Nationalist ideology in news reporting on the Yugoslav crisis: A pragmatic analysis

Journal

of Pragmatics

217

20 (1993) 217-237

North-Holland

Nationalist ideology in news reporting on the Yugoslav crisis : A pragmatic analysis Michael Meeuwis* Received May 1992; revised version February 1993

A corpus of articles, culled from four major Western European and American newspapers, and reporting on the early stages of the Yugoslav crisis, is analyzed following Verschueren’s pragmatic method (1991). This pilot study attempts, via the analysis of news reporting on this particular nationalist and intercultural issue, to inquire into a general interpretive framework, called world of interpretation (WoI), representing deeply-rooted and commonly unchallenged beliefs about ethnic identity and interculturality. In addition to suggestions about the nature of the WoI, some theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.

1. Introduction: Inquiring into a ‘world of interpretation’ Nobody looking at the post-1988 political developments in Europe can dispute the resurgence of nationalist and ethnic frictions. These upheavals have caused a renewed popular and academic interest in the general issue of nationalism and related matters such as interculturality and ethnic identity. As a result, the prevalent ideas and conceptions about these issues are now readily accessible. Those ideas and conceptions are indeed the concern of the present article, meant as a pilot study for the exploration of the world of interpretation concerning nationalism, ethnic identity, and interculturality, observable in modern Western public opinion. By ‘world of interpretation’, I mean a socioculturally grounded, continuously fashioned, and fairly unconscious cognitive mold of conceptions and patterns of reasoning, by means of which phenomena and relations in the Correspondence to: M. Meeuwis, IPrA Research Center, Universitaire Instelling Antwerpen (GER), Universiteitsplein 1, B-2610 Wilrijk, Belgium * I am indebted to Jef Verschueren, Louis Goossens, and Jan Blommaert for reading and discussing earlier versions of this article. This contribution also benefits from some fruitful discussions with Frank Brisard.

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world are ‘internalized’ and understood, by means of which these phenomena are thought about, and by means of which these phenomena are communicated about with others. This notion of world of interpretation (henceforth WoI) can clearly be situated within the sphere of social psychological deliberation, and compares as such with Tulviste and Wertsch’s concept of “interpretive framework” as a frame of values and assumptions operating at an unconscious level, “accepted by those who hold it as being obvious and the only natural possibility”, and “providing the groundwork of our thinking and identity” (Tulviste and Wertsch 1990: 2-3). The full reconsruction of such a world of interpretation is, practically as well as theoretically (given, e.g., its constant remodeling), too pretentious an ambition. To trace fragments and an approximate picture of such WoIs, however, seems to be a feasible task. In social psychological thinking, especially social-constructivism, communication is taken to be one of the most accessible manifestations of a general, underlying cognitive frame for interpreting ‘the world’ (see, e.g., Shotter 1990, Wertsch 1988). This idea is also prevalent in much of the discourse-analytic tradition (among others, Van Dijk 1987, Essed 1988, also Sorenson 1991, Downing 1990). Communication about the (knowledge and interpretation of the) world offers, so to speak, a window onto the properties of a WoI. In the present study, the same heuristic strategy will be followed. I use communication about nationalist and ethnic issues as a means of grasping aspects of the WoI concerning interculturality and nationalism. The particular ‘communication’ investigated in the present study is written international news reporting. As such, my contribution can be situated withing the growing interest in news reporting analysis, represented by studies such as Bell (1991) Downing (1990), Fairclough (1989), Nir and Roeh (1992), Sorenson (1991). and Van Dijk (1983, 1988a, 1988b). The present investigation concentrates on articles on the Yugoslav crisis that appeared between March 31st and April 30th, 1990 in the following newspapers: The Guardian (UK), NRC Handelsblad (the Netherlands), Le Monde (France), and The International Her&d Tribune (US and international). This, then, is the background assumption for the present contribution: an examination of Western news reporting on an intercultural and nationalist issue such as the Yugoslav crisis can yield indications as to the nature of the mainstream Western WoI concerning interculturality, ethnicity, and nationalism. There are two reasons for this assumption (in addition to the social psychological considerations mentioned above). First, the chosen newspapers do not represent eccentrically radical, marginal opinions about the issues involved. Although an ideologically unbiased newspaper is something alien to this planet, some newspapers undoubtedly deviate less from the ideological ‘norm’ in our society than others. These ‘mainstream’ newspapers are commonly the ones evaluated as ‘serious’, and are taken to represent ‘neutral’, inconspicuous, and generally unchallenged beliefs and conceptions.

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Second, the newspapers originate from more than one country, and (rather than being subjected to a contrastive analysis) are examined with respect to their mutual convergences and the ‘ideological average’.

2. Methodology: The pragmatic perspective International news reporting as a communicative phenomenon has been studied from the perspective of a variety of disciplines, among which is linguistics (see the references cited above). For the present study, I have opted for the linguistic-pragmatic method proposed by Verschueren (1991). Verschueren’s is a ready-to-use method for the linguistic study of (international) news reporting; it takes the frame of reference for the pragmatic and functional study of linguistic phenomena outlined in Verschueren (1987) as a starting point. In this model, which views language use as a process of linguistic adaptation, language use is to be viewed from several angles. These are, among others, the objects of adaptation, i.e. all the contextual and psychological elements language is adapted to; the levels of adaptation, i.e. the actual levels of linguistic structuring at which the adaptation takes place; and the functions of adaptation, which explore the ways in which a linguistic choice is used in a communicative exchange, with a distinction between ‘surface’ (apparent, but often illusive) and ‘strategic’ (less manifest, but more authentic) functions. In a first characterization, this pragmatic method for the analysis of news reporting consists of two main parts: a first part contains information external to the text (hereafter ‘the preliminary data’); a second part contains the actual analysis (‘the pragmatic analysis’). The preliminary data are obtained by describing the levels of adaptation and the objects of adaptation (such as author’s intentions, historical context in which the actually investigated news reporting is to be situated, etc.), as well as their mutual relationships. The pragmatic analysis is built around four central questions: (a) What is the substance with the paper’s readership?

