The Language of Fear

Piotr Cap

The Language
of Fear
Communicating Threat in Public Discourse
Piotr Cap
Department of Pragmatics
University of Łódź
Łódź, Poland

ISBN 978-1-137-59729-8 ISBN 978-1-137-59731-1 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59731-1

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 CONTENTS

1 Cognitive, Social and Psychological Issues of Public

Discourse and Threat Communication 1

2 Proximization: A Threat-Based Model of Policy

Legitimization 15

3 Health Discourse: The War on Cancer and Beyond 29

4 Environmental Discourse: Climate Change 41

5 Technological Discourse: Threats in the Cyberspace 53

6 Immigration and Anti-migration Discourses: The Early

Rhetoric of Brexit 67

7 Conclusion 81

Bibliography 83

Index 89

v
 LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1.1 Discourse space (DS) 5

Fig. 1.2 Dimensions of deixis 6
Fig. 1.3 Events located on spatial, temporal and modal axes 7
Fig. 2.1 Proximization in discourse space (DS) 18
Fig. 5.1 Proximization in cyber-terrorist discourse 63

vii
 LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.1 Spatial proximization framework and its key

lexico-grammatical items 19
Table 4.1 Spatial proximization framework and its key
lexico-grammatical items (in anti-terrorist discourse,
after Table 2.1) 45

ix
 INTRODUCTION

This book has two aims: empirical and theoretical. The empirical aim is to
study patterns of threat construction and fear generation in contemporary
public communication, including state political discourse as well as non-
governmental, media and institutional discourse on issues of public con-
cern, such as health, environment and technology. We argue that most
public communication is inherently coercive, involving a variety of dis-
cursive strategies by which the top actors (political, organizational and
business leaders) legitimize their goals, actions and policies. We claim that
manufacturing fear and social anxiety is a central feature of modern public
discourse, serving to justify policies which include the policy-makers and
their audiences in a joint course of action aimed to prevent or neutralize
the threat. The book documents these claims in examples from a number
of American as well as European discourses, including presidential
speeches, journalistic opinions and organizational reports. The approach
is essentially critical discourse analytic, combining insights from prag-
matics, cognitive linguistics, text linguistics and several non-linguistic
theories within social and political sciences. In particular, the book
employs the apparatus of Proximization Theory (PT). PT is a recent
model of crisis construction and threat generation which has been devel-
oped to account for the ways in which the discursive construction of
closeness and remoteness can be manipulated in the public sphere and
bound up with fear, security and conflict. Originally designed to deal with
instances of state political communication (presidential addresses, parlia-
mentary debates), PT is used in the book to cover an extended spectrum of
public discourses, from immigration debates to anti-tobacco campaigns.

xi
xii INTRODUCTION

Proving the suitability of PT to explore such a broad and eclectic collec-

tion of discourses constitutes the second, theoretical aim of the book.
The book comprises 6 chapters, followed by a brief Conclusion.
Chapter 1 contains a discussion on the nature of fear and threat and how
they affect public audiences, as well as motivate them to act. It introduces
the relevant theoretical concepts, such as coercion, legitimization and dele-
gitimization. Chapter 2 describes the main tenets of PT and its applicability
to work with the above concepts to account for acts of coercion in ‘state
political’ and, potentially, ‘public’ discourse. Chapters 3–6 are case studies
in which PT is used to analyse four different public discourses: health,
environment, technology and immigration. The Conclusion reflects on
the fear and threat generation patterns in these discourses and how success-
ful PT has been in elucidating them.
 CHAPTER 1

Cognitive, Social and Psychological Issues

of Public Discourse and Threat
Communication

Abstract This opening chapter contains an interdisciplinary discussion on

the nature of threat and fear and how they affect the audience in public
discourse. It introduces relevant theoretical concepts, such as coercion,
legitimization and delegitimization. It demonstrates that threatening
visions and anticipations appeal to the public as long as they are considered
personally consequential. This socio-psychological premise is taken as a
prerequisite for the development of Proximization Theory.

Keywords Threat communication
Coercion
Legitimization

Delegitimization
Credibility

What is public discourse? Depending on the discipline one is construct-

ing a definition from what this term constitutes may differ. In this book,
the term ‘public discourse’ is used to refer to communicated issues of
public culture and public concern that affect individuals and groups in a
given civilization. Public discourse is understood, after Jürgen Habermas
(1981), as a collection of voices on top issues of politics, economy, law,
education, and other areas of public interest and participation. Since in a
nation-state some of these voices are naturally more powerful than
others, a bulk of public discourse is produced – or at least initiated – by
political leaders, as well as institutional bodies regulating social practices

© The Author(s) 2017 1

P. Cap, The Language of Fear, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59731-1_1
2 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

in different domains of life. It is this large and dominant part of public

discourse that the present book focuses on.
Public discourse is essentially strategic: there exist observable and
systematic ways in which interests of the top actors – politicians,
institutional leaders, lawmakers, media management – are performed
linguistically. Public leaders use a plethora of rhetorical means to
manage their power, status and credibility in the service of a social
consensus. The aim is to receive people’s approval of policies involving
both sides, the leader and her audience, in a joint course of action. In
the words of Habermas (1981), public communication – including
state political discourse as well as voices of various non-governmental
bodies and ‘grass-roots’ initiatives – has the continual goal of max-
imizing the number of ‘shared visions’, that is, common conceptions
of current reality as well as its desired developments.

COERCION, LEGITIMIZATION AND DELEGITIMIZATION

As such, public communication emerges as necessarily coercive. Public
actors behave coercively in a variety of ways – setting agendas, selecting
topics in conversation, positioning the self and others in specific relation-
ships, making assumptions about realities that their hearers are obliged to
at least temporarily accept in order to process the text or talk. Power can
also be exercised through the control of others’ use of language – that is,
through various kinds and degrees of censorship and access control. The
latter include the structure and management of the media, the arena where
much public communication takes place (Fetzer and Lauerbach 2007).
Another important language-related phenomenon that could be judged
coercive is the strategic stimulation of affect. Although the precise details
are still under-researched, it is reasonable to hypothesize links between
meaning structures produced via discourse (Chilton 2004, 2014). Putting
it simply, certain kinds of texts can stimulate certain hormones, and the
effect may be automatic.
Coercion strategies almost always involve legitimization, except in the
extreme case, where it is questionable that one is still in the realm of what
is understood by ‘politics’, ‘public sphere’ and the like. Legitimization is a
complex concept and a complex practice involving, first of all, a linguistic
enactment of the speaker’s right to be obeyed (Chilton 2004; Cap 2008).
The claim to rightness and the resulting enactment of legitimization mean
that the speaker’s rhetoric is grounded in her implicit claim to inhabit a
 1 COGNITIVE, SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES OF PUBLIC DISCOURSE . . . 3

particular social role, and to possess a particular authority (Martin and

Wodak 2003). The possession of authority provides argumentative ratio-
nale for listing reasons to be obeyed (Van Eemeren and Grootendorst
2004). This involves a symbolic assignment of different ideological values
to different discourse parties, the assertion of hearers’ wants in the
moment of crisis and, crucially, the construal of charismatic leadership
needed to handle the crisis situation (Huntington 2004). All these prac-
tices are components of successful legitimization, whose central objective
is a broad social mobilization around a common goal. Legitimization can
thus be ‘a good means to a good end’, as well as ‘a bad means to a bad end’
(Hartman 2002). A telling example of the former is legitimization of the
‘war on cancer’, which we discuss in Chap. 3.
The essential counterpart of legitimization is delegitimization (Chilton
2004; Cap 2006, 2008): others (foreigners, ‘enemies within’, political
opposition, institutional adversaries, etc.) are presented negatively, and
the techniques include the use of ideas of difference and (geographical,
cultural) boundaries. The strategies of delegitimization (of the Other) and
legitimization (of the Self) may thus be conceptualized as lying at opposite
ends of a scale. Delegitimization can manifest itself in acts of negative
other-presentation, acts of blaming, scape-goating, marginalizing, exclud-
ing, attacking the moral character of some individual or group, attacking
the rationality and sanity of the other. The extreme is to deny the human-
ness of the other. This can be seen in several interventionist discourses of
today, for instance the Western narrative against the Islamic State (ISIS).
At the other end of the spectrum legitimization, usually oriented to the
Self, includes positive self-presentation, manifesting itself in acts of self-
praise, self-apology, self-explanation, self-justification, self-identification as
a source of authority, reason, vision and sanity, where the self is either an
individual (political or institutional leader) or the group with which the
individual identifies or wishes to identify.

FROM ‘SELF AND OTHER’ TO THREAT AND FEAR

The Self–Other distinction and the related coercion, legitimization and
delegitimization strategies are a stable property of public discourse, deriv-
ing their strength from anthropological developments. In his classic dis-
cussion of the co-evolution of language and the public sphere, Hockett
(1960) notes the two-tier organization of human socio-political awareness
and behaviour. On the one hand, people possess a mental ability to
4 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

structure their cognitive experience (‘looking at’ the world) in terms of

dichotomous representations of good and evil, right and wrong, accepta-
ble and unacceptable, etc. On the other hand, they possess a strictly
linguistic ability to evoke or reinforce these dichotomous representations
in accordance with their social goals. The central goal involves, let us
repeat, getting others to share a common view on what is good/evil,
right/wrong, acceptable/unacceptable, etc., and consequently, on how
to secure the ‘right’, ‘good’, ‘useful’, ‘acceptable’, ‘just’, against a possible
intrusion, in the life of a society, of the ‘wrong’, ‘evil’, ‘harmful’, etc.
Thus, public communication nearly always presupposes distance between
the Self party (the home group and its leaders) and the Other party (the
possible ‘intruder’). The more specific the Self party and the more con-
sequential or broader the goals (as in state political discourse), the clearer
the marking of the distance through linguistic means. The ‘good’ and
‘right’ are thus conceptualized and then lexicalized as ‘close to Self’ and
the ‘wrong’ and ‘evil’ as ‘remote to Self ’.

Discourse Representations
Several models have been proposed to account for this cognitive–linguistic
interplay, such as ‘text worlds’ (Fauconnier 1985; Werth 1999; Gavins
2007) and ‘discourse spaces’ (Levinson 2003; Chilton 2004, 2014). Text
World Theory (Gavins 2007), Deictic Space Theory (Chilton 2004, 2014)
and the theory of spatio-temporal frames of reference (Levinson 2003) all
agree that texts/discourses enable hearers to generate cognitive structures
in short- and long-term memory, as it were backstage rather than upfront
in the words themselves. We can think of such structures – ‘spaces’ or
‘worlds’ – as discourse ontologies. All forms of public communication make
assumptions about what there is in the public sphere – what social entities
exist and what are the relationships between them, including physical
distance as well as, usually, ideological/moral distance. The basic archi-
tecture of a discourse space (DS) is thus as follows (Fig. 1.1):
While this core bipolar arrangement of the DS is seldom disputed,
controversies arise with regard to the many and different ways in which
the distance between the Self and the Other can be defined. There is first
of all – as has been noted – physical or spatial distance, but the other
dimensions are far less obvious. In his influential Deictic Space Theory
(DST), Chilton (2004, 2014) acknowledges the primacy of the spatial
dimension and recognizes two accompanying dimensions, temporal and
 1 COGNITIVE, SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES OF PUBLIC DISCOURSE . . . 5

Other
There
Bad
ce
an
st
Di

Self
Here
Good

Discourse space

Fig. 1.1 Discourse space (DS)

modal, both of which involve conceptualizations in spatial terms. Time is

conceptualized in terms of motion through space (‘the time to act has
arrived’) and modality is conceptualized in terms of distance (‘remotely
possible’) or (deontic modality) as a metaphoric extension of a binary
opposition between the close and the remote. The origin of the three
dimensions is at the deictic centre, which includes the symbolically marked
Self, that is I, we, etc. All other entities and processes exist relative to
ontological spaces defined by their coordinates on the space (s), time (t)
and modality (m) axes. We may call these spaces ‘dimensions of deixis’
(Fig. 1.2), which allow communicators to process the ongoing kaleido-
scope of ontological configurations activated by text.
Figure 1.2 can be taken as a three-dimensional elaboration on the distance
relation shown in Fig. 1.1. Assuming that distance is crucial to the account of
the Self–Other dichotomy, it offers a useful pre-requisite for studying differ-
ent linguistic ways of ‘othering’; that is the many ways in which top public
actors depict their socio-political adversaries as a distant yet real threat to the
group (or nation, in state political discourse) that they represent and speak
for. By way of illustration, let us use the ‘bare’ geometrical arrangement in
6 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

tpast m

tfuture

Fig. 1.2 Dimensions of deixis

Fig. 1.1 to create a full-fledged three-dimensional representation of one of

the presidential addresses analysed in Chilton (2004). The excerpt below
comes from a speech by President Bill Clinton, in which he prepares
Americans for the US intervention in Kosovo on 24 March 19991:

(25) Ending this tragedy is a moral imperative. (26) It is also important to

America’s national interest. (27) Take a look at this map. (28) Kosovo is a
small place, but it sits on a major fault line between Europe, Asia and the
Middle East, at the meeting place of Islam and both the Western and
Orthodox branches of Christianity. (29) To the south are our allies,
Greece and Turkey; to the north, our new democratic allies in Central
Europe. (30) And all around Kosovo there are other small countries, strug-
gling with their own economic and political challenges – countries that
could be overwhelmed by a large, new wave of refugees from Kosovo.
(31) All the ingredients for a major war are there: ancient grievances,
struggling democracies, and in the center of it all a dictator in Serbia who
has done nothing since the Cold War ended but start new wars and pour
gasoline on the flames of ethnic and religious division. (32) Sarajevo, the
capital of neighboring Bosnia, is where World War I began. (33) World War
II and the Holocaust engulfed this region. (34) In both wars Europe was
slow to recognize the dangers, and the United States waited even longer to
enter the conflicts. (35) Just imagine if leaders back then had acted wisely
and early enough, how many lives could have been saved, how many
Americans would not have had to die. (36) We learned some of the same
lessons in Bosnia just a few years ago. (37) The world did not act early
enough to stop that war, either.
 1 COGNITIVE, SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES OF PUBLIC DISCOURSE . . . 7

