Selling the War on Terror

Jack Holland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136207532
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Terrorismo

This book uses a comparative analysis to examine foreign policy discourses and the dynamics of the 'War on Terror'.

The book considers the three principal members of the Coalition of the Willing in Afghanistan and Iraq: the United States, Britain and Australia. Despite significant cultural, historical and political overlap, the War on Terror was nevertheless rendered possible in these contexts in distinct ways, drawing on different discourses and narratives of foreign policy and identity.

This volume explores these differences and their origins, arguing that they have important implications for the way we understand foreign policy and political possibility. The author rejects prevalent interpretations of a War on Terror foreign policy discourse, in the singular, highlighting that coalition states both demonstrated and relied upon divergent policy framings to make the War on Terror possible. The book thus contributes to our understanding of political possibility, in the process correcting a tendency to view the War on Terror as a universal and monolithic political discourse.

This book will be of much interest to students of foreign policy, critical security studies, terrorism studies, discourse analysis, and IR in general.

1 Language and Legitimacy

Foreign Policy as Culturally Embedded Discourse

Introduction

It is a strange and unnerving thought that it is impossible to know that the world exists outside of language and discourse. This is certainly not a new idea, having been elaborated by the likes of Wittgenstein and Nietzsche. And, whilst initially appearing counter-intuitive or even nonsensical, it is an idea that follows a strict logic. We simply cannot remove our heads to see what the world looks like exclusive of the mediation of thought.¹ How the world is seen, experienced and understood inevitably depends upon malleable but pre-existing concepts and categories. These concepts and categorisations – ways of understanding and making sense of the world – are held within thought, articulated and communicated through language, and shared and partially stabilised as discourses. Everything, from a table to a tank, is invariably understood through the discourse that generates its meaning. Thus, what one same tank is – what it represents and implies and the course of action it inspires – varies among people for whom meanings are generated by different discourses. Whether a tank represents invasion or liberation depends on the meanings generated through chains of equivalence and difference within discourse.² Competing discourses enable tanks to be ‘read’ simultaneously as symbols of invasion and liberation by different people.

There are important limits to these insights. Some possible meanings for the tank might be more difficult to construct than others. Certain framings, for instance, such as the production of the tank’s meaning through recourse to narratives of repression or rescue, are far easier to conceive and more likely to resonate than many alternatives. This point is brought home by the struggle to frame and fix the meaning of 9/11 in the day’s aftermath. Although clearly controversial, it was possible to frame 9/11 as the biblical punishment of American sins, the phallic dismembering of a patriarchal society, or the government-sponsored demolition of symbolic buildings. All three of these narratives failed to resonate beyond relatively narrow population groups, which were culturally predisposed to their acceptance. The wider American cultural context actively selected against them, making them far harder to sell to the population at large. This corollary is vital. While foreign policy is discursive, it is certainly not the case that ‘anything goes’.³ Cultural context enables, shapes and constrains foreign policy discourse in particular and significant ways.

This chapter introduces a framework for the analysis of foreign policy as culturally embedded discourse. The case is made for such analysis through a discussion of two features central to the foreign policy of democratic states: language and legitimacy. In the first section, a discursive ontology is outlined, focussing on a poststructural understanding of language and noting its importance and implications. In the second section, arguments on the politics and productivity of language are accompanied by their crucial corollary: cultural context. While language is central to the operation and analysis of foreign policy, in democracies such as the US, the UK and Australia foreign policy is almost always conditioned by the requirements of legitimacy. In the third section, a framework that can account for language and legitimacy is introduced. This framework begins the task of theorising the cultural context in which foreign policy discourse is embedded.

Language

Following the breakdown of established patterns in world politics at the end of the Cold War, new approaches emerged in the study of International Relations (IR), which sought to move beyond traditional emphases on realpolitik.⁴ One of the most prominent approaches was post-positivism. It took inspiration from an array of thinkers challenging structural linguistics, centring on the work of Foucault and Derrida. Its basis was, and remains, a belief that international relations generally, and foreign policy specifically, are discursive and processual. Denying attempts to appeal to extra-discursive reality, poststructural IR takes normative drive from a desire to undermine dominant discourses, which are necessarily violent in that they serve to marginalise ways of thinking and being otherwise.