of the world view the author assumes s/he shares

Here, I try to identify the relevant ‘fragments’ of the world view the author assumes as shared with his/her readership. These fragments denote that particular background knowledge which is taken as the starting point for the new information to be built upon. Three types of background knowledge can be distinguished. First of all, we have existential knowledge. The author takes the existence of certain entities, persons, and locations for granted. Second, there is knowledge about systems. This involves factual knowledge about the structure and properties of certain cultural and social institutions and conventions. This is where understanding of particular ideologies and political scenarios comes in. Third, there is historical-contextual

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The author assumes that the readership already knows something about the central theme of the article. For instance, in an article about Yugoslavia, the author will presuppose some knowledge about the previous history and the structure of that state. A way to reveal the substance of this presumedly shared world view is to scrutinize the linguistic presuppositions and implicatures at the intraclausal level of the text (such as proper names and other definite NPs). Linguistic presuppositions, however ~ lexical as well as propositional - can sometimes transcend their surface function of carrying given information. This is where the functions of adaptation, along with the distinction between ‘surface’ and ‘strategic’, become important. As is well-known, presuppositions can indeed be exploited as a useful way of introducing new information without having to present it as such (‘surface presuppositions’). In this way, new information, too, can be used as secondary, background data, needed as anchoring points for the actual assertion. As such, the news reporter’s choice of a presupposition-carrying construction is a handy means of exerting hegemony, i.e. establishing what is, in principle, questionable information as definite background knowledge. (b) What information is implicitly communicated? This question also gauges the implicitly communicated information. The difference from (a) lies in the fact that question (b) wants to point at actual new information, and that, as part of the communicated meaning, this information will have a more central role to play in the build-up of the argumentation. This implicitly communicated new information is primarily to be found at a somewhat higher level of linguistic structuring than the information in (a), to wit, mostly the interclausal level. Juxtaposed clauses and even paragraphs can indicate implications of relevance or causal relation between two ideas expressed. In (c) What message can we expect to (have) come across to the readers? much the same way as the foregoing inquiry, this question concentrates on the communicated meaning. The difference from (6) lies in the degree of consciousness or accessibility. Question (c) deals with what is explicitly formulated in the propositional content. For a complete answer to the question ‘What message has come across?‘, an examination of the combination of the explicitly communicated meaning with the implicitly communicated information is needed. The linguistic units to be approached for this inquiry are the sentence, the paragraph, and the text as a whole. This question probes (d) What ‘real information’ does the article contain.7 into the proportion of communicated reality. It is an evaluation of the ‘informative value’ of the text. Informative value can be determined by examining how much ‘real information’ the text offers. That is, truly new information about previously unknown facts in the world is contrasted with the proportion of evaluative, attitudinal statements. The target linguistic level for this investigation is the entire text.

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Not all of the four constituent questions are of equal importance for a specific research target. In the present case, the search for the WoI regarding interculturality and nationalism, for instance, did not turn out to benefit too significantly from an inquiry into informational value (d), however interesting results this inquiry might reveal on its own. The presentation of the pragmatic analysis (section 4) will therefore be confined to the findings on questions (a), (b), and (c), which have yielded the most insightful information in tracing the nature of the WoI. The theoretical apparatus of the four central questions is furthermore backed by two restrictive methodological principles: (i) The principle of predictable knowledge. It is of course useless to ‘gain’ insights that are already predictable at the onset of the actual research, as conclusions of an analysis of news reporting. For instance, to show that international news reporting is more a matter of ‘reality construction’ than of ‘reality reporting’, as many earlier studies have endeavored to do (see Verschueren’s criticism, 1985 and 1991: 189ff.), is only to adduce evidence for something that already can be predicted from an observation of the structure and properties of news reporting institutions, as private organizations trying to survive economically. The relevant questions to pose are, rather: “How much of the news content is ‘constructed’ reality? What are the processes which make this kind of ‘construction’ possible? And how, and to what extent, do these processes affect the information value of news reports?” (Verschueren 199 1: 190). (ii) The principle of quantitative support. When the conclusions concern such a complex and deeply-rooted matter as a WoI, and the unit of concentration is implicitly communicated information, phenomena discovered with a certain degree of recurrence are pretty reliable indicators of the characteristics of such a WoI. This quantitative principle also wants to respond to the risk of reading more in(to) the text than what is meant by it, a risk the reader runs when his/her focus of analysis is implicitly conveyed messages. The principle does not imply any exclusive criterion of the sort that would brand every singularity as insignificant. Indeed, as will be shown in the analysis, it is sometimes the very scarcity of a feature that offers the indicative clue for the nature of a WoI. The principle rather states that, when a feature is observed with a certain rate of repetition, at the least that feature can safely be said to constitute a genuine manifestation of the WoI. And the same holds mutatis mutandis for systematic scarcity or absence of certain features. Quantity is thus not a criterion, but an indication of significance, both in its positive and in its negative manifestation. How is the principle of quantitative support to be applied in practice? It is not to be applied by taking one text as a starting point and checking whether the findings occur in other texts. Such is not a valid procedure, as it presupposes all the ultimate findings to be at least represented in that

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particular ‘master’ text. Since there is no investigational way back, worthwhile elements in the other texts would inevitably get lost. In order to avoid this, one should rather approach the corpus in its totality, to be inspected with regard to the interrelations and reappearance of elements. I have sketched a framework and method for the investigation of the newspaper articles. In the next section, I will present the corpus of newspaper articles chosen to study the WoI by describing the preliminary data, or the external properties of the texts.