The emerging conceptual-lexical representation (Fig. 1.3 below; the

numbers refer to sentences or [30′–31′] parts of sentences responsible
for a particular conceptual operation) can be described as follows. At
the intersection point (the origin) of the three axes is ‘this map’
(President Clinton is seen pointing to a visual aid). The map itself
does not represent an objective reality; its task is to launch a reality
space to be specified by the verbal commentary. A presupposition
obtains: addressees must, in order to interpret the unfolding text as
coherent, infer that (27) and the following sentences are intended to
motivate (26) (that national interests are at stake) and (25) (that
action is a moral imperative). On that premise, sentences (28), (29)
and (30) serve to set up a ‘map representation’ space. This construal
involves a conventional pragmatic function, by which cartographic
images are taken to represent objective reality spaces (Fauconnier and

s
33
32
Asia, Middle East, Islam
30'
31'
Kosovo, Bosnia, Sarajevo

Metonymy 28-31
25, 26
t
Our new allies

m
WWI Our allies
Map
WWII Europe
Could

End of
Cold war

27 Moral imperative, important

Take a look…

Fig. 1.3 Events located on spatial, temporal and modal axes

8 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

Turner 2002). ‘This map’ in the studio (or ‘in’ the viewer’s area)
represents a conceptual space that is mutually understood as remote
(‘there’ in [31]), but which the map presented ‘here’ and ‘now’ makes
conceptually close. In the process of defining the map’s conceptual
projection space the use of ‘could’ ([30′] in ‘countries that could be
overwhelmed by a large new wave of refugees from Kosovo’) prompts
the addressee to launch a space at the possibility point of m and in the
near future zone of t. This is not part of the televised map picture; it is
part of the conceptual ‘picture’ produced by the discourse, which
conflates the apparently remote Kosovo space and addressee space.
The resulting proximity of the Kosovo space and its negatively charged
Other-entities (as opposed to the positively charged Self-entities
[President Clinton, his audience, allies in Europe] in the deictic cen-
tre) allows transition to (31), which expresses a generalized likelihood
of a major military conflict and thus threat to American interests. In
(31), the positioning of the (31′) embedded clause (‘ . . . who has done
nothing since the Cold War but start new wars and pour gasoline on
the flames of ethnic and religious divisions’) as a syntactic and intona-
tional focus furthers this likelihood by a metaphoric phrase: the ‘flames
of divisions’ (refugees fleeing from Kosovo) will cause a major ‘fire’ in
the region as they ‘meet’ with (more) ‘gasoline’.
On the t axis, the geopolitical space is extended ‘backwards’, meto-
nymically, by reference to the spatial location ‘Sarajevo’ (32). Kosovo
is linked to Sarajevo, and Sarajevo is linked metonymically to World
War I, and World War I to World War II and the Holocaust. The links
can be considered metonymic since the relation between Kosovo,
Sarajevo and WWI is one of conceptual ‘contiguity’ in a geopolitical
frame which holds events progressing from the remote past toward the
present. ‘Sarajevo’ is used to evoke the whole WWI frame, and ‘this
region’ (33) is used in the same metonymic fashion to evoke the
WWII and the Holocaust frames. These discursively linked frames
constitute the groundwork for two sets of generalizations: (31) relat-
ing to the geographical space conceptualized ‘around’ Kosovo, and
(34)–(35) relating to a flashback historical space conceptualized in
connection with Sarajevo. These generalizations are used in turn to
wrap up the entire representation ([36]–[37]) and justify its initial
point (25), that is a moral imperative to act.
 1 COGNITIVE, SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES OF PUBLIC DISCOURSE . . . 9

Threats at the Doorstep

The strength of models such as Chilton’s DST lies in showing how
discourse can be used to express the Self–Other opposition in terms of a
clear and potentially growing threat – such as the threat to US allies in
Europe following the possible escalation of the Kosovo war. The discourse
of threat has a coercive function: it generates fear and as a result facilitates
strong leadership. It also possesses a legitimizing function, in that it offers
a quick and easy rationale for following an actor who claims the ability and
thus the right to handle the crisis situation.
In public communication, the effectiveness of threat relies much on the
conceptualization of personal consequences it involves (Bandura 1986;
Zimbardo and Leippe 1991). Public audiences are normally reluctant to
accept and legitimate radical policies unless they are proposed as a
response to developments posing direct danger to particular groups or
individuals. The danger may be construed as physical and involving an
emerging threat to life, as in the Kosovo example or other discourses of
military intervention. On many occasions, however, the endangered ele-
ments are the quality of life, the functioning of a given social structure as
well as individual interests of people. Thus, the construal of imminent
danger paves the way for legitimization of preventive measures in a vast
number of public discourses. These include public health, environment,
technology, migration, education and many other domains.
The enforcement of imminent personal threat often involves analogy,
which sets up a link between the current crisis situation and a past situation
in which the threat materialized as a result of negligence. Silberstein
(2004) observes that much of the contemporary anti-terrorist rhetoric,
especially the rhetoric after the 9/11 attacks, includes strong claims of
‘inaction’ following the UN anti-terrorist diplomatic resolutions of the
1990s. This fact has been often used as a ‘lesson from the past’ and ‘for the
future’, legitimizing prompt response and military measures. Similar
voices could be heard after the Paris 2015 attacks instigated by the ISIS.
In his 14 November 2015 address to the nation, President Francois
Hollande announced a French air operation on the city of Raqqa in an
attempt to destroy the ISIS headquarters in Syria. At the same time, he
called the earlier coalition-led efforts ‘inadequate’ and in fact making the
ISIS threat grow.
10 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

CREDIBILITY
The construction of analogy, as well as other carriers of fear-based legit-
imization, relies for success on the credibility of the speaker. This includes
enactment of credibility for a new legitimization case, maintaining cred-
ibility notwithstanding contextual developments which undermine it, and,
notably, re-enactment of credibility after it has been temporarily
damaged/lost. There are two classic theories which are relevant for each
of these three situations. The latitude of acceptance theory (Sherif and
Hovland 1961; Kiesler et al. 1969; Jowett and O’Donnell 1992) main-
tains that the best credibility (and thus legitimization) effects can be
expected if public speaker produces her message in line with the psycho-
logical, social, political, cultural, religious, etc., predispositions of the
addressee (Jowett and O’Donnell 1992). However, since full compliance
is almost never possible, it is essential that the novel message is at least
tentatively or partly acceptable – then, its acceptability and the speaker’s
credibility are going to increase with time. This is where consistency theory
starts. Festinger (1957) observes that the increase in credibility over time
can be attributed to human drive toward consistency in belief. Namely,
people possess the need for ‘homeostasis’, a state of mental stability. This
means that, in the long run, they do not tolerate dissonance in their
judgements, especially with regard to the same or similar issues.
Consequently, whenever faced with a new message producing a potential
conflict with the existing ideological, psychological or moral groundwork,
people go to great lengths trying to see any positive aspects of the
message so it could be internalized as an element of the groundwork.
Naturally, the precondition obtains that the message is not entirely reject-
able from the very beginning; at least some parts of it must be congruent
with the addressee’s predispositions.
Issues of credibility in public discourse have also been investigated by
cognitive-evolutionary theories, such as cheater detection module (Axelrod
1984; Cosmides 1989; Sperber 2000; etc.). The cheater detection
module has been originally (Axelrod 1984; Cosmides 1989) considered
a logico-rhetorical device that evolved in human cognition to resist acts of
deception, through the checking of speaker’s coherence. This basic char-
acterization has undergone several modifications, which involve seeing the
module not only as addressee’s defense mechanism but also as speaker’s
persuasion tool, particularly useful in threat communication. In Dan
Sperber’s (2000, p. 136) words, for addressees the module is ‘a means
 1 COGNITIVE, SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES OF PUBLIC DISCOURSE . . . 11

to filter communicated information’, but for speakers it is ‘a means to

penetrate the filters of others’. In this communicative ‘arms race’, public
speakers make strategic displays of discourse coherence to neutralize the
operation of the cheater detection module in the addressee so as to force
their legitimization strategies.
The linguistic approaches to credibility provide a useful elaboration on
specific structures and discourse forms responsible for actual legitimization
and coercion acts. Within linguistic pragmatics, credibility issues have been
investigated in terms of the illocutionary force and perlocutionary effects
of speech acts, most commonly the act of assertion. Assertions are helpful
in establishing speaker’s credibility due to several content features and
pragmalinguistic functions, including predication of facts, reference to
undeniable and/or historically accepted (ideological) groundworks,
enactment of ideological ‘common ground’ uniting the speaker and the
addressee, expression of beliefs (often implying actions) being currently in
line with the addressee’s predispositions (Jary 2010). Assertions seldom
perform their job individually; they tend to appear in sequences which
collectively build up the credibility needed to pursue actions or policies.
Assertions are thus instrumental in setting up an ‘assertion-directive link’
(Cap 2002), which involves sanctioning controversial future acts based on
trust the speaker has earned in her (thus far) uncontroversial rhetoric.
Another pragmatic concept bound up with credibility is implicature
(Grice 1975; Levinson 2000; Horn 2004), which plays a key role in
maintaining legitimization over time. Implicature has the power to launch
a vast spectrum of possible meanings interpreted differently by different
addressees in accordance with their different pre-expectations, wants and
needs. Since any such inferences can be ‘cancelled’ in prospective discourse
(i.e. by adding more content), implicature not only helps legitimization in
current reality, but also in the future, ‘updated’ reality, where it redefines
and re-legitimizes actions for the new context and new predispositions or
priorities of the addressee. The process where public speaker monitors the
current needs of the addressee, enforcing or cancelling inferences accord-
ingly, reflects operation of the cheater detection module: the speaker is
constantly sensitive to whether her original message or legitimization
pattern are still coherent and still work for the addressee or there is already
a need to alter the rhetoric. An example of such a turning point is the
transition that occurred in the US interventionist discourse when, around
November 2003, the world learned there were no WMD (weapons of
mass destruction) in Iraq (Cap 2013). This meant that the Bush
12 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

administration had to find a new legitimization premise for the Iraq war,
yet without making nonsense of the original premise of ‘direct threat’.
Consequently, the phrase ‘programs for WMD’ was coined at the end of
2003, replacing the initial ‘WMD’. The function of the new phrase was to
induce two apparently disparate inferences at the same time: one seeing
WMD as a ‘product’ in accordance with the original premise, and the
other seeing it as a vague ‘conception’.
Credibility and legitimization issues have also been addressed by text and
corpus linguistics, especially in the area of internal and external coherence of
texts (Hart 2010, pp. 92–94), offering a much needed linguistic addition to
cognitive models such as cheater detection. As far as internal coherence is
concerned, Gough and Talbot (1996) indicate that legitimization of asser-
tions is greatly enhanced by the use of logical terms (‘and’, ‘or’, ‘if’) and
items marking inferential relationships (‘therefore’, ‘since’, ‘nevertheless’,
etc.). These terms are considered adaptive devices for persuasion, facilitating
acceptance of ideational information and ‘cueing ideological assumptions’
(Fairclough 1989, p. 109). Regarding external coherence, scholars have
stressed the role of evidentiality (the linguistic marking of evidence) as a
source of reliability of assertions. For example, Bednarek (2006) identifies
four specified bases of knowledge used as evidence in the British newspaper
reporting of transnational crises: (i) Perception; (ii) General Knowledge;
(iii) Proof; (iv) Obviousness. These bases of knowledge legitimize assertions
in different ways, drawing on different types of evidence. Perception provides
directly attested sensory evidence, whose existence is indicated in discourse
by phrases such as ‘it appears that’ or ‘visibly’. The evidence is construed as
acquired directly via visual perception or as something made available to see.
Evidence from General Knowledge is ‘marked as based on what is regarded
as part of the communal epistemic background’ (Bednarek 2006, p. 640)
and the most typical markers are ‘widely held [view(s), opinion(s)]’ and
‘everybody knows (it/that)’. Hart (2010) observes that this pattern of
legitimization reflects what Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) call ‘confor-
mity authorization’, involving the ad populum fallacy that something is true
if everyone believes it. Proof is expressed by markers such as ‘research’,
‘results’, ‘statistics’, etc., which ‘show’, ‘indicate’ or ‘reveal’ facts; as such,
Proof often overlaps with Perception. Finally, Obviousness provides evidence
from so-called facts of life – self-evident claims containing phrases such as
‘obviously’ or ‘clearly’.
Lastly, applied studies point out that legitimization of assertions, espe-
cially those expressing strong and imminent threats, benefits a lot from
 1 COGNITIVE, SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES OF PUBLIC DISCOURSE . . . 13

source-tagging, a judgement attribution strategy whereby an antecedent

authorial voice is invoked (‘ . . . experts warned that . . . ’; ‘ . . . specialist
think tank established that . . . ’) to communicate sensitive or potentially
controversial information (Groom 2000; Hunston 2000). The credibility
of the assertion rises as a result, as does the credibility of any subsequent
discourse drawing upon the initial legitimization effect. Source-tagging is
thus a macro-functional strategy, particularly useful in long-term
legitimization.

FINDINGS THUS FAR

We have discussed in this chapter the most important concepts associated
with public discourse and power relations in public communication, such
as enactment of leadership, coercion, legitimization and credibility. These
concepts define phenomena which underlie and characterize public dis-
course as a strategic, goal-oriented undertaking in which the top actors
aim at a broad public acceptance of policies benefitting the social or
political group that they represent. To accomplish this aim, public leaders
tend to legitimize their actions or proposals for action in terms of opposi-
tions between right and wrong, good and evil, acceptable and unaccep-
table. As a result, most public communication operates indexically, with a
view to enacting social and political affiliations and distinctions. These
distinctions are embedded in mental representations that public leaders
continually define, enforce, negotiate and redefine through language, to
maximize the number of shared visions of reality.
The default representation that serves as an anchor for all further
conceptualizations is the Self vs. Other opposition, which involves physical
as well as ideological distance between the home party (the leader’s social
group) and the foreign party (the group or entity which the leader defines
as adversarial). The presence of the adversarial group or entity is construed
as a threat to interests of the home group. The construction of threat is
aimed at generating public fear, which in turn helps legitimization of
(preventive) policies. Legitimization effects are likely to be the greatest
if, first, the threat is presented as imminent and global yet personally
consequential; second, it is communicated by a credible speaker who
observes predispositions of her addressee.
The analysis of threat communication in public discourse is best carried
out within models which recognize the Self–Other arrangement and thus
the dichotomous character of the DS. We have found such a potential in
14 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

several cognitive-linguistic theories, particularly the Deictic Space Theory

proposed by Chilton (2004, 2014). Indeed, DST can be successfully used
to express the Self vs. Other opposition in terms of a clear and potentially
growing threat. It properly recognizes that the threat has a coercive
function of generating fear and as a result facilitating strong leadership
on the public arena. However, Chilton’s DST has rather little to say about
how the threat is actually performed. That is, while it shows what typical
lexico-grammatical choices are available to define the remote Other as a
static entity, it does not account for the discursive ways to make it dynamic
and encroach on the Self entity – the speaker’s home group. For this, we
need a related but essentially different theory, which we describe in the
next chapter.

NOTE
1. Numbering original (Chilton 2004, p. 142).
 CHAPTER 2

Proximization: A Threat-Based Model

of Policy Legitimization

Abstract This chapter outlines the main tenets of Proximization Theory

(PT). It defines proximization as a discursive strategy of presenting the
apparently remote events and ideologies as increasingly consequential to
the speaker and her addressee. Working with examples from the discourse
of the War on Terror, it reveals how threatening visions are invoked to
obtain legitimization of preventive actions and policies. The chapter pro-
poses that the success of PT in describing legitimization patterns in state
political discourse warrants its extended application to other discourses in
the public domain.

Keywords Legitimization
Proximization
Proximization Theory
Self

and Other
State political discourse

We have seen in the opening chapter how discourse can be used to

structure socio-political realities in terms of conceptual oppositions
between the home group (Self) and the apparently remote out-group
(Other). The Self–Other dichotomy constitutes a basis for construing
the presence of the out-group as a growing threat and thus a premise for
response from the home group. We have discussed discourse models,
particularly Deictic Space Theory (DST), which account for this dichot-
omy and how it underlies the fear-based rhetoric of legitimization.

© The Author(s) 2017 15

P. Cap, The Language of Fear, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59731-1_2
16 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

It should be evident by now that the focus of DST is on the basic or

default arrangement of the discourse space (DS), where Self and Other are
located at a set distance from each other. This means that DST is ideally
suited to analyse discourse representations of the fixed positioning of the
two groups of entities and the ominous presence of the Other as the source
of all threat. At the same time, however, it is not very well suited to account
for the important mechanism of the realization, or performance, of the
threat. That is, it does not provide tools, including lexical and grammatical
patterns, to study the discursive construal of movement of the Other as the
central threat element. In this chapter we introduce a model that integrates
the DST perspective with a cognitive-pragmatic perspective on discourse as
the vehicle of such a movement and DS re-arrangement.

