons against the coalition forces. Not only this, but also, the Iraqi Republican Guard was frequently described as an elite military force, highly trained and equipped.130 For the American public, but not only, the war was a TV war. The role of mass‐media in representing the evolution of the conflict was a very important one, mainly due to the fact that most journalists were embedded with the coalition forces. The TV war was a clean war: “the news downplayed the issue of civilian casualties and the damage to Baghdad”.131 The role of the mass‐media was even greater, because this was the first ‘live war’ ever to be showed on TV:

“a war brought live and brought constantly into the living rooms and bedrooms of the whole world via television. You could now experience war as it was happening”.132

From all the media channels only the TV could “deliver the experience, the images and the sounds that made of war a live spectacle”.133 In representing the war, the two dimensions of media representation, the informative and the entertainment one, are often combined into an ‘infotainment’ that shows the war as a spectacle to millions of viewers: “television cannot but turn war into a spectacle and a story that employs the styles of popular culture”134 to fashion the war information transmission. The war broadcast 130 Ibidem, p. 66. 131 Ibidem, p. 100. 132 Ibidem, p. 79. 133 Ibidem, p. 80. 134 Ibidem, p. 108.


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follows the patterns of entertainment broadcast, transforming the informational content into a story with such elements as adventure, tragedy, action, mystery, heroism. It follows certain patterns that turn it into a hybrid genre similar to the movie genre. A good example is the way the saving of Private Jessica Lynch was shown on TV. It can be easily compared to the Hollywood movie Saving Private Ryan because it had all the ingredients for a typical hollywoodian representation of military operations: it had heroism, adventure, comradeship. What helped construing this representation were elements of popular culture and especially elements of a western ‘war mythology’. All elements were present in Jessica Lynch’s case:

“Private Lynch was young, nineteen years old, attractive, blond, and a woman, an American victim saved by the heroics of her comrades, in a short a natural for retelling of that old yarn, the captivity narrative, that harked back to the legends of the Indian wars”.135

Mass‐media, especially television, had a fare share in creating an

image of the war as an adventure with hero‐soldiers sent to disarm a demonic tyrant that tortures his own people. There is also a phallic dimension to this extremely masculine war. Although the feminine element is also present: there are women soldiers; there is no feminine dimension of the war that is only a restatement of the macho masculine style. The gender discourse in western society is one that considers the war as an exclusively masculine thing, the hero being a typology based on the masculine ideal of force and courage. Meanwhile, the victim typology is preferably a feminine typology. Bearing this in mind, the story of Jessica Lynch is only restating the gendered representation of war in western society. In the televised representation of war, the phallic dimension is best visible in the “depictions of American weaponry, the impressive Abrams tanks, the sleek fighters, the phallic missiles, the really big bombs”.136

This media representation of the war was based o a certain type of journalism: embedded journalism which in exchange for loosing some of its 135 Ibidem, p. 68. 136 Ibidem, p. 174.


objectiveness can bring to the public exclusive war images. “Embedding journalists with the troops has produced its desired effect, creating a feeling of thereness that many an action‐movie director would envy”.137 Although it is not an entirely new type of journalism, “the practice of embedding journalists in military units has a long history, dating to the Civil War”,138 the scale it reached during Operation Iraqi Freedom was unprecedented: more than 600 American and foreign journalists139 were embedded with the coalition troops. The embedding of such a large number of journalists determined the creation of a monolithic image of the war. The journalists had access to the war, that became thus public, but this was an American perspective mostly. The relation between the journalist and the military unit that embedded him led to some sort of symbiosis between the troops and the journalists: “Now, the generals and the journalists were not only at peace but locked into a symbiotic relationship: the military delivered the show and the media promoted it to the public”.140 But the war was not perceived in the same way all across the globe. The same product could have different significations in different parts of the world. A quite opposite representation from that predominant in the West was the one offered by several Arab televisions that showed a much ‘dirtier’ face of the war. Far from being considered liberation troops, the coalition forces were viewed as invading and aggressive. The Self – Other identification was exactly the opposite of the western one. Humanitarian Intervention? Representing and Identifying the Other The main argument for the intervention in Iraq was not humanitarian in nature, but was mainly determined by the identification of the Iraqi regime as a threat to international security, rather than as a threat 137 Richard Goldstein, The Village Voice, 26 March – 1st April 2003, apud Paul Rutherford, op. cit., p. 86. 138 Michael Pfau, Michael M. Haigh, Lindsay Logsdon, Cristopher Perrine, James P. Baldwin, Rick E. Breitenfeldt, Joel Cesar, Dawn Dearden, Greg Kuntz, Edgar Montalvo, Dwaine Roberts, Richard Romero, ʺEmbedded Reporting during the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq: How the Embedding of Journalists Affects Television News Reports,ʺ in Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media no. 49.4, 2005, [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5013910771], 2 June 2008. 139 Ibidem. 140 Paul Rutherford, op. cit., p. 77.