3. The corpus: The preliminary data The corpus consists of 31 articles collected, as mentioned in the introduction above, between March 31st and April 30th, 1990 in one Americaminternational and three Western European dailies, The International Herald Tribune (henceforth HT), The Guardian (Guardian), NRC Hundelsblad (NRC), and Le Monde (LM)l. The articles all report on the Yugoslav crisis, except for three, which are commentaries on the general rise of nationalism and ethnic frictions in Central and Eastern Europe at that time. HT contributed 7 articles, Guardian 11, NRC 5, and LM 8. First of all, a note about the authors. Minimal attention was paid to the personal identification of the author. As long as we are not dealing with external guest writers or with letters-to-the-editor (which were not included), we can safely conjecture that what the author writes will represent the inhouse values of the newspaper. My corpus contains 25 reports and 6 editorials. In the editorials, the author assumes that the facts s/he is commenting upon are part of the reader’s background knowledge. In this sense, editorials are clearly texts of an interpretive, reflecting kind, and will mainly contain strategies of argumentation and persuasion. Reports, in contrast, pretend to be a direct account of ‘hot news’. Nonetheless, since we can safely assume that every report will in one way or another be biased, or contain some ‘reality construction’ (see above), some argumentation and persuasion will be present under the surface of the ‘bare’ report. Here, the functions of adaptation become apparent, implying a clear separation between the ‘surface’ function (to report) and the ‘strategic’ function (to persuade). The historical context in which the selected articles were written can be depicted as follows. In April 1990, what became afterwards known as ‘the Yugoslav crisis’ was in its incipient stage. In some republics, such as Slovenia and Croatia, local communist parties split from the official, federal CP in the

1

For the complete

list of articles,

see the appendix.

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earlier months of the year. The same republics then planned to organize free elections within their frontiers, the first free elections to be held in post-war Yugoslavia, in Slovenia as the first, on April 8th. As to the international atmosphere in which all this takes place, there is, first of all, the wave of political reform in communist Eastern and Central Europe, with as its climax the sensational demolition of the Berlin Wall in the fall of the year before. Furthermore, April ‘90 is also the period of the Baltics’ claim to independence. In Lithuania, tension reaches its culmination point when the Soviet authorities impose an economic blockade and threaten with military intervention. Also Latvia, Estonia, and Georgia demand a loosening of the Soviet grip. Political reforms and nationalist disruptions constitute two major conditions of European life in those days; hence, they form important aspects of the context in which the articles on Yugoslavia were written.

4. The pragmatic analysis 4.1. Presumedly shared world view Although seemingly trivial in itself, the assumed shared knowledge about certain persons and locations (existential knowledge) is the crucial frame of reference in an author’s selection of anchoring points for his/her story. In the articles under investigation, the ‘existential knowledge’ appears at two levels. First, the authors presuppose a considerable amount of common knowledge about political figures (such as Gorbachev or Mitterand), about geographical entities (countries and major cities, etc.), and about historical facts not having to do with Yugoslavia proper (the two World Wars, etc.). Second, a high number of geopolitical entities and political protagonists within Yugoslavia are also assumed to belong to the background knowledge. Concretely, this information includes the existence of Yugoslavia’s six federal republics and two provinces, along with the names of their capitals. It also comprises individuals such as, among others, Franjo Tudjman, Milan KuEan, and Slobodan MiloSevic, and political parties such as ‘Demos’ and ‘the Coalition of People’s Accord’. All these data, however, often appear as ‘surface presuppositions’: while they are, strictly speaking, new information, they are ‘forced’ into the class of presupposed, background knowledge by being coded as presuppositions. 2 As for the knowledge on systems, the reader is assumed to possess factual

2 The linguistic heuristic device used to distinguish ‘real’ presuppositions from ‘surface’ presuppositions has to do with whether or not the definite noun is accompanied by qualifying complements. A full exposition of this highly technical matter does not fall within the scope of the present contribution. The interested reader is referred to Meeuwis (1991).

