Discourse and Political Culture: The Language of the Third Way in Germany and the UK 9789027204219, 9027204217

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discourse approaches to politics, society and culture

Discourse and Political Culture The language of the Third Way in Germany and the UK Michael Kranert

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JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY

Discourse and Political Culture

Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture (DAPSAC) issn 1569-9463

The editors invite contributions that investigate political, social and cultural processes from a linguistic/discourse-analytic point of view. The aim is to publish monographs and edited volumes which combine language-based approaches with disciplines concerned essentially with human interaction – disciplines such as political science, international relations, social psychology, social anthropology, sociology, economics, and gender studies. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see benjamins.com/catalog/dapsac

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Volume 86 Discourse and Political Culture The language of the Third Way in Germany and the UK by Michael Kranert

University of Neuchâtel Tianjin Foreign Studies University

Joanna Thornborrow Cardiff University

Ruth Wodak

Lancaster University/University of Vienna

Sue Wright

University of Portsmouth

Discourse and Political Culture The language of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

Michael Kranert University of Southampton

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

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For Helen

Table of contents

List of tables List of figures List of abbreviations Acknowledgements

xi xiii xv xvii

Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Comparative discourse research: Global and local discourse structures  1 1.2 The Case study: Discourses of the Third Way  4 1.3 Aims and Research Questions  7 Chapter 2 Elements of Comparative Politico-Linguistic Discourse Analysis 2.1 From Politico-Linguistics to Comparative Politico-Linguistic Discourse Analysis: Theoretical origins  9 2.2 Discourse as texts in context, or Discourse Linguistics as Cultural Studies  15 2.3 The contexts of political discourses  21 2.3.1 The context of culture: Political institutions and political culture  21 2.3.2 Context and subject of political discourse: Ideology and ideologies  24 2.4 Conclusions: Methodological approaches to comparative political discourse analysis  30

9

Chapter 3 Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK 31 3.1 The long end of the social democratic century: A brief comparative history of Labour and the SPD  31 3.2 Discourses of the Third Way – a global phenomenon?  44 3.3 The political systems and political cultures of Germany and the United Kingdom as discourse contexts  47

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3.4 3.5

Texts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK: Corpus justification and description  57 Conclusions: Research questions for a comparative politico-linguistic discourse analysis of Third-Way discourses  65

Chapter 4 69 Texts in context: Register and genre in the discourses of the Third Way 4.1 Genre and the text-context relations in political discourse  69 4.2 Uniting the party, uniting the nation: Party conference speeches as a genre in the discourses of the Third Way  72 4.3 Integrating and promoting the party: The genre election manifesto in the discourses of the Third Way  84 4.4 Conclusions: Register and genre as reflections of political culture  98 Chapter 5 101 Lexical strategies in the discourses of the Third Way 5.1 Political lexis: Politics as semantic struggle  101 5.2 The conceptualisation of the Third Way as a lexico-semantic frame  108 5.3 The Realisation of the Third Way frame in Germany and the UK  112 5.3.1 Ideological publications and party conference speeches  112 5.3.2 The Third Way semantic frame in political competition: Election manifestos  117 5.4 Ideological decontestation – redefinitions and recontextualisation of lexical elements  123 5.5 Evidence of context-sensitivity of political lexis in the Schröder-Blair paper  129 5.6 Metalinguistic comments as indicators of an ongoing ideological battle between Schröder and Lafontaine  134 5.7 The lexis of election manifestos – A corpus linguistic view  138 5.7.1 Actors and actions in the manifestos  138 5.7.2 Keywords – indicators for political culture, political competition and ideological change?  147 5.8 Political lexis and political myth: re-, rück- and wieder-derivations as signifiers for a golden-age myth  161 5.9 Conclusions: Political lexis and political culture  166



Table of contents

Chapter 6 The argumentative structure of party-political discourse in the discourses of ‘new Labour’ and ‘Die Neue Mitte’ 169 6.1 Political deliberation and ideology: The argumentative structure of politics  169 6.2 Legitimisation of ideological change in ideological publication  174 6.3 The construction of ideology in the pre-election speeches of Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder  185 6.4 Personal Stories: Mythopoetic legitimation of a leader  190 6.5 Counter-discourses in the SPD 1998: Lafontaine’s speeches as party leader  193 6.6 Rhetoric in times of change: Blair’s Clause Four and Schröder’s Agenda 2010  198 6.7 Conclusions: Legitimation of ideological change in political context  205 Chapter 7 207 New politics, new metaphor? 7.1 Metaphor in political discourse  207 7.2 The conceptual metaphor politics is a journey  216 7.3 The conceptual metaphor politics is building  221 7.4 The conceptual metaphor politics is battle  223 7.5 Religious metaphors in the introduction to Labour’s manifesto in 1997  226 7.6 The Target domains state, society and welfare  229 7.7 Constructions of necessity in the metaphorical ideation in ideological publications  231 7.8 The metaphorical construction of political myths in the party conference speeches  235 7.9 The art of aestheticisation and promotionalisation through metaphorical programme terms in Blair’s conference speeches  238 7.10 Conclusions: Metaphors of the Third Way  246 Chapter 8 Conclusions: Political cultures and the political discourses 8.1 Genres differences in political discourse  249 8.2 Legitimation of party-ideological change  251 8.3 Linguistic construction of Third Way ideology in Germany and the UK  253 8.4 The text-context relation in political discourse  256

249

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8.5 8.6

Theoretical and methodological conclusions for a comparative politicolinguistic discourse analysis  257 Social democracy after the Third Way: Questions for future comparative politico-linguistic research  259

Appendix: Short Biographies of Political Actors

265

References

269

Name index

293

Subject index

295

List of tables

Table 1.

Self-references in party conference speeches (Kranert 2017: 192)  80

Table 2.

Semantic frame of programme and stigma terms in the discourses of the Third Way  113

Table 3.

‘our’/ ‘uns’ in election manifestos  139

Table 4.

Frequency of ‘CDU’, ‘SPD’ and ‘rot-grün’ in the election manifestos  140

Table 5.

High-frequency verbs in Labour/SPD election manifestos between 1987 and 2002  142

Table 6.

Recipients of the verb ‘help’ in the 2001 Labour manifesto  144

Table 7.

The nominal and verbal use of ‘reform’ in the Labour and SPD manifestos between 1987 and 2001  145

Table 8.

Keywords in the 1997 Labour election manifesto compared to the 1997 Conservative manifesto  149

Table 9.

Keywords in the 1997 Labour election manifesto compared to the 1987 Labour manifesto  153

Table 10.

Keyness of ‘resource’ in Labour and Conservative manifestos  153

Table 11.

‘Community’ and ‘Gemeinschaft’ in the election manifestos  158

Table 12.

Keywords in the 1998 SPD election manifesto compared to the 1998 CDU manifesto  160

Table 13.

Keywords in the 1998 SPD election manifesto compared to the 1990 SPD election manifesto  160

Table 13.

Keywords in the 1998 SPD election manifesto compared to the 1990 SPD election manifesto (continued)  161

Table 14.

re- and rück- and wieder-derivations  162

Table 15.

Metaphors in party conference speeches  211

Table 16.

Metaphors in the SPD and Labour manifestos 1990–2002  212

Table 17.

Concordance ‘build’ in the 1997 Labour manifesto  222

Table 18.

‘Nation’ metaphors in Blair’s party conference speeches  236

List of figures

Figure 1.

Exclusive and inclusive ‘we’  78

Figure 2.

Front cover of the 1987 Labour manifesto  88

Figure 3.

Front cover of the 1992 Labour manifesto  89

Figure 4.

Pages 6 and 7 of the 1992 Labour manifesto  90

Figure 5.

Front cover of the Labour 1997 manifesto  91

Figure 6.

Detail from the top left corner of page 4 in Labour’s 1997 election ­manifesto  92

Figure 7.

Second double page of Labour’s election manifesto 2001 (pp 2–3)  93

Figure 8.

Pages 6 and 7 of the SPD manifesto 1994  95

Figure 9.

Double page from ‘Wir sind bereit’ (Vorstand der SPD July 1998, 42–43)  97

Figure 10.

Concordance ‘politics’ in the 1997 Labour manifesto  151

Figure 11.

Toulmin’s Model of Argumentation, my figure, original example from Toulmin (2003: pp. 90–97)  170

Figure 12.

Austin’s stages of action and Klein’s argumentative macro topoi in political discourse, translated and adapted from Klein (2000a, 34)  171

Figure 13.

Macro topoi in political discourse, adapted and translated from Klein (2000a: 638)  171

Figure 14.

Argumentative structure of political discourse, adapted from Kuck and Römer (2012: 77)  172

Figure 15.

Macro topoi in the discourses of the Third Way  175

List of abbreviations

adav cda cdu clp dgb dha dimean dl enep enpp fdp frg gdr mk pds pfi plp sapd sdap sfl spd uk

Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein Critical Discourse Analysis Christlich-Demokratische Union Deutschlands Constituency Labour Party Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund Discourse-Historical Approach Discourse linguistic multi-layered analysis Discourse linguistics Effective number of electoral parties Effective number of parliamentary parties Freie Demokratische Partei Federal Republic of Germany German Democratic Republic Michael Kranert Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus Private finance initiatives Parliamentary Labour Party Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Systemic Functional Linguistics Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands United Kingdom

Acknowledgements

Despite carrying one name on the title page, research and writing is never a purely individual undertaking. I am indebted to many people and institutions who supported this study and whom I would like to thank. First and foremost, my thanks go to my PhD-supervisor Dr Geraldine Horan. She kept my floating attention focused and my interest in the subject alive, and patiently reminded me to stop reading and start writing. I am immensely grateful for her careful reading of all my academic writing, which went far beyond her duty as a supervisor. It truly helped me to improve the clarity and style of my writing in English. I also have to thank my second supervisor, Professor Mark Hewitson, for valuable feedback on my work. Special thanks go to Professors Josef Klein and Thomas Niehr for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of my work, and long conversations about language and politics. I would also like to convey my thanks to the network ‘Sprache in der Politik’ for inviting me to present my work at their meeting in Münster in September 2013. I am most grateful to UCL for providing generous funding for my doctoral research, in which this monograph is based, in the form of the Impact Scholarship, the Faculty Institute of Graduate Studies Scholarship and the Fielden Research Scholarship. As a linguist without training in using archives, I owe many thanks to the knowledgeable people at the archives I used: I would like to thank Dr Beate Häupel for allowing me to use the Political Archive of the SPD at the Willy-Brandt-Haus in Berlin, and Dr Astrid Stroh for guiding me through a wealth of information there. My thanks also go to Darren Treadwell, the very helpful archive assistant at the Labour History Archive and Study Centre, People’s History Museum, Manchester. I would also like to thank the Labour Party and the SPD for granting me permission to reproduce excerpts from their election manifestos. Nathalie and Steven Bending took on the immense work of proofreading my first drafts, and I have to thank Robert Matthews for his great attention to detail in copy-editing the final draft of my thesis, on which this monograph is based. Manya Elrick kindly ‘declunced’ my translation of the quotations from German sources for this book. Nick Pilcher and Sal Consoli kindly commented on the last draft of this book. I am also immensely grateful to the series editor Professor Jo Angouri

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for her encouragement and support with this monograph, and to Isja Conen from John Benjamins for keeping the project on track. Of all my friends who supported me through the time of this research, I would particularly like to thank Hendrik Lange for keeping me interested in politics, and Roland Schaette for teaching me to bake sourdough bread, an activity that was invaluable for clearing my head before attempting any type of writing. My thanks also go to my parents, Susanne and Günter Kranert, for supporting my interest in everything and for allowing me to extend my studies for as long as I did. I apologise to my lovely children, Josef and Louisa, who always had to be quiet around the house and who could say ‘Papa muss arbeiten’ before they learned to say anything else. Most of all, however, I am indebted to my wife Helen, who gave me the love, time and patience to finish this project without losing my sanity. It is to her that I dedicate this work.

Chapter 1

Introduction

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’  (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass1)

1.1

Comparative discourse research: Global and local discourse structures

Changes in political ideologies and movements seem to happen in global waves and move globally from place to place, from polity to polity, whether it is socialism, fascism, social democracy, or the now so-called populism. But do these global political ideologies differ globally, and if so, how and why? In this book, I am going to answer this question in a case study as a linguist, looking at the language used to construe political ideologies. I do so because I believe that politics to a large extent does, amongst other human activities, rely on the use of language. In fact, I follow Chilton and Schäffner (2002a, 3) who argue that the use of language is constitutive for doing politics. While this was already recognised by Plato and Aristotle, only in the 20th century did linguistics and political scientists start engaging in the analysis of language use in politics. In recent years, political discourse analysis has developed as a transdisciplinary endeavour combining discourse analysis to analyse language use in context with the analysis of discourses as systems of knowledge and ideology in political science (Kranert and Horan 2018: 3–4). This book is an intervention in this debate and aims to present a framework for comparative politico-linguistic discourse analysis. This framework will allow an answer to the overarching question of how global changes in political discourse are adapted locally, or, to phrase it in linguistic terms, how political contexts 1.  Quoted from Carroll, Lewis, John Tenniel, and Martin Gardner. 2001. The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition. London, New York: Penguin Books., p 224.

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dominated by the local political system influence political language use. Using the case of the discourses of the Third Way in Germany and the UK, i.e. the social democratic reform discourses at the turn of the 21st century, I will explore how discourses, genres and party-political ideologies are sensitive to their political contexts, and develop a methodological and theoretical framework to describe this interdependency. Combining discourse analytical tools from the anglophone tradition of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the German tradition of politicolinguistics and comparative methods from political science, I will develop an interdisciplinary approach to comparative politico-linguistic discourse analysis. The approach is interdisciplinary in the sense of van Leeuwen’s (2005) integrationist interdisciplinarity, which is sometimes also named transdisciplinarity: ‘Here it is recognized that no single discipline can satisfactorily address any given problem on its own’ (van Leeuwen 2005: 8). This integrationist interdisciplinarity is typical for the developing field of Discourse Studies (Kranert and Horan 2018: 4). Comparative methodologies have long been established in political science. They became fashionable in the systems approach in the 1950s in the United States, but can be traced as far back as the philosophers of the Enlightenment (Hantrais 2009: 24), if not further: ‘States, kingdoms and principalities have been compared for approximately 2,500 years’ (Deutsch 1987: 5). Lijphart (1971, 682) argues that comparison is, together with experiments, statistics and case studies, a basic research method. He points out that it is ‘a method of discovering empirical relationships among variables, not […] a method of measurement’ (Lijphart 1971: 683, original emphasis). Landman (2008: 4) goes further by seeing comparison as essential to human knowledge. With the advent of comparative research in the social sciences in more general terms, often under the name of Cross-National Studies, the question of the unit of comparison gained more interest, and with the transition to ideas of Transnational Studies, it was asked whether ‘the concepts of the “nation-state” or “society” still continue to have relevance in our globalized, cosmopolitan world’ (May 2011: 244). The answer was of course that we need to understand how the global and the local are interdependent, and scholars of communication have understood from early on that global communication is contextualized locally (e.g. Slevin 2000), a process for which we need analytical tools. May (2011: 246) therefore concludes that ‘insights into forms of life are enhanced by studying the ways in which different cultures and societies organize their social and political affairs.’ Comparative approaches are of course not alien to linguistics. In fact, they were dominant in the 19th century as linguists then were mainly interested in diachronic changes of languages and in the analysis of language families, a contrastive view that led to taxonomies of languages (Hartmann 1980: 23). This thinking had a lasting influence on 20th century historical linguistics and later in



Chapter 1.  Introduction

theories of language contact. Interest in the transphrastic level, i.e. language above the sentence, started with Harris’ (1952) discourse analysis which is, from today’s point of view, a text linguistic approach: it identifies linguistic features and their distribution in the text relative to each other in order to develop a theory of text structures and text linguistics. This was picked up by many linguists interested in textual structures, and Hartmann (1980), amongst many others, introduced a comparative element into it by combining traditional contrastive linguistic analysis and discourse analysis into a comparative textology. However, discourse analysis in this context was still understood as text linguistics and not as the transtextual analysis it is today. The comparative element was introduced by Hartmann (1980) to further foreign language learning and teaching as well as translation theory. Politico-linguistic discourse analysis in the German tradition partly evolved around the idea of ‘Sprachgeschichte als Mentalitätsgeschichte’ (language history as history of mentality) (Hermanns 2012), aiming to grasp the cognitive and affective patterns of social groups through the changes of keywords, metaphors and argumentative structures that indicate changes in mentality. For a long time, this was often conducted intradiscursively with a focus on Germany, but comparative aspects entered the debate in the early 2000s. In their programmatic paper, Böke et al. (2000: 12) discuss methodological questions for inter-lingual corpus building as well as for the analysis of lexis, argumentation and metaphor in those corpora. Despite their implicit suggestions for a multi-layered analysis, even today comparative analyses mainly focus on the lexical domain (see for example Leuschner and Jaworska 2018). In her comparative analysis of the catch term ‘multicultural society’ in Germany and the UK, Schröter (2013) reflects on different possible approaches to comparative discourse analysis: she takes the route of a discourse comparison by analysing political keywords as ‘discourses in a nutshell’ (Schröter 2008). As an alternative approach, she suggests a comparison of phenomena such as genres, linguistic strategies and metaphors, but worries that, in this case, the findings could not be integrated into a contrastive programme. Such integration would only be possible in what she calls a structural comparison – and this is the approach the present study is taking: It is defined as a comparison of language in institutional contexts based on comparative politics, arguing that this approach would be fruitful if it could demonstrate how the systemic differences can be traced down to the level of linguistic patterns in political discourse.2 This idea fundamentally opposes a line of thought represented by recent studies on political discourses 2.  'Ein solcher top-down-Ansatz wäre besonders dann gewinnbringend, wenn sich solche Systemunterschiede tatsächlich bis auf die Ebene von Sprachgebrauchsmustern im politischen Diskurs verfolgen ließen.' (Schröter 2013: 92).

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which start out from a transnational hypothesis such as Gür-Şeker (2012), who aims to demonstrate that in discourses of security in Germany, the UK and Turkey, many linguistic patterns, especially metaphors, are recurrent  – despite differing political cultures. I aim to show that this is certainly not true for the discourses of the Third Way. We will see instead that political and ideological discourses, especially in politics, are localised versions of global discourses because national political cultures form discourse systems (Scollon, R., Scollon, S. B. K., and Jones 2012) dependent on political institutions and political cultures. We will see that the analysis therefore needs to start with differences at the genre level, an insight that has been neglected by almost all comparative studies so far. 1.2

The Case study: Discourses of the Third Way Let us together build social democracy’s success for the new century. Let the politics of the Third Way and the Neue Mitte be Europe’s new hope.3  (Blair and Schröder 1999: 12)

On 8th June 1999, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair along with the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder presented the policy paper ‘Europe: The Third Way/ Die Neue Mitte’4 in London. This signalled how, in their cases, as leader of their social democratic party, they had overcome an electoral crisis of their parties that had left them in opposition for nearly two decades. With the label of the ‘Third Way’, a reformed, pragmatic, post-ideological vision of social democracy, they had led their respective parties into victory, and now proclaimed the Third Way as a model for social democratic parties in the rest of Europe. But how were the reform discourses in the two parties connected, how did their language use differ and why? In order to understand how global political discourse changes are adapted locally, I aim to undertake a comparison of the political discourses of New Labour and the German SPD of the ‘New Centre’ (‘Die Neue Mitte’) at the turn of the twenty-first century, a period during which both parties sought to win over the ‘middle ground’ of the electorate in order to return to power. This study will also contribute to the growing literature on the discourses of the Third Way that are, as we will see later, mainly focused on the discourse of New Labour and has, so far, largely neglected the German discourse of ‘Die neue Mitte’. 3.  The title ‘Die neue Mitte’ for the German SPD in the late 1990s translates as ‘new centre’. 4.  The German version is entitled ‘Der Weg nach vorne für Europas Sozialdemokraten. Ein Vorschlag von Gerhard Schröder und Tony Blair. ’ (Schröder and Blair 1999). Because it was jointly presented by Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, it is better known in Germany as ‘Schröder-Blair-Papier’. Henceforth, I will refer to it as the ‘Schröder-Blair paper’.



Chapter 1.  Introduction

The New Labour and the ‘Neue Mitte’ discourse lend themselves to a comparative study: Both parties won their first election in 1997 (Labour) and 1998 (SPD) after having been in opposition for 18 years and 16 years respectively and having both lost four consecutive general elections. Changes in society, especially the dissolution of the traditional working class and the rise of post-materialist values, led the European social democratic parties into electoral difficulties, prompting a modernisation discourse in European social democratic parties. The Schröder-Blair paper also indicates a clear connection between the modernisation discourses of New Labour and ‘Die Neue Mitte’. The discourse of a ‘Third Way’ as presented in the Schröder-Blair paper suggests that social democracy must adapt to ‘objective’ changes in world politics, especially to globalisation. The argument focuses on economic policies, abandoning traditional social democratic positions such as Keynesian economics and a strong welfare state. It suggests combining social democratic aims with policy elements from economic liberalism such as a more flexible labour market and a welfare-to-work approach to reduce the effects of unemployment. The Schröder-Blair paper had barely any impact in the UK, possibly because the discourse of economic liberalism had long been established during Margaret Thatcher’s government. It was, however, very controversial in Germany, as it seemed to import a discourse from the UK. The different reception of this text suggests that the distinct political cultures and discourse-historic backgrounds had a marked influence on its evaluation. Both New Labour and the SPD tried to modernise, following the example of the Democratic Party in the United States, in order to win swing voters politically to the left of the Conservatives/CDU, but still to the right of the Labour/SPD. We will see that both parties collaborated with politicians from the US and social scientists to develop a coherent Third-Way ideology, but had to adapt their rhetoric to the local discourse. The social democratic discourses of the Third Way have been analysed predominantly by political scientists, who use discourse analysis on a much more abstract level and do not undertake detailed analyses of linguistic features. A typical example of this approach is Finlayson (2003), who reconstructs the political theory of New Labour from New Labour’s policies as well as from its political rhetoric. A similar approach is used by Turowski (2010), who compares social democratic modernisation discourses in Sweden, the UK, and Germany. He focuses his analysis on this selection of countries because they are comparable as capitalist welfare states and liberal democracies, and all introduced reforms in reaction to internal and external challenges. However, they differ considerably in their political structures and cultures and are therefore suitable for comparative analysis (Turowski 2010: 33). Turowski (2010) describes reform discourses as a resource of political power and asks what a social democratic governmental reform discourse could look like under the specific political conditions of the compared countries.

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The focus of Turowski’s research is the contextual influence, and his analysis has informed my work in this respect, but his approach to political discourse analysis is not aimed at the details of the political language used in the different countries. Fairclough (2000) is the most prominent source on the discourse of New Labour that actually analyses its language. However, Fairclough characterises political language as manipulative language from the outset. As I will argue in the following chapter on the analysis of political language, strategic language use must not be equated with manipulative language use, since the idea of manipulation is built on the notion of an objective truth being accessible. Although my approach differs in this basic assumption, it is similar in focus: I will similarly consider ‘styles, discourses, and genres’ (Fairclough 2000: 14), but will also concentrate on the discursive difference which can be explained with differences in political institutions and political culture. The most recent addition to the analysis of the Third Way from a linguistic perspective is L'Hôte's (2014) corpus assisted study which compares a New Labour corpus to corpora of the Labour Party before 1994 and texts of the Conservative Party. Her study, like many corpus linguistic studies, analyses lexis and metaphor but does not consider argumentation and genre. The quantitative analysis points out significant changes in the Labour Discourse under New Labour and sees it as being closer to the Conservative discourse than to Labour before 1994. L'Hôte (2014) discusses changes in the identity of the Labour Party on the basis of the linguistic evidence without presenting a theory of party political identity, a gap that I will fill in the development of my framework of comparative politico-linguistic discourse analysis. Her corpus assisted approach also neglects differences in the realisation of political discourses in different genres, as her corpora consist of a combination of speeches, manifestos and pamphlets, and therefore ignore contextual differences realized by these genres. Nevertheless, I will use her results of the lexical differences as points of reference in the discussion of the analysis presented here. In the German tradition of politico-linguistics, which my research also draws on, there is no comparable work on the language of ’Die Neue Mitte’. However, Josef Klein has published several articles on aspects of its language use. Klein (1999b) is a more general and brief analysis of the linguistic strategies in the general election of 1998. Klein observes a change in the semantic strategy of the SPD driven by modernisers such as Schröder and Hombach because the manifesto and the speeches adopt ‘Markt’, ‘Wettbewerb’, ‘Leistung’ and ‘Flexibilität’ as catch terms, and focus on renewal and modernisation. Klein (1999b) also notes personalisation in the election campaign, and Klein (2007a) analyses the language of the reform discourse ‘Agenda 2010’, which introduced controversial welfare reforms in Germany. He discusses Schröder’s changing use of the term



Chapter 1.  Introduction

‘Reform’ and contextualises the unprepared announcement of the agenda without a more detailed linguistic analysis. The actual linguistic analysis of the ‘Agenda’ speech, in which Schröder announces the ‘Agenda’ reforms, is undertaken in Klein (2007b). In this analysis, Klein also contextualises the speech through interviews with important political actors of the SPD at the time (Wolfgang Clement, Achim Großmann and Gernot Mittler). In an analysis of the argumentative topoi of the Agenda speech, Klein demonstrates that it constitutes a problematic attempt to reframe the central policies of the SPD: Schröder had not prepared the party for it, hence the failure of his carefully crafted catalogue speech, specifying a staggering total of 66 political measures. 1.3

Aims and Research Questions

As we have seen, there are linguistic studies exploring the linguistic features of the Third Way discourses on the one hand, and comparative studies in the social sciences analysing the contexts of modernisation discourses in social democratic parties on the other. In this study, I combine both approaches in order to reveal a clearer understanding of the relation between text and context in political discourse. I suggest that a linguistic analysis and comparison of the discourses of ‘New Labour’ and ‘Die Neue Mitte’ can demonstrate how differences within the political context have influenced linguistic strategies: while Blair renewed his party using elements of the discourse of Thatcherism in the context of a (more or less) two-party system that would lead to a single-party government, Schröder had to face a more complex and difficult party situation. He had to share the leadership with Oskar Lafontaine at the beginning and was planning to win the election in coalition with the Green Party, which in turn had its own ideas. Starting from these apparent differences, I will ask how the discourses of New Labour and the SPD of the ‘Die Neue Mitte’ differ, and how these differences are related to the discourse-historical and political context. This general research question can be divided into five questions: (1) Which theoretical elements and research methods are appropriate for a comparative linguistic analysis of political discourses? (2) How do genres of political discourse differ in the Third Way discourses in Germany and the UK? (3) How are changes in the social democratic party-political ideologies in Germany and the UK represented and legitimised in the language use of the party? (4) Does the language use and the construction of the Third Way ideology differ in Germany and the UK?

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(5) How can differences in political language be explained with reference to the political context? In Chapter 2, I will introduce the idea of comparative politico-linguistic discourse analysis as part of Applied Linguistics in order to answer Research Question 1. My theoretical ideas are based on the developments of politico-linguistics in Germany, as well as on the debate of Applied Linguistics as part of cultural studies. Both notions form the basis of my model of the text-context relation in political discourse. This model allows an analysis of the connection between a political discourse and the political system or political culture it is situated in. Chapters 3–8 are dedicated to a case study which analyses the discourses of the Third Way in Germany and the UK. This case study has a two-fold function: Firstly, it will further develop my approach by introducing methodologies to comparatively analyse political discourse in a multi-layered manner concentrating on genre, lexis, argumentation and metaphor. Secondly, they will present a detailed comparative analysis of the Discourses of the Third Way in Germany and the UK to fill a gap in discourse-historical research. Chapter 3 introduces the discourse-historical background of the Third Way discourses, describing the historical roots of the British Labour Party and the German SPD and the different situations the two parties found themselves in during the 1990s. I will also discuss the general discursive features of Third Way discourses as introduced by Bastow and Martin (2003). They argue that a plurality of third way discourses existed in the twentieth century, of which the discourse of the Third Way in the social democratic parties of the 1990s has been only one variety. This discussion is followed by an analysis of the differences between the political institutions and political cultures of Germany and the UK. The chapter concludes with the definition and discussion of the corpus for the present study Chapters 4–7 are dedicated to the analysis of the discourse, each focusing on one linguistic area. Each chapter introduces the theoretical and methodological basis of the analysis presented.

Chapter 2

Elements of Comparative Politico-Linguistic Discourse Analysis

This chapter situates the present analysis conceptually, laying out my approach of comparative political discourse analysis. To do so, I will first demonstrate how this approach is indebted to the German tradition of Politico-Linguistics,1 to its extension, Linguistic Discourse Analysis, and, in parts, to the Discourse-Historical Approach within Critical Discourse Analysis. I will argue for a conceptualisation of discourse linguistics as part of cultural studies, and the necessity to research the connection between text and context, as well as discuss how political language is related to different levels of context. 2.1

From Politico-Linguistics to Comparative Politico-Linguistic Discourse Analysis: Theoretical origins

A central justification for a linguistic approach to language in politics results from the insight that language is a central condition for the existence of politics (Girnth 2002: 1), which can be justified linguistically as well through a classical idea of political philosophy. The linguistic argument is based on speech act theory and the pragmatic function of language: it has been known for a long time that speaking means acting (Austin 1962; Searle 1969). The main acts of a politician are linguistic acts, since the important task a politician’s day is acting through language – giving speeches, reading statements or bills, following public discourse in media and formulating responses to it. The central trade of politicians is to change the world views of others in order to influence their actions. Political language is thus a tool of persuasion. Argued from the point of view of political philosophy, language is the defining ability that distinguishes humans from the animal kingdom and 1.  ‘Politolinguistik’ is a research paradigm in German linguistics (see Burkhardt 1996; Niehr 2013, 2014). In English publications it is often translated as polito-linguistics (Reisigl 2008a; Cedroni 2013), while other authors prefer the more anglicised term politico-linguistics (Townson 1992: 164; Charteris-Black 2014; Baker and Ellece 2011: 33), which I will use.

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allows them to deliberate their actions (Chilton and Schäffner 2002a, no. 2; Chilton 2004: 4–6). This argument was first brought forward by Aristotle, who famously defines humans as political animals because of their capacity for language, since language is a means to distinguish the just from the unjust, and good from evil (Aristotle 1998: no. 1253). My concept of comparative political discourse analysis draws on the German tradition of politico-linguistics. In his seminal article, Burkhardt (1996: 76) describes Politico-Linguistics as a field settled between linguistics and political science. Writing in the 1990s, he can look back on a long tradition of analysing political language in Germany that started with the reflection on National Socialist language and that resulted in a long and intensive reflection on the nature of political language under the varying titles ‘language in politics’, ‘language of politics’ and ‘political use of language’ (see Burkhardt 1996: 76–80), which mainly applied an eclectic mix of linguistic methods from lexico-semantics, sentence and textual semantics, and semiotics (for a catalogue of methods see Burkhardt 1996: 90–91). Rooted in politico-linguistics, some German linguists analysing language in politics have been influenced by Foucault’s approaches to discourse, and aimed to integrate corpus and text linguistics with Foucauldian epistemology (Busse and Teubert 1994; Konerding 2009; Spitzmüller 2011; Spitzmüller and Warnke 2011), a development that was later named ‘Diskurslinguistik’ (henceforth: discourse linguistics). This approach attempted to integrate notions of discourse that Gee (2005: 7–8) captured in the distinction between ‘little d discourse’ and ‘big D Discourse’, referring to discourse (little ‘d’, singular) as language in context, often understood as the most abstract element in the hierarchy of linguistic signs, and to ‘Discourses’ (big ‘D’, plural) as systems of knowledge and ideology in the sense of Foucault’s discourse theory.2 In this monograph, I will use the term ‘language use’ for little ‘d’ discourse, and reserve the term ‘discourse’ for big ‘D’ discourse. The German school of Discourse Semantics attempted to reconcile the two understandings of discourse by defining discourse as a virtual text corpus that consists of all texts belonging to a topic, or to complexes of knowledge referring to each other. The discourse analyst must then define a specific corpus in order to describe the virtual corpus with the aim of understanding the conceptual structures of the field chosen (Busse and Teubert 1994). This approach to discourse, however, has been criticised for neglecting the embeddedness of discursive structures in concrete texts. Fairclough (2003: 2–3), therefore, distinguishes textually oriented analysis from not textually oriented analysis and argues that a connection of both is necessary: a close analysis of texts reflecting the discourse as a whole.

2.  For a detailed discussion of these relations, see Warnke 2007.



Chapter 2.  Elements of Comparative Politico-Linguistic Discourse Analysis

A slightly different focus by a more recent generation of discourse linguists, Spitzmüller and Warnke (2011), aims to integrate the different linguistic methods into a multilevel linguistic analysis of discourse, DIMEAN.3 Accepting the necessary integration of textual orientation with the discourse orientation, they argue that the concrete material of observation of discursive practices are texts, since they represent the linguistic material and indicate abstract discourses and practices. They therefore suggest an intra-textual layer of analysis comprising of a word-oriented analysis, a proposition-oriented analysis and a text-oriented analysis, which again involve various analytical methods. As the linguistic analysis of discourses aims to transcend individual texts in order to grasp recurring discursive patterns such as scripts and frames, argumentative patterns as well as ideologies, Spitzmüller and Warnke (2011) propose a transtextual layer, which they also describe as the plane of collective knowledge: ‘Collective knowledge manifests itself in systematic linguistic practice. The analyst can reconstruct collective knowledge (only) by analysing these patterns. Consequently, discourse analysis requires corpus analysis.’ (Spitzmüller and Warnke 2011: 87) The transtextual layer contains analytical categories such as schemata, frames, and scripts, all formed of metaphors, lexis and arguments. Both layers are mediated by the agent layer, which is assumed to capture how discursive practices are shaped by rules and roles of interaction, but at the same time shape these rules and roles. Although the rules of a situation normally shape the discursive strategies of actors, they are also able to bend or break rules, and thereby reshape the discursive situation – and if other actors follow his example, an actor might change the rules and expectations of this genre of discourse for the future. In a similar fashion to Burkhardt’s (1996: 89–91) overview of methods and categories in politico-linguistics, Spitzmüller and Warnke (2011, 88–89) accept that their methodological model is eclectic, a characteristic that they see as a necessity rather than a problem, as each analysis needs to adapt its catalogue of methods to its object. This view is shared by other schools of discourse analysis, such as Critical Discourse Analysis (for example Wodak 2004: 200). As much as DIMEAN was welcomed as providing a systematic overview of discourse linguistic methods, it has also been criticised for being undertheorised, as it does not take into account the recent discussion of Foucault’s discourse theory (Konerding 2009: 170). It is also not always systematically clear; for example, why do metaphorical fields appear in the intratextual layer if they are often clearly 3.  DIMEAN is the acronym of ‘Diskurslinguistische Mehrebenen-Analyse’ which translates as discourse linguistic multi-layered analysis. The model was first published in German in 2008 as Warnke and Spitzmüller (2008).

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indicative of whole discourses? We will see later in Chapter 7 that metaphors are cognitive phenomena that form reoccurring schemata, and should therefore appear in the transtextual layer. Furthermore, text types and genres should also be understood as transtextual as they are culturally dependent. This is also true for keywords and stigma terms, which are connected in frames. Spitzmüller (2011: 187) acknowledges this problem, and argues that the three layers are in fact to be seen as integrated, since the interaction of intratextual elements, transtextual structures and actors is one of the main characteristics of discourse. This complex interaction can be described as the relation between text and context. Spitzmüller (2011: 124) defines contexts as conditions of existence of discourse and as a complex field of transtextual dimensions of language in complex interaction with and of discourse agents, based on Foucault’s distinction between questions of linguistic analysis and questions of discourse analysis: The question posed by language analysis of some discursive fact or other is always: according to what rules has a particular statement been made, and consequently according to what rules could other similar statements be made? The description of the events of discourse poses a quite different question: how is it that one particular statement appeared rather than another? (Foucault 2002: 30)

However, neither Foucault nor Spitzmüller offer an explicit theory of the textcontext-relation, an omission I will attempt to remedy in Section 2.3. Before adapting discourse linguistics for the purpose of the present analysis, influences of a further major school of discourse analysis on my concept of comparative political discourse analysis need to be discussed: the ideas of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in general (Fairclough 1989; van Dijk 1993; Wodak and Meyer, M. 2009b; Jäger 2009), and the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) in particular (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 2009; Wodak et  al. 1998, 2009). Similar to Discourse Linguistics (DL), CDA is a collective term for different methodological approaches, or, as one of the founders of CDA put it, CDA is ‘at most a shared perspective on doing linguistics, semiotics or discourse analysis’ (van Dijk 1993: 253). Both DL and CDA employ discourse-analytical methods using one central criterion: while discourse linguists concentrate mainly on the linguistic analysis of a discourse, critical discourse analysts foreground the critical approach (Spitzmüller and Warnke 2011: 78–79). Within discourse analysis, the strong notion of criticism proposed by Fairclough (2009: 168), as well as Jäger and Maier (2009: 36), has been criticised for being circular by taking a stand: it runs the risk of predetermining results and therefore deviating from the rules of academic discourse (Widdowson 1995; Blommaert 2005: 51; Wengeler 2011). It is also reductionist in terms of topics and methods if purely focused on the critique of social wrong (Warnke and



Chapter 2.  Elements of Comparative Politico-Linguistic Discourse Analysis

Spitzmüller 2008a: 22–23). The possibility of avoiding these fallacies while still allowing critique is offered in Wengeler’s (2011) idea of enabling critique through thorough description and analysis of the discursive construction of social reality, a position that seems to be reflected in Reisigl and Wodak’s (2009) DiscourseHistorical Approach. The main differences between DL and DHA are seen in the research interests and the data sets (Spitzmüller and Warnke 2011: 75–77): While DL originates in Busse’s (1987) discourse semantics and traditionally focuses on knowledge and the epistemological structures of discourse, DHA focusses on pragmatical meaning. In corpus construction, DL aims to cover the whole virtual corpus for a discourse, while DHA is based on heterogeneous data sets. However, Spitzmüller and Warnke (2011: 75) argue that in recent years CDA and DL have been converging and ‘[y]oung scholars set out to combine both approaches and demonstrate not only that these approaches are far less “distinct” than postulated, but also and, more importantly, that each branch can benefit a lot from the fruits of the respective other, both in terms of methods and methodology and in terms of theoretical and conceptual inspirations’. As a lexico-grammatical and discourse-semantic basis for the linguistic analysis of discourses, I will draw on the model of Systemic Functional Linguistics (henceforth SFL) because it is a comprehensive theory of language use that shares the idea of language as a social phenomenon with other sociological theories that have influenced the field of discourse analysis, such as Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein 1963) and the sociology of knowledge (Berger and Luckmann 1991). It has also had a strong influence on CDA, particularly on Norman Fairclough. SFL understands language always as language in context, which means that language use, meaning and form are linked in a system. Language is understood as a tool and a system of potentials to be realised by choice. The concept of ‘meaning’ is a very wide concept in SFL, since it includes many aspects that traditionally belong to the strata of semantics as well as pragmatics (Smirnova and Mortelmans 2010: 50–52). SFL also assumes a weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis by pointing out that we use socially shared linguistic categories to typify experiences: It is clear that language does – as we put it – construe human experience. It names things, thus constraining them into categories; and then, typically, goes further and construes the categories into taxonomies, often using more names for doing so. […] language provides a theory of human experience, and certain of the resources of the lexicogrammar of every language are dedicated to that function.  (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 29, original emphasis)

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SFL starts its analysis of the language system on the stratum of the text and from this perspective it approaches lexico-grammar as well as discourse semantics. It is therefore a unified theory of the semiotic system of ‘natural language’ that can enable us to describe the complexity of text and discourse. The complex systemicfunctional analysis of the system of language starts with the idea of three metafunctions which represent how we use language to construe human experience by naming things, distinguishing them into categories, and construing taxonomies for categories: 1. The ideational metafunction describes how language construes experience; 2. The interpersonal metafunction captures how we interact socially using language, and how language always represents social relations; 3. The textual metafunction is responsible for the discursive organisation of ideational and interpersonal functions. SFL also provides a strong theory of textual grammar. It analyses a clause as a message, i.e. the information structure of a sentence, as exchange, i.e. the mood system, and as representation – transitivity and grammar of role. Having analysed these properties of a clause, SFL has a good foundation to go beyond the clause. It therefore consistently moves on to look at system networks for the construction of clause complexes and textual cohesion. More recently, exponents of SFL have also developed a genre theory and an approach to discourse, and the system networks for the resources of meaning-making have proven to be a practical analytical tool for genre description and the analysis of discourse structures. Particularly enlightening for our linguistic approach to discourse will be the theory of grammatical metaphor that has been developed in SFL. One final point is necessary to define my approach to politico-linguistics: we need to return to the methodological debate about the benefits of a comparative approach. In the introduction, I argued that in political science, the value seen in the comparison of different systems can be measured by the success of comparative politics and the number of high-profile publications. In media-research, Blumler and Gurevitch (1995) have argued that comparative research is not only productive because it expands the database and avoid naïve universalism as well as parochialism, but also because of …its capacity to render the invisible visible. It draws our attention to imperatives and constraints built into the very structure of political communication arrangements, which, though influential, may be taken for granted and difficult to detect when the focus is on only one national case.  (Blumler and Gurevitch 1995: 75–76)



Chapter 2.  Elements of Comparative Politico-Linguistic Discourse Analysis

However, the value of comparative analysis for politico-linguistic research had also been recognised early on: Burkhardt (1996: 96) argued that comparative studies would support the politico-linguistic aim to produce classifications of discourses and discursive elements, whilst simultaneously supporting intercultural understanding. In line with this idea, my work aims to understand the text–context relation in party conference speeches and election manifestos by comparing a corpus of texts from a historic period where social democratic parties all over Europe drew on the discourse of a ‘Third Way’ to reposition themselves and to return to power. Being comparable in this respect, there are two central questions: (1) How do party conference speeches and election manifestos in Germany and the UK differ as a genre due to the contrasting political contexts? (2) How did the recontextualisation of this discourse in the different cultural contexts lead to an adaptation of discursive elements in lexis, argumentation and metaphor? 2.2

Discourse as texts in context, or Discourse Linguistics as Cultural Studies

The last section argued for a comparative approach to political discourse in order to gain a better understanding of the relationship between discourse and context. The global context of discourse can be seen, in the widest sense, as a context of culture. But how does culture influence discourse? Is this a reciprocal relationship: does not every speaker form culture through their actions? In recent years, there have been repeated calls to understand (applied) linguistics as a part of cultural studies (Benke 2003; Günthner and Linke 2006; Kuße 2012), arguing that linguistic discourse analysis is intertwined with cultural studies. Benke (2003: 45), for example, sees the ‘interplay of texts in society’ as the central research topic of Applied Linguistics: In her view, cultural studies aim to understand the dialectic between societies and individual identity, but need Applied Linguistics as their ‘empirical other side’. Applied Linguistics in turn needs the contribution from cultural studies to facilitate a more complex understanding of structures of texts and discourses (Benke 2003: 47–48). Building on this idea, Kuße (2012: 19–21) suggests ‘Cultural Linguistics’4 as an integration of various branches of Applied Linguistics such as politico-linguistics, discourse-linguistics, sociolinguistics and text linguistics. He also proposes to 4.  Kuße talks about ‘Kulturwissenschaftliche Linguistik’, which could be understood as ‘linguistics as cultural studies’. It is, as the capitalisation suggests, also understood as a proper name for a programme of research, which he describes in his monograph. Henceforth, I will use the translation ‘Cultural Linguistics’, using it as a proper name referring to Kuße’s concept.

