/Discour & Society
/content/10/2/149The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1177/0957926599010002002 1999 10: 149Discour Society RUDOLF DE CILLIA, MARTIN REISIGL and RUTH WODAK The Discursive Construction of National Identities Published by:
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Introduction 1
We start our article by quoting from two booklets we recently discovered: The Xenophobe’s Guide to the Austrians (James, 1994) and The Xenophobe’s Guide to the English (Miall, 1993).
‘When a Stone Age Austrian popped out of a glacier in Tyrol 1991’, James (1994: 11) remarks: ‘he was claimed by the Italians as one of them. A learned commission established that maybe he was lying just over the border by a metre or two, and a television reporter inquired satirically why they didn’t “just look at his passport”’. The moral of this is: even the ice-man after all tho years in cold storage is still as confud about his identity as all other Austrians. Of cour, this RU D O L F D E C I L L I A , M A RT I N R E I S I G L A N D RU T H W O DA K U N I V E R S I T Y O F V I E N NA
A B S T R AC T .The concept of the nation as an imagined community
has gained importance in the relevant literature during the last
decade. How do we construct national identities in discour? Which
topics, which discursive strategies and which linguistic devices are
employed to construct national sameness and uniqueness on the one
hand, and differences to other national collectives on the other hand?
The questions were investigated in our study on the Austrian
nation and identity . Taking veral current social scientific
带小标题的作文
approaches as our point of departure, we have developed a method of
description and analysis of the phenomena which has applications
快乐玩游戏beyond the discursive production of national identity in the specific
Austrian example studied. By focusing particularly on the discursive
construction of (national) sameness, this study has broken new
ground in discour-historical analysis, which until now has mainly
been concerned with the analysis of the discursive construction of
difference.
K E Y W O R D S :
放心买
collective memory, discour strategies, group discussion,
habitus, nation, national identity, topical analysis, tropes, ‘we’Discour & Society
Copyright © 1999
SAGE Publications
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and New Delhi)
Vol 10(2): 149–173
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(199904) 10:2;
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150Discour &Society10(2)
nationalist tug-of-war between Austria and Italy to which James refers ironically tells us nothing about ‘Ötzi’s’ identity, for questions of national(ist) identification only aro during the age of modernity, centuries after Ötzi’s demi. Still, the attempts by both Austria and Italy to adorn their respective ‘national past’ with a historically highly significant archeological find reveal a typical nationalizing strategy of usurping and taking posssion of past contingencies (i.e. casual dis-coveries) by means of transhistorical and, at the same time, de-historizing (i.e.
eternalizing) mythical expansion ex post facto. Making an analogy to the theory of relativity, Rudolf Burger (1996: 40) describes this strategy metaphorically as the ‘nationalist dilatation of time’.
‘The English’ also em to be worried about ‘their’ national identity. ‘[A]s far as the English are concerned’, writes Miall (1993: 5), ‘all of life’s greatest problems can be summed up in one word – foreigners’. He continues: ‘English views on for-eigners are very simple. The further one travels from the capital in any direction, the more outlandish the people become’ (1993: 6). It is obvious that the ego-, ethno- and natio-centric view described by Miall with respect to English people is less an English peculiarity than a general feature of ethnicist and nationalist pat-terns of perception of others.
Naturally, we could multiply nearly endlessly such more or less rious anec-dotal remarks about nationality or the alleged mentalities of nations. But while in
a certain n this might be entertaining, we also know that nationalist attitudes
and stereotypes articulated in discours accompany and also influence political decision-making, and we notice today with anxiety a growing number of nationalist acts of discrimination in many European states.
Far-reaching changes in Europe’s political landscape since the end of the 1980s, such as the transformation of the former eastern bloc, Germany’s reuni-fication, the expansion and deepening integration inside the European Union (EU), together with the persisting debates on immigration and integration, have called renewed attention to the issue of ethnic and national identities. In the countries of the EU, the propagation of a new European identity has been accom-panied by the emergence or reemergence of emingly old, fragmented and unstable national and ethnic identities. Apparently firmly established national and cultural identities have become contested political terrain and have been at the heart of new political struggles.
As the Economist put it in an article as early as 1930 (quoted by the German political scientist Ulrich
Beck, 1993: 99–100):
Economically, the world today acts as a single, common unit. Politically, the world has
not only remained distributed among sixty or venty sovereign nations, but the
national units are becoming smaller, more numerous, with an increasing trend
写菊花的诗towards national consciousness. The tension created by the two diverging trends
has led to a wave of shock, upheaval and collap for the world population.