PROXIMIZATION AND PROXIMIZATION THEORY

In its broadest sense, proximization is a discursive strategy of presenting
physically and temporally distant events or states of affairs (including
‘distant’, i.e. adversarial ideologies) as increasingly and negatively conse-
quential to the speaker and her addressee. Projecting distant entities as
gradually encroaching upon the speaker–addressee territory (both physical
and ideological), the speaker seeks legitimization of actions and policies
she proposes to neutralize the growing impact of the negative, ‘foreign’,
‘alien’, ‘antagonistic’, entities.
The term ‘proximization’ was first proposed by Cap to analyse
coercion patterns in the US anti-terrorist rhetoric following 9/11
(Cap 2006, 2008, 2010). Since then it has been used within different
discourse domains, though most commonly in studies of state political
discourses: crisis construction and war rhetoric (Chovanec 2010), anti-
migration discourse (e.g. Hart 2010), political party representation
(Cienki et al. 2010), construction of national memory and design of
foreign policy documents (Dunmire 2011). Findings from these stu-
dies have been integrated in the Proximization Theory (PT) put for-
ward in Cap (2013). PT follows the original concept of proximization,
which is defined as a forced construal operation meant to evoke
closeness of the external threat, to solicit legitimization of preventive
measures. The threat comes from DS-peripheral entities, referred to as
outside-deictic-centre (ODCs) entities, which are conceptualized to be
crossing the Space to invade the inside-deictic-centre (IDC) entities,
the speaker and her addressee. The threat possesses a spatio-temporal
 2 PROXIMIZATION: A THREAT-BASED MODEL OF POLICY LEGITIMIZATION 17

as well as ideological nature, which means that proximization can be

considered in three aspects. ‘Spatial proximization’ is a forced con-
strual of the DS peripheral entities encroaching physically upon the DS
central entities (speaker, addressee). Analogously to Chilton’s DST,
the spatial aspect of proximization is primary as the remaining aspects
or strategies involve conceptualizations in spatial terms. ‘Temporal
proximization’ is a forced construal of the envisaged conflict as not
only imminent, but also momentous, historic and thus needing
immediate response and unique preventive measures. Spatial and tem-
poral proximization involve fear appeals (becoming particularly strong
in reactionary political projects) and typically use analogies to conflate
the growing threat with an actual disastrous occurrence in the past, to
endorse the current scenario. Lastly, ‘axiological proximization’
involves construal of a gathering ideological clash between the ‘home
values’ of the DS central entities (IDCs) and the alien, antagonistic
(ODC) values. Importantly, the ODC values are construed to reveal
potential to materialize (i.e., prompt a physical impact) within the
IDC, the speaker’s and the addressee’s, home territory.
Altogether, PT subsumes a dynamic conception of the DS, which
involves not only the opposition between IDC entities (i.e. Self entities,
as defined by earlier DS models) and ODC (i.e. Other) entities, but also
the discursively constructed movement of the latter towards the centre of
the DS (Fig. 2.1 – compare Fig. 1.1). It thus focuses, from a linguistic
standpoint, on the lexical and grammatical deictic choices speakers make
to, first, index the existing socio-political and ideological distinctions and,
second, demonstrate the capacity of the out-group to erase these distinc-
tions by forcibly colonizing the in-group’s space.
PT holds that all the three strategies of proximization contribute to
the continual narrowing of the symbolic distance between the entities or
values in DS and their negative impact on the speaker and her addres-
see. This does not mean, however, that all the three strategies are
linguistically present (to the same degree) throughout each stretch of
the unfolding discourse. While any use of proximization principally
subsumes all of its strategies, spatial, temporal and axiological, the
degree of their actual representation in text is continually motivated
by their effectiveness in the evolving context. Extralinguistic contextual
developments may cause the speaker to limit the use of one strategy
and compensate it by an increased use of another, in the interest of the
continuity of legitimization.
18 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

Them
There
Bad
n
tio
iza ODC
o xim
Pr
Us
Here
Good

IDC

Discourse space

Fig. 2.1 Proximization in discourse space (DS)

Compared to discourse representations discussed in Chap. 1, PT makes

a new contribution at two levels, (i) cognitive-pragmatic and (ii) linguistic,
or more precisely, lexico-grammatical. At the (i) cognitive-pragmatic con-
ceptual level, the Spatial-Temporal-Axiological (STA) model of proximi-
zation revisits the ontological status and pragmatic function of deixis and
deictic markers. Deixis has been traditionally considered (Levinson 1983;
Levelt 1989) a merely technical necessity for the possible interpretability
of communication. On the proximization approach deixis constitutes
more than a formal tool for the coding of elements of context to make
all communication possible. It is potentially an instrument (or a compo-
nent thereof) for legitimization, persuasion and social coercion. Within
PT, the concept of deixis is not reduced to a finite set of ‘deictic expres-
sions’, but rather expanded to include bigger lexico-grammatical phrases
and discourse expressions in which conventional deictic markers (e.g.
pronominals) partake to force conceptual operations (such as the ODC–
IDC movement). An example of the proximization approach to deixis is
Cap’s (2013) spatial proximization framework (see Table 2.1), which not
only reflects the constituents and the mechanism of proximization in DS,
 2 PROXIMIZATION: A THREAT-BASED MODEL OF POLICY LEGITIMIZATION 19

Table 2.1 Spatial proximization framework and its key lexico-grammatical items
Category Key items

1. (Noun phrases (NPs) construed [‘USA’, ‘United States’, ‘America’];

as elements of the deictic centre [‘American people’, ‘Americans’, ‘our
of the DS (IDCs)) people/nation/country/society’]; [‘free
people/nations/countries/societies/
world’]; [‘democratic people/nations/
countries/societies/world’]
2. (NPs construed as elements outside [‘Iraq’, ‘Saddam Hussein’, ‘Saddam’,
the deictic centre of the DS (ODCs)) ‘Hussein’]; [‘Iraqi regime/dictatorship’];
[‘terrorists’]; [‘terrorist organizations/
networks’, ‘Al-Qaeda’]; [‘extremists/
radicals’]; [‘foreign regimes/dictatorships’]
3. (Verb phrases (VPs) of motion and [‘are determined/intend to seek/acquire
directionality construed as markers WMD’]; [‘might/may/could/can use
of movement of ODCs towards the WMD against an IDC’]; [‘expand/grow in
deictic centre) military capacity that could be directed
against an IDC’]; [‘move/are moving/
head/are heading/have set their course
towards confrontation with an IDC ’]
4. (VPs of action construed as markers [‘destroy an IDC’]; [‘set aflame/burn down
of impact of ODCs upon IDCs) an IDC or IDC values’]
5. (NPs denoting abstract concepts [‘threat’]; [‘danger’]
construed as anticipations of impact
of ODCs upon IDCs)
6. (NPs denoting abstract concepts [‘catastrophe’]; [‘tragedy’]
construed as effects of impact of ODCs
upon IDCs)

but also serves to abstract the relevant lexico-grammatical items. The items
in the framework are quantifiable, which means they define the intensity of
the kind of proximization applied. Table 2.1 below includes the spatial
items abstracted from a corpus of the US anti-terrorist rhetoric – a state
interventionist discourse widely analysed within the proximization para-
digm (Cap 2013; among others).
The six categories depicted in the left-hand column are a stable element
of the spatial proximization framework, while the key items provided in
the right-hand column depend on the actual discourse under investiga-
tion. Table 2.1 includes the most frequent of the spatial proximization
items in the 2001–2010 corpus of presidential addresses on the US anti-
terrorist policies.1 Quantifiable items appear in square brackets and
20 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

include combinations of words separated by slashes with the head word.

For example, the item [‘free people/nations/countries/societies/world’]
includes the following combinations, all of which contribute to the gen-
eral count of the first category: ‘free people’, ‘free nations’, ‘free coun-
tries’, ‘free societies’, ‘free world’. The italicized phrases indicate parts that
allow synonymous phrases to fill in the item and thus increase its count.
For example, the item [‘destroy an IDC’] in category 4 subsumes several
quantifiable variations, such as ‘destroy America’, ‘destroy our land’ or
‘destroy the free and democratic world’.2
The framework and its 6 categories capture not only the initial arrange-
ment of the DS (ctg. 1, 2), but also (and crucially) the shift leading to the
ODC–IDC clash (3, 4) and the (anticipated) effects of the clash (5, 6).
The third category, central to the design of the framework, sets ‘tradi-
tional’ deictic expressions such as personal pronouns to work pragmati-
cally together with the other elements of the superordinate VP. As a result,
the VP acquires a deictic status, in the sense that on top of conventionally
denoting static DS entities (marked by pronominals), it also helps index a
more challenging element of context, their movement, which establishes
the target perspective construed by the speaker.
Emerging from the spatial proximization framework (as well as the
temporal and axiological frameworks [Cap 2013]) is the (ii) lexico-
grammatical contribution of the STA model. The model makes it
possible to extract quantifiable linguistic evidence of the use of differ-
ent proximization strategies within a specific timeframe. The STA
model can thus also account quantitatively for cases where for contex-
tual reasons one proximization strategy is dropped and replaced by
another.

A CASE STUDY OF PROXIMIZATION IN (STATE)

POLITICAL DISCOURSE
As has been mentioned, the main application of PT so far has been to
critical studies of state political discourses seeking legitimization of inter-
ventionist preventive measures against an external threat. In this section
we exemplify this application, discussing instances of the US discourse of
the War on Terror. Specifically, we outline what proximization strategies
were used to legitimize the US government’s decision to go to war in Iraq
(March 2003), and what adjustments in the use of the strategies were
 2 PROXIMIZATION: A THREAT-BASED MODEL OF POLICY LEGITIMIZATION 21

made later (from November 2003) as a result of contextual changes which

took place in the meantime.

Initiating Legitimization Through Proximization

Below we look at parts of G.W. Bush’s speech at the American Enterprise
Institute (AEI), which was delivered on 26 February 2003.3 The speech
took place only three weeks before the first US and coalition troops
entered Iraq on March 19, and has often been considered (e.g.
Silberstein 2004) a manifesto of the Iraq war. The goal of the speech
was to list direct reasons for the intervention, while also locating it in the
global context of the War on Terror declared by G.W. Bush on the night
of the 9/11 attacks. The realization of this goal involved a strategic use of
various lexico-grammatical forms reflecting different proximization
strategies.
Providing his rationale for war, President Bush had to confront the kind
of public reluctance faced by many of his White House predecessors: how
to legitimize the US involvement in military action in a far-away place,
among a far-away people, of whom the American people knew little
(Bacevich 2010). The AEI speech is remarkable in its consistent continuity
of attempts to overcome this reluctance. It amply applies spatio-temporal
and axiological proximization strategies, which are performed in diligently
designed pragmatic patterns drawing from more general conceptual pre-
mises for legitimization:

We are facing a crucial period in the history of our nation, and of the
civilized world. . . . On a September morning, threats that had gathered for
years, in secret and far away, led to murder in our country on a massive
scale. As a result, we must look at security in a new way, because our
country is a battlefield in the first war of the 21st century. . . . We learned a
lesson: the dangers of our time must be confronted actively and forcefully,
before we see them again in our skies and our cities. And we will not allow
the flames of hatred and violence in the affairs of men. . . . The world has a
clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free
nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. . . . Saddam Hussein and his
weapons of mass destruction are a direct threat to our people and to all free
people. . . . My job is to protect the American people. When it comes to our
security and freedom, we really don’t need anybody’s permission. . . .
We’ve tried diplomacy for 12 years. It hasn’t worked. Saddam Hussein
hasn’t disarmed, he’s armed. Today the goal is to remove the Iraqi regime
22 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

and to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. . . . The liberation of

millions is the fulfillment of America’s founding promise. The objectives
we’ve set in this war are worthy of America, worthy of all the acts of
heroism and generosity that have come before.

In a nutshell, the AEI speech states that there are WMD4 in Iraq and
that, given historical context and experience, ideological characteristics of
the adversary as opposed to American values and national legacy, and G.
W. Bush’s obligations as standing US president, there is a case for
legitimate military intervention. This complex picture involves historical
flashbacks, as well as descriptions of the current situation, which both
engage proximization strategies. These strategies, involving the usual
credibility ploys (cf. Chap. 1), operate at two interrelated levels, which
can be described as ‘diachronic’ and ‘synchronic’. At the diachronic level,
Bush evokes ideological representations of the remote past, which are
‘proximized’ to underline the continuity and steadfastness of purpose,
thus linking with and sanctioning current actions as acts of faithfulness to
long-accepted principles and values. An example is the final part: ‘The
liberation is . . . promise. The objectives . . . have come before’. It launches
a temporal analogy ‘axis’ which links a past reference point (the founding
of America) with the present point, creating a common conceptual space
for both the proximized historical ‘acts of heroism’ and the current and/
or prospective acts construed as their natural ‘follow-ups’. This kind of
legitimization, performed by mostly temporal and axiological proximiza-
tion (the originally past values become the ‘here and now’ premises for
action5), draws, in many ways, upon the socio-psychological predisposi-
tions of the US addressee (Dunmire 2011). On the lexical plane, the job
of establishing the past-present link is performed by assertions, which fall
within addressee’s ‘latitude of acceptance’ (Jowett and O’Donnell
1992).6 The assertions range from indisputably acceptable (‘My job
is . . . ’; ‘The liberation of millions . . . ’), to acceptable due to credibility
developed progressively within a ‘fact-belief series’ (‘We’ve tried diplo-
macy for twelve years [FACT] . . . he’s armed [BELIEF]’), but none of
them is inconsistent with the key predispositions of the addressee.
At the synchronic level, historical flashbacks are not completely aban-
doned, but they involve proximization of near history and the main
legitimization premise is not (continuing) ideological commitments, but
the direct physical threats looming over the country (‘a battlefield’, in
G.W. Bush’s words). As the threats require a swift and strong pre-emptive
 2 PROXIMIZATION: A THREAT-BASED MODEL OF POLICY LEGITIMIZATION 23

response, the ‘default’ proximization strategy operating at the synchro-

nic level is spatial proximization, often featuring a temporal element. Its
task is to raise fears of imminence of the threat, which might be
‘external’ and ‘distant’ apparently, but in fact able to materialize any-
time. The lexico-grammatical carriers of the spatial proximization
include such items and phrases as ‘secret and far away’, ‘all free people’,
‘stable and free nations’, ‘Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass
destruction’, etc., which force dichotomous, ‘good against evil’ repre-
sentations of the IDCs (America, Western [free, democratic] world) and
the ODCs (Saddam Hussein, Iraqi regime, terrorists), located at a
relative distance from each other. This geographical and geopolitical
distance is symbolically construed as shrinking, as, on the one hand, the
ODC entities cross the DS towards its deictic centre and, on the other,
the centre (IDC) entities declare a reaction. The ODC shift is enacted
by forced inference and metaphorization. The inference involves an
analogy to 9/11 (‘On a September morning . . . ), whereby the event
stage is construed as facing another physical impact, whose (‘current’)
consequences are scrupulously described (‘before we see them [flames]
again in our skies and our cities’).
While all spatial proximization in the text draws upon the pre-
sumed WMD presence in Iraq – and its potential availability to
terrorists for acts far more destructive than the 9/11 attacks – Bush
does not disregard the possibility of having to resort to an alternative
rationale for war in the future. Consequently, the speech contains
‘supporting’ ideological premises, however tied to the principal pre-
mise. An example is the use of axiological proximization in ‘The
world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because
stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder’. This
ideological argument is not synonymous with Bush’s proximization of
remote history we have seen before, as its current line subsumes acts
of the adversary rather than his/America’s own acts. As such it
involves a more typical axiological proximization, where the initially
ideological conflict turns, over time, into a physical clash. Notably, in
its ideological-physical duality it forces a spectrum of speculations
over whether the current threat is ‘still’ ideological or ‘already’ phy-
sical. Since any result of these speculations can be effectively cancelled
in a prospective discourse, the example quoted (‘The world . . . ’)
points towards a relation between proximization and implicature (cf.
Chap. 1).
24 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

Maintaining Legitimization Through Adjustments

in Proximization Strategies
Political legitimization pursued in temporally extensive contexts – such as
the timeframe of the Iraq war – often involves redefinition of the initial
legitimization premises and coercion patterns and proximization is very
well suited to enact these redefinitions in discourse. The legitimization
obtained in the AEI speech and how the unfolding geopolitical context
has put it to test is an illuminating case in point. Let us repeat that
although President Bush has made the WMD the central premise for the
Iraq war, he has left half-open an ‘emergency door’ to be able to reach for
an alternative rationale. Come November 2003 (the mere eight months
into the Iraq war), and Bush’s pro-war rhetoric adopts (or rather has to
adopt) such an emergency alternative rationale, as it becomes evident that
there have never been weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, at least not in
the ready-to-use product sense. The change of G.W. Bush’s stance consists
in a swift move from strong fear appeals involving a ‘direct threat’ to a
more subtle ideological argument for legitimization, based on axiological
proximization. This change can be seen in the Whitehall Palace address of
November 19:

By advancing freedom in the greater Middle East, we help end a cycle of

dictatorship and radicalism that brings millions of people to misery and
brings danger to our own people. By struggling for justice in Iraq, Burma,
in Sudan, and in Zimbabwe, we give hope to suffering people and improve
the chances for stability and progress. Had we failed to act, the dictator’s
programs for weapons of mass destruction would continue to this day. Had
we failed to act, Iraq’s torture chambers would still be filled with victims,
terrified and innocent. . . . For all who love freedom and peace, the world
without Saddam Hussein’s regime is a better and safer place.