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integrate non-verbal semiotic systems, and thus sees semiotics as a basis for this field. The task of Cultural Linguistics must consequently be to analyse the relations of internal linguistic and external cultural phenomena, both synchronically and diachronically. This must take into account the regularities between discourses, genres and texts, as well as the cultural contexts, a relation that is missing in the system of discourse linguistic multi-layered analysis suggested by Spitzmüller and Warnke (2011). Regarding the status of the relation between discourse and language use, Kuße (2012: 120–21) argues that it must not be misunderstood as causality. This would be a fallacy that Simpson (1993: 111–16) calls ‘interpretative positivism’: a theory of discourse must not be designed resting on the assumption of a one-to-one correspondence of discourses and linguistic structures but should critically analyse the relationship between these phenomena. Therefore, the relation between discourse and language use must be understood as discourse sensitivity as opposed to discourse dependency: language use is not determined by discourse, but the discourses show distinctive linguistic features (‘Auffälligkeit’) such as typical lexis, metaphor use and genre structure, which can be interpreted. I would like to argue that this idea can be extended to context-sensitivity,5 since text and context are also not in a causal relation, but part of a relation between discourse participants, discourse structures and contextual restrictions – restrictions participants can accept or break, change slowly or revolutionise. The linking element explaining context sensitivity are discursive strategies as discussed by Wodak et  al. (2009: 30–33). They adapt Heinemann and Viehweger’s (1991, 214–16) concept of strategy from text linguistics for DHA and describe them as a mediating component between the communicative situation including individual communicative goals and the realisation of these goals through linguistic means (types) and linguistic realisations (tokens). Discourse strategies can therefore be the missing link between text and context. In order to avoid any confusion with the notion of manipulation, Wodak et al. (2009) take inspiration from Bourdieu’s sociological idea of strategic action: although it is goal oriented, it is not necessarily instrumentalist, finalistic and voluntary, as there is no absolute freedom of social actors (Bourdieu 1993: 90; Wodak et al. 2009: 31–32). Concentrating on the discourse of political actors, Chilton and Schäffner (Chilton and Schäffner 1997; Chilton 2004) suggest analysing political discourse as strategic language use. They introduce the idea of strategic functions of political discourse in a similar fashion to the discursive functions in DHA: both the discursive functions and the strategic functions link the context of an utterance to the structure of discourse. These following three strategies can either be understood 5.  The term was first used by Reisigl and Wodak (2001: 31), but not defined.



Chapter 2.  Elements of Comparative Politico-Linguistic Discourse Analysis

as interpretative rules for the discourse analyst, or as productive rules that the analyst can attribute to the speakers, who aim to produce coherent discourse in the context of their political culture (Chilton and Schäffner 1997: 213): (1) Coercions are speech acts backed by possible legal and physical sanctions: commands, laws, edicts, etc. Political actors can influence discourse coercively in setting agendas, selecting topics in conversation, positioning themselves and others in specific relationships, and making assumptions about realities that hearers are obliged at least temporarily to accept in order to process the text or talk. This includes the control of others’ use of language through different types and degrees of censorship and access control. The counter strategies against coercion are resistance, opposition and protest. (2) Legitimisation and delegitimisation are the most basic strategies of political discourse in democratic countries. Political actors do not normally act by physical force, but should use the speech act of ‘defending oneself ’. The felicity conditions of this type of speech act are good reasons and acceptable motivations for past or present actions which are prone to be criticised. In Section 6.1 we will see how these strategies work on an argumentative level. Legitimisation as a special case of ‘defending oneself ’, however, does not have actual attacks or challenges as a precondition, as does the speech act defence. Rather, it anticipates and reacts to possible counterarguments. The struggle over resources and legitimacy can be regarded as an ideological struggle. We will see later how ideologies provide the basis for judgements of specific groups and how these groups are constructed using lexical strategies (Section 5.1). The counterpart of legitimisation is delegitimisation – here others are presented negatively, and as not having the right to do or say what they do. Analysing racist discourse, van Dijk (1998: 259) suggests sub-strategies of delegitimisation that are linked to the category of group membership such as the delegitimisation of group membership itself (‘THEY do not belong to US’), of actions and discourse (‘THEY have no right to do/say X’), as well as of goals, norms and values. Furthermore, certain types of discourse themselves can be delegitimised by negative description (‘Marxist’, ‘radical’). Another means of delegitimisation is the control of meanings by controlling mass communication. (3) The strategies of representation and misrepresentation are concerned with qualitative and quantitative control of information. At the linguistic level, they are again about claiming positive lexemes for oneself or employing stigmatising lexemes against competing groups. Another important means for representation and misrepresentation is the metaphorical construction of arguments (see Section 7.1). Klein (1998) has suggested three main discursive strategies in political discourse which can also be subsumed under representation and misrepresentation: basic strategies, which target the audience cognitively and emotionally, as

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obfuscation strategies to conceal deficits and strategies of semantic competition. Strategies of competition are generally employed to form and occupy the appropriate terminology for one’s own political programme. I will discuss these strategies on the lexico-semantic level in more detail in Section 5.1. A necessary extension of the system of basic strategies suggested by Chilton (2004) is the strategy of politicisation and depoliticisation, i.e. the question of which problems in society become part of the political discourse. In political science, politicisation is defined as a process in which ‘issues […] become the subject of deliberation, decision making and human agency where previously they were not’, while depoliticisation is ‘the effective demotion of issues previously subject to formal political scrutiny, deliberation and accountability to the public yet nongovernmental sphere. This may take one of two general forms: the displacement of responsibility from governmental to public or quasi-public authorities and the offloading of areas of formal political responsibility to the market’ (Hay 2007: 81–82). But politicisation and depoliticisation can also be found as strategies in political discourse and language, as Muntigl (2002) argues: given that politics and policies are stable political structures, there has to be the possibility of changing these structures in order to introduce new political thinking or to react to political circumstances. Thus, politicisation refers to the discursive creation of alternatives for acting and for defining social reality. It opens the discursive space and creates new opportunities for political action by identifying alternatives. Politicisation and depoliticisation seem to be a valuable extension of Chilton’s notions of strategic functions in political language because they supply an analytical tool for an aspect that is a blind spot in them: in political communication the discourse can be closed by construing a policy as without alternative and construing alternatives as not accepting the necessity of it. A possible alternative to the concept of strategies in political discourse is the idea of persuasion and persuasiveness. It originates in the debate about the manipulative character of political discourse or rhetoric in more general terms. I would like to argue that strategic language use must not be equated with manipulative language use, as the concept of manipulation is based on the assumption that something like an objective truth is directly accessible to people. But it also implies a reductionist theory of the effects of language, assuming a direct relationship between language and action, which as Reisigl and Wodak (2001: 33) argue, ‘risks incapacitating the recipients (hearers or readers) as autonomous, self-aware and self-reflective psycho-physical organisms.’ The school of New Rhetoric has therefore tried to turn the notion of persuasion in rhetoric in a more positive direction: ‘Argumentation is intended to act upon an audience, to modify an audience’s convictions or dispositions through discourse, and it tries to gain a meeting of minds instead of imposing its will



Chapter 2.  Elements of Comparative Politico-Linguistic Discourse Analysis

through constraint or conditioning’ (Perelman 1982: 11). More recent literature has stated that language is generally persuasive and has defined persuasion as linguistic behaviour that aims to change thinking or behaviour as well as strengthen certain beliefs (Virtanen and Halmari 2005). But to utilise the notion of persuasion analytically, one has to adopt the very strong assumption by Juncker (1997) that texts are persuasive if a persuasive intention can be assumed (Virtanen and Halmari 2005: 7). The problem is therefore that persuasion in speech act theory has a perlocutionary effect – it does not only depend on the ‘persuasiveness’ of the text. Persuasiveness is difficult to verify. Consequently, I wish to use the terms ‘linguistic strategy’ and ‘discursive strategy’, and follow Perelman in not implying any purely manipulative meaning. We saw that discourse strategies capture the discourse-sensitivity and contextsensitivity of language use: Political language is the semiotic medium in which politicians compete with political ideas, and politicians use linguistic strategies to win an argument, strategies which depend on contextual conditions. The relationship between contextual conditions and language use is discussed in two major theoretical approaches: the social semiotic or Systemic Functional Approach (Halliday and Hasan 1985; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004; Leckie-Tarry 1995; Martin, J. R. and Rose, D. 2008), and the Socio-Cognitive Model (van Dijk 2008, 2010). SFL frames context as a semiotic rather than a mental phenomenon. Contexts as semiotic systems contain patterns on the cultural level, which are realised in the situation and in the text-in-context: ‘[…] speakers’ cultures are manifested in each situation in which they interact, and […] each interactional situation is manifested verbally as unfolding text, i.e. as text in context’ (Martin, J. R. and Rose, D. 2008: 9–10). Halliday suggests a correlation between the three metafunctions and context variables, which link the context to the social functions of language (Martin, J. R. 1999, 27): the interpersonal metafunction is related to the social reality of the discourse participants, which in SFL is analysed as the context-variable ‘tenor’. This variable represents the social role or status of the participants, which influence the linguistic choices they make. The ‘field’ variable is related to the ideational metafunction, construing reality in subject-specific language. The semiotic reality, i.e. the role of language in discourse and the dialogue/monologue distinction, related to the textual metafunction, is represented by the ‘mode’ variable. In SFL, the knowledge of text structures is analysed as ‘field’, the effects of media in ‘mode’, social relations in ‘tenor’. Van Dijk (2010: 37–40) criticises the Systemic Functional Approach to the textcontext relation fiercely: he describes it as theoretically closed to interdisciplinary influences. His own socio-cognitive approach assumes that contexts of discourse influence discourse only indirectly. The mediating element between contexts and discourse is cognition, as only cognitive elements, i.e. cognitive context models,

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can influence the planning of discursive moves. The planning of discursive moves is, after all, itself a cognitive operation (van Dijk 2008, 4; 2010, x). From van Dijk’s position, the SFL approach to context is guilty of antimentalism, i.e. a lack of consideration for the mental processes behind language and discourse. This leads to a lack of explanatory power concerning the question of the influence of contexts on discourse production. This so-called ‘antimentalism’ is, however, a form of complexity reduction which does not necessarily have to deny the cognitive basis of language. SFL and social semiotics describe the functions of language on a linguistic and social level without presenting a valid cognitive theory of language as well as text and context. This is both possible and reasonable in the same way that a sociological theory is possible without a detailed and valid empirical theory of the connected cognitive functions of social actors. To respond to van Dijk’s criticism, I need to point out that macro contexts do not only have an individual cognitive existence, as van Dijk assumes. It is the interaction between group beliefs and institutional settings that restricts what people can say without being excluded: they restrict which arguments can be successful (see for example, the effects of the semantics of ‘state’ in Chapter 3.3). One can therefore assume that speakers and writers anticipate these contexts, as they are acting within discourse systems which are acquired by socialisation (Scollon, R., Scollon, S. B. K., and Jones 2012). Hence, the macro context will have had an indirect influence on the text. Furthermore, it is important to recognise that many genres in political discourse consist of texts mainly produced by teams of writers, not by individuals. This is, as we will see, especially true for political speeches. Thus, my analysis will not ask how the participants constructed the text and context (this would in many cases be pure speculation), but whether I can argue that there is a context-sensitivity of the discourse elements in the texts. Analytically, the distinction of tenor, field, and mode needs to be complemented by a hierarchy of contexts in order to distinguish more general contexts such as the political system, from more specific influences such as the structure of the speech event, for example the order of speeches at a party conference. Such a multilevel approach to context has been adopted by the Discourse-Historical approach, which assumes four levels of context (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 40–41; Wodak 2004: 205–6): – Immediate context or text internal co-text; – Intertextual and interdiscursive relationship between utterances, texts, genres and discourses; – Extra-linguistic social/sociological variables and institutional frames (MiddleRange Theories); – The broader socio-political and historical contexts (Grand Theories).



Chapter 2.  Elements of Comparative Politico-Linguistic Discourse Analysis

Discussing and revising the distinction of tenor, field and mode, Leckie-Tarry (1995: 17) suggests three-level classification of context: ‘context of culture (or social institutions), context of situation and context of text’. The context of culture contains ideational knowledge of processes and phenomena as well as ideological assumptions, i.e. assumptions which have been naturalised and are now considered common sense. These assumptions legitimise social power (see Fairclough 1989: 2). Her context of situation captures the ideational knowledge about the factual and institutional background and interpersonal knowledge. Textual knowledge, on the other hand, consists of knowledge from texts as well as parts of the current text, and includes knowledge about textual structures and genres. 2.3

The contexts of political discourses

Taking up Leckie-Tarry’s distinction between cultural and situational contexts, I shall now examine the cultural contexts of political communication further. The elements of situational contexts have been analysed in depth in publications on speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969) and on the linguistic analysis of political discourse (van Dijk 2008, 2010; Chilton 2004). The main elements of situational contexts are the situation of the speaker and listener, the mutual constructions of roles and ranks, and the felicity conditions of speech acts. I will refer to Leckie-Tarry’s notion of cultural contexts of (political) discourse as macro contexts, and in the following discussion analytically divide it into institutional, cultural and ideological contexts. 2.3.1

The context of culture: Political institutions and political culture

If culture is a context of text and discourse, then a key question to ask is what do we mean by culture? In his introduction into Cultural Linguistics, Kuße starts from the classical definition by the cultural anthropologist and linguist Goodenough: [… A] society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members, and do so in any role that they accept for any one of themselves. Culture […] does not consist of things, people, behaviour, or emotions. It is rather an organisation of these things. It is the forms of things that people have in mind, their models of perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them. (Goodenough 1964: 36)

Kuße (2012: 26) argues that this definition shows the complex interdependence of cultural phenomena. This was later aptly captured by Geertz’s (1973: 5) famous metaphor of culture as web of significance, which we ourselves have spun.

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Interpreting the concept of culture in a similar way from a semiotic perspective, Posner (1992) aims to define culture as semiotic system by reconstructing the basic terminology of anthropology in semiotic terms. He distinguishes between three sub-disciplines of anthropology which in turn analyse three distinct cultural systems (Posner 1992: 12–13), whilst social anthropology describes institutions and rituals of society, material anthropology investigates artefacts of societies, their production and their use. Cultural anthropology, as the third sub-discipline, focuses on the mental culture of a society, which consists of systems of ideas and values that Posner calls mentefacts. Posner (1992) argues that semiotics can integrate these three systems by interpreting ‘society’ as a group of sign users, ‘mental culture’ as a set of codes, and ‘civilization’ as a set of texts. Posner uses a broad concept of ‘text’ as an artefact that is produced intentionally based on a code and used according to conventions within a culture. For an analysis of culture as the context of discourse, two questions need to be answered: who are the carriers of culture? And; how do we define the relation between the context of culture and discourse? Posner (1992: 17) distinguishes between three carriers of culture: Firstly, individuals in a society own artefacts and mentefacts, i.e. the material products as well as the ideas and values of a culture, and are therefore carriers of culture. But this is also true for societies as a whole, and for groups of individuals within societies or institutions, as far as they act as independent users of signs and producers of text. Within society, culture as a semiotic system is the synchronic dimension of it, the established code at a certain point in time. Posner (1992: 33) therefore only counts communication with established codes as part of a culture. Within the discourses in society, culture is therefore an element of inertia, which normally stops participants from breaking the rules of communication, from communicating ideas that might be unacceptable within a culture. Discourse, on the other hand, can be understood as the diachronic dimension or element of fluidity in a cultural semiotic system: while the established codes of a culture influence discourse, discourse participants can change culture by establishing new codes.6 Accepting that cultures can be understood as semiotic systems, we now need to consider that modern societies are highly differentiated into subsystems that develop their own codes to regulate discourses. Kuße (2012: 125) identifies registers along the subsystems that are generally assumed in general discourse, such as politics, religion, law, economy and so on. Each of these social subsystems contain elements of social, mental and material culture that form the general culture. These semiotic structures of the general culture therefore limit the possible elements 6.  For an elaborate theoretical approach to the relation of inertia and fluidity in political culture see Welch (2013).



Chapter 2.  Elements of Comparative Politico-Linguistic Discourse Analysis

of subcultures in a specific general culture. The political culture of a society is therefore partly determined by the general culture (Lehman 1972: 364). Analysing discourse and discourses in politics, I will use the term ‘political culture’ for the elements of social, mental and material culture in the political subsystem. I am aware that this is a highly contested and ambiguous term and was widely associated with positivist research of political attitudes (Almond and Verba 1963). Originally the term ‘political culture’ was used in the context of the political attitudes research by Almond and Verba (1963). Their ground-breaking study on ‘The civic culture’ used sample survey methods to collect data on people’s ideas about government and analysed how these attitudes are connected to the structure of the political system. This approach has been criticised as capturing the wrong categories, since surveys ask for attitudes of individuals rather than collective belief systems. These belief system contain argumentative rules, especially about the burden of proof, and can culturally suppress certain arguments (Rohe 1994: 4). Almond and Verba’s (1963) idea of political culture has also been accused of being reductionist because it explains cultures as emerging from individual personalities or as part of the social system (Lehman 1972: 361; Dittmer 1977: 555). Elkins and Simeon (1979, 127–30) define political culture as political assumptions shared by a group or a mind-set, and point out that while individuals have beliefs and attitudes, they do not have culture, since culture is a property of a collective. They also warn that cultural explanations in politics are difficult to distinguish from institutional and structural explanations, since these influence each other. This is particularly important for beliefs about welfare systems, which have historical origins materialised in institutions that in turn influence the belief system. The analytical methods to interpret political cultures have since become broader, more and more historical and hermeneutical, or even semiotic: Rohe (1994: 4), for example, argues that political cultures can be studied like written texts, and this is the context in which I will use the term. In order to analyse and compare the linguistic strategies in politics of different polities, it will not only be necessary to compare the political cultures, but also the institutional contexts of these polities, because the political institutions are carriers of culture: they take part in the political discourse but are at the same time contexts of the discourse. The fact that institutional contexts influence discourses in politics is a standard paradigm in social sciences. Turowski (2010: 46) demonstrates that content and form mirror institutional contexts, since institutional structures determine cognitive and normative interests of discourse participants. He adds that the conditions of political discourse are also constrained by general culturally specific notions (for example about ‘state’, ‘society’ or ‘welfare’) that influence politics as well as the structure of the specific polity (i.e. voting systems,

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government systems). Political scientists use typologies of political systems to compare them, and I will use their results as context variables. The most influential typology of democratic political systems has been developed by Arend Lijphart (1999), who differentiates democracies mainly on a scale between majoritarianism and consensus orientation. He uses two dimensions to give a more differentiated picture: he studies the influence of parties over the executive and distinguishes polities on a federal-unitary dimension. Although Lijphart’s system is widely used, there is a more helpful way of distinguishing political systems in order to analyse the influence of the context on linguistic strategies: the veto player theory (Tsebelis 2002). This is a research programme that has been categorised as rational choice institutionalism (Caramani 2011: 9) a categorisation that has recently sparked an influential debate in political science (Cox and McCubbins 2005; König, T., Tsebelis, and Debus 2010; Green-Pedersen and Walgrave 2014). Abromeit and Stoiber (2006) use an adapted veto player theory to analyse power concentration and fragmentation in certain countries. This approach helps analyse the influence of different actors within a particular political system. If politicians want to implement a policy, a certain amount of agreement between different actors within a certain institutional setting has to be reached, and key players who have the right to veto a policy have to be persuaded. These key players are often not individuals, but institutions. By analysing who these key players are, we can differentiate between political systems. Actors who can veto a policy are called veto players. Agenda-setters are veto players in the discourse, who also have the power to propose a policy which other veto players can only reject or accept. A policy can be implemented when a set of ideas leads to an improvement in the eyes of all veto players; this is called a win set. A win set is empty when veto players cannot agree on a policy. Unlike Lijphart, Abromeit and Stoiber base their comparison on both an analysis of the polity as a constitutional structure and a study of politics within that structure. Their more complex approach allows a better evaluation of the real effectiveness of veto players. 2.3.2 Context and subject of political discourse: Ideology and ideologies The analysis of political language is often understood as the analysis of ideological language. There are many controversies about the epistemological and political meaning of ‘ideology’, which can be separated into two major categories, using the term as a singular or plural word: (1) Some social scientists analyse ‘ideology’ in the singular as a ‘general phenomenon characterising the totality of a particular social or political system,



Chapter 2.  Elements of Comparative Politico-Linguistic Discourse Analysis

operated by every member or actor in that system’ (Blommaert 2005: 158, original emphasis). Typically, in these theories, capitalism is seen as the ideology, more generally defined as the dominant world view of a particular society in history (Bourdieu 1990; Althusser 1971; Foucault 1977). These approaches are very valuable to the analysis of political discourse in showing how certain arguments become naturalised and treated as unchangeable truths. Naturalisation of a discourse results in political disputes becoming depoliticised. The blind spot of theories that totalise ideology, however, lies in the competitive character of political discourses in democracies: here, ideologies as belief systems compete for followers and voters. We therefore need tools to analyse the discursive competition between political concepts and the discursive strategies involved in that competition. (2) ‘Ideologies’ in the plural are understood in the social sciences as specific representations of the world, often linked to certain groups in society. Ideologies in this sense are typically studied as ‘-isms’ (see for example Heywood 2007). A possible pitfall of this theoretical approach lies in its tendency to subsume ideologies under a name and to treat them as unified sets of ideas shared by all members of a certain group. It is, however, the norm rather than the exception that ideologies are not shared by everybody in the same way, but almost always ‘part-believed and part-rejected’ (Holborow 2012: 29); hence, part of the analysis must concern the dynamics of ideologies in political discourses. Yet, how do we distinguish these competing ideologies from mentalities, world views, and political ideas? Following a Marxist approach, ideologies are often understood as ‘false consciousness’. Marx’s original analysis of ideologies points out that people produce their ideas in an active life process engaging the world, but their ideas of the world and society depend on their material circumstances (Marx and Engels 1959: 26). Historically, some social scientists have adopted this Marxist theory and tend to use the term ‘ideology’ with a pejorative connotation of lying and deceit. Epistemologically, this concept of ideology presupposes an objective and transparent concept of truth and reality. Philosophical reflection on truth, however, has demonstrated that the human mind has no direct access to an objective reality, and reality is always structured through mental and social processes. I therefore prefer a broader concept of ideologies as world views in a social context. Because reality cannot be a mirror image of the external world, such world views will necessarily be wrong, albeit in part. Ideologies in this sense are also necessarily a part of social relations and power struggles, since world views influence our political discourses and decisions. In order to understand the relation between belief systems, the social relations they occur in, and the language used to express them, van Dijk (1998) offers a complex multidisciplinary reconstruction of ‘ideology’. He argues that ideologies are located in the conceptual and disciplinary triangle that relates cognition,

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society and discourse (van Dijk 1998: 5). He assumes a multitude of ideologies, which have to be distinguished from cultural knowledge or the cultural common ground: cultural knowledge contains beliefs shared by virtually all competent members of a culture. These beliefs consist of propositions that are presupposed in discourse by almost all competent members of a culture. Group beliefs are a system similar to cultural beliefs, and only shared by a certain group. They often consist of cultural beliefs that are partly altered  – e.g. have a looser or stricter approach, or just different truth criteria (e.g. scientists versus religious believers). The fact that ideologies are the foundation of the socially shared beliefs of a group corresponds to the role of ideologies at a social level: they control or organise the more specific knowledge or opinions of a group, which are important for the interaction, coordination and reproduction of the group. Furthermore, they influence the reproduction of power and dominance within and between groups, and provide legitimisation for domination. In order to analyse the social function of ideologies, van Dijk introduces the concept of social power as a specific type of social relation between groups: the exercise of control from members of one group over members of their own or another group (van Dijk 1998: 162). Social power can be consensual and beneficial, e.g. when groups elect their leaders, but it can be abused as well, in the form of domination. Relations of domination between groups are controlled by ideologies, which construct differences between ‘them’ and ‘us’, partly by exercising persuasive power through mass media. In van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach, people’s minds are the interface between the social (situation) and the personal (models and communication moves). His significant achievement is the detailed cognitive description of discursive interaction. This approach is, however, faced with two major problems. Firstly, it treats ideologies as static belief systems and does not take into account that in reality they are not only full of contradictions but are also only very rarely completely shared by all members of a group. This leads to the second problem that a cognitive approach causes by analysing the linguistic strategies of a discourse in an unnecessarily complex way: the analysis of discursive strategies does not presuppose a detailed analysis of individual people’s beliefs, if a more general sociological approach allows us to capture ideologies in discourse. The ‘politics of knowledge’ concept of political ideologies (Edmondson and Nullmeier 1997: 212–13) constitutes such a sociological-interpretative approach to political discourse. It shares Karl Mannheim’s sociological ideas, assuming that ideologies, here called ‘knowledge’, are produced in social and political interaction. To capture the dynamics of political discourse, proponents of the ‘politics of knowledge’ approach draw on Mannheim’s idea of knowledge as a market system (Edmondson and Nullmeier 1997: 213–16; Nullmeier 1993: 183–86; Bleses and Rose, E. 1998: 30). However, the metaphor of a ‘knowledge market’ is highly



Chapter 2.  Elements of Comparative Politico-Linguistic Discourse Analysis

problematic. The central criticism is the theoretical bias of this metaphor: to describe the market as prototypical for the open access to discourse completely neglects the reality of markets and follows one particular ideology. It offers, nonetheless some important insights into ideologies in modern democracies. Knowledge markets develop: if knowledge systems compete for validity, they can occur in all types and sizes of organisations with a public audience, and the competing ideas can be anything from common knowledge to scientific concepts and ideologies (Edmondson and Nullmeier 1997: 214). The aim of a ‘knowledge market analysis’ is to scrutinise why some interpretive patterns are accepted and not others. The main strategic moves in the knowledge market aim for the closing of the knowledge market. In this case one interpretative pattern dominates the knowledge system, underlies most decisions in society, and therefore constitutes a substantial gain of power for one part of society. This type of hegemonic system is commonly referred to as ‘ideology’ in the singular. On this basis, the occurrence of certain linguistic features in political discourse can be predicted: A main stratagem to close knowledge markets is the use of constructions of necessity (Bleses and Rose, E. 1998: 46). They replace a normative argument with a descriptive argument and are very difficult to counteract, because they put the burden of proof on new ideas introduced into the knowledge market. Three factors contribute to successive constructions of necessity: – the suggestion of a good assumption for a consensus; – the claim that there is no alternative; – the exaggeration of a crisis. The discursive strategies of Chilton and Schäffner (1997) and Muntigl (2002) (see Section  2.2) can all be understood as strategies relating to knowledge markets: representation strategies capture how the world is constructed in discourse, because the representation of the state of the world is a necessary part of persuasion. Legitimisation supports the validity of somebody’s claims in order to win ideological hegemony in the knowledge market, while de-legitimisation aims to disqualify political ideas or their proponents. Politicisation and de-politicisation are strategies to open or close a knowledge market. Muntigl (2002: 48) defines politicisation in his terminology as strategies that open the discursive space. Since the interest of the analysis here is the language use of two political parties in Germany and the UK, I will now focus on the relation between ideologies and political parties. Although the term ‘ideologies’ does not only refer to partypolitical positions alone, in representative democracies, parties are usually seen as representing political ideologies. In a highly salient definition, Bale (2008: 158) describes political parties as ‘information-economizing devices, providing distinctive but manageably-packaged alternatives […] for voters who would otherwise

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be confronted with a chaotic choice of alternatives and agents they could neither conceivably hope to know nor trust’. Political ideologies represented by parties are therefore the ‘manageable-packed alternatives’ on offer. They represent the group belief systems van Dijk (1998) described, as parties are social organisations  – groups of people with shared beliefs on how to change society. A key question therefore is how do parties manage to adapt to the electoral challenges without losing their followers, who identify with certain core beliefs of the party? Buckler and Dolowitz (2009) have developed a model to describe the ideological renewal of a party. This becomes necessary once a party has had a long continuous time of electoral failure and finds itself in a situation of an entrenched hegemonic disadvantage – exactly the situation that both the Labour Party and the SPD found themselves in in the 1990s. This theoretical model from political science is essential to understand party-political discourse in order to explain the results of descriptive linguistic analyses of identity change such as L'Hôte (2014), who describes the language of identity change in New Labour, but does not generalise it to the level of political ideology. Both Buckler and Dolowitz (2009) and L'Hôte (2014) use the term ‘identity’ to describe the self-identification of a party. As Brubaker and Cooper (2000) have demonstrated, this is a highly problematic term which potentially includes so many theoretical contradictions that it consequently loses a clear meaning. It also supports the reification of social categories such as ‘race’, ‘class’ and ‘gender’ instead of analysing the process of reification. Instead of using ‘identity’, the authors suggest alternative terms. Applied to the case of Buckler and Dolowitz’s (2009) model, we can use the terms ‘identify/identification’ and ‘groupness’: Buckler and Dolowitz’ (2009) describe the ‘identity’ of a political party as characterised by the party as an institution. Because the institutional structure of a party regulates power structures within the party as a group and legitimises mandates to speak on behalf of the group, this aspect of ‘identity’ can easily be translated as ‘groupness’. However, parties also have an ideological ‘identity’: a belief system with core commitments, recognisable values and core political concepts, which supporters and voters ‘identify’ with. These are the shared group beliefs that van Dijk (1998) describes as ideologies. Because the core ideological concepts are a matter of loyalty and mobilisation, Buckler and Dolowitz’ (2009) argue that they influence the rhetoric of a party. Thus, policy adaptations and rhetorical changes are normally in alignment with an ideological core. If, however, the changes need to be more radical, ideologies can be a constraint for a party. Consequently, more radical ideological changes need a rhetoric that constructs ideological continuity in order to keep the support of party members and voters who might not identify with the new policies. Buckler and Dolowitz (2009, 13–15) described three possible argumentative moves to achieve this:



Chapter 2.  Elements of Comparative Politico-Linguistic Discourse Analysis

i. in the history of the party, there will be strands that can be used as support for the new position; ii. explanation of failure in elections on an ideological level – ‘old’ position not viable under changed circumstances; iii. demonstrate to supporters how changes allow rhetorical advantage over opponents. The metaphor of ‘core beliefs’ in Buckler and Dolowitz’ (2009) is a central analytical term in the analysis of political ideologies and their changes over time in Michael Freeden’s (1998) theory of the morphology of ideologies. I will employ his approach to analyse the rhetoric of ideological change in New Labour and the SPD, as his terminology captures ideological changes on a more general level than Buckler and Dolowitz (2009). Freeden (1998) suggests that ideologies as social constructions have an internal structure, and that a structural analysis allows a comparison of ideological systems such as the political ideology of New Labour and the SPD. Freeden treats ideologies as ‘distinct configurations of political concepts’ (Freeden 1998: 4), using the biological metaphor of ‘morphology of ideologies’ to grasp their structure as well as their changes (Bevir 2000: 280). He uses Saussure’s synchronic view of languages as interconnected semiotic systems in which the meaning of a sign depends on a network of relationships between signs as a model to describe ideologies. While the paradigmatic dimension of political ideologies produces meaning via the presence or absence of signs, the signs are also linked into syntagmatic relations where the sequential or spatial relations between signs and the rules of the combination of signs influence the meaning. Ideologies are therefore conceptualised as combinations of single concepts such as ‘liberty’, ‘justice’ and ‘equality’, but the exact meaning of these concepts depends on their combination. To take a salient example from the discourse of ‘Die Neue Mitte’, the meaning of ‘freedom’ differs significantly whether one sees ‘solidarity’ as the precondition for ‘freedom’ (Lafontaine), or whether ‘freedom’ is the precondition for ‘solidarity’, since ‘solidarity’ is based on individual initiative (Schröder).7 Freeden (1998) describes the relation between the different concepts employing core and periphery metaphor, as well as the term ‘adjacency’. Core concepts are central to the political ideology, while marginal concepts are less important. The change of an ideology can then be described as the move of concepts from the core to the margin, or the other way around. This structure also allows for the strategy described by Buckler and Dolowitz (2009): a policy change

7.  This is analysed in detail Section 6.5.

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can be justified by arguing that the value it is based on has always been part of the party’s ideology, but only recently has it become more central. The relations between political concepts in an ideology can also be described as types of adjacencies: logically adjacent concepts belong together in a certain ideology, because they explain each other – so in our example from above, ‘freedom’ and ‘solidarity’ are adjacent, but this adjacency is understood by Schröder and Lafontaine in different ways. Nevertheless, although concepts can also be culturally adjacent – certain adjacencies are more culturally acceptable in some societies than in others because of institutional patterns, ethical systems or influential theories and beliefs (Freeden 1998: 69–70). We will see that logical adjacencies are central to the modernisation discourse of Labour and the SPD, as they are employed strategically to legitimise the new position of the party. Furthermore, cultural adjacencies can explain the differences in the strategies between Labour and the SPD. 2.4

Conclusions: Methodological approaches to comparative political discourse analysis

Comparative politico-linguistic discourse analysis is an approach indebted to Politico-Linguistics, Discourse Linguistics and the Discourse-Historical Approach. Building on the idea of Linguistics as Cultural Studies, we saw that language use must be analysed as both discourse and context sensitive, with discourse strategies being the link between texts and context. Throughout the following analytical chapters, I will now discuss and demonstrate how the suggested five macro strategies of political discourse are realised in language use, using the discourses of the Third Way in Germany and the UK as a case studies. The study will be structured along the layers of a political discourse (genre, lexis, argumentation and metaphor), with each chapter introducing the methodology in more detail. As we saw that a level of political culture needs to be assumed for a comparative analysis of political discourses in different polities, we will begin our case study with a context analysis. This will be based on the idea that political culture can be described as a semiotic rule system shaped by the specific discourse history of a polity. Not only individuals but also institutions act as carriers of culture, and in politics these can be understood using the veto-player theory.