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knowledge concerning the panorama of political ideologies. S/he has to know what ‘communism’ covers, who the ‘Greens’ are, and so on. More specifically, the political knowledge involved concerns the nomenclature established for the traditional European political creeds. Pivotal terms (and derivations) are, among others, ‘Social Democrat’, ‘Christian Democrat’, ‘Socialist’, and ‘Center-Right’. Such labels are quite foreign to, for instance, the North American political scene. The dominant use of these typically European epithets characterizes the discourse as ‘Europe-oriented’, and this has some implications for the reader’s interpretation of certain political labels. The ‘European-ness’ of the discourse is part of the conditions that allow the reader to interpret a polysemous term such as ‘liberal’ in the European, rather than in the North American sense; this is a major differentiation. The actual meaning of the term ‘liberal’ is thus negotiated by the discourse of use. Such ‘discourse-negotiation of meaning’ is a most meaningful phenomenon with respect to some terms that are crucial in our search for the WoI on interculturality. Two examples can be given in this respect: (i) the term their ‘nationalist’, and (ii) the term ‘communist’ (for both, read ‘including derivations’). (i) ‘Nationalist ‘. An analysis at the sentence and text level reveals a rather straightforward interpretation of the term ‘nationalist’. 3 unambiguous, (Although the level of analysis mainly refers to question (6) above, the presupposition of the noun clearly concerns ‘knowledge on systems’ and forms part of the starting point or background information.) ‘Nationalism’ appears to represent the following conceptualization. As an ideology, it only involves foreign policy. It refers to attitudes of one territory towards another (or others). It has nothing to do with attitudes towards non-geographical (social, racial, or ethnic) minorities within the own regional boundaries. In the texts, this interpretation is communicated, among other things, by commentaries on the electoral campaigns and the political beliefs of the persons and parties qualified as ‘nationalist’. In other words, I use the heuristic device of, what could be called, the ‘conditional transitivity of identification’: if X is said to be nationalist, and elsewhere X is said to be Y, then, where Y and ‘nationalist’ are compatible, Y can be said to be the correct The following example represents a pervasive interpretation of ‘nationalist’. tendency. At the beginning of article 8, Tudjman and his Croatian Democratic Union are labeled ‘nationalist’: “the jierce1.v nationalist Croatian Democratic Union led by Franjo Tudjman, said it would win 60 per cent of the votes” (the italics in this and the following examples are mine, MM). Then, when we

3 At this point, it should be stressed that the ‘definitions’ revealed for concepts such as ‘nationalism’ and ‘ethnicity’ represent conceptualizations that are to be found in the texts. Notice that these conceptualizations may deviate in various ways from more ‘scholarly’ or ‘scientific‘ explanations, such as those suggested by Fishman (e.g. 1968. 1972, 1989).

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look at all the places in this text where Tudjman’s campaign is described, the following emerges: “won much of his support by demanding freedom from Serbia”, and “Mr Tudjman is on record as wanting immediate secession from Yugoslavia”. In this connection, the notion of ‘significant absence’ becomes relevant. It is indeed significant that the characterization of the electoral campaign of the protagonists that are labeled ‘nationalist’ points exclusively in the direction of separatism. Apart form some rare cases, references to positions or attitudes towards internal minorities do not occur as an identification of the term. The very absence of such references characterizes the authors’ interpretation of ‘nationalist’ as a solely external attitude and as a stance in foreign policy. This purely external interpretation sometimes leads to a full equation of ‘nationalist ’ with ‘separatist’, such as operated by means of the titles of articles 13 and 18. The fact that intolerance towards minorities within the region finds no place in the ideological credo of nationalism is furthermore revealed by another, prominent recurrent feature. The possible consequences of nationalist feelings for internal minorities are presented as mere reactions on the part of those minorities. Potential threats to those minorities are always put in the mouths of the minority people themselves; they are never formulated in connection with the articulation of the campaign. It is assumed that the menaces are no more than alleged menaces, and that they represent mere sidephenomena or occasional symptoms, alien to the ideology itself. In article 7, for instance, a sentence reads: “Mr Tudjman’s fierce nationalist campaigning has caused concern among the 600,000-strong Serbian minority in Croatia”. Rather than pointing out that the campaign’s content ‘signified a certain threat’ to the Serbian minority, the author opts for a construction that views the matter from the Serbian minority perspective, in such a way that the reader is invited to question that viewpoint. In article 26, we find another illustration of this general tendency in the following statement: “Since the Communist Party in Croatia gave up its hegemony last year, the loud call for sovereignty is heard again in and around the capital Zagreb. The Serbian minority shudders at the very thought of it, and sees the electoral victory of the nationalist Croatian Democratic Union, this weekend, certainly not as a reassuring development”.4 Again, the consequences of a rising nationalism in Croatia for the Serbian 4 The translation from the Dutch is mine. In order to do justice to the phrasing, the translation is as literal as possible. The original reads: “Sinds de communistische partij in KroatiE vorig jaar haar hegemonie opgaf, klinkt de roep om soevereiniteit weer luid in de hoofdstad Zagreb en omstreken. De Servische minderheid rilt bij die gedachte en ziet de verkiezingingsoverwinning van de nationalistische Kroatische Democratische Unie, dit weekeinde, bepaald niet als een geruststellende ontwikkeling”.

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minority within that republic are presented as mere reactions, the legitimacy of which can be discussed. (ii) ‘Communist’. In addition to the label ‘nationalist’, there is another term whose use requires special attention, namely ‘communist’. This term is persistently used to denote certain entities that, politically speaking, do not form a homogeneous whole. This applies specifically to the local ex-communists, i.e. former communists who have departed from the traditional MarxistLeninist canons and who have structurally reorganized themselves after breaking away from the central Yugoslav CP. These reform communists are more often than not referred to by the label ‘communist’, a label which obviously - is also used for the ‘classical’ communists in Belgrade. In a way, this puts the reformers, against their will, back into the one class of communists. The reformist campaigns and the breach with the central CP are neglected and rendered invalid: communists will be communists. At work is a nominal strategy of overgeneralization that obliterates all nuances and creates a nice, clear bipolarity between a non-communist and a (redefined) communist camp, now comprising both orthodox and reform communists. The significance of such a strategy of bipolarization will be touched upon below (4.2). As I said, this active categorization is accomplished by the persistent application of the label ‘communist’ to the reformers. Since this labeling is not exclusive, but is often paralleled in the same text by a more appropriate labeling as ‘reformed’, one could argue that the inappropriate labeling ‘communist’ has no significance whatsoever, but is merely due to the typical style of journalese (partly occasioned by limits of space). This does not mean that certain patterns of ‘style’ such as generalized labeling, however characteristic of a register, cannot be given an interpretation. In the present case, other strategies cooperate towards bringing the reformers back among the communists. It is repeatedly insinuated that the differences between the reformers and the orthodox communists are merely differences in name. For instance, in article 7, where the reformed communists are as a rule referred to the label is qualified by the following relative clause: as “the Communists”, “The Communists, who have taken a new name - the Party of Democratic Change - are led by Ivica Racan”. A third type of presupposed background knowledge consists of the historical-contextual knowledge an author wants to use as a starting point for his/her ‘real story’. This knowledge contains information on, i.a., the federal structure of Yugoslavia, how the country is ruled, what the ethnic, linguistic, or religious differences are within the country, or what historical developments Yugoslavia has gone through. This kind of information is predominantly encoded in surface presuppositions, which indicates that the author actually assumes that this material is not really known by his/her readership. The fact that, in a number of articles, these data were included within the explicit content corroborates this indication.

