RHETORIC AND THE CONSTITUTIVE CONDITIONS OF POLITICAL ORATORY

The Commemorative Address as a Special Genre of Oratory

Classical rhetoric distinguishes three classes of genre: the judicial (genus iudiciale), the deliberative (genus deliberativum) and the epideictic (genus demonstrativum). According to the ideal-typical classification scheme, judicial oratory is focused temporally on the past, and thematically on justice or injustice, and its function is to accuse or defend. Deliberative rhetoric is associated with the future, thematically with expediency or harmfulness, and functionally with exhorting or dissuading. Finally, epideictic oratory is linked to the present, thematically to honor and disgrace and functionally to praise or blame (cf. Plett 1989, pp. 15f.).

With the exception of Friedhelm Frischenschlager's lecture ‘Austria in a Europe of Solidarity’, delivered before the SPÖ's Zukunftswerkstätte (‘Workshop for the Future’), 1 all the political addresses we analyse in this study were concerned with commemoration and may therefore be attributed to epideictic oratory in a broader sense. However, none of the three classes mentioned above occurs in pure form: the diversity of topics and temporal references usually results in the simultaneous presence of elements from all three oratorical categories within one and the same speech (on the close relationship between epideictic oratory and political speech, see Ottmers 1996, pp. 18–30).

Commemorative speeches are normally delivered on public days of remembrance, which are usually associated with the ‘magic of numbers’ (Huter 1994), and primarily serve to retrieve the past for the present.

CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: DISCOURSE AS SOCIAL PRACTICE

Since the 1970s, the term ‘discourse’ has become common currency in an everyday research sense in a variety of humanities and social science disciplines, including the applied branches of linguistics. Because of the wide-ranging use of this term, a variety of meanings have been attributed to it (see Ehlich 1993, p. 145, and Ehlich 1994), which has led to considerable semantic fuzziness and terminological flexibility. In the following we will briefly describe the concept of discourse as it is currently employed in the context of the research activities carried out at the University of Vienna, which have also informed the present investigation, and place this usage within the international research context (for an overview of research on discourse analysis in Austria, see Menz 1994).

The paradigm of Critical Discourse Analysis is not homogeneous. The British variety, represented by such figures as Gunther Kress, Robert Hodge, Roger Fowler, Norman Fairclough and Theo Van Leeuwen, has drawn upon Foucault's theory of discourse and, in its linguistic dimension, is closely associated with the systemic linguistic theory formulated by William Firth and M. A. K. Halliday, as well as with Halliday's social semiotics. The cognitive-oriented approach of Dutch Critical Discourse Analysis, exemplified by the work of Teun van Dijk, uses a triadic model to show how personal and social cognition mediates between social structures and discourse structures. German Critical Discourse Analysis, as practised by Utz Maas, Siegfried Jäger and Jürgen Link, has been influenced even more strongly by Foucault's concept of discourse than has the British.

In The Xenophobe's Guide to the Austrians (James 1994) author Louis James writes: ‘When a Stone Age Austrian popped out of a glacier in Tyrol in 1991, 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’ (1994, p. 11).

The moral of this story is that even after all those years in cold storage, the iceman (Ötzi) suffers from a certain confusion as to his identity, a trait he ostensibly shares with all other Austrians. Of course, this nationalist tug-of-war between Austria and Italy, to which James ironically refers, really tells us nothing about Ötzi's identity, for national(ist) ideas and sentiment did not emerge before the age of modernity, centuries after Ötzi's demise. Still, the attempts by both Austria and Italy to adorn their respective ‘national pasts’ with a historically highly significant archaeological find reveal a typical strategy, metaphorically described by Rudolf Burger (1996, p. 40) as the ‘nationalist dilation of time’. In this view, similar problems of identity seem to beset the English too. Past contingencies (in this case, a casual discovery) are appropriated by the contemporary nation by mythically expanding the nation into a transhistorical, and thus eternal, entity.

In a companion volume, The Xenophobe's Guide to the English, Antony Miall writes: [As far as] ‘the English are concerned, all of life's greatest problems can be summed up in one word – foreigners’. And he continues: ‘English views on foreigners are very simple. The further one travels from the capital in any direction, the more outlandish the people become’ (1993, pp. 5–6). It is obvious that the ego-, ethno- and nation-centric view described by Miall with respect to English people is not so much an English peculiarity as a general cross-cultural feature of ethnicist and nationalist patterns of perception of others.

