Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2002

How are language, identity and war related? This exploratory essay probes the conceptual and logical connections among these three elemental factors of human existence, offers thoughts about an alternative discourse, and takes a look at suggestive data regarding the tie between violence and identity. I posit that who we are, what we say and when we fight are inseparable from one another. In this argumentative essay, language is seen as forming a nucleus of identity, identity as being forged in conflict, and discourse marking our path to, through and out of war and peace. Abating identity threats through identity-affirming discourse may, I conclude, be the best and most lasting tool towards peace.

The paper reports results of an ongoing ESRC-funded project into constructions of identity in German and Polish border communities. We are interested here in how our informants from different generations position themselves and their communities with regard to those on the other side of the river. The data come from a set of semi-structured interviews conducted in the towns of Guben (Germany) and Gubin (Poland) separated by the river Neisse, with some reference to the data elicited in the similarly split communities on the former East West German border on the Saale. For the people living in our target communities, the official narratives of the nation were re-written not just once, but in the case of the older generation at least three times. This meant a challenge of how to construct their own cultural identity in response to official changes and in relation to oppositional constructions of the nation on the other side of the border literally by ‘looking across’ at the Other in their every-day lives. In this paper we discuss how members of the oldest generation living on both sides of the river Neisse in the respective German and Polish towns of Guben and Gubin construct each other in their discourses. We show that the discourses of the Other are ridden by a mismatch in the constructions of the ownership of the past and the present. While the Polish narratives construct the German neighbours in terms of threat to the present status quo of the town, the German narratives position Gubin mostly in terms of the nostalgic past.

Europe is in a phase of institutional and political transformation. It is however not only the restructuring of the organisational procedures, i.e. the so-called reform of the institutions in the face of the coming enlargement of the European Union (EU), but also questions of the overall identity and legitimacy of Europe that are increasingly approached in political discourses. This essay analyses recent political speeches on Europe; it focuses on the problems of legitimisation and political representation at the “new” supranational level. In a comparison between French and German speeches the different semantic fields in talking about Europe are explored. Particular emphasis will be given to the interplay of ideational and organizational aspects — Making meaning of Europe and Organizing Europe — as being constitutive for these speeches. The discursive construction of past and future, experience and expectation; will be illuminated as well as problems of space and time, strategies of territorialisation and temporalisation.

The debate on the European Enlargement to East and Central Europe and the negotiations with presently thirteen and possibly more countries later, raise a cultural problem at large, briefly summarized by two questions: what do we have in common? And what is the European identity? Practically it raises the problem of what language will we speak? The paper, written by an anthropologist, is based on extensive periods of observation of EU institutional life and several months of participation to the Commission working operations. It intends to clarify the linguistic situation of the EU, considered as a political entity, by making explicit the relations between three articulated layers that are: the realm of an official polity, the world of the institutions, and society at large. Within the general context of EU making, I distinguish the problematic of the official European languages policy, the use of languages that is made by European officials and their impact on policy making, and the delicate shifting from monolingualism to multilingualism in a social context. The EU destiny is to carry together two antagonistic perspectives such as Unity and Diversity, which constitute its motto. Diversity is at the core of the European identity and within the institutional process itself, bringing, in terms of language, interesting issues for improving communication, through translation, interpretation and personal attitudes. Progresses towards the forms of unity that represent the integration policies and the adoption of a single currency do not lead simply to a linguistic unification, nor to the adoption of English as a common vehicular language. European elite (usually trained in English) and people (located in their own multiple languages) do not live identical linguistic situations. What is at stake is the possibility for individuals to manage several languages for being really part of a European space, which does not limit itself to national and regional boundaries.

This paper focuses on what appears to be the emergence of linguistic chauvinism in Brazil. Large-scale influx currently under way of foreign words (mostly from English) into the country’s national language, Portuguese, is being eyed with suspicion and distrust by large segments of the population. The current crisis was kick-started by a federal deputy in the House of Representatives who presented a controversial bill aimed at curbing the use of foreignisms by the use of law. Critics have however been quick to point out that the bill is a covert attempt to advance a political agenda. The paper examines the role of linguists in the unfolding national debate. After noting that they have by and large been set aside and have failed to bring the weight of their expert opinion to bear on the whole issue, I advance the claim that it is they themselves who are largely to blame. I conclude by making a plea that it is high time we as linguists did some soul-searching and asked ourselves whether, in our single-minded effort to theorise about language in total disregard for what the lay people think and believe about it, we have not isolated ourselves from them and rendered ourselves largely inconsequential. I suggest that Critical Linguistics may turn out to be one way of regaining some of the lost ground.

Skilful use of the rhetorical tropes which typify the language of serious political occasions — described here as “rhetorical weight” — is closely associated with charismatic political leaders. This paper studies the political rhetoric of a skilled exponent of the art, Chris Patten, the last British colonial governor of Hong Kong, and shows how he used rhetorical weight to promote his political agenda. Detailed analysis of four segments of Patten’s political oratory, spread over the period of his five-year term of office, highlights his heavy use of the tropes of metaphor, antithesis, parallelism, actualisation, and the unities of time, place and action. The paper demonstrates how the use of these tropes related to Patten’s overall political goals and their manipulative nature within the context of his discursive construction of Britain’s imperial/national history and identity.