War Rhetoric Research Articles

World War Flu: War Rhetoric of The Australian Prime Minister on Coronavirus

During the coronavirus pandemic in spring 2020, political discourse was dominated by the language of war as the world’s political leaders saturated their speech with the terminology of war. This article examines some properties of the speech delivered by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in the parliament on March 22, 2020. The general framework of the study is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) which investigates how language is used in ideological and social contexts and how it relates to power. The material of the research requires to apply a more specialised tool, namely Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) that examines the relation between language and political agendas and ideology. The study considers the political and ideological contexts of the speech through the entire political process and decision making at the national level as well as the sociopolitical and cognitive aspects of the speech in the parliamentary setting. In particular, attention is paid to the war rhetoric that induces the public to conceptualise the virus as an enemy and thus to present the crisis as a threat to the nation. The article explores language means employed by the speaker to actuali s e rhetorical strategies aimed at justifying his government’s measures taken to manage the crisis. To do this, the research looks into historical, cultural and psychological contexts of the speech as well as its political implicatures. Keywords: political speech; war rhetoric; political discourse; critical discourse analysis; mental models

Review: When Banana Ruled, by Mathilde Damoisel

Review: <i>When Banana Ruled</i>, by Mathilde Damoisel

«РУССКИЙ ШТЫК» В ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ XVIII – ХХ вв.: МАГИЧЕСКОЕ ОРУЖИЕ ИМПЕРИИ

The article deals with one of the most important unofficial imperial symbols of Russia - the Russian bayonet. For quite a long historical period, 1790-1945, the bayonet remained a metaphor for military, state, and national power. In the historical perspective, it had three main meanings: 1) the glory of the Russian Army, and then the Red Army; 2) the greatness and strength of the Russian Empire; 3) courage, determination, and the Russian man’s contempt for death. The cult of Suvorov and the myth of the Russian bayonet were formed in Russian poetry at the same time - at the end of the XVIII century, and they supported each other. Suvorov’s bayonet charge training remained relevant in the tactics and military theory of the Russian Army until the end of the 19th century. The idea of the mythical Suvorov’s “bogatyr”, a Russian soldier, was poeticized by the commander himself in The Science of Victory (1795) and was continued primarily in the patriotic poetry of the 1830s. The mythologization of the Russian bayonet in Russian poetry and battle prose reached its apotheosis in the early 1830s, at the time of Russia’s confrontation with Europe over the Polish Uprising. The literary myth of the bayonet is presented in its most complete form in Pyotr Yershov’s poem “The Russian Bayonet”. Patriotic lyrics with their collective lyrical subject and nationwide sublime pathos and the battle prose of the 1830s both played a decisive role in the creation of the myth. The hyperbolization of the Russian hero wielding the bayonet in the prose of the 1830s is usually linked with the motif of national superiority. The ideological imperial myth of the invincible and all-powerful Russian bayonet was used primarily within Russia itself. During the Crimean War, the poetical hope that the bayonet would help to win the war with the most well-armed armies in Europe was in vain. In addition, the destruction of the myth was influenced by the spread of the personal point of view in the psychological prose of Leo Tolstoy and Vsevolod Garshin. In Tolstoy’s battle prose, the war rhetoric and the valorization of war are devalued, this “demythologization” also includes an unusual description of the Russian bayonet charge. This trend continues in the prose of Garshin, who gained the experience of an ordinary volunteer soldier in the Russian-Turkish War. In the last third of the 19th century and before the beginning of the First World War, the bayonet in Russian unofficial literature became a metaphor for the repressive state apparatus. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the war, the suppressed national semantics of the bayonet was actualized again. The same thing happened at the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War when the very existence of Russians as an ethnic group was called into question. Soviet poets once again turned to the myth of the all-conquering Suvorov’s Russian bayonet.