Chapter 3

Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

This chapter presents a context analysis of the discourses of the Third Way in Germany and the UK. As it situates the discourses historically, it also details the argumentative basis for the corpus definition. The context analysis is also an essential part of comparative political discourse analysis as it makes it possible to isolate the differences in the contexts which influenced the discourses, and is therefore crucial to answer research question (5): If the Third Way discourses in both countries differ, how can these differences be explained with references to the political context? 3.1

The long end of the social democratic century: A brief comparative history of Labour and the SPD

In the late 1980s, social democracy seemed to be in crisis. In Germany and the UK, conservative parties had dominated the agenda for nearly a decade and no end of conservative hegemony seemed to be in sight. Because of seemingly changed global political circumstances, the liberal politician and sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf even announced the ‘end of the social democratic century’ (Dahrendorf 1988: 116). In 1996, Borchert at al. (1996: 7) described the public perception of this situation in Germany in comparison to Britain: whereas the end of the crisis of social democracy seemed to be in sight in the UK and a reformed Labour Party led by the charismatic, yet controversial, Tony Blair, was predicted to enter government at the next general election, the German SPD still seemed to be without clear programmatic orientation. However, both parties managed to end their long period of opposition, the Labour Party after 18 years’ dominance by the Conservatives (1979–1997), the SPD after 16 years of Helmut Kohl leading a CDU/CSU-FDP coalition (1982–1998). In 1999, the successful leaders of these modernised social democratic parties, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, published a programme for a modern social democracy in Europe, praising the ‘Third Way’ as the solution for

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the renewal of social democracy – and this crossover between the modernisation discourses of two social democratic parties is the starting point of my analysis. In the following paragraphs, I will analyse the discourse-historical circumstances of the crisis of social democracy, and the different modernisation discourses in the Labour Party and the SPD. This is of course not a detailed analysis of the history of both parties, which would require at least one separate volume, rather than a short chapter.1 The origins of the British Labour Party and the SPD could not be more different. The German social democratic movement was established very early as a result of the failed 1848 revolution which was largely supported by workers hoping for social and political changes in Germany. In contrast to Britain, where trade unions had a long tradition since the ban on freedom of association was lifted in 1824, the labour movement in Germany was suppressed by this ban, which in most German states remained officially in place until 1848. However, the suppression of the workers’ movement in Germany also continued in the restoration period following the failure of the 1848 revolution. Soon after this period, two workers’ parties were founded that subsequently merged into the SPD: Lassalle’s Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (ADAV) in 1863 in Leipzig and the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (SDAP) in 1869 in Eisenach. While the ADAV hoped for social concessions from the state, the SDAP fought for a democratic unification of Germany leading to a socialist Germany. The foundation of the German Reich 1871 shattered the hopes of both parties, and state suppression of the labour movement increased again. Therefore, a unified effort for political change seemed necessary, and in 1875 both parties merged into the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (SAPD). Its programme was a compromise between the more ‘state-affirming’ ADAV (Potthoff, Miller, and Kane 2006: 38) and the more radical SDAP, and was subject to scathing criticism by Marx. Only in 1891 the party adopted a Marxist programme and renamed itself Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD). The development of the British Labour Party took an opposite direction: it was founded in 1900 by well-established and free trade unions in order to represent them in parliament. Traditionally, British trade unions were not revolutionary socialists, but were mainly interested in being allowed to freely negotiate with employers. They also stood in a strong liberal individualist tradition in which the state stood for the oppressive poor law and social coercion, so state interference was not favoured by many workers. Rubinstein (2006, 17) points out that the function 1.  For a detailed analysis of the social democratic modernisation discourse see (Nachtwey 2009), for the historic differences see (Potthoff, Miller, and Kane 2006), (Rubinstein 2006) or (Sassoon 1996).



Chapter 3.  Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

of the unions in Britain was very different from the socialist movement on the continent – it was essentially defensive, and aimed to improve workers’ wages and working conditions. In this role, they had to seek compromise and could not think as social revolutionaries. Although socialists aimed to gain power in the Labour Party, their influence remained weak to begin with, since different socialist groups were arguing amongst each other and with the unions. This comparison of the historical origins of the Labour Party and the SPD demonstrates fundamental differences. Despite originating from similar motivations – to further the case of workers – both parties had different approaches to it: The Labour Party, as the parliamentary arm of the unions, was more pragmatic and less ideological, and influenced by a strong liberal tradition. The German social democrats, in contrast, were social reformers from the beginning. Furthermore, Marxism was far less influential in Britain than in Germany, especially as the general political culture of Britain was based on political stability and a tradition of gradualism, on reforms to parliament and the franchise. The most striking difference between the Labour Party and the SPD in the post-war period results from the asymmetry of the (West) German party system. Between 1945 and 2013, the SPD managed only three times (out of eighteen) to become the biggest parliamentary group: The Labour Party, however, manged to achieve this seven out of seventeen times. Despite both parties developing differently, both found themselves in the same situation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a long period of opposition was difficult to end and only a programmatic renewal seemed to be the solution. After 1945, the SPD had a strong Marxist orientation that appealed less and less to the electorate, the more the strong economic recovery after the war unfolded. The CDU, however, was united in its anti-communist and anti-socialist attitude which appealed to the large West German Catholic community. In 1959, the SPD renounced class-based politics and adopted the Godesberg Programme, which in essence accepted the capitalist market as a sensible allocation mechanism in many parts of society, with the slogan ‘Wettbewerb soweit wie möglich, Planung soweit wie nötig’. Nationalisation of industry as a means of politics was given up, and the SPD presented itself as a catch-all party.2 Only in 1966 did the SPD join the first government, and after the election in 1969, an SPD politician became Chancellor 2.  ‘Catch-all parties’ is a technical term for parties that lack a clearly defined social basis and try to attract a wide range of supporters through a set of rather general policies. The term was originally introduced into the analysis of party change by Kirchheimer (1966) as a translation of ‘Volkspartei’, which is still used in Germany. I am using this term here without introducing the debate on whether modern mass parties are catch-all parties or cartel parties (Katz and Mair 1995), since it is not relevant to the question of political discourse. For a detailed introduction to this debate, see (Krouwel 2006).

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for the first time in the history of the FRG. The successes of the SPD in government were significant: although the welfare state is part of the German constitution, in their first term in power the SPD strengthened it significantly (Potthoff, Miller, and Kane 2006: 265). The SPD successfully worked for democratisation and an open and more tolerant society. In foreign policy, Brandt’s ‘Ostpolitik’, which aimed for a normalisation of relations with Eastern Europe, helped to diminish the impact of the Cold War and made the FRG a more internationally significant player. During World War II, Britain was governed by a ‘National Government’ – a coalition of all major parties. At that time, the Labour Party’s share of the vote rose from 38% in 1935 to over 48% in 1945. The collectivist approach to society seemed to have grown through experience of the dire times of the war, resulting in the publication of ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services’, the Beveridge Report. Beveridge analysed the social problems in Britain and suggested a universal welfare state on the basis of a flat rate contribution to fight the five giant evils in society: want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness (Abel-Smith 1992: 5). This played a central role in the 1945 general election, and its implementation by the subsequent Labour government was possibly the most successful restructuring of British society in the twentieth century. Yet, the election was also won on the promise of a major nationalisation of industries and of full employment. However, the Labour Party was still divided as to the speed at which to aim for a socialist society – a debate that would last through the electoral successes and defeats of the Labour Party in the subsequent decades. There were strong Marxist voices, but also reoccurring suggestions for a revisionist programme such as Anthony Crosland’s ‘The Future of Socialism’ in 1956. After a long time in government, both the Labour Party and the SPD lost power in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This marked a crisis of social democracy that has been widely discussed. Burnham (1996, 26) sees two problematic assumptions in the political theory of social democracy, which led to its crisis. Firstly, the strategy to change society through participation in election and government, and secondly reliance on a Keynesian approach to economic policy. The electoral strategy was already problematic in the 1920s, when winning elections became more difficult because workers turned to other parties. This made it necessary to focus on other social groups, but led to the question how far a class-based party can move away from its original electorate without losing it. The second question was why a party which wanted to change the current political system should be part of the political system, and what it could achieve there. The answer was later found in the Keynesian economic approach that allowed governments to achieve the aims of full employment, equality and economic efficiency at the same time. However, the Keynesian class compromise was based on state intervention to stabilise an unstable capitalist system by avoiding underconsumption through



Chapter 3.  Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

state investment, and the redistribution of wealth through the welfare state. This, again, depended on the autonomy of national economies from the global economy (Burnham 1996: 26–28). These circumstances changed radically with the economic crisis of the 1960s and the new capitalism of the late 1970s, with the globalisation of capital and free trade, and with workers still bound to national borders. At the same time, new social movements such as the Greens in Germany rose and threatened the electoral success of social democratic parties. Furthermore, the social democratic welfare state came under strong criticism from left and right: while the conservatives attacked it as too big and too expensive for taxpayers, the left complained that the welfare states degraded people through their bureaucracy and repressive measures (see Gough 1979, Offe 1972). Because both the left and the right were critical of the welfare state, its identification as the cause of the problem and its active demolition by Thatcher and Reagan were barely opposed (Borchert 1996: 41). The conservative revolution of the welfare state in the US and Britain soon became hegemonic, and changes in welfare in the 1990s were perceived as a necessary adaptation to the global economy. These factors seemed to question the Keynesian class compromise, and led the social democratic parties into an electoral and programmatic crisis. Merkel (1996) and Borchert (1996) both reject a general theory of social democratic decline. Merkel (1996) demonstrates that the development of social democracy in the 1980 and 1990 very much depended on local economic, political and social circumstances – whilst socialist parties in southern Europe could not compensate for global changes, traditional social democratic societies such as Sweden, Austria and Norway were very much able to continue with successful social democratic policies. Borchert (1996: 43) refutes the interpretation of a general electoral crisis for the social democrats in the 1980, since there was no uniform downward trend in their election results: while the results were problematic in Britain, their sister parties in France and Spain celebrated electoral successes. This shows that a discussion of the localised development of social democratic parties is necessary. The crisis of the Labour Party began after the lost general election of 1979, when Labour moved to the left. This development had already begun in the early 1970s, as a severe economic crisis seemed to discredit revisionism. Strong internal division and heavy internal power battles distracted the party from focusing on its political opposition (Jun 2004: 162–65; Rubinstein 2006: 148–56; Thorpe 2008: 209–29). The programmatic move to the left eventually resulted in a split in the party: in 1981, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) was founded. However, most of the Labour Party’s right wing did not join and so the tension within the Labour Party remained. For electoral success, the SDP formed an alliance with

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the Liberal Party. This strengthened alternative to the Conservatives mainly took votes away from the Labour Party and, because of the first-past-the-post system, effectively strengthened the Conservative Party. At the same time, ‘Militant Tendency’, a Trotskyist organisation, used ‘entryist’ action in order to radicalise the Labour Party from within. A subsequent expulsion of Militant supporters caused even more division, since the Labour left feared a general assault and initiated reforms of the party’s structures to make leadership more accountable to the party outside the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). The PLP lost the exclusive right to elect the party leader to an electoral college dominated by the unions and party activists. Furthermore, the Constituency Labour Party (CLP) now had to approve a candidate for parliament to run again. After the 1983 election defeat the new leader, Neil Kinnock, tried to reunite the party, reducing the influence of the left and the unions by strengthening individual members. He introduced the one-member-one-vote system in order to contain the power of activists who were normally more radical. From 1990, the unions’ share in the block vote at annual conferences was reduced from 90% to 70%, and was finally abolished in 1993. Kinnock also initiated the programmatic changes that would eventually result in ‘New Labour’. His inner leadership circle was mainly formed of politicians who wanted to change Labour’s values, a group internally known as ‘modernisers’. Kinnock especially promoted Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, who were seen as part of the right wing (Shaw 1996: 186). After losing the 1987 election, Kinnock launched a policy review: The Labour Party distanced itself further from the aim of the nationalisation of industries, and focused on market discipline and a favourable climate for businesses. It ruled out bigger tax increases, became less anti-European Community, and gave up the commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament. The programmatic reforms did not bring about immediate electoral success; however, by the time of the 1992 election, Margaret Thatcher had been replaced by the less charismatic John Major. Although the Labour manifesto famously announced that it would support businesses (‘A government which business can do business with’ (The Labour Party 1992: 11)), the Conservatives focused on Labour’s tax plans, which aimed to lower taxes on lower incomes while increasing higher tax rates. The Conservative campaign convinced many in the electorate that the average taxpayer would be £1,000 worse off. Kinnocks’ resignation from the leadership after the lost election was followed by a leadership interlude with John Smith, who tragically died aged only 55 after less than two years in office. However, in his short interregnum he continued Kinnock’s reforms, reducing the influences of the unions further and implementing the one-member-one-vote system.



Chapter 3.  Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

The crisis of the SPD started after the fourth re-election of the SPD-FDP coalition in 1980, when the economic situation became increasingly difficult, and cuts to balance the budget were deemed necessary. This led to tensions in the coalition. On 20th August 1981, the deputy chancellor and FDP leader Hans-Dietrich Genscher published his Wendebrief, announcing that a change of political direction was necessary, and that the welfare state could not provide everything for everybody. This was clearly a move to depict the FDP as the party of laissez-faire and economic liberalism. In 1982, it finally became impossible to agree a budget and Helmut Schmidt announced the end of the coalition. As a result, the CDU and FDP brought a constructive vote of no confidence, instead of calling an election, and elected the CDU politician Helmut Kohl as the new Chancellor. This was the beginning of 16 long years in opposition for the SPD, which were marked by internal power struggles and the unexpected collapse of the GDR, which prolonged Helmut Kohl’s chancellorship significantly. After Schmidt’s resignation, Willy Brandt, still party chairman, became the symbol of programmatic change between 1983 and 1985 (Walter 2009: 202–3): the SPD wanted to be the party of ecology and the peace movement. It focused on young people and on the regeneration of the party. This ethos of post-materialism resulted in the new party programme of Berlin in 1989. After Brandt fell due to a scandal, Hans-Jochen Vogel became party chairman. At the same time, the ‘Enkelgeneration’ – a term first used by Brandt for the young influential SPD politicians Oskar Lafontaine, Gerhard Schröder and Björn Engholm  – began to position themselves as potential leaders. Brandt originally favoured Lafontaine, who was perceived as a moderniser in the 1980s, attacking the trade unions and asking for a reduction of working hours without compensatory wage adjustments (Potthoff, Miller, and Kane 2006: 304). But Lafontaine failed to lead the SPD to success in the 1990 election, despite the CDU being in an electoral crisis in 1988 and 1989. Chancellor Kohl, however, regained strength through his management of reunification and managed to run a campaign based on the East Germans’ hope for a better future. Lafontaine’s scepticism about a fast unification of Germany was not acceptable to the public and his tactical action in the Bundestag and Bundesrat about the currency union damaged his reputation, although his economic arguments were strong. The result was a permanent crisis of leadership and constant changes of leader in the SPD in the 1990s. But there was also a programmatic dilemma: while the post-materialist Green party became increasingly stronger and had to be fought programmatically, too much post-materialism frightened core voters in troubled economic times (Walter 2009: 226–27). To counter the loss of members, the SPD undertook a series of inner-party reforms similar to those undertaken in the Labour Party. The reform discussion originated in the 1980s and was implemented under the new leader, Björn Engholm,

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from 1991. These reforms made a membership ballot for the new chancellor possible, and also aimed to introduce membership consultations – a rule change that was blocked at the Wiesbaden Conference 1993 because the delegates saw it as an attempt by the leadership to bypass them through calling for consultation (Jun 2004: 136–49). Jun (2004: 149) interprets the effects of these reforms as a change in the power structures of the party in favour of the leadership. This is because they gave more influence to members and outsiders as opposed to conference delegates, and thus they strengthened the leadership, because the membership was more fragmented and lacked the information necessary to oppose the leadership. After Engholm had to step down because of a political scandal, the membership ballot was first used in 1993 to elect a new leader. The choice was between three candidates: Rudolf Scharping won with 40.3% of the votes, followed by Gerhard Schröder with 33.2% and Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul with 26.5%. The use of the membership ballot to elect the leader could be interpreted as an instrument to block the ambitious Schröder – who in the end did not accept Scharping as a leader and actively undermined Scharping’s leadership through strategic use of the media (Walter 2009: 212). Although Scharping was relatively inexperienced, with only two years’ experience as Minister President of Rhineland-Palatinate, he was perceived to manage the SPD well: In winter 1994, the chances looked positive for the SPD to win the next election, but yet again, a far more experienced Helmut Kohl managed to turn the mood round. With the election lost, the competition between Scharping and Schröder became more intense, but led to a further fall of the SPD in the opinion polls. At the Mannheim party conference in 1995, Oskar Lafontaine gave a motivating speech, stood, surprisingly, for the party leadership against Scharping – and won. As a skilled speaker and party organiser, who now stood for a more traditional social democratic position, he managed to unite the party behind him. For the first time in a decade, the party seemed to speak with one voice. There was, however, another ‘grandson’ left who had his eye firmly on the chancellor candidacy  – the media-skilled Minister President of Lower Saxony, Gerhard Schröder, who, supported by his close aide Bodo Hombach, followed Blair’s successful modernisation of the British Labour Party closely, and introduced elements of the Third Way discourse into the programmatic debate within the SPD. The most important difference between both parties for the purposes of the present analysis is their different reactions to the crisis and their particular paths to ‘modernisation’: the modernisation discourse in the Labour Party became hegemonic before it entered government in 1997. It was particularly driven by the new party leader Blair, and culminated in the rewriting of the Clause Four of Labour’s constitution in 1995. I therefore call the time between 1994 and 1997 the ‘historical focal period’ of the modernisation of the Labour Party: the



Chapter 3.  Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

modernisation had started slowly before, but came to its culmination in this period. In the SPD, however, the modernisation discourse became hegemonic only after the party chairman Lafontaine stepped down in 1999. As we will see later, the signs of a battle for hegemony are certainly recognisable in the time around the 1998 election, which is therefore one focal period of the modernisation discourse in the SPD. The culmination, however, is the announcement and implementation of the welfare reforms known as ‘Hartz IV’ or ‘Agenda 2010’ – the second focal period of the modernisation discourse in the SPD. Announced in 2003, the Hartz reforms arguably constituted the ‘most ambitious German reform project in social insurance policy since World War II’ (Kemmerling and Bruttel 2006: 90). In the following outline, I will discuss both paths in more detail, as they form the historical context for the linguistic analysis of my corpus. After a short leadership campaign, Blair was elected party leader by the Electoral College on 21st July 1994. Blair made his mark almost immediately by adopting a Third Way rhetoric, by branding the party as ‘new Labour’, and by initiating the change to the famous Clause Four of Labour’s constitution. The change of Clause Four, by which the nationalisation of industries was seen as a core means of achieving socialism, was a symbolic act against a quasi-religious symbol: The central part of the clause’s original text3 from 1918 was printed on every membership card between 1918 and 1995 (Jun 2004: 225) and, in Fielding’s words, echoed ‘through the ages like a secular version of the Ten Commandments’ (Fielding 2000: 371). However, its centrality for the Labour ideology was mainly felt by party activists and trade unionists, who attended the conferences4 – and these activists resisted the change since Gaitskell first attempted it in 1959. The reform of Clause Four demonstrated Blair’s decisiveness as the new leader (Faucher-King 2005: 133), and his desire to be recognised as different from his predecessor John Smith. Smith had refrained from changing it in order to avoid the controversy surrounding the decision. Blair took this decision for exactly the opposite reasons: ‘… the whole point of revision was to cause a fuss’ (Fielding 2003: 75). The change was part of a strategy to attract voters who had not voted for Kinnock in 1992 – the controversy around the redraft was intended to signal that the party had changed. The left wing of the Labour Party opposed the change strongly, since socialism was seen as impossible without common ownership, and 3.  ‘To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.’ 4.  In a survey in the 1960s in a safe Labour seat of Newcastle-under-Lyme, for example, only 46% of people asked had actually heard of Clause Four (Fielding 2000: 371).

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the old Clause Four was seen as symbolic for a commitment to the working class and redistribution of wealth. But the decision was reached by an electoral college where individual members and individual trade unionists, instead of the unions’ leaders and party activists, were strongly represented, and 85% voted in favour of the new Clause Four. The symbolism of the new Clause Four was linked to profound programmatic changes: while the market as a central part of policy was accepted under Kinnock, it became understood as a positive force under Blair (Driver and Martell 1998: 40). Even more, as Hall (2002: 47) points out: In many cases, the Blair government has not simply accepted the role of the market mechanisms in the allocation of resources, but reinforced their bite. It is apparent that the character of the British economy has influenced the government.

It became a hegemonic belief that politics should not burden the market with tax and regulation, but should instead strengthen its efficiency, while at the same time supporting equality of opportunity – a position that was a means to fight Labour’s image as the ‘tax and spend party’, which had damaged Labour so badly in the previous election. The Conservative privatisations were kept, and the general economic agenda of Thatcherism accepted (Hall 2002: 46); however, the charge that New Labour is ‘Thatcherism continued’ (e.g. Hay 1999b) is not uncontroversial. Driver and Martell (2002: 86) for example argue that ‘[t]hose who advocate the Labour as Thatcherism view, downplay, or even ignore social democratic elements to the Third Way’ – such as the minimum wage, and increased public spending on health. But even Driver and Martell concede that the ideological profile of New Labour is certainly influenced by changes in the political landscape brought about through Thatcherism: the radical right-wing experience with fiscal conservatism, trade-union legislation as well as privatisation and deregulation. This had not been as radical in other European countries, and made Blair seem more to the left of the political spectrum from a British perspective, but rather more to the right from an external one (Driver and Martell 2002: 96). Regarding the welfare state, New Labour moved away from unconditional universal welfare and borrowed the welfare-to-work concept from US president Clinton’s welfare reforms (King and Wickham-Jones 1999: 65): While Labour traditionally saw unemployment as a problem of demand for labour, New Labour saw it as a supply-side problem created through a lack of opportunities as well as incentives. Originally, social welfare was based on social needs, which were understood as rights of all members of society. New Labour saw this as passivity and claimed that there was a problem of a welfare dependency culture. Out of this criticism the party developed the notion of a social investment state as a viable alternative (Shaw 2007: 44–45), which included stronger means testing and



Chapter 3.  Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

stronger penalties for not taking up (low-paid) work. This strategy was complemented by new incentives to work, such as the minimum wage, tax credits and training options. New Labour also turned to the use of private finance initiatives (PFI) in order to fund necessary investments, and employed market mechanisms to increase efficiency in the state sector. Finally, New Labour can be interpreted as social democratic liberalism (Jun 2004: 247), and New Labour proponents wanted elements of a liberal political philosophy strengthened, as they see liberalism as a part of the Labour tradition which goes back to the lib-lab pacts of the early twentieth century (Fielding 2000: 375). From a traditional Labour position, however, New Labour was seen as right-wing reformist: Roy Hattersley for example argued in the Observer that he did not recognise it as ‘his party’ any more (Hattersley, 24th June 2001). We saw how the Labour Party undertook significant changes in the structure of the party as well as in the party’s ideology before the election in 1997. This constitutes the most significant difference in comparison to the SPD, which went into the election in 1998 still presenting a mixture of ‘modernised’ and ‘traditional’ positions. With Lafontaine, the party had a leader since 1995 who had returned to more traditional neo-Keynesian approaches to economic and political problems. This seemed suitable, as towards the end of 1996 there was a change in the general mood in Germany: a renaissance of belief in the ‘social state’. Following a survey by the conservative ‘Allensbach Institute’, a majority of Germans did not see the crisis of society and economy in conservative terms such as flexibilisation and prudency, but hoped for a strengthening of the welfare state. The socially unbalanced tax reform bill introduced by the government therefore proved unpopular, and the SPD capitalised on the unpopularity publicly by blocking the bill in the upper house (Bundesrat) (Walter 2009: 233–34). By 1997, however, Lafontaine’s personal ratings began to fall, while Schröder’s popularity grew. In March 1998, Schröder won the Lower Saxony election with 47.9% of the vote – an election that he had staged as US-style primaries (Wolfrum 2013: 31). Following this interpretation, the SPD presented Schröder as Chancellor Candidate, since he had a better chance of winning. However, there is an alternative interpretation: the double leadership was employed as a strategic integration of different voter potentials. Lafontaine and Schröder reflected the contradictions in the electorate, which saw the need for change in the welfare system, but also feared the effects of these changes. The discourse of the Third Way was in full swing in the US and the UK in 1997 and 1998, but whether it informed the SPD election campaign of 1998 is debatable. Jun (2004: 249), for example, argues that there is no influence of this discourse before the Schröder-Blair paper in 1999. However, I will later demonstrate that there are clear signs of its reception in Hombach (1998), whose approach to the ‘Neue Mitte’ clearly influenced the 1998 SPD manifesto. Furthermore, the SPD

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studied the election campaigns of Clinton and Blair systematically: its campaign managers met the advisers of the Clinton campaign in seminars at the FriedrichEbert-Stiftung (Wolfrum 2013: 27–28) and, following their advice, developed a highly professionalised campaign centre: ‘Kampa 98’. After the historic election victory in 1998 – only for the second time in its postwar history had the SPD managed to become the biggest group in parliament – the internal differences between Schröder and Lafontaine continued. Lafontaine had strong ‘neo-Keynesian’ ideas (Hegelich, Knollmann, and Kuhlmann 2011: 36) and loathed the dominant monetarist approach, which he regarded as failed because it did not alleviate unemployment. He therefore aimed for an approach of redistribution through taxation, and fought for a European harmonisation of taxes as well as for central banks supporting economic policy through the monetary policy. Moreover, he wanted to re-regulate the international capital flow. However, Lafontaine encountered intense opposition and was criticised by Gordon Brown and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, as well as by bankers from the ECB and the Bundesbank. Eventually, Lafontaine resigned from his position as finance minister and party chairman on the 11th of March 1999, citing personal circumstances and a lack of teamwork in government as reasons, but otherwise staying silent for months until he gave a detailed account of his reasons in ‘Das Herz schlägt links’ (Lafontaine 1999). After Lafontaine’s resignation, the red–green coalition changed its course decisively: the new key aims were austerity and the lowering of taxes. Later in 1999, the Schröder-Blair paper was published as an affirmation of the modernisers’ hegemony and an open adoption of ‘Third Way’ strategies. The modernising politics of the SPD in Germany eventually culminated in Agenda 2010 – a welfare reform, better known as ‘Hartz IV’, which was perceived as radical and led to public outrage. ‘Agenda 2010’ was announced in a government policy declaration that Schröder gave in parliament without the consultation of the party membership or the wider public. The party seemed unprepared for these rather radical reforms, and the announcement was followed by heated debates in party and society. But was it really unexpected? And what were the central points of the reform? Hegelich et  al. (2011) argue that central to the welfare reforms that had already started before the announcement of Agenda 2010 is a ‘re-commodification of work’ through a welfare-to-work approach. Originally, most social democratic parties aimed for a decommodification of work through the welfare state by reducing individuals’ dependence on the labour market. Modernised social democrats such as New Labour and Schröder’s SPD, however, saw integration into the labour market as central. Furthermore, an individualisation of life risks, as well as the privatisation of parts of the welfare state, were also central from the beginning. Hegelich et al. (2011) argue that since Lafontaine’s resignation, a phase of ‘Agenda



Chapter 3.  Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

politics without Agenda 2010’ started. The party’s left was paralysed and without a leader after that, and a part-privatisation of the pension system through the ‘Riester Reform’ remained almost unopposed. It is important to note that this was a significant change for the German social democrats, as equally shared contributions by employers and employees into welfare insurances used to be a central commitment of the SPD, a principle that was abandoned for the privatised parts of pensions. The Labour market was initially re-regulated, as the modernisers under Schröder retracted further on election promises after losing state elections, but plans for these reforms had already been drafted. Indeed, the first steps towards welfare-to-work were introduced in 2001 via the Job-AQTIV bill (Hegelich, Knollmann, and Kuhlmann 2011: 36). In 2002, the process of introducing the so-called Hartz reforms was initiated after a scandal about inaccurate statistics in the ‘Agentur für Arbeit’ (the central institution that cared for the unemployed) broke. The evidence, however, suggests that the statistics were probably leaked strategically by the Kanzleramt (Streeck 2003: 8). As a reaction, an advisory committee on labour market reforms under the chairmanship of the VW human resources executive Peter Hartz was asked to submit suggestions which eventually resulted in the so-called ‘Hartz laws’. Most significant was the suggested integration of unemployment assistance and social benefits into a single system that henceforth became known as ‘Hartz IV’. To understand the outrage these reforms caused, it is important to be aware that the German welfare system was part of the Christian-democrat welfare regime, which aimed at achieving social stability and cohesion by maintaining the individual’s standard of living in cases of unemployment (Seeleib-Kaiser 2008: 236–40). This regime consisted of a contribution-based unemployment insurance system which, in case of unemployment, provided people with 60–67% of their last net earnings for up to 32 months, and tax-funded unemployment assistance, which provided the unemployed with 53–57% of their last net salary, after their unemployment insurance payments stopped. The Hartz reforms radically changed this system: after only 12 months of unemployment insurance payments (18 months for people aged over 55), unemployed people had to depend on much lower means-tested social benefits and were under obligation to accept any legal job, or to expect to have their benefits significantly reduced (Kemmerling and Bruttel 2006: 96–97). This was a stark change towards a more liberal-communitarian approach to welfare, which was typical also for Britain and the United States (Seeleib-Kaiser 2008: 249).

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3.2

Discourses of the Third Way – a global phenomenon?

New Labour and the SPD of ‘Die Neue Mitte’ are usually described as Third Way social democratic parties. I will now identify the main elements of the Third Way discourse, and explore to what extent New Labour and ’Die Neue Mitte’ are both part of the same Third Way discourse. The linguistic analysis of the present study will be based on this discussion. Bastow and Martin (2003) discuss the Third Way as a variety of ideologies of the third way.5 They define the third-way discourse as a ‘mode of ideological reasoning rather than a distinctive ideology in itself ’ (Bastow and Martin, J. 2003: 2). Typical for Third-Way social democrats is in their eyes an attempt to unite opposing policy choices – state and market, rights and responsibilities – since their central claim is to move beyond ideology. This is also the reason for the apparent vagueness of the Third Way: if it tries to dissolve ideologies and move on, where does it move to: where are the criteria for the reliance on markets and states? Bastow and Martin answer that ‘[…] the Third Way functions as a “discourse” that resets the horizons of social objectivity by claiming to transcend received ideological perspectives. In doing so, it resists easy classification along a left–right spectrum’ (Bastow and Martin, J. 2003: 6). Bastow and Martin (2003) discovered five basic elements that characterise all third-way discourses, and found elements of all of them realised in New Labour’s Third Way: (1) The idea that New Labour is situated on the political spectrum between left and right is repeatedly used in the discourse of New Labour, and it has profound influences on political language, as observed by Fairclough: he identified an increased occurrence of equivalences that connect elements once ideologically separated by ‘and’ instead of ‘or’ (Fairclough 2000: 9–12). Alternatively, both the discourse of New Labour and the discourse of ‘Die Neue Mitte’ employ a topos of post-ideology, arguing that political ideologies have led to adversary politics. The Third Way is thus proposed as a political position that is not ideological, but pragmatic. (2) All third-way discourses contain an element of crisis (Bastow and Martin, J. 2003: 50–52). For Blair, a crisis materialises in the challenges of ‘change’, which include the internationalisation of trade and general globalisation, as well as a rapid development of new technologies, which all have an effect on the labour market. Therefore, Blair argues for a necessary rebalancing of responsibilities between state and economy. Giddens analyses this on a more sociological basis 5.  Bastow and Martin (2003) use the lower-case spelling to refer to the general phenomenon of third- way ideologies, while the upper-case ‘Third Way’ refers to the particular discourse in and around New Labour.



Chapter 3.  Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

and sees the crisis emerging out of a series of social transformations: changes in time and space because of globalisation diminish state influence on the economy. He also observes a critical decline of traditional identities and an increase in individualism (Giddens 1998: 27). Traditional ideologies are in crisis, because they see modernisation as a ‘linear’ process, where one institution is responsible for delivering economic benefits: either the state (left) or the market (right). Instead, Giddens wants globalisation to be seen as an opportunity to modernise while being aware of the risks of modernisation (Giddens 1998: 64–68). (3) All third-way discourses define their objectives on the basis of a renewal of ethical principles, and reject a materialist analysis of the political problems of their time (Bastow and Martin, J. 2003: 40–41). New Labour sees equality of outcome as an aim that does not match a pluralistic society. In this view, prejudice and discrimination are the main causes of social problems, not material inequality, and so New Labour aims for equal moral worth (Bastow and Martin, J. 2003: 52–54). Giddens connects this to the rise of a new individualism (Giddens 1998: 34–37), which he stresses is not egoistic individualism, but part of social change and the liberation from traditional fixed social relations. Because of rising individualism  – although Giddens evaluates it positively  – solidarity cannot be produced by the state any more. New means of solidarity need to be found, and Giddens argues for a renewal of a combination of individual rights and responsibilities in the community. (4) Basing a renewal of politics on the community is a further element of all third-way discourses (Bastow and Martin, J. 2003: 41–42). The Third Way claims that the state cannot replace civil society, and society is more than a collection of self-interested individuals whose relationship is regulated by market forces. Thus, New Labour campaigns for a partnership between the government and the voluntary sector, as well as the ‘stakeholder society’, as a means to revive the civil society (Bastow and Martin, J. 2003: 54–56). (5) The fifth and last element of third-way discourses is a sense of agency amongst their proponents: Like other proponents of third ways, ‘new Labour’ sees itself as more than just a party: it is the living symbol of the change it wishes to bring about. Few slogans express this better than ‘New Labour, New Britain’. As an agency of modernisation, Labour’s newness was to become Britain’s newness.  (Bastow and Martin, J. 2003: 57)

The defining difference between other third-way discourses (such as Italian Liberal Socialism or parts of the Green movement) and the Third Way discourse of New Labour is the necessity of modernisation due to globalisation. This discourse of modernisation can be seen as part of the crisis element: globalisation causes

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social and economic challenges, and when ‘globalisation […] is the symptom […], modernisation is the cure’ (Bastow and Martin, J. 2003: 58). This objectivation of globalisation would suggest that both the discourse of New Labour and the discourse of ‘Die Neue Mitte’ rely on discursive strategies of depoliticisation. Although Bastow and Martin do not use this term, they describe the effect of the objectified globalisation in a similar way: ‘This encourages us to think of economic and social change as non-political (that is, essentially incontestable) and therefore enforces a closure on political discourse’ (Bastow and Martin, J. 2003: 68). This has also been observed by Finlayson (2003),  who points out that fundamental decisions on how we want to live are kept out of politics in the discourse of New Labour: ‘Instead the way we live is simply derived from the way things are.’ (Finlayson 2003: 136) He also notices a strategy to close the discourse: in the New Labour discourse, its opponents are often misconstrued as opponents of progress and justice in order to delegitimise them (Finlayson 2003: 80). As I have argued in my discussion of ideology and the politics of knowledge, these discursive closures or constructions of necessity are typical of political ideologies. A further typical element of political ideologies can be found in the discourse of the Third Way: contradictory elements. The neoliberal emphasis on individual choice in New Labour’s approach counteracts the ideas of solidarity in community, since the first creates well-known problems of solidarity (Bastow and Martin, J. 2003: 66). The demanded sense of community also contradicts the idea of a social contract that is often used by New Labour, because the classical liberal idea of a contract suggests a weak or purely commercial human relationship (Freeden 1999: 45). But even liberal values itself are not used without contradiction, as the ‘zero tolerance’ rhetoric of ‘new Labour’ directly negates the liberal core value of tolerance (Freeden 1999: 45). Freeden (1999) also notices a clear reformulation of socialist values in favour of the position of economic liberalism: He observes that the ‘right to work’ becomes a puritanical ‘duty to work’ that sees humans as a resource. The value of equality of distribution is substituted by equality of opportunity, which in New Labour’s terminology means opportunity to work rather than to realisation of personal potential (Freeden 1999: 47). King and WickhamJones (1999: 62–63) show how the traditional democratic socialist idea of welfare and universal social benefits that was a central and uncontroversial commitment of the Labour Party between 1945 and 1992, is redefined by New Labour: ‘welfare’ is not understood as the means to human wellbeing and human creativity any more, neither is it part of a political effort to fight alienation, but becomes ‘a support service for the marginalised’. The discussion of the literature on ideologies of the third way above demonstrates that New Labour’s political ideology has generally been categorised as an ideology of the third way. There has been, however, less analysis of ‘Die Neue



Chapter 3.  Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

Mitte’ in this respect, which keeps the question open whether the discourse of ‘Die Neue Mitte’ and of New Labour are comparable and have more in common than one policy paper published in 1999. We saw in the previous section that the time lines are rather different. The establishment of New Labour is commonly dated at Tony Blair’s most important internal victory: the change of Clause Four in 1995; while the start of the modernisation discourse is often located much earlier, in Kinnock’s leadership (1983–1992). ‘Die Neue Mitte’ was taken on as a catch term only for the 1998 election by Gerhard Schröder’s team. In this election, the party supposedly tried to maintain a balance between modernising (Schröder) and a more traditional approach (Lafontaine). The controversial extensive welfare reforms of Agenda 2010 were only presented in 2003. It will therefore be necessary to establish how the Third Way discourse has influenced the discourse of ’Die Neue Mitte’ in the following chapters, where I will compare the discursive and linguistic structures in ideological publications from New Labour and ‘Die Neue Mitte’. Hence, we will discuss how the elements of the Third Way discourse described by Bastow and Martin (2003) were recontextualised in the German political discourse, and also consider whether they were adapted to the local political culture. 3.3

The political systems and political cultures of Germany and the United Kingdom as discourse contexts

The British Westminster model is a democratic system with a very long tradition. Its complex historical development can be represented as a series of evolutionary changes building on the previous traditions of monarchy and parliament. This is very different from the continental experience of various revolutions and wars that have led to discontinued traditions and political systems that have been completely restructured for a number of reasons. The main characteristic of the British political system is the supremacy of parliament, and this is unparalleled in other European political systems. The Westminster parliament has plena potestas, the full power that is not bound by anything: no written constitution or law, and no decision of a previous parliament. Since 1949, the House of Commons has been the actual power centre of the British Parliament because the upper house only has powers to delay the passing of a bill, but not a final veto. The members of the House of Commons are elected in singleseat constituencies by the first-past-the-post system. Historically, this has mostly returned a strong majority for the government. Lijphart (1999: 10–12) therefore sees the main features of the British political system in the principle of majority rule and cabinet dominance. The principle of majority rule, according to Lijphart, leads to a power concentration and to the exclusion of large majorities. The cabinet

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is dominant, since it consists of influential members of a cohesive majority party. Abromeit and Stoiber (2006: 81) go further and argue that the British system lacks a separation of powers: the agenda setter is the Prime Minister, with a right to hire and fire members of the government. Difficult members of parliament for the governing party are often made parliamentary secretaries. They are therefore part of the executive and in no position to oppose the government, if they want to keep their position. But to what extent can the Prime Minister be seen as the only veto player? Since the first-past-the-post system normally leads to a strong majority, other parties are not veto players between elections. Furthermore, the second chamber does not have veto powers, and because of the supremacy of parliament there is no strong constitutional court. The only other possibly dangerous actor in the system is the parliamentary party. It needs to be kept ‘on-side’, since it can revolt against prime ministers, as happened to Margaret Thatcher in 1990. The parliamentary party can therefore be treated as a conditional veto player. Therefore, it will be revealing to see which linguistic strategies are used in the discourse within New Labour to convince the more traditional parts of the Labour Party who could potentially threaten the modernising party elite. The German political system could not be more different from the British system. Decision-making is generally more complex, since there are three general veto players: The Bundeskanzler as the head of government, and the two chambers of parliament, Bundestag and Bundesrat. The Bundestag, as the directly elected chamber, elects the Bundeskanzler, which has the right to issue policy guidelines and is therefore the agenda-setter. The electoral system has mixed-member proportional representation, which mostly returns a coalition government. This limits the power of the chancellor to discipline the parliamentary majority, and his or her agenda-setting powers. These are also mostly limited by a formal coalition agreement between the parties of government. German political parties are therefore strong situative veto players, as their veto power depends on majorities and coalitions. Their veto power becomes even stronger if the majorities in both chambers are different: The Bundesrat, as the second chamber, is not directly elected. It is a representation of the member states, and its representatives are sent by their governments. The number of votes for each member state varies according to its population. Although the Bundesrat is not equal to the Bundestag in the power to legislate, it is a veto player, especially if the coalition government does not have a majority there. This can easily be the case, since elections in the member states mostly happen between general federal elections. If the governing coalition does not have a majority in the Bundesrat, the opposition becomes a powerful veto player that can block decisions. Abromeit and Stoiber (2006: 135) argue that this makes Germany a type of consensus democracy, where the power distribution changes with majorities. It can be surmised that the German system of