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4.2. Implicitly and explicitly communicated new information

My inquiry into question (6) has certainly revealed the most interesting findings with respect to the posited research target, namely the WoI on interculturality and ethnic identity. This implies that what will be presented here predominantly represents the findings of question (6) and that only those results of question (c) are included that constitute a valuable contribution to the characterization of the WoI. Although the findings will be presented in as synthesized a form as possible, a differentiation of three principal ‘prisms’ of concepts and opinions seems required for both expository and theoretical reasons. (i) There appears to be a belief in the overwhelming character of the electoral victory of the non-communist side, in contrast with the humiliating defeat the (ex-)communists will have to endure. The few electoral successes of the latter are presented as of minor importance, Also, the (ex-)communists’ claims for electoral success are often implicitly presented as very untrustworthy. Some indications of this are the contrastive choices of expressions for either side, as well as text-organizational implications of relevance. In article 6, for instance, the sentence “Slovenia has voted overwhelmingly to ditch Communist rule” stands in opposition to: “The Reform Party may gain consolation on Sunday when its former leader, Milan Kucan, is expected to win in a run-off against the Demos leader, Joze Pucnik, for the Slovene presidency”. Another example of the contrastive choices of expressions can be found in article 17 : “The Communist Party of Croatia, the second largest republic, is fighting for survival in the election. A major Communist Party loss in Croatia could be more damaging to the federal party’s grip on power than the election defeat in the northern republic of Slovenia was earlier this month”. An example of how the minor importance of the (ex-)communists’ electoral successes is implicitly communicated can be found in the following two sentences (article 17). These sentences are not connected by a modifying adverb or conjunction. This direct successive order of sentences implies a minimization of K&an’s presidential success. “A Communist advocate of change, Milan Kucan, was favored to narrowly defeat the center-right coalition leader, Joze Pucnik. Mr. Pucnik’s Democratic United Opposition of Slovenia crushed the Communists in elections to Slovenia’s parliament on April 8, Yugoslavia’s first multiparty ballot since 1938”.

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Article 7 offers an example of how the untrustworthiness (ex-)communists’ claims for victory is implicitly conveyed:

of

the

“The ruling Communist Party in Croatia, Yugoslavia’s second largest republic, yesterday expressed its confidence of victory in tomorrow’s first multi-party election for more than 50 years. That would buck the trend elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and even in Yugoslavia, where the anticommunist opposition alliance scored a clear victory on April 8”. A further insinuation is that the (ex-)communists’ stance is not at all prosegregation and that the non-communists’ is very pronouncedly so. The two sides are represented in a strong black-and-white opposition. This black-andwhite opposition is signaled by the general tendency to give a very elaborate depiction of the non-communists’ secessionist plans, in contrast with the total absence of any such mention in accounts of the (ex-)communists’ electoral campaign. Furthermore, the texts suggest that the ballots have separation as the central issue. These insinuations serve to support the belief that the electoral victory of the non-communist block and the defeat of the (ex-)communists are predictable processes. The belief is demonstrated by the fact that the articles make ready predictions even when none or very few votes have been counted. Separatism is thought to be an indispensable condition for electoral success. This is considered to be the case for the following reasons. As mentioned, the non-communists are presented as the separatists. In the articles, more than abundant mention is made of the ‘group differences’ in Yugoslavia, be they religious, historical, linguistic, or ethnic. These differences are believed to be such that separation (and thus electoral success for separatists) is an inescapable and necessary outcome. The causal relation between cultural differences and separation is implicitly expressed. The differences are always reported in the surroundings of references to secession, implying relevance of the one for the other. Let me illustrate this by quoting from article 1: “Independent groups have blossomed since Slovenia, which has strong Western European roots, last year became the first republic to allow opposition parties. It has long been at odds with more conservative republics, such as Serbia”. A few lines below, the author spells out the likelihood of the separatists’ electoral victory. Then, as an explanation for this likelihood, the following is stated : “The republic is a world apart from the rest of Yugoslavia, which still harks back to the Ottoman empire. Slovenia was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until the end of the first world war”.