ОБРАЗ РОССИИ В КУЛЬТУРЕ БИТ

The article deals with one of the most important unofficial imperial symbols of Russia - the Russian bayonet. For quite a long historical period, 1790-1945, the bayonet remained a metaphor for military, state, and national power. In the historical perspective, it had three main meanings: 1) the glory of the Russian Army, and then the Red Army; 2) the greatness and strength of the Russian Empire; 3) courage, determination, and the Russian man’s contempt for death. The cult of Suvorov and the myth of the Russian bayonet were formed in Russian poetry at the same time - at the end of the XVIII century, and they supported each other. Suvorov’s bayonet charge training remained relevant in the tactics and military theory of the Russian Army until the end of the 19th century. The idea of the mythical Suvorov’s “bogatyr”, a Russian soldier, was poeticized by the commander himself in The Science of Victory (1795) and was continued primarily in the patriotic poetry of the 1830s. The mythologization of the Russian bayonet in Russian poetry and battle prose reached its apotheosis in the early 1830s, at the time of Russia’s confrontation with Europe over the Polish Uprising. The literary myth of the bayonet is presented in its most complete form in Pyotr Yershov’s poem “The Russian Bayonet”. Patriotic lyrics with their collective lyrical subject and nationwide sublime pathos and the battle prose of the 1830s both played a decisive role in the creation of the myth. The hyperbolization of the Russian hero wielding the bayonet in the prose of the 1830s is usually linked with the motif of national superiority. The ideological imperial myth of the invincible and all-powerful Russian bayonet was used primarily within Russia itself. During the Crimean War, the poetical hope that the bayonet would help to win the war with the most well-armed armies in Europe was in vain. In addition, the destruction of the myth was influenced by the spread of the personal point of view in the psychological prose of Leo Tolstoy and Vsevolod Garshin. In Tolstoy’s battle prose, the war rhetoric and the valorization of war are devalued, this “demythologization” also includes an unusual description of the Russian bayonet charge. This trend continues in the prose of Garshin, who gained the experience of an ordinary volunteer soldier in the Russian-Turkish War. In the last third of the 19th century and before the beginning of the First World War, the bayonet in Russian unofficial literature became a metaphor for the repressive state apparatus. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the war, the suppressed national semantics of the bayonet was actualized again. The same thing happened at the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War when the very existence of Russians as an ethnic group was called into question. Soviet poets once again turned to the myth of the all-conquering Suvorov’s Russian bayonet.

The Melodramatic Mode in American Politics and Other Varieties of Narrative Suspicion

The Melodramatic Mode in American Politics and Other Varieties of Narrative Suspicion Timothy Melley (bio) No consideration of paranoia or conspiracy theory can proceed these days without at least a nod to Richard Hofstadter. Hofstadter's 1964 "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" is among the most influential essays ever on the American political imagination, and it is significantly responsible for much contemporary thinking about conspiracy theory. There is, of course, nothing new about conspiracism, and it was in fact Karl Popper who introduced the contemporary notion of "conspiracy theory" in 1945.1 Yet Hofstadter's essay popularized the idea that conspiracy theory is a distinct, recognizable, and dismissible category of thinking with outsized effects on national political life. The paranoid style, he argued, has a "long and varied history," simmering on the margins of American society from the beginning and occasionally flaring into decisive political movements (1965a, 3). Its core epistemological error is the tendency to see "a 'vast' or 'gigantic' conspiracy as the motive force in historical events" (25, 29). It is also characterized by a sense of persecution, the attribution of malevolent intentions to large organizations, and the deployment of "overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic" rhetoric (4). While the paranoid style is an expression of "distorted judgment" and "political pathology," it is not a symptom of true mental illness. Whereas clinically paranoid individuals fear plots against themselves, practitioners of the paranoid political style descry threats against "a nation, a culture, or a way of life" affecting millions (4). The age of Donald Trump seems an important time to reexamine Hofstadter's concept. Trump has frequently been seen as the avatar of a [End Page 57] new "post-truth era" and a "golden age of conspiracy theory."2 He is a stunning example of the paranoid style. His singular ability to wed the nostalgic politics of national grievance to a narrative of personal suffering at the hands of vicious political enemies, "deep state" traitors, and malevolent journalists propelled his unlikely rise to conspiracy theorist-in-chief. Still, if Trumpism marks a high point in the annals of paranoid politics, it is important to recall that Hofstadter was writing amid his own "post-truth" crisis. After a decade of anti-communist demagoguery from Joseph McCarthy and others, Hofstadter was confronting the disturbing rise of Barry Goldwater. "The Paranoid Style" connected the rhetoric of such Cold War "pseudo-conservatives" to a much older tradition of paranoid politics in order to confront the frustrating persistence and appeal of populist demonology in the U.S. The most important legacy of Hofstadter's essay is the idea that conspiracy theory is an easily recognized and dismissed type of political speech, marked by symptomatic errors of interpretation and understood chiefly as a result of faulty cognition—a "crippled epistemology," to use the term of Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule (2008, 675). This view continues to inform most scholarly and popular thinking about conspiracy theory, but it has also troubled some critics.3 For one thing, "The Paranoid Style" focuses exclusively on conservative and American examples. For another, it paints the paranoid style as a marginal, rather than central, aspect of American politics. Third, and most important, Hofstadter pathologizes the suspicion of conspiracy without acknowledging that something akin to paranoid suspicion might actually help discern the nature of modern political and economic power. Over the past two decades, numerous scholars, including myself, have asked whether the imagination of concealed structures and intentions may be a reasonable, even salutary, response to the conditions of knowledge in contemporary democracy.4 These inquiries have been intensified by the weaponization of the phrase "conspiracy theory," which is often used to dismiss claims as patently absurd and unworthy of serious consideration. The debate over Hofstadter's concept has mostly emphasized its epistemological rather than narratological framework—acknowledging the power of his category while challenging the confident assumption that paranoid interpretation can easily be distinguished from its rational counterparts. But what if Hofstadter's essay is, in the end, not primarily about paranoia? What happens if we take Hofstadter's term "style" more literally and attend to the formal dimensions of his major examples? What happens, in short, if we...

