This article applies Bakhtinian dialogism and the idea of centripetal
and centrifugal forces in struggle to critical discourse studies to
analyse how powerful and marginalised discourses are brought
into competition in political language to justify paradigm
changes. I analyse German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende
(‘watershed’) speech, which he gave as a response to the Russian
invasion of Ukraine, announcing a radical armament programme
and change in foreign policy, paradigm shifts that ...
This article applies Bakhtinian dialogism and the idea of centripetal
and centrifugal forces in struggle to critical discourse studies to
analyse how powerful and marginalised discourses are brought
into competition in political language to justify paradigm
changes. I analyse German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende
(‘watershed’) speech, which he gave as a response to the Russian
invasion of Ukraine, announcing a radical armament programme
and change in foreign policy, paradigm shifts that had previously
been unthinkable in German politics. Based on a qualitative
analysis using the Appraisal Theory strategies Attitude and
Engagement, I identify how Scholz aligns himself with particular
powerful discourses, centring some and marginalising others, to
construct an existential threat for Germany and a ‘watershed’
moment, a new situation which casts his policies of armament as
without alternative. I use a dialogic approach to analyse how the
speech responds to and anticipates past (already-spoken) and
future (not-yet-spoken) discourses, to position itself both in terms
of the immediate and the historical function of a policy
statement. The paper demonstrates the strength of Bakhtinian
analysis of how utterances are shaped by past and envisaged
future uses of particular discourses and of dialogically contractive
and expansive strategies in critical discourse studies.
+