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to the rights and freedoms of the Iraqi people. But the humanitarian argument was not absent from the justification and the legitimization of the war. The demonizing of Saddam Hussein was accomplished through a series of arguments that would prove his disdain for western norms and values, especially those regarding human rights.

“The use of innocent victims (e.g. women and children, civilians) to articulate the ‘truth’ of the opponents’ villainity is the primary rhetorical means to vilify an opponent”.141

But this argument is not as much about the human rights violations

per se and the prejudices to the Iraqi people, as they are to prove that there is a precedent, and that Saddam had used his dreadful weapons before, and is capable of doing so again. As long as the weapons of mass destruction argument is the main argument for the intervention, the humanitarian argument is left aside. Between humanitarian interventions and the two interventions of the ‘war on terror’ military campaign the main difference in the words of the Canadian UN ambassador, Paul Heinbecker, is that: “while the interventions in Kosovo and East Timor were all about protecting the vulnerable other, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the motivation was protecting ‘self’”.142 The humanitarian argument was present in the legitimization of the Iraqi intervention, but it was to be even more emphasized after the declared failure to find the weapons of mass destruction. What needed to be protected in this was the, the Other was always interpreted as a danger. This reading of the Other as a danger to the Self is also due to a dimension that Piotr Cap calls axiological proximization. This proximization is neither a physical, nor a temporal phenomenon,

141 Michael Blain, op. cit., p. 63. 142 Jennifer M. Welsh, ”Conclusion: Humanitarian Intervention after 11 September” in Jennifer M. Welsh (ed.), Humanitarian Intervention and International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 181.


“it rather involves the narrowing of the distance between two different and opposing ideologies whose clash could lead to the events defined within the dimensions”.143

In a first stage of the discursive process of legitimizing the Iraqi

intervention, the axiological dimension was present along with the temporal 9/11 analogy and spatial weapons of mass destruction threat, but this axiological dimension was not as emphasized as the other two. Axiological proximization is based upon representing the Other as rejecting the core values of the Self. Thus, while the United States of America cherishes such values as freedom, democracy, and respect for human rights, the Other, Saddam Hussein’s regime, is an ideology of murder. Discursively situated on the terrorist’s side, this rogue regime also shares the terrorist’s hatred for all that the civilized world stands for. The Other becomes an image of radicalism, dictatorship, tyranny, showing only contempt towards human rights and western values.

“In this conflict, America faces an enemy who has no regard for conventions of war or rules of morality. Saddam Hussein has placed Iraqi troops and equipment in civilian areas, attempting to use innocent men, women and children as shields for his own military – a final atrocity against his people”.144

From an axiological perspective, the theme of a battle between good and evil is outlined by dichotomy in identifying the opponents: us, the United States of America on the side of good – them, the Iraqi regime on the side of evil. The humanitarian argument is used to define the evil nature of Saddam’s regime.

“The failure to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq inevitably led to attempts by President George W. Bush and others in

143 Piotr Cap, op. cit., p. 6. 144 George W. Bush, ”Speech of March 19, 2003”, apud Piotr Cap, op. cit., p. 36.


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his Administration to use humanitarian justifications to defend the removal of Saddam Husseinʹs regime”.145