Chapter 3.  Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK 49

government makes the policy discourse generally more complex, since the parties are stronger veto players than in Britain. There is rarely a single-party government, and the possibility of power changes in the second chamber lead to a permanent election campaign. Despite their differences, both Britain and Germany have a parliamentary system with a strong head of government, whose democratic legitimacy rests on the support of a majority in the legislature. In comparison to presidential systems, parliamentarism is characterised by a limited separation of powers, since the political executive emerges from the legislature and the executive collectively shares responsibility for the decisions of government. In the last two decades, however, the question has arisen as to whether there is an increasing leader focus in parliamentary regimes because of the increasing dominance of the media in politics, but also because of an erosion of the traditional social cleavages and an internationalisation of politics. This question is discussed in political science under the hypothesis of presidentialisation (Poguntke and Webb 2005). ‘Presidentialisation’ is defined as an increase in power of the head of government. This increase is divided into three parts: the analysis of the executive face of presidentialisation describes the increase of more formal power and power resources for the head of government. The party face grasps the growing autonomy of the leader of a party from his or her party, often via the use of plebiscitary elements that favour party members with less argumentative resources, a mechanism we have seen in both Labour and the SPD. And finally, with the electoral face, analyses of presidentialisation evaluate the personalisation of electoral processes, i.e. the growing emphasis on the leader in the campaign and a possibly increasing effect of the leader chosen by the party on voters’ behaviour. The process of presidentialisation in Germany and the UK differs. Regarding the executive face in the UK, there has been a significant increase in the institutional resources of the Prime Minister, which can be demonstrated for example with the growth of special advisers to the Prime Minister from eight under Major to twenty- seven under Blair. The executive face in Germany is characterised by two constitutional privileges: the status of parties in what is commonly called a ‘Parteienstaat’, and the elevated position of the Chancellor as the head of government (‘Kanzlerdemokratie’) (Poguntke 2005: 64). Both characteristics of the German political system are part of the German constitution: Article 21 of the Basic Law defines the freedom to form a political party; their structure has to be democratic and is therefore strictly regulated by law (‘Parteiengesetz’). The position of the chancellor as the leader of the government with the competence to define the general direction of government policy (‘Richtlinienkompetenz’) is defined in the Basic Law, article 65. This is balanced by the principle of ministerial autonomy, which gives ministers the right to lead their department on their own

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authority, so long as they do so within the guidelines set by the Bundeskanzler, and by abiding to the cabinet principle, which calls for the democratically shared responsibility of the cabinet in cases of disagreement between ministers. Poguntke (2005) argues that the central principles of party state and chancellor democracy mitigate a tendency towards increasing presidentialisation in the German political system, since the electoral system produces a structural need for coalition governments and the Chancellor therefore depends on their coalition partner. However, in his view, the Chancellor wins presidential attributes through his position as the chief negotiator between the many veto players, a role that Gerhard Schröder publicly acted out in the revival of tripartite talks in the ‘Bündnis für Arbeit’. In terms of the party face of presidentialisation, both the Labour Party and the SPD adopted reforms to increase the power of the party leadership. However, the ill-fated experience with the directly elected leader Scharping mitigated the effects of these reforms in Germany  – the powers to use a membership ballot to elect the leader have not been used since. Nonetheless, Schröder aimed for a popular mandate by effectively framing the 1997 election in Lower Saxony as a primary for the SPD chancellor’s candidacy. Still, the problems of the presidential way of gaining a popular mandate in a strong party democracy such as Germany are clearly apparent. Gerhard Schröder led his party presidentially, yet had difficulties getting its approval for the Agenda 2010 reforms. Furthermore, despite claiming the leadership on electoral appeal, he led his party into the worst election results at state level since 1949 (Poguntke 2005: 73). In terms of the ‘electoral face’, Britain (Heffernan and Webb 2005: 53) and Germany (Poguntke 2005: 78) both had an increased leadership focus on election since the 1980s. However, while studies in Britain have shown an increased leadership effect since the 1970s (Mughan 2000), the results in Germany are inconclusive (Poguntke 2005: 80). This leads to the question to what extent we can find the leader focus reflected in the discourses under analysis. The different electoral and governmental systems of Britain and Germany have also had a significant impact on their party systems. The British system limits the number of influential parties, since the first-past-the-post system disadvantages smaller parties. The effective number of parliamentary parties (ENPP) in comparison with the effective number of electoral parties (ENEP) shows this: both are calculated by dividing one by the sum of squared shares of the relevant parties, which are for ENEP all parties standing in elections, for ENPP all parties in parliament. While ENEP in Britain after 1945 has been between 2.1 and 3.5, ENPP has rarely risen above 2.5. Therefore, the British party system is mostly seen as a twoparty system. The German party system also appeared to be a two-party system for a long time, because the two largest parties, CDU and SPD, dominated politics after 1945 with the surprisingly resilient FDP playing the deciding factor as to who



Chapter 3.  Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

is in government. This has slowly changed with the rise of the Green party since the 1980s. A significant change took place after 1990, when the post-communist PDS won seats in the Bundestag. The change is reflected in the ENPP rising to 3.0 (Abromeit and Stoiber 2006: 193). The differences between the party systems of the United Kingdom and Germany are reflected in the political discourse: in Britain the majority of pledges in election manifestos are implemented (Rose, R. 1984: 65) and the manifestos are very often referred to in political discourse. This is not as much the case in Germany, where manifestos are often not precise enough to be binding, because the electoral system regularly leads to coalition governments, which increases the importance of coalition agreements and decreases the importance of election manifestos (Abromeit and Stoiber 2006: 188). These differences should also be shown in the linguistic strategies used in election manifestos and political speeches. More generally speaking, the system of proportional representation in Germany made the German political culture centre-oriented rather than polarising, since the two catch-all parties fight over the centre ground. Historically, both the CDU and SPD had to be able to join a coalition with the FDP. Although this has changed with the rise of the Green Party in the 1980s and the PDS/LINKE after re-unification, it is still the case that no party can use a strong rhetoric of conflict or of total opposition, since cooperation is necessary through the power division between the federal and the state levels. For the UK, the thesis of adversary politics as a result of the first-past-the-post system, originally proposed by Finer (1975), has long been debated. Although it seems likely that the single-party governments traditionally returned by the electoral system might be part of a more radical rhetoric, the actual effects are vigorously debated. The arguments for the phenomenon were developed as part of a political discourse on the change of the UK electoral system and were based on an analysis of elections between 1945 and 1970. These effects seemed to weaken in 1980 and 1990, as Cole (1999, 172) demonstrates. He also argues that this model assumes rhetoric to equal reality and misses the point that politicians often exaggerate the differences between the parties in order to legitimise support. A further important difference between the political systems of the UK and Germany is the influence of parties on society caused by the internal structures and traditions of the parties. Abromeit and Stoiber (2006, 188) call this effect ‘partyness of society’ and argue that in the UK parties are less influential, since local parties are not very powerful, inner party democracy is low, and national politics is dominated by parliamentary parties. The party systems in Britain and Germany have also led to ideologically very different main competitors in the political discourse: not only do Labour and the SPD have very different traditions, but the conservative parties, who are their main

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opponents, are also very different in both countries. As Schmidt (2007, 102) points out, the German party system lacks a secular-conservative free-market party similar to the British Conservatives, so both large parties in Germany group around the centre. British conservatism is generally difficult to pin down ideologically. It aims to be the party of all British people. Following Disraeli’s ideal of one-nation conservatism, the Conservatives take a pragmatic approach to political ideology, while strongly arguing for the importance of tradition in institutions (Kavanagh et al. 2006: 71–72). The CDU as the main party for conservatives in Germany was a newly established party after World War II. It successfully integrated the different liberal middle-class parties from the Weimar Republic as well as many local and right-wing parties. This is partly the reason for the structural asymmetry of the party system, which works to the disadvantage of the SPD. Despite integrating the denominational split of the old party system (Lepsius 2009: 65), German Christian democracy is more strongly based on Catholic social theory rather than Protestantism. While Protestant social theory, as constituting the basis of British Conservatives, traditionally relied on the idea of salvation through individual effort, Catholic social theory has focused on social-group and organic harmony. The CDU has therefore aimed for corporatism, social partnership and a social market economy rather than a free market and economic liberalism (Heywood 2007: 85). They also favour a strong welfare state to mitigate the conflict between rich and poor, and as part of the Christian duty to exercise compassion. Although Christian democracy is based on a clear commitment to private property and a market-based economy, it also advocates the necessity of state intervention and market regulation from its Christian values. These interventions are, within limits, justified to ‘prevent the exploitation of workers by their employers and the resultant development of an antagonistic relationship between the forces of capital and labour’ (Huntington and Bale 2002: 45–46). Having focused on the political systems in Germany and the UK and their major differences, I now turn to two important socio-cultural differences: the perceived role of the state, and national discourses on the welfare state. These also influenced the shape of political systems in Britain and Germany. The role of the state is perceived differently in both countries. Dyson (1980) distinguishes between state societies and stateless societies, basing his distinction on ‘political world pictures’ resulting from historic developments. State societies see the state as an impersonal entity which is the source of public morality and which is different from the government and the governed. These societies generally prefer bureaucratic and legalistic conflict resolutions, and have strong non-economic attitudes towards political relations. Stateless societies have an instrumental view of government and stress the private character of politics. Political



Chapter 3.  Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

conflicts are resolved by following shared traditions and rituals rather than written rules. The governing ideas of these societies are heritage and social practice rather than rational principles and technology (Dyson 1980: 50–52). Dyson sees Britain’s political culture as the European exception: although in the Renaissance the concept of the state in Italian philosophy influenced English thinkers and shaped the Tudor state, England did not develop the concept of the state any further after the seventeenth century. Dyson shows that even the term ‘state’ was less and less used, and terms such as ‘kingdom’, ‘country’, ‘people’, ‘nation’ and ‘government’ replaced it. He points out that the idea of the state exerting executive power became impossible after the power struggles between the Crown and Parliament in the seventeenth century, because it would have been a reminder of the absolute monarchy of the past. As a result, there was also no concept of the executive educating and mobilising people, unlike in the enlightened absolute monarchies on the continent. Even English Common Law lacks the concept of state that is so important to the continental Roman law: common law is remote from politics, and therefore did not develop a concept of the state as legal entity. Furthermore, English scholars of law did not embrace the reception of Roman law and ‘the idea of the state as the public institution acting in the name of public authority and general interest’ (Dyson 1980: 43). Germany’s political culture can be seen as the opposite to Britain’s: Germany is a typical state society. The rationalist idea of a centrally governed state setting the framework for economy and society, and the concept of a unified professional civil service administrating a country, originated in the German state of Prussia in the eighteenth century. The Prussian King Frederick the Great saw himself as the ‘first servant of the state’ and its chief bureaucrat. Industrialisation and modernisation in Germany only started in the nineteenth century, and required the centrally organised state support of the Prussian state. Although it was autocratic, it allowed a liberalisation and a strong local administration. The Prussian state set a framework of stability of law and supported the growth of the work force (Wehler 1987: 593). Nineteenth-century German thinkers, who opposed the system of absolute monarchy and aimed for a more democratic Germany, discussed the liberal ideas advanced in eighteenth-century Britain. However, they adapted them significantly: Rohe (1993, 221) talks about Germany having a ‘republican’ tradition,6 which includes a strong belief in individual liberty and the rule of law, but is opposed to the liberal utilitarianism of Britain. German liberal thinkers see political societies not as based on individual interest alone, but on virtues – an inheritance of the 6.  Rohe explicitly points out that this is not a native German term, but uses it because it captures the German adaptation of liberalism best.

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Prussian state tradition. The state in this concept is conceived as a precondition of civil life, as larger societies need formal juridical rules rather than unwritten traditions. This strong state tradition continued in West Germany after 1945. Although the original move of the SPD and parts of the newly formed CDU for nationalisation of the key industries has not become part of the constitution, the first Bundestag voted with a majority for a ‘social market economy’ as the economic system of West Germany. The idea of the ‘social market economy’ is based on the economic theory of ordo-liberalism, which assumes complementarities between the state setting the framework for the economy and social policy, while the economy is governed by market laws. This analysis of the ‘state’ tradition in Britain and Germany, drawing on the history of political ideas, is also reflected in elements of the political discourses in these countries. Dörner and Rohe (1991) have undertaken an analysis of polsemantics, i.e. word formations derived from the Greek word ‘polis’. They used a corpus consisting of dictionaries, encyclopaedias and newspaper articles and studied the morphological structures of words, their collocations and their grammatical and semantic roles. German dictionaries linked ‘Politik/ politisch’ to ‘Staat’ and defined ‘Staat’ as ‘politisch’. Dörner and Rohe (1991) found that the definitions of pol-lemmata contained nouns from the organisational-administrative field (Amt, Rangordnung, Ministerium, Genossenschaft) in collocation to verbs of control (ordnen, wählen, leiten, beherrschen etc.). Metaphorically, the state is interpreted as the government. In British dictionaries, pol-lexemes are mainly connected to ‘government’. The authors also found verbs of control, which were, however, not linked to organisational nouns, but to terms belonging to the field of ‘society’ and ‘community’. Dörner and Rohe’s (1991) analysis of a journalistic corpus of the 1960s shows the same results: in German, ‘Staat’ is often the logical or syntactical subject, and in English texts this is the case for ‘government’. While ‘Staat’ is the third most frequent political term in the political section of ’Die Welt’ in the 1960s, in British newspapers it ranks only forty-fourth. The second major difference between the political cultures of Britain and Germany can be found in the national discourses about the ‘welfare state’, which are particularly important to my project, since New Labour and the SPD of ‘Die Neue Mitte’ introduced highly controversial welfare reforms. Kaufmann (2003: 33) talks about the ‘idiosyncratic character’ of welfare systems caused by an interaction between economic and technological progress, and normative discourses. Therefore, nation states have different cultures of welfare. As we have seen above, Germany’s political culture is deeply rooted in the idea of the state. The tradition of German social policy started with the ‘Soziale Frage’ and the ‘Arbeiterfrage’. The social question originated from people losing their means of subsistence when the feudal structures in Prussia started to change and land ownership became capital



Chapter 3.  Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

(Potthoff, Miller, and Kane 2006: 19–20; Kaufmann 2003: 259). The problems of industrialisation and the beginning of mass industrial employment raised the worker question: the work was often hazardous, and falling wages threatened the livelihood of families. Germany’s social democratic movement, beginning with the foundation of the ‘Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein’, therefore fought for the protection of workers, and the legality and legitimacy of unions, as well as for protection from financial problems following unemployment. The German empire’s first reaction was Bismarck’s attempt to suppress a socialist opposition with the ‘Sozialistengesetze 1878’. However, Bismarck also tried to win German workers for the Empire by introducing social reforms that came to form the basis of the modern German welfare state. He introduced laws to insure workers against illnesses (1883), occupational hazards (1884) and poverty as the result of age or infirmity (1889). These insurances were obligatory for all workers and were funded by obligatory subscriptions from employers and employees, but without state funding. With this insurance, workers for the first time had legal entitlement to welfare payments. Kaufmann (2003, 272) points out that the social reforms did not address the poor, and the system was only addressed to people in work or looking for work, since the introduction of the social system under Bismarck happened completely on the back of the social democratic movement. After 1945, the development of the German welfare state continued on this basis: benefits were increased, and dynamic pensions introduced to secure peoples’ achieved standard of life in retirement. Still, the system was completely based on employment, and only in 1961 social benefits not based on employment (‘Sozialhilfe’) were introduced. By comparison, the British welfare state originated with questions about poverty. The 1601 Poor Law Act, tailored for an agrarian society with high sedentary tendencies, tried to tackle poverty. From 1795 onwards, abolition of this act was repeatedly discussed, since liberal thinkers feared the benefits were higher than the income of workers and the act would therefore increase the cost of labour. In 1834, reforms in this direction became a reality: a new poor law influenced by Bentham tried to make poor relief unattractive by only giving benefits for work in the poor house, and by causing a loss of civil rights for benefits claimants. The inhumanity of this poor law became a cultural topos with Dickens’ Oliver Twist (Kaufmann 2003: 140–41). However, only with the first National Insurance Act in 1911 did Britain introduce public health insurance for workers. The motivation for this was similar to that for Bismarck’s reforms in Germany. The governing Liberal Party wanted to demonstrate its ability to represent workers’ interests in response to the emergence of the Labour Party. The modern British welfare state is based on the Beveridge Report of 1942, which was first implemented by the Labour government under Clement Attlee after 1945. The measures include social benefits to secure the subsistence level of all people, the foundation of the NHS,

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and a Keynesian policy of full employment. Yet the Beveridge plan was in one respect similar to the National Insurance Act of 1911: it was built on the flat rate principle. While the German system tries to relate benefits to earnings, the British welfare state follows the idea of the same premium and same benefits for all. Beveridge explicitly wanted to maintain and increase the self-reliance of workers and leave room for private insurance, and therefore upheld the typical British liberal principle of a minimum of government interference. Closely linked to the differences in discourses on welfare are more general socio-economic differences and, returning to the political system, differences in relations between government and interest groups in Germany and the UK. Socioeconomically, Britain can be described as a liberal economy, whereas Germany is more of a coordinated market economy. These descriptions are formalised in the comparative analyses of the ‘varieties of capitalism’ approach (Hall and Soskice 2001b). In this approach, liberal market economies such as the USA, Britain, and Australia are characterised by a legal system that leads to more competitive markets. Their welfare states follow a liberal welfare regime with a low level of benefits and restrictive approaches to eligibility, which force people into the work force and sustain a fluid labour market complementing a low-wage economy. Coordinated market economies such as Germany, Japan and Sweden, on the other hand, have strong networks between firms via cross-shareholding, through the maintenance of powerful business associations, as well as by having powerful trade unions. Coordinated market economies often have either a social democratic welfare regime (e.g. Sweden) or a conservative welfare state (Germany). Conservative welfare regimes have a high level of benefits which are dependent on the status of the employee, which they are meant to maintain in unemployment and sickness. According to Hall and Soskice (2001a), these welfare regimes lead to a highly developed skills base since high benefits depending on status encourage skills development. Furthermore, early retirement programmes in conservative welfare regimes allow firms to renew the labour force more regularly without damaging the cooperative spirit that high-quality production relies on. The coordinated market economy in Germany is also linked to the corporatist elements of the German political culture. (Abromeit and Stoiber 2006: 236; Schmidt 2007: 128–32). Its corporatist tradition is rooted in the beginnings of the welfare state under Bismarck, which delegated regulation of welfare to interest groups of insured employees and employers paying  – a system which is still in place in the German health and pensions insurance system. Since 1945, (West) Germany has been dominated by highly concentrated unions with the DGB (German Trade Union Association) constituting a strong umbrella organisation, and its employers are also highly organised, although generally the proportion of organised employers and employees is falling (Abromeit and Stoiber 2006: 234–38).



Chapter 3.  Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

Furthermore, federal ministries are bound to consult interest groups when drafting bills (Schmidt 2007: 126). Tripartite negotiations as a means of corporatist negotiation, however, have been the exception: the ‘Konzertierte Aktion’ (‘concerted action’), the first tripartite negotiations between trade unions, employers’ associations and the government, organised by the SPD economic and finance minister Karl Schiller in order to agree on main economic policies to stabilise the German economy, only lasted from 1967 to 1976. However, these negotiations had an impact on German political discourse, as demands for ‘Konzertierte Aktionen’ can still be found in the early 1990s (Wengeler 1995: 68). A renewal of the corporatist tradition of concerted action was attempted by the metal union chairman Klaus Zwickel in 1995 under the headline ‘Bündnis für Arbeit’ and picked up by Helmut Kohl, but failed, since the Kohl government had its own agenda in the negotiations. Nevertheless, the corporatist tool of tripartite negotiations was then picked up again by the SPD as one of their central pledges in the 1998 manifesto: to reinstate the ‘Bündnis für Arbeit’. In contrast to Germany, Britain is very close to being a pure pluralist system, with its unions weakened after Thatcher’s regulation of their activity and the reduction of influence on the Labour Party (Abromeit and Stoiber 2006: 206–7). Here, interest groups are often highly fragmented and are not invited to influence government directly, but instead compete for influence. 3.4

Texts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK: Corpus justification and description

Discourses are situated in historical and institutional contexts, and they are realised as language use in texts. These texts are the basis of a discourse-linguistic analysis. On the basis of the context analysis of the modernisation discourses in the British Labour Party and the SPD, I will now define the corpus of texts that this study is based on. The analysis of the historical context in Section  3.1 has demonstrated that the modernisation discourse in the Labour Party and the SPD started to become hegemonic in the mid-1990s. Therefore, my corpus has been assembled for the analysis of the political language and the ideological discourse in both parties between 1995 and 2002. The corpus consists of three parts: 1. Ideological publications of the Third Way, New Labour, and ’Die Neue Mitte’; 2. Party conference speeches of Blair, Schröder, and Lafontaine; 3. Election manifestos. The first part of the corpus contains ideological publications – texts, which explicitly discuss and present the changing ideology of social democratic parties. The

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idea for the present study originated in recognising the evidence of the interconnection of the discourses of New Labour and Die Neue Mitte in the Schröder-Blair paper (Blair and Schröder 1999; Schröder and Blair 1999), so the German and English versions of this text belong to the first part of the corpus. This text needs to be read in the context of an interdiscursive connection between three partypolitical reform discourses in progressive parties in the United States, Britain and Germany. One of the main reasons for these reform discourses was the long-term electoral failure of these parties. The electoral success of the Democrats, the US progressive party programmatically reformed by Bill Clinton, made them a role model for European social democratic parties and initiated a chain of electoral successes: ‘New’ Labour admired and emulated the ‘New’ Democrats, and the SPD took inspiration from the ‘Modell Blair’ (Wolfrum 2013: 139) in order to win the general election of 1998. However, each party created their own version of the Third Way (Wolfrum 2013: 143): whilst the New Democrats followed policies of extensive deregulation, a reduction of welfare transfers and therefore a transfer of life risks to the individual citizen, New Labour focused on social justice as inclusion, guaranteeing equality of opportunities, but not equality of outcome through redistribution. By the time New Labour won their first general election in 1997, this radical programmatic reform of the Labour party was well under way and the leadership of the Labour party had studied Clinton’s path to success in great detail (Seldon 2005: 368). The Labour Party was already united as ‘New Labour’, while the German SPD was still unclear about its position. By the time of the 1998 election campaign, the SPD had already begun using its own version of Third Way rhetoric, but its double-leadership of Schröder and Lafontaine was still sending different ideological messages. Only after Lafontaine had stepped down from all positions did the modernising wing around Gerhard Schröder begin the process of overhauling the SPD’s programmatic position. It is in this context that the Schröder-Blair paper was conceived by the two parties’ most able communicators: Peter Mandelson and Bodo Hombach. At the time of the paper’s publication, Hombach was Kanzleramtsminister – a minister without portfolio who is the Chancellor’s chief of staff. He was a renowned specialist on election campaigns, and well acquainted with influencing public opinion. As a firm ‘moderniser’, he aimed to use his position in the Kanzleramt to drive the debate on modernisation against the party leader and finance minister Oskar Lafontaine, whom he saw as an old-fashioned socialist. Hombach wanted to reform the SPD in a top-down manner, in a similar fashion to New Labour, and he established contacts with modernisers in other European social democratic parties such as Peter Mandelson, his co-author for the Schröder-Blair paper (Wolfrum 2013: 146).



Chapter 3.  Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

Mandelson, almost as controversial as Hombach, was originally the media skills mentor of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, and later Blair’s primary ‘spin doctor’. He became the main media strategist of the Labour Party before 1997, and was ‘rightly given much of the credit for Labour’s presentation as well as policy being so improved in the 1987 General Election’ (Seldon 2005: 159). The initiative for the publication of the Schröder-Blair paper was taken by the SPD. Schäffner (2003) quotes Mathias Bucksteeg, Head of the Political Analysis Division in the German Chancellery, who reported that a joint policy paper was originally suggested by Bodo Hombach. Since his election victory in 1998, Schröder was seen as a new link in the Third-Way Movement (Wolfrum 2013: 146), and therefore such a suggestion must have been welcomed as beneficial for both sides by Mandelson. For the ‘modernisers’ in the SPD, it will also have been an attempt to gain ideological hegemony by connecting to a successful sister party. Whilst the paper was well received in Britain and commentators welcomed it as a vision for the future of social democracy, both the German press and German social democrats were extremely critical of it: Schröder’s first attempt to establish a positive modernist reform agenda for the social democrats failed. Reinhard Klimmt, for example, published an open letter to the SPD leadership, heavily criticising the text. Klimmt was a close friend of Lafontaine whom he followed as the leader of the SPD and premier in Saarland. At the time of the open letter, he was fighting a general election, which he subsequently lost. He criticised the position of Schröder and Blair, because it seemed to hold the SPD of the past responsible for Germany’s problems, and therefore strengthened conservative presumptions about social democracy (Klimmt 1999: 1137). There are many reasons for the critical reception of the Schröder-Blair paper in Germany. Wolfrum (2013: 146) sees it as constituting the wrong move at the wrong time, and in the wrong place: to present a modernising policy paper so soon after the so- called traditionalist Lafontaine had stepped down, and to do so in London instead of Berlin could only be received as clumsy and provocative. In the German political culture with its coordinated social market economy and its regulated job market, the positive mention of a low-paid sector and of an end-of-life long, stable employment status quo was more difficult to accept than in Britain, where the neo-liberal reforms of the Thatcher era had long become accepted. Turowski (2010: 291) therefore calls the German discourse of a Third Way a ‘borrowed discourse’. The examination of a broader corpus of ideological texts will shed light on the differences between the two discourses and will help to see whether both discourses can indeed be treated as discourses of the Third Way. Three publications lend themselves to this purpose:

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– Giddens’ The Third Way (Giddens 1998) – 155 pages, approx. 31,000 words;7 – Mandelson and Liddle’s The Blair Revolution (Mandelson and Liddle 1996) – 261 pages, approx. 78,000 words; – Hombach’s Aufbruch (Hombach 1998) – 255 pages, approx. 58,000 words. Giddens is possibly the best-known proponent of The Third Way, grounding the discourse in academic sociology. His ideas were the basis of seminars held by the party leadership of the Labour Party in order to discuss which policies followed from the modernised approach to social democracy (Seldon 2005: 371), and his book is often treated as the programmatic statement of New Labour’s Third Way in many academic analyses (Bastow and Martin, J. 2003; Finlayson 2003). It should therefore be part of my corpus. Published after the landslide victory of 1997, it justifies and evaluates the Third Way politics of New Labour and argues for a European-wide renewal of social democracy on the basis of insights from academic sociology. The text has been described as that of a modern Machiavelli, ‘offering itself as a prescription for a leader who wishes to understand how political society works and what should be done to achieve certain aims’ (Finlayson 1999: 275). Despite discussing New Labour as one outstanding example of this new orientation, the book should not be read as a party political publication. Its aim is rather to be the academic foundation of a supposedly necessary ideological reorientation of social democratic parties in Europe. A more party-political position is taken in both Mandelson and Liddle’s, and in Hombach’s book. Mandelson and Liddle’s The Blair Revolution (1996) is a promotional text presenting an argument for New Labour and its leader Tony Blair in the run-up to the 1997 general election. The book is relevant to my corpus, as it was widely read: it sold 13,000 copies within a month of publication. Mandelson originally initiated the book project in order to show that he was not only a spin doctor, ‘but a politician in his own right’ (Macintyre 2000: 353). His main responsibility were the chapters on Blair, on Europe, and on New Labour in government. The book was closely reviewed by the Labour leadership, most thoroughly by David Miliband, at the time Head of the Policy Unit, and ‘… the final version was so closely vetted by the New Labour high command that it was bound to be seen as largely reflecting Blairite thinking’ (Macintyre 2000: 353). The claim in the introduction that New Labour’s strategy was ‘to move forward from where Margaret Thatcher left off, rather than to dismantle every single thing she 7.  In this first step of my analysis, I did not use a corpus-assisted approach and therefore did not use digitalised texts. In order to give an estimate of the corpus size, I have given the number of pages of the text itself, excluding bibliography and indices. I have counted a sample of pages, taken the average and calculated a word count, rounded to the nearest thousand words.



Chapter 3.  Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

did’ (Mandelson and Liddle 1996: 1) is even reported to have been proposed by Blair himself. The book was read thoroughly by civil servants and is, according to Macintyre (2000: 366), ‘the most accurate route map of what subsequently became the course of the Blair government’. Hombach’s Aufbruch argues for a modernised approach to social democracy and must have been published at the end of the year in 1998, after the election had been won, since both Hombach in the main text, and Schröder in the epilogue, talk about the victory and the new momentum that comes from it. Hombach had a successful career as an election campaigner and a media strategist, similar to Mandelson’s. He had run many election campaigns, for example he had worked as a consultant for Mandela’s election campaign in South Africa (Perger, 1998) before becoming Schröder’s election manager in Lower Saxony. As Kanzleramtsminister, similarly to Mandelson, he proved to be a controversial figure (Knaup et al., 1999: 30), and was certainly perceived as a ‘moderniser’ similar to Giddens (VidalBeneyto, July 09, 1999). Hombach’s book, although obviously written as a programmatic text for the SPD, talks less about the party and more about the country. The central metaphorical scene is JOURNEY combined with BATTLE metaphors to justify the necessity of political change. The analysis revolves around the crisis narrative of ‘Reform- und Problemstau’ (jam of overdue reforms) or a ‘blockierte Gesellschaft’ (blocked society), and calls for the blockades to be broken down. Hombach implicitly argues against traditionalists such as Lafontaine, who is not named in this context: ‘Die Sozialdemokraten stehen jetzt in einer Koalition. Sie muß eine Koalition der Modernisierer sein, sie muß auf Ideologie verzichten, sonst wird sie scheitern’ (Hombach 1998: 21) (The SPD is part of a coalition – a coalition of modernizers that must dispense with ideology, otherwise it will fail. […] We must use the hope for a modernisation of society that was linked with the victory of the SPD in the 1998 election to undertake fundamental reform of the party. (Hombach 2000, xli–xlii)). Following a long argument about the end of ideologies and the necessity of pragmatism, Blair and New Labour are depicted as being ideal for the SPD: ‘Tony Blair und New Labour – Pragmatismus mit Vision’ (Hombach 1998: 106). All three authors together allow a differentiated analysis of the ideological language of party renewal, since they saw themselves, and were indeed seen by both friends and opponents, as important modernising figures within European social democracy. Even though I have described ideologies as belief systems of groups, ideologies are expressed and promoted by such leading figures, who also influence the political language of a political party by acting as speech writers or working in writer collectives for programmatic party publications. Freeden (1998) calls those leading figures nodal points in ideological discourses:

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Ideologies are, after all, manifestations of group behaviour, supportive or subversive of social structures and institutions. […] Ideology-producing groups will reflect the impact of articulate and representative individuals, who may be the effective channels that give expression to more widely held beliefs, as well as adding their own imprint on what they absorb and convey. Those individuals – serving as nodal and eloquent points of ideological discourse  – may offer an excellent illustration of a particular ideological position […]. (Freeden 1998: 106)

The selection of texts in the second and third part of the corpus takes into account that discourses are realised differently in specific genres. This is important for a comparative analysis: the institutional and cultural contexts affect genres in different ways, as genres in divergent cultures differ in their functions and have other producers or intended audiences. To capture these interdependencies, the second and third part of the corpus consists of texts from two clearly delineated genres: party conference speeches and election manifestos. (2) The second part of the corpus consists of party conference speeches by Blair, Schröder and Lafontaine. We will see that a central function of party conference speech is the construction of groupness: following van Dijk’s (1998) understanding of ideologies as group-based belief systems, political parties can be understood as groups of people that share central parts of political belief systems. At the same time, they are institutions governed by complex internal structures and led by individuals as leaders. We will see how party conferences legitimise the core elements of the ideology of a party as well as the leader, and the role the leader’s speech plays in this process. I will demonstrate how the ideologies manifest themselves in the party conference speeches and show which linguistic means the leaders employ to defend changes of ideology without damaging group solidarity in the party. As the focus of my analysis is the linguistic construction and communication of the general ideological position of New Labour and ‘Die Neue Mitte’, I have chosen speeches central to the formation of the new ideological outlook. As discussed in the analysis of the discourse-historical context, there is one historical focal period in the modernisation discourse in the British Labour Party between 1994 and 1997, when the ideology of the Labour party changed dramatically under the leadership of Tony Blair. In Germany, however, there are two focal periods, as the modernising wing of the SPD became stronger before the election in 1998 without winning ideological hegemony. In the differences between their 1997 and 1998 speeches Lafontaine and Schröder represent competing positions within the party. Only after Lafontaine stepped down did the Third Way agenda finally become hegemonic, a process that culminated in the discourse on the ‘Agenda 2010’ in the second focal period in 2003–2004.



Chapter 3.  Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

The focal period of the modernisation discourse in the Labour party began in October 1994, when Blair gave his first speech at a party conference as the newly elected leader of the party. It launched Blair’s project of ‘party renewal’ by culminating in the surprising announcement of a redraft of Clause Four in the Labour Party’s constitution, which at the time committed the party to the common ownership of the means of production. It can be argued that this revision of Clause Four was nothing new, since Clause Four was widely regarded as irrelevant and did not result in policies of nationalisation. Although the decision was reached by the Electoral College, the Labour Party also held a special conference to debate the change, and Blair’s speech at this conference is represented in the corpus. Both this speech and his speech at the regular annual conference in 1995 defend the changes; the speech at the regular conference in particular was received as an emotional and motivational piece of political oratory by the commentators. Although I have chosen Blair’s 1996 party conference speech to represent the pre-election party conference speeches, the 1995 speeches can also be read as part of an ongoing election campaign, since the electoral system at the time did not allow a fixed parliament. The ‘Parliament Act 1911’ required that parliament needed to be dissolved before the fifth anniversary of its first sitting, so an election could be announced at any given time during the parliament. At the 1996 party conference however, a general election in the following year was certain, as the latest date for the dissolution of parliament and a following election according to the law was 28 April 1997. The pre- and post-election party conference speeches before and after the general election in Germany 1998 represent the first focal period of the social democratic reform discourse in Germany. At the time, Lafontaine was party leader and represented a more critical position towards belief in the free market, while Schröder as candidate for chancellor argued more in favour of a Third Way position. Therefore, I have included both politicians’ speeches at the 1997 and 1998 conferences. At the 1997 conference, Schröder spoke as Prime Minister of Lower Saxony and presented the motion ‘Innovationen für Deutschland’. At the time, the discussion about Schröder becoming the next chancellor candidate was already open, and this motion and speech were seen as Schröder trying to raise his profile (Beste, 2nd December 1997). A second focal period of the German reform discourse is the announcement of the Agenda 2010 in 2003, which changed the German welfare state significantly and resulted in deep cuts in welfare payments. Announced in parliament by Chancellor Schröder, this reform project was not the result of a policy discourse within the SPD and therefore needed considerable efforts to convince the party that it was in line with the party’s ideology. This happened first in four regional conferences in April 2003 and culminated in a special party conference on 1st June 2003, where the reform was confirmed by 90% of the delegates. However, efforts to convince

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the party of the new course did not end there, since in November 2003 the regular biannual party conference with elections for the party leadership was still to come. Schröder’s speech at this conference is therefore also part of the corpus. In total, the sub-corpus of party conference speeches consists of 13 speeches amounting to 67,296 words with an average length of 5,714 words: Blair, regular annual conference 1994 – 7,043 words; Blair, special conference 1995 – 2,684 words; Blair, regular annual conference 1995 – 6,915 words; Schröder, special conference ‘Agenda 2010’ 2003 – 5,803 words; Schröder, regular biannual conference 2003 – 7,800 words; Lafontaine, April 1998 – pre-election conference – 2,163 words; Schröder, April 1998 – pre-election conference – 9,537 words; Schröder, October 1998 – post-election conference – 2,252 words; Lafontaine, October 1998 – post-election conference – 4,840 words; Blair, 1996  – regular annual conference  – ‘pre-election conference’  – 7,219 words; – Blair, 1997  – regular annual conference  – post-election conference  – 5,970 words; – Schröder, 1997 – speech as Prime Minister of Lower Saxony – presentation of motion ‘Innovationen für Deutschland’ – 4,722 words; – Lafontaine, 1997  – leader’s speech at regular biannual conference  – 7,336 words. – – – – – – – – – –

I have deliberately excluded later party conference speeches which focus on foreign policy as Kosovo, the ‘war on terror’ and the war in Iraq, since they primarily contain discourses on war and peace, which are not the focus of my analysis. (3) The election manifesto genre will constitute the third part of the corpus, as election manifestos are the result of party-internal discourses relevant for the party’s repositioning. They represent the party to the electorate, and their analysis will allow an insight into the ideological position of the party at the time: how is the identity of the party portrayed, which central programme terms does it claim, and what is the role of the party leader? This part of the corpus will cover a longer period (1987–2002) in order to allow a diachronic comparison of the language of New Labour and ’Die Neue Mitte’ to that of its predecessors. The manifestos of the German CDU from 1998 and the British Conservatives in 1997 are included to allow a comparison of linguistic features of the two main political competitors in the general elections of those years: – Labour 1987 – 9,153 words; – SPD 1990 – 8,056 words;



– – – – – – – –

Chapter 3.  Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

Labour 1992 – 12,459 words; SPD 1994 – 16,963 words; Labour 1997 – 17,444 words; SPD 1998 – 15,219 words; Labour 2001 – 30,477 words; SPD 2002 – 21,166 words; CDU 1998 – 8,807 words; Conservative Party 1997 – 21,262 words.

As this list demonstrates, election manifestos are substantial texts. I will therefore employ a corpus-assisted methodology to capture discursive patterns in the manifestos. A possible methodological objection against this corpus results from Spitzmüller and Warnke’s (2011, 79–80) discussion of underspecified analyses, which they define as an analysis that ‘discovers less of (a given) discourse than necessary for understanding it and less than possible by linguistic means’. Admittedly, the basis of this study is not a large-scale corpus as the corpus consists of not more than about 385,000 words. However, the corpus is clearly defined in its topic, as it concentrates on the linguistic means employed in the repositioning of social democratic parties in Germany and the UK. Furthermore, my analysis aims to be data-driven and textually oriented. The basis of a linguistic discourse analysis needs to be a detailed textual analysis, which cannot solely rely on quantitative analysis via electronic corpus tools. Such a text-based analysis needs a corpus size manageable without electronic means. I will mainly rely on a detailed manual analysis, but will add another approach in the Chapter 5.8, where I will analyse a larger corpus of election manifestos and discuss methodological implications of this method for a comparative analysis of discourses in different languages. 3.5

Conclusions: Research questions for a comparative politico-linguistic discourse analysis of Third-Way discourses

The historical analysis in this chapter provides arguments that the discourses of New Labour and Die Neue Mitte are parallel yet interconnected discourses, and allowed me to define a corpus for analysis based on three focal periods of the social democratic modernisation discourses that I carved out in the historical analysis. I will now return to the research questions presented in the introduction in order to review them according to the methodological discussion and the corpus definition.