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The presentation of the secession as being an inevitable result of the cultural differences houses the assumption that cohabiting differences by de$inition must conflict. In studies on intercultural communication, this conception is called the colliding cultures perspective (Blommaert 1991: 19ff.). In this perspective, it is believed that, when dissimilar cultures come into contact, this automatically and in all cases leads to conflict. In the majority of the cases, the idea that cultures ‘collide’ only appears at an implicit level. Sometimes, however, it is more explicitly formulated. The rhetorical question and the subsequent comments in article 29, which is an article that did not specifically comment on the situation in Yugoslavia (see section 3), are an instance of such explications: “After World War I, the Romanians of Transylvania demanded union with the new Romanian state next door. It responded by annexing Transylvania. The postwar settlement left Transylvania Romanian. Now it was time for Romanians to oppress Hungarians. Does anyone wonder that people were again murdering one another a few days ago in such a place? These are grudges a thousand years old, expressing cultural, religious, ethnic and class conflicts. There is no solution except reconciliation - or mass population transfers, and they would only create new grievances for new generations”. Another illustration is the following passage in article 27. The “cultural divide” the author refers to is presented as unavoidably leading to declarations of independence. “The same forces that propelled Lithuania to declare independence from Moscow are at work in Slovenia, Mr. Novak said. ‘The Lithuanians feel like a foreign element in the Soviet Union,’ he said. ‘The Slovenes feel the same way here.’ The cultural divide separating northern and southern Yugoslavia has always been there. Slovenes who live along the border with Austria and Italy, are industrious Roman Catholic Slavs whose culture was shaped by centuries spent under Austrian rule. To them, southern Yugoslavia, where the religion is Islam or Eastern Orthodox and the culture more Mediterranean, is a foreign country, strange and threatening”. The conception of ‘colliding’ cultures will be further dealt with below, since it is a basic conceptual frame of interculturality used in my corpus, and, as such, an essential notion in the WoI. At this point, however, I would like to give some evaluation of the observations made above. The presentation as if the (ex-)communists did not want a secession, but the others did, and very strongly so, is, to say the least, an oversimplification. The facts are that both sides had some sort of secession in mind, opinions diverging only as to the extent of the secession. The black-and-white polarization, as it appears in the articles, seems to be motivated by the frame in which it finds its place. This frame sets up the defeat of the allegedly non-separatist

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(ex-)communists. The assumed inevitability of the segregation of cultural differences is presented as one of the reasons for this defeat. Another black-and-white polarization is the one between the communists and the reform communists on the one hand, and the non-communists on the other (cf. 4.1). The reform communists are presented as belonging to the same category as the orthodox communists, in such a way that only two - instead of three - classes remain: ‘communists’ and ‘non-communists’. This opposition, too, fits into an argumentation built on the predictability of electoral loss for the reform communists: given the general trend of communist downfall in Central and Eastern Europe, and given the established ‘fact’ that the reformed communists are still communists, the reformed communists will without doubt be defeated in the elections. Black-and-white oppositions make things clearer and more comprehensible. Facilitating categorization makes reading and thinking about the world more attractive. Moreover, since the written press is marked by a limitation of space and by deadlines in time, a fully nuanced elaboration is not even feasible, practically speaking. Thus, finding black-and-white polarizations in the written press is not too interesting an observation. In keeping with the principle of predictability, the more interesting project to pursue, then, is to investigate the way in which such oversimplification is used. We can thus rebut the possible counterclaim that bipolarization, as a mere function of space, time, and style (see above), is of no significance at all: the relevant question is why polarizations occur where they occur. We should investigate the general conceptual frame that the mechanisms of polarization and simplification are part of. In the present case, this frame is constituted by the idea of ‘colliding’ cultures. Thus, by looking for the specific strategic operations supported by polarization and simplification, it becomes possible to present a picture of the way in which, and not just the bare fact that, news reporting is a reality-constructing medium of communication. (ii) In a second conceptual prism which clearly emerges from the data, ethnic identity is seen as a territorial affair by definition. Throughout the articles, ethnic and nationalist conflicts are consistently equated with conflicts between geographically bounded regions. The implicit interpretation of ethnicity as a territorial affair underlies many types of reasonings and comparisons. Again ‘transitivity of identification’ is a good indicator. In article 8, the sentence “But Mr Racan, the communist leader, warned against such talk and referred to the possibility of future ethnic conflicts in Croatia, which has a 600,000-strong Serbian minority” clearly gives an account of an internal ethnic conflict. In the sentence immediately following, these conflicts are called ‘nationalist frictions’: “Nationalist friction has always been present in Yugoslavia”. So far, we are only dealing with ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nationality’ as features of human groups without any connotation of territoriality. Now, the remainder of this passage reads:

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“[Nationalist friction has always been present in Yugoslavia,] particularly in Croatia and neighbouring Slovenia, the two most westernised and affluent regions. Slovenia accounts for a third of Yugoslav’s (sic) exports and Croatia for 80 per cent of its oil production. Both accuse Serbia, Yugoslavia’s biggest republic, of favouring a strong central power with a rigid communist regime, and trying to dominate the country. Mr Tudjman is on record as wanting immediate secession from Yugoslavia. The Coalition wants a more cautious approach, with a loose confederation in mind”. The phenomenon of ethnic, nationalist frictions is worked out by means of exemplifying reference to the existing conflict between the republics of Slovenia and Croatia on the one hand, and the republic of Serbia on the other. But this is a conflict between geopolitical entities. The author is elaborating an analogy in which transitivity of identification betrays an implicit interpretation of ethnicity as a territorial matter: the ethnic diversity inside Croatia is compared with - and thus considered analogous to - the relationship between the republics of Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia. A second example is offered in article 26. In this text, a comparison is made that also concerns the Serbian minority in Croatia. In the first half of the text, the author describes the minority’s disquiet since the Croatian call for secession. He quotes and rephrases the Croatian Serbs’ complaints about harassments by Croats, and about the Croats’ desire to segregate. He then says : “The world is full of ambivalence. For several years, the republic of Serbia, the homeland of the Serbs in Croatia, has been subject to sharp international criticism for the way in which they oppress the ethnic Albanian majority in the autonomous province of Kosovo”. 5 The conclusion the author draws is unequivocal: “Are the ethnic Albanians victims of the Serbs, in the same way as the Croatian Serbs are victims of the Croats?“. 6 By comparing the behavior of the Croats towards the Serbian minority with the behavior of the republic of Serbia towards the Albanians, the Serbs in Croatia are connected with Serbia as a territorial unit. Their ethnic identity is established as belonging to a geographical entity. The connection of their Serbian ethnicity with the territory of Serbia is so strong that a kind of responsibility is assumed: they can be held responsible for Serbia’s oppression of the Albanians. This connection is made in spite of the 5 My translation from Dutch: “De wereld is vol dubbele bodems. De republiek Set-vie, het thuisland van de Serviers in Kroatie, oogst al enkele jaren scherpe intemationale kritiek om de manier waarop zij de etnische Albanese meerderheid in de autonome provincie Kosovo onderdrukt”. 6 “Zijn de etnische Albanezen het slachtoffer van de Serviers, zoals de Kroatische Set-vi&s het slachtoffer zijn van de Kroaten?”