1. Address by Federal President Thomas Klestil at the ceremony celebrating ‘Fifty Years of the ÖVP’, delivered at the Konzerthaus in Vienna on 21 April 1995 (Klestil 21)

2. Address by Klestil during the ceremony celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the re-establishment of the Austrian Auswärtiger Dienst (Foreign Office), delivered on 25 April 1995 (Klestil 25)

3. Address by Klestil at the ceremony celebrating ‘Fifty Years of the ÖGB’ (Austrian Trades Union Federation), delivered on 26 April 1995 (Klestil 26)

4. Address by Klestil to the joint session of the National Assembly (Nationalrat) and the Federal Council (Bundesrat) celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Second Republic, delivered on 27 April 1995 (Klestil 27)

5. Address by Klestil at the ceremony celebrating ‘Fifty Years of Gewerkschaft Öffentlicher Dienst (Civil Servants' Trade Union)’, delivered on 23 May 1995 (Klestil 23)

6. Address by Klestil at the ceremony commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the restoration of independence of the province of Vorarlberg, delivered in Feldkirch on 24 April 1995 (Klestil 24)

7. Declaration by Federal Chancellor Franz Vranitzky before the National Assembly, made on 8 July 1991 (Vranitzky 1991)

8. Vranitzky's address before members of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at the ceremony at which he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, delivered on 9 June 1993 (Vranitzky 1993)

9. Vranitzky's address before the joint session of the National Assembly and the Federal Council celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Second Republic, delivered on 27 April 1995 (Vranitzky 27)

[…]

DATA

Focus Group Interviews in Social Science Research

A focus group, also called a group interview or group discussion, is in essence ‘a discussion among a number of participants on a certain topic predetermined by a moderator …, which serves to collect information’ (Lamnek 1989, p. 121). Whereas this method has not been widely used in social science, group interviews are common in market research to investigate consumer motivation and behaviour. In the German-speaking countries, this method was occasionally employed by the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research in the 1950s, and in Austria it has recently been used in the reception analysis of tabloid print media by Bruck and Stocker (1996).

In the following paragraphs this method will be outlined as far as it is relevant for the purpose of our study (for more information on the subject see, for example, Bruck and Stocker 1996, Morgan 1993, Lamnek 1989, Greenbaum 1988, Morgan 1988, Friedrichs 1985).

The focus group method, according to Bruck and Stocker, entails interviewing a group of, ideally, five to twelve persons selected according to certain theoretically predetermined criteria (‘theoretical sampling’) on a particular subject, using a guided discussion technique. The discussion is conducted by a moderator, who structures, summarises and attempts to ensure balanced participation, raises specific topics in an informal way, and above all encourages the participants to contribute to the discussion (Bruck and Stocker 1996, p. 46).

1. Televised address by Federal President Kurt Waldheim on 15 February 1988, televised on ORF (Austrian state broadcaster) (Waldheim 15.2.1988)

2. Interview with Federal Chancellor Franz Vranitzky (SPÖ) on 9 February 1988 on the TV news programme Mittagsjournal (Vranitzky 9.2.1988)

3. Interview with Vice-chancellor Alois Mock (ÖVP) on 9 February 1988 on the TV news programme Mittagsjournal (Mock 9.2.1988)

4. Address by Federal Chancellor Franz Vranitzky (SPÖ) commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the November Pogrom, delivered on 9 November 1988 (Vranitzky 9.11.1988)

5. Address by Federal President Thomas Klestil to the joint session of the National Assembly (Nationalrat) and the Federal Council (Bundesrat) celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Second Republic, delivered on 27 April 1995 (Klestil 27.4.1995)

6. Address by Federal Chancellor Franz Vranitzky (SPÖ) to the joint session of the National Assembly and the Federal Council celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Second Republic, delivered on 27 April 1995 (Vranitzky 27.4.1995)

7. Address by Federal Chancellor Franz Vranitzky (SPÖ) at the ceremony commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War and of the liberation of the Nazi victims imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp, made in Mauthausen, Upper Austria, on 7 May 1995 (Vranitzky 7.5.1995).

8. Address by Federal President Thomas Klestil at the ceremony celebrating ‘Fifty Years of Gewerkschaft Öffentlicher Dienst (Civil Servants' Trade Union)’, delivered on 23 May 1995 (Klestil 23.5.1995)

[…]

THE STATE OF THE ART

Academic literature on Austrian identity deals mainly with historical perspectives and attempts to prove the existence of an independent Austrian nation and a national identity as well as to document, by means of empirical quantitative surveys, how this identity is rooted in the Austrian mind (for example, Bruckmüller 1996 and 1994, Haller et al. 1996, Stourzh 1990, Reiterer 1988a, Zöllner 1988, Dusek, Pelinka and Weinzierl 1988, Kreissler 1984, Heer 1981). However, because this approach has scarcely considered social history or the history of everyday life, it has largely neglected to analyse everyday political culture or to interpret national consciousness as a manifestation of political communities.