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Which theoretical elements and research methods are appropriate for a comparative linguistic analysis of political discourses? (1) In Chapter 2 I have developed a general theory of the text-context relation in political discourse. This theoretical approach will be extended in Chapters 4–7, which will all discuss linguistic approaches to the elements of political discourse (genre, lexis, argumentation and metaphor) discussed in the chapter. This approach will then be applied to the discourses of the Third Way. How do genres of political discourse differ in the Third Way discourses in Germany and the UK? (2) The basis of my analysis will be a thorough genre analysis, which needs to include the role of genre in the institutional setting. I will, for example, ask whether party conferences in Germany and the UK differ in their function and structure and how this impacts on the genre characteristics of the leader’s speech. I will also discuss whether election manifestos have different discursive functions in Germany and the UK, and how they are linked to the political culture as well as the political institutions. How are changes in the social democratic party-political ideologies in Germany and the UK represented and legitimised in the language use of the party? (3) On the level of argumentation, I will ask whether the argumentative macro topoi of the modernisation discourses in the two parties are similar. We know from the Schröder-Blair paper that the conclusive topoi of New Labour and ‘Die Neue Mitte’ might be similar, but are they supported by the same data topoi and values? Integrated into the analysis of argumentation will be the exploration of the changes of ideology based on Freeden (1998). The question will be to identify which of the argumentative macro topoi change and how these changes are legitimised in order to protect the groupness of the party.8 I will also ask which metaphorical scenarios are used to support this legitimisation and whether possible differences in the scenario can be attributed to the discourse historical context. Does the language use and the construction of the Third Way ideology differ in Germany and the UK? (4) On the level of political lexis, the question will be which central programme and stigma terms are used, what their functions are, and whether they form a similar semantic frame. An important question will be whether the main 8.  See my discussion of Buckler and Dolowitz (2009) in Chapter 2.3.2.







Chapter 3.  Contexts of the Third Way in Germany and the UK

differences are in the tokens, i.e. the individual catch terms and metaphors, or whether the macro structures such as the semantic frame of catch terms and the metaphorical scenarios also differ, and if they do, how this can be explained. Analysing metaphor, I will ask which conceptual metaphors are dominant and why. I will discuss which function these conceptual metaphors serve and whether these metaphors form scenarios or narratives. If the Third Way discourses in both countries differ, how can these differences be explained with reference to the political context? The context analysis in Chapter 3 provides the context knowledge in order to answer the final research question:

If the Third Way discourses in both countries differ, how can these differences be explained with references to the political context? (5) The comparative element of this study will be answered in all of the following analytical chapters where I will discuss which of the discursive differences found can be attributed to differences in the party-political systems, which to the specific roles of the Prime Minister and Chancellor and the particular political culture.

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Chapter 4

Texts in context Register and genre in the discourses of the Third Way

4.1

Genre and the text-context relations in political discourse

Discourses are realised in genres, and both discourses and genres influence language use in different ways. Conventions for types of texts are called genres. These conventions influence the ways in which we structure texts and choose our words. We all have, for example, expectations about the format of a newspaper article. These expectations, however, vary culturally, which means genres are culturally dependent. Martin and Rose (2008: 17) therefore describe genre analysis as ‘mapping cultures from a semiotic perspective’: ‘cultures seem to involve a large but potentially definable set of genres, that are recognisable to members of a culture, rather than an unpredictable jungle of social situations’. When defining their Discourse-Historical Approach, Reisigl and Wodak (2001: 36) recommend that discourse analysis always start with a genre analysis: In order to be able to identify the idiosyncratic peculiarities of a specific singular text, one has to know something about the general features and structures of the semiotic type, that is to say, of the institutionalised, codified pattern of linguistic (inter)action to which the concrete text belongs.

This is even more important for a comparative approach: As the aim of this study is to establish the differences in language use in British and German social democratic discourse at the turn of the twentieth century and their root in differences of the political cultures, we will also have to capture genre differences, an aim captured in research question (3). Within different linguistic traditions, the concept of genre varies considerably.1Dorgeloh and Wanner (2010a, 7) situate it ‘somewhere in the intersection of sociolinguistics, discourse studies, and literary or rhetorical theory’. Virtanen (2010: 54) suggests differentiating between text types and genres along 1.  For a succinct discussion of the different traditions of genre theory see, for example, Gruber (2013).

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the text–context distinction: while the category of text type should focus on the textual structures themselves, genre includes the contextual elements in the typology. Therefore, the analysis of text types uses text-internal criteria and is grounded in ‘cognitively based, goal-oriented, form-function relationships, which evolve through recursive and reiterative strategies and intertextual practices across contexts that facilitate discourse production and interpretation’, whereas a study of genre uses text-external criteria in terms of a relation between texts and their situational and socio-cultural contexts. Virtanen (2010: 54) also points out that the integration of text types and genres into one theory allows insights that are not possible to gain from each of the approaches individually. A narrative type of text can, for example, appear in the text type ‘press text/report’ as well as in ‘public speech’. Following Virtanen’s argument, I will use the term genre rather than text types in my analysis, since it is the text–context relation I am interested in. For the analysis of genres in the Third Way discourse, I will draw on three main traditions of genre analysis: (1) In the German tradition of linguistics, a detailed discussion on text typologies within the area of text linguistics has taken place that eventually led to the emergence of a sub-discipline called Textsortenlinguistik (Adamzik 2001). This tradition prefers the term ‘text type’. However, it does not only define them text-internally, but also uses contextual criteria such as emitter and addressee, and their text typologies can therefore be understood as genre typologies. The development of Textsortenlinguistik also had an influence on the discipline of politicolinguistics, which tried to establish a systematic overview of genres in political discourse (Klein, J. 2000b; Girnth 1996, 2002). I will use these typologies as a basic framework for my analysis. However, they will have to be revised in the light of the results of my comparative analysis, as they are solely based on the analysis of German political discourse. (2) CDA in general, and DHA in particular, understand genre as ‘a conventionalised and schematically structured language use connected to a particular type of social activity’ (Fairclough 1995: 14) and define genre more from a contextual perspective. Genres are seen as realised in texts, and texts are not just part of one genre but often hybrids of various genres. Hence ‘genre mixing is an aspect of the interdiscursivity of texts, and analysing them allows us to locate texts within processes of social change and to identify the potentially creative and innovative work of social agents in texturing.’ (Fairclough 2003: 216, original emphasis) In their Discourse-Historical Approach, Wodak and Reisigl (2001: 35–37, 2009: 91–93) integrate this view of genre with Girnth’s (1996, 2002) analysis of fields of action which produce certain genres or – in his terminology – text types. These text types realise different discourses, which in the terminology of DHA are essentially macro topics. Hence, genre analysis is a precondition of the analysis of



Chapter 4.  Texts in context

interdiscursive relations – the analysis of the realisation of different discourses in different genres – as well as intertextual relations – which involves the analysis of sequence of texts, and the analysis of the embeddedness of texts into social practices, such as party conferences. The analysis of intertextuality also includes the investigation of references to topics or events and the transfer of arguments between different social practices, called recontextualisation: If arguments or narratives are taken out of a context and put into a new context they partly acquire new meaning. (3) SFL developed its approach to genre in the context of education and school genres in order to facilitate the literacy education of primary school children. The main proponents of a systemic functional approach to genre, Martin and Rose, analyse textual structures as a realisation of the metafunctions of language on the stratum of discourse semantics (see Martin, J. R. and Rose, D. 2003; Martin, J. R. and White, P. R. R. 2005; Martin, J. R. and Rose, D. 2008). In systemic functional terms, a genre is a pattern of realisations of resources from the ideational, interpersonal or textual metafunction. It is defined as ‘a configuration of meanings, realised through language and attendant modalities of communication, is designed to generalise across these distinguishing features’ (Martin, J. R. and Rose, D. 2008: 20). This approach complements the typological system developed in German text linguistics, as it is integrated into an overarching theoretical framework that analyses the linguistic semiosis as a system of text and context reaching from the morphological domain into the textual and discourse domain. Hence, genres are understood as configurations of the context variables of tenor, field, and mode discussed in Section 2.2. The following analysis focuses on the two clearly delineated genres in the corpus: leaders’ speeches at party conferences and election manifestos. Both are core genres in party-political discourse and well described in publications of German politico-linguistics. The discussion about genre relations in political discourse has been greatly influential in the discourse-historical approach. Reisigl and Wodak (2001: 36), for example, argue that the basis of every text-oriented discourse analysis is the knowledge of ‘the institutionalised, codified pattern of linguistic (inter) action to which the concrete text belongs’. In order to give an overview of that knowledge, they adapt Girnth’s (1996, 2002) concept of fields of actions, which continues a strand of genre analysis in political discourse based on Wittgenstein’s language games (Strauss 1986), and analysed political discourse as structured by fields of action. A missing link in the literature is, however, the question of how genres in different political discourse communities differ and how the differences can be understood with reference to the political culture. This chapter will fill this gap at least partly by analysing the genre differences for party conference speeches and election manifestos in detail.

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4.2

Uniting the party, uniting the nation: Party conference speeches as a genre in the discourses of the Third Way

Party conferences serve the legitimisation of party ideologies, party policies and the leadership, but they are also rituals that reconstitute group solidarity within the party. What is more, they are media events that disseminate the message of a political party. To all these functions, the leader’s speech is central. It lays out the party’s position, establishes central symbols of the party’s ideology and, hopefully, unites the party’s membership, as much as its followers, behind the leader. Party conference speeches of party leaders belong to the genre of political speeches. Speeches can be understood as structured chains of utterances emitted on specific occasions by one speaker and addressed to a specific audience (Reisigl 2008a: 244; Beganović et  al. 2013: 698). Classical rhetoricians distinguish three forms of public speaking according to circumstances (Reisigl 2008b: 244–46; Charteris-Black 2014: 6–15). The first, a deliberative speech (genus deliberativum) is given in front of a decision-making body. The speaker aims to establish the best course of action by considering different possible outcomes from different courses of action. The speaker wants to influence policy decisions and the speech is therefore oriented towards the future. As a result of the speech, the audience is expected to vote for the course of action suggested by the speaker. The second form, forensic speeches or judicial oratory (genus iudicale) are addressed to a legal assembly in order to accuse or defend a suspect by considering different types of evidence. The genus iudicale therefore focuses on the past and aims to ensure justice. As a result of the speech the audience is expected to pass a judgement. Thirdly, there are epideictic oratory (genus demonstrativum) honours or commemorates individuals or events. The speaker usually focuses on the present and aims to elicit the applause of the audience to celebrate the successful event or individual. Political speeches and party conference speeches more specifically are typically hybrids of the deliberative and epideictic genre. In order to persuade the audience to support the leadership, the speaker needs to employ what classical rhetoricians refer to as ethos, logos and pathos. As a piece of deliberative oratory, a party conference speech will of course focus on evidence to support a political argument (logos) and the values underlying decisions (ethos), but it will also contain epideictic elements: the leaders need to strengthen the ‘groupness’ of their party by celebrating its values and successes in order to motivate members to rally support for the party, and therefore will have to be able to arouse the emotions of the audience (pathos). Modern political speeches as a genre have far more complex production and reception conditions than those imagined by classical rhetoricians  – they are usually multi-authored and multi-addressed. Party leaders are highly sought-after



Chapter 4.  Texts in context

speakers and speak at many different occasions. They speak on behalf of complex networks of political institutions such as their party, their parliamentary group or indeed the government, but they also have to construct and convey a clear image of themselves as an individual politician. In order to master this complex task, they employ researchers and speech writers; the resulting speech is thus a product of a complex interaction of different writers.2 Finlayson and Martin (2008: 449) argue that because speeches are multiauthored, they not only represent individual ideas, but also represent compromises of ideas in a political organisation, and therefore allow an insight into the evolution of political ideologies. The reception conditions of modern political oratory are as complex as the production process. Contemporary political speeches are almost always addressed to multiple audiences, since all important political occasions are covered by the media either directly through broadcasting or indirectly through reports and comments in the media. Kühn (1992, 1995) demonstrates that multiple addressing is the default case in modern political oratory, arguing that the addressee is not defined by the speaker’s intention, but by the individuals or organisations who are affected by the argument made, and their reaction. In a context analysis of political speeches, Kühn shows that speakers are aware of this type of multi-addressing, and that multi-addressing is systemic in modern political discourse. Public speeches of politicians usually start a merry-go-round of replies and re-addressing: an utterance may be intended as an advertising element within an election campaign, but an opposing politician might understand it as an accusation she has to respond to, while observers abroad interpret it as a provocation, and so on (Kühn 1992: 57). In order to capture this complex system of addressees, Gruber (2013: 47–48) suggests analysing ‘stakeholder groups’ in order to give a description of who is ‘identifiably affected by the announced policies in the speech and who can therefore be seen as its intended audience’. In order to understand the reception conditions of leaders’ speeches at party conferences in Germany and the UK, I will firstly compare the institutional role of party conferences in both countries, and secondly analyse the functions of the leader’s speech within this context. Party conferences are not only important for the deliberation and communication of the ideological position of political parties. They are also essential for identity-building within the party as a social institution, as they are opportunities to ‘regenerate social bonds through shared intense emotions’ (Faucher-King 2005: 72). The institution and ritual of party conferences in Germany and the UK, however, differs.

2.  Kammerer (1995), for example, describes the production process for the speeches of Helmut Kohl in great detail.

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In Britain, party conferences are highly ritualised annual events. I use ‘ritual’ here in the sense suggested by Kertzer (1988: 8–9), who defines ritual as formal symbolic behaviour which is socially standardised, repetitive, and often redundant, ‘but these very factors serve as important means of channelling emotion, guiding cognition, and organising social groups’. Rituals are used to form social bonds and make an uncertain world more controllable. They often employ highly charged symbols or myths that are ambiguous enough to unite people, and also allow them to symbolically connect the past, present, and future of a group of people. Party conferences in the UK are rituals in the sense that they reoccur annually and are therefore anticipated by many actors within the political and the media systems. The conferences of all major political parties in the UK are traditionally held in the so-called ‘conference season’ in September/October, which is an integral part of the political diary of Britain and is linked to the opening of parliament with the Queen’s speech after the summer recess (Faucher-King 2005: 11). FaucherKing (2005: 1) gives a vivid description of the ritualisation of party conferences in the political culture of Britain from the position of an external observer: When I arrived in Britain in the mid-1990s, I was struck by the peculiarity of British political party conferences. These annual gatherings are familiar to any observer of British politics. For over a century, they have temporarily diverted attention away from Westminster and towards the seaside resorts of Britain. Every autumn, media attention is focused for about a month on internal party politics.

But their ritualisation cannot only be recognised in their regular annual occurrence, which is observed by all major parties, but also in the individual structure of the party conferences and in the role of the leader’s speech in them. In the Labour Party, for example, the leader’s speech is officially called a ‘parliamentary report’ and traditionally delivered on the Tuesday afternoon of the conference week. Although the name suggests a verbal legitimisation and possible discussion of parliamentary politics, it has developed into an emotional mass ritual that is framed with entertainment and warming-up events (Faucher-King 2005: 83). However, despite the symbolic importance of party conferences in the UK, they have very little legal or democratic power. The institutional role of the party conference in British parties is defined by the constitution of the individual parties, and varies greatly. While the Conservatives’ party conference decisions are not binding, the conferences of the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are seen as the sovereign body of the party. The leader of the Labour Party is, however, not directly accountable to the party conference. Traditionally, the leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) is regarded as the leader of the whole party; however, he or she is not elected by the party conference, but by an electoral college representing unions, MPs and MEPs, and, since 1993, the wider membership



Chapter 4.  Texts in context

(Peele 2004: 290–93). However, a leader’s performance at the party conference is still essential to establish or confirm their legitimacy (Faucher-King 2005: 34). In Germany, party conferences are a legal requirement and less ritualised in the sense that they are not fixed elements of the political year and therefore attract less media focus. They are, however, increasingly staged performances. The German ‘Parteiengesetz’ from 1967, §9 subsection 1, defines the party conference as the ultimate deciding body in a political party, which has authority over leadership and policy (Rudzio 2003: 117–22). The law also requires regular party conferences to be held biannually, but usually more conferences are held, often in order to respond to recent political developments, and to legitimise election manifestos or coalition agreements (Müller 2000, 2002). Because of its legal status, the party conference holds substantial powers, especially the power to elect the party chairman (‘Parteivorsitzende’). Within the party, the party chairman has a similar status to the party leader in the UK, but is not necessarily the candidate for the chancellorship, or does not necessarily hold the position of the chancellor. However, the chancellor candidate of the party must also be confirmed by the party conference. That the leader’s speech can be a decisive factor for the leadership elections in the SPD has been demonstrated by the successful challenge to Scharping as a leader in 1995 after a lost election. Scharping found himself suddenly, and to his great surprise, challenged and voted out after a poorly received speech. Although this was exceptional, the leader’s speech is still important to rally support, since the percentages of the election results are regularly reported and interpreted in the press.3 In genre-analytical terms, party conference speeches are a subgenre of political speeches, aiming at ‘party-internal formation of attitudes, formation and will’ (Reisigl 2008b: 248, see also Girnth (2002: 38)). It is, however, important to take into account the multi-addressing of party conference speeches, which are under scrutiny from the media. I therefore suggest distinguishing between internal and external functions and will name primary and secondary stakeholders of the leader’s speech, although some effects of it obviously contribute to both the internal and the external function. The leader’s speech is normally at the centre of the focus for party members and the public: it is expected to present the leader as a visionary. Internally and externally, the leader needs to gain approval for his political position by claiming credit for the fulfilment of past ambitions, laying out the future programme, and 3.  For example: ‘Schröder wurde mit 86,3 Prozent der Stimmen als Parteichef wiedergewählt. Das waren zehn Prozentpunkte mehr als beim Parteitag im April. ’ (Schröder was elected party leader with 86.3 percent oft he votes. This is a rise of ten percent compared to the party conference in April.) (Deupmann, December 08, 1999).

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presenting themselves as a visionary (Gaffney 1990: 107; Klein, J. 2000b: 750). Internally, one main function of the leader’s speech is to strengthen group solidarity within the party. This is a feature it shares with political speeches in general, which are always ‘interactional contributions to identity politics and accomplish the two political purposes of inclusion and exclusion’ (Reisigl 2008b: 251). With their speech, the leader needs to move the present primary audience emotionally and allow them to find their individual idea of the party’s ideological position in the speech: each member wants to be referred to by the exclusive and groups forming ‘we’ (Faucher-King 2005: 86). The authors of the speech therefore need to be aware that parties are broad coalitions of opinion, and therefore a breadth of ideological positions need to be covered in the speech. Externally, the leader’s speech is addressed to various secondary audiences and has to be effective on a number of different levels. Firstly, it is often the anchor point for media coverage for the party conference (Faucher-King 2005: 140–41). Therefore, these speeches are also addressed to the general public, and speakers often suggest validity claims in the name of the party using the pronoun ‘we’. In this case, the party acts as a collective speaker and the public as collective addressee. Secondly, the leader’s speech is often employed as a tool for personalisation politics: it needs to stimulate the general audience’s imagination of power not as something remote or abstract, but rather impersonated by famous, heroic characters that they can connect to. In her ethnographic study of British party conferences, Faucher-King (2005: 88) describes how the leader’s speeches observed via television give an impression of intimacy and transport this intimacy into the living room, supported by a more intimate rhetorical style. In Blair’s speech at the 1996 conference, for example, he talks about his father as an inspirational figure, while the television screens at home show close-ups of his wife Cherie Blair ‘holding hands with her father-in-law’, followed by pictures of weeping delegates. A third level is the effectiveness of the written documentation of the leader’s speech as a source for media coverage: accredited journalists usually receive a printed version of the speech in advance, which forms the basis of news reports, analysis and comments. Therefore, the speech needs to be effective as a spoken performance to the primary audience at the conference and to the secondary audience watching the speech on TV, and also as a written document to form the basis of the media discourse on party politics. Which discourse linguistic questions follow from this analysis of the leader’s party conference speech as a genre? Firstly, we saw that the construction of personal leadership and group identity is a core function of the leader’s speech as a genre. Therefore, I demonstrated, how the different contextual conditions in Germany and the UK influence this process. Secondly, party conference speeches have both internal and external communicative functions. The internal and external



Chapter 4.  Texts in context

construction of the political position is partly served by symbol, programme and stigma terms. These construe the differences between parties by legitimising a party’s position while delegitimising the position of the political opponent. I will therefore compare the use of these lexical items in the conference speeches to their use in other texts of the corpus in the chapter on the lexis in the discourses of the Third Way. Thirdly, similarly to Finlayson and Martin (2008), I argue that conference speeches are a valuable source for the reconstruction of discursive features such as argumentative topoi and metaphorical ideation (see Chapter 6 and 7). And finally, on all the levels of analysis I discuss whether the stronger ritualisation of party conferences in the UK and their reduced decision-making power, compared to Germany, influences the language of the conference speeches under analysis. I will now turn to the construction of leadership and group solidarity in the party conference speeches through the use of the first person singular and plural pronouns, an analysis that I have presented in more detail in Kranert (2017). Apparent differences in text and context will be used to demonstrate the context-sensitivity of this discursive strategy. Fairclough (2000, 35) describes the ‘constant ambivalence and slippage between exclusive and inclusive “we”[…]’ as a salient feature of the New Labour discourse. He argues that this slippage is used to obfuscate differences in a divided society. In contrast to Fairclough, however, I aim to demonstrate that in party conference speeches this mechanism is used to construe leadership and group ideology as well as to handle multi-addressing. The differences in the use of the self-referring pronouns ‘I’ and ‘we’ in the speeches can be explained by local contexts such as the timing of the conference pre- or post-election and the socio-historical context of the speech. The party-political ideology and the political culture, however, do not seem to influence this linguistic feature directly. The intermittent use of ‘I’ and ‘We’ and the often ambiguous use of ‘we’ seems to be a defining feature of leaders’ speeches at party conferences. Fetzer and Bull (2012) argue that leaders use the self-referring pronoun ‘I’ in speeches in order to ‘do leadership’. Their argument builds on the notion from Conversation Analysis that communicative action is ‘doubly contextual’, both ‘context-shaped’ and ‘context-renewing’ (Heritage 1984: 242): the understanding of utterances depends on the context while each new utterance renews and changes the context. In order to capture the construction of groupness and solidarity, we need to distinguish the use of ‘I’ as well as inclusive and exclusive ‘we’. Because ‘we’ as a pronoun usually refers to the speaker and at least one other, it can be used to construct groupness. The use of ‘we’ represents the speaker as a central or defining member of the group s/he speaks on behalf of (Wortham 1996: 333). Mühlhäusler and Harré (1990: 92) see this effect based on the double indexicality of personal pronouns which are spatial – temporally anchored in the here-and-now, and also

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in the pragmatic domain of the speaker’s responsibilities for illocutionary force and perlocutionary effects. According to Fetzer (2014: 336), ‘we’ is thus part of the membership categorisation and signifies proximity and possibly solidarity with the group ideology. Fetzer further argues that the use of ‘we’ aligns the speaker with supporters of a political party irrespective of the party’s ideology (Fetzer 2014: 345–46). The basis of this effect is the ambiguity of the reference of ‘we’, which can be categorised in the following way: Exclusive we Refers to a group including the speaker but excluding the hearer

Inclusive we Integrative use, referring to speaker, hearer and others Expressive use referring to speaker, hearer and expressing solidarity

Figure 1.  Exclusive and inclusive ‘we’

Wilson (1990: 47) argues that the choice of pronouns can in most cases be interpreted as a sociolinguistic fact, for example in the choice of you/yous for the second person plural in spoken language. The use of inclusive or exclusive ‘we’ by politicians is, however, a pragmatic manipulation and thus strategic. It exploits the ambiguity of ‘we’ based on implicatures of the hearer. These interpretations can always be denied by the speaker. Wilson (1990) also points out that ‘we’ distances the speaker from a statement. This is supported by Mühlhäusler and Harré (1990, 175) who demonstrate that ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ construes the speaker as collaborating with the hearer. This therefore diminishes the responsibility of the speaker for what is being said. Du Bois (2009: 22) suggests a strong similarity of this mechanism in German and English, as both languages hold an ambiguity in the first person plural that can be pragmatically exploited. As a final theoretical point, I would like to connect the use of ‘I’ and the different forms of ‘we’ in party conference speeches to the multi-authored and multi-addressing properties of this genre. The changing use of first person pronouns in these speeches is an indicator of changes of footing, a concept developed by Goffman (1981) in order to deconstruct the dyadic categories of hearer/addressee and speaker. Instead of the speaker being conceived as a single unit who addresses hearers with deliberately chosen linguistic constructions to fulfil an individual intention, Goffman (1981: 144–45) analyses the production format of utterances instead: – the principal: whose position is established in the words spoken; – the author: selector of sentiments expressed and words encoding them; – the animator: ‘talking machine’, producing the sound.



Chapter 4.  Texts in context

Following Wilson (1990: 65), I have argued that the use of personal pronouns in pre-scripted speeches is most likely both strategic and also intended. The strategy here is one of legitimisation by changing the footing in the sense of Goffman. The shift from ‘we’ to ‘I’ or ‘I’ to ‘we’ indicates a change in footing in the production format: while ‘I’ foregrounds the leader’s responsibility for a policy and therefore the leader as a principal, the exclusive ‘we’ foregrounds the party as a principal and construes or constructs group solidarity. The inclusive ‘we’ integrates the nation into the ideology, construing all parts of the audience as principal. This can, of course, not only be interpreted as a strategy of legitimisation, but also one of depoliticisation by obfuscating political differences. Table 1, taken from Kranert (2017), presents an overview of the use of pronominal self-references in the party conference speeches analysed: In the table, we can identify three distinct features: In Blair’s pre-election speech of 1996 the use of ‘I’ is highest, while it is lowest in Schröder’s 2003 special conference speech, which shows a particularly high use of exclusive ‘we’. Generally, inclusive ‘we’ is highest in the pre-election speeches, and the ambiguous use of ‘we’ is highest in post-election speeches. The following discussion will demonstrate how these genre variations can be explained by the particular contexts of the speeches and why they can be understood as strategic. In his 1996 pre-election speech, Blair foregrounds the construction of his personal leadership, using ‘I’ in 50.2% of all self-references, which can be interpreted as typical for the leader-focus and the process of presidentialisation in the British systems. The process of presidentialisation in the UK is much further advanced, since there are restrictions within the German political institutions, but also in the history of the SPD. The German political system consists of many more veto players than the British, where the Prime Minister is almost the only veto player, as long as he or she has the support of his parliamentary party. Furthermore, reforms within the Labour Party since 1983 have made the party leader much more autonomous than in Germany: they have introduced complex policy development procedures that are more under the control of the leadership, and integrated strong plebiscitary elements in the party democracy that weaken the influence of party activists. Although the SPD has also introduced reforms that allow plebiscitary elements, they refrained from using them after the popular election of Scharping as a party leader did not prove successful. Despite the general leadership focus of Blair’s 1996 party conference speech, its opening and closing are presented by the party as being principal: the use of the first-person plural indicates that it is the party’s position that is established in the utterance, the speaker itself is merely representing its position, and therefore taking the role of author and animator:

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80 Discourse and Political Culture Table 1. Self-references in party conference speeches (Kranert 2017: 192) Speech

Length in words

Pronominal self-references in %

Pronominal self-references (%) I = speaker

I = general

Excl. We

Incl. We

Ambiguous We Other we

Blair 1994 Blair

7043

2.95

23.1

2.9

50

13.5

10.6

1995 Blair 1995

6915

2.73

37

2.1

30.7

16.4

7.4

0 6.3

(SC) Blair 1996

2684

1.97

35.8

0

45.3

5.7

13.2

0

Blair 1997

7219

2.99

51.9

0

28.2

13.4

6.5

0

Lafontaine 1997

5970

3.48

32.2

0

29.8

9.6

27.9

Lafontaine 04/98

7336

3.15

24.2

0

58.4

12.1

2.6

Lafontaine 10/98 Schröder 1997

0.5 0

2163

2.96

28.1

0

59.4

1.6

0

4840

3.22

42.3

0

42.9

1.9

3.8

10.9 9.0

4722

2.39

31.0

0

42.5

20.4

3.5

2.7

Schröder 04/98

9537

2.75

33.6

0.8

53.1

6.1

3.8

2.7

Schröder 10/98

2252

2.62

32.2

0

20.3

3.4

42.4

1.7

Schröder 2003

7800

4.03

15.9

0

70.4

5.4

5.4

2.9

Schr. 2003 (SC)

5803

4.53

13.7

0

75.3

3.4

6.8

0.8

AVERAGE

5714

3.06

30.85

0.45

46.64

8.86

SC = Special Conference

10.3

2.88



Chapter 4.  Texts in context

Diana, friends, colleagues, this year we meet as the opposition. Next year, the British people willing, an end to 18 years of the Tories and we will meet as the new Labour government of Britain. (Applause) It is exciting!  (Blair 1996a: 80, emphasis MK) We have the programme. We have the people to make decent change in our country. Let us call our nation now to its destiny. Let us lead it to our new age of achievement and build for us, for our children, their children, a Britain – a Britain (Blair 1996a: 87, emphasis MK) united to win in the 21st century.

Here, the pronoun ‘we’ is used to construe the solidarity of the group. The party speaks through the leader and reasserts itself by saying ‘We have the programme’. But of course, this is also addressed to the general public. When Blair speaks of ‘our country’, ‘our nation’ and ‘our children’, the general public is construed as being part of the event through entextualisation. In other parts of the pre-election speeches, Schröder and Blair explicitly address the secondary audience on behalf of the party as principal (‘Wir’): Liebe Genossinnen! Liebe Genossen! Liebe Freundinnen! Liebe Freunde! Und vor allen Dingen, lieber Helmut Schmidt! Wir wenden uns an die Bürgerinnen und Bürger und sagen ihnen: Wir, die deutschen Sozialdemokraten, sind bereit, die Verantwortung für Deutschland und die Verantwortung für Deutschland in Europa zu übernehmen. (Schröder 1998a: 20, emphasis MK) Dear comrades, dear friends! And first and foremost dear Helmut Schmidt. We turn to the citizens and tell them: We, the German Social Democrats are ready to take responsibility for Germany and the responsibility for Germany in Europe. Today, I offer you, and we offer the country a new vision. If we are to build this new age of achievement, you and I and all of us together must build first the decent society to deliver it. (Blair 1996a: 84, emphasis MK)

While Schröder immediately construes the party as the principal (‘we’), Blair changes footing from ‘I’ to ‘we’, stressing his position as a leader who offers the party a vision. This very strong construction of leadership would be unsuitable for Schröder as a chancellor candidate, because he is not the undisputed leader of the party. The party conference of the SPD elects both leader and chancellor candidate, and the leader or chancellor candidate needs to campaign for votes. The leader of the Labour Party, however, speaks to the party conference as somebody already elected through a different system. This also becomes clear at the end of Schröder’s speech, where he asks the delegates directly to vote for him as the party’s candidate for chancellor by asking for a mandate. At their first post-election party conferences, both Schröder and Blair give speeches that seem to be hybrids: Schröder’s speech is a hybrid between a leader’s

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speeches and a government report, and Blair’s speech a hybrid of a leader’s speech and a presidential inauguration speech where the leader, elected by the people, addresses his people in a religious tone. Schröder’s post-election speech has the lowest use of exclusive ‘we’ in all the speeches and the highest use of ambiguous and other ‘we’, which mainly refers to the government, as the following example from the end of the speech demonstrates: Liebe Genossinnen und Genossen, wir wollen und wir werden einen neuen Anfang in Deutschland machen: zuerst in Bonn und dann in Berlin. Wir bauen dabei auf die Geschlossenheit und die Disziplin der SPD, wir bauen dabei auf eure Unterstützung heute und morgen. Vielen Dank für die Aufmerksamkeit.  (1998b, 46, emphasis MK) Dear Comrades. We want, and we will start afresh in Germany: first in Bonn, and then in Berlin. For this, we count on the unanimity and discipline of the party, we bank on your support, today and tomorrow. Thank you for your attention!

Here, the ‘we’ in ‘Wir bauen dabei auf ’ does not include the audience, who are referred to as ‘eure’. It can therefore only mean the prospective government, and Schröder asks here for the party’s support of the government. This is a necessary question, since this party conference needs to approve the coalition agreement – the aim of his speech as prospective chancellor is to gain support for the government’s programme. In contrast, Blair already speaks as Prime Minister, as the leader of the British people who is describing his programme (metaphorically as ‘course’) for the country: Today I want to set an ambitious course for this country. To be nothing less than the model 21st-century nation, a beacon to the world. It means drawing deep into the richness of the British character. Creative. Compassionate. Outward-looking. (Blair 1997: 68) Old British values, but a new British confidence.

This is supported by the very high use of inclusive ‘we’. Blair speaks on behalf of the country; he does not need approval from the party. He aims, in fact, to motivate all his followers, to strengthen the party’s and the country’s group solidarity at the same time. He does this by keeping the footing of the speech ambiguous at the end of the speech, by mixing his addressing:

5

On May 1, the people entrusted me with the task of leading their country into a new century. That was your challenge to me. Proudly, humbly, I accepted it. Today, I issue a challenge to you. Help us make Britain that beacon shining throughout the world. Unite behind our mission to modernise our country. There is a place for all the people in New Britain, and there is a role for all the people in its creation. Believe in us as much



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Chapter 4.  Texts in context as we believe in you. Give just as much to our country as we intend to give. Give your all. Make this the giving age. (Applause) ‘By the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more together than we can alone.’ On 1st May 1997, it wasn’t just the Tories who were defeated. Cynicism was defeated. Fear of change was defeated. Fear itself was defeated. Did I not say it would be a battle of hope against fear? On 1st May 1997, fear lost. Hope won. The Giving Age began. (Applause) Now make the good that is in the heart of each of us, serve the good of all of us. Give to our country the gift of our energy, our ideas, our hopes, our talents. Use them to build a country each of whose people will say that ‘I care about Britain because I know that Britain cares about me.’ Britain, head and heart, can be unbeatable. That is the Britain I offer you. That is the Britain that together can be ours. (Standing ovation) (Blair 1997: 73)

In line 1 of the quotation, Blair separates the people and the addressee by using the third person possessive pronoun ‘their’ in ‘their country’. He also depicts the general election as a contest of leaders – parallel to a presidential election, interpreting the victory as a personal victory (‘the people entrusted me with the task of leading their country into a new century’). In line 2, Blair switches to ‘you’, when describing the task set as ‘your challenge’ – he is now addressing the people. In lines 9 and 10, he quotes the Labour Party’s revised constitution, without changing the footing – he is thus still speaking to the British people. The intertextual connection of the last paragraph, which resembles the Christian dismissal at the end of a service, produces the religious tone of the speech that demonstrates the influences of a presidential inauguration speech in the US, a genre that Campbell and Jamieson (2008: 29) describe as follows: Presidential inaugurals are a subspecies of the kind of discourse that Aristotle called epideictic, a form of rhetoric that praises or blames on ceremonial occasions, invites the audiences to evaluate the speaker’s performance, recalls the past and speculates about the future while focusing on the present, employs a noble, dignified literary style, and amplifies or rehearses admitted facts.

Although the speech has strong deliberative elements in presenting and legitimating policies of the new government, the quoted ending of the speech clearly focuses on the epideictic element: It addresses the nation and unites it through the metaphor ‘Britain as a beacon to the world’, as well as through ceremonial words that recontextualise the tone of the Christian dismissal. The party conference speeches of Blair and Schröder at the special conferences in 1995 (Labour, change of Clause Four) and 2003 (SPD, Agenda 2010) clearly differ in the construction of leadership. Schröder’s special conference speech has the highest proportion of exclusive ‘we’ and the lowest proportion of the use of ‘I’ in all conference speeches of the corpus, followed only by his speech at the regular

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biannual party conference in the same year. This shows a clear focus on internal affairs and on the rebuilding of group solidarity at the conference. At the same time, Schröder’s special conference speech has a very high use of ‘exclusive we + must + verb’. Schröder often repeats the construction ‘Wir müssen’ followed by a subjectification verb (e.g. ‘anerkennen’) or event verb. The modal verb ‘must’ construes a high implicit subjective modality and presents the audience with a closed discourse: Wir müssen den Mut zeigen, anzuerkennen, dass die Zahl der Arbeitslosen nicht nur aus konjunkturellen Gründen auf mehr als 4 Millionen angestiegen ist, sondern dass es dafür auch strukturelle Ursachen gibt. Diese Ursachen müssen wir erkennen und beseitigen. (Schröder 2003b: 14) We must have the courage to recognise that the number of unemployed people has not only risen to more than 4 million because of the economic situation, but there are also structural reasons. These reasons we must recognise and eliminate.

Strategically, Schröder combines the building of group solidarity by using ‘we’, with the closing of the discourse by using constructions of high obligation (‘must’) in combination with mental processes. He includes himself in the group that is forced to accept what he calls ‘reality’. What does this analysis tell us about the language in the leader’s speeches at the party conferences of New Labour and the German SPD? It has become clear that the three speakers use the first person singular and plural pronouns strategically to change the footing of their speeches from the leader as principal (‘I’), to the party as principal (exclusive ‘we’) and to the nation as principal (inclusive ‘we). These changes help the speaker to construe notions of leadership and to facilitate ideological in-group construction. The differences in the usage of this mechanism in my corpus seem to be governed mainly by more localised context, i.e. the situation of the speech before or after an election, before or after a critical decision such as the Clause Four revision or the Agenda 2010. There are, however, influences of the political culture of the party: Blair can speak as a leader who is not directly dependent on the votes of the party conference, whereas Schröder and Lafontaine have to aim for legitimisation by the votes of the delegates and therefore adapt the leadership construction and the construction of in-group solidarity accordingly. 4.3

Integrating and promoting the party: The genre election manifesto in the discourses of the Third Way

Election manifestos represent the ideological position as well as the concrete policies of a party as a choice for voters. Yet, a key question to ask is whether they



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present these choices in the same way in political systems that differ as much as the Westminster system in the UK, which is dominated by two parties usually forming a single party government, and the proportional and federal system of Germany, that is usually governed by coalitions. In this section I will analyse the central features of election manifestos and demonstrate how their structure and function differs in Germany and Britain. Election manifestos as a genre have not been analysed in detail, but politicolinguists have situated them in the system of genres in politics. Girnth (2002) and Klein (2000b) both understand election manifestos as advertising materials aimed at potential voters. Girnth (2002: 38) places them in the action field of ‘political advertising’ and Klein (2000b: 743) analyses them as a genre emitted by parties and aimed at the public. In Klein’s (2000b) view, election manifestos give party campaigners and the party base an overview of the party’s policy. They can use the text as a toolbox for political argumentation. Election manifestos are also a source of information for journalists and interested voters. As early as 1971, the political scientist Heino Kaack argued that programme texts of political parties have internal and external audiences (Kaack 1971: 400– 403). Targeted at external audiences, programme texts have an advertising function in order to win new members and voters. They present the party as being distinct from political competitors (profile function) and support its ideological groupness (agitating function). On the basis of manifestos, parties demand concrete political action (operational basis). Internally, programme texts integrate the different ideologies of the membership. They help the individual member to identify with the party-political ideology. They are also a source of legitimisation, since the party conferences have voted on their content. Finally, election manifestos help the party leadership to control possible rebels, because they allow utterances such as ‘This is not in the manifesto/we haven’t got a mandate’ as a closing move in an argument on party policy. The question I need to answer in this chapter is whether the importance of these functions differ in the two countries. A first piece of evidence for a difference in the genre can be found in Rose’s (1984: 65) argument that manifesto pledges in the UK are highly relevant and often implemented, because the first-past-the-post electoral system mostly returns a one-party government. The German system of proportional representation almost always makes coalitions necessary in order for a government to command a parliamentary majority. In contrast, UK governments are closely observed on how they keep the promises made in the manifestos and cannot normally use a coalition partner as an excuse, as German governments tend to do. Election manifestos are therefore discursively of less importance in Germany, since many policy pledges are revised in the coalition- building process.