The now dominant axiological proximization involves a dense concentra-

tion of ideological and value-oriented lexical items (e.g. ‘freedom’, ‘jus-
tice’, ‘stability’, ‘progress’, ‘peace’ vs. ‘dictatorship’, ‘radicalism’) as well as
of items/phrases indicating the human dimension of the conflict (‘misery’,
‘suffering people’, ‘terrified victims’ vs. ‘the world’ [being] ‘a better and
safer place’). All of these lexico-grammatical forms serve to build, as in the
case of the AEI address, dichotomous representations of the DS ‘home’
and ‘peripheral/adversarial’ entities (IDCs vs. ODCs), and the represen-
tation of impact upon the DS ‘home’ entities (cf. Fig. 2.1). In contrast to
 2 PROXIMIZATION: A THREAT-BASED MODEL OF POLICY LEGITIMIZATION 25

the AEI speech, however, all the entities (both IDCs and ODCs) are
construed in abstract, rather than physical, ‘tangible’ terms, as respective
lexical items are not explicitly but only inferentially attributed to concrete
parties/groups. For example, compare phrases such as ‘all free people’,
‘stable and free nations’, [terrorist] ‘flames of hatred’, etc., in the AEI
address, with the single-word abstract items of general reference such as
‘dictatorship’ and ‘radicalism’, in the Whitehall speech. Apparently, prox-
imization in the Whitehall speech is essentially a proximization of antag-
onistic values, and not so much of physical entities as embodiments of
these values. The consequences for maintaining legitimization stance
which began with the AEI address are enormous.
First, there is no longer a commitment to a material threat posed by
a physical entity. Second, the relief of this commitment does not
completely disqualify the original WMD premise, as the antagonistic
‘peripheral’ values retain a capacity to materialize within the DS deictic
centre (viz. ‘ . . . a cycle of dictatorship and radicalism that brings mil-
lions of people to misery and brings danger to our own people’,
reiterating ‘The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic
values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of
murder’ from the AEI speech). Third, as the nature of ideological
principles is such that they are (considered) global or broadly shared,
the socio-ideological argument helps extend the spectrum of the US
(military) engagement (‘Burma’, ‘Sudan’, ‘Zimbabwe’), which in turn
forces the construal of failure to detect WMD in Iraq as merely an
unlucky incident amongst other (successful) operations, and not as
something that could potentially ruin the US credibility.
Add to these general factors the power of legitimization ploys in
specific pragmalinguistic constructs (‘programs for weapons of mass
destruction’,7 the enumeration of the ‘new’ foreign fields of engage-
ment [viz. ‘Burma’, etc., above], the always effective appeals for soli-
darity in compassion [viz. ‘terrified victims’ in ‘torture chambers’]) and
there are reasons to conclude that the autumn 2003 change to essen-
tially axiological discourse (subsuming axiological proximization) has
helped a lot towards saving credibility and thus maintaining legitimiza-
tion of not only the Iraq war, but the later anti-terrorist campaigns as
well. The flexible interplay and the discursive switches between spatial
and axiological proximization (both aided by temporal projections) in
the early stages of the US anti-terrorist policy rhetoric have indeed
made a major contribution.
26 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

TOWARDS FURTHER APPLICATIONS

Drawing on the cognitive-linguistic approach to discourse, PT provides the
cognitive representation of DS with a dynamic element reflecting speaker’s
awareness of the constantly evolving context. In its account of discourse
dynamics, PT focuses on the strategic, ideological and goal-oriented essence
of construals of the near and the remote. Most importantly, it focuses on
how the imagining of the closeness and remoteness, a core element of
conceptualization (cf. Chap. 1), can be manipulated in the public/political
sphere and bound up with fear, security and conflict. PT is thus a critically
minded revision of the classical models of DS such as Chilton’s DST or
Levinson’s spatio-temporal frames of reference. It is also a truly linguistic
revision, in terms of linking specific construals to stable and recurrent sets of
lexico-grammatical items (cf. Table 2.1). As such, PT is ideally suited to
analyse discursive representations of legitimization, delegitimization, coer-
cion and other socially consequential phenomena involving a threat
element.
Given its broad conceptual framework, PT possesses explanatory power
reaching far beyond state political discourse. The last thirty years have seen
prolific discourse studies in the most urgent social issues such as racism,
xenophobia, national identity, gender identity, equality and inequality,
social exclusion and many more. This list, by no means exhaustive, gives a
sense of the spectrum of discourses where proximization applies. The main
focus of contemporary discourse analysis (practiced mostly under the ‘cri-
tical’ banner8) is on the many strategies in which worldviews, ideologies and
identities are reflected, (re)-enacted, negotiated, modified, reproduced, etc.,
in discourse. This calls for an analytic framework able to capture the original
status of the different worldviews, ideologies and identities, as well as the
‘target status’, that is the change the analyst claims is taking place through
the speaker’s use of discourse. As a theory of conceptual organization as well
as re-organization of the DS (cf. Fig. 2.1), Proximization seems the natural
candidate.
In the next four chapters, PT is used to explore four public discourses:
health, environment, modern technology and (anti-)migration. We argue that
these seemingly different discourses are remarkably similar in their consistent
use of the threat element as the central premise for legitimization. We thus
claim that threat construction is a core feature of public communication,
which relies for policy-making and policy legitimization on the discursively
construed aura of fear and general anxiety. As a linguistically minded theory,
 2 PROXIMIZATION: A THREAT-BASED MODEL OF POLICY LEGITIMIZATION 27

Proximization brings to light the specific, lexico-grammatical choices respon-

sible for threat construction and fear generation. In so doing, it provides CDA
and other critical and sociological approaches with an organized empirical
model to add to their formative conceptual frameworks. It binds together the
main concepts – legitimization, credibility, coercion – and sets them in relation
to general cognitive underpinnings of communication, such as indexing,
polarization and fear of the remote.

NOTES
1. The corpus contains 402 texts (601,856 words) of speeches and remarks,
downloaded from the White House website http://www.whitehouse.gov
in January 2011. It includes texts matching at least two of the three issue
tags: defense, foreign policy, homeland security.
2. See Cap (2013, pp. 108–109) for details. See also the two other frameworks,
temporal (p. 116) and axiological (p. 122), which we do not have space to
discuss here.
3. The parts are quoted according to the chronology of the speech.
4. Weapons of mass destruction.
5. This is a secondary variant of axiological proximization. As will be shown,
axiological proximization mostly involves the adversary (ODC); antagonistic
values are ‘dormant’ triggers for a possible ODC impact.
6. We have noted in Chap. 1 that the best credibility and thus legitimization
effects can be expected if the speaker produces her message in line with the
psychological, social, political, cultural, etc., predispositions of the addres-
see. However, since a full compliance is almost never possible, it is essential
that a novel message is at least tentatively or partly acceptable; then, its
acceptability and the speaker’s credibility tend to increase over time.
7. The nominal phrase ‘[Iraq’s] programs for WMD’ is essentially an implica-
ture able to legitimize, in response to contextual needs, any of the following
inferences: ‘Iraq possesses WMD’, ‘Iraq is developing WMD’, ‘Iraq intends
to develop WMD’, ‘Iraq intended to develop WMD’, and more. The phrase
was among G.W. Bush’s rhetorical favourites in later stages of the Iraq war,
when the original premises for war were called into question.
8. See Hart and Cap (2014) for an overview of current work in Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA).
 CHAPTER 3

Health Discourse:
The War on Cancer and Beyond

Abstract Initiating a series of four case studies, this chapter explores the
applicability of Proximization Theory in health discourse. It demon-
strates that fear-inducing proximization strategies are widely present in
the discourse of disease prevention and health promotion. Picturing
disease as ‘aggressive enemy’ which ‘invades’ the patient, the speaker
(medical practitioner, healthcare institution) generates a fear appeal
which helps justification of a preferred course of treatment. The chapter
uses data from anti-tobacco and swine flu prevention campaigns.

Keywords Health discourse
War on cancer
Cancer prevention discourse

Anti-tobacco discourse

The study in Chap. 2, as well as several other proximization studies (e.g. Cap
2013; Dunmire 2011; Hart 2010, 2014; Wieczorek 2013), points towards
new empirical territories. They suggest that the explanatory power of
Proximization Theory (PT) goes beyond state political discourse (such as
the US anti-terrorist rhetoric) and can be used to account for a broader range
of legitimization discourses in the vast space of public communication.
Prospects look promising as many of these discourses demonstrate analogies,
apparently remote yet actually close, to state-level interventionist discourse.
First, many reveal a similar conceptual groundwork, that is the presumed
cognitive dichotomy of the ‘bad Other’ encroaching upon the ‘good Self’.

© The Author(s) 2017 29

P. Cap, The Language of Fear, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59731-1_3
30 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

Second, many demonstrate a common pragmatic function, that is soliciting

approval of (radical) measures to offset the growing threat. As such, public
discourse emerges as very strongly dependent on threat construction and
threat proximization for effective policy-making and, above all, policy com-
munication. This can be evidenced in formal lexico-grammatical terms by
PT. Our initial focus is on health discourse and cancer prevention discourse
in particular, though we also include examples from other domains.

PROXIMIZATION OF THREAT IN CANCER PREVENTION DISCOURSE

The War on Cancer Scenario
The discourse of cancer prevention involves a strategic use of fear appeals,
drawing on metaphoric construals of an enemy entity (cancer) posing an
imminent threat of impact on the home entity (patient). In response, the
patient and her healthcare team wage a ‘war on cancer’, which is often a
preventive kind of war. Although, as will be argued, the construals underlying
the war on cancer metaphor are not entirely synonymous with the proximiza-
tion construals in state interventionist discourse, there is still enough similarity
to consider the discourse of cancer prevention a field to be explored by PT.
The war metaphor has been the prevailing metaphor used to describe and
‘combat’ cancer since at least 1971, when US President Richard M. Nixon
declared a federal ‘war on cancer’ with the National Cancer Act. Following
this legislation, as well as Sontag’s (1978) seminal book Illness as Metaphor,
medical discourse, both in and outside the US, has quickly implemented the
concept, adding the war on cancer metaphor to an already rich inventory of
metaphors involving ‘wars’ on other negative social phenomena, such as
drugs, poverty or illiteracy.
Van Rijn-van Tongeren (1997) claims that the concepts of war and cancer
reveal a perfect metaphoric correspondence: there is an enemy (the cancer), a
commander (the physician), a combatant (the patient), allies (the medical
team), as well as formidable weaponry (chemical, biological and nuclear
weapons, at the disposal of the medical team). Another analogy, she argues,
is that both concepts connote ‘an unmistakable seriousness of purpose’ (Van
Rijn-van Tongeren 1997, p. 46). Based on these observations, she describes
the ‘war on cancer’ in terms of the following conceptual scenario:

(1) Cancer is an aggressive enemy that invades the body. In response, the
body launches an offensive and defends itself, fighting back with its army of
 3 HEALTH DISCOURSE: THE WAR ON CANCER AND BEYOND 31

killer T-cells. However, this is not enough and doctors are needed to target,
attack and try to defeat, destroy, kill or wipe out the cancer cells with their
arsenal of lethal weapons. However, cancer cells may become resistant and
more specialised treatments are required, such as magic bullets or stealth
viruses. (Van Rijn-van Tongeren 1997, emphasis original)

The consecutive stages of the scenario are widely represented in real-life

discourse. Van Rijn-van Tongeren (1997) gives, among many others, the
following examples (emphasis original). Van Rijn-van Tongeren’s data
come generally from academic publications, such as monographs, text-
books and articles (examples [3–5]), but also bulletins and newspaper
articles aimed at a broad public (example [2]).

(2) The next trial involves several hundred patients, helping microwaves
become another cancer-fighting tool.
(3) This molecule called Sumo, is then attacked by an enzyme called RNF4,
a process that also destroys the cancer-causing proteins.
(4) A second gene, called LMTK2 is a promising target for new drugs to
treat the disease.
(5) This activates only those antibodies surrounding cancer, which then
attract the immune system’s army of killer T cells, to destroy the tumor.

Van Rijn-van Tongeren’s scenario, as well as the examples, rings some

familiar notes. Like in the proximization arrangement of political interven-
tionist discourse, there is an ‘alien’ entity ready to invade (or actually invad-
ing) the ‘home’ entity, that is, here, the body of the patient. The ‘alien’
entity is construed as evil and actively operating (‘aggressive enemy’), thus
the impact probability is high. The ‘home’ entity has the capacity to deliver a
counter-strike, which is defensive/neutralizing, as much as offensive/
preventive in character (‘the body launches an offensive and defends itself,
fighting back with its army of killer T-cells’). These analogies prove that, in
its basic conceptual design, the discourse of cancer prevention and treat-
ment borrows from state interventionist rhetoric a lot. Of course, there is
never a full correspondence. The ‘alien’ entity cannot be described as a
genuinely ‘external’ entity (ODC), since cancer cells develop inside of the
patient’s body. Furthermore, the body is not, technically, the only ‘home’
or ‘Self’ entity (IDC) that counters the ‘alien’/‘Other’ entity, since its
‘army of T-cells’ gets support (medical treatment) from another party (the
physician), which the latter has not been ‘invaded’. These and other
32 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

differences call for a more extensive, textual look at the cancer prevention
discourse, to distinguish the areas which can be described in terms of the
STA model, from those which might not be describable quite as easily,
unless the model is revised to deal with a broader spectrum of data.