A poststructural view of language recognises a number of features. First, as a system of communication, employing collective codes and conventions, language is social. Second, as Hansen explains, language is ‘constitutive for what is brought into being’; it is ‘ontologically significant’. The meaning and identity of things – ‘objects, subjects, states, living beings, and material structures’ – is always constructed in language.⁵ A poststructural approach to language downplays the relevance of the notion that these things might possess any intrinsic or essential qualities. Such qualities could not be known or agreed upon outside of language, which is a site of contestation for the production, reproduction, inclusion and exclusion of particular subjectivities and representations. In short, language is political. Third, meanings and identities are constructed in language through simultaneous processes of linking and differentiation. For instance, constructions of the Taliban and Al Qaeda by the Coalition of the Willing frequently linked ideas of Afghanistan as a barbarian, violent and irrational space. This construction simultaneously reinforced an understanding of the Self. It did so through juxtaposition to the notion that freedom-loving nations are civilised, peaceful and rational.

David Campbell has highlighted the important role that absence plays in the formation of American national identity.⁶ Frequently, the US has been defined in opposition to what it is not, whether that ‘Other’ be Native Americans, Hitler’s Germany, the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union, or Islamic terrorism. However, while differentiation dominates processes of identity creation, meaning can also be fixed through processes other than opposition and dichotomy. Ole Waever has shown that processes of linking can construct identities in proximity to particular ideal types.⁷ Ambitions of countries to join the European Union have resulted in a hierarchy or spectrum of identities, which move gradually away from a European core, defined by free markets, human rights and secular Kantian liberalism. Politicians in neighbouring countries have actively attempted to remodel the identity of their states, linking in with features of European-ness in order to maximise cultural and political proximity to both the lucrative heart of Europe and the perceived positive image it affords.⁸ Nevertheless, a linked-identity project in Europe inevitably works alongside the construction of European identity through its differentiation from American, Asian, African and Russian alternatives.

Partial, temporary stability, although always indefinite and incomplete, frequently produces regularity in the connections and juxtapositions evident in processes of linking and differentiation. This relative if impermanent fixity marks the formation of a discourse, identifiable through the comparatively systematic construction of meaning and identity. While interpretation and understanding are always ultimately conducted at the level of the individual, meaning is achieved by relating new information to unique, previously acquired and constantly evolving knowledge. A subjective thought process, whilst unique at the level of the individual, is almost inevitably structured by intersubjective socio-cultural knowledge and the processes that operate to produce and verify or limit and even prevent it. And language is the most significant of the processes facilitating intersubjective understandings. It is through language, most frequently, that humans communicate and represent the world. Discourses occur where particular linguistic representations achieve relative stability, regulating which meanings are produced by legitimising or discrediting statements in a comparatively systematic way.

A broadly poststructural view of the linguistic regulation of meaning production should, however, be noted as much for its identification of impermanence and instability, as for that of regularity and systematicity. Poststructuralism recognises ‘structure’ and ‘post’: discourses are structured systems of linguistic construction, albeit inevitably marked by instability and incompleteness. This inherent and inevitable instability and incompleteness ‘brings to the fore the importance of political agency and the political production and reproduction of discourses’.⁹ Discourses are political. Established through and reliant upon human agency, discourses should be viewed as both an impermanent construction of reality and a medium through which power operates to create knowledge. They form at the nexus of power and knowledge to shape and determine socially acceptable and unacceptable ways of talking. Discourses frequently mark the limits of what it is possible to say.¹⁰ And, correspondingly, they help to demarcate what it is possible to think and do.

