Twisting Tongues and Twisting Arms: The Power of Political Rhetoric

Abstract

While scholars of International Relations and comparative politics have usually treated rhetoric as epiphenomenal, one strand of constructivism has recently returned rhetoric to the heart of political analysis, especially through the mechanism of persuasion. We too maintain that rhetoric is central to political processes and outcomes, but we argue that persuasion is theoretically and methodologically problematic. We aver that rhetoric's role may be more usefully conceptualized in the context of coercion, and we advance a stylized model that illustrates how rhetorical coercion operates, explains why it works, and identifies key scope conditions. We subsequently illustrate our model's relevance through a detailed examination of a 'hard' case. This article's agenda is twofold. First, it advises scholars in these fields to avoid focusing on unanswerable questions about actors' motives and to examine instead what actors say, in what contexts, and to what audiences. Second, it lays the groundwork for a 'coercive constructivism', complementing the liberal version so prevalent today.KEY WORDS ♦ coercion ♦ constructivism ♦ discourse ♦ Habermas ♦ Israel ♦ military service ♦ persuasion ♦ rhetoric Talk is often thought to belong to the realm of diplomacy, war to the realm of action. Yet, during the 2003 Iraq War, the Bush administration was nearly as preoccupied with how the combat was portrayed as with the combat itself. Its foreign policy team invariably spoke of coalition forces rather than American forces, the war to liberate Iraq rather than the invasion of Iraq, Saddam's death squads rather than Saddam's fedayeen. Rhetoric is central to politics, even when politics takes the form of war.Yet rhetoric is curiously not central to much scholarship in comparative politics and International Relations. Politics is typically marked by rhetorical competition, but our theoretical frameworks are generally hard-pressed to make sense of its dynamics and outcomes. Whereas the dominant materialist tradition treats rhetoric as epiphenomenal, we argue, following recent constructivist work, that the rhetorical interplay itself provides leverage in explaining outcomes. We are less comfortable, however, with the argument advanced by some constructivists that political actors deploy resonant rhetorical forms and thereby persuade their interlocutors of the correctness of their preferred course of action. Although persuasion undoubtedly does occur in the political arena, it is also rare. Moreover, such mechanisms rest on a strong specification of the subjective motivations of individuals and thus are methodologically intractable. Recent mainstream constructivist research has prompted a refreshing debate on and advanced our understanding of political deliberation and argumentation. By focusing on internalized norms as the driving forces of behavior and policy, however, such research has ultimately diverted attention from the dynamics of rhetoric.Persuasion does not exhaust the ways through which rhetoric might shape political contest. In par...

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