A Proximization Analysis of the Rhetoric of Cancer Prevention

The following text appeared in the spring 2011 edition of the Newsletter
of the British Association of Cancer Research (BACR). Its argument,
structure and lexical choices seem all quite representative of the contem-
porary discourse of cancer prevention and treatment, both specialized and
popular (cf. Semino 2008, pp. 11–12):

(6) Some say we can contain melanoma with standard chemotherapy mea-
sures. The evidence we have says we must strike it with a full force in its
earliest stages. We will continue to conduct screening programmes to spot
the deadly disease before it has spread throughout the body. We must be
able to wipe out all the infected cells in one strike, otherwise it takes a
moment before they continue to replicate and migrate around the body. We
now aim to develop a new treatment that targets the infected cells with
precision, effectively destroying the engine at the heart of the disease, and
doing minimal harm to healthy cells. We will inject specially-designed anti-
bodies coated in a light-sensitive shell. The coating prevents the antibodies
from causing a massive immune reaction throughout the body. Once the
‘cloaked’ antibodies have been injected, we will shine the new strong ultra-
violet light on the engine and the infected cells.

To elucidate all analogies and empirical similarities, the analysis of this text
in terms of PT and the STA model must involve, same as the analysis of the
US anti-terrorist discourse in Chap. 2, at least three interrelated levels.
These are: the conceptual level of organization of the Discourse Space
(DS), the level of lexis responsible for the enactment of strategic changes
to the DS principal organization, and finally the coercion level, where the
text is considered an example of legitimization discourse which aims to
win support for specific actions performed by the speaker. At the DS
conceptual level, we must be able to determine the presence of the IDC
(‘home’, ‘central’, ‘Self’) entity and the ODC (‘alien’, ‘peripheral’,
‘Other’) entity, the existence of a conceptual shift whereby the ODC
entity impacts the IDC entity, and a preventive or reactive posture of the
IDC entity. Looking at (8), this arrangement indeed holds in general,
 3 HEALTH DISCOURSE: THE WAR ON CANCER AND BEYOND 33

though there are some deviations. The IDC status can be assigned, most
directly, to the patient’s body, which is invaded by cancer cells, which thus
emerge as the ODC entity. This basic proximization construal follows the
standard metaphoric conceptualization of the body as a container (Lakoff
and Johnson 1980; etc.). But the container metaphor is only partly of
relevance here since the patient’s body is not a typical IDC, in the sense of
where the impact it undergoes comes from. In that sense, the cancer cells,
responsible for the impact, are not a typical ODC, either. As has been
pointed out, cancer cells develop, technically, inside the patient’s body. At
the same time, causes of cancer are put down to internal (e.g. genetic), as
well as external (e.g. civilizational), factors. The picture gets even more
complex if we consider the aspect of agency. While the body has an
internal defense mechanism, fighting the cancer cells involves mostly
external resources, that is measures applied by the physician. Thus, in
terms of neutralization of the ODC impact, the physician becomes an
IDC entity as well, and even more so considering he remains under the
cancer threat himself. What we arrive at, then, is a rather broad concept of
the IDC entity, involving the patient and, by the attribution of agency and
the recognition of common threat, the physician, as well as a vaguely
construed concept of the ODC party, involving the infected cells in the
patient, but also a whole array of cancer provoking factors, ‘located’
externally. Looking at (6), it appears that the only (though crucial) part
of the default proximization arrangement that cancer discourse does not
alter in any way is the construal of the very impact. Indeed, it seems that all
of its characteristics, like speed, imminence and deadliness, are there in the
text, which in that sense resembles the two texts of state political discourse
in Chap. 2.
This last observation explains why there are fewer analytic problems at
the level of lexis. In proximization discourse, lexical markers of the ODC
impact generally count among the most plentiful, within all the linguistic
material categorized (Cap 2013). As a result, the abundance of such
markers in (6) makes its phrases resemble many of the discourse items
and sequences we have seen above in the war on terror rhetoric.1 The
ODC impact speed is coded explicitly in phrases such as ‘spread through-
out the body’, ‘it takes a moment’, ‘replicate and migrate around’, and
can also be inferred from ‘we must strike it with a full force in its earliest
stages’, ‘we must be able to wipe out all the infected cells in one strike’
and ‘the engine at the heart of the disease’. The imminence is construed
in, for instance, ‘before it has spread throughout’ and ‘in its earliest
34 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

stages’, presuppositions of the ODC’s inevitably fast growth. The effects

of the impact are explicitly marked by the ‘deadly disease’ phrase.
At the coercion-legitimization level, the STA model recognizes in (6)
an attempt to solicit legitimization of a non-standard course of treat-
ment, sanctioned by the momentousness of the decision-making context
(‘We now aim’), as well as by the clear evidence the speaker possesses
(‘The evidence we have says’) which speaks in favour of the treatment.
Since the legitimization is sought by the physician acting, in a way, ‘on
behalf of’ the patient, and not by the patient herself, we again face the
problem of who, under the current design of the STA model, belongs to
the deictic centre and who, thus, is acting (or is supposed to act) in
response to the ODC threat. The recurrence of this issue at the coercion-
legitimization level of analysis of cancer discourse delineates a possible
avenue for the modification of selected structural elements of PT (as in
Cap 2013), to better process data beyond the state-political interven-
tionist discourse. Apparently, PT may be in need of a critical reflection on
the size and range of the DS and its deictic centre in proximization
operations.
It is not our ambition at this point to develop this diagnosis into a
full-length methodological discussion. Given the goals of the present
book, the current PT offers enough to capture the role of the threat
element in legitimization strategies of health discourse. Crucially, prox-
imization analysis demonstrates a consistent reliance of health discourse
and disease prevention discourse in particular on three interrelated
threat construals: the construal of the ODC as an enemy entity, the
construal of the ODC impact speed and the construal of the ODC impact
consequences. These three construals underlie cancer prevention dis-
course as well as a number of other discourses in the field of (preventive)
medicine.

BEYOND THE WAR ON CANCER

The following two texts (7–8) are concerned with different health
issues, communicated by different institutional speakers to different
audiences, via different news channels in different media cultures.
They are however remarkably similar in their consistent use of
threat-based strategies in the service of legitimization and public
mobilization. Most of these strategies involve spatial as well as tem-
poral proximization.
 3 HEALTH DISCOURSE: THE WAR ON CANCER AND BEYOND 35

(7) H1N1 virus returns, already claiming lives of 10 British adults

The swine flu virus that swept the world last year causing a global health
emergency has returned to claim the lives of 10 adults in the UK in the past
six weeks. The 10 deaths were in younger adults under 65 and directly
associated with H1N1 swine flu. Only 3 had underlying conditions, the rest
were healthy before being struck down by the killer virus, according to the
Health Protection Agency (HPA). Seasonal flu normally causes severe illness
in the elderly. The H1N1 swine flu virus is now targeting pregnant women,
younger adults, and those with chronic conditions, making it a cause of
particular alarm. No other similar reports of deaths linked with swine flu
have been received from elsewhere in Europe. Official figures show GP
consultations for flu-like illness in England were at 13.3 per 100,000 popu-
lation last week, well below baseline levels. ‘We are just beginning to see
more of H1N1 activity in the UK’, said John Watson, head of respiratory
diseases at the Health Protection Agency. The fear among flu experts is that
the deadly virus could mutate to cause more severe illness in younger adults.
The NHS recommends people have the 2014 seasonal flu vaccination to
protect them against swine flu.

(The Independent, 20 January 2014)

(8) Secondhand smoke could penetrate your body in no time at all. The
moment you inhale your lungs and blood become affected, transmitting tox-
icants all over your brain, heart, stomach . . . , your neural, respiratory, cardio-
vascular . . . systems. Toxicity is growing every second you are exposed,
increasing the chances of stroke, heart attack, cancer, . . . affecting reproductive
capacity in both males and females. . . . Until all forms of public smoking are
banned state-wide in California, your life is at a continual risk. . . .
Tobacco kills, and people who market it are terrorists. The bomb is
ticking. Will we respond? If we don’t, who will? Awareness is not enough;
only strategic action will change the course of human events. The industry is
increasingly spending money to target all, but especially the most vulnerable
cells of our society: children, minorities, and American citizens who had
immigrated to our country from the third world. . . . We need to more
aggressively fight tobacco marketing. This is an issue of social justice.
Predatory marketing by the tobacco industry must be actively opposed.
(Action on Smoking and Health in California, Internet release on passive
smoking and tobacco marketing, 29 July 2009)

The strategies of threat construction in (7) and (8) involve a concerted

interplay of construals of the enemy entity (ODC), its ability to produce
quick impact, and the (destructive) effects of that impact. Although the two
36 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

texts differ with regard to the kind and number of ODC agents (‘swine flu
virus’ in [7]; ‘secondhand smoke’, ‘tobacco’, ‘tobacco industry’ in [10]),
both construe all the ODC agents as inherently evil (‘killer virus’, ‘deadly
virus’, ‘tobacco kills’ ‘[tobacco industry] are terrorists’). This is contrasted
with the innocence and helplessness of the victims: both texts include in the
IDC group the most vulnerable individuals, such as ‘pregnant women’ and
‘the elderly’ in (7), and ‘children’ in (8). As a result, the fear-raising appeal
of the enemy entity gets stronger, triggering expectations of an effective
defense or prevention plan. The characterization of the ODC entity as evil is
deftly combined with its construal as active and potent. In (7) a historical
flashback is used to endorse the high calibre of the current threat (‘The
swine flu virus that swept the world last year causing a global health
emergency has returned’). In (8), a bomb metaphor is used to underline
the size and urgency of the threat (‘The bomb is ticking’).
This brings us to the construal of the ODC impact. To force the construal
of the impact as a close and threatening possibility, both (7) and (8) include
expressions structured grammatically in the progressive imperfective aspect
(‘The H1N1 swine flu virus is targeting’, ‘We are just beginning to see more
of H1N1 activity’, ‘Toxicity is growing every second’, ‘The bomb is tick-
ing’). It is commonly accepted that with regard to its grammatical and
discourse function, the progressive imperfective represents actions as
‘unbounded’, incomplete and without explicitly indicated endpoints
(Bybee and Fleischman 1995). It thus helps construe the present moment
as durative, that is continuing on into the future unless intervened upon. The
continuity salient in the progressive imperfective phrases can thus be read, in
our case, as the continuity of threat extending into the future yet without
indication of the precise moment of materialization. The consequences of
such a construal for fear generation are enormous. First, the threat that is
unpredictable gets automatically bigger, entailing a continual mobilization
and preparedness of resources to handle it. Second, since the timeframe of
‘waiting for the threat to happen’ is extensive, it provides a background
against which the actual materialization of the threat (the actual impact) is
conceptualized. In this process, the impact is naturally construed as a ‘deadly
strike’, a nick of time bringing about devastating and irreversible change.
The last element of the arrangement is the construal of the ODC
impact effects. Since the ultimate goal of (7) and (8) is unconditional
legitimization, and legitimization gains are the greatest when the impact
of ODCs is conceptualized as maximally consequential, the two texts
feature a number of constructs which evoke globality of the gathering
 3 HEALTH DISCOURSE: THE WAR ON CANCER AND BEYOND 37

threat, as well as a potentially massive toll it could take if unstopped. The

items/phrases construing the range of the threat include ‘swept the
world’, ‘global health emergency’, ‘in both males and females’, ‘target all’
and ‘our society’. Apart from these nominal phrases that extend the
calibre/target of the threat, several verb phrases (VPs) are used (such as
‘could mutate’) to multiply its sources. The possible toll of the threat is
described as huge and heavy (‘deadly virus’, ‘toxicants all over’, ‘life ( . . . )
at a continual risk’), thus calling for and justifying radical measures
(‘aggressively fight tobacco marketing’, ‘must be actively opposed’).
In general, the coercion and legitimization strategies in (7) and (8)
are realized in spatio-temporal construals which depict and proximize
the threat element as a real, ‘tangible’ entity. This is no surprise given
the overarching legitimization goals, which involve quick and unequi-
vocal approval of the proposed course of action. It seems that the same
rule holds for most of health discourse and disease prevention discourse
in particular. Naturally enough, speakers in health discourse aim at an
unconditional and, above all, ultra-fast legitimization, in order to be
able to take rapid actions against equally rapid negative developments.
Possessing a uniquely high capacity for threat construction and fear
generation, spatio-temporal proximization strategies seem to make the
best rhetorical choice.

Health Discourse and PT

This chapter has made the first attempt to redirect the empirical focus of
PT, from its ‘cradle’ domain of state political discourse, towards the vast
and heterogeneous territory of ‘public discourse’ in general. What have we
learnt about, first, the conceptual characteristics of threat and fear genera-
tion patterns in health discourse compared to political discourse? And
what can be said, as a result, about the compatibility of PT to handle
further interventionist discourses in the public domain? To receive an
answer, we re-focus on example (8), which we re-quote in two parts
(8a–8b) below:

(8a) Secondhand smoke could penetrate your body in no time at all.

The moment you inhale your lungs and blood become affected, transmit-
ting toxicants all over your brain, heart, stomach . . . , your neural, respira-
tory, cardiovascular . . . systems. Toxicity is growing every second you are
exposed, increasing the chances of stroke, heart attack, cancer, . . . affecting
38 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

reproductive capacity in both males and females. . . . Until all forms of public
smoking are banned state-wide in California, your life is at a continual
risk. . . .
(8b) Tobacco kills, and people who market it are terrorists. The bomb is
ticking. Will we respond? If we don’t, who will? Awareness is not
enough; only strategic action will change the course of human events.
The industry is increasingly spending money to target all, but especially
the most vulnerable cells of our society: children, minorities, and
American citizens who had immigrated to our country from the third
world. . . . We need to more aggressively fight tobacco marketing. This is
an issue of social justice. Predatory marketing by the tobacco industry
must be actively opposed.
(Action on Smoking and Health in California, Internet release on
passive smoking and tobacco marketing, 29 July 2009)