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Croatian Serbs’ explicit claims, presented in the same text, that they do not want to move to the republic of Serbia ~ which is nevertheless referred to as their ‘homeland’. As mentioned, the idea of ethnicity as a territorial feature is a highly implicit matter in that it forms the taken-for-granted foundation of deductive chains of reasoning. Since the articles whose issue is not restricted to the Yugoslav crisis have ethnicity and nationalism as their direct subject, we can expect that they exhibit some manifestation of the territorial concept of ethnicity at a more explicit level. The last two sentences in the following passage (article 29) state that nationalist and ethnic group-identification is only possible if the situation is geographically well-defined: “Transylvania has recently seen bitter violence, with angry exchanges between Romanian and Hungarian governments. No one who saw the television footage of beatings and backings and manhunts in Transylvania can fail to appreciate the enduring hatreds of the region. These are described as nationalist hatreds. Yet the problem really is the lack of achieved or fulfilled nationalism in Central and Balkan Europe. Nationalism is a relatively modern concept there, unfulfilled and unfulfillable because of this history of the region and the complexity of its ethnic patterns, product of wave after wave of migrations into the region”. As a significant component in the WoI on interculturality, the conception of ethnicity as a territorial matter decidedly links up with the notion of ‘colliding’ cultures (see prism (i)) and with the view of nationalism as an ideology of foreign policy (see 4.1., ‘knowledge on systems’). This point will be clarified in the closing section of my article. (iii) A third and last conceptual prism involves the idea that secession per se is an act of democratization. In a recurrent way, democracy and secession are presented as indissolubly related. The two terms are connected in an implicational correlation: as democracy (in terms of less communism, the organization of free elections, etc.) increases, secession is bound to follow. And, vice versa, the more secession becomes established, the more democratic a system is. In the texts, the processes of democratization (among which the plain fact of having free elections) and the accomplishment of secession are often mentioned in the same breath. The following ways of formulating are far from exceptional (article 7) : “Serbia, the largest republic, retains rigid Communist ideas and is strongly opposed to any idea of confederation or free elections in the immediate future. That position is sharply at odds with both Croatia and Slovenia in terms of the pace of reform and demands for more independence from the central Yugoslav authorities”.

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The next passage (article 6) shows how secession is presented as a natural corollary of democratization (i.c. the elimination of the communists): “The east-west split along political, cultural and ethnic lines that runs through the country is likely to be aggravated at the weekend when the Communists could again be ditched in Croatia, the bigger and more powerful republic that lies alongside Slovenia”. The presentation of secession as a democratic accomplishment is often mediated by the qualification ‘communism’. The authors reason that, since communism is undemocratic, and since the Yugoslav federation is communist, this federation is not democratic. The break-up of the federation is presented as a triumph for and an achievement of democracy. The texts suggest that a seceding republic or group takes a democratic step and that a government allowing secession is a democratic one. An evaluation of this conceptual frame is suggested in the following section, where I will recapitulate my discussion of the conceptualization prisms in the light of the ultimate target of investigation, viz. the Wol on interculturality, ethnicity, and nationalism.

5. Conclusions: The world of interpretation on interculturality

and nationalism

In my discussion of the shared world view, the term ‘nationalist’ appeared to cover an ideological stance in external affairs. Nationalism is seen as aspiring the independence of a territory vis-a-vis other territories. The ideology is purged of any attitude of intolerance or bigotry towards minorities within the own territorial boundaries. Any threat for the internal minorities is presented as a side-phenomenon, alien to the ideology itself, and is seen as nothing but an occasional reaction on the part of the internal minorities. Self-identification as a group on an ethnic basis is thus equated with opposing one’s territory to other territories. This betrays a view of ethnicity as being fundamentally a territorial question. It was shown that this idea was also directly manifested in the texts (prism (ii)). Hence, it appears to be an essential property of the WoI. Another basic aspect of the WoI was the conception of ‘colliding’ cultures. Cultural, religious, linguistic, ethnic, and politico-historical differences were often directly related to the increasing calls for secession. The authors suggest that secession has always been latent, and that it is the natural and inevitable outcome of cultural differences. Any contact between different structures is believed to automatically result in conflict. The notion of ‘colliding’ cultures and the conception of ethnic identity as a territorial matter are not unrelated in the WoI. They are merged in a conceptualization pattern in which the cohabitation of different cultures in one territorial unit is seen as governed by mechanistic, Newtonian principles:

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it is impossible for two bodies to occupy the same space. Not only is each ethnic group held to fundamentally belong to a territory, but it is also assumed that each territory can accommodate only one ethnic group. In this line of thinking, territorial units are characterized by cultural homogeneity. Heterogeneity is taken to engender conflicts, and to represent a provisional state in an inevitable development towards homogeneity (secession). The concepts of ‘ideal homogeneity’ and ‘colliding’ cultures take on a rather peculiar shape in the articles. The suggested cultural differences that allegedly cause secessions and conflicts actually relate to a very diverse typology. As such, they seem to depend on the question as to what fits the argument. Slovenia is presented as totally different from the rest of Yugoslavia due to its Austro-Hungarian political history. And when the Croatian call for independence is at issue, the separation of this republic seems to be compulsory because of its religious identity as Roman Catholic. It seems that one difference or another can always be found. This strongly points in the direction of rationalizations post factum and considerably undercuts the argument that every territory or population ‘with a difference’ must segregate. There is, I believe, enough evidence to suggest that differences do not cause problems per se. Rather, their problematic character emerges from the way they are strategically used to achieve other goals. In general, the notion of homogeneity whithin the nation-state and the idea that cultures ‘collide’ do not stand on firm ground. As Hobsbawm’s study (1990) shows, the uniform nation-state is historically as well as synchronically unmistakably the exception, and cultural heterogeneity does not always and automatically represent instability. Hobsbawm’s insights also suggest the use of rationalizations post factum. As he convincingly argues, secessionist movements find their motivations primarily in economic or socio-political grievances. Cultural differences are more often a secondary explanation or ‘excuse’ (easy to find, since some difference is never far away), or, at best, a reality that merely facilitates secession. The driving force lies elsewhere: “

most such movements appear to be reactions against the centralization - i.e. the remoteness of state, economic or cultural power, against bureaucratization, or else they express other various local or sectional discontents capable of being wrapped in coloured banners.” (Hobsbawm 1990: 178).

A general feeling of socio-economic insecurity seems to have arisen after the brusque political transformations in post-cold-war Central and Eastern Europe. Hobsbawm’s argumentation offers an adequate explanation for the apparently coincidental concurrence of this feeling of insecurity and the rise of nationalist disruptions. Finally, I traced the belief that secession is a democratic accomplishment. A region that separates itself from the territorial unit it belonged to is held to

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deserve the label ‘democratic’. So is any federal government that permits secession. In this sense, it is assumed that democracy can be measured by actions in the realm of external policy. As an evaluation of this conceptualization, it suffices to say that secession is not enough for an institution to be genuinely democratic. It is not hard to conceive of a multitude of independent states characterized by an all but democratic political system. After the act of secession, democracy still has to be accomplished internally, since it is essentially defined by the people’s participation in its government’s internal and external policy. This, of course, is not intended to disprove that a democratic system has to respect the rights of groups. Only, secession is not a fulfillment of democracy in its own right.

Appendix ’ (I) Discourse type: Report

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Guardian Guardian Guardian Guardian Guardian Guardian

07104 p. 4: Slovenes’ vote could break up Yugoslavia 09/04 p. 4: Slovenes join the democratic ranks lo/O4 p. 24: Slovenia’s communists head for humiliation 12/04 p. 4: Kosovo’s leaders resign in protest 14/04 p. 4: Slovenian poll victors seek independence from Belgrade 17/04 p. 4: Slovenia overwhelmingly drops former Communists.

Yugoslavia’s crisis deepens after vote Guardian 21/04 p. 4: Communists lead in Croatia polls Guardian 23/04 p. 5: Croatian election could split Yugoslavia Guardian 24/04 p. 4: Nationalists score big win in Croatia Guardian 25/04 p. 4: Yugoslav ethnic leader released NRC 09/04 p. 5: Ex-communist winnaar in Sloven% NRC 12/04 p. 5: Sloveen beledigt straffeloos leger NRC 23104 p. 5: Separatisten winnen verkiezingen Kroatie NRC 25/04 p. 5: Kosovo viert vrijlating van ex-partijchef Vlasi HT 09/04 p. 5: Slovenians vote in the first free Yugoslav election HT 17/04 p. 2: Center-right Slovenes win election, ousting communists after 45 years HT 23/04 p. 6: Foes of Party favored in Croatian election HT 24/04 p. 7: Separatists are leading Croatia vote LA4 1l/O4 p. 4: Incertitude sur la composition du futur parlement de Slovenie LA4 12/04 p. 3: L’opposition en t&te aux elections en Slovenie LM 13/04 p. 3: Mise en garde de l’armee a la Slovenie LM 18/04 p. 3 : L’opposition devrait former le nouveau gouvernement en Slovenie LA4 20104 p. 4: Levee de l’etat d’urgence au Kosovo LM 24/04 p. 6: M. Milan Kucan est assure d’etre elu president de la Slovenie LM 27/04 p. 4: Net sucds de l’opposition aux elections en Croatie

’ Date format is ddimm.

236 (Ha) 26.

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type:

/ Nationalist

ideology in news reporting

Editorial

NRC 25104 p. 10: Woede

in Servische

dorpen:

laat die Kroaten

maar een toontje

lager zingen 27. HT 07/04 p. 2: Yugoslav election to test fragile union 28. LA4 26/04 p. 1: Decrispation au Kosovo (Ilb)

Discourse

type:

Editorial,

not Yugoslavia-restricted

29. HT 02104 p. 6: To have a ‘Sarajevo’, you need major powers ready for war 30. HT 02/04 p. 6: Rights vs. rights: When individuals identify with groups. Difference brings honest principles into conflict. 31. Guardian 07/04 p. 4: Ideal of Europe meets reality of nationalism

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