On the Pseudo-Recognition of Female Commanders in Medieval China: War, Gender, and Imperial Rhetoric

On the Pseudo-Recognition of Female Commanders in Medieval China: War, Gender, and Imperial Rhetoric

The “Total Continuous War” and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Neoliberal Governmentality, Disposable Bodies and Protected Lives

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we very often heard the expression “We are at war,” but the warlike tactics that appeared more visibly during the pandemic have been long before used and deployed against the most precarious bodies among us (Butler). In fact, the “danger” constituted by the narrative of fighting the pandemic served in imposing security apparatus and exceptional measures, as well as deepening the “structural reforms” that neoliberal governments consider as their sole task to carry out (Federici). Thus, the rhetorical resource of the pandemic danger gave legitimacy to the expansion of warlike strategies with the complacency of the whole population. In the present paper, drawing on an analysis of what we consider to be the main neoliberal governmental strategies in the way of dealing with the pandemic, we question the logic of a “total continuous war” (Foucault), carried out in particular through different bodies hierarchization and the designs of post-pandemic societies. This reflection has been developed in three steps: first, we question what is this war that the COVID-19 pandemic made more visible. In a second part, we observe government tactics and its relation with the rhetoric of war, which allows neoliberal governments to expose differently the human bodies (Agamben). Finally, we examine the relation between bio-necro-policies and the urgency of promoting a total continuous war that opposes disposable bodies to lives that neoliberal governments seek to protect.

Susan Murray, Bright Signals: A History of Colour Television

Bright Signals: A History of Colour Television by Susan Murray charts the development of colour television between 1928 and 1970 – the period in which the technology was invented, standardized and widely disseminated. The book adopts a media archaeological approach, depicting a broad yet integrated network of visual culture with colour television at its centre. Murray impressively draws upon the work of colour theorists, market researchers, psychologists, social scientists and film scholars to support and contextualize her arguments. Bright Signals offers a rich cultural, social, industrial and political context for the history of colour television, which has hitherto been lacking. The book is structured into six main chapters, the first two of which focus on early experimentation with colour television technology and the growing standardization of colour across several nationwide industries. The following three chapters focus predominantly on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). Through the prism of CBS and NBC, these chapters address the technical refinement of colour television, its transformation into a commercially viable medium, colour aesthetics and programming strategies. The final chapter focuses on the global expansion of colour television, contextualizing it within the rhetoric of the Cold War and US imperialism.

John Updike’s Terrorist: Islamist Misogyny or a Backlash on American Feminist Propaganda?

The United States of America launched its war on terror in October, 2001. The war was declared both as a fight againstterrorism and a mission to liberate the powerless, oppressed Muslim women. The Orientalist representation of Muslimwomen as a victim of their misogynistic culture is observed to have been re-invented by this twin rhetoric of war on terror ofthe American Government. Following the assumption that American literary artists would devote their artistic talent insupport of their government, critics and scholars have excessively approached post 9/11 literature through Edward Said’stheory of Orientalism. While it is true that some American artists represent the conflict to be between two civilizations(modern vs backward), but the theory affect has made it difficult to imagine a western literary depiction without anOrientalist lens. Consequently, western texts become vulnerable to misunderstanding or biased reading. John Updike’sTerrorist (2006), for example, has been read as an Orientalist text in which women are used to depict Muslim frustrationtoward women liberation. Focusing on the representation of women, this article explores Updike’s text as a backlash onAmerican feminist politicized discourse, a new strategy of narrative to encounter the dominant narrative and challenge thetradition of Orientalism.

