War, Virtual War and Human Security - 2007 Programme Session 4

Session Four: War Talk
Chair: Peter Vanderkruit

The Language of War: George W. Bush’s Discursive practices in Securitising the “Western Value System” in the War on Terror
Janicke Stramer
The American Graduate School of International Relations and Diplomacy, Paris, France

The Western value system is a broad term, which includes issues such as; democracy, freedom, libertarian values (economically and politically), and free speech. The American version of freedom is ambiguous and far from self-evident and straightforward. Although a very popular term in presidential rhetoric, it is more implied than really explained. What is particular about President George W. Bush’s rhetoric during the War on Terror is that it has a strong religious element. Bush manages to tie together elements of the “Western value system,” represented as democracy, liberty, and freedom, with security and religion. Moreover, he sanctifies America by stating that America’s strength and resolve is to advance freedom which is God’s gift to the world, hence America is doing God’s work. This paper will examine Bush’s securitizing speech act in defense of the “Western value system,” in order to assess the discursive practices in America’s language of war under George W. Bush. To do so, I will use the Copenhagen School of Security Studies, in order to explore the processes of securitization used by the Bush administration in the “War on Terror” and how religious rhetoric has had an enormous influence on the securitization of “the Western value system.” I choose to use the Copenhagen School of Security Studies, as a framework for understanding the processes through which particular issues are ‘securitized in order to discern how Bush is viewing the threat against “the Western value system.” This is a more useful framework from which to discern the language of war than the traditional accounts of security, which suggest that discursive practices are ultimately marginal to the study and practice of security in international relations.

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“Fight is not the past, but the present and the future”. Language of Conflict and War in the Spanish Basque Country
Asta Maskaliunaite
War and Conflict Studies, The Baltic Defence College, Estonia

When talking about war our focus is usually turning away from Europe. The conflicts of the old continent appear to be settled and the events in other regions have more influence on the experiences of violence than those of the inside. There are, however, places in Europe where past wars translate into present violence and the violence into a continuous limbo – not totally war but not complete peace. One of such places is the Spanish Basque Country.
The end of the IRA campaign for united Ireland left the Basque ETA as the oldest and most vigorous terrorist organization in Europe. Despite the hopes that ETA will follow the same route as its sister organization when it announced the permanent ceasefire in March last year, ETA made its come back with the bomb blast in the Madrid airport and its environment enforced its presence in the Basque Country with the burning of the buses and the Molotov cocktails against the branch offices of the “Spanish” political forces. For the last ten years such local “intifada” intended to “socialize the suffering” has been a part of the Basque nightscape. Coupled with the attacks of ETA itself, the police raids and the presence of the highest number of bodyguards in Europe, it creates a sense of continuous danger, threat and instability. In this presentation I will analyze the language of permanent conflict and war that the Basque social and political forces are using when discussing the situation in the region; how the idea of conflict is constructed and reconstructed; and how the rhetoric of war maintains its presence in a seemingly democratic society.

Yugonostalgia and the Post-National Narrative
Stephenie Young
Department of English and Comparative Literature, Central Michigan University, USA

In the postwar literature of former Yugoslavia, narrative functions as a disruption of time and space (as event) to better examine a certain malaise evident during the transitional period in the Balkan region. Many texts are a response to, or a thinking-through of, a nostalgia for a nation that never existed in the first place. What might be called “post-national” then are books by authors such as Slavenka Drakulić (Croatia), which look at the crisis of national literatures while simultaneously breaking epistemological ground for future accounts that speak to the crisis of what “nation” and “national” denote in other war torn region in the early 21st century.
This paper examines the recent work of Croatian writer Dubravka Ugreŝić as that which disrupts the literary canon, and which closely scrutinizes the relationship between “nation,” narrative and “Yugonostalgia.” The latter, defined as a certain disorientation that occurs under the transitional process of “new” political and/or ideological circumstances, is especially important for the understanding of what post-national literature might be, and how it might act as a caesura in the tradition of national literatures.
Through two of Ugreŝić’s works about exiles from former Yugoslavia, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1996)and The Ministry of Pain (2005), and the writing of Giorgio Agamben, I will consider how Ugreŝić’s work is a performative of the destabilization of traditional literature and its relation to “nation,” and how it exposes a crisis about the function of so-called “transnational literature” to serve as a replacement for national literatures. Finally, I will discuss how Ugreŝić’s work calls into question the ways that a discourse of war and “postwar” is formed, and how literature narrativizes the continuous unfolding of meaning in the 21st century