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As discussed in the justification of the corpus, I chose to include election manifestos of the Labour Party and the SPD over a longer period (1987–2002) in order to incorporate a diachronic element into the analysis. In the following parts of this chapter, I will focus on two particular elements of the genre election manifesto and their change over time: The preface or introduction, and multimodal structures. The introductions or prefaces of the manifestos set the tone for the programmatic remarks that follow. They are the first part that a reader might look at, especially in the UK, where they are aimed at a more general reader. The tone of the German and English introductions is very different, since the Labour manifestos are all introduced by the party leader, whereas the SPD manifestos are introduced by the party in the first-person plural. The exception is, however, the 1994 manifesto, which seems to be an experiment in many ways, but one that has not been repeated. This SPD manifesto has a preface by the party leader and chancellor candidate of the SPD at the time, Rudolf Scharping, who also uses the first-person pronoun ‘ich’ in the introduction. This isolated move towards a leader-focus is consistent with the unusual leadership election in 1993: Scharping was elected by a membership ballot and won with 40.3% against Gerhard Schröder and Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul. This victory was, as Walter (2009: 221) points out, not overwhelming – more than half of the membership voted against Scharping. More importantly, Scharping had to defend his legitimacy against Schröder, who tried hard to raise his public profile against Scharping by setting the agenda through the media. Therefore, the stronger leader-focus of the manifesto can be understood as a counter-strategy against this challenge. The different tone is also set by different or missing sub-genre descriptors in the headline. In the British Labour Party manifestos of 1987 and 1992 they are called ‘Preface’ and ‘Introduction’, which seems to communicate a separation from the main body of the manifesto. This distancing function is not present in the first two New Labour manifestos. The 1990 and 2002 SPD manifestos use the headline ‘Präambel’, which is normally understood as the introduction to a more official genre such as contracts and charters, and are often written in a solemn tone (Wilpert 1989: 703). The voice of the introductions to the manifestos in the corpus varies. While all British manifestos have an introduction by the party leader, the introductions of the German manifestos, except for the 1994 manifesto, are written in the firstperson plural: it is the party’s voice setting the scene of the following programme by presenting the general values of the party. In addition, although all the Labour manifestos have an introduction by the party leader, the prefaces by Neil Kinnock in 1987 and 1992 are also presented in the first-person plural, from the perspective of the party. Blair breaks this tradition in the 1997 and 2001 manifestos: The introductions there present a personal message by Tony Blair without the genre-defining



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headline ‘preface’. In 1997, Blair uses ‘I’ 20 times, mostly as participant sensor, and in the middle part of the introduction ‘I’ is often intertwined with ‘we’ or ‘new Labour’. This clearly marks an increase in the leadership focus on the textual side, something already identified in the visual aspect of the manifestos. Not all the manifestos use a combination of exclusive and inclusive ‘we’, or use ‘we’ with an unclear scope. There is, however, no example in the 1992 introduction, which suggests that the mixed use in the Labour introductions from 1997 and 2001, as well as in the SPD introduction from 1994 and 1998, is intentional and strategic. The strategic use of inclusiveness in the 1997/1998 manifestos becomes more obvious when we turn to other linguistic means used inclusively. In the preamble to the 1998 SPD manifesto, the inclusion is constructed by the regular use of the metonymy ‘Deutschland’ (8 times + 4 times ‘unser Land’ in the first 500 words). The lexeme ‘Deutschland’ needs to be read as a metonymy, because in a sentence such as ‘Unser Land hat große Chancen […] Dafür braucht Deutschland eine neue Politik und eine neue Regierung’ (SPD Parteivorstand 1998a: 9), ‘Deutschland’ refers to the people of Germany. Combined with the use of ‘Unser Land’, the text includes all possible readers in order to depict the SPD as a catch-all party as opposed to a clientele party. This strategy is even more marked in the 1997 manifesto of the Labour Party: ‘Britain’/ ‘British’ is used 13 times in the first 500 words, ‘our country’ twice. The strategy is supported by the use of programme terms such as ‘one nation’ and metaphoric constructions depicting the manifesto as a contract with all people. The text construes ‘New Labour’ as a body-part of the nation (‘New Labour is the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole’ (The Labour Party 1997: 2) and together with the British people set in opposition to the political system: I want to renew faith in politics through a government that will govern in the interest of the many, the broad majority of people who work hard, play by the rules, pay their dues and feel let down by a political system that gives the breaks to the few, to an elite at the top increasingly out of touch with the rest of us.  (The Labour Party 1997: 1)

This also depoliticises the Labour Party, as it characterises New Labour as outside the political system, as part of the betrayed public. It backgrounds that the Labour party had been part of the system for almost a hundred years and foregrounds the Labour Party as a new political power emerging from the British people and a part of the topos of ‘Third-way parties as special agents for change’. I now turn to the multimodal elements in the election manifestos of the Third Way in order to understand the role of the advertising function of the German and British manifestos and its context-sensitivity. With the exception of the 1994

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manifesto of the SPD, both SPD and CDU present their manifestos between 1990 and 2005 as text only. The German manifestos therefore use very few contactorientated strategies such as pictures, which means their external advertising function is less strong. The Labour Party in contrast are visually increasingly complex. In both the 1997 and 2001 manifesto, texts and visual elements are combined into a semiotic strategy that focuses on the leader: Blair is depicted many times, and the pictures clearly carry more than just the denotation, the photographic message ‘without a code’. They convey structurally coded ideological messages (Barthes 1987: 17–19) and are integrated into complex semiotic structures, as is typical for advertising genres (Spillner 1982, Bateman 2014). Comparable to the Labour manifestos is an SPD election campaign publication from 1998 (Vorstand der SPD July 1998). A comparative analysis of both will demonstrate that the SPD in 1998 used similar semiotic means to communicate its goals and its leader’s qualities, and that the German election campaign seems to show a similarly increased promotionalisation of the political culture, a process from which the German election manifestos seem to be exempt. This comparative analysis of the text–picture relation will also help in understanding the differences in the multimodal construction of political messages, as well as the construal of leadership in British and German election materials. It will partly be based on Kress and van

Figure 2.  Front cover of the 1987 Labour manifesto



Chapter 4.  Texts in context 89

Leeuwen (2006), who have developed a social-semiotic grammar of visual design based on the three metafunctions of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The Labour Manifesto of 1987 does not use any picture material in the body of the text, but presents the leader on the front cover. Neil Kinnock is depicted in a medium- range shot, smiling with excitement, gazing away from the reader and raising his left hand, possibly waving (Figure 3).4 Kinnock is wearing a suit with a red rose on the lapel – the symbol for the Labour Party at the time. This pose communicates his leadership of the party as energetic and strong: the low-angle depiction construes the power of the participant (Kress and Leeuwen 2006: 148) and the waving and excited pose seem to communicate connection with the party. The 1992 manifesto does not depict the leader on the front cover (Figure 3), but instead shows him in a type of official portrait on the left hand side of the double page that contains his foreword (Figure 4). Kinnock wears a formal suit without party symbols. The picture itself also does not contain the context of the picture, unlike the photograph on the front cover of the 1987 manifesto. The background of the 1992 portrait is simply black and grey. In 1987, the picture shows Kinnock being engaged with an audience that is not visible in the picture but clearly part

Figure 3.  Front cover of the 1992 Labour manifesto 4.  All pages from the Labour manifestos are reproduced with kind permission of the Labour Party.

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of the scene where the picture was taken, possibly at the party conference. The portrait in 1992 does not evoke an external event as part of the picture. It is part of the textual structure of the double page and Kinnock seems to be appealing to the reader: the frontal angle of the shot and the direct gaze of Kinnock towards the viewer realises demand (Kress and Leeuwen 2006: 148): Kinnock is demanding the attention of the readers by looking into their eyes and addressing them directly in the text: Foreword by the Rt. Hon. Neil Kinnock Leader of the Labour Party This general election is a choice between a Conservative government peralysed by recession, and a Labour government determined to get on with building recovery. Gripped by the longest recession since the war, Britain needs a government with a clear sense of direction and purpose. A government with the people and the policies to get Britain working again and to achieve sustained recovery - strength with staying power. Labour will be such a government. But this election is not only a choice between policies, important though both are. It is also a choice between values. At the core of our convictions is belief in individual liberty. We therefore believe; First, that for liberty to have real meaning the standards of community provision must be high and access to that provision must be wide. Second, that those rights of the individual must, like all others in a free society, belong to all men and women of every age, class and ethnic origin and be balanced by responsibilities of fair contribution and law-abiding conduct. Third, that for rights and responsibilities to be exercised fully and fairly, government in Britain, as in other industrialised democracies, must work to build prosperity by properly supporting research, innovation, the improvement of skills, the infrastructure and long-term industrial development. Our vision for Britain is founded on these values. Guided by them, we will make our country more competitive, creative, and just; more secure against crime, aggression and environmental danger. We want government to serve the whole nation - using its power to realise this vision. Labour will be such a government. These are our convictions and we will work to fulfil them. They are also down-to-earth aims - essential objectives in a country hit by recession, suffering run-down public services and facing the intensifying pressures of European and global economic competition. All of those realities require that the government provides; a stable economic environment; education and training that fosters the abilities of all young people and adults; a firm emphasis on productive investment in both the public and private sectors. Labour will implement and maintain those policies. They are vital for prosperity, for consistently low inflation and for continuous improvement in economic performance and living standards. They are also fundamental to improving the quality and quantity of provision in health and social services, and to combating poverty. We have absolute commitment to a high-quality National Health Service, free at time of need and not fractured and weakened by underfunding and a commercialised contract system. We will get on with fulfilling that commitment from the moment of our election - by strengthening and modernising the NHS, by extending care in the community and by establishing the National Health initiative to prevent illness. Our pledges to increase the income of pensioners and families with children will urgently be fulfilled. Our undertakings to stop the perpetual experiments in schools and to raise standards of investment and achievement in education will be kept in full. These policies - like those to increase house-building, improve transport and protect the environment - are not only important to the well-being of the British people now. They are vital preparations for the future. In that future, we are determined that Britain will be a leader in the New Europe, setting higher standards and not surrendering influence by opting out. We have confidence in our country and in the qualities and potential of its people. We want to nourish their artistic, scientific, sporting and other abilities. And we want to enhance their democratic power too. We shall therefore make constitutional and other changes that will give renewed vitality to our democracy. We shall empower people as citizens and as consumers of public and private services. We

Figure 4.  Pages 6 and 7 of the 1992 Labour manifesto

The New Labour manifesto of 1997 communicates a very different visual language. Blair as the leader, who is depicted as less formal than Kinnock, dominates it; he is shown nine times. The front cover shows him in a close-up, very intimate shot, slightly from the left-hand side, the right part of the face in the shade, wearing a casual blue shirt (Figure 5). He is presented as the ‘normal person’, a strategy that also characterises his speeches. Only the following pictures show Blair dressed more formally. On the first double page, he also relates to the reader directly, being depicted in the top right-hand corner of the preface.



Chapter 4.  Texts in context

Figure 5.  Front cover of the Labour 1997 manifesto

On pages 2–5, which contain the continuation of the preface, we see Blair together with different people at the top left of the pages, taking up the space of the idea, as has been described by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006: 186–87), who demonstrate that in many different genres, the top of the text represents general ideas, for example in headlines, while the bottom often contains concrete new information: ‘For something to be ideal means that it is presented as the idealised or generalised essence of the information, hence also as its, ostensibly, most salient part. The real is then opposed to this in that it presents more specific information (e.g. details).’ These structures are part of the textual metafunction of visual design. The pictures in this part are all combined with a slogan that is printed in a large, bold font in blue on the outside margins of the page. The slogan ‘The vision is one of national renewal, a country with drive, purpose and energy’ is accompanied by a picture of Blair and Mandela, presenting Blair as a renewing leader who unites his nation. This pictorial strategy has the same effect as the lexical strategy of denotational contextualisation: depicting the party leader with a legendary politician leads to the properties of one also being associated with the other. The following page shows Blair with John Prescott, the new deputy leader. He supposedly represented the left of the party, although ‘views of him as a leftist owed more to his working-class roots and the party’s shift to the right than they did to political reality’ (Thorpe 2008: 245). Despite his image as a member of the party’s left wing, Prescott was an active supporter of New Labour. The picture of Blair and Prescott

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appears above the slogan ‘… a new and distinctive approach has been mapped out, one that differs from the old left and the Conservative right’. The slogan presents Labour as a party of the Third Way, a party that is new. The picture, however, suggests continuity of Labour and New Labour: the leadership consists of a young, supposedly radical reformer, and an ‘old labour’ supporter who turned to New Labour. The last picture of that series shows Blair head to head with a young boy (Figure 6). This supports New Labour’s message on education and enhances the slogan ‘New Labour is a party of ideas and ideals, but not of outdated ideology’ by depicting Blair as being in touch with people.

Figure 6.  Detail from the top left corner of page 4 in Labour’s 1997 election manifesto

In the programmatic part of the 1997 manifesto, pictures of people from all walks of life are used, such as students in a library and sales assistants selling food. But towards the end, Blair appears again, communicating both his aptitude as leader and his ‘normal person’ persona: We see him in the world of power with the world leaders Jacques Chirac and Bill Clinton at the beginning of the section on ‘leadership in Europe’, but also in the world of ordinary people, talking to children at a sports event, wearing a track suit. ‘Ambitions for Britain’, the Labour manifesto of 2001, shows Blair on the front page in a medium-range shot talking to people. But in striking difference to Kinnock in 1987 there is no reference to the party in the picture, no rose on the lapel. Blair is yet again dressed slightly informally – in just a white shirt. In the



Chapter 4.  Texts in context

unfocused background, we see shapes of people in what looks like a relaxed audience. The first double page after the contents page contains the beginning of Tony Blair’s preface to the manifesto (Figure 7). In a picture on the left-hand page, Blair is sitting at a table, writing, with his mug of tea clearly visible. The right-hand page contains his words. The text does not carry the headline ‘preface’ or ‘introduction’, in fact it has no headline at all. Instead, the whole double page is framed by the underlined words ‘Fulfilling Britain’s great potential’ in the red colour of the Labour party. Since in the textual structure of multimodal texts, the left of a double page is often perceived as given/theme (Kress and Leeuwen 2006: 181), the reader naturally inserts Tony Blair’s picture as the subject position of the clause, which is also reserved for the theme. Here, Labour’s election campaign is focused on one person, who is ‘fulfilling Britain’s great potential’. This general election is in many ways even more important than the last. Since May 1997 we have laid the foundations of a Britain whose economy is stronger, where investment is now pouring into public services, where social division is being slowly healed and where influence abroad is being regained. But these are only the foundations of larger change. Now is the chance to build the future properly, to make the second term the basis for a radical programme of British renewal: to keep a firm grip on inflation, with low interest rates and the public finances sound, and then build the dynamic and productive economy of the future; to keep investment coming into public services and then making the reforms so we use the money well; to refashion the welfare state on the basis of rights and responsibilities, with people helped to help themselves, not just given handouts; to ensure all families are safe in their communities by tackling crime and its causes; and to give Britain back its leadership role in the world. We need the second term to do all this. That is the choice: to make progress or to dismantle the foundations laid. And with the state of today's Conservatives, the choice is stark. This choice will decide whether more people will be able to realise their aspirations for themselves and their children to be able to rely on a stable economy where hard work is rewarded by rising living standards, to receive world-class education and healthcare, to enjoy a dignified old age, to feel safe and secure in a strong community, and to be proud to be British. Or whether we will be held back by the traditional British malaise of restricting life's great opportunities and blessings to a minority. There is much still to be done, but we have come a long way in four years. Britain stands more prosperous, more equal, more respected. Our country is on a new course. My passion is to continue the modernisation of Britain in favour of hard-working families, so that all our children, wherever they live, whatever their background, have an equal chance to benefit from the opportunities our country has to offer and to share in its wealth. The challenge for Britain I am honoured to be Prime Minister. And I have a confident belief in our country. We are not boastful. But we have real strengths. Great people. Strong values. A proud history. The British people achieved magnificent things in the 20th century. But for too long, our strengths have been undermined

by weaknesses of elitism and snobbery, vested interests and social division, complacency bred by harking back to the past. We achieved spurts of economic growth, but inflation would then get out of control. Our welfare state was founded to offer security, but its progress was stalled. We reached out to Europe, then drew back to become semi-detached. It is as if a glass ceiling has stopped us fulfilling our potential. In the 21st century, we have the opportunity to break through that glass ceiling, because our historic strengths match the demands of the modern world. We can use our openness and entrepreneurial flair to become a global centre in the knowledge economy. We can use our sense of fair play and mutual responsibility to be a strong, dynamic, multiracial society held together by strong values. We can use our historic and geographical position to link Europe and America, and help the developing world. The key to tapping our strengths, to breaking through this glass ceiling, is contained in a simple but hard-to-achieve idea, set out at the heart of our party's constitution: the determination to put power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many, not the few. I know as well as anyone that we have just begun; millions of hard-working families want, need and deserve more. That means more change in a second term, not less - to extend opportunity for all. We reject the quiet life. We must secure a mandate for change. Ten golals for 2010 • Long-term economic stability • Rising living standards for all • Expanded higher education as we raise standards in secondary schools • A healtheir nation with fast treatment, free at the point of use • Full employment in every region • Opportunity for all children, security for all pensioners • A modern criminal justice system • Strong and accountable local government • British ideas leading a reformed and enlarged Europe • Global poverty and climatge change tackled

Figure 7.  Second double page of Labour’s election manifesto 2001 (pp 2–3)

And Blair is yet again depicted as the ‘normal person’, with his formal jacket off, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up. Finlayson (2002: 596–97) points out the importance of the mug in the picture – a mug, not a cup with a saucer: And then there is that mug […] A mug took a starring role in the 1997 election broadcast focusing on the leader and the motif reappeared in the 2001 version. In 1997 he was in his kitchen, still a man with his own house and living at his own expense in ‘middle-class’ England. In 2001 the mug had a ‘walk-on’ part as a cup of tea was delivered to him while he sat on a stool being filmed for his broadcast. It is a cliché to associate tea with the British (or, at least, the English), but it has a truth to it. […] Now, as our cultural markers of class dissolve […] the mug of tea (taken in Downing Street, no less) is an emblem of traditional values in a modern setting.

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The programmatic text of the 2001 manifesto shows Blair numerous times in similar poses to 1997. Finlayson (2002: 597) points out that only three other politicians are depicted in the 2001 manifesto: David Trimble, Seamus Mallon and Nelson Mandela, who are all depicted together with Blair in order to communicate his credentials as a leader. Conspicuously absent are any Labour MPs or Labour ministers. Finlayson concludes: ‘In the 2001 election campaign Blair, it is now clear, was applying for a job. He was, almost literally, interviewed for it.’ However, this is also true for the 1997 manifesto, which does not show any pictures of Labour politicians except for Blair – and Prescott. We can see how the advertising function of British election manifestos is of much more importance than in the German manifestos. Indeed, it has become more prominent since 1997. Part of the reason is a much higher importance placed upon election manifestos in British political discourse. However, the British manifestos also show an increasing leadership focus in the text–picture relation. This supports the presidentialisation thesis discussed in political science on a level of political culture and political communication. By comparison, the SPD manifestos could not be more different. With the exception of 1994, they all rely solely on the written word and are presented in the party voice (‘we’). A comparison of the CDU manifestos of the time reveals a similar picture. Despite the popularity of Helmut Kohl, they do not contain pictures of the leader, nor do they feature prefaces in which Kohl personally addresses the electorate directly. I discussed already that the 1994 manifesto is the exception in the German election manifestos analysed, as it has an introduction by the party leader and introduces multimodality in the genre. It does not, however, reach the same multimodal complexity as the New Labour manifestos of 1997 and 2001. The leader’s picture, a plain passport-style head shot (Figure 8), is merely used once next to his signature as an illustration, as it demands the attention of the reader much less than, for example, Kinnock’s portrait in 1992, or Blair’s writer pose in 2001. The double-page pictures that introduce the eight sections of the manifesto are often mere illustrations of the topic covered, rather than construing Scharping’s leadership. The picture introducing Section 1 ‘Arbeit schaffen’, for example, shows two civil engineers presumably discussing a project, while the second section ‘Eine soziale und ökologische Gesellschaft’ is introduced by a depiction of a luscious freestanding tree on a meadow. Between 1995 and the next federal election, Lafontaine managed to unite the party, but seeing Schröder as potentially more successful with the electorate, he allowed Schröder to lead the SPD in the election as chancellor candidate. This double leadership of the party is reflected in an election manifesto that avoids a leadership focus by returning to the more traditional German format that stresses



Chapter 4.  Texts in context

Figure 8.  Pages 6 and 7 of the SPD manifesto 1994

the voice of the party and backgrounds the advertising function of the manifesto. This format was also kept for the 2002 and 2005 manifestos. There are other programmatic publications, however, which foreground the advertising function and employ more complex multimodal means. The brochure ‘Wir sind bereit’, published by the SPD in July 1998 (Vorstand der SPD July 1998), is a good example. Although I do not have the space to analyse the text of this brochure in detail, I will explore the text–picture relation within the brochure and the construal of Schröder’s leadership. We can then compare the use of pictures in the German election campaign materials to the 1997 Labour election manifesto, which has a clear advertising function. As a first major difference, this SPD brochure only addresses the chancellor candidacy indirectly. Whilst the Labour manifestos show a picture of Blair as a leader on the front page, this brochure has a plain front page with the title ‘Wir sind bereit’ and as author label ‘SPD’. The whole front-page mimics the SPD logo since it is printed in the party’s logo colours of red and white, and uses the same sans serif typeface. The title ‘Wir sind bereit’ and the construction of the text suggest it is the party voice speaking, rather than the chancellor candidate. The participants in the subject position are mainly construed using ‘wir’, often used inclusively. The text is divided into seven major sections, followed by a reproduction of Gerhard

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Schröder’s CV in a typewriter typeface and a summary of nine promises, again phrased in the first-person plural. Each major section of the text is framed by a double-page picture of Gerhard Schröder, together with a slogan. The sections are all followed by a double page section depicting a member of the public, whether self-employed, unemployed or retired, and briefly sketching their life story. These short narratives show people who have overcome difficulty or are in difficulty and stay positive, who express the desire for change. All of them are also creative in their spare time: all have taken up dancing in one form or the other, hence the sections are all entitled ‘tanzen’. These interludes are a powerful multimodal metaphor for the change that the brochure asks for: Sichere Zeichen sind gesetzt. Am 27. September 1998 entscheiden Sie. Vollziehen Sie den Wechsel auch in der Politik. Der Zeitpunkt ist da.  (Vorstand der SPD July 1998, 89) The signs are there. On 27th September 1998, you will decide. Implement change in politics as well. Now is time.

While the interludes focus on members of the public, each section is introduced by a picture of Gerhard Schröder. The eight pictures show Schröder informally, his hair natural and not carefully combed, his face not carefully shaved, without any airbrushed attempt to hide his age (Figure  9). Most pictures are intimate close-ups, aiming to show his personality: a thinker (head on hand), engaging (gazing straight at the reader), caring (close-up of his hand), loving life (holding a cigar, but not foregrounded) and working hard (learning a speech outside a venue). All pictures contain a verbal political statement of which only one is explicitly attributed to Schröder, using the first person singular pronoun and a projecting clause: Ich will, daß wir die großen Chancen der Globalisierung betonen und nutzen und uns nicht durch ständiges Lamento lähmen. (Vorstand der SPD July 1998, 56) I want us to concentrate on the great opportunities of globalisation and use them, instead of being paralysed by constant lamentation.

There is also only one quotation directly attributed to the party, using the firstperson plural pronoun in a similar projecting construction: Wir wollen, daß die Menschen wieder gespannt sind auf morgen und neugierig auf das, was die Zukunft bringt. (Vorstand der SPD July 1998, 71) We want people to be excited about tomorrow and curious about the future.



Chapter 4.  Texts in context

Figure 9.  Double page from ‘Wir sind bereit’ (Vorstand der SPD July 1998, 42–43)

All other statements, often those more controversial, are ambiguously projected, as in Figure 9. They can either be attributed to Schröder individually, who is depicted on the double page, or to Schröder representing the party in general. While more traditional social democrats could read these statements as Schröder’s personal comments (and disregard them), the target group of the ‘new centre ground’ could understand them as the position of a changed social democratic party. 5 When compared with Labour’s 1997 manifesto, this brochure shows a number of striking similarities. It employs complex multimodal semiosis to construe its message, which is not surprising, since its primary function is advertising. It also focuses in a similar way on the chancellor candidate: similarly to Blair, Schröder is mainly shown informally as an ordinary person, and the pictures suggest leadership qualities. The brochure can also be read as an application for the national leadership position in the same way that Finlayson (2002) described for the Labour manifestos: Schröder is interviewed in the double pages following the programmatic chapters. Even more directly, his CV is reproduced at the end of the brochure. The chapters themselves, however, are dominated by the party voice 5.  The inscription in the picture reads in English: ‘In our country, there is an infinite amount of expertise waiting to be used. Sometimes we should trust society more the state.’

97

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‘wir’. The direct personal voice ‘ich’ only appears once in the whole text. Even the political statements embedded in the portraits of Schröder project ambiguously. Although an analysis of a broader corpus of these election materials needs to be undertaken in order to confirm this conclusion, I suggest that an open and direct leadership focus in central programmatic texts was at the time still not acceptable in the general German political culture. A reason can be found in a much higher ‘partyness of society’ (Abromeit and Stoiber 2006) and in the much greater dependence of the party leader and chancellor candidate on the party. Parties are much more powerful veto players in German politics. Despite the increasing dominance of the chancellor candidates of the SPD and the CDU in the election campaigns (Poguntke 2005: 77–78), the parties seem to reserve some genres such as the election manifestos exclusively for the party voice. Even in campaign materials such as the brochure analysed here, the leader focus is mitigated. This could, of course, also be an effect of the dual leadership in the 1998 election campaign. An analysis of similar material from later elections would help but is beyond the scope of this project. Throughout the research for this project, I realised that compiling a comparable corpus of election materials from the past in different countries would prove difficult. No central archive in Germany or the UK has collected a representative collection of these election materials. They are often spread through several archives and, since the period of new Labour and ‘Die Neue Mitte’ is still historically close, they are often not well catalogued. 4.4 Conclusions: Register and genre as reflections of political culture There are systemic differences in the genres of political language in the UK and Germany. Both leaders’ speeches at party conferences and election manifestos differ in their function within the political system and these differences are clearly reflected in the genre. Party conference speeches by party leaders are a hybrid between deliberative and epideictic oratory. They target logos and pathos in order to construct groupness and solidarity in party members and followers, but also to construct personal leadership. The production conditions of party conference speeches are complex: they are written by teams of speech writers, but more importantly need to present the party as united, and the leader as in tune with party and country, as decisive and responsive. The complex production conditions of the speeches lead to distinct patterns in the footing of the speech. The speeches switch between the party as principal (exclusive ‘we’), the nation as principal (inclusive ‘we’), and the leader as principal (‘I’). The speeches change footing strategically, depending on the role of the leader



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at the party conference and on the aim of the speaker. However, there is also an influence of political culture, as Blair’s speeches are far more leader-centred than Schröder’s or Lafontaine’s – an effect than can be explained by the more advanced process of presidentialisation in Britain. Election manifestos also reveal how they are influenced by the differences in political cultures. In Germany, election manifestos are legal requirements for parties that take part in general elections. However, since the German electoral system normally returns coalition governments which then renegotiate the programme for the period of the government, they are less prominent in the German political discourse in general. In British political discourse, election manifestos are used by the media and the public to measure the success of government, which since 1945 have mainly been single-party governments that did not have to seek programmatic compromise with a coalition partner. The analysis of the prefaces and of the advertising function reveals an increasing personalisation of the manifestos in the British part of the corpus and a strong party voice in the introductions to the German manifestos. These characteristics correspond with contextual factors in the political culture, such as ‘partyness of society’. Abromeit and Stoiber (2006: 158) argue that the ‘partyness of society’ in Britain is low. Originally, British parties were not authentic mass parties and the parliamentary parties were dominant (see also Webb 2000: 192). The Labour Party, for example, was historically founded as an organisation run by the unions to organise workers’ representation in parliament. In post-war Germany, however, the partyness of society has been traditionally high: the parties in parliament are proportionally represented in many regulatory bodies such as the ‘Rundfunkräte’, which govern the public broadcasters. All major political parties also have an affiliated foundation of political education. These foundations have a vital role in funding political education and are major funders of postgraduate scholarships. Although they are funded by the government, the political party they are affiliated to influences their political values. Thus, German political parties influence civil society much more directly, which has historically led to a stronger identification of party followers in all parts of society.6 The stronger party voice in the German manifestos can be interpreted as an influence of the German political culture on this genre. The election manifestos of the Labour party, in contrast, show an increasing focus on the party leader. Institutional analysis in political science has debated whether personalisation has increased in Britain, especially in the years of New Labour. Heffernan and Webb (2005: 55–59) argue ‘that party leaders play an ever more prominent role 6.  As in all Western democracies, loyal electoral support and stable identification with political parties are also waning in Germany (Scarrow 2002).

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in governing and electioneering’, especially in election campaigns. They are more and more the centre of intra-party power and, as prime ministers, become more presidential. However, Blair’s ‘net effect’ as the source of policy is not uncontroversial (Fawcett and Rhodes 2007: 99–103). The election manifestos of the Blair years certainly show an increased emphasis on the party leader and are almost framed as applications for the position of Prime Minister. Although Poguntke (2005: 82) argues that the German political system, especially with Kohl’s and Schröder’s chancellorship, shows similar signs of presidentialisation, he also observes that one should not underestimate the influence of German parties over their leaders, which is based on their power to remove their leaders. This power shows in the strong party voice of the German manifestos. Even in texts whose primary function is advertising, such as election brochures, the leadership focus is still mitigated. The characteristics attributed to the leader, however, are similar: strong leadership on the one hand, but being a ‘normal person’ on the other.

Chapter 5

Lexical strategies in the discourses of the Third Way

5.1

Political lexis: Politics as semantic struggle

In German politico-linguistics, the concept of ‘semantic struggle’1 was introduced to discuss lexico-semantic strategies in political language (Dieckmann 1975; Busse 1989, 1993). With this concept, linguistic theory in Germany reacted to a meta-discourse on political language in politics that was famously part of Kurt Biedenkopf’s speech at the CDU party conference in 1973: Was sich heute in unserem Lande vollzieht, ist eine Revolution neuer Art. Statt der Gebäude der Regierung werden die Begriffe besetzt, mit denen sie regiert, die Begriffe, mit denen wir unsere staatliche Ordnung, unsere Rechte und Pflichten (Biedenkopf 1973: 61) und unsere Institutionen beschreiben. At the moment we are seeing a new type of revolution in our country. Instead of taking over government buildings, the terminology of government is being taken over. The terminology we use to describe our system of government our rights, our responsibilities and our institutions.

Biedenkopf recognised that in a media society, political battles are not fought in the streets but in semantics, and politicians need to fight this battle consciously. This has been echoed by many other German politicians since, for example by Wolfgang Thierse at the SPD Party conference in Hannover in 1997: ‘Nehmen wir den Kampf um die Begriffe auf! […] Machen wir die Kombination von Innovation und sozialer Gerechtigkeit zu unserem Markenzeichen!’ (Let’s fight for our terms […] Let’s make the combination of innovation and social justice our brand.) (quoted in Girnth 2002: 62, transl. MK). This demonstrates that politicians recognise that a central strategy of legitimisation is to dominate the terminology of a discourse. The problem of terminology, 1.  In German linguistic discourse, this is referred to as either ‘Semantische Kämpfe” (Busse 1989; Felder 2006) or ‘Kampf um Wörter” (Klein, J. 1989: 11; Girnth 2002: 62). I use Busse’s (1993) English phrase for the concept here.

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however, is that it has a double function: on the one hand, the syntactical noun group has the ideational and textual function of reference and identification. On the other hand, the terminology ties in with the appraisal system on the interpersonal level of discourse semantics. Busse calls this ‘covert predications’: Covert predications are those words or phrases, which have, syntactically speaking, the function of reference (nounphrases), but, in fact, semantically function as predications. […] These covert predications have the purpose of insinuating semantic definitions and interpretations of reality without revealing the fact that a linguistic act of predication has taken place and that there are agents responsible (Busse 1993: 124) for these acts.

Although the analysis of political lexis has long been a part of linguistics, the semantic struggle concept in German politics has intensified the linguistic metadiscourse about political terminology, and it has developed into a part of linguistic discourse analysis: the research into political catch words (‘Schlagwörter’) and symbol words (‘Symbolwörter’). Although the original terminology uses ‘word’, I will use ‘catch terms’ and ‘symbol terms’, since these are quite often noun groups including adjectives, rather than single lexical units. Catch terms are lexemes or phrases which symbolise a political and programmatic content and have a strong evaluative component as well as a high frequency. Their use is also commonly typical for a certain political group and they are related to certain discourses and also change with them (Schröter and Carius 2009: 24). Girnth (2002: 53) distinguishes catch terms from symbol terms, which share the evaluative component of catch terms, but are not typical for a political group. Symbol terms are a more general point of orientation for the whole of a political culture. In modern democracies, ‘freedom’, ‘liberty’ and ‘human rights’ are typical positive symbol terms or miranda, while ‘communism’ and ‘racism’ are established negative symbol terms or anti-miranda.2 Klein (1991) introduced tools to analyse lexical-semantic strategies linked to the use of catch and symbol terms. I will modify his terminology here, since it has not been published in English. Klein (1991) discusses four basic lexico-semantic strategies. Firstly, political actors will coin terms and hence enter into terminological competition: new terminology is a precondition for the existence of facts, since it is language that helps us to understand the world in a certain way. The political aim here is to produce facts by coining a term. Typically, there are three linguistic processes involved: 2.  The term was originally introduced by Dovring (1959: 41–42): ‘Miranda, as the term indicates, consists of symbols for the sentiments which make the doctrine and the formula of the community’s life and admired reality to all strata of population’. Political scientists talk about essentially ‘contested concepts’: see Gallie (1955).



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– new fixed collocation: (1) new Labour; 3 – derivation: (2) devolution; – composition: (3) Chancengleichheit4 (equality of chances). Strategically biased predication leads to a denotational competition and aims to foreground an aspect important to the party’s own policy. (4) ‘terrorist’/’freedom fighter’

This shows that catch terms can be used as deontically positive and claimed by a political group as programme terms; as stigma terms they are used as deontically negative terms in order to refer to and delegitimise the political competition. This strategic use of stigmatising and programmatic terms is part of the delineation of ideological groups as described by van Dijk (van Dijk 1998), and therefore typical of the language of political parties (see also Section 2.3.2). In a strategic re-evaluation of terms, politicians can induce competition of deontic meaning: this strategy can help in establishing positively connotated programme terms for one’s own position or negative terms as stigma terms for the position of their opponents. As an example in most Western democracies, ‘socialism’ is a stigma term used by conservatives for a social democratic position (CDU slogan 1976: ‘Freiheit statt Sozialismus’/ ‘Freedom instead of socialism’). To use a more recent example, the British Conservatives tried to establish ‘the big society’ as a positive programme term for their classical liberal position of minimising the scope of state and government. Girnth (2002: 62–69) describes strategies used to take over positive symbol terms or miranda as a symbol for a group’s own political position: firstly, modern political communication uses the instrument of public opinion research to find 3.  The title of the first New Labour manifesto in 1997 opens with a central motif of New Labour’s language: in the New Labour discourse, ‘new’ as an adjective has been used prominently from the very beginning (Fairclough 2000: 18–19). It symbolises the Third-Way idea of a necessary renewal of politics, because classical political ideologies supposedly led the country into a crisis. In this context, ‘new Labour’ (note the lower-case spelling) is established as a brand, although the official name of the party is still ‘The Labour Party’ (The Labour Party 2010: 8). Publicly, ‘new Labour’ is certainly perceived as a name, as in most non-party publications it is spelled ‘New Labour’. The alternative spelling emphasises the attributive use of ‘new’ in order to establish the motif of ‘new’ and ‘renewal’ as a brand, at the same time, however, denying the brand-name qualities. This spelling is certainly used strategically, since non-party publications such as Mandelson and Liddle (1996) use ‘New Labour’ as a name. An online corpus search with the web tool http://www.webcorp.org.uk on 16th April 2013, searching 60 web pages for the case-sensitive phrases ‘new Labour’ and ‘New Labour’, turned up 13 concordances for ‘new Labour’, but 611 concordances for ‘New Labour’, only 102 occurrences being after a full stop. 4.  As this type is much more prevalent in German, I am using a German example here.

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established miranda. The use of a mirandum to refer to the programme of one’s own party is the first step to establish a programme term (Girnth 2002: 66). The use of miranda in direct proximity to other terms can then lead to a denotational contextualisation, where the miranda gain meaning related to other programme terms of a party. The use close to other positive symbol terms can lead to an enhancement of the positive connotation. This strategy is called evaluative contextualisation. A typical example from my corpus is the SPD slogan ‘Arbeit, Innovation und Gerechtigkeit’/ ‘Work, Innovation and Justice’. Political actors can also use a strategy of reinterpretation to induce a change of the connotation of a term occupied by their competitors in order to be able to use it for their own policy, especially if it is a term with a positive deontic connotation. This means the competing political groups enter into a connotational competition of meaning. Klein uses ‘Solidarität’ as an example. This is traditionally a term with a connotation of solidarity in a class struggle and therefore ‘occupied’ by the SPD. In 1979, the German conservative politician Heiner Geißler tried to reinterpret this term, highly valued by voters from the working classes, and to reclaim it for a conservative position: ‘Solidarität ist für uns nicht der Kampfaufruf, mit Gleichgesinnten die eigenen Interessen durchzusetzen, sondern die Aufforderung, füreinander einzustehen’5 (quoted in Klein, J. 1998: 390). This strategy is also known as meta-linguistic comment (‘Sprachthematisierung’), which is indicative of a semantic struggle (Niehr 2002; Schröter 2008: 51). For the purpose of analysing discourses as knowledge systems or ideologies, catch terms can also be analysed as forming semantic frames, based on the cognitive frame theory. The term ‘frame’ was originally introduced into artificial intelligence research by Minsky (1975) and adapted for linguistics by Fillmore (e.g. Fillmore 1977). Frames capture how we imagine whole scenarios of connected objects and actions even on a small database. The frame consists of a top-level set of data that captures the general properties of a situation. This top-level frame opens slots on a lower level which can be filled with specific facts about a specific situation – the so-called fillers (Minsky 1975: 212–13). For example, if somebody only mentions that he went to a party on a Saturday night, we can imagine a typical party scene and ask relevant questions such as ‘What was the occasion?’, ‘Who did you go with?’, ‘What did you drink?’, ‘Did you dance?’. The generalised knowledge in this party-frame on the top level opens slots  – here for example drinks and visitors – while the concrete elements such as the individual drinks (whisky, beer) at the specific party are called fillers.

5.  For us, solidarity is not a call to arms to force your interests upon others together with likeminded people. It is a need to help others.