Social history from a bird’s eye view: Perry Anderson’s theory of international relations

Few living Marxists are more famous, yet Perry Anderson’s theory of international relations (IR) remains underexplored. This article is an interpretive analysis of Anderson and finds a coherent, albeit changing and at times contradictory, IR theory. It marks three phases of his theorizing: an internationalism, which sought to combat Cold War rhetoric of Western powers; a structuralism that attributed the Westphalian system to a synthesis of ancient and medieval modes of production; and a clear-headed radicalism of great power politics and increased agency. Yet this periodization also shows consistency of thought, one that emphasized hegemony, the complex totality, and a historicized view of sovereignty. Anderson’s IR theory traverses Marxist thought, such as that of the Gramscians, world-systems analysts, and those returning to Trotsky’s notion of uneven and combined development. His neo-Marxism is a distinct alternative to, yet relevant for, other radical traditions.

El verdadero anticomunismo: Política, género y Guerra Fría en Costa Rica (1948–1973)

El verdadero anticomunismo: Política, género y Guerra Fría en Costa Rica (1948–1973)

Інтонаційні засоби увиразнення військово-конфліктної риторики президентів Сполучених Штатів

Інтонаційні засоби увиразнення військово-конфліктної риторики президентів Сполучених Штатів

A Curse Upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World by Kay Wright Lewis

Reviewed by: A Curse Upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World by Kay Wright Lewis Douglas R. Egerton (bio) A Curse Upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World. By Kay Wright Lewis. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. Pp. 281. $64.95 cloth; $28.95 paper; $27.50 ebook) Even before the arrival of large numbers of enslaved Africans into the British mainland colonies, English colonists were experienced in the tactics of exterminatory warfare. In battles against Irish Catholics and Indigenous Americans, settlers learned how to eradicate some enemies while enslaving others. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, Kay Wright Lewis argues in this provocative study, Americans mastered the rhetoric of race war, and a good many of both races, she convincingly demonstrates, regarded it as a serious threat. Even after emancipation, African American fears of racial extermination continued, reemerging in the writings and speeches of W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X. Southern whites and Caribbean masters learned that racially based conflicts often cut in both directions. As French refugees fled the revolt in Saint Domingue and settled in Charleston, they carried with them stories of the formidable capacity of Black soldiers. Those fears [End Page 341] nearly became reality in South Carolina in 1822 when former bondman Denmark Vesey orchestrated a plot to liberate the enslaved through bloodshed before sailing for Haiti. When questioned by one of his lieutenants over the necessity of wholesale slaughter, Lewis observes, Vesey replied by remarking that "nits make lice," a term earlier used by white settlers regarding southern Indians. These mainland revolts were initially isolated and quickly failed, the author notes, but thanks to the internal slave trade, stories of Vesey and Nat Turner traveled across the South and were passed from one generation to the next, keeping alive ideas of a war to the death. On occasion, Lewis's determination to fit all of her data into her larger theory appears forced. When discussing the late antebellum efforts of lower South fire-eaters to reopen the Atlantic slave trade, the author suggests that the debates—which in fact divided Carolina planters from their Virginia brethren, who wished to sell their surplus laborers to the fresh lands of the frontier South—"set the stage for future ideas about Black labor and Black disposability" (p. 141). Although it was true enough that white southerners united in claiming that abolition would result in a race war and the extermination of freedmen, advocates of the traffic in Africans insisted that it would reduce the price of enslaved labor enough for middle-class farmers to buy and carry bondmen into the western territories. Far from thinking in terms of "disposability," writers such as Louisianan James De Bow argued that modern steamships could quickly ferry captured Africans to the South with little loss of life. De Bow's editorials embraced the language of paternalism and insisted that Africans were better off enslaved by Christian masters than left on their own in the old world, a ghastly argument shared by a good many white Americans regardless of section. Lewis returns to form in her final chapters, however, as the Civil War years witnessed a rebirth of the language of extermination. Northern Democrats, who worried that Black military service would lead to demands for citizenship and voting rights, warned their Black neighbors that Confederates planned to chop captured African [End Page 342] American soldiers into "mincemeat, or [be] quartered and pickled" (p. 179). Conservative Democrats had their agenda, of course, but they were right enough in thinking that Jefferson Davis and his Congress threatened to enslave or execute Black prisoners of war. Even without orders from Richmond, Confederates at Fort Pillow in Tennessee and Marks Mills in Arkansas slaughtered both Black combatants and civilians. Lewis's prose is clear and strong and only rarely lapses into jargon. Although most of her sources are published rather than archival, her dense footnotes reveal both secondary literature and often obscure pamphlets and newspaper editorials. Wisely, Lewis lets these past voices speak for themselves through ample quotations, demonstrating the centrality of fears of mass extermination among both...

