The Discourse of Conflict and Crisis

Poland’s Political Rhetoric in the European Perspective

Piotr Cap

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781350270268
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350135659
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book explores the linguistic patterns of conflict, crisis and threat generation in Polish political rhetoric that have been at the heart of state-level policies since the Law and Justice (PiS) Party came to power in October 2015.

Analysing a vast corpus of speeches, statements and remarks by prominent Law and Justice Party politicians, this book sheds light on internal parliamentary and presidential discourse against opponents of the government, before widening its lens to Poland's strained relations with the EU regarding refugee distribution and immigration. Drawing on theories from contemporary critical discourse studies and critical-cognitive pragmatics, the book shows how the crisis, conflict and threat elements in these discourses produce public coercion and strengthen the Party's leadership.

Piotr Cap extends his argument further to examine discursive examples from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Austria, Italy and the UK, highlighting the correlation between the Law and Justice Party and broader socio-political and rhetorical trends in contemporary Europe. The result is an authoritative panorama of the mutual dependencies and shared discursive strategies of European right-wing groups.

1

“Do What I Say, Unless . . .”

Political Leadership, Coercion, and Threat Construction

The ability to generate an emotional response is the key to any leader’s success and examples abound since antiquity. Moses got his people’s undivided attention by putting the fear of a wrathful God in them. Winston Churchill appealed to the English sense of pride to rally spirits in the early, dark days of the Second World War. Martin Luther King, Jr., inspired the affection of millions by his own noble example of nonviolent leadership in the cause of civil rights for African-Americans. In 2003, George W. Bush invoked catastrophic visions of ”another September 11” to win popular support for a preemptive strike on Iraq. And away from the world of politics we see, too, that business leaders, executives, and managers need to inspire emotions in order to persuade people to give their best. When it comes to social mobilization, emotions go a long way.

But does the nature of the emotion matter? Niccolo Machiavelli took on these questions centuries ago in the course of writing The Prince, famously advising at one point that “it is better to be feared than loved.” Machiavelli was clear about which of the two emotions is likely to be more effective. Drawing on his sociopolitical study of ancient Rome, he conceded that there were indeed examples of men who led primarily “by love,” and some were great leaders. But, according to him, those were still in minority. “Love is fickle,” says Machiavelli in The Prince, and followers are likely to turn on their leader at the first sign that things are going badly. Fear is more reliable because it is “maintained by dread of punishment, which never fails” (Machiavelli 1532/2003: 46).

Five centuries after Machiavelli, most democratic leaders may not be followers of this stance in terms of their own image; nonetheless, fear continues to be the dominating emotion in modern political communication, even more so in the post-9/11 era of global anxiety and insecurity. It is not supposed to be fear of the leader anymore; it is, much rather, a fear that is inspired by the leader, and thus its source, object, or embodiment can be anyone and anything in the world—a looming storm, a wave of immigrants, or a terrorist attack. As found by Time’s Alex Altman, nearly 30% of the language used by Donald Trump in his 2016 election campaign included words and phrases depicting visions “in some way threatening” to American people (Time, February 9, 2017).

In this opening chapter we focus on the relations between fear and threat, political leadership, credibility, political discourse, and, crucially, discursive constructions of conflict and crisis. Eventually, we scrutinize scholarly theories and models that account for these relations. First, however, we need to address some general questions and issues from which these theories emerged. What are the core underpinnings, characteristics, and objectives of political leadership and political communication that make threat construction and fear generation so viable and widespread? And, conversely, what are the elements and features of threat-based discourse and crisis construction that help enact leadership in the best possible way?