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From lexical semantics, the frame theory was also introduced into politicolinguistics (Klein, J. 1999a, 2002a) and linguistic discourse analysis (Ziem 2008). The two-level description of frame semantics (slots, fillers) is a tool that allows a better comparison of different discourses and the discourse specific lexis than a simple collection of catch terms, and illustrates their semantic connection (Klein, J. 2002a: 174). Both the analysis of the catch terms itself as well as the analysis of the frame semantics is again a methodological swinging movement between theory and empirical work. The analysis of catch terms involves a close reading of the texts in the corpus and a collection of the central terms in headlines and slogans. Often, these central terms are used frequently, but even less frequent terms such as ‘one nation’ in the discourse of New Labour can be central due to their cultural saliency, which involves a broad knowledge of the political cultures involved. The categorisation of the catch terms in a semantic frame will be based on the theoretical knowledge of political ideologies as well as on observations of their co-texts and also involve multiple revisions. The resulting frame is to be understood as a hermeneutical and interpretative suggestion rather than an absolute and final categorisation. To add an additional perspective to the triangulation of the discourses of the Third Way, I am going to introduce a corpus assisted methodology to the analysis of the political lexis, as this combination of qualitative approaches with quantitative approaches can help to reveal non-obvious discourse structures (Partington 2008: 97). Partington (2008: 96) defines Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) as the ‘investigation, and comparison of features of particular discourse types, integrating into the analysis where appropriate techniques and tools developed within corpus linguistics’. For reasons of space, I will restrict this approach to the election manifestos, as election manifestos are substantial texts in length and have been increasing in length over the period under analysis. The use of quantitative tools developed in corpus linguistics will help with exploring linguistic patterns that are relevant to the manifestos as a whole but might be missed in a purely manual analysis. The aim in my approach here is not, as often claimed, to make the analysis more ‘objective’ or to ‘avoid human bias in an analysis’ through quantification (McEnery, Xiao, and Tono 2006: 6). Nor will the use of corpus tools bypass the intuition of the analyst. Stewart (2010: 148) has shown that corpus searches always rely on intuition and introspection. Concordances in particular can influence the reading to an extent ‘that we may perceive features, such as syntagmatic and paradigmatic cohesion, which in reality are absent’ (Stewart 2010: 120–21). I would rather suggest supporting my manual analysis by using the software to present the sub-corpus of election manifestos from a different perspective. I do not aim to objectify the results purely on the basis of statistical significance, but use a combination of qualitative and

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quantitative analysis, which also means that the results of my analysis should not be distorted by the problem of statistical validity in my relatively small corpus. Thus, I understand my approach here as a corpus-assisted, quantitatively informed qualitative analysis6 (Bubenhofer 2013: 118). This is, however, not a unified methodology, rather it is an application of a selection of corpus linguistic tools. An appropriate starting point for a corpus assisted approach is the calculation and analysis of simple word lists sorted by relative frequency. This can give a first characterisation of a text or a discourse as the choice of words reflects its ideological position (Baker 2006: 47–48). These word lists tend to be sorted by relative frequency, which is the standardised measurement in percentages or per million words and allows frequency comparison of data sets that differ in size. A further tool is the comparison of these wordlists with a reference corpus that represents general language use in British English and German. Such a comparison can reveal statistical differences between the general language use represented by the often very large reference corpus and the language use in the corpus under analysis. One result of this method can be keyword lists. Keywords are words that occur statistically more often in one wordlist compared to another. It is also possible to produce a keyword list for two sub-corpora of a bigger corpus – in my case the corpus of election manifestos. This could demonstrate ideological differences between large texts. A third tool that supports the analysis of the results of frequency lists and keyword lists is to form and analyse concordances of a lexeme or lemma that was particularly frequent or statistically key. Concordances are lists of all occurrences of a search term, including a defined context left and right of this term. These lists can be sorted alphabetically on the search term itself, or on terms left and right of the search term. Thus, they are very helpful in an analysis and categorisation of the contexts in which the search term is used, and can reveal subtleties of meaning. When using corpus assisted methods, many important analytical decisions regarding the software have to be reached. The main decision relates to the software and the reference corpora to be used. Both decisions are interdependent, as not all reference corpora are available for all software. Furthermore, different software often uses different mathematical approaches. I have decided to approach my analysis with two software packages to combine their advantages. Both Wordsmith tools 6 (Scott 2014) and the sketch engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2014) are long established and widely used. Wordsmith has been used in many publications for keyword analysis (most prominently Baker (2006)), as it combines most statistical tests used in corpus linguistics. It is a software package to be downloaded on the researcher’s computer and can be used for a license 6.  German original: ‘quantitativ informierte qualitative Analyse’



Chapter 5.  Lexical strategies in the discourses of the Third Way 107

fee of £50. It supports multiple languages and allows the calculation of wordlists with relative frequency in percentage of the total word count, the calculation of keywords and collocations, and also includes a concordancer. The software package does not, however, include the function of part of speech tagging nor does it include reference corpora. Sketch engine is an online tool that can be used for a subscription fee. It contains the classical reference corpora such as the British National Corpus, but also automatically produced web corpora such as EngTenTen and DeTenTen.7 The researcher can upload their own corpora which the sketch engine will automatically tag for part of speech and also lemmatise. It is then possible to calculate word lists, however, sketch engine only returns word lists with absolute frequencies, which makes them difficult to compare. It is important to note, however, that there are other significant differences. First of all, Wordsmith tools 6 and the sketch engine use different mathematical approaches to calculate keywords. While Wordsmith uses established statistical measures such as chi-square and log-likelihood, which are used in most publications on cultural keywords (e.g. Baker 2004, 2006: 121–52; McEnery, Xiao, and Tono 2006: 52–57; Jeffries and Walker 2012), the sketch engine uses a simple mathematics approach (Kilgarriff 2009), as its author argues against the necessity of statistical testing in corpus linguistics. Language, in Kilgariff ’s view, is never random (Kilgarriff 2005). Both programmes also use different approaches to lemmatisation: Wordsmith does not allow automatic part-of-speech tagging, and lemmatisation is therefore limited. It can either be done manually – a very time-consuming task, or automatically, which is simply based on lemma lists. These are not provided, but need to be produced manually or through computer assisted approaches. For English, the Wordsmith website suggests a lemma list based on the BNC (Someya 1998), and a similar list can be obtained for German (Naber and Měchura 2014). The advantage of Wordsmith’s approach is that a manual correction of lemmatisation is possible. The sketch engine on the other hand, uses automatic part of speech tagging and lemmatises based on the results of automatic tagging, but does not allow to correct the lemmatisation manually, which represents a problem, as the reliability of automatic part of speech tagging is still limited: [T]agging is time-consuming when carried out by hand, and it is likely to be error-prone when done automatically. In addition, such schemes may not be able to show all of the subtleties of word meaning, which often will not be made apparent until the word is analyzed via a concordance. (Baker 2004: 356)

Finally, the researcher has to decide on the reference corpus, and this decision also influences the software employed. For the analysis of the election manifesto 7.  See (Jakubíček et al. 2013) for the background of the TenTen web corpus family.

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sub corpus, I used the British National Corpus (BNC) for the British English texts and the web corpus DeTenTen 2010 for the German texts. The BNC has become the standard reference corpus for corpus-assisted discourse analyses in British English. It is suitable for my analysis, since it contains a representative collection of texts between 1975 and 1994, roughly the same period as my corpus. The BNC is also freely available for download and can be used in conjunction with independent software such as Wordsmith. Choosing a German reference corpus proved much more difficult: most contemporary German corpora such as the German national corpus (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften 2014) or the Deutsches Referenzkorpus Dereko (Institut für Deutsche Sprache 2015) are not available for download, nor does their software package allow for any keyword analysis. I therefore decided to use DeTenTen 2010, a large web corpus available online via the sketch engine as a reference corpus for the comparison of the language use. The question of course is, whether the comparison with such different reference corpora will influence the results significantly. For two reasons, this should not pose a problem: firstly, the quality of the reference corpus is not critical for the analysis. Scott (2009) demonstrates that even a deliberately inappropriate reference corpus such as Shakespeare’s plays can yield valid results in an analysis of a corpus in modern English. 5.2

The conceptualisation of the Third Way as a lexico-semantic frame

A thorough search for programme and stigma terms in all texts forms the basis of the lexico-semantic analysis of the semantic struggle in the ideological publications of the Third Way. The Schröder-Blair paper was excluded from this analysis since it is more monoglossic in its textual structure and primarily aimed at party supporters rather that at the general public. In order to infer a semantic frame for the catch terms used in this discourse, I need to discuss three questions: firstly, I will ask how the parties of the Third Way construe the field of political competition. I will therefore analyse the use of the names ‘Third Way’ and ‘Neue Mitte’ here in more detail. The second question will be: which slots could be expect to occur in the semantic frame? And finally, I will analyse the fillers for the slots and discuss, whether this semantic frame is also found in the party conference speeches and the election manifestos. (1) We will later see that the JOURNEY metaphors are dominant in the Third Way discourses because of the prominent role in naming the new political ideology as ‘Third Way’. But how are political ideologies more generally represented, and what is the metaphorical scenario formed by this special type of JOURNEY metaphor? Analysing this will help us to understand the differences in the naming



Chapter 5.  Lexical strategies in the discourses of the Third Way 109

strategies of both parties (‘Third Way’/ ‘Neue Mitte’) as well as the use of programme and stigma terms. Both ‘The Third Way’ and ‘Die Neue Mitte’ are essentially decontestations of the political left–right spectrum and the place of social democracy in it. The left– right metaphor as a cognitive structure to distinguish political ideologies is widely established in Western democracies. It originates from the French revolution and referred to the seating arrangement of the French Estates General where the groups opposed to the King’s suspensive veto would gather on the left of the chamber, the groups supporting it on the right. It was almost universally naturalised all over Europe, although its exact meaning has always been vague and relative to a political culture as well as to the historical frame of reference (White, J. 2012: 200). The underlying spatial metaphors are cognitive and symbolic classifications that simplify the complexities of national politics and that carry strong emotional connotations (Lukes 2003: 602). They have been understood as a dichotomy enclosing a political space or a continuum (Lukes 2003: 605), as well as being based on the necessarily adversarial nature of politics (Bobbio 1996: 31). The metaphorical scenario is used as a means of self-categorisation or self-positioning, as well as for the positioning of others, where it is often employed as derogatory. In the ideological publications of the Third Way the metaphorical scenario left–right is partly reinterpreted in keeping with the dominance of JOURNEY metaphors. The reading of the ‘Third Way’ as the ‘happy medium’ between the alternatives ‘Old left’ and ‘New right’ would suggest this. A combination of left and right metaphors with JOURNEY metaphors can be found in Hombach (1998), as well as in Mandelson and Liddle, who do not use the label ‘Third Way’ itself: The polarisation politics between left and right has for too long obscured the way forward for Britain. (Mandelson and Liddle 1996: 17)

The rhetorical function is mostly similar: they are part of the ‘post-ideology’ topos, depicting ‘New Labour’ and ‘Die Neue Mitte’ as non-ideological and using ‘left’ as well as ‘right’ as a means of other-positioning. In order to maintain the groupness of a ‘party of the left’, the term ‘left-of-centre’ is used in Mandelson and Liddle as well as Giddens, who argues social democrats should not worry too much about distinguishing themselves from left and right as this distinction tends to re-establish itself. It is, however, central that ‘a renewed social democracy has to be left of centre, because social justice and emancipatory politics remain at its core’ (Giddens 1998: 45). Giddens also finds the understanding of ‘political centre’ as compromise between left and right problematic and wants it to be read as cooperation across political fences. Because of the political crisis, he argues, the solutions need to be ‘radical’. Here, Giddens adds yet another catchword to the discursive element ‘non-ideological’ and tries to redefine ‘left-of

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centre’, using ‘radical’ (five times in one paragraph!) to underline that ‘centre-left’ is not inevitably the same as ‘moderate left’. Mandelson and Liddle use a similar naming strategy: they refer to the Labour party as ‘left-of-centre’ and consequently use modified noun groups containing ‘left’ to distinguish between themselves and others on the left: ‘hard left’, ‘far left’ and ‘left wing’ are used as stigma terms. The German SPD uses the term ‘Neue Mitte’, instead of the label ‘Third Way’, because it has both strong intradiscursive links within the German political discourse, and interdiscursive links into the discourses of the Third Way. Interdiscursively, the name is linked to the renewal motif of ‘New Labour’. The recontextualisation of the fashionable discursive construction of the ‘new’ from the Anglo-American political discourse (‘New Democrats’/ ‘New Labour’) is an attempt to profit from the positive image of the ‘New Labour’ Government with the young and dynamic leader Blair. The catch term ‘Neue Mitte’ has intradiscursive importance, as it had first been used by Willy Brandt at the SPD party conference 1972 in order to legitimise the social liberal coalition – an intertextual connection Hombach makes explicit before he defines ‘Neue Mitte’ in his text (Hombach 1998: 26). The equivalent to the English term ‘centre’ had to a strong catholic connotation to be used as an inclusive catch term, because up to 1945 the term ‘Zentrum’ was used by the ‘Deutsche Zentrumspartei’, primarily a catholic political movement. Since Willy Brandt first used it, the term ‘Mitte’ has been established as the metaphorical centre of the left–right spectrum that the catch-all parties aim for. In 1994 for example, the CDU-FPD coalition used the slogan ‘politische Mitte oder Linksbündnis’ in its election campaign (Stötzel and Eitz 2002: 288–93). Therefore, the term ‘Neue Mitte’ strategically exploits the CENTRE IS GOOD metaphor, and can be read as a counter-discursive and legitimising move against the conservative claim that the SPD was a leftist clientele party. In summary, we have seen that both naming terms, ‘The Third Way’ and ‘Die Neue Mitte’ are based on the left–right spectrum of political ideologies. Proponents of Third-Way social democracy aim to position themselves in the middle of this assumed political spectrum using the CENTRE IS GOOD metaphor. They therefore construe their political competitors as positioned on the extremes. Hence, the semantic frame of stigma and programme terms is structured in three ways: left and right are stigmatised in different ways, while their own programmatic position is construed as being able to overcome the left–right divide. The semantic frame thus contains one group of programme terms, but two groups of stigma terms, one for the ‘old left’, and one for ‘neoliberalism’. (2) We now need to define slots for the semantic frame of lexico-semantic competition between political ideologies. Parallel to the party example in the theoretical discussion, where the generalised structure of the party frame contained



Chapter 5.  Lexical strategies in the discourses of the Third Way 111

drinks, music and guests etc., we need to ask what the general properties of political ideologies in the twentieth century are. I suggest five general properties of partypolitical competition, which, together with the three-way division of programme and stigma terms, will form the slots of the semantic frame: – – – – –

Naming; Values; State activity; Principles of economy; Principles of wealth distribution.

Catch terms for the purpose of naming are widespread in political discourse, as they easily allow covert biased predication, as discussed above using the example of ‘terrorist’/ ‘freedom fighter’. Further important types of catch term are those expressing values, as they form the basis of political argumentation and are heavily contested in the discourses of New Labour and ‘Die Neue Mitte’. The three categories of ‘state activity’, ‘principles of economy’ and ‘principles of wealth distribution’ are derived from the main ideological battle grounds of the twentieth century. The role of the state has always been a central question of political ideologies. As a result of the historical breakdown of feudalism, a strong opposition to government interference developed, because the interests of the rising middle classes were no longer compatible with absolute monarchy and the interest of landed aristocracy. However, the resulting ideology of liberalism occupies quite a wide range in the spectrum between the opposition to state interference and the suggestion of the necessity of having a strong state: classical liberalism wants to minimise state interference, but still sees the state as a precondition for negative freedoms. Modern (social) liberals, however, see a much stronger role for the state as enabling individuals to live up to their potential: the state has to guarantee positive freedom. Only anarchists of various descriptions see the state as unnecessary and completely inhumane. The extreme of a strong state was argued for by the social democratic and labour movement in the early twentieth century, which believed in nationalisation and planning. Only towards the middle of the twentieth century did they move towards a mixed economy. But the core belief was stable: Keynesian economics as the basis of social democratic and labour ideology was based on the necessity of market regulation by the state. The ideological battleground over the ideal type of economy forms a further semantic field of the frame. The extremes are radical free-market positions and proponents of a totally planned economy. The laissez faire (‘let them act’) position of classical market liberals is opposed to all forms of regulation of markets, including the labour market. Social liberalism on the other hand sees the necessity of regulation as a result of the Wall Street Crisis of 1929. Keynes rejected the belief

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in the self-regulation of markets, since the level of employment is determined by the aggregate demand of an economy, part of which is government spending as well as government investment and taxation. Socialists take the other extreme of the spectrum, arguing that welfare for the people can only be produced and guaranteed by the state. The final ideological dimension of the twentieth century considered here is the type of wealth distribution seen as just. Whilst conservatives argue that inequality is a natural state, liberals fight for equality of opportunity: the same chance to win or lose. Since equality of opportunity does not seem to be the natural state and unrestrained pursuit of profit leads to strong inequality, social liberals see the welfare state as a necessary measure to guarantee equality of opportunities. This meritocratic approach is opposed by socialists. In their view, it does not take into account that wealth distribution in capitalist societies reflects the power differences in society. They also criticise meritocratic ideologies, because they lead to a type of social Darwinism that infringes on individual liberties. 5.3 5.3.1

The Realisation of the Third Way frame in Germany and the UK Ideological publications and party conference speeches

Table 2 provides an overview of the catch terms found in the ideological publications of the corpus. They are the fillers of the semantic frame which has been developed. In the following analysis I will, for reasons of space, focus on the most salient commonalities and differences in the semantic frame presented for the ideological publications, to then discuss how it applies to party conference speeches and election manifestos. Firstly, all three ideological publications construe three competing ideologies as I expected from the metaphorical term ‘Third Way’, picturing the preferred political ideology as the middle way: – Giddens: Old-style social democracy – Third Way – Neoliberalism; – Mandelson: Old Labour – New Labour – New Right; – Hombach: staatsgläubige Sozialdemokratie  – Neue Mitte  – unreflektierter Marktliberalismus. While Hombach uses names with a strong evaluative component (‘staatsgläubige Sozialdemokratie’/ ‘statist social democracy’ – ‘oberflächlicher Vulgärsozialismus’/ ‘superficial vulgar socialism’), Giddens chooses less clearly evaluative terms in order to create a more academic style. He uses separate text boxes to summarise his analyses in keywords.

Chapter 5.  Lexical strategies in the discourses of the Third Way 113 Table 2. Semantic frame of programme and stigma terms in the discourses of the Third Way Slots

Naming

Fillers Stigma terms for old labour/old social democracy

Programme terms for the Third Way

Stigma terms for neoliberalism (Giddens, Hombach)/new right (Mandelson)

Hombach

Mandelson/ Giddens

Hombach

Mandelson/ Giddens

Hombach

altes Denken des Nachkriegsstaates; Staatssozialismus; staatsgläubige Sozialdemokratie

(death of) socialism, old-style social democracy, classical social democracy, old Labour, Bennite excesses

Neue Mitte

New Labour (Mandelson) oberflächlicher Vulgärliberalismus, unreflektierter Third Way (Giddens) Marktliberalismus Neoliberalismus Reiner Ökonomismus Ideologie

Ideologie

Ideale

State activity

Versorgungsstaat Umverteilungsstaat Rund-um-sorglos-Staat Erzieher und Obrigkeit Ökonomische Gleichmacherei Planung, Dirigismus

state intervention (Giddens)

Values

Absicherungs- und Mietermentalität, Subventionsmentalität

blind belief in state Marxism; state control (Mandelson)

Aktivierender Staat; Soziale Marktwirtschaft Staat als Partner an overmighty and overly Konkurrenzföderalismus high-spending state Starker Staat Umbau des Sozialstaates

social inclusion, one-nation politics social investment state (Giddens), one-nation socialism, stakeholder economy, active government (Mandelson)

undogmatisch und unideologisch; Fairneß, Arbeit, Innovation und Gerechtigkeit; Eigenverantwortung; Rechte und Pflichten; Flexibilität Transparenz, Wirtschaftlichkeit, Effizienz

equality, no rights without responsibilities, radicalism (Giddens), mutuality, social justice ethical socialism equal opportunity (Mandelson)

Deregulierung um jeden Preis

Mandelson/ Giddens neoliberalism (Giddens), New Right (Mandelson)

minimal state (Giddens) laissez-faire, few before the many (Mandelson)

Abbau des Sozialstaates Moral authoritarianism, strong economic individualism (Giddens), pessimistic, mean- spirited view of human nature (Mandelson), xenophobia (Mandelson and Giddens)

(continued)

114 Discourse and Political Culture Table 2. (continued) Slots

Principles and type of economy

Fillers Stigma terms for old labour/old social democracy

Programme terms for the Third Way

Stigma terms for neoliberalism (Giddens, Hombach)/new right (Mandelson)

Hombach

Mandelson/ Giddens

Hombach

Mandelson/ Giddens

Hombach

Mandelson/ Giddens

etatistischer Wohlfahrts-staat; Planung, Dirigismus

centralised planning, nationalisation (Mandelson)

Soziale Marktwirtschaft

new mixed economy (Giddens)

Deregulierung reiner Ökonomismus Markliberalismus

market fundamentalism (Giddens), boom and bust (Mandelson)

penal income tax rates government-led job creation (Mandelson)

Eigenverantwortung, Gleichheit am Start, Chancengleichheit

Principles Tonnenideologie hohe Steuern, of wealth distribution Gleich-macherei

Angebotspolitik von links

supply-side socialism, Versöhnung von Ökono- one-nation socialism, mie und Arbeitsmarkt socially productive spending, Innovation stakeholder economy (Mandelson) Kultur der Selbständigkeit und gesellschaftliches Klima für Existenzgründungen investment in skill, welfare to work, pay restraint, fair taxes for hardworking majority, wise spending, hard work Reunited Kingdom

waste, inefficiency unjustified privilege, deregulation, cuts in benefits, greater inequality for higher employment, social exclusion, divided Britain, opting out of community

Chapter 5.  Lexical strategies in the discourses of the Third Way 115



The keywords for the ‘Third Way programme’ contain many terms from the political lexis used by New Labour as programme terms: The third way programme The radical centre The new democratic state (the state without enemies) Active civil society The democratic family The new mixed economy Equality as inclusion Positive welfare The social investment state The cosmopolitan nation Cosmopolitan democracy



quoted from Giddens (1998: 70)

The text box quoted above contains some of the typical lexical elements of the New Labour discourse. The political position is described as ‘radical’, which is central in the introduction to the 1997 manifesto. It also uses ‘active’ as a qualifier for the civil society, which can be found in both Hombach and Mandelson as ‘aktivierender Staat’ and ‘active government’. ‘New mixed economy’ is intertextually connected to the whole field of ‘new’ phrases in New Labour. Both ‘equality as inclusion’ and ‘social investment state’ are keywords that are part of the redefinition of social welfare. While Mandelson and Giddens clearly situate the programme terms between stigma terms for left and right as a ‘middle way’ for the ‘centre’ of society, Hombach does not do so to the same extent. Although he establishes stigma names for both competing positions, his analysis and criticism is more focused on the crisis of the welfare state and the corporatist system with more stigma terms directed against traditional social democratic positions, for example ‘Absicherungs- und Mietermentalität’/ ‘Security and tenant mentality’ as values and ‘Tonnenideologie’/ ‘barrel ideology’ as a stigma term for the redistributive policies of the old SPD. Another set of stigma terms in Hombach is not aimed against the ‘left’ or ‘right’ but instead connected to his crisis diagnosis for the ‘old corporatism’, and so aimed at left and right at the same time: The stigma term ‘Klüngel-Korporatismus’/ ‘crony corporatism’ is set against ‘Innovationsallianzen’ as a programm term. All positions Hombach argues against are qualified throughout the text as ‘ideologisch’/ ‘ideological’ as opposed to ‘pragmatisch’/ ‘pragmatic’, which is part of his depoliticising strategy. One key lexical strategy that signifies the ideological change in the Labour Party and the SPD is the appropriation of conservative terminology. First described by L'Hôte (2014, 89) as a counter strategy of new Labour against the political

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stereotypes used for the left, I argue that appropriation is used by both new Labour and the SPD more generally to position the party as defending the true nature of their nation: Both, for example, appropriate a central mirandum of political discourse in their polities which were originally a conservative programme terms: ‘One nation’ for the Labour Party and ‘Soziale Marktwirtschaft’ for the SPD. ‘One nation’ has been a British mirandum since Disraeli’s fight against extreme individualism within conservatism and his warning that Britain might end up divided into two nations, into rich and poor (Heywood 2007: 83). Originally a conservative programme term, it was abandoned by the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher’s leadership. Giddens uses the term without any explanation of its origin, clearly assuming his readers understand it as a positively connotated cultural symbol; however, at the same time he contextualises it with his idea of the cosmopolitan nation, thus avoiding any nationalist overtones: Third way politics is one-nation politics. The cosmopolitan nation helps promote social inclusion but also has a key role in fostering transnational systems of gover(Giddens 1998: 69) nance.

Mandelson goes even further in claiming the term for New Labour by using a denotative contextualisation and calling New Labour’s approach ‘one nation socialism’. He also sets it into the context of the stigma term ‘divided Britain’, which summarises his analysis of the conservative’s legacy. In this context, ‘one nation’ is clearly aimed at conservative voters who should be persuaded by the negative evaluation of ‘divided Britain’, since ‘one nation’, although not used by the Conservative Party as a whole, is certainly understood by many more progressive Conservative Party supporters as a conservative value. Parallel to the appropriation of the catch term ‘one nation’ from the Conservatives by the Labour Party, the SPD introduces ‘Soziale Marktwirtschaft’ into the party’s programme terminology. This catchphrase has been the label for the economic policies of the CDU since 1949 (Stötzel and Eitz 2002: 381) and in the 1950s the CDU used it in its election campaigns as a programme term. The SPD have used the term ‘Marktwirtschaft’ since 1953, using different attributes such as ‘geplante’ and ‘sozialistische’ to distinguish it from the conservatives’ use (Stötzel and Eitz 2002: 382). However, it had become a symbolic phrase for the successful system of the old BRD and the German welfare state since the mid-1990s. Taking it on as a programme term for the SPD, it was supposed to appeal to more traditional voters, as it gave the SPD the chance to communicate clearly that it is part of the liberal economic consensus. ‘Wir werden die Soziale Marktwirtschaft erneuern: Wir setzen auf die Kräfte des Marktes und die Leistungsbereitschaft der Menschen’ (‘We will renew social market democracy: We count on market forces and the motivation of people.‘) (SPD Parteivorstand 1998a: 11). The catchphrase is also



Chapter 5.  Lexical strategies in the discourses of the Third Way 117

contextualised with the Third-Way topos of ‘renewal’ in the headline ‘Erneuerung der sozialen Marktwirtschaft’. It is this extended phrase that the SPD tries to establish as a programme phrase, since it is used in the same way in the economic policy section of the 1998 manifesto. The party conference speeches we find similar programme terms we have seen in the programmatic publications. It was to be expected that Oscar Lafontaine, who did not argue for a Third Way, does not use any stigma terms against what New Labour deemed the ‘old left’ or ‘old Labour’. Instead, he focuses his delegitimisation strategies against ‘conservatism’ and ‘neoliberalism’. However, Blair and Schröder also use very few stigma terms against the traditional position of the Labour and the SPD, and neither speaker actually names this ideology. While stigma terms are slightly more prominent in the conference speeches at the special conferences, they hardly feature in the pre-election conference speeches. In Schröder’s pre-election speech, for example, the only stigma term for the ‘old left’ is ‘Verteilungsstaat’ / ‘distribution state’ as opposed to ‘aktivierender Staat’/’activating state’. This represents the central change of the idea of the state in Schröder’s version of the ‘Third Way’ and therefore the stigma term is used more as a negative defining element than as a delegitimising term. A similar pattern can be found in Blair’s pre-election speech of 1996, where he contrasts ‘big government’ and ‘better government’. The stigma term against the conservatives, however, form a connected argumentative frame to blame the government for the apparent crisis – in Blair’s case ‘self-interest’ and ‘elitism’ as values result in a ‘divided society’. This pattern of stigma and programme terms can be explained with the function of leader’s speeches at party conferences: its primary audience is still the party, and the leaders need to unite the party behind their leadership, hence they concentrate on the common ideological values of the party as well as the common opponent, especially before a general election. This is even more important for Schröder, who seeks votes from delegates to confirm him as chancellor candidate. Dividing the party into new and old, and stigmatising old positions would not have been helpful in this situation. In the programmatic texts, however, the proponents of the ‘Third Way’ wanted to reposition the party between left and right and therefore employed the semantic frame to its full extent. 5.3.2 The Third Way semantic frame in political competition: Election manifestos The following discussion of the lexis in the election manifestos will supply a broader context to the analysis of political lexis presented so far: For the purpose of a synchronic comparison, the manifestos of the largest competitor of the Labour Party and the SPD in 1997/98, as their terminology is of course shaped in

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opposition to the political competition At the heart of the catch term analysis will be the 1997/98 and 2001/2002 manifestos, since they fall historically into the core time of the modernisation discourse. In this section, I will discuss whether the three-way division of the semantic frame is applicable to the election manifestos of the Labour Party and the SPD in the late 1990s and early 2000s, in order to understand whether there are genre-specific differences in the use of programme and stigma terms. In the subsequent and more detailed analysis of some catch terms, the earlier manifestos of Labour and the SPD will be used as a point of comparison in keeping with the diachronic approach of this chapter. An analysis of the catch terms in the 1997/1998 manifestos of the Conservative Party/the CDU will capture how the programme and stigma terms of Labour and the SPD are interconnected with the terminology of the political competition. The three-way division of the semantic frame is most apparent in the 1997 Labour manifesto and less so in the 2001 manifesto. The main motif of the 1997 Labour manifesto is ‘new politics’ and the ‘renewal of Britain’. The programme terms ‘new Labour’, ‘renewal’ and ‘new politics’ stand in opposition to the stigma terms ‘dogma’, ‘doctrine’ and ‘outdated ideology’. These semantic oppositions legitimise the politics of the Third Way as being different from the old political ideologies, even to the extent of being non-ideological and pragmatic: ‘New Labour is a party of ideas and ideals but not of outdated ideology. What counts is what works’ (The Labour Party 1997: 4). Here, the party-political discourse is depoliticised. The text does not give political alternatives or open the discursive space, and there is no political vision: ‘What counts is what works’ is a non-political phrase, unconnected to political values. Another main ideational motif of this introduction, which is strongly linked to the motif of ‘renewal’, is the motif of modernisation. ‘Modern’ is used ten times as a positive evaluative attribute for policy elements without being established as a political value. Finlayson (2003: 76–80) describes the use of ‘modern’ in Labour’s language as what I call a construction of necessity: opponents of modernisation are opponents of progress and justice. Therefore, the use of ‘modern’ as part of many programme terms in the manifestos is a clear depoliticisation strategy. Similarly to Mandelson and Liddle (1996), the introduction of 1997 also adopts an old Conservative programme term as its own programme term: ‘one nation’. How is this construal of the Labour Party situated in the field of the political competition? In the 1997 Conservative manifesto, the Conservatives name Labour’s ideology the ‘socialist model’, using traditional stigma terms such as ‘state action’, ‘red tape’, ‘radical reform’, ‘taxation’, ‘stagnation’ and ‘nationalised compassion’. It is this discourse of radical alternatives that the Labour manifesto of 1997 aims to overcome by offering a ‘Third Way’ and by distancing themselves against



Chapter 5.  Lexical strategies in the discourses of the Third Way 119

the interpretation of them as a statist and socialist party. Within their manifesto, the Conservatives position themselves as economic liberals as clearly illustrated by the programme terms ‘personal ownership’, ‘free market’, ‘free competition’ and ‘low tax economy’. There is also an attempt to reinterpret Labour’s programme terms as Conservative stigma terms: There is, of course, an alternative on offer: to load costs on business while calling it ‘stakeholding’; to increase the role of the state, while calling it ‘the community’; to succumb to a centralised Europe while calling it ‘not being isolated’; to break up our country while calling it ‘devolution’. (Conservative Party 1997: 3)

The Labour manifesto, in contrast, claims ‘welfare into work’ as their programmatic phrase, although the Conservative manifesto uses the same term. The Labour manifesto names the Conservative suggestions ‘workfare’, arguing that ‘workfare’ does not offer ‘real opportunities’. On a lexical level, the repeated evaluation ‘real’ indicates a connotational competition, and the Conservatives ‘Welfare to Work’ programme is characterised as having failed. The evaluation ‘real’ entails that the Conservatives do not offer opportunities, while Labour’s programme is described as ‘ambitious’. The programme is funded by taxing illegitimate profits (‘excess’) from ‘privatised’ utilities, delegitimising the Conservatives policies of privatisation. One important difference between the New Labour manifestos of 1997 and 2001, and the manifestos of 1987 and 1992, is the use of ‘democratic socialism’ as a programme term in the 1987 manifestos. This symbol term has vanished from New Labour’s manifestos, although it is still part of the definition of the Labour party in Clause Four of its constitution. Blair himself still uses the term ‘socialism’ in his speeches, often reflecting upon its meaning in metalinguistic comments and reinterpreting it. It is possible that the term was excluded from the manifestos as it was found to be too negatively connotated by swing voters from the Conservative Party. The 1998 SPD manifesto opens with the title slogan ‘Arbeit, Innovation, Gerechtigkeit’/ ‘Work, Innovation and Justice’, which uses the strategy of contextualisation in order to establish a new programme term for a modernised party: ‘Innovation’. The term is normally connected to technology8 and is now contextualised with the traditional positive catch terms of the SPD: ‘Arbeit’ and ‘Gerechtigkeit’. It also engages in a redefinition of ‘Gerechtigkeit’, as the almost obligatory attribute ‘soziale’ is missing, a change that must have been significant

8.  The ‘Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache’, an online corpus dictionary developed by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, shows ‘technisch’ und ‘technologisch’ as the most frequent attributes to ‘Innovation’.

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for politically interested readers at the time.9 The collocation is therefore reintroduced later, to mitigate a negative effect amongst more traditional SPD supporters. The term ‘Innovation’ can also be understood as a recontextualisation of New Labour’s motif of renewal. However, while New Labour’s term ‘renewal’ has a strong ethical connotation and the quasi-religious connection to a golden-age myth (see discussion in Chapter 5.9), ‘Innovation’ evokes a technical approach to the problems in society and is aimed at connecting with the image of Germany as a high-tech country. In the SPD manifestos in 1998 and 2002 the Third Way semantic frame is less salient than in the new Labour manifestos, as only very few stigma terms are used against ‘the old left’. In 1998, only the term ‘Bevormundung’ can be read as a stigma term of ‘old social democracy’ values. This term is used to develop the central programme term ‘Eigenverantwortung’ and to redefine the status of the welfare state: Ziel des modernen Sozialstaates ist Ermutigung zu Eigenverantwortung und Eigeninitiative, nicht Bevormundung. Wir müssen das Verhältnis von Solidarität und Individualität ständig neu bestimmen. Neue Freiräume für die Menschen müssen das Ergebnis sein.  (SPD Parteivorstand 1998a: 37) The aim of the modern welfare state is to encourage personal responsibility and personal initiative, rather than paternalism. We must constantly redefine the relationship between solidarity and individualism. The result must be new freedom.

Using ‘Eigenverantwortung’/ ‘personal responsibility’, the SPD claims a typical Christian Democrat term, which has regularly appeared in the CDU in the 1980s and 1990s and which was also central to the social policy of the CDU in 1998. At this point, the 1998 manifesto construes the Third Way paradigm of situating the SPD in the centre of the left–right spectrum. This is, however, is less salient in the manifesto as a whole, as it represents a compromise position between the Third-Way modernisers such as Schröder and Hombach, and the supporters of a more traditional social democracy such as Lafontaine. The central programme and stigma term oppositions in the 1998 manifesto are turned against the external other: the CDU. Particularly important is the pair ‘Soziale Innovation’ vs. ‘Sozialabbau’ (‘Social innovation’ vs. ‘social cuts’), which not only legitimises the new programme term ‘Innovation’, but also draws on an established competition of denotation. Both parties use the opposition ‘Umbau’ 9.  See (Klein, J. 1996), who describes programme texts, especially ‘Parteiprogramme’, as insider communication using technical terminology.



Chapter 5.  Lexical strategies in the discourses of the Third Way 121

(alteration or conversion) and ‘Abbau’ (dismantling) which rely on the conceptual metaphor STATE AS A BUILDING. While the SPD interprets the conservative measures as ‘Abbau’, the CDU rejects this interpretation by using the more positive term ‘Umbau’: Die SPD-geführte Bundesregierung wird dafür sorgen, daß es bei den notwendigen Veränderungen fair und gerecht zugeht. Wir wissen: Soziale Innovation, und nicht Sozialabbau, das ist die Basis für wirtschaftlichen Erfolg.  (SPD Parteivorstand 1998a: 11, emphasis MK) An SPD-led government will make sure that the necessary changes are fair and just. We know: Social innovation and not cuts are the basis for economic success. Damit die Leistungsfähigkeit der sozialen Sicherungssysteme erhalten bleibt, werden wir den Sozialstaat weiter umbauen. Daß Umbau nicht gleichbedeutend mit Abbau ist, sondern Fortentwicklung bedeutet, haben wir mit der Einführung der Pflegeversicherung, durch die sich die Situation von über 1,7 Millionen Pflegebedürftigen und der Pflegekräfte durchgreifend verbessert hat, bewiesen.  (CDU-Bundesgeschäftsstelle and CSU Landesleitung 1998: 21, emphasis MK) In order to maintain the function of our social security systems, we will transform the welfare state. Transformation does not equal cuts, but development. We have demonstrated this with the introduction of care insurance, which has improved the situation of 1.7 million people in need of care and carers.

In his party conference speeches on the Agenda 2010, Schröder adopts the strategy of the CDU. He names the cuts in the welfare budget ‘Umbau’ without using the counter-term ‘Abbau’. The speech relies on the opposition ‘Abbau’-‘Umbau’ implicitly: Die Agenda 2010 ist nicht einfach nur ein Programm, ein notwendiges Programm zum Umbau des Sozialstaates. Nein, sie ist mehr: Die Agenda 2010 ist ein umfassendes Modernisierungsprogramm.(SPD Parteivorstand 2003: 60, emphasis MK) The Agenda 2010 is not just a programme, a necessary programme for the transformation of the welfare state. No, it is more: Agenda 2010 is a programme of comprehensive modernisation.