IMF Research Bulletin, Fall-Winter 2019

It has been two years since the trade tensions erupted and not only captured policymakers’ but also the research community’s attention. Research has quickly zoomed in on understanding trade war rhetoric, tariff implementation, and economic impacts. The first article in the December 2019 issue sheds light on the consequences of the recent trade barriers.

“Militant Piety” in 21st-Century Orthodox Christianity: Return to Classical Traditions or Formation of a New Theology of War?

The article focuses on the reclaiming of militaristic ideas and the emergence of specific “militant piety” and “theology of war” in the Orthodox discourse of post-Soviet Russia. It scrutinizes the increasing prestige of soldiering in the Church and its convergence with the army. This convergence generates particular hybrid forms, in which Church rituals and symbols interact with military ones, leading to a “symbolic reception of war” in Orthodoxy. The authors show that militaristic ideas are getting influence not only in the post-Soviet but also in American Orthodoxy; they consider this parallel as evidence that the process is caused not only by the political context—the revival of neo-imperial ideas in Russia and the increasing role of power structures in public administration—but is conditioned by socio-cultural attitudes inherent in Orthodox tradition, forming a type of militant religiosity called “militant piety”. This piety is not a matter of fundamentalism only; it represents the essential layer of religious consciousness in Orthodoxy reflected in modern Church theology, rhetoric, and aesthetics. The authors analyze war rhetoric while applying approaches of Karen Armstrong, Mark Juergensmeyer, R. Scott Appleby, and other theoreticians of the relationship between religion and violence.

Virtual War: States of Prolepsis and the Aesthetics of Violence

This paper discusses ways in which the definition of war has become more amorphous in the twenty-first century, being displaced from a series of material conflicts typically organized through competing national ideologies to a more generalized state of collective anxiety and terror. This shift in the definition of war is linked to technology and equated with similar shifts in the discursive patterns of medicine. The paper suggests that such a reorientation of the meaning of war allows us to reconsider literary history, with particular attention to the ways in which civil wars throughout history created fissures and lingering tensions within the body of a nation state. It also suggests that civil wars might be understood as precursors to transnational understandings of a national body, one always already fractured. By indicating how the rhetoric of war has long been embedded in various ways within English and American literary history, this paper offers new ways of understanding the relationship between war and society. Despite the tendency of war to lend itself to retrospective mythologies consolidating national identity, this paper suggests that war is always a scene of multiple ambiguities. With reference to Salvador Dali’s painting The Face of War and Wilfred Owen’s poem “Strange Meeting”, it also suggests ways in which war may serve to illuminate some of the strangeness and alienation inherent within the human condition.

The Rhetoric of the Cold War and Fear of Nuclear War in German Films of the 1950s

