Deploying soldiers, deploying words

Abstract

An underlying assumption of this issue's theme is that not only can language be manipulated to serve political interests, but using language differently opens spaces for political action which can reinforce or go beyond existing parameters of thinking. Often, linguistic strategies enable political action, for good or ill, which previously would have been proscribed. In postwar Germany, the use of the military abroad was a taboo written in the blood of the Second World War. Yet in 1995 German combat troops were sent with overwhelming support as part of a peacekeeping mission to the former Yugoslavia, a location that nary a year earlier the German Foreign Minister had sworn German troops would never again encounter. How was it possible that in the course of one year the German government garnered parliamentary support and undertook a historic first with relatively little public debate? The usual answers, which lie in the pragmatics of politics—the exigencies of the NATO alliance, for example, or the sheer urgency of the situation in Bosnia—are seldom adequate to explain how such a decision came to be. For this we need to look at the workings of language and politics in the development of policy. The post‐Cold‐War/post‐unification era in Germany unsettled myriad concepts and terms, from German national identity to the meaning of war and peace. New situations have arisen with no clear guide to political action, and existing policy and identity discourses stemming from the Cold War found themselves struggling to establish themselves anew. A discourse establishes itself by controlling meaning—by setting the boundaries of interpretation. A discourse is said to prevail when it succeeds in establishing linguistic dominance over the meaning of key terms in a given context. Controlling meaning is a linguistic strategy that sets the parameters of the possible, both for understanding the past and for constructing the future. Becoming aware of this process aids both political and historical analysis, and the search for ways to transcend some of the more confrontative strategies and consciously move the interplay of discourses to a more hermeneutic level. Let us observe this process at work in the case of the first postwar deployment of German combat troops, exactly 50 years after 1945. I refer to the supporters of deployment as the “prevailing discourse"—these consist primarily of the governing conservative—liberal coalition and a majority of the opposition Social Democrats. Those opposed to the use of the German military abroad I refer to as the counter discourse. They are almost exclusively composed of the remaining Social Democrats, Greens, and the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS; the successor to the defunct East German Communist Party).