Securitization, Emergency and the Rediscovery of Responsibility in Times of Pandemic: Analyzing Political Discourses from the European South

Salomi Boukala,Dimitris Serafis

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-91017-4_11

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter intends to provide an argumentative perspective on the justification of securitization by Southern EU’s political leaders in times of a public health crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic by examining instances of public discourses, specifically addresses to the nation of four EU leaders with different ideological positioning, in different social settings of the European South. Based on the theory of securitization, we perceive public debate as a polylogical phenomenon where multiple actors, from multiple (ideological) positions, in multiple times and spaces interact, creating a complex network of public communication while expressing and supporting their claims. Through this prism, our aim is to shed light on argumentative polylogues by unveiling whether and how the state of emergency has been justified. We employ the frame of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016) to study the socio-historically conditions against which established endoxical premises are (re)constructed by the political leadership and how these interrelate with specific argumentation strategies (topoi) in the social settings under scrutiny. We then draw on the quasi-Y structure provided by the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT) (Rigotti & Greco, 2019) to scrutinize the interplay of topical and endoxical premises in the development of single standpoint-argument couplings.

Highlights

Our aim here is to examine the discursive construction of the pandemic threat and how it links to the security measures that were implied to mitigate the spread of COVID-19
To explicate our methodological framework, we focus on a specific “discourse strand” (Rheindorf, 2019: 210–211) regarding COVID-19 at the beginning of the respective pandemic, that is in mid-March 2020, and we examine instances of public discourses, addresses to the nation of four EU leaders (Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Giuseppe Conte, Emanuel Macron, Pedro Sanchez) with different ideological positioning, in different social settings of the European South
To provide a critical micro-analysis of the reasoning based on which the aforementioned polylogue and, the standing standpoint are premised, we present a synthesis of principles and tools coming from the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT)

Summary

11.1 Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has unprecedently modified the social and living conditions in Europe. As Wodak noted “[e]ach crisis contributes to both new and old threat scenarios” and, as evidenced in the context of the ongoing pandemic, COVID-19 was “instrumentalized by governments in various ways in order to persuade people to comply with restrictive measures in view of the pandemic” (Wodak in press and refs therein). We argue that the emergency decrees announced by the political figures under investigation promoted security and the legitimation of emergency in the name of people’s safety against COVID-19 Through these premises, in what follows, we provide a theoretical discussion on the ways public argumentation in polarized times of crises could be conceived as a polylogical network that occurs at the interplay of different actors, in different places and times who apparently have different objectives

11.3 Argumentative Polylogues and Standing Standpoint in Times of Pandemic

11.4 Scrutinizing Argumentative Polylogues: A DHA-AMT Micro-level Synthesis

11.5 Data Analysis and Discussion

11.6 Conclusion