핵 공포의 황금시대라고 일컬어지는 1950년대 독일의 전쟁영화에는 냉전의 수사학과 핵전쟁의 공포가 강하게 암시된다. 냉전과 ‘전쟁영화의 물결’ 현상으로 나타나는 전쟁영화에는 나치즘의 과거극복이라는 층위에서 반유대주의와 같은 반인류적인 행위에 대한 비판, 세계파괴로서의 전면전, 나치즘에 대한 군사적 저항, 독일연방군의 창설 및 재무장과 핵무장과 같은 주제가 두드러진다. 서독의 전쟁영화에서 제시되는 냉전의 수사학은 나치의 야만적인 부정적 영웅을 통한 재무장의 비판, 서독과 동독의 부정적 소통과 핵무장으로 인한 내전의 위험성, 히틀러에 대한 나치장군들의 군사적 저항, 전쟁의 무의미성을 통한 재무장과 핵무장의 부정성, 그리고 이로 인한 핵전쟁의 공포에 대한 비판 등으로 나타난다. 1950년대 후반에는 알프레드 바이덴만의 처럼 전쟁을 변호하는 ‘영웅’의 토포스 속에서 나치의 전쟁 테크놀로지를 미학화하면서 부분적으로 이에 동조하는 경향도 보인다. 동독의 전쟁영화는 대부분 나치의 파시즘뿐만 아니라, 서독의 재무장과 자본주의 체제 이데 올로기를 비판하는 냉전영화로 제시되면서 이로 인한 핵전쟁의 공포를 부각시킨다. 다큐멘터리 시리즈 영화 는 서독의 재무장을 신나치주의와 연관시키고 비난하면서 서독의 반핵운동을 지지하는 측면도 보인다. 또한 과 같은 SF영화는 1950년대 말에 부각된 ‘베를린 위기’현상과 연관되어 핵전쟁의 위험성을 드러낸다. 동독의 전쟁영화는 장르나 주제의 층위에서 서독에 비해 적지만 냉전의 디스토피아를 훨씬 더 강하게 환기시킨다.

Hate Speech as a Manipulative Means of Forming the Inimical Image of Russia in British and American Mass-Media (viewed from the Aspect of the English Language Taught to Russian Students)

The research features manipulative technologies aimed at forming the inimical image of Russia in British and American mass-media. The inimical conception, when intentionally built, is predetermined by the already existing stereotype of an enemy, whose most evident and manifest features are singled out and enclosed into the image thus constructed. The stereotype, in its turn, can be traced back to the most ancient archetype of a hostile member of a different tribe, perilous to the group he intends to destroy. The image of Russia created by the British and American mass-media is overloaded with negative connotations as contrasted with a highly positive self-image of the British and Americans. Russia is presented as an aggressor that interferes with other countries’ affairs, while its opponents, as they claim, fight against terrorism and meet other global challenges. Nothing is farther from the truth but the manipulative technologies employed help to drive this idea into the readers’ heads. The British and American media-language turns to “hate speech” whenever they refer to Russia. Most effective, though over-exploited, is its constant repetition. All this serves as a substitute for actual facts, logic, and arguments. The question arises: what should EFL students do with the language material that often misinforms or insults their country? The answer is obvious: never degrade yourself by attacking or insulting the opponents. They might be entrapped in the war rhetoric or the stereotypes and be truly convinced of the Russians’ hostility. Consider the facts, but not emotions, and manipulation will miss you or your friendly attitude to Englishmen and Americans as a target.

Makarios cultural diplomacy legacy in the republic of Cyprus

ABSTRACTThe article explores the cultural diplomacy initiatives undertaken by the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) during Makarios presidency (1960–1977) in order to strengthen the state acknowledgement and visibility in the international scenery and promote a nation brand focused mainly on the Hellenocentric aspect of the Greek-Cypriots’ cultural identity. Cyprus, a recently independent state (1960), shaped its cultural diplomacy practices according to the political developments; on the escalation of bi-communal conflicts internally and the international insecurity provoked by the Cold War rhetoric. This paper aims to map certain state cultural initiatives in an attempt to make connections between the internal identity-building process and the external projection of cultural identity and gain a better understanding about how a small-sized state can pursue and project a nation brand abroad by practicing the diplomacy of culture.

The Rhetoric of War and the Reshaping of Civil Society in North Macedonia

In this article, I explore recent efforts to “de-Sorosize” the Republic of Macedonia, arguing that they reveal an obsession in Macedonia—and more broadly in east central Europe—with defending ethnonational interests against assumed interlopers. New, self-proclaimed patriotic associations have mobilized ideas of combined external and internal threats to national existence as though there were a war frontier. This imagined war frontier marks the dividing line between belligerent nationalists, who claim that Macedonian sovereignty and national identity are under threat of extinction, and the Macedonian center-left and liberal (moderate and left-leaning) NGOs, which tend to promote greater inclusiveness in society, are assumed to side with “the Albanians,” and to have a direct connection to George Soros. The case study of Macedonia highlights the outright public rejection of liberal ideals and the key role that populist, militant sensibilities play in the formation of civil society groups in Europe today.