What the Economist foresaw in 1930 – apart from the fact that today there are far more than 70 nations – is even more the ca today. Nowadays, very opposing
De Cillia, Reisigl & Wodak: Discursive construction of national identities151 tendencies can be obrved: What Beck et al. (1993) name ‘reflexive modernis-ation’ does away with boundaries within or between class, ctors, nations, continents, families, and gender roles. ‘Reflexive modernisation,’ which Beck (1993: 57) understands as a cond epoch of modernity, means the ‘lf-acting’, unintentional, unen and, so to speak, reflex-like (rather than ‘reflexive’ in the n of‘thoughtful’) transition from industrial society to ‘risk society’ which is,
inter alia, characterized by increasing geographic, social, political and partner mobility (Walzer, 1994: 164–6) and with the aggravation and individualization
of social inequalities which cannot adequately be described by comprehensive sociological categories and ‘grand’ theories any longer. ‘Reflexive modernisation’denotes the more or less automatic, unplanned and creeping process of change
亟待解决什么意思that take place in the cour of‘normal’ modernizations and that – although the political and economic orders remain quite constant and intact – results in the radicalization of modernity, in the dissolving of the premis and shapes of indus-
感恩的习惯
trial society and in the opening of ways to other forms of modernity or counter-modernity (Beck, 1993: 67). Counter-modernization, simultaneously a project
and result, a structuring demarcation and a (challenged) contradiction of moder-nity, emphasizes, forms, constructs and reinforces vacillating boundaries anew (Beck, 1993: 100). Directed against the already really existing ‘world domestic policy’, it falls back upon esntialist key concepts of‘nation’, ‘Volk’, ‘nature’,鸟的诗句古诗
‘man’, ‘woman’, etc., and always aims at producing the impression of natural
lf-evident certainty.
The very interrelated but conflicting process of nationalist regression and emancipatory, supranational humanitarianism manifest themlves discursively
试用期转正总结in different modes of legitimation and de-legitimation. Taking Austria as an example for a ca study, we try to illustrate at least some of the most prominent linguistic strategies employed to construct nations and national identities. The theoretical framework of our study is that of Critical Discour Analysis as it has been developed at the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Vienna. And though this framework has been elaborated with respect to Austria,
the theoretical as well as the general analytical findings yield information about some widespread patterns of discursive nationalization within many (counter) modern nation-states.
In this article we outline first some of our basic assumptions about the discur-
sive construction of nations and national identities and briefly discuss the con-cepts of‘nation’ and ‘national identity’ in order to provide working definitions which are primarily bad on the works of Benedict Anderson (1988); Pierre Bourdieu (1993, 1994a and 1994b); Paul Ricoeur (1992); Denis-Constant Martin (1995); Stuart Hall (1994 and 1996) and Leszek Kolakowski (1995). We
then prent the distinguishing features of the approach designated as ‘Critical Discour Analysis’ and, in particular of the discour-historical approach, devel-oped in Vienna, which inter alia tries to uncover discursive strategies of dissimi-lation (aiming at the construction of national differences) and discursive strategies of assimilation (aiming at the construction of intranational sameness)
152Discour &Society10(2)
and which describes a number of context-determined ‘national-identity narra-tives’. This special methodological approach was developed and tested initially on
a large corpus of data in the cour of a recently completed 2-year study which
investigated the discursive constitution of national identities by analysing both the reprentations and the social rituals connected with national identities. We conclude our article by attempting to establish a relationship between the results of our study and the theoretical assumptions on nation, identity, nationalism and globalization.
First, however, we provide here some information about the data we analyd in our study. Our corpus included (a) 23 speeches of politicians at specific com-memorative events (mainly related to t
he 50th anniversary of the Second Austrian Republic); (b) newspaper articles discussing Austrian neutrality and European curity policies in June 1994, just before the referendum of EU mem-bership; (c) posters, slogans and direct-mail advertiments nt out or displayed during the campaign leading up to the referendum on becoming a member of the EU; (d) ven focus-group discussions organized in different provinces of Austria;
as well as (e) 24 problem-centered, qualitative interviews in which a range of questions concerning different aspects of national identity were asked and responded to (for more details e Wodak et al., in press).
Most of the examples quoted and analyd in this article are taken from the focus-group discussions which we conducted in order to explore mi-public dis-cours. With an example taken from a political talk (example 4) we wish to illus-trate in passing the recontextualization from public political sphere in mi-public context (for more details about the analyd politicians’ speeches e also Reisigl, 1998). We cho to illustrate the eminently political topic of the construction of national identities by means of everyday conversations in groups and not only by excerpts from speeches of politicians or by prenting samples of media discour.
This reflects our u of a wide notion of the ‘political’ which not only focus on the discours of the elites in power, but also on (discursive) actions which, according to Paul Chilton and Christina Schäffner, ‘involve power, or its inver, resistance’ (1997: 212) in many other contexts, including non-official and infor-mal ones.
To understand the impact of the discour of politicians on the public, it is necessary to investigate its reception and its recontextualization (in Bernstein’s n) in other domains of a society, for example in concrete life-worlds. The method of the ‘focus-group discussion’ (e Bruck and Stocker, 1996; Lamnek, 1989; Friedrichs, 1990) offers a very promising tool for ethnographic rearch in Critical Discour Analysis. It enables one partially to study the recontextualiza-tion and transformation of specific political concepts and identity narratives which are expresd by politicians, taught in educational systems (e.g. by teachers and in schoolbooks), promoted in the mass-media, etc., and which are expresd in everyday situations and interactions. Specifically, it allows one to obrve the local co-construction of meaning of concepts (like ‘nation’ and ‘identity’) during an ongoing discussion, by individuals, but under the interactive