After the official recognition of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction the axiological dimension, that was until then kept a bit aside in comparison to the other two dimensions, is now brought forth and emphasized. Loosing the WMD argument is reflected upon the usage of the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ collocations in the public speeches of the president: thus before loosing this argument the collocation is used 88 times, and after loosing the argument, only 6 times.146 The axiological dimension allows for “glorifying military action as moral agency”.147 Defending the Self also implies the defending of its values against the values of an ideology of murder. In this discursive context of military action read as a moral action, the identities of the opponents are defined. First of all, by demonizing Saddam Hussein and his regime, the Iraqi people becomes a victim of a cruel tyrant that uses his own people as human shield, tests his dreadful weapons on whole villages that are under his rule, and subjects innocent civilians to horrible torture acts, locking up Iraqi women in ‘rape rooms’. Because it stands for an ideology of murder, the Iraqi regime does not respect the rights and freedoms of its citizens. At the other end America’s identity is that of protector of human rights, a moral agent, whose violence is justified because it is for a good cause, the fight against evil. The discursive identification of America positions it on the victim’s side, as their protector, as a proof of America´s Exceptionalism:

“Our cause [of liberating Iraq and ridding it of terrorist connections] is just, and it continues. […] And all nations should know: America did, do and will do what is necessary to ensure our nation´s and the world’s security. […] We want to be a nation that serves goals larger

145 Eric A. Heinze, ʺHumanitarian Intervention and the War in Iraq: Norms, Discourse, and State Practiceʺ, in Parameters no. 36.1, 2006, [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5015582841] 3 March 2008. 146 Piotr Cap, op. cit., p. 62. 147 Michael Blain, op. cit., p. 64.


that self. We’ve been offered a unique opportunity, and we must not let this moment pass”.148

As proof of this Exceptionalism, America must rise up to the

opportunity that was given to her. Was given by whom? In this Exceptionalism there is also a bit of predestination that sets this “Great Nation” on the side of Good in the battle against Evil. While the ideologies of murder “embrace tyranny and death as a cause and creed”, America always chooses “freedom and dignity of every life”, being guided in its actions by “a moral compass”.149 America’s actions, even if violent are only the outcome of a wish to spread the values of freedom and human dignity, of a mission to act according to the requirements of a universal moral code and to protect human rights in every corner of the world. This is how the Iraqi intervention becomes a moral one:

“From this ontological position, our violence, which cannot be a

violation of human rights, is a therapeutic corrective applied to a people who must be ‘rescued’ from their ‘backwardness’ or punished for and rehabilitated from their criminality and their guilt”.150

To promote human rights and to stop the violence against innocent

victims, America’s mission is a civilizing one based on the liberal assumption that “the world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder.”151 Democratization is the solution in order to stop the violence just as modernization was seen during the colonial age as the solution in order to civilize a backward Orient. “Transforming the Middle East into a democratic oasis, even when imposed by military force, was the answer to

148 George W. Bush, ”Speech of March 15, 2004”, apud Piotr Cap, op. cit., p. 105. 149 George W. Bush, ”Speech of April 19, 2004”, apud Piotr Cap, op. cit., p. 106. 150 Cyra A. Choudhury, ”Comprehending ‘Our’ Violence: Reflections on the Liberal Universalist Tradition, National Identity and the War on Iraq”, in Muslim World Journal of Human Rights no. 3.1, 2006, p. 9, [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=940207], 28 February 2008. 151 George W. Bush, “Address at the America Enterprise Institute, February 26, 2003”, apud Piotr Cap, op. cit., p. 3.


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the problem revealed on September 11”.152 The Other is identified just like in the orientalist discourse: barbaric, uncivilized, irrational, its violence is justified only as an instinctual impulse. Only through democratization can these breeding grounds of violence be eliminated. And democratization is brought about by those whose violence is legitimate.

“The construction of the other as savage allows the speaker to construct a binary discourse differentiating ‘us’ (on the victims’ side) from ‘them’ and consequentially ‘our’ use of force – technologically driven and precise – and ‘theirs’, which is brutish and vile”.153 Our violence is the outcome of a moral action, and is justified by our

positioning on the side of Good, by our mission to help the victims, and by the fact that the values we stand for are universal values of good. The violence is also justified by the identity of America as a liberator of an oppressed people, coming to aid helpless victims. Behind the violence there is a motivation based on care and compassion and the occasional victims of our violence are in fact ‘collateral damage’, a euphemism that springs from the legitimate use of force. Using the logic of dichotomy, because America’s identity is that of a liberator, and its actions are legit, the Iraqi violence is illegitimate. First of all, standing proof of their barbarity and irrational nature, the regime’s violence against its own people is the first violent manifestation of the Other. The one situated on the good side intervenes exactly to put a stop to this violence. The Other is identified as a primitive savage, situated beyond reason, this “stressing the consequent futility of negotiation and the need for immediate intervention on behalf of the savaged”154 that must be saved from himself. Second of all, the violence against the liberating forces of the coalition is defined as being illegitimate, there being no justification for it, it is but a manifestation of the primitive nature of the savage, an expression of its irrationality. Thus, any act of resistance is illegal:

152 Robert L. Ivie, op. cit., p. 175. 153 Eran N. Ben‐Porath, “Rhetoric of Atrocities: The Place of Horrific Human Rights Abuses in Presidential Persuasion Efforts” in Presidential Studies Quarterly no. 37, 2, 2007, p. 184. 154 Ibidem, p. 185.


“When such actions are (inevitably) taken against us, our identity formulations create us as the victims, our acts of violence as self‐defense and justifiable, and their acts of violence as further proofs of their criminality”.155

Criminality becomes the main trait of the Other, that is permanently read as danger. His violence is always a threat to security, while our violence is necessary for maintaining order and security. This potential threat permanently represented by the Other determines a change in its innocent statute:

“For example, those who have been interned in the Iraqi jails and at the Guantanamo Naval Base are not given the benefit of the doubt that is presumably afforded every criminal in the U.S. As enemy combatants, these detainees are not innocent until proven guilty but quite the opposite”.156

They are a priori guilty through their positioning on the enemy’s side. And the enemy is always evil. The Iraqi insurgents are either Saddam Hussein’s supporters, either members of a terrorist network. The Iraqi people that were liberated are represented by those who welcomed the coalition troops and not by those who resorted to using violence against them.

“The work of building a new Iraq is hard, and it is right. And America has always been willing to do what it takes for what is right. But as democracy takes hold in Iraq, the enemies of freedom will do all in their power to spread violence and fear”.157

The only motivation of the insurgents is contempt for the values of democracy and freedom, and their only purpose is to spread violence and fear. In the war on terror those who are not on America’s side are on the side of the terrorists.

155 Cyra A. Choudhury, op. cit. p. 10. 156 Ibidem, p. 10. 157 George W. Bush, ”Speech of January 20, 2004” apud Piotr Cap, op. cit., p. 97.


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The discursive positioning of the insurgents on the terrorist’s side opened the possibility for the torture acts of Abu Grahib. The making public of these torture acts determined their condemnation by America and the other coalition forces but at the same time “as a result, we can also focus our attention on one kind of violence while ignoring if not justifying other violence that may have much greater impact on a far larger number of Iraqis”.158 Besides, a reinterpretation of the torture act and its definition took place. This was possible due to the blurring of the civilian/military distinction and to the emergence of an undetermined discursive space concerning the way in which these prisoners of war must be treated. These prisoners are discursively positioned on evil’s side, this transforming them into a priori guilty persons – they are guilty by proof of their very identity and the proof of facts in no longer necessary. The main effect of this torture discourse that is characteristic of the ‘war on terror’ paradigm is

“to construct the symbolic conditions in which ‘torture’ (as designated by the instruments of international law) is able to be enacted without being designated as such, without signifying as such”.159

Conclusions Being aware of the critics that such an approach can bring upon it, and also being aware of the interdisciplinary approach that was used in order to achieve the goal that was stated in the introduction, I nevertheless believe that a discursive approach to international relation can shed some light on these complex phenomenon that is embedded into the nature of a truth‐knowledge relation. Starting from an analysis of the way in which 9/11 acquired its meaning, the aim of this essay was to render visible the discursive structures of the ‘war on terror’ and the process of discursive identification of the Self and the Other. Acknowledging that words do much more that describe an objective reality and being aware of the historic and cultural meaning of certain words and distinctions, we are able to explain 158 Cyra A. Choudhury, op. cit. p. 13. 159 Nina Philadelphoff‐Puren, ”Speach Acts, Torture Acts”, in Deborah Staines, op. cit., p. 79.


how certain expressions structure our understanding of the world, making some representation more plausible that other and thus making possible such acts as the 2003 intervention in Iraq. The deconstruction of such expressions as ‘war on terror’, ‘Axis of Evil’ or ‘weapons of mass destruction’ can help us see beyond the simplistic dichotomizing discourse that legitimized the intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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