A further striking difference between the Labour and SPD manifestos in 1997/98 is the use of ‘New Labour’ and ‘Die Neue Mitte’. In the Labour manifesto, ‘new Labour’ is used throughout the text (28 tokens) and developed as a brand name. The core programme term ‘Neue Mitte’, however, rarely occurs in the SPD manifesto of 1998 (four instances). It is nevertheless central: the phrase is first used in the headline to the last section of the introduction, which functions as a type of conclusion: although this conclusion contains an old social democratic catchphrase (‘Wir

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wollen Arbeit und Wohlstand für alle’/ ‘We want work and prosperity for all’ (SPD Parteivorstand 1998b: 12)), it redefines its political target group as ‘Neue Mitte’: Wir setzen auf die Leistungsträgerinnen und Leistungsträger unserer Gesellschaft: Auf die hoch qualifizierten und motivierten Arbeitnehmerinnen und Arbeitnehmer, auf die Frauen und Männer, die in Familien und Schulen Verantwortung tragen für Erziehung und Bildung unserer Kinder, auf die vorausschauenden und engagierten Manager und Unternehmer, auf die innovativen und flexiblen Mittelständler, Handwerker und Freiberufler, auf die mutigen Existenzgründer, auf die hervorragend ausgebildeten Informatikerinnen, Ärztinnen und Ingenieurinnen, auf die erfindungsreichen Techniker und Wissenschaftler und auf die verantwortungsbewußten deutschen Gewerkschaften. Das sind Menschen, auf die wir bauen. Zusammen mit diesen Leistungsträgern unserer Gesellschaft sind wir die Neue Mitte Deutschlands. Zu dieser Neuen Mitte gehören auch die Menschen, die ihren Platz in Beruf und Gesellschaft wollen, um ihren Leistungswillen zur Geltung bringen zu können. Dazu gehören auch die Jugendlichen, die Ausbildung und Arbeit suchen, und all die Menschen, die sich nicht abfinden mit Arbeitslo(SPD Parteivorstand 1998a: 13) sigkeit und Ungerechtigkeit.’ We rely on the key players of our society: The highly qualified and motivated employees, the men and women who take responsibility for education in schools and families, the foresighted and committed managers and entrepreneurs, the innovative and flexible SME, craftsmen and freelancers, the brave founders of new companies, exceptionally well educated computer specialists, doctors and engineers, inventive technicians and scientists and responsible German unions. These are the people we rely on. Together with these hard working people in our society, we are the New Centre of Germany. People who aim for a position professionally or in society, in order to fulfil their potential, are also part of this New Centre, as well as young people looking for an apprenticeship and work, and all people who do not just accept unemployment and injustice.

The redefinition is only noticeable if we realise who is excluded from this list: the unemployed, the low-qualified, single mothers, and many more disadvantaged people. It is also in contrast to the 1994 manifesto, which states that ‘Leistungsträger’ are ‘[die] vielen Millionen Arbeitnehmerinnen und Arbeitnehmer … ebenso wie die verantwortungsbewussten Unternehmer’ (key players [are] the many millions of employees, […] as well as the responsible entrepreneurs’) (SPD Parteivorstand 1994: 5). Here, all employees are included: there are no restricting adjectives such as ‘hoch qualifiziert’. Yet, the term ‘Unternehmer’ is restricted as ‘verantwortungsbewusst’.



5.4

Chapter 5.  Lexical strategies in the discourses of the Third Way 123

Ideological decontestation – redefinitions and recontextualisation of lexical elements

Political parties do not only coin new catch terms, they also try to claim miranda (positive symbol terms) which are established in the political discourse of their political culture, and reinterpret them in the context of their ideology. Both New Labour and the SPD claim similar miranda because of their family resemblance as parties born within and connected to the labour movement. The Schröder-Blair paper claims these main catchwords right at the beginning as core values for social democratic parties: Fairness and social justice, liberty and equality of opportunity, solidarity and responsibility to others – these values are timeless.  (Blair and Schröder 1999: 3, emphasis MK)

The recontextualisations and reinterpretations that occur in the Third Way discourses can already be seen in this short quotation: All programme terms are used with restrictions and qualifications – e.g. ‘equality’ is qualified as ‘equality of opportunity’. Furthermore, ‘solidarity’ is contextualised with ‘responsibility’  – a salient Third Way catch term that normally appears in the pair ‘rights and responsibilities’, where it binds ‘rights’ that have traditionally been understood as universal and unconditional into a conditional construction. In the Schröder-Blair paper, the reinterpretation of ‘social justice’ occurs with a negative description of the past without naming it as old Labour/old social democracy: The promotion of social justice was sometimes confused with the imposition of equality of outcome. The result was a neglect of the importance of rewarding effort and responsibility, and the association of social democracy with conformity and mediocrity rather than the celebration of creativity, diversity and excellence. Work was burdened with ever higher costs.  (Blair and Schröder 1999: 8, emphasis MK)

The explicit claim is that ‘equality of outcome’ was ‘imposed’. Implicitly, ‘effort’ and ‘responsibility’ are made new adjacent values to social justice: only matters of importance can be neglected. At the same time the supposedly old meaning is disqualified as ‘conformity’ and ‘mediocrity’, as opposed to the positive programme terms of ‘creativity’, ‘diversity’ and ‘excellence’. These qualifications are made subjectively (‘association with’), but the agent of these qualifications is deleted, because ‘neglect’ and ‘association’ are used as a grammatical metaphor – a nominalisation. This is a strategy of mitigation: that Schröder and Blair as the writers of the paper agree with the negative evaluation is an inference and can always be rejected, the

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authors can therefore not be held responsible for that negative evaluation. That the cost of work has risen because of the redistribution is metaphorically classified as a problem: taxes are rendered as a ‘burden’, which foregrounds the problem of labour costs in an international market and backgrounds the function of taxes as a source of funding for a fairer society. Whether the historical claim that ‘social justice’ was originally understood as equality of outcome is historically accurate does not find agreement in the academic literature on the matter: Turowski (2010, 290), for example, argues that this is historical fiction. However, at least for the SPD in 1998 the understanding that social justice needs ‘more equality of distribution of income, property and power’ was still part of the party programme: Gerechtigkeit erfordert mehr Gleichheit in der Verteilung von Einkommen, Eigentum und Macht, aber auch im Zugang zu Bildung, Ausbildung und Kultur. Gleiche Lebenschancen bedeuten nicht Gleichförmigkeit, sondern Entfaltungsraum für individuelle Neigungen und Fähigkeiten aller.  (SPD Parteivorstand 1998b: 12) In order to have justice, we need greater equality in the distribution of income, property and power but additionally equality in access to education, training and culture. Equal opportunities do not always mean uniformity, but the space to develop individual interests and skills for everybody.

The party programme here denies exactly the negative values that the SchröderBlair paper ascribes to ‘equality’. Here, ‘equality’ is quite explicitly not uniformity (‘Gleichförmigkeit’), and equal outcome is qualified as relating to more equality in distribution. This definition has to be read in the context of ‘Bedarfsgerechtigkeit’: traditionally, social democracy used redistribution to produce equality of opportunities, and the satisfaction of basic needs was deemed to be a right (Hegelich, Knollmann, and Kuhlmann 2011: 47–48). In the Schröder-Blair paper the contextualisation with the metaphor of ‘tax burden’ signifies a shift in the focus towards the concept of ‘Leistungsgerechtigkeit’ or meritocracy, because it implies that taxes have an unfair impact on work. In Hombach, this shift is phrased much more openly: Gerechtigkeit bedeutet, daß jeder den größten Teil dessen, was er durch eigene Kraft verdient, in der Tasche behalten kann. (Hombach 1998: 84) Justice means allowing every man to retain the lion’s share of what he has produced by his own efforts. (Hombach 2000: 50)

In The Third Way, Giddens attempts a different reinterpretation of social justice and equality: equality is redefined as ‘inclusion’, and inequality as ‘exclusion’ (Giddens 1998: 102). This redefinition became part of the New Labour repertoire;



Chapter 5.  Lexical strategies in the discourses of the Third Way 125

Labour even created a Social Exclusion Unit. Fairclough (2000: 54–55) analyses the language of social exclusion in detail and comments critically that in the language of New Labour ‘social exclusion’ is mainly used as an ideational metaphor. In its nominalised form, social exclusion is an outcome rather than a process; it is even construed as a condition (‘suffer from’, ‘combat’, ‘reduce’). Levitas (1998: 7–28) argues that three discourses are associated with the discourse on inclusion and exclusion: – a redistributionist discourse; – a social integrationist discourse; – a moral underclass discourse. She also identifies a changing dominance from redistributionist discourse to moral underclass discourse in New Labour. Referring to a speech by Harriet Harman (at this time minister for social security), Fairclough (2000: 57) demonstrates how a social integrationist discourse of welfare to work is integrated with a moral underclass discourse: Work is central to the Government’s attack on social exclusion. Work is the only route to sustained financial independence. But it is also much more. Work […] is not just about earning a living. It is a way of life. Work helps to fulfil our aspirations  – it is the key to independence, self-respect and opportunities for advancement … Work brings a sense of order that is missing from the lives of many unemployed young men. [… The socially excluded] and their families are trapped in dependency. They inhabit a parallel world where income is derived from benefits, not work; where school is an option not a key to opportunity; and where the dominant influence on young people is the culture of the street, not the values that bind families and communities together. There are some estates in my constituency where the common currency is the giro; where the black economy involves much more than moonlighting – it involves the twilight world of drugs; and where relentless anti-social behaviour grinds people down.  (Harman 1997, quoted in Fairclough 2000: 57, emphasis MK)

By constructing parallel and incompatible worlds, argues Fairclough, Harman uses an integrationist discourse as well as a moral underclass discourse. The moral underclass discourse is also evident in the proposition ‘unemployed young men lack regularity of life’ in the underlined clause. Giddens’ redefinition of equality differs from the use of the exclusion discourse by New Labour politicians. He rejects the model of equality of opportunity as being ‘neoliberal’: in his view, it is a radical meritocratic model which would create deep inequalities of outcome and threaten social cohesion (Giddens 1998: 101). It is also self-contradictory, since large inheritances would be the result of radical meritocracy on the one hand, and would destroy it on the other. As an alternative

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he introduces the ideas of inclusion and exclusion, analysing the problem of exclusion as twofold: construing society metaphorically as a hierarchy, he distinguishes ‘exclusion at the bottom’  – the exclusion from opportunities in society  – from ‘exclusion at the top’ – a voluntary withdrawal from society by the rich. Giddens sees exclusion at the top and exclusion at the bottom as causally linked: ‘Limiting the voluntary exclusion of the elites is central to creating a more inclusive society at the bottom’ (Giddens 1998: 105). This is clearly part of a social integrationist discourse, and Giddens’ approach is much broader than the focus on the exclusion at the bottom by New Labour. Although the keywords ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’ are not used by Mandelson and Liddle, the basis of an integrationist discourse is already established in the narratives they use to demonstrate the problems of ‘divided Britain’. Under the headline ‘reluctantly opting out’ (Mandelson and Liddle 1996: 116) they tell the story of the Hodgsons, a middle-class family who admire the NHS but opt for private education because state education is so problematic in many ways: it avoids ‘any competitive spirit’ and ‘the facilities were poor and undermaintained’. As a contrast, the authors present a narrative of ‘blighted prospects’ in the Cook family, stifled by the inflexible bureaucracy of social services, schools not tackling truancy, as well as drugs and crime on the streets. Mandelson and Liddle argue that both stories show a divided Britain under the Conservatives, a Britain which would be better off with a stronger public sector: Eileen on the other hand, with her £100 a week take-home pay, counts as badly off by most people’s standards. But she does have a job. And because her wages are low she gets housing benefit to pay part of the rent, as do two thirds of council tenants, particularly in deprived urban areas. When Eileen’s pay goes up, her housing benefit is adjusted so it seems to make little difference at all. […] Many people would agree that they deserve to be better off – and in a civilised society they ought at the minimum to share in the country’s growing prosperity. But they are caught in a trap where the world seems set against them.  (Mandelson and Liddle 1996: 121, emphasis MK)

Within this quotation from the narrative, two intra- and intertextual links are established by the use of catch terms. The story is linked to the discourse of the shareholder society on the one hand and the welfare discourse on the other. The New Labour welfare discourse metaphorically constructs the welfare state as a trap for the poor, which underlines the argument for a necessary welfare reform: ‘[…] today’s welfare state too often traps people in long term dependency’ (Mandelson and Liddle 1996: 73). Giddens also connects his reinterpretation of equality to the welfare discourse under the common headline ‘The Social Investment State’. He argues against



Chapter 5.  Lexical strategies in the discourses of the Third Way 127

Beveridge’s negative welfare programme (war on Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness) for a positive concept of welfare ‘which is functional for wealth creation’ (Giddens 1998: 117). Although Giddens stresses that welfare is ‘not in essence an economic concept’, his language clearly draws on an economic discourse: The aim of the welfare state is ‘investment in human capital wherever possible’ (Giddens 1998: 117). ‘Welfare expenditure […] should be switched to human capital investment’ (Giddens 1998: 122), and the programme term for the new concept is the ‘Social Investment State’. This is a recontextualisation of an economic discourse into the welfare discourse and a metaphorical dehumanisation of people into capital, a process which is typical of capitalist economic theories.10 The catch term ‘human capital’ also occurs in all publications under analysis here. Although elements of an economic discourse have always been part of the political discourse, they now seem to dominate it, not only concerning the topic of welfare. The lexis used in the headlines of the Schröder-Blair paper for example are almost all from this background: – – – – – – –

‘Supply-side agenda for the left’; ‘Robust and competitive market framework’; ‘Sustainable growth’; ‘Adaptability, flexibility, knowledge-based economy’; ‘Active government/active labour market policy for the left’; ‘Modern social democrats’; ‘Sound public finances’.

In Hombach  – and also in the SPD election campaign of 1998 for the German Bundestag – a network of compositions with ‘Innovation’ dominate the language, which are also part of an economic discourse: – – – – – – –

‘Innovationssystem’/ ‘system of innovation’; ‘Innovationshemmnis’/ ‘barrier of innovation’; ‘zu geringe Innovationsgeschwindigkeit’/ ‘too low speed of innovation’; ‘Innovationsregime’/ ‘regime of innovation’; ‘Innovationsblockaden’/ ‘barrier of innovation’; ‘Innovationsallianzen’/ ‘alliances of innovation’; ‘Innovationsdruck’/ ‘pressure of innovation’.

However, even the ideological discourse itself shows lexical elements of an economic discourse, rendering the ideological position as a brand or trademark:

10.  For a historical analysis of ideological metaphors of capitalism, see (Goatly 2007: 335).

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It is the other brand of socialism – the ethical approach – that has unsurprisingly stood the test of time (Mandelson and Liddle 1996: 30, emphasis MK) The trademark of this approach is the New Centre in Germany and the Third Way in the United Kingdom. (Blair and Schröder 1999: 2, emphasis MK)

The ‘redefinition of equality’ and ‘social justice’ as ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’, and the recontextualisation of political discourses into economic discourses is also evident in the German discourse of the new centre ground. Although the catch term pair ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ does not appear in the German discourse, the term ‘Teilhabegesellschaft’ includes a similar evaluation. While New Labour’s language focuses on exclusion and on a moral discourse, ‘Teilhabegesellschaft’ foregrounds the positive attitudes. Whilst ‘social exclusion’ appears regularly in the New Labour discourse, ‘Soziale Ausgrenzung’ is not an established catchword in the German social democratic discourse. ‘Teilhabe’, however, appears regularly. Hegelich et al. (2011: 49) argue that the term was chosen to obfuscate the marketcentred quality of the welfare reform discourse in Germany. This becomes clear in the Schröder-Blair paper, which intertwines the British discourse elements of inclusion and exclusion with the German ‘Teilhabe’: […] prolonged unemployment also damages individual life chances in other ways and makes it more difficult for individuals to participate fully in society. A welfare system that puts limits on an individual’s ability to find a job must be reformed. Modern social democrats want to transform the safety net of entitlements into a springboard to personal responsibility.   (Blair and Schröder 1999: 81)

In the German version, the verb ‘participate’ is translated as ‘macht gesellschaftliche Teilhabe schwieriger’. The awareness of the established programme terms is noticeable throughout the Schröder-Blair paper and is discussed in the next part of this chapter. The redefining metaphor complex in the last paragraph of the quotation is almost a literal citation from Hombach: ‘Wir müssen den Sozialstaat vom Sicherheitsnetz zum Trampolin machen, von der Hängematte zum Sprungbrett’ (Hombach 1998: 18). Here, the traditional metaphor for the welfare state, ‘safety net’, is replaced by a new metaphor, ‘springboard’. The reason is not as obvious in the text of the Schröder-Blair paper as it is in Hombach’s text. Hombach reinterprets the ‘safety net’ as a ‘hammock’ (Hängematte) implying that the laziness of welfare recipients to pick up work is caused by a welfare system that is constructed as a ‘safety net’. This reading is also possible for the Schröder-Blair paper: the new programme term and metaphor ‘springboard’ is extended into ‘springboard into personal responsibility’. The presumption is therefore that a safety net does not give people the chance to accept personal responsibility for their lives. Part of this redefinition process is also the redefinition of fairness:



Chapter 5.  Lexical strategies in the discourses of the Third Way 129

Das Merkmal linker Politik ist Fairneß – gegenüber denen, die Hilfe brauchen, aber auch gegenüber denen, die Hilfe leisten sollen. (Hombach 1998: 198) The catchword of left-wing politics is fairness, i.e. social justice for those who need assistance but also for those who pay for it. (Hombach 2000, 135) People rightly demand high-quality public services and solidarity for all who need help – but also fairness towards those who pay for it. All social policy instruments must improve life chances, encourage self-help and promote personal responsibil(Blair and Schröder 1999: 85) ity.

This meaning of fairness – recipients of social benefits have a responsibility to keep the costs low – is presupposed in the evaluational contextualisation at the beginning of the Schröder-Blair paper, where the core values of social justice, equality and solidarity are quoted in pairs: ‘Fairness and social justice, liberty and equality of opportunity, solidarity and responsibility to others – these values are timeless’ (Blair and Schröder 1999: 3). These pairs redefine the core values: ‘Social justice’ must be fair to the tax payer, and solidarity requires responsibility to society. Although an explicit redefinition of ‘solidarity’ does not appear to be in the texts in this part of my corpus, it is nevertheless clear in the broader discourse-historical context: Lessenich (2003) argues that ‘solidarity’ in traditional social democracy was understood as a promise of mutual help within a group. The mutuality of solidarity in systems such as the state pension or the provision of universal health care was deemed a necessity because of a common fate and common risks. The knowledge that we will be old and in need of support one day legitimised a publicly funded pension system. Nevertheless, even under conditions of uncertainty, whether we personally will become seriously ill makes the need for solidarity to provide help for the ill seem necessary. Furthermore, the long-term solidarity of the welfare state was legitimate because poverty was seen as the result of social and political circumstances. The new metaphor ‘Solidarität darf keine Einbahnstraße sein’ is therefore a clear reinterpretation of the concept (Lessenich 2003: 1053). 5.5

Evidence of context-sensitivity of political lexis in the Schröder-Blair paper

In the Schröder-Blair paper, the awareness of the lexical differences is made explicit for the names chosen to represent the new political movement: The trademark of this approach is the New Centre in Germany and the Third Way in the United Kingdom. Other social democrats choose other terms that suit their own national cultures. But though the language and the institutions may differ, the motivation is everywhere the same. (Blair and Schröder 1999: 2)

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The Schröder-Blair paper is an ideal object for observations on the interdependence between political language and the political culture, since it has been published in English and German, and both texts differ considerably at the lexical level. Christina Schäffner (2003) has analysed the translation of the Schröder-Blair paper from the perspective of translation studies in great detail, since the cultural dependency of the wording is important for future translations of political and ideological documents. In this section, I review Schäffner’s findings and elaborate upon them in order to give a more detailed account of the text-context relation in the discourse of the Third Way, as it can be inferred from the two versions of this text. The differences between the two texts already begin with the title of the publication: Europe: The Third Way/Die Neue Mitte  – Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder  (Blair and Schröder 1999) Der Weg nach vorne für Europas Sozialdemokraten. Ein Vorschlag von Gerhard (Schröder and Blair 1999) Schröder und Tony Blair11

Schäffner (2003: 28) observes that the English title only gives the names of the new approaches and the (official) authors, whereas the German title signals an evaluation of the new approach, using a JOURNEY metaphor where ‘forward’ is positively connotated. She also reads ‘ein Vorschlag’ as a ‘kind of genre descriptor’. I would like to argue that in combination, this is quite a significant cultural adaptation: whilst the English title does not signal any evaluation or deliberately set any expectations, the German title starts the publication with a positive evaluation and a strong hidden assumption. The genre descriptor suggests that the addressees of this paper have yet to follow the suggested path. Of course, it could be argued that this is aimed at other European social democrats. However, given the context of the German social democrats just having lost their more traditionally positioned leader Oskar Lafontaine, it can be inferred that the German SPD is included in the group of social democratic parties that have yet to follow this new way forward. Schäffner (2003: 38) also points out that major changes in the German text are due to differences in the representation of interest groups in German corporate society and the British liberal tradition, which is also reflected in the differences in the ideologies of New Labour and the SPD of the New Centre. Our countries have different traditions in dealings between state, industry, trade unions and social groups, but we share a conviction that traditional conflicts at the workplace must be overcome. This, above all, means rekindling a spirit of

11.  Literally: ‘The way forward for Europe’s Social Democrats. A proposal by Gerhard Schröder and Tony Blair’



Chapter 5.  Lexical strategies in the discourses of the Third Way 131

community and solidarity, strengthening partnership and dialogue between all groups in society and developing a new consensus for change and reform. We want all groups in society to share our joint commitment to the new directions set out in this Declaration [sic!]. (Blair and Schröder 1999: 32, emphasis MK) Unsere Staaten haben unterschiedliche Traditionen im Umgang zwischen Staat, Industrie, Gewerkschaften und gesellschaftlichen Gruppen, aber wir alle teilen die Überzeugung, daß die traditionellen Konflikte am Arbeitsplatz überwunden werden müssen. Dazu gehört vor allem, die Bereitschaft und die Fähigkeit der Gesellschaft zum Dialog und Konsens wieder neu zu gewinnen und zu stärken. Wir wollen allen Gruppen ein Angebot unterbreiten, sich in die gemeinsame Verantwortung für das Gemeinwohl einzubringen. (Schröder and Blair 1999: 33–34, emphasis MK)

Despite both versions highlighting the differences in political culture, they also stress the united conviction to overcome conflicts between interest groups in the economy. Schäffner (2003: 38) shows that the authors have adapted the second part accordingly: in the English text, the programme term ‘spirit of community’ is added, pointing to the communitarian tradition of New Labour. Individuals are, in this tradition, created in a local network of relationships in families or the community. Fairclough (2000, 38) points out that ‘community’ has changed meaning and focuses on the responsibility of the individual within the community. Although communitarist philosophy is critical of liberalism, it maintains its critical element against state involvement in communities and the economy. It is important to understand that the German tradition of a corporate society differs from the communitarian approach: on a national level, tripartite negotiations between unions, employers’ associations, and the government have been part of the political culture since the 1960s (see Chapter 3.3). In this context, the programme terms ‘Dialog’ and ‘Konsens’, replace ‘the spirit of community’ and ‘partnership’ in the German text. Schäffner (2003: 38) points out that the concept of ‘community’ (translated as ‘Gemeinschaft’) would not have been familiar as a political keyword to German readers. Nevertheless, a parallel discourse strand to the New Labour discourse of community in the German discourse later, in spring 2000, under the headings ‘Zivilgesellschaft’ and ‘Bürgergesellschaft’. The context of political culture is also important for the subsequent paragraph of the text, where the programme terms ‘partnership’ and ‘Partnerschaft’ appear. Schäffner (2003: 39) suggests that the two keywords need to be read in the context of the New Labour concept of the stakeholder society and the German ‘Sozialpartnerschaft’. I will discuss this in more detail in order to establish the differences in political culture and their influences on the discourse more clearly. In the German political context, ‘Partnerschaft’ is a mirandum, an established symbol term with

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a positive connotation. Originally, ‘Sozialpartnerschaft’ was a programme term of employers’ associations in the 1950s, and as a concept was established to counter the unions. The unions at the time aimed for ‘Mitbestimmung’, a much broader set of rights to be involved in the control over big companies (Wengeler 1995: 59–62). However, ‘Partnerschaft’ has later become part of the compound noun ‘Tarifpartner’, which positively evaluates the German system of self-regulation of the labour market between the employers’ associations and the unions which the noun denotes. At the turn of the century, the term ‘Sozialpartnerschaft’ was even romanticised as the ideal German system of corporatism, originating after the two devastating world wars as a concerted effort to rebuild the country (Rüthers, January 06, 2001). In the Britain of the 1990s, ‘partnership’ is a programme term of New Labour that belongs to the ideological idea of a ‘stakeholder economy’, a communitarian counter-concept against corporatism and for an individualist society cooperating in a community: New Labour has shed 1970s ideas of ‘corporatist government’, of taking decisions with pressure groups and in alliance with certain vested interests, over the heads of the public as a whole – a process akin more to bargaining than to governing. The concept of a stakeholder economy addresses the needs and aspirations of individuals, not interest groups acting for them.   (Mandelson and Liddle 1996: 25)

Fairclough (2000: 128) shows that the main collocations of ‘partnership’ in the New Labour discourse, alongside its meaning in international relations, are ‘private-public partnerships’ and partnerships between government and business. He argues that in this context, ‘partnership’ is developed as a positive programme term for the practice of privatisation, whilst ‘privatisation’ is used to stigmatise the same practice on the conservative side. In the following paragraph of the Schröder-Blair paper, Schäffner observes a change in the text that again can be attributed to the differences in political culture: whilst the English version asserts that Third-Way social democrats ‘support modern trade unions’ (Blair and Schröder 1999: 35), the German text reads differently: Wir wollen, daß die Gewerkschaften in der Modernen [sic!] Welt verankert bleiben. (Blair and Schröder 1999: 37)

The English text restricts the support to ‘modern’ unions, using a New Labour programme term as a restrictive attribute, while the German text construes this as a metaphor (‘stay anchored in the modern world’) and presupposes that all unions are anchored in the modern world: ‘Die Gewerkschaften’ is not restricted to some of them, but generic, and ‘bleiben’ (stay) presupposes that a state is already established. I would like to add that the capitalisation of the spelling of



Chapter 5.  Lexical strategies in the discourses of the Third Way 133

‘Modern’ in ‘in der Modernen Welt’ is ironic. Although certainly an error, it could be read as signifying a proper name and therefore indicating the use of ‘modern’ as a programme term that disqualifies other worlds or policies as ‘old fashioned’, i.e. not suitable.12 The perception of state and government is also different in both versions of the text. In Chapter 3.3 we saw that in German and British political discourse, ‘state’ and ‘government’ differ in connotation. In the Schröder-Blair paper, the German lexeme ‘Staat’ is not translated consistently: it is rendered partly as ‘state’, and partly as ‘government’. Whereas ‘government’ is often used in a positive context, ‘state’ is more often used in a negative context:

‘government does all it can to support enterprise’ (Blair and Schröder 1999: 4)



‘responsibility … can’t be offloaded to the state’ (Blair and Schröder 1999: 11)



‘heavy-handed state intervention’ (Blair and Schröder 1999: 38)

An indicator that the writers were aware of these differences is that ‘aktiver Staat’ is rendered as ‘active government’ in the headline before paragraph 64 (65 in the German text), but within the text as ‘active state’. This might again simply be an oversight, but the change in the headline can also be explained with the greater importance of keywords in headlines, since headlines as realisations of the macro propositions attract greater attention in the readers (van Dijk and Kintsch 1983: 101–3). Thus, it can be argued that in the editing process the headline was deliberately changed into a more culturally appropriate term. There are other important catch terms in the German and English text that have been carefully placed according to the context of publication because they are either important symbol terms in that political culture or have been established as programme terms for New Labour and the SPD of the New Centre. This shows how both sides tried to make the text relevant to their audience by connecting it intertextually. The German text, for example, contains symbol terms such as ‘Mittelstand’, ‘Lohnnebenkosten’ and ‘Strukturwandel’, which are all part of the German discourse on economic policy. The New Labour programme term ‘social exclusion’, a main reinterpretation of ‘inequality’ by Giddens, is translated as ‘soziale Ausgrenzung’, which is not an intertextually established catchword in Germany. The German text, on the other hand, uses the word ‘Aufbruchstimmung’, which is intertextually connected to Hombach’s book ‘Aufbruch’ and the election manifesto from 1998 which uses the term regularly within the metaphoric scene of SPD politics as JOURNEY after a long standstill. The English translation of 12.  For the use of ‘Modernisierer’ as a political catch term see (Klimmt 1999: 1137) or (Nachtwey 2009: 191).

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‘Aufbruchstimmung’ as ‘go-ahead mentality’ is not connected in the same way to the discourse of New Labour. 5.6

Metalinguistic comments as indicators of an ongoing ideological battle between Schröder and Lafontaine

In the German party conference speeches of Schröder and Lafontaine before 1999, there are many prominent occurrences of the discursive strategy of metalinguistic comments (‘Sprachthematisierung’), which can reveal differences between the ‘new Labour’ discourse and the discourse of ‘Die Neue Mitte’. In metalinguistic comments, speakers focus on the controversial elements of catch terms. They are therefore indicators of an awareness of semantic conflicts (Schröter 2008: 51) and a strategy used by speakers to position themselves against a political competitor. One central set of metalinguistic comments that occurs in both Lafontaine’s and Schröder’s speeches is a reflection on the meaning of ‘modern’ and ‘reform’. Blair uses the adjective ‘modern’ regularly, but without any clarification of its meaning. Lafontaine and Schröder openly and strategically reflect on its meaning in their speeches in the context of a prevalent press discourse about ‘Traditionalisten’ and ‘Modernisierer’ in the SPD. Lafontaine criticises the meaning of ‘modernisation’ implied by this distinction as being one that deems the reduction of the welfare state as modern.13 Instead, he reminds the audience of the tradition that connects modernity to the enlightenment and its idea of freedom and equality. This leads him to a value topos that stresses the logical adjacency of freedom and individual social rights. He reflects on the proposed change of meaning using the metaphor THEFT OF WORDS. Schröder takes up the distinction between modernisers and traditionalists in the SPD in a different way: Liebe Freunde, Innovation und Gerechtigkeit – viele meinen ja, das gehe nicht zusammen. Sie wollen in Lagern denken, weil es dann so einfach ist, die Menschen gegeneinander auszuspielen. Die einen, das sind dann die Technokraten und kalten Modernisierer. Die anderen, das sind dann die Traditionalisten und die Verteidiger des bewährten Systems. Die einen, so wird gesagt, verwalten das Wachstum und die anderen die Gerechtigkeit. Das ist keine Politik für eine moderne Industriegesellschaft, liebe Genossinnen und Genossen. Das ist spalterische Politik, die wir nicht wollen und nicht zulassen dürfen. Innovation und Gerechtigkeit, das sind keine Gegensätze. Das bedingt einander. Dies werden wir in Deutschland deutlich machen.   (Schröder 1998a: 19) 13.  See quotation in 6.5.



Chapter 5.  Lexical strategies in the discourses of the Third Way 135

Dear friends, innovation and justice – many think these are not compatible. They want to think in distinct groups, because it is so easy to play people off against each other. On the one hand, there are supposedly the technocrats and cold modernisers, but on the other hand, there are the traditionalists and defenders of the proven system. One group, they say, organises growth and the other justice. That is not a policy for a modern industrial society, comrades. That is divisive politics, which we don’t want and must not accept. Innovation and justice are not opposites; they are mutually dependent. And we will prove that in Germany.

Schröder criticises the same distinction in connection with the election slogan ‘Arbeit, Innovation und Gerechtigkeit’, quoting unnamed voices who associate ‘innovation’ with modernisers who are characterised as cold, whilst simultaneously identifying the ‘Gerechtigkeit’ with traditionalists in the SPD. He argues that these two concepts belong together if a policy is to be successful in a modern industrial society – an argument of logical adjacency that has a very different focus to that of Lafontaine. These metalinguistic comments on ‘modern’ are connected to reflections on the concept of ‘reform’, which precede the modernity question in Lafontaine’s speech and follow it directly in Schröder’s speech: Der Reformbegriff ist unser Begriff. Was ist denn Reform? Unter Reform haben wir Sozialdemokraten in aller Welt und hier in Deutschland verstanden, daß es den Menschen nach der Reform besser geht als vorher. Das ist der Inhalt des Reformbegriffs. Es kann doch nicht so sein, daß Sozialabbau, Kürzung von Arbeitslosengeld, Kürzung von Renten und Abbau von Lohnfortzahlung im Krankheitsfall Reformen sind! (Lafontaine 1997: 56) The word ‘reform’ is our word. What is reform? By ‘reform’, social democrats all over the world and in Germany mean, that people are better off after a reform. That is the meaning of ‘reform’. How can cuts in social security, cuts in unemployment benefits, cuts in pensions and sick pay be reforms? Wir werden klar machen, daß für uns eine Innovation erst dann wirklich taugt, wenn sie Arbeit sicher macht oder neue schafft, und daß eine Reform vor allen Dingen nur dann eine ist, wenn sie das Leben nicht erschwert, sondern wenn sie es leichter macht. Das war der Reformbegriff von Willy Brandt und Helmut Schmidt. Das ist unser Reformbegriff, liebe Genossinnen und Genossen.  (Schröder 1998a: 19) We will demonstrate that innovation is only valid if it secures jobs or creates jobs and that reforms are only valid, if they make life easier, and not more difficult. That was the understanding of reform that Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt had, and that is our understanding of reform, comrades.

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Lafontaine claims ‘reform’ as the programme term of social democracy, and opposes an idea of ‘reform’ that results in social welfare cuts. On the surface, this is directed against the Kohl government and their reforms which changed the terms of unemployment benefits, sick pay and pensions – decisions that, in the 1998 election campaign, both Lafontaine and Schröder promised to reverse. Yet, accompanying this surface impression and underlining its significance, is the fact that this claim is directly followed by metalinguistic comments on ‘Moderne’, which are interdiscursively linked to the discourse of New Labour. Therefore, it can be argued, the thematisation of ‘Reform’ is also one that is aimed against an understanding of modernisation that will eventually result in Schröder’s Agenda 2010. After Lafontaine’s withdrawal from front-bench politics in 1999, and as a reaction to the publication of the Schröder-Blair paper, Lafontaine’s political ally Reinhardt Klimmt added to the criticism of the rhetoric of ‘modern’ politics. He argued that it disqualifies and stigmatises the critics of the Third Way as old-fashioned (Klimmt 1999: 1137). Klimmt’s criticism thematises the linguistic strategy behind the regular use of the adjective ‘modern’ as a closing of the reform discourse in the SPD and New Labour through stigmatisation. In his pre-election conference speech, Schröder also thematises the concept of ‘reform’ and contextualises it with his programme term ‘Innovation’, arguing that a good reform is one that makes life easier, and claiming that his ideas of reform and modernity are in line with the tradition of the successful chancellors Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt. This interconnected thematisation of ‘Reform’ and ‘Modern’ in Schröder’s and Lafontaine’s pre-election speeches demonstrates a significant difference between the discourses of new Labour and the SPD directly before they win their first general elections. While the party-internal discourse on ‘modernisation’ in the Labour Party has reached a certain level of agreement and Blair’s position was hegemonic, the SPD was still openly battling its position, and two different positions were represented by its two leaders. Both employed the strategy of metalinguistic comments to position themselves in this respect. Whereas Schröder and Lafontaine represented two different ideological positions and used metalinguistic comments to clarify these differences, Blair used this strategy from the very beginning of his leadership to claim Conservative programme terms as Labour values. The following is an example from his pre-election speech in 1996: Look at [the Tories, MK] – the tax-cutting party that gave us the biggest tax rises in peacetime history; the law-and-order party that doubled crime and gave us a Home Secretary in court more often than the people he is supposed to be locking up; the farmer’s party that gave us BSE; the party that set up the Scott Report,



Chapter 5.  Lexical strategies in the discourses of the Third Way 137

then, when it found ministerial deceit, tried to ignore it and would have got away with it but for the brilliance of that man Robin Cook. … Time to change. The Tories never did have the best vision for Britain. They just took the best words – freedom, choice, opportunity, aspiration, ambition. (Blair 1996a: 81)

Blair begins by using supposed self-definitions of the Conservative party (‘taxcutting party’; ‘law-and-order party’) which describe their aims. He contrasts them with the data topos of crisis as the result of the Conservative government’s action in order to delegitimise the Conservatives. This is followed by a delegitimisation of the Conservatives’ claim that ‘freedom’, ‘choice’, ‘opportunity’, ‘aspiration’ and ‘ambition’ are their programme terms. Later in this speech, Blair claims ‘spirit of enterprise’ for New Labour by constructing a competition of connotation, delegitimising the meaning used by the Conservatives and redefining it for the Labour Party: When the Tories talk about the spirit of enterprise they mean a few self-made millionaires. Well, best of luck to them. But there should be a spirit of enterprise and achievement on the shop floor, in the office as well: in the 16- year-old who starts as an office girl with the realistic chance of ending up as the office manager; in the young graduate with the confidence to take initiatives; in the secretary who takes time out to learn a new language and comes back to search for a new and better job. These people have enterprise within them. (Blair 1996a: 83)

In his speech at the special conference in 1995, Blair uses this strategy combined with metaphorical argumentation and with the reflection of the use of ‘democratic socialism’ as a stigma term used by the Tories: For far too long the Conservatives have defined what it is to be a democratic socialist. I say it’s time we defined our socialism for ourselves. Reaching out does not make us Tories. Speaking up for the majority does not make us Tories. We can win new friends without losing old values. […] Please let us not fall for this nonsense about stealing Tory clothes when we talk of crime or the family or of aspiration or of duty and responsibility. […] We are reclaiming this ground, because it is rightfully ours. It is they, the Tories, who are the intruders. It’s Labour that provides the real thing. We are reoccupying ground that we should never ever have vacated.  (Blair 1995c: 291)

To sum up, the analysis of the of the metalinguistic comments in the speeches by Schröder and Lafontaine suggested that in 1997/1998 the reform discourse was still ongoing in the SPD, and the two leading figures, although publicly stressing their united position, actually engaged in semantic battles with each other. Blair, however, having already united the party ideologically, used this strategy against the Conservatives.

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5.7

The lexis of election manifestos – A corpus linguistic view

In this part I will introduce a corpus assisted methodology to the analysis of the political lexis of election manifestos. This will add an additional perspective to the triangulation of the discourses of the Third Way. Combining qualitative approaches with quantitative approaches can help to uncover non-obvious discourse structures, especially in large texts such as election manifestos. In Section 5.7.1, I will concentrate on actors and actions in the election manifestos. This focus results from an analysis of relative frequency lists of the manifestos, which are a typical starting point of a corpus assisted discourse analysis (Baker 2006: 47–48). I will quote all relative frequencies as ‘a percent of the running words in the text(s) the word list was made from’ (Scott 2015), following the established practice in Wordsmith. Manual calculations and results from the sketch engine are also represented that way. Analysing these wordlists, I found that among the expected grammatical words (articles, prepositions, conjunctions), the first ten high-frequency items for all manifestos included ‘we’/ ‘wir’ and ‘werden’/ ‘will’. This pattern did not occur in the frequency lists of the reference corpora. I will therefore ask how election manifestos construe actors, and consider who is the subject of processes, and how are they referred to. I will also explore which actions or processes are construed most frequently and why. Section 5.7.2 will then explore whether a keyword analysis can reveal the ideological differences between the two main contenders in the 1997/1998 election. For this purpose, lists of positive and negative keywords between the Labour and Conservative manifestos of 1997, as well as between the SPD and CDU manifestos, are analysed. Positive keywords are words that occur statistically more often in one wordlist compared to another, while negative keywords occur statistically less often (Baker 2006: 125). Furthermore, changes in the programmatic lexis of the manifestos between 1987/1990 and 1997/1998 are identified by comparing keyword lists of the Labour and SPD manifestos of those years. 5.7.1

Actors and actions in the manifestos

The first questions in this corpus-assisted analysis are: 1. Who are the main actors in the manifestos? 2. How are the main actors construed? Election manifestos construe the political programme of an in-group that refers to itself in the first person plural, which explains the high frequency of this pronoun compared to the reference corpora. The lowest frequency can be found in the Labour manifesto of 1987 and the SPD manifesto of 1990, but both are significantly salient:



Chapter 5.  Lexical strategies in the discourses of the Third Way 139

– ‘We’ Labour 1987 compared to the BNC: Log-likelihood 297.45 (p