One of the most persistent (and incorrect) criticisms of a discursive ontology argues that ‘material facts’ are ignored. Adopting a discursive ontology does not deny the materiality of the world, but instead argues that the world is given meaning through discourse. The material is not dissolved; rather the material and the ideational are seen to be fully imbricated in one another. ‘What is denied is not that objects exist externally to thought’; this is neither denied nor asserted, as it is impossible to know either way. Rather the different assertion is made that ‘they could not constitute themselves as objects outside any discursive condition of emergence’.¹¹ Prominent discourse-focussed works analysing the War on Terror have addressed this criticism head on. Richard Jackson, for example, has argued that underpinning his analysis is

the assumption that while everything is text (even a bomb is a text – especially when soldiers write personal messages on them, but also when they are dropped in the name of ‘freedom’ or as a message to other dictators), text is not necessarily everything (bombs are also instruments of death that at the moment of detonation are impervious to any form of deconstruction).¹²

Despite emphasising that he does not deny the possibility of extra-discursive reality, at no point in Writing the War on Terrorism does Jackson rely upon its invocation. On the contrary, he attempts to denaturalise the dominant discourses of the War on Terror, arguing that a new social reality was created for the American public through the creation of a whole new language.¹³ The militaristic response to 9/11, Jackson shows, required the articulation of the event as simultaneously new, unique and yet like Pearl Harbor. It required that 9/11 be viewed as an act of war, perpetrated by an enemy that existentially threatened the US and could not be dealt with through negotiation or diplomacy. Jackson traces the considerable efforts afforded, once the campaign was viewed as a war, to portray the War on Terror as good, moral and just. To this end, he deconstructs the writing of the identity of evil terrorists and good Americans, showing how existing popular discourses are intertextually drawn upon and plugged into by politicians keen to maximise popular resonance for policy decisions. This intertextual analysis is paralleled by a genealogical reading of contemporary American foreign policy that shows how politicians drew upon and replicated earlier responses to other security threats and national crises. Jackson’s work is thorough, erudite and important. However, here a reading of Jackson’s Writing the War on Terrorism is deliberately offered as representative of two limitations and silences prevalent within analytic approaches to discourse. First, given the book’s elucidation of many direct linkages in US foreign policy discourse to past articulations, it is surprising that the issue of foreign policy culture is not afforded greater attention. And, second, Jackson’s work quite rightly attempts to deconstruct dominant discourses of the War on Terror, but risks portraying a monolithic political discourse, which veils the heterogeneity evident within the Coalition of the Willing. This heterogeneity was vital to the possibility of the War on Terror, and a greater recognition of cultural context is required if it is to be understood and explained.

While discourse-analytic approaches claim that discursive analysis is required if we are to understand ‘how the war on terrorism functions domestically’, such approaches have rarely attempted to theorise or assess the domestic context.¹⁴ This failure to engage with context – as facilitating, shaping and constraining of foreign policy discourse – can be split into two related flaws. First, there exists a lack of consideration for how agency operates. An unyielding structuralist legacy grips poststructuralism, to the extent that, where it is acknowledged that practitioners require popular consent or acquiescence, little work is put into theorising how practitioners as self-reflexive, strategic agents may attempt to realise this.¹⁵ At their most extreme, discourse-analytic approaches risk reducing agents to ‘discoursers of discourses’.¹⁶ As Schattenmann summarises,

the poststructuralist is prone to ignore the pulling and hauling of politics … the problem is that actors are more or less absent. This seems to be a fundamental and almost inescapable problem of a discourse-analytic poststructuralist approach: discourses are dominant, and agency is blurred.¹⁷

Second, there is reluctance in poststructural IR to acknowledge that ‘cultural practices are more ba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Language and legitimacy: foreign policy as culturally embedded discourse
• 2. Agency, audience and alternative: foreign policy and political possibility
• 3. Before 9/11
• 4. From void to crisis: from 11 September 2001 to 9/11
• 5. Response: Afghanistan
• 6. Translation: Iraq
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index