The division of excerpt (8) into two parts (8a–8b) allows examination of
the conceptual specificity and heterogeneity of health discourse, particu-
larly disease prevention discourse. Even though (8a) and (8b) belong to
the same text, they reveal, apart from similarities, some subtle differences
with regard to the arrangement of the DS which they construe to generate
threat and fear. Both (8a) and (8b) make use of proximization strategies
conceptually similar to those in the ‘canonical’ representation of state
political discourse (except that the response they legitimize comes no
longer from the speaker alone but rather from the speaker and the addres-
see together). At the DS basic organization level, in both parts the speaker
and the addressee are positioned in the deictic centre, facing an external
threat entity construed as moving from the apparent periphery of the DS
in the direction of the DS centre. Yet in contrast to these similarities, the
argument in (8a) differs from (8b), as well as from a ‘typical’ proximiza-
tion discourse, in its use of intended vagueness. The passive voice makes it
unclear who exactly is expected to act. At the same time, the addressee in
(8b) seems more concrete (activists, voters, legislators) and more able to
deliver a response (‘Will we respond? If we don’t, who will?’). (8b) uses
mostly active voice, as well as inclusive ‘we’, which refers to a broad range
of possible agents.
Less vagueness can be observed as regards the ODC entities, which
become proximized to negatively affect the DS central entities (IDCs).
However, the overall design of the DS is again not quite uniform. In (8a)
the ODC entity is simply ‘secondhand smoke’, which is construed as
 3 HEALTH DISCOURSE: THE WAR ON CANCER AND BEYOND 39

animate, almost ‘intelligent’ in fact. This not only maximizes the speed
and force of the impact, but also marks its ‘strategic’ character, which
involves a step-by-step assumption of full control over the body.
Speaking of ‘the body’, we must note that the IDCs in (8a) are not
only the persons exposed to secondhand smoke within their social space,
but also their organs, exposed to the smoke within the bodies, concep-
tualized as ‘containers’ similar to social spaces. This onion structure of
the DS ‘Self’ entities does not detract from their general status as
‘central’; it only produces some referential and agency problems. That
is, while the collective agency in (8a) can easily pertain to people, it
cannot pertain to their organs. In (8b) the ODC entity is again the
smoke (tobacco), but also the ‘tobacco industry’ and ‘people who mar-
ket it’. In contrast to (8a), (8b) reveals no vagueness resulting from the
IDC composition.
At the level of lexis responsible for the discourse enactment of prox-
imization there are fewer asymmetries. In both (8a) and (8b) some
strongly appealing lexico-grammatical forms are used (‘Tobacco kills,
and people who market it are terrorists. The bomb is ticking’, ‘ . . . to
target all, but especially the most vulnerable cells of our society . . . ’,
‘Predatory marketing . . . ’, ‘ . . . could penetrate . . . in no time at all. The
moment you inhale your . . . become affected, transmitting . . . all over . . . ’,
‘Toxicity is growing every second . . . ’, ‘ . . . stroke, heart attack,
cancer . . . ’, ‘ . . . life is at a continual risk’), to indicate the ODC ‘evil’
power, capacity and unpredictability such as necessary to force construals
of the continuing possibility of an unexpected, fast and devastating impact
(note the metaphor of terrorist attacks). At the coercion level, the analo-
gies to state political discourse are equally clear, involving a consistent use
of proximization strategies in the service of legitimization. Both (8a) and
(8b) include discourse that works consistently towards legitimization of
the adoption of anti-tobacco policies – even though there are some
differences with regard to who is directly addressed, who is expected to
respond, and who has the necessary tools. The similarities at the coercion
and lexico-grammatical levels seem to offset these relatively small disana-
logies at the DS organization level. We can thus conclude that health
discourse – and particularly the discourse of disease prevention – lends
itself to analysis within the proximization framework. Moreover, it invites
explorations in further public discourses using the rhetoric of threat and
fear to force interventionist policies.
40 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

NOTE
1. Let alone intriguing metaphoric correspondences. Apart from the analogies
listed by Van Rijn-van Tongeren (1997), note that (6) may force construal
of the screening programs as intelligence, the infected cells as terrorist cells,
the new treatment as air strikes on the terrorist cells, and the healthy cells as
civilian population (‘We now aim to . . . , doing minimal harm to healthy
cells’).
 CHAPTER 4

Environmental Discourse: Climate Change

Abstract The focus of this chapter is on proximization strategies in

today’s environmental discourse, especially the discourse of climate
change. It is claimed that threat construction in climate change discourse
possesses a strategic character, constituting a prerequisite for legitimiza-
tion of environmental policies. The strategies of proximization involve
external physical threats, such as adverse weather phenomena, as well as
internal threats, such as inaction, lack of environmental awareness and bad
management. The chapter includes analyses of speeches by NATO leaders
and the former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Keywords Environmental discourse
Climate change
Green policies

Axiological proximization

Chapter 3 has shown that Proximization Theory (PT) provides a rich

framework to study issues of fear and threat in health discourse. The aim
of the present chapter is to analyse proximization strategies involved in
threat construction in another important discourse of today, namely
environmental discourse (Boykoff 2008; Berglez and Olausson 2010;
Stibbe 2014; Bevitori 2014). In the following we focus on the discourse
of climate change, where threat generation patterns occur most fre-
quently. Similar to the health domain, threat construction in climate
change discourse possesses a strategic character, constituting a prerequisite

© The Author(s) 2017 41

P. Cap, The Language of Fear, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59731-1_4
42 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

for legitimization of environmental policies. In climate change discourse,

the construal of threat is nonetheless more complex, as the ‘remote’,
‘other’ entity – the ODC in technical terms – is not quite obvious and
needs to be precisely defined. There is a direct ‘external’ impact, such as
devastating natural phenomena which affect people, but also an indirect
‘internal’ impact, for instance, unsustainable environmental management.
The discourse of climate change shows that the former is best construed
by spatial and temporal proximization, while the latter often involves
axiological proximization. The axiological element consists in the assign-
ment of negative values to selected public actors, institutions and industry,
situating them in the opposition to ‘ordinary people’, who are construed
as the ‘real self’ entity.

CLIMATE CHANGE
Climate change is a relatively new domain of discourse studies, investi-
gated mainly within the rapidly expanding CDA paradigm (Boykoff 2008;
Berglez and Olausson 2010; Krzyżanowski 2009). Thus far, studies in
climate change demonstrate a unilateral focus: most analyses concentrate
on climate change as a form of transnational crisis. There are, however,
two different ways in which this broad conception is approached in actual
analysis. These different approaches result – probably – from two rather
contradictory views that emerge from the media and the related dis-
courses. On the one hand (Krzyżanowski 2009), there exists a tendency
to frame climate change as a general issue of interest and critical impor-
tance to the entire societies and all social groups. Within that trend,
climate change is described mainly as a threat to the entire humanity
which thus must be dealt with by the entire societies or the global
populace as a whole. On the other hand, the somewhat contradictory
approach (Boykoff 2008) sees climate change as a problem which cannot
be handled by the entire societies but by selected individuals who, due to
their knowledge and expertise, are able to cope with different facets of
climate change.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND PROXIMIZATION

Where does proximization, as an analytic device, belong, then? It seems
that the former, ‘global’ view invites proximization better than the ‘parti-
cularized’ view. It would be quite unrealistic to count on the latter to help
 4 ENVIRONMENTAL DISCOURSE: CLIMATE CHANGE 43

define the Self party and its agents in the first place. We have seen from the
analysis of cancer discourse how difficult that might be. Considering that
climate change is dealt with by a number of different (locationally, politi-
cally, rhetorically, perhaps also ideologically) individual expert voices in
the vast and heterogeneous area of the global socio-political space, an
attempt to ascribe any stable and homogeneous discursive strategies or
practices to these actors would probably fail. However, if we focus on the
global, institutionalized dimension of the discourse of climate change, the
dimension that evens out the individual legitimization-rhetorical and
other differences and conceptually consolidates the Self, chances emerge
that proximization may indeed be applicable. To determine that applic-
ability, and to demonstrate the role of proximization in threat and fear
generation, we discuss excerpts from the speech ‘Emerging Security Risks’
by the NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The speech was
given in London, on 1 October 2009:

(1) I want to devote a little more time today discussing the security aspects
of climate change, because I think the time has come for a change in our
approach.
First, I think we now know enough to start moving from analysis to
action. Because the trend lines from climate change are clear enough, and
grim enough, that we need to begin taking active steps to deal with this
global threat.
We know that there will be more extreme weather events – catastrophic
storms and flooding. If anyone doubts the security implications of that, look
at what happened in New Orleans in 2006.
We know sea levels will rise. Two thirds of the world’s population lives
near coastlines. Critical infrastructure like ports, power plants and factories
are all there. If people have to move they will do so in large numbers, always
into where someone else lives, and sometimes across borders.
We know there will be more droughts. According to evidence, by 2025
about 40% of the world’s population will be living in countries experiencing
water shortages. Again, populations will have to move. And again, the
security aspects could be devastating.
If you think I’m using dramatic language, let me draw your attention to
one of the worst conflicts in the world, in Darfur. One of the main causes was
a long drought. Both herders and farmers lost land, including to the desert.
What happened? The nomads moved South, in search of grazing land – right
to where the farmers are. Of course, a lot of other factors have contributed to
what has happened – political decisions, religious differences and ethnic
tensions. But climate change in Sudan has been a major contributor to this
44 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

tragedy. And it will put pressure on peace in other areas as well. When it
comes to climate change, the threat knows no borders.
There are more examples, but to my mind, the bottom line is clear. We
may not yet know the precise effects, the exact costs or the definite dates of
how climate change will affect security. But we already know enough to start
taking action. This is my first point: either we start to pay now, or we will pay
much more later.
You get the point. Climate change is different than any other threat we
face today. The science is not yet perfect. The effects are just starting to be
visible, and it’s difficult to pin down what will actually change because of
climate change. The timelines are not clear either. But that only makes the
threat bigger. Sailors never thought the mythical North-West Passage would
ever open. But it is opening. Anything’s possible.
The security challenges being discussed today are big, and they are
growing. They might also seem overwhelming. But I firmly believe that a
lot can be done – to address the root causes, to minimize their impact, and
to manage the effects when they hit.

Rasmussen’s speech is an exemplary case of proximization rhetoric, bear-

ing much similarity to the proximization discourse of anti-terrorism and
military intervention. Except for the topic, it could well belong in the
discourse of the Iraq war, which we have explored in Chap. 2. Rasmussen’s
construal of climate change is in terms of a global threat whose outlines are
‘clear enough’ and consequences ‘devastating’; thus, an immediate action
is necessary (‘either we start to pay [costs of the climate change] now, or
we will pay much more later’). Similar to the rhetoric of the Iraq war, the
threat ‘knows no borders’ and a delay in response ‘makes the threat
bigger’. Analogy is used, like in the anti-terrorist discourse, to a past
event (the war in Darfur), to endorse credibility of future visions. The
visions involve construals of future events as personally consequential, thus
strengthening the fear appeals (‘Two thirds of the world’s population lives
near coastlines . . . If people have to move they will do so in large numbers,
always into where someone else lives . . . ’). Another familiar strategy is the
construal of the moment of impact as virtually unpredictable (‘the time-
lines are not clear’). Construing the climate change threat as continual and
extending infinitely into the future, Rasmussen centralizes ‘the now’ and
the near future as the most appropriate timeframe in which to act
preventively.
At the micro level, Rasmussen’s speech lends itself to analysis invol-
ving the canonical lexical markers of proximization, especially spatial
 4 ENVIRONMENTAL DISCOURSE: CLIMATE CHANGE 45

proximization. Let us bring back (Table 4.1) the six lexico-grammatical

categories of the spatial proximization framework we used in the study of
the US anti-terrorist rhetoric in Chap. 2. Most phrases in Rasmussen’s
address match the items captured in the particular categories, 1 to 6.
Note, for instance, the ample use of ‘threat’ (category 5), the use of
‘catastrophic’, ‘tragedy’ (category 6), or the presence of verbs in the
progressive (‘growing’) marking the closeness of the threat (category
3). These spatial forms are strongly supported by temporal projections,
which involve (i) the use of a modal auxiliary (‘could’) construing con-
ditions increasing impact probability, and (ii) the application of the
present perfect (‘the time has come’) construing change from the ‘safe

Table 4.1 Spatial proximization framework and its key lexico-grammatical items
(in anti-terrorist discourse, after Table 2.1)
Category Key items

1. (NPs construed as elements of the [‘USA’, ‘United States’, ‘America’];

deictic centre of the DS (IDCs)) [‘American people’, ‘Americans’, ‘our
people/nation/country/society’]; [‘free
people/nations/countries/societies/
world’]; [‘democratic people/nations/
countries/societies/world’]
2. (NPs construed as elements outside [‘Iraq’, ‘Saddam Hussein’, ‘Saddam’,
the deictic centre of the DS (ODCs)) ‘Hussein’]; [‘Iraqi regime/dictatorship’];
[‘terrorists’]; [‘terrorist organizations/
networks’, ‘Al-Qaeda’]; [‘extremists/
radicals’]; [‘foreign regimes/dictatorships’]
3. (VPs of motion and directionality [‘are determined/intend to seek/acquire
construed as markers of movement of WMD’]; [‘might/may/could/can use
ODCs towards the deictic centre) WMD against an IDC’]; [‘expand/grow in
military capacity that could be directed
against an IDC’]; [‘move/are moving/
head/are heading/have set their course
toward confrontation with an IDC’]
4. (VPs of action construed as markers [‘destroy an IDC’]; [‘set aflame/burn
of impact of ODCs upon IDCs) down an IDC or IDC values’]
5. (NPs denoting abstract concepts [‘threat’]; [‘danger’]
construed as anticipations of impact
of ODCs upon IDCs)
6. (NPs denoting abstract concepts [‘catastrophe’]; [‘tragedy’]
construed as effects of impact of
ODCs upon IDCs)
46 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

past’ to the ‘threatening future’. The frequent repetitions of the ‘will’

phrases (‘We know that there will be more extreme weather events’) are a
particularly noteworthy case. Resembling the ‘typical’ war on terror
items captured in the third and the fourth category of the spatial frame-
work, they have an even stronger appeal in Rasmussen’s speech. This is
due, first, to the epistemic modality marker (‘will’), second, to the
syntactic embedding of that marker, that is the entire evidential claim.
At places, then, Rasmussen’s climate change argument forces construals
of threat in a more direct, appealing fashion than the ‘canonical’ or
‘cradle’ discourse of proximization, the anti-terrorist discourse.
Rasmussen’s success in proximizing the climate change threat as an
alert to action is not hindered by the global character of the threat. The
globality of the threat does not result in vagueness or weakening of the
ODC (i.e. the climate change) as an agent. Conversely, listing specific
consequences such as storms, floodings, droughts, and linking them to
specific places, regions or countries (New Orleans, Darfur, Sudan), con-
cretizes the ODC in terms of its proven capacity to strike whichever part of
the IDC’s (i.e. the world) territory. This is obviously, as in any kind of
interventionist discourse, the most effective prerequisite to solicit legiti-
mization of preventive measures. The latter are missing from the speech
but we can assume (which the later developments seem to prove) that the
goal of Rasmussen’s address is, first and foremost, to alert public attention
to the gravity of the issue so the follow-up goals, involving specific actions,
could be enacted as a matter of course. The spatial and temporal prox-
imization strategies used in the speech make a significant contribution
and, given the recurrence of some of the forms (for instance, all the lexical
as well as grammatical forms construing the threat as growing with time),
one can say that their application has been a strategic choice.

