“Clean and green — That’s the way we like it”: Greening a country, building a nation

This paper focuses on the discursive strategies used by the Singapore government to construct national identity and solidarity on the basis of a ‘clean and green’ environment. By analysing the slogans used in the Clean and Green Week campaign in terms of the use of pronouns and the pragmatic notion of ‘politeness’, the paper shows that the people of Singapore are not only persuaded to ‘buy’ the idea of environmentalism, but also to buy into the ideology of national identity and unity being derived (in part) from the proper management and conservation of Singapore’s scarce resources and limited physical space. The paper concludes with a discussion on how national campaigns such as the Clean and Green Week constitutes a form of political discourse, where public educational discourse becomes a veiled medium through which socio-political ideologies are produced and propagated. With the government treading the fine line between information and manipulation where ‘greening’ a country becomes a scaffolding for building a nation, a study like this offers interesting insights into the interplay between the language of politics and the politics of language.