1.1. Leadership and Communication: A Political Duo

One cannot speak about political leadership without discussing the concept of politics in the first place. Needless to say, there is no universal characterization, and it is not the business of this book to provide one. What we are interested in is, broadly speaking, what social aspirations, mechanisms, and goals make language and discourse the core elements of political behavior, that is, actions and practices geared toward realization of these goals. From this perspective, politics can be considered in two interrelated dimensions. On the one hand, politics involves a struggle for power, between “those who seek to assert and maintain their power and those who seek to resist it” (Chilton 2004: 3). On the other hand, politics can be seen as cooperation, a set of practices designed to resolve various clashes of interest that arise in a society—over money, social influence, freedom, and the like. In both of these dimensions, doing politics means contributing to a collection of voices on top issues of social order, economy, law, education, and other areas of public interest and participation. On this broad view, politics is, in the words of Habermas (1981), about “sharing visions”; it has the continual goal of maximizing the number of common conceptions of current reality, as well as its future developments. Emerging from the aforementioned view is the notion of political leadership: the ability to ensure public approval of a joint course of action prescribed by the leader in order to realize the invoked vision (Cap 2017).

Soliciting public acceptance for common action entails that political leader must reconcile the existing differences of opinion through discussion and persuasion. This makes politics rely heavily on the art of communication; most crucially, the ability to present future visions as beneficial to audience, assuming that the actions and policies proposed by the leader are unequivocally approved and followed. Political communication is essentially bipolar and coercive, discursively placing the leader, her audience, and all allies in a “home camp” (a geopolitical “Us”), and thus excluding, marginalizing, and stigmatizing those in opposition to the home camp (a geopolitical “Them”) (we will take an in-depth look at this critical distinction in the next section). Coercion can be exercised not only by the speaker’s (leader’s) own discourse but also through the control of others’ discourse—that is, through various kinds and degrees of censorship and access control. The latter include the structure and management of the media, the arena where much political communication takes place (Fetzer and Lauerbach 2007), either directly or in a recontextualized form (Cap and Okulska 2013). Importantly, it appears that the coercive element in political communication may involve the strategic stimulation of affect (Chilton 2014). Although the precise links are still under-researched, there seem to exist connections between meaning structures produced via discourse; in other words, certain kinds of text can stimulate certain hormones and the effect may be automatic (Hart 2014).

Coercion strategies naturally entail legitimization, a complex concept and a complex practice involving a linguistic enactment of the speaker’s right to be listened to and obeyed (Chilton 2004; Cap 2008). As noted by Chilton (2004), the claim to rightness is grounded in the speaker’s implicit claim to inhabit a particular social role and to possess a particular authority (Martin and Wodak 2003). The possession of authority provides rationale for listing reasons to be obeyed. This involves a symbolic assignment of different values to different discourse parties (such as Us and Them opposites), a firm assertion of audience’s wants and needs in the moment of crisis, and, crucially, the construction of charismatic leadership needed to handle the crisis situation (Huntington 2004; Cap 2017). All these practices are components of successful legitimization, whose central objective is a broad social mobilization around a common goal. Legitimization is thus a universal weapon: it can be “a good means to a good end,” as well as “a bad means to a bad end” (Cap 2017: 3; Hartman 2002).

In political communication, legitimization is often accompanied by delegitimization (Chilton 2004; Cap 2006, 2017), the strategy of presenting others (e.g., foreigners, “enemies within,” political opposition, institutional adversaries) as “bad” and potentially hostile. Delegitimization involves the use of ideas of difference and geopolitical as well as ideological and cultural boundaries. In that sense it partakes, together with legitimization, in defining and positioning of the Us and Them camps at opposite ends of a scale. Pragmatically, delegitimization can manifest itself in acts of negative Them-presentation, acts of blaming, scapegoating, marginalizing, excluding, attacking the moral character of an individual or a group, or attacking the rationality and sanity of the other. The extreme is to deny the humanness of the other—a strategy adopted, for example, in the anti-Semitic propaganda in the Nazi Germany. In general, delegitimization strategies are widely present in state interventionist discourses (Oddo 2018), where leaders use them to foster legitimization of the proposed preventive or reactionary policies (Oddo 2018; Koller et al. 2019). These days such manifestations of delegitimization are notably salient in the anti-terrorist and anti-immigration rhetoric (Cap 2017; Oddo 2018), or as elements of complex national discourses such as Brexit discourse (Koller et al. 2019).

