‘Doing Politics’

The Discursive Construction of Politics

Ruth Wodak

Understanding politics and the procedures of decision-making are not only

of theoretical interest, — as an interdisciplinary endeavour between Politi-
cal Science and other disciplines, such as Sociology, History, Discourse Stud-
ies, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Psychology, and so forth —, but also of
eminent relevance for practice. After the referendums on the Draft European
Constitutional Treaty in France and the Netherlands May/June 2005 many Eu-
ropean citizens, the media and politicians have emphasised continuously and
explicitly that ‘traditional’ politics are in a state of crisis. No easy way out is to
be recommended. The same is true for problems of security which obviously
can not be solved with conventional and traditional measures. Politics seem to
have become a matter decided at the top only: participation is often perceived
as lacking by many citizens. Hence, there has been vehement criticism con-
cerning the lack of democratisation, in Europe and in other parts of the world.
Opinion polls, moreover, detect a loss of trust in politicians and in politics.
The papers in this issue touch on several aspects mentioned above: it is im-
portant to make processes of decision-making, of ‘doing politics’ transparent
for the wider public (Wodak, forthcoming; Duranti 2006). The representation
of politics in the public sphere, e.g. in televised news, is usually constructed
from symbolic and selected images: prominent politicians giving speeches,
shaking hands, stepping out of planes on red carpets, talking to other promi-
nent politicians, and by declaring, promising or presenting policies via press
conferences, in interviews, and so forth (Edelman 1964; Tolson 2001; Wodak
and Busch 2004; Hallin and Mancini 2005). However, most of what becomes
eventually visible to the general public could be labelled as a ‘performance’ or as
a ‘staging’ of politics: the public is actually excluded from the negotiations, from
the many conversations taking place in the corridors of the buildings of various
institutions as well as by phone, fax or email, from the relevant decision-mak-
ing bodies, as well as from the crises and stress which occur as they do in most

Journal of Language and Politics 5:3 (2006), 299–303.

issn 1569–2159 / e-issn 1569–9862 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
300 Ruth Wodak

other professions as well. The public is thus excluded from the everyday life of
politicians behind the scene (Wodak 2000; Muntigl et al. 2000; Holly 1990).
This exclusion from the actual doing of politics is also manifest in the schol-
arly literature in Political Science and neighbouring disciplines (Pelinka 2004;
Heywood 2004). Most theories and their methodologies in political science
deal with the macro-level of politics and policy; these theories include systems
theory, rational choice theory, game theory, and so forth. These theories, in
sum, deal with the macro-structures and functions of political institutions,
with, for example, the history of political parties, with prognoses of elections,
with historical developments and change, with cultural political economy. The
exceptions are a few studies in political action research, research from a more
behaviouristic position in Political Sciences (Heinz Eulau et al. 1984), and nar-
rative policy analysis (Roe 1994). Studies in these paradigms have investigated
processes of negotiation as well as legislative behaviour. However, fieldwork in a
truly ethnographic sociolinguistic sense is usually neglected (however, see Fen-
no 1996; Yanow 1996; Nullmeier, Pritzlaff and Wiesner 2003; Rabinow 1999).
Three papers in this issue focus on the impact of specific politicians, elabo-
rating the seminal research on charismatic politicians by Max Weber (2003).
Paul Danler investigates the rhetoric of Benito Mussolini — thus contributing
to research on charismatic personalities who have had huge impact on political
developments in the 20th century. The detailed analysis of such rhetoric serves
our understanding of persuasive and manipulative skills. Moreover, Danler
succeeds in linking the detailed analysis of syntactic variants with Mussolini’s
rhetoric. Thus, on many occasions the political orator obviously opts not to
state explicitly who the agent responsible for an action is, exploiting passive
constructions without expressed agents, or impersonal constructions of vari-
ous kinds. The author suggests that this very specific style made it possible for
Mussolini to conceal from his audience how far he had left his original socialist
ideals behind, once he had come to power.
Naima Boussofara-Omar has had access to unique data: drafts and the final
version of the first ‘presidential’ speech that Ben Ali, the current president of
Tunisia (then the newly appointed Prime Minister), delivered on November
7, 1987 to announce the deposition of President Bourguiba and the end of his
thirty-year post-independence rule (1956–1987), and to proclaim himself the
successor of Bourguiba. Boussofara describes the elaborate way in which the
presidential political speeches are composed, scrupulously revised and edited,
resulting in numerous drafts, in order to carry the voice of authority and power
of the president, while they are at the same time carefully crafted to be heard
as the voice of the collective. In this paper, the author focuses on two types of
 ‘Doing Politics’ 30

interventions: word order and omissions of clauses from previous drafts, and
illustrates how the changes capture the processes whereby the new discursive
authority and presidential voice are in the making.
Gisela Ruiseco and Thomas Slunecko apply the discourse-historical ap-
proach to Critical Discourse Analysis in analyzing the inaugural speech of the
current president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, delivered on August 7th,
2002 in Bogotá. This speech employs discursive strategies for the construction
of national identity by the Colombian elites. In their analysis, the authors focus
on Uribe´s strategy of referring to the European heritage and on his methods
for appeasing the cultural and ethnic differences of the population. These first
three papers thus also make it possible to compare three prominent politicians,
in different historical and socio-political contexts, and to compare political
speeches with differing functions, which by nature of the genre employ a range
of linguistic, pragmatic and argumentative strategies and elements. This, more-
over, makes it possible to detect changes in the genre as well as cross-national
and cross-cultural influences.
Barbara De Cock investigates language policies in the European Union,
more specifically the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie: The EU
and the OIF have both developed to become international organisations that
combine economic, geopolitical and cultural-linguistic policies. She analyzes
the ways by which both organisations construct their concepts of linguistic
and cultural diversity and how they deal with language rights — topics which
are at the centre of many debates on citizenship, language rights, immigration,
and so forth, in the European Union. In addition, the paper studies the on-
going Belgian public debates on French as an international language and the
European debates on French as the legal language for the EU. In a similar vein,
He Xianbin demonstrates — with Chinese historical data — that the cultural
status of a language (or dialect) directly affects the translation flow, legal power
of parallel texts, orientations of translators, etc. The author claims that the cul-
tural positioning of translators and their assessment of languages seem more
decisive than speaker’s assessments. The same might be true for the European
Union, of course. A language obviously might become dominant when it is
considered the vehicle for advanced technology and thought. Its interaction
with translation seems dialectic.
Finally, this issue presents two interdisciplinary discussion papers: one on
the ‘Future of the European Union’ by the Swedish historian Bo Stråth, the
second by the English sociologist Andrew Sayer, on ‘Language and significance
— or the importance of import: implications for critical discourse analysis’.
Stråth paints a dark picture for Europe and the European Union. By employing
302 Ruth Wodak

a historical semantic analysis, he deconstructs many of the mainstream utopian

visions put forward by both European politicians and scholars; he claims that
public spheres in democratising societies usually emerged historically through
contention and struggles where social issues were the focus. He proposes that
the European Union should take up the social issue (i.e. the traditional Scan-
dinavian Social Model) at the European level, thus a parliamentarisation of
the social issue through various contested proposals from both the left and the
right spectrums of politics. Andrew Sayer argues that critical discourse analysis
can hardly be critical unless it acknowledges and evaluates how discourses im-
pute and interpret significance or import and how this relates to well-being. He
opposes many positions which tend to view critique as ‘merely subjective’ and
beyond the scope of reason or science. The paper illustrates how significance
can be understood by challenging traditional dualisms.

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