Catastrophic Visions and Ideological Oppositions

The discourse of climate change often links its apocalyptic projections to
unmeasurable factors, such as unsustainable management, negligence, as
well as ill will on the part of various public actors and industrial leaders,
both institutional and individual. This involves attribution of negative
values to the selected party or parties, which are thus construed as the
ideological ‘Other’ standing in opposition to the ‘Self’, the ‘ordinary
people’. The construction of the ideological conflict (and its conse-
quences) usually draws upon patterns of bipolar axiological representation
 4 ENVIRONMENTAL DISCOURSE: CLIMATE CHANGE 47

and proximization. There are two major construals, both involving con-
ceptual shifts. On the one hand, the adversarial posture of the Other
(ODC) is shown as increasingly conducive to physical impact and destruc-
tion. On the other, the Self (IDC) is presented as mindful of certain
historical events and analogies that underlie the present situation. These
events and memories are recontextualized as background for the current
judgment and decisions. The four excerpts below reveal both construals,
embedded in larger patterns of policy legitimization. The excerpts come
from four consecutive State of the State addresses (2007–2010) by the
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:

(2) There are some who don’t see the threat. Some who pretend not to
see it and some who don’t want to see it. I think that global warming is
real; it is a huge and growing problem. There is no single issue that is
threatening the health and prosperity of our nation and humanity more
than climate change. . . . The costs are high and they are growing. The
cost of 19,000 people that are dying here in California alone every year
because of smog, the cost of millions of hospital visits every year for
smog related illnesses. I don’t think that we can afford to waste any more
time. (2007)
(3) We know what’s going on with global warming and we know what’s
going on with the pollution, what kind of a health hazard it is. We must act
because waiting only makes the threat bigger. We must act before the threat
hits with its full force. California has taken the leadership role in fighting
global warming and cleaning our environment, and we have worked very hard
to pass laws in the last few years to make sure that we are fighting global
warming and do everything to clean our environment. This is the challenge of
our generation, and we will meet it with innovation and technology, and with
total commitment that matches the greatest pioneers in our history, because
that’s the way California works. That’s what California is all about. (2008)
(4) We can put not just our nation but the entire world on a path towards a
clean and sustainable future. Wouldn’t that be a great, great thing?
Wouldn’t that be a great legacy for our generation to do that? So this is
why I say let’s go to work, let’s roll up our sleeves make it happen. ‘There are
some in the industry and over there in Washington DC who may not be on
our side. But we have economics on our side. Since the supply of wind and
sun and algae is unlimited, their prices will not jump. That cannot be said of
oil, the supply of which is limited and declining. We are facing all of these
challenges locally here, while in Washington they are still taking their time
and they are not doing anything to act on curbing the greenhouse gas
emissions. (2009)
48 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

(5) It used to be that we could sit and wait. But the last years have changed
all that. The time has come to start adopting green policies as fast as we can
develop them, because this is the only way to go and that’s how we can
inspire the creation of new technology, which will save us all. Some have
argued that we can still wait and that’s an option. In my view, it’s the riskiest
of all options. Being dependent on one source of fuel leaves our economy
and our national security vulnerable to price shocks and global events
beyond our control. Hydrogen [as a fuel source in cars] leaves no trail of
pollution and causes no global warming. Using it does not fund the terror-
ists who would destroy us. (2010)

The common function of texts (2), (3), (4) and (5) is to construct a
legitimization frame for a continual implementation of clean energy
policies, providing an effective yet very costly alternative to toxic gas
emissions. Under the Assembly Bill (AB) 32, or the ‘California Global
Warming Solutions Act of 2006’, California will reduce its greenhouse
gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, which roughly equates to a 15 %
reduction. In 2011 the California Air Resources Board adopted a cap-
and-trade program, which covers the ‘major sources of [greenhouse gas]
emissions in the State such as refineries, power plants, industrial facilities
and transportation fuels’ (Air Resources Board 2013). The program
commenced in 2012, and ‘enforceable compliance obligations’ came
into effect in relation to emissions generated in 2013. It is planned that
the cap-and trade program will aid the achievement of an 80 % reduction
of emissions, as dictated by AB 32. The Low Carbon Fuel Standard,
which was issued in 2007, ‘calls for a reduction of at least 10 % in the
carbon intensity of California’s transportation fuels by 2020’. Overall, it
is estimated that these regulations will result in an ‘18 % reduction in
climate change emissions from the light-duty fleet [of vehicles] in 2020
and a 27 % reduction in 2030.’ (Air Resources Board 2014). Further
investments include the Million Solar Roof Initiative, which offers tax
incentives to the general public in return for installing solar panels on
their homes; and the Hydrogen Highway project, which is designed to
ensure that those who buy hydrogen powered cars will have access to
hydrogen fuelling stations throughout the state. Altogether, the cost of
green energy solutions adopted in the state of California in the years
2005–2015 is estimated at $2.4 billion, a truly staggering amount. To
legitimize this size of investment, Governor Schwarzenegger develops a
 4 ENVIRONMENTAL DISCOURSE: CLIMATE CHANGE 49

complex rhetorical stance, in which threat and fear generation patterns

are skilfully complemented by ideological appeals.
First and foremost, the calibre of the environmental threat is considered
in relation to the attitudes and social postures of those responsible for
containing it. The threat is depicted as ‘huge’, ‘growing’ and ultimately
devastating unless there is a reaction ((3) ‘We must act because waiting
only makes the threat bigger. We must act before the threat hits with its full
force’). The gravity of the moment is construed through temporal prox-
imization of an emerging danger. The ‘before’ phrase presupposes an
external impact, yet without specifying when it might actually occur. This
adds to the threat at the conceptual level, since there is no clue when to
react. At the lexical level, the word ‘threat’ produces a similar effect. As a
nominalization, ‘threat’ conflates the present and the future; it represents
an objectified entity that exists at the present moment and presages an
ominous future. It thus creates an intriguing effect of ‘continual momen-
tousness’: the threat can materialize anytime. These scary visions are set
against the background of mutually opposite opinions, ideas and attitudes
of people and institutions which are supposed to handle the crisis situation.
On the one hand, the California government and its people are presented
as rational, resourceful and positively inspired by their state legacy ((3)
‘This is the challenge of our generation, and we will meet it with innovation
and technology, and with total commitment that matches the greatest
pioneers in our history, because that’s the way California works. That’s
what California is all about’). On the other, the ‘adversaries’ (the federal
government and, most probably, the nationally owned and/or controlled
companies) are described as passive, incompetent or plainly cunning and
cynical ((2) ‘There are some who don’t see the threat. Some who pretend
not to see it and some who don’t want to see it’; (4) ‘There are some in the
industry and over there in Washington DC who may not be on our side’).
The legitimization of the state policies is thus built on the positive image of
the ‘Self’ group (the State and its people), as well as the negative image of
the ‘Other’ group (the central government and part of the state industry).
The negative conceptualization of the Other is particularly appealing and
legitimization-effective, as their inaction and ill will make the threat grow
quickly enough to warrant prompt response from the local government.
The proximization of the threat involves thus both the spatio-temporal
construal of imminence of the greenhouse effect, and the multiplication of
the contributing socio-political and ideological factors.
50 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

The construction of the ideological conflict in (2–5) rests on a ‘com-

petition’ between two political postures (active and committed vs. passive
and negligent) which determine two disparate scenarios construed as
parallel extensions of the present. The scenarios develop in a quasi-dialogic
discourse stretch, in which Governor Schwarzenegger presents two con-
flicting views of the future, one of which can be described as ‘privileged’
and the other as ‘oppositional’ (Dunmire 2011). The privileged future
(the growth of the greenhouse threat) is a future that is highly probable
and thus requiring a response Schwarzenegger favours over an alternative
response (or a lack thereof). The oppositional future presupposes a ‘we can
sit and wait’ view, which holds that there is no imminent threat and,
consequently, no preventive steps are necessary. This view is presented as
contradictory to evidence (‘The cost of 19,000 people that are dying here
in California alone every year because of smog, the cost of millions of
hospital visits every year for smog related illnesses’) and is contrasted with
the privileged view, which is conceptualized as informed, knowledge-
based and rational. The rationality of the privileged view consists in a
thorough consideration of the past state of affairs and its comparison
with the present state. One of the key strategies Schwarzenegger engages
to draw such a comparison is a contrastive use of grammatical tenses: the
simple past (‘It used to be that we could sit and wait’) and the present
perfect (‘But the last years have changed all that. The time has come to
start adopting green policies . . . ’). The contrastive pattern marks a clean
break from the safe past and, above all, a predefined, continually threaten-
ing future extending infinitely from that past.
Lastly, it is easy to notice that almost any time a strong fear appeal is
made based on spatio-temporal proximization of the Other, a balancing
positive appeal is delivered, involving axiological proximization of the
central values of the Self. This can be seen in (3) (‘California has taken
the leadership role. This is the challenge of our generation, and we will
meet it with innovation and technology, and with total commitment that
matches the greatest pioneers in our history, because that’s the way
California works’), as well as (4) (‘We can put not just our nation but
the entire world on a path towards a clean and sustainable future.
Wouldn’t that be a great, great thing? Wouldn’t that be a great legacy
for our generation to do that? So this is why I say let’s go to work, let’s roll
up our sleeves make it happen’). The strategic interplay of the two distinct
appeals reflects the logic of the thesis-antithesis formula as described and
advocated by the Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson 1988).
 4 ENVIRONMENTAL DISCOURSE: CLIMATE CHANGE 51

The RST holds that for best argumentative effects, the speaker’s positive
claim (the thesis part) should follow the opening negative claim (the
antithesis). That way, the positive claim is better remembered and can
serve to legitimize direct action. Governor Schwarzenegger’s speeches
contain several examples of the RST formula, for instance, (3) starts with
issues of public concern, such as pollution and health hazards, which
subsequently give way to a reassuring ideological call. Interestingly, the
call draws upon another pragma-rhetorical strategy, which can be
described as ‘complimenting the hearer’ (Brown and Levinson 1987,
among others). By paying compliments (to the hearer and/or the hearer
and himself), the speaker expresses appreciation and solidarity between the
parties and enacts mental ‘common ground’ as a prerequisite for soliciting
involvement of the hearer in a joint course of action. In Schwarzenegger’s
speech of 2008 (3), the strategy of complimenting is particularly appealing
and credible, as it builds on past facts (‘California has taken the leadership
role in fighting global warming and cleaning our environment, and we
have worked very hard to pass laws in the last few years to make sure that
we are fighting global warming and do everything to clean our environ-
ment’). It thus abides by the core rule of consistency, which we discussed in
Chap. 1.

The Controversial ‘Other’ and Axiological Proximization

The smooth interplay of the spatio-temporal and axiological proximization
strategies in texts such as Rasmussen’s and Schwarzenegger’s warrants the
applicability of proximization and PT to studies in climate change discourse.
It seems that PT is particularly well suited to elucidate the twofold nature of
climate change rhetoric, which involves the presence of fear appeals and
threat generation patterns, as well as calls to ideological awareness, pride
and civic legacy. At the same time, climate change discourse informs PT
with regard to two central elements of the STA proximization model. First,
similar to health discourse, it provides a fine-grained insight into the com-
plex status of the conceptual ‘Other’. The Other in climate change texts
cannot be accounted for unless recognized with respect to a physical or
abstract ODC category, such as weather phenomena, climate policies or
institutions managing climate change. Each of these distinct categories
makes for a different proximization arrangement and thus a different prox-
imization strategy. While the impact of natural phenomena can be perceived
as physical and tangible, the ‘impact’ of environmental inaction is in
52 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

comparison intangible – though it is, somewhat paradoxically, equally

cumulative. The number of potential ODCs in climate change discourse
seems high and probably higher than in health discourse, let alone state
political discourse, the original domain of proximization. We thus need to
exercise an increasingly greater caution when it comes to the conceptual
groundwork for textual analysis. The other important insight that climate
change data offer is the extra focus on axiological proximization. Whereas
the ‘standard’ construal of axiological proximization involves the piling up
of adversarial negative values, climate change discourse relies at least to the
same extent upon the ‘positive’ proximization of home values, which are
conceptualized as elements of historical legacy triggering public mobiliza-
tion. That said, climate change texts emerge as venues of deeply ideological
struggle, where the presence or absence of a given set of values is directly
linked to a specific social behaviour.
 CHAPTER 5

Technological Discourse: Threats

in the Cyberspace

Abstract This chapter demonstrates that the original terrain of

Proximization Theory, anti-terrorist discourse, has expanded to blend
with other domains, such as discourse of cyberspace. Originally a mundane
technological discourse, the discourse of cyberspace has changed drama-
tically after 9/11, incorporating fear-inducing alerts to the possibility of
cyberattacks. The chapter shows that, today, the discourse of cyberspace
has virtually turned into the discourse of cyberthreat, reflecting general
context of uncertainty and common anxiety following the WTC and the
Pentagon terrorist attacks. It includes a variety of proximization strategies
which construe ‘clear and present’ threats in order to trigger public
mobilization and response.

Keywords Cyberspace
Cyber-terrorist discourse
Cyber-fear
Electronic

Pearl Harbor

The term ‘technological discourse’ can be interpreted in two ways; first, as

a jargon used to exchange in-field specialized information, second, as a
public discourse concerned with technological progress and its conse-
quences. The discussion in this chapter draws, obviously, on the second
interpretation. Specifically, we focus on the rapid technological advance-
ment as an urgent security issue, growing in its importance in the last
couple of years. The seriousness of this issue reflects in an ever-increasing

© The Author(s) 2017 53

P. Cap, The Language of Fear, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59731-1_5
54 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

number of publications, such as books, articles as well as media reports,

alerting the public to various hazards and threats that modern technology
can create unless powerful control means are promptly put in place.
Particular concern is over the power of information technologies as,
potentially, mighty weapons in the hands of terrorists to launch cyberat-
tacks on public digital networks. The loud voices demanding steps to
prevent such catastrophic events from happening constitute a specific
discourse, which furthers its goals through fear appeals and other forms
of discursive coercion. It is thus an essentially legitimization discourse,
even though the producers of particular texts are not necessarily state
leaders, but most of the time individuals (scientists, journalists, media
experts, etc.) acting ‘on behalf’ of the general public (Sandwell 2006;
Graham 2004). While not possessing directly executive powers, they aim
to describe the threat and pre-legitimize preventive actions which they
propose to policymakers. Their fear-based, hard-hitting rhetoric lends
itself, with a number of reservations, to proximization analysis. This
shows, from a methodological standpoint, that Proximization Theory
(PT) may be applicable well beyond the state-controlled discourse.