A large number of works, which concentrate mainly on the (chronological) develop ment of European nation-states, regard the French Revolution as the beginning of the modern, plebiscitarian conception of the nation and distinguish it from the concept of a nation defined by ethnic and cultural characteristics. In this view, Austria is considered a ‘belated nation’ (cf. Reiterer 1988a, p. 110), which has developed from the Habsburg Monarchy (influenced by confrontation with the ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution) to the First Republic (whose viability as an independent state was widely doubted and which failed largely because of ideological conflicts between its two main political camps) to the Second Republic of Austria in which the concept of Staatsnation has gained broad acceptance.

METHODOLOGY

As one of the aims of our study was to include ‘subjective’ aspects of the discursive construction of Austrian identity we carried out a number of topic-orientated qualitative interviews, to determine informants' views, attitudes and levels of awareness. The interviews took place in a relatively relaxed and flexible setting, which enabled the interviewer to react to unanticipated turns in the conversation and provided ample opportunity for feedback and clarification of ambiguous points.

Since the interviews were structured to resemble informal open-ended, private conversations there was little observable pressure to articulate statements conforming to group opinions or politically correct statements, as observable in focus group participants. Due to the dialogic nature of the interviews, moreover, respondents were able to produce sequences of thoughts and utterances without being interrupted or being pushed in a certain direction by other participants.

Of course, we make no claim to present a representative sample. The material collected in these interviews can, however, throw light on how patterns of national identification and identity find expression in individuals; and can illustrate the subjective dimension of the contents and figures of argumentation, and the construction of Austrian identity conceived on a more ‘macro’ level. It can also help trace the diffusion of specific information units about Austrian identity from public (media) or semi-public discourse down to the opinions expressed by individuals.

In this chapter, we briefly discuss and summarise developments since 1995. We have selected three salient events and socio-political phenomena which characterise the period between 1995 and 2008 and which have had a strong impact on the construction of recent Austrian national identities.

While we continue the discussion from the last chapter, it is important to emphasise specifically that ‘neutrality’, which was already considered to be obsolete, has made a surprising ‘comeback’ in the Austrian debates (see p. 202; see also Kovács and Wodak 2003). This development is tied to recent global crises and wars such as 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the successor states of former Yugoslavia.

Secondly, in 1995 Austria joined the EU and has since held the EU presidency twice. Attitudes towards the EU shifted from very positive acclamation to disappointment and Euro-scepticism. Simultaneously, the rise of the Austrian rightwing populist party FPÖ has to be reflected on and analysed with respect to attitudes towards the EU and globalising phenomena. In the past years, the Austrian rightwing populist movement has served as a model for other right-wing populist parties across Europe. Indeed, the label ‘Haiderisation’ was coined to describe local and regional protest movements which endorse nationalism, chauvinism, revisionism, EU-scepticism and racist, xenophobic beliefs.

Thirdly, we compare selected debates and rhetorical patterns (in political speeches and focus group discussions) surrounding the commemorative year 2005 with the analyses of the same genres in 1995 (see Chapters 4 and 5).

In this section we will tie together the key issues which have arisen from the analysis of our data in the light of the theoretical assumptions and hypotheses we outlined in the first chapter. We will first look at the content of the discursive constructs of national identities in general and of Austrian identity in particular, and then summarise the main strategies and forms of linguistic realisation.

THE INITIAL HYPOTHESES REVISITED

Over the past decade, the concept of nation as an imagined community has gained increasing importance in the relevant scholarly literature. The main objective of our study has been to identify this mental construct and to specify its emotional appeal and social binding force through an examination of different types of discursive practices related to the Austrian nation. Although our results cannot be generalised in every specific point, they nevertheless demonstrate tendencies in national processes of identification which are observable across contemporary Europe. Consequently, the methodological and theoretical framework of our discourse-historical approach (cf. Wodak et al. 1990, Matouschek, Wodak and Januschek 1995) is also applicable to investigations of the discursive construction of national identities other than the Austrian alone.

One of our principal operating assumptions has been that national identities are generated and reproduced through discourse. We have assumed further not only that institutional and material social structures determine the construction of national identities in important ways, but that institutional practices can conflict with discursive models of identity.