Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2011

Integration has become a keyword across texts and genres, and is often uncritically embraced not only by politicians and journalists but also by academic researchers. In this paper, we explore how integration is used in reference to people categorized as “migrants” or “foreigners”. We discuss intertextual links between a wide range of texts from different European countries, including official policy documents, print media texts and academic publications. We have deliberately chosen liberal and progressive texts rather than the texts of the extreme right, since our objective is to show how even in liberal texts, the use of the concept of integration is frequently informed by illiberal assumptions and ideologies. Our analysis aims to lay bare the cultural or discourse models underlying the use of the concept of integration. We compare and contrast three discourse models of integration, which we have labelled as the centre-periphery, mathematical game and statistical correlations models. We show how one particular text shuttles between models and examine the pernicious consequences of the linguistic choices made in the text. The paper concludes with a call for greater awareness of the potentially discriminatory ideological frameworks within which the term “integration” functions.

When the principle of subsidiarity was introduced into Community law in 1992, it was hailed as a triumph of diversity over the previous uniformity of an excessively centralised European Union. It was generally believed to be an infallible way to preserve the cultural and linguistic heritage of each Member state, as it meant that responsibility for the design and implementation of educational, cultural and linguistic policies lay with the Member States. However, this transfer is not producing the desired results. On the contrary, it is helping to consolidate a monolingual tendency already observed in the EU since the United Kingdom joined the EU in 1973. In this context, the article examines the defensive strategies based on subsidiarity adopted by France and Germany and briefly assesses the outcome of these strategies.

Accusations that some purposefully manipulate information in order to create a favourable impression in others are commonplace in political life. The term ‘spin’ has emerged in recent decades as a versatile but ill-defined normative charge that signifies a lost fidelity. This article examines a prominent attempt to adjudicate on allegations of it in order to ask how such debates are collaboratively produced and sustained. The case study is the ‘Butler Inquiry’, an investigation established to determine whether the British government distorted intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction capabilities in the build up to the 2003 war. It is argued that the Inquiry and the subsequent debate about it is notable for two features: (i) the multiple and shifting orientations adopted to the standing of language; and (ii) the lack of regard in this dispute about likeness to how determinations of likeness should be argued — a kind of “a-resemblance resemblancing”. Through the multiple ways in which matters of similitude were resolved and deferred, treated as publicly demonstrated and beyond simple verification, rendered knowable and undecidable, the debate about the Butler Inquiry established the conditions for further charges of spin. The failure to attend to how claims about resemblance were being grounded limited the public debate as well as conceptions of political accountability.

In 1973, former President of Tunisia, Habib Bourguiba delivered nine speeches in which he recounted episodes of the national movement. Even though delivered in an official setting and to a highly educated audience, the semi-planned speeches were delivered in the dialectal variety of Arabic, i.e. Tunisian Arabic. The speeches were brought together in a book form titled ḥayātī, ’ārā’ī, jihadi (My Life, My Opinions, My Jihād). Their publication in a book form meant that the original performed texts were modified from a spoken mode to a written mode and ‘translated’ from Tunisian Arabic, a dialectal form of Arabic, to fuṣḥā, the High variety of Arabic (Ferguson 1959). The rewriting of the speeches led to strategic sociolinguistic choices. In the translation process, the linguistic product was regulated by a web of competing institutions of power, sites of linguistic ideologies, and linguistic practices; each of which represents an institution of power whose interests shift strategically between moments of ideological convergence and/or divergence, if not rivalry and connivance, among and between them. The present essay is an attempt to explore those sociolinguistic choices translated into erasures, shifts, modifications, and polishing of the original text. The carefully orchestrated changes in the original text, I believe, aim at re-establishing the authoritative presidential voice, restoring the institutional linguistic status quo, and rendering Bourguiba’s personal ‘ḥkāyāt’, stories, to ‘tārīkh aš-šaʿb t-tūnsi’, ‘the history of the Tunisian people’.

This paper discusses the Israeli newspaper coverage of a single event of considerable public significance in the Israeli-Palestinian context. A dominant analogy in the coverage that played various argumentative roles and its responses are analyzed. When trying to answer the question of how to respond to an analogy put forward by a participant in a communication, various methods available to the interlocutor are mentioned, two of which are shown to be rhetorically effective in this case: (1) acceptance of the analogy enables the interlocutor to expand and enrich it into new argumentative directions; (2) a mere rejection of an analogy, without explicitly pointing to specific deficiencies in it or offering an alternative analogy, is shown to be potentially effective when its power stems from the use of irony: Ironic utterances allow for the explicit mention of the analogy, while at the same time holding it up to ridicule, thereby causing the rival’s arguments to be indirectly rejected. This method of rejection is not discussed in the literature on analogy. The analysis demonstrates the ways in which a figurative analogy might be effective although there is no difficulty to attack and refute it. In a complex context such as the political arena, the pragmatic effectiveness may be more relevant than incoherence, thus an analogy is not necessarily judged according to normative criteria.

The language of press and television news reportage is familiar territory for critical discourse analysis and other approaches to politics in the mass media (e.g., Kelly-Holmes and O’Regan, 2004, Chouliaraki 2005), as is that of newspaper editorials (e.g. Le 2003). But, in sympathy with, e.g., van Leeuwen and Jaworski (2003), we believe that a full understanding of mediated political culture needs to extend beyond this territory to consider a wider range of linguistic, visual and multimodal media genres. This article reviews the character of political sketchwriting in Britain as a basis for an assessment of its contribution to the national political mediascape. To do this, we draw on recent work in discourse analysis (Engebretson 2007) and sociolinguistics (Jaffe 2009) on the concept of ‘stance’. First, we illustrate the history of sketchwriting as a newspaper genre, tracing it back to the earliest days of political reportage in Britain. We then explore, with reference to a corpus of materials assembled during the British General Election campaign of 2010, how the stance-work of this genre is prototypically managed. Following this, we demonstrate the extension of such work to a wider range of political column discourse, under the general heading of ‘colour writing’.

This article analyzes the relationship between two of Machiavelli’s political texts The Prince (1513) and the Discourses on Livy (1512–1517), and his popular comedy The Mandrake Root (La Mandragola) (1515). Through an examination of these works, I will show what influence his political ideas may have had on his comedy and, conversely, how key points in his comedy emerge as central ideas in his political texts. By demonstrating how his texts communicate with each other, I will show how he recycles established concepts and even changes their meaning.