The concepts and manifestations of coercion, legitimization, and delegitimization, and their mutual relations in which they enter in discourse, endorse the conception of political leadership and political communication as inextricably intertwined. If politics is, as we have observed, about “sharing visions” (Habermas 1981), then language and communication are powerful tools whereby a political speaker is able to convince her audience to a particular course of action regardless of where and when it takes place. This is because we as humans have the ability to not only represent, but also, and crucially, meta-represent, things (Sperber 2000). In other words, human communication is a system that, among other things, includes symbols that are detached from their direct referents (Hockett 1960). Thus, we can communicate about things not only present but equally past, future, possible and impossible, permissible, and impermissible—from the point of view of the communicator(s) (Gardenfors 2002; Chilton 2004). This ability emerges as critical in political discourse, which often relies on analogy or other spatial and temporal projections and shifts for successful legitimization of future action.

1.2. Us and Them or Them vs. Us? The Politics of Fear Dichotomies

The relations between coercion, legitimization, and delegitimization and the social goals served by these strategies and practices reflect a specific nature of political communication. In general, political communication operates indexically, with a view to enacting sociopolitical affiliations and distinctions. These distinctions are embedded in mental representations that political leaders continually define, enforce, negotiate, and redefine through language, to maximize the number of the promoted visions. As noted by Hockett (1960), the key Us-and-Them distinction is probably the result of anthropological developments, such as the two-tier organization of human sociopolitical perception. On the one hand, people possess a mental ability to structure their cognitive experience (“looking at” the world) in terms of dichotomous representations of good and evil, right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable. On the other hand, they possess a strictly linguistic ability to evoke or reinforce these dichotomous, bipolar representations in accordance with their social goals (Hockett 1960; Chilton 2004). The central goal involves, let us repeat, getting others to share a common view on what is good/evil, right/wrong, acceptable/unacceptable, and so on, and, consequently, how to secure the “right,” “good,” “useful,” “just,” “acceptable,” against a possible intrusion, in the life of a society, of the “wrong,” “evil,” “harmful,” and so on. Thus, political communication nearly always presupposes distance between the Us party (the home group and its leader or leaders) and the Them party (the possible “intruder”). Recent intercultural discourse research (Cap 2013, 2017; Abdi and Basarati 2018) demonstrates that perception of the Us camp by its members has a direct and universal influence on speaker’s discourse. The more specific the Us party and the more consequential or broader the goals (as in, e.g., state-level discourse), the clearer the marking of the distance through linguistic means. The “good” and “right” are thus construed and lexicalized as “close to Us,” and the “wrong” and “evil” as “remote to Us” (Cap 2017; Abdi and Basarati 2018).

The possibility to use discourse to control the perceived distance between Us and Them is an essential asset in political communication, especially in reactionary political projects that require swift social response and mobilization to face the emerging conflict (Dunmire 2011). The clearer the outlines of the conflict and the bigger the threat involved, the quicker, normally, the response. As found by anthropological and sociopsychological research, the success of threat-based communication nearly always relies on conceptualization of consequences of the conflict or crisis as personal and close (Zimbardo and Leippe 1991; Bandura 1986). Public audiences are generally reluctant to accept and legitimate radical policies, unless they are proposed in response to developments posing direct danger to specific groups or individuals. The danger can be physical and involving an apparent threat to life (as in state discourses of military intervention such as war-on-terror) or, as often happens, it can aff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 “Do What I Say, Unless . . .”: Political Leadership, Coercion, and Threat Construction
• 2 Polish Contexts: Threat-Based Communication and Crisis Management in Communist and Post-Communist Poland
• 3 Enemy at Home: “Total Opposition,” “Post-Communist Elites,” and “Keepers of the Round Table Order”
• 4 The “Worst Sort of Poles” Narrative
• 5 European Union and the Discourse of National Sovereignty
• 6 Oppressed by Neighbors: Germany, Russia, and Nord Stream 2
• Concluding Remarks
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright