Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (1999) 19, 215–232. Printed in the USA.

Copyright © 1999 Cambridge University Press 0267-1905/99 $9.50

LANGUAGE AND POLITICS

Moira Chimombo

INTRODUCTION

This is an exciting time to be surveying the interrelationship between

language and politics, both for political and linguistic reasons. The past decade, as
everyone knows, has been witness to dramatic changes in the political map of the
world, reflected most noticeably in the west in the fall of the Berlin Wall in
November 1989, but also, more quietly in some cases, more violently in others, in
countries physically and politically as far apart as South Africa and China. Moves
toward democracy in many areas of the world coincided with or followed on the
end of the Cold War. These moves came about due to a return to democracy of
postcolonial states that had become totalitarian and the granting of independence to
most of the few remaining colonies. Through such changes we have come to see
that “the language of democracy was mobilised against regimes that, in however
perverted a way, were speaking the language of Marxism and socialism”
(Schwarzmantel 1998:183), colonialism, and other totalitarianisms. Between 1989
and 1994, although later in some countries, the vast majority of newly
(re)democratized peoples experienced for the first time in their lives the opportunity
to express freely their political voice in democratic general elections, reflecting a
move from bullets to ballots that appeared to be a “virtual miracle” (Joseph
1998:3). Since 1994, in many places, the optimism has faded as the “illusory
nature of [the new regimes’] democratic institutions and practices” has become
evident (Joseph 1998:3). Even in the long-established democracies, a disturbing
rise in hate speech leading to violence has served to emphasize that speech can, and
often does, provoke action (Owen 1998), while in certain particularly troubled
areas, discourse, especially media discourse, has even been linked to genocide
(e.g., Lemarchand 1994).

Interwoven with these profound political changes, people are becoming

ever more aware of the implications for politics of the convergence of technology
and the arts (Lanham 1993). In a number of previously totalitarian societies, from

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Russia to Malawi, for example, the introduction of new technologies, such as the
facsimile, has already played a direct role in political events, allowing information
in and out of the countries before it could be censored (Nkhalambayausi Chirwa
1994). As a result of the new technologies, furthermore, it is possible that not only
the democratic process but also the form of modern democracies will change
(Glassman 1997), leading to changes in political discourse, at least in the West if
not elsewhere. In the West, on the other hand, the increasing reliance on electronic
technology in the mass media has necessitated a reexamination and reinterpretation
of legislation, such as the First Amendment in the United States, to consider
options ranging from a complete absence of censorship to government control of
access to the media (cf. Collins and Skover 1996). Likewise, the global reach of
the Internet and the difficulties of controlling electronic transfer of information have
been a cause for concern to many governments (cf. Hart and Kim forthcoming).

We are thus reminded of the “deeply political” nature of texts (Lemke

1995:1) by two broadly interrelated moves: “the textualization of politics, and the
politicization of texts” (Hartley 1992:5). Together, these two trends will provide
the framework for a brief overview of recent research on the politics of language
and the language of politics in relation to the discourse of democracy. I touch first
on the context of political discourse, that is, political culture and ideology in the
new and old democracies and the re-emerging manifestations of totalitarianism,
censorship, and linguistic imperialism. Afterward, I examine selected linguistic
features of political discourse and their manipulation for purposes of power,
whether in the old or new democracies, or in the resurrecting totalitarianisms.

THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE

The textualization of politics is integral with its contextualization in terms

of political culture and ideology and its cotextualization and/or
intertextualization in terms of the new technologies and censorship. In this
section, I briefly survey the level of democratic consolidation in certain of the
newly liberalized nations to determine the extent of contextualization of democracy.
I then consider the relationships among democratic consolidation, freedom of
speech, and the advantages and disadvantages of censorship in both the old and new
democracies. Finally, I review the status of modern ideologies as they relate to
postmodernism as well as technological and linguistic imperialism.

Political culture is a crucial factor in contextualizing political discourse. A

major area of concern over the past decade has been the level of democratic
consolidation in the new democracies. Miller, White and Heywood (1998:29) point
out the need both for publics to develop a supportive pattern of values and for new
governments to develop democratic institutions, and especially democratic
precedents, if such consolidation is to be achieved. In their comprehensive
1993–1994 survey of political values of the populations and politicians of former
communist bloc countries, Miller, et al. found that the Czech Republic seemed to
have been the most successful in internalizing and institutionalizing democratic
 LANGUAGE AND POLITICS 217

principles (1998:17). In a 1996 follow-up survey in Russia, they found an

increasing minority willing to express belief in communist ideals. “It did not,
however, presage a return to the old regime, but, paradoxically, open support for
communist ideals—now freed from the chains of communist practice—did represent
an increasingly important, coherent and self-confident element in the new
‘postcommunist’ politics” (Miller, et al. 1998:386). This move toward political
intertextualization occurs frequently after major changes, as populations look back
on the advantages and disadvantages of previous regimes from a new comparative
perspective, in some cases, as in Russia, leading to a new coherence, but in others,
such as Zimbabwe, to a “discourse of disillusionment” (Morrison and Love 1996).

With regard to elsewhere in the ‘second’ and ‘third worlds,’ C.L.R.

James, the well-known West Indian author, makes a telling comment on the
immediately post-independence democracies of the 1950s and 1960s:

British colonial officials have understood nothing about the development of

colonial peoples. They have stood in the way of their forward movement
from colonial status to freedom. The people who understand this had to go
to jail. Gandhi and Nehru [India] went to jail for any number of years.
Nkrumah [Ghana] went to jail. Dr Hastings Banda [Malawi] went to jail.
Nyerere [Tanzania] went to jail.... So you notice that they didn’t learn
about democracy in British schools, they learnt it in the jails into which the
British had put them; and from those jails they taught the population and
the Colonial Office what were the realities of independence (James 1980,
in Harlow 1992:3).

But even the United States has frequently set higher standards for democracy in the
‘third world’ than it has applied to itself (Downing 1990:51).

This context does not bode well for the future consolidation of the newly
(re)democratized nations of Africa and Asia, especially if the international aid
agencies insist on these nations adopting western models of democracy rather than
being allowed to apply their own political intertext. Alatas (1997), for example,
traces the factors that led to the differing outcomes of the imposition of democratic
systems in Malaysia and Indonesia at independence. The former has maintained a
semi-democratic system up to the present, the latter has lapsed back into
authoritarianism. Alatas sadly notes that “if there is to be any force for democratic
change in Malaysia and Indonesia, it will in all likelihood come from extra-
bureaucratic forces rather than from within the state” (1997:162). We have seen
the financial collapse which has recently led to dramatic changes in Indonesia,
although we are yet to see whether these changes will lead to genuine
redemocratization. Elsewhere in Asia, attempts to (re)democratize have met with
varying success. Myanmar is one example of a country where international
intervention has failed to ensure the implementation of democratic reforms despite
the fact that the National League for Democracy under Aung San Suu Kyi won the
1990 elections, although in September 1997 the NLD was allowed to hold a
218 MOIRA CHIMOMBO

national party congress, a sign of possible future progress toward democracy

(Halperin and Lomasney 1998:143–144).

In the Middle East, the awakening of Islamic consciousness, along with

moves towards democratization, has aroused fears about “the perceived absolutist
and potentially undemocratic nature of [Islam’s] political objectives...[because of] a
basic incompatibility between what might be regarded as secular democracy and
God’s law” (Deegan 1996:51–52). This perception raises the paradox that anti-
democratic groups are supported simply because they are secular and so presumed
to be potentially more democratic—but they are not necessarily so, as we shall
notice in the case of censorship. Another issue in democratic consolidation, in
particular in Islamic countries but also elsewhere, is the participation of women,
which is reported to be minimal throughout the Maghreb (Khoury and Moghadam
1995). Thus, we find an interesting cotextualization of the issues of religion and
gender in politics.

Turning to Africa, as in Asia, different countries have had widely differing

success in democratization. Docking and Dunn (1997) note that only six out of 52
African countries can actually be considered democratic, with eight others having
made moves toward political liberalization. Mali is widely considered to be one of
the success stories. While Mali’s new political system has clearly been influenced
by France, in a common form of political intertextualization, Konarï has introduced
a number of innovations to increase transparency, accountability, and
decentralization (Docking and Dunn 1997) which will improve the chances of
developing a locally viable democratic culture based on a Malian political co- and
intertext.

In a different cotextual and intertextual innovation, Uganda’s “No party

democracy” under Museveni has made the country more democratic than prior to
his National Resistance Movement’s (NRM) takeover in 1986. However, “without
institutions, without an ideology, and, finally, without a rationale that can justify its
no-party democracy, [the NRM] no longer has any existence apart from its leader”
(Kasfir 1998:62). On the other hand, Mozambique appears to be locked into
imitation, rather than innovation, continuing “its historical dependence on external
political actors and models with the wholesale adoption of the Western democratic
discourse and all of its concomitant institutions” (Docking and Dunn 1997). Thus,
both Uganda and Mozambique, in radically different ways, clearly reveal potential
dangers to the long-term consolidation of democracy.

In Malawi, one of the six African countries considered democratic,

Chimombo and Chimombo (1996) claim that a culture of democracy, as reflected in
the arts, is yet to take root following the 1994 democratic elections, concluding that
there is little evidence of genuine democratic consolidation. In a related study,
Moto (forthcoming), however, demonstrates how many of the values attached to a
democratic ideology are evidenced in Malawi’s traditional proverbs, a finding
which contrasts significantly with C.L.R. James’ observation quoted above and
 LANGUAGE AND POLITICS 219

which is important for researchers examining the co- and intertextualization of

democratic principles in other supposedly newly democratized nations.

Thus, despite the limited progress made in countries like Burundi, Niger,
and Sierra Leone, and the failure of democracy to take root in Belarus, Myanmar,
Cambodia, Congo, and Nigeria, some positive developments have been noted in the
consolidation of democracy. These developments are seen both in the international
community’s commitment to defending democracy, as demonstrated in Albania,
Guatemala, Haiti, Paraguay, and Serbia (Halperin and Lomasney 1998) on the one
hand; and, on the other, in the increasing emphasis on internal growth of
constitutionalism, civil society, and parliamentary government (Gyimah-Boadi
1998), for example, in South Africa.

One of the major indices of cotextualization of a democratic culture with a

strong civil society is freedom of speech, and the concomitant freedom of the press.
“In the last decade...that brutal threat [of censorship] has seemed to recede as
democracy—at least in a nascent and often in a surprisingly vigorous form—has
replaced tyranny in Russia, eastern Europe, South Africa, South America and
elsewhere” (Dworkin 1997:148). But in many countries, the freedom of speech
that came immediately prior to and following the democratic elections has faded as
the democratically elected governments have slid back toward totalitarianism. In
Russia, for example, “if a free press exists, it is thanks not to Yeltsin, but to
democratically oriented politicians, social and human rights activists, and ordinary,
decent people” (Kovalev 1996:57–58). And in Iran, which experienced freedom of
expression for barely a year after Mohamad Khatami’s election as President on a
secular platform, the regime is once again trying to impose censorship (Sarkoohi
1998).

In Africa, a major problem immediately prior to democratic elections has

been the reluctance of the governments to relinquish control of the media to allow
opposition parties to campaign fairly, for example in South Africa (Mkhondo 1993)
and Malawi (Chimombo and Chimombo 1996). Ghana continues to experience
very little freedom of expression (Obeng 1997). On the other hand, Nigeria
continues to have a vibrant free press, despite the lack of progress toward
democracy, and in Kenya, similarly, “there has developed a kind of freedom of
expression such as Kenyans have never had before.... Yet...neither the Government
nor the opposition has shown any intellectual maturity in what they express”
(Ochieng 1992:189). In Malawi, Chimombo (1998) traces the return of
interference in the media by the democratically elected government, despite the
increasingly democratic rhetoric of the newspapers. However, Chirambo is more
optimistic about the role of political cartooning in sidestepping censorship, claiming
that “the cartoonist acts as a social censor against the social deviant,..expos[ing],
clarify[ing], and exorcis[ing] the insanities, absurdities, and contradictions of
contemporary life, most commonly politics” (1998:196). In this way, political
cartoons are a major cotext in instilling a democratic culture in Malawi (Chirambo
1998:216) in a way not dissimilar to the role played by satire in the development of
220 MOIRA CHIMOMBO

a democratic culture in England in the days of Swift and Arbuthnot (Condren 1997)
and visual images in the politics of the 20th century (Hartley 1992).

In the West, on the other hand, a particularly disturbing question with

regard to the intertextualization of politics is the extent to which supposedly liberal
governments should use totalitarian methods to sustain their democracies. Dworkin
(1997:148) argues, “if we deny freedom of speech to opinions we hate, we weaken
the legitimacy of our entire political system, particularly the legitimacy of the very
laws we pass to protect victims of stereotype and prejudice.” He goes on to
analyze the pronouncements of the new chief executive of Hong Kong, Tung Chee-
Hwa, that the new government must “...strike a balance between civil liberties and
social stability” (Dworkin 1997:149), restating the fundamental need for freedom of
speech in order for the governed to have access to the information they need to
make appropriate choices. Significantly, access to information is not only a
problem outside the West, as Fisher (1996) points out with reference to a potential
new Freedom of Information Act in Britain: “What we need is a government which
believes that, in the long term, freedom of information will lead to better decision
making and a climate of greater trust between the public and politicians” (Fisher
1996:32).

Yet there remains a serious dilemma: How to permit individuals to exercise

their right to information, that is, the necessary co- and/or intertext, and the
corresponding freedom of expression (Article 19 of the 1966 International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) in a responsible way, while allowing
governments to impose censorship “in the interests of national security”? This
dilemma has surfaced in two different but related areas. First, it has surfaced in
the desire of governments to monitor the free flow of information through the
Internet by controlling encryption technology, while software producers try to
ensure that consumers “...are not bugged from the very moment of purchase”
(Banisar and Davies 1998:162). Second, it has surfaced during numerous limited
conflicts since the Second World War, when governments have systematically
manipulated the media, from the French wars in Indochina and Algeria to the Gulf
war and in various peace-keeping operations, denying the public’s right to know
(Young and Jesser 1997). However, recent and imminent advances in technology
have meant that the global media are becoming more sophisticated and thus freer to
access communications and disseminate information without government
interference, revealing a “...sense of purpose that promises much for the public’s
right to know” (Young and Jesser 1997:290).

A related dilemma has resurfaced because of Article 20 (1966 International

Covenant on Civil and Political Rights), which states that no one may incite others
to “discrimination, hostility or violence” while exercising his/her freedom of
expression. This dilemma is seen in connection with atrocities ranging from the
genocide in Rwanda in 1994 to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in Israel in
November 1995, and in incidents of neo-fascist resurgence in the West, where
“...words of hate have turned into the deeds that kill” (Owen 1998:32). With
 LANGUAGE AND POLITICS 221

respect to Bosnia, for example, “True, arms are the immediate instruments of
death, but radical nationalist and ethnicist text and talk manufacture the state of
mind, that is, the emotions, the biases, the prejudices, and the ideologies, that
motivates and legitimates the choice of weapons to ‘solve’ a conflict in the first
place” (van Dijk 1994:6). Even more disturbing, though, is the respectability
being achieved in the New Right, both in the United States and the United
Kingdom, with its “...new forms of racism, forms that disavow racist intent yet
demonize and marginalize...immigrants and lesbians and gays” (Ansell 1997:10),
as race is used “...to construct political enemies with labels such as ‘reverse
racism’ and the ‘loony left’” (Ansell 1997:37). The great danger lies in creating
“...a culture of hate, a culture which makes it acceptable, respectable even, to hate
on a far wider scale” (Owen 1998:36), resulting in “...one of the ultimate forms of
censorship: the obliteration of the memory of a place, as if those lives and
communities had never been” (Owen 1998:38–39).

Some countries, for example Hungary, have tried to deal with hate and
memories of the past by granting amnesties (de Gruchy 1993:6), denying the
political intertext. But it is precisely because the past needs to be acknowledged in
order to achieve reconciliation that we have seen in the 1990s such phenomena as
truth commissions in South Africa, Rwanda, Chile, and Argentina (Harlow 1992),
trials of the former Security Police (Stasi) in the German Democratic Republic (de
Gruchy 1993), and the ongoing work of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in
Argentina, the CoMadres in El Salvador, and the CONAVIGUA widows in
Guatemala (Harlow 1992, Schirmer 1993). In what can only be seen as the height
of ironic cotext in this era of the global village, in the same week, P.W. Botha,
former president of South Africa, was found guilty of contempt of court for his
refusal to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to answer
charges of crimes during the apartheid era, while President Clinton finally
confessed to an affair with Monica Lewinsky. Such political communications leave
us with uncomfortable questions: “Can nations, like individuals, be reconciled to
their past...by working through traumatic events, by telling and hearing the truth?
Whose truth is it? Can nations [like individuals] cleanse their past and start again?
More important, perhaps, can they ensure ‘never again’?” (Chirwa 1997:479).

Such questions relate directly to the (re)construction of truth, the naming of

identities, and the identification of the concomitant ideologies in postcolonial and
post-totalitarian societies. At the root of our identity as human beings is the need to
acknowledge and remember the truth. The problem is, however, to persuade the
perpetrators to accept their responsibility and the victims to agree to reconciliation
(Harlow 1992). In either case, they must name both their own and the others’
identities as constructions “...woven from the warp and woof of cultural semiotic
resources (language, categories, values, practices) in accordance with the learned
patterns of [their] communit[ies]” (Lemke 1995:89) as a prerequisite to
deconstructing and subsequently reconstructing these identities in the new
dispensations, and thus acknowledging each other’s truth (cf. Hall 1996). Such
processes are extremely difficult in contexts of difference, as when, for example,
222 MOIRA CHIMOMBO

westerners construct their self-image through the inferior projection of the non-
western Other (Dunn 1997, Shi-xu 1994) or a “power imbalance of international
identity construction” (Dunn 1997) is assumed. If it is difficult for the dominant
identity, it is even more difficult for the dominated, for “...to control a people’s
culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others” (Ngugi
1986:16). But the interaction between subaltern, marginalized, or dominated
identities and dominant identities is, unfortunately, rarely studied as mutually
constitutive (cf. Grossberg 1996:90), denying the shared context, cotext, and
intertext of postmodern politics.

This discussion then raises the question of ideologies, which are closely
related to social identity in the sense that they are“organized in terms of polarized
structures” of dominant-dominated continua (van Dijk 1998b). One problem in the
postmodern world is whether the multiple sources of identity now recognized,
including gender, sexual orientation, age, race, ethnicity, class, might “...be
accommodated in one overarching picture of society, such as those provided by the
‘classical’ ideologies of modernity” (Schwarzmantel 1998:151). One candidate for
an ideology which could integrate con-, co-, and intertext may be the concept of
ecology extended from the environment to include the ‘whole human’ (body, mind,
and spirit). A second problem is that the whole concept of ideology has, until now,
remained largely undefined, amorphous, with little theoretical grounding, little
appreciation of the need for application of any theory to the issues usually
addressed by “ideological talk,” and scant attention to the mutually constitutive
relationship between ideology and discourse (cf. van Dijk 1998a).

However, frighteningly for the future of humanity, “with the computer, the
problem of identity is moot, and the idea of reflection is transformed into the
algorithm of replication” (Istvan Csicery-Ronay, Jr. in Shore 1996:136), opening
up the related issue of imperialism—the technological imperialism brought about by
such software and media giants as Microsoft and CNN in the postmodern age (cf.
Shore 1996, Chapter 6), allied with the cultural imperialism of English as an
international language (cf. Pennycook 1994, Phillipson 1992). Technological
advances, from the introduction of writing to the invention of computers and the
subsequent emergence of word-processing, made possible the long-term storage of
memories such that the ‘truth’ could be (re)discovered in political texts, alongside
their cotexts and intertexts, at a later date, supposedly without the interference of
human forgetfulness (cf. Shore 1996:140–141).

But technological imperialism has implicated two further problems as

outlined by Griffiths (1997):

First,..the flow of information is still largely one-way and [is] determined

by the economic control of the large Western international publishing
houses and media distributors; and secondly,..when the postcolonial world
wants to employ the resources and technology of the metropolitan world to
speak, it had better learn to do so in voices and accents (for these read
 LANGUAGE AND POLITICS 223

formats and structures) which people in the West want to hear (Griffiths
1997:131).

This imperialism is most clearly confirmed in the fact that 80 percent of the
information stored in the world’s electronic retrieval systems is in English, with the
vast majority of people communicating in English through the Internet (Crystal
1997:360). Far from being a “neutral” international language, culturally and
politically, English is asserting and maintaining its dominance by “...the
establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities
between English and other languages” (Phillipson 1992:47; cf. Pennycook
1994:12). The dominance of English is thus leading, if not to linguistic genocide,
at least to “linguistic curtailment” (Pennycook 1994:14), as, for example,
demonstrated by Yahya-Othman (1997) with regard to the respective roles of
English, Swahili, and ethnic languages in Tanzania. The language planners of
many countries are actually “planning inequality,” whether or not they are actually
aware of the ideological implications (Tollefson 1991). The global village is
bringing about an increasingly English-based textualization of politics.

The above discussion highlights the wide variations in internalization of the

principles of democracy within democratic cultures. For example, although
freedom of speech is usually considered axiomatic in a democracy, the newly
democratized nations differ in the willingness of their governments to allow a free
press. But even the old democracies are experiencing concern as they adjust to
technological advances which threaten their control over the media. At the same
time, the modern ideologies are having to adapt to the postmodern world, with its
contradiction between the global village brought about by technology and the
fragmentation of nation states brought about by the new nationalism. I now turn to
the language of politics to explore how political cultures are constituted by
language.

THE LANGUAGE OF POLITICS

Since ancient times, politicians have been aware of the power of language
to persuade, manipulate, and control. This section reviews selected linguistic
features of political discourse and how these features can be manipulated for
purposes of power, whether in the old or new democracies, or in the re-emerging
totalitarianisms. In the first part, I first look at negotiation and the related forms of
mediation, interview, and argument. I then look specifically at nonliteral meanings
at the lexical and phrase level. Although there are many other features of political
discourse that have been researched, for reasons of space, they will not be
considered here.

Political leaders have, since ancient times, realized that “political talk plays
a vital role in shaping and transforming political reality” (Gastil 1992:470).
However, it is not just leaders who need to be aware of and control the language of
politics in a democracy, but also all citizens. “The most profound implication of a
224 MOIRA CHIMOMBO

textual politics is that by examining the texts of our own community, we can come
to understand how and why we make the meanings we do, and what other meanings
might be made instead” (Lemke 1995:79; emphasis in original), thus becoming
conscientized (Freire 1968) by politicizing these texts.

As Harlow (1992:viii) points out, negotiation, for a while, displaced armed

struggle in South Africa, El Salvador, Palestine, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere
“as another means to resolve long-standing conflicts from the continuing history of
colonialism, decolonization, and ‘post-colonialism’.” Such negotiation is,
hopefully, a far cry from Matthews’ (1972, in Harlow 1992) representation of
black-white discourse in apartheid South Africa:

Dialogue / the bribe offered by the oppressor / glitters like a fool’s gold /
dazzling the eyes of the oppressed / as they sit at the council table /
listening to empty discourse promising / empty promises / beguiled by
meaningless talk / they do not realize ointment-smeared words / will not
heal open wounds / the oppressor sits seared with his spoils / with no
desire to share equality / leaving the oppressed seeking warmth / at the
cold fire of / Dialogue (Harlow 1992:143).

An examination of the discourse of negotiation, as one subgenre of political

discourse might help us understand why negotiation has succeeded in some cases
and failed in others, and how to ensure its success in the future.

In the case of the very South Africa that Matthews had had cause to
criticize, we have seen the positive results of negotiation. The negotiating process
was long and slow, starting in 1989 with de Klerk’s call for a new South Africa.
During this period, the African National Congress had to make the transition “from
the politics of protest and resistance to the politics of negotiation and, beyond that,
of electioneering and administration” (Mkhondo 1993:142), and of course, in the
process, practice the language of negotiation. The first phase of the process ended
with the all-race elections in April 1994, but of course it has continued at all
political levels in the society to ensure the consolidation of the hard-won
democracy.

The success of the South African negotiations is somewhat surprising,

given the strictly hierarchical nature of communication in most societies,
particularly in Africa:

Communication patterns...tend to be top-down, unidirectional, paternalistic

and manipulative rather than being participatory, dialogical, horizontal and
providing awareness of genuine feedback and interaction. The existing
situation has been described as one in which ‘the few talk to the many
about the needs and problems of the many from the standpoint of the few’
(Ansah 1992:56, in Morrison and Love 1996:66).
 LANGUAGE AND POLITICS 225

However, we have sadly seen how negotiation has repeatedly broken down in many
areas, such as the Middle East and Northern Ireland.

On the other hand, in the latter case, Peter Brooke, British Secretary of
State for Northern Ireland from 1989 to 1992, clearly used many key skills in
negotiation, such as listening to all parties, being flexible, and showing discretion
in making pronouncements (Bloomfield 1998). Significantly, although his Initiative
did not lead to a great deal of visible progress toward peace at the time, it laid the
foundation for future talks:

First and, perhaps, foremost, it produced an enduring formula which has

been universally adopted as the accepted orthodoxy for structuring political
negotiations. Second, it was the initial step in assembling and then
addressing the substantive agenda for any such negotiations.... Third, it
was an initial and all-important learning experience of negotiation
processes for the politicians involved. Even if at times it demonstrated
how not to do it, it was part of the evolutionary process of turning
rhetoricians into negotiators (Bloomfield 1998:197).

Mediation in other contexts of dispute and conflict requires similar skills,

skills which may be more developed in women, a key feature being that women
tend to “...see themselves as ‘co-equal’ to the disputants...” (Cooks and Hale
1992:279), “...controlling the process while denying the possession of power...”
(Cooks and Hale 1992:295). This observation may be significant in the current
appointment of a woman, Mo Mowlan, to represent Britain in the ongoing
negotiations in Northern Ireland. Gender differences in mediation contexts are
likely to be similar to those found in the political interview, at least in similar
cultural contexts. For example, male and female reporters have displayed
significantly different discourse patterns in interviewing politicians in similar
contexts, on Australian television, with the female being more cooperative and
emphasizing information exchange, but the male displaying a more adversarial,
competitive style (Winter 1993).

A major feature of the language of negotation is clearly persuasion, which

is achieved through a variety of strategies including specific argumentation devices
and grammatical features. First, argumentation devices include logically relevant
assertions, repetition of key statements, name-giving, and quoting (Sornig 1989).
Each of these devices may be used to present an argument with its “actual or virtual
counterargument” (Sauer 1989:23). In one kind of pseudo-argument,
conversational participants collaboratively support a single position, whereas in
another, they collaboratively dispute “...an absent antagonist’s imported position
and support...” (Kleiner 1998:192) so as to confirm the “rightness” of their own
positions. A major requirement for the citizens of new democracies is to learn both
to distinguish between genuine and pseudo-arguments and counterarguments, and to
structure their own arguments, if they are to achieve the necessary conscientization
(Chimombo forthcoming). If these citizens are able to avoid being taken in by the
226 MOIRA CHIMOMBO

extravagant promises of government politicians in infant democracies, with their

pseudo-arguments against the previous regime or the current opposition, there is a
much greater chance for ongoing consolidation of democracy through the
internalization of democratic discourse.

The grammatical features of political rhetoric are many and have been
extensively researched. The most striking and pervasive are lexical and semantic
features, which, it appears, are identifiable in modern political communication
around the world. For example, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
used key words and formulaic phrases which were adopted widely by both
Conservative and (to a lesser extent) Labour politicians, in the former case
transforming the discourse of Thatcherism, and in the latter, resisting it (Phillips
1996). Nigerian politicians have consistently used metaphors in their addresses to
the United Nations to reflect an Africanist ideology in an attempt to focus attention
away from African leaders’ own responsibility and toward the grim economic
conditions which they seek to blame on foreign adversaries (Akioye 1994).
Likewise, both Peres and Abbas used metaphors during the historic signing of the
1993 peace accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization
(Chimombo and Roseberry 1998:327–328), possibly to emphasize the significance
of the negotiated outcome.

Politicians use, in addition to metaphor, a variety of other forms of indirect

meaning like innuendo and circumlocution, and indirectness appears to be more
common among the politicians of developing nations than among their western
counterparts, with the aim of cushioning the dangers inherent in political discourse
and helping politicians protect their jobs, parties, and governments (Obeng 1997).
In western contexts, United States President Clinton uses antithesis and the
hortatory subjunctive in addition to metaphor in his repertoire of tools of
presidential rhetoric, with varied impacts (Perloff 1998). For example, Clinton has
had difficulty mobilizing the support of the elite members of his party, the
Democrats, as in the case of health reform, but he was able to reassure the public
after the Oklahoma bombing (Perloff 1998:130–131). One of his predecessors,
Reagan, exploited myths about the origins of America to win over the electorate
and deflect criticisms by his opponents (Gastil 1992). And the last governor of
Hong Kong, Chris Patten, made extensive use of presupposition as well as lexical
reiteration to create the myth of Britain’s democratic legacy to Hong Kong
(Flowerdew 1997). Such nonliteral meanings “...constitute a kind of repetition on
a more abstract level of the ideological, without having recourse to literal meaning”
(Sauer 1989:14).

At the same time, it is important to be aware of the general public’s skill in

using the full range of nonliteral meanings in politically significant communication.
In Poland, for example, under the communist regime, the people developed their
own skills in manipulating language to counter those of the government, using a
“lexicon of inequality” (Zaslavsky and Fabris 1982:394, in Wierzbicka 1990).
Voters in Ghana were even able to campaign while waiting to cast their vote in the
 LANGUAGE AND POLITICS 227

1992 general elections without breaking any electoral law simply by using
traditional rhetorical skills, particularly proverbs, which were interpretable in
relation to the candidates, who remained unnamed (Obeng 1997).

The above features, and of course many others, serve their users in the
process of politicizing their texts, and although they have been treated
independently of the process of textualizing politics in this survey, we must not
forget that the two processes are inextricably intertwined. Political cultures are
constituted by language; ideologies are (re)produced through discourse;
negotiations and mediation are conducted through the process of trying to find
shared meanings; politicians and populations both persuade and are persuaded in
carefully chosen words. In engaging in politics, we must use language, and in
using language, we are, whether we like it or not, engaging in politics.

CONCLUSION

For reasons of space, I have been unable in this brief survey to do justice
to the huge amount of research currently being conducted into the politics of
language and the language of politics, leaving us with as many questions as
answers. I have focused on the textualization of politics as a form of democratic
consolidation in the newly democratized nations, but “already one hears debates
about instant referenda conducted through computer-television hookups, inter-active
town meetings conducted through computer-telephone combinations, and much
more” (Glassman 1997:4). These developments make possible a new form of
“mass-mediated ‘direct democracy’” (Glassman 1997, Chapter 11) which could
mean a retextualization of politics, at least in the West. The revolution in high
technology is bound to affect the forms of governance in literate societies. I cannot
help but wonder, however, to what extent the new modes of transmission and
consolidation of democratic culture will filter down to the grassroots, particularly in
the still predominantly illiterate ‘third world.’ At the same time, we have to ask to
what extent the increasing globalization, as a result of media innovations, will lead
to an ever greater standardization of political rhetoric and to an ever greater
linguistic imperialism.

Nonetheless, although we acknowledge the paradoxes in the increasing

complexity of the relationship between power and discourse, and language and
politics, let us not forget the wisdom of Solomon: “The tongue has the power of
life and death” (Holy Bible 1995:Proverbs 18:21), which is not unlike the Akan
adage, “If you speak well, your lips do not offend anyone” (Obeng 1997:78). It
thus seems that text has actually been politicized, and politics has been textualized,
for over 3,000 years. The new technologies have merely made the politicization
and textualization more obvious, and spread them more globally, than at any time
in the past.
228 MOIRA CHIMOMBO

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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This journal, which first appeared in 1990, is making a major contribution

to the study of discourse from multiple disciplinary perspectives. In almost
every issue since it started, there is at least one article or book review
relevant to the interaction between language and politics, power, and
ideology, as well as a number of related issues, not only in the West but
throughout the world.

Index on Censorship. 1972–present. London: Writers & Scholars International Ltd.

This index, which serves as a watchdog on human rights, in particular the

right to freedom of speech, is an essential, invaluable resource for anyone
wishing to have a quick overview of the key current issues prior to
pursuing more academic research on language and politics.

Lemke, J. 1995. Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics. London: Taylor
& Francis.

This book analyzes the use of language to maintain, strengthen, challenge,

or resist socio-political relationships. Chapter 5, on the social construction
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Perloff, R. M. 1998. Political communication: Politics, press, and public in

America. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum.

This book is a comprehensive introduction to political communication from

the early history of the presidency’s relationship with the press and the
public to the current rhetorical presidency in the postmodern world.
Although not giving a linguistic analysis of presidential rhetoric, chapters 6
and 7 are particularly relevant for anyone interested in the relationship
between language and politics in America, with the latter examining what
Perloff labels genres, such as inaugural addresses, pardoning rhetoric, and
crisis rhetoric.

Schwarzmantel, J. 1998. The age of ideology: Political ideologies from the

American revolution to post-modern times. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

This book provides a valuable survey of the history of ideologies of the

modern world, questioning the relevance of ideology to the postmodern
world, but concluding that it is vital to have some overarching theory if
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It complements van Dijk’s (1998a) book.
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van Dijk, T.A. 1998a. Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. London: Sage.

This book takes off from Schwarzmantel’s conclusion, and will no doubt
prove invaluable in its insistence on the need for a theory of ideology based
on a joint psycho-social account of “the social mind in its social (political,
cultural) context” (6). It examines closely each of the rather “fuzzy”
concepts that have been connected with the term “ideology” and builds
them into models for the theory. It is the first in what promises to be an
exciting series of books on the theory and application of ideology.

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