THE DISCOURSE OF CYBER-TERROR

According to Sandwell (2006), the discourse of cyber-terror is a direct
consequence of 9/11; cyberthreats are construed within the ‘general
context of uncertainty and common anxiety’ following the WTC and the
Pentagon terrorist attacks (Sandwell 2006, p. 11). The most extreme
manifestations of cyber-fear, says Sandwell, are articulated around the
‘post-9/11 boundary dissolving threats, intrusive alterities, and existential
ambivalences created by the erosion of binary distinctions and hierarchies
that are assumed to be constitutive principles of everyday life’ (Sandwell
2006, p. 40). As such, the discourse of cyber-terror is not merely a US
discourse, it is a world discourse. Its principal practitioners are the world
media, media experts, and the press in particular, which, on Sandwell’s
view, perpetuate the threat by creating mixed representations of ‘the off-
line and the online world, the real or physical and the virtual or imagined’
(Sandwell 2006, p. 40).
Neither Sandwell (2006) nor other scholars (e.g. Graham 2004) are
precise about the motives that underlie such fear-inducing representations.
This is unfortunate since establishing the motives is of clear relevance to
the analysis of the discourse of cyber-terror as a legitimization discourse.
 5 TECHNOLOGICAL DISCOURSE: THREATS IN THE CYBERSPACE 55

There are however two hypotheses that emerge from data analysis. On the
first, the media discourse of cyber-terror has a strong political purpose: it
aims to alert the people, the government and state’s security structures to
the seriousness of the issue, thus exerting pressure on the state to imple-
ment or strengthen defense measures. Such a discourse can be considered
a legitimization discourse since the measures become pre-legitimized by
discourse construals reflecting a true intent to influence the state’s policies.
On the other hypothesis, the press representations of cyber-terror have,
instead of or apart from political motives, a strong commercial purpose
and one of the central aims is to increase readership.
The data evidence to determine the ultimate correctness of the hypoth-
eses is limited. Thus, in the proximization analysis that follows we cannot
help speculations at the coercion-legitimization level. In other words, we
cannot tell with an absolute certainty why the proximization strategies, as a
whole, have been used. Still, it is thought-provoking to see so many of
different proximization forms operate within just two relatively small texts.
The texts are excerpts from a book by Dan Verton, a respected IT journal-
ist working with the influential Computerworld magazine.1 In the book
(2003), he recaps the thoughts presented in the 2002 issues of the
Computerworld:

(1) This is the emerging face of the new terrorism. It is a thinking man’s game
that applies the violent tactics of the old world to the realities and vulner-
abilities of the new high-tech world. Gone are the days when the only victims
are those who are unfortunate enough to be standing within striking distance
of the blast. Terrorism is now about smart, well-planned indirect targeting of
the electronic sinews of the whole nations. Terrorists are growing in their evil
capacity to turn our greatest technologies against us. Imagine, one day,
overloaded digital networks, resulting in the collapse of finance and e-com-
merce networks, collapsed power grids and non-functioning telephone net-
works. Imagine, another day, the collapse, within seconds, of air traffic
control systems, resulting in multiple airplane crashes; or of any other control
systems, resulting in widespread car and train crashes, and nuclear melt-
downs. Meanwhile, the perpetrators of the war remain undetected behind
their distant, encrypted terminals, free to bring the world’s mightiest nations
to their knees with a few keystrokes in total impunity. (Verton 2003, p. 55)
(2) Armed with nothing but a laptop and a high speed Internet connec-
tion, a computer geek could release a fast spreading computer virus that
in a matter of minutes gives him control of thousands, perhaps millions,
of personal computers and servers throughout the world. This drone
56 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

army launches a silent and sustained attack on computers that are crucial
for sending around the billions of packets of data that keep e-mail, the
Web and other, more basic necessities of modern life humming. At first
the attack seems to be an inconvenience – e-mail traffic grinds to a halt,
Web browsing is impossible. But then the problems spread to services
only tangentially related to the Internet: your automated-teller machine
freezes up, your emergency call fails to get routed to police stations and
ambulance services, airport- and train-reservation systems come down.
After a few hours, the slowdown starts to affect critical systems: the
computers that help run power grids, air-traffic control and telephone
networks. (Verton 2003, p. 87)

Analysis
Similar to the discourse of climate change, (1) and (2) include a number of
fearful anticipations and alerts to the imminence of a gathering threat. To
make the threat global, they construe a broad spectrum of the IDC
entities: it seems from the texts that there is no entity in the world,
whether a nation or an individual, that is not under threat. This construal
involves several lexico-grammatical ploys, such as, in (1), the abundant
pluralization of the affected entities (e.g., ‘victims’, ‘nations’, ‘networks’,
‘systems’) or, in (2), depicting the cyberthreat in personally consequential
terms (‘your automated-teller machine freezes up, your emergency call fails
to get routed to police stations and ambulance services’). Analytically, the
texts reiterate the problem with demarcating the ODC entities. Unless we
take Verton’s ‘cyber-terrorists’ as ‘terrorists’ in the ideological, geopoliti-
cal and locational sense of alterity that we have recognized so far, we have
to approach them as, in a way, isolated ‘ODC cells’ among the IDC
entities. This dilemma may well be unresolvable given the short history
of the cyberthreat discourse and the resulting shortage of data, especially
reference data. Thus, the part of the conceptual scenario that remains most
in line with the ‘default’ proximization scenario is the act of proximization
as such, the symbolic shift of the threatening entity in the direction of the
IDC entities. Though neither (1) nor (2) give a clear picture of the source
of the threat, they include a large number of lexico-grammatical forms
construing its speed, imminence, as well as devastating effects.
Most of these forms echo the language choices and strategies from,
again, the war on terror discourse. They also reveal – to the benefit of
Proximization as a theory – several features of the discourses that have
 5 TECHNOLOGICAL DISCOURSE: THREATS IN THE CYBERSPACE 57

been studied in Chaps. 3 and 4. The cyberthreat is construed as redefining,

once and for all, the ‘old world’ security arrangement ([1]: ‘Gone are the
days when . . . ’). The ‘new world’ arrangement is far more ‘vulnerable’:
not only are the ‘old’ ideologies of ‘evil’ and ‘violence’ still in existence,
they are now ‘exercised’ with new and formidable (‘high-tech’) tools. As a
result, the threat is ‘growing’, its ‘blast’ could now reach the entire
‘nations’, and the impact is virtually unpredictable: it may come ‘one
day’ or ‘another’. Both (1) and (2) construe the impact as ultra-fast
([1]: ‘within seconds’; [2]: ‘fast spreading’, ‘in a matter of minutes’) and
massively destructive ([1]: ‘airplane crashes’, ‘nuclear meltdowns’; [2]:
‘affect critical systems’). All the lexical forms which force such an ominous
conceptualization are apparently categorizable in terms of the ‘spatial’,
‘temporal’ and ‘axiological’ items of proximization as recognized by PT.
For instance, the ‘fast spreading’ phrase performs spatial and temporal
proximization, the ‘blast’ performs spatial proximization, and ‘one day’
enacts indefiniteness and thus uncertainty about the future, in line with
the strategy of temporal proximization. In contrast to health discourse, as
well as the majority of environmental discourse, there are also phrases
which force axiological construals (‘evil capacity’, ‘violent tactics’).
Intriguingly, text (2) includes a discourse sequence that resembles
President Bush’s argument linking the ideologies of ‘dictatorship and
radicalism’ to the later material impact (‘brings danger to our own people’
– recall the analysis in Chap. 2). The sequence in question leads from ‘At
first the attack seems to be an inconvenience’ to ‘After a few hours, the
slowdown starts to affect critical systems’. Though it includes no ideolo-
gical element, it still forces a conceptualization whereby an initially minor
glitch turns over time into a real, ‘tangible’ threat.

REASONING BY ANALOGY
Drawing on fears instilled in the public space by the 9/11 attacks, the
discourse of cyber-terror makes ample use of historical flashbacks and
analogies, whose function is to endorse credibility of future visions by
linking them to real events of the past. Catastrophic past events are thus
proximized and conflated with current developments. As a result, the
current events, as well as projections, increase their dramatic appeal. The
main reference point is, naturally, the 9/11 itself, but there are other and
more distant analogies too, such as ‘electronic Pearl Harbor’ and
58 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

‘Waterloo’. The accuracy of some of these analogies is disputable, reveal-

ing the manipulative potential of cyber-terror discourse.

Electronic Pearl Harbor

Winn Schwartau of infowar.com first used the term ‘Electronic Pearl
Harbor’ in testimony before the US Congress as early as 1991
(Schwartau 1994, p. 43). This analogy links the cyber security debate to
a ‘real’ and successful surprise attack on critical US military infrastructures
during World War II while, simultaneously, warning against the idea of
American invulnerability due to its geographical position. The Pearl
Harbor analogy is used with startling frequency in the US and world
media as a shorthand description of the likely consequences of a cyber-
terrorist attack on the US. A Lexis-Nexis search of major world news-
papers finds 205 mentions of this and related terms in the twenty years
between 1994 and 2014.
Another play on words that has found favour in the media is the term
‘electronic Waterloo’. Its 1994–2014 frequency is however considerably
smaller: a LexisNexis search reveals (only) 85 mentions of the term. Such a
big difference begs several questions, as it has been asserted that the
Waterloo analogy is the more accurate of the two. The visions conjured
up by reference to an ‘electronic Pearl Harbor’ are of a sudden crippling
blow against critical infrastructures resulting in panic, chaos and destruc-
tion. However, it has been argued that this ‘bolt-out-of-the-blue scenario’
is not the most significant cyberwarfare threat to America. The greater
danger, according to analysts at the US Center for Strategic and
International Studies, is a meticulously planned, carefully executed cam-
paign by a focused adversary with a thorough grounding in information
warfare techniques. The most important feature of such a strategy, accord-
ing to the CSIS 2014 report, would be its contribution to important
strategic goals as part of a larger-scale, possibly long-term strategy. It
would not, in other words, be intended simply to gain the public spot-
light, create havoc or win a temporary edge in battle:

Although the attack on Pearl Harbor precipitated major strategic change,

the attack itself was a single blow that failed to achieve Japan’s strategic
objective, which was to force the US to an accommodation more favorable
to Japan’s then expansive foreign policy. The more significant information
warfare threat would likely resemble not Pearl Harbor but instead Waterloo,
 5 TECHNOLOGICAL DISCOURSE: THREATS IN THE CYBERSPACE 59

where technology, planning, and careful execution were used as part of a

long-range plan aimed at altering the world’s political, military and eco-
nomic order. (CSIS 2014: 2)

The prevalence of an ‘electronic Pearl Harbor’ over ‘electronic Waterloo’

in the US and world media shows, apparently, the necessity for the
proximized threat images and related analogies to have immediate reso-
nance and attract wide understanding. The aim of such a discourse is not
actually to be informative or explanatory, but to manufacture fear and to
do so in the simplest and most direct way possible.

Weapons of Mass Disruption

In the wake of 9/11, threats to the integrity of US information infrastruc-
ture have been ascribed a level of urgency analogous to nuclear and biolo-
gical threats, which has galvanized the relationship between IT and security
as a primary policy consideration in the US (Yould 2003, p. 75). In
September 2002, Richard Clarke, former Special White House Advisor for
Cyberspace Security, told ABC News: ‘Cyberterrorism is easier to do than
building a weapon of mass destruction. Cyberattacks are a weapon of mass
disruption, and they’re a lot cheaper and easier’ (Wallace 2002). Howard
Schmidt, Clarke’s one-time deputy, has also repeatedly referred to the
threat from ‘weapons of mass disruption’ (McGray 2003). But even before
9/11 the American ‘cyber-angst’ was palpable (Bendrath 2003). As early as
1999, Congressman Curt Weldon (R-Pennsylvania) placed cyberterrorism
at the top of his list of modern threats to the American way of life. Speaking
at the 1999 InfoWarCon conference to an audience of uniformed military
personnel, corporate IT managers, computer security consultants and at
least one screenwriter, Weldon said: ‘In my opinion, neither missile prolif-
eration nor weapons of mass destruction are as serious as the threat of
cyberterrorism’. In May 2001, Senator Robert Bennett (R-Utah), stated:
‘Attacks against the US banking system would devastate the United States
more than a nuclear device let off over a major city’ (Porteus 2001). At
around the same time, Michael Specter (2001), author of The New Yorker
article alluded to above, predicting: ‘The Internet is waiting for its
Chernobyl, and I don’t think we will be waiting much longer’. Such
predictions are not limited to US commentators. A 2003 Newsweek article
quoted John Naughton, described as ‘an Internet expert at Britain’s Open
University’, as saying ‘If I were Al Qaeda, I wouldn’t waste time with
60 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

nuclear weapons. I’d be going to Microsoft training courses’ (Adams and

Guterl 2003). In her seminal article on the role of linguistic metaphors,
puns and acronyms in the field of nuclear defense strategy, Cohn (1987)
demonstrates how specific uses of language are used to dedramatize the
actual, growing threat. It seems that, with regard to the cyber-terrorist
threat, exactly the opposite is happening. Far from derealizing the threat,
much of the discourse of cyberterrorism mobilized by the media fosters the
formulation of vociferous phrases and fearful buzzwords. The example is
John Naughton’s ultimate designation of cyberthreats as ‘weapons of mass
disruption’ (Adams and Guterl 2003), which is directly analogous to
‘weapons of mass destruction’, that is nuclear, biological or chemical weap-
ons. Since its coinage in 2003, the phrase has appeared multiple times in
both the US and world press (Jarvis 2016).
While hugely popular and appealing as a fear-generating device, the phrase
‘weapons of mass disruption’ seems essentially inaccurate and unhelpful in
terms of advancing ideas about the relationship between national security and
IT. This is true whether one believes such threats are imminent or one is
sceptical of the cyber-terrorist threat. For sceptics, for example, equating the
effects of a cyberattack on the US banking system with the effects of the
Chernobyl disaster is not only an exaggeration that defies corroboration, but is
extremely disingenuous suggesting as it does that the physical (and continu-
ing) death of not just large numbers of people, but literally the whole of a vast
territory, is less significant than its digital disconnection. The functions of such
comparisons are clear however: ‘Urgency; state power claiming the legitimate
use of extraordinary means. . . . Survival might sound overly dramatic but it is,
in fact, the survival of the unit as a basic political unit – a sovereign state – that is
the key’ (Jarvis 2016, p. 10). Public perceptions are thus messaged, so that
urgent issues such as cyberterrorism, portrayed as having this ‘undercutting’
potential are accepted as having to be addressed prior to all others because, if
they are not, the state will cease to exist as a sovereign entity, and all other
questions will thus be irrelevant. This is, rhetorically, in line with the principle
of consistency, which we have discussed in Chap. 1.

IDENTIFYING ANTAGONISTIC ACTORS

The discursive securitization of cyberterrorism involves defining the specific
hostile actors. This has never been easy, posing a challenge for analysis of
particular texts in terms of PT. Traditionally, the focus in security policy
analysis has been on potentially threatening states or governments, but in
 5 TECHNOLOGICAL DISCOURSE: THREATS IN THE CYBERSPACE 61

debates about terrorism and information warfare it has been emphasized that
non-state actors too may pose a threat. The idea that anonymous adversaries
might attempt to penetrate information systems from virtually anywhere in
the world breaks with the traditional understanding of security – that the
identity, location and goals of the enemy are known – and increases the sense
of fear and insecurity. Eriksson (2001) argues that ‘the introduction of non-
state enemies in security thinking implies opening up Pandora’s box, as the
number of potential enemies in “cyberspace” is virtually unlimited’
(Eriksson 2001, p. 218). In terms of IT security, Sandwell (2006) posits
five different types of antagonistic actors: insiders, hackers, criminals, cor-
porations, governments and terrorists. Conceptually and analytically, each of
these ‘ODC’ groups reveals a different positioning in discourse space (DS).
The patterns of discursive coercion involving proximization of an external
threat are thus also different – though interrelated – as these examples
demonstrate (italics added):

(3) The so-called hacker intrusions not only cost Defense tens of millions of
dollars, but pose a serious threat to our national security. Without increased
attention by Defense top management and continued oversight by the
Congress, security weaknesses will continue. Hackers and our adversaries
will keep compromising sensitive Defense systems.
(4) Air Force officials at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base told us that, on
average, they receive 3,000 to 4,000 attempts to access information each
month from countries all around the world. It is quite possible that at least
one of the hackers may have been working for a foreign country interested in
obtaining military research data or learning what the Air Force is working on.
(5) We do have evidence that computer-related education and training
courses conducted by nation-state sponsored organizations are being
attended by those who go on to act independently. Some of us have strong
suspicions that there is occasionally some foreknowledge by those actually
conducting the training that that is why the training was being pursued by
certain individuals.
(6) Because of the seriousness and gravity of the potential consequences, we
never discount and remain very vigilant to, the possibility of foreign intelli-
gence exploitation by nation-states whom we know have the capability to
conduct cyber-terrorist activities.

All the examples come from an interview with Jack L. Brock, Director
of US Defense Information and Financial Management Systems. The
interview took place on CNN on 2 May 2006, three days before a
62 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

Congressional debate on possible increase in federal funding for IT

security agencies. In an attempt to rationalize the needs of his agency,
Brock paints a complex picture of the ominous cyberthreat, involving
multiple agents and antagonistic groups. The hostile actors differ in
specificity: while the activity of hackers (3, 4) is presented in terms of
concrete evil acts (‘intrusions’), the activity of hostile states (4, 5, 6) is
not immediately obvious and visible; it consists in harbouring, support-
ing or merely tolerating the organizations and individuals that pose a
cyber-terrorist threat. There are thus, despite individual differences,
some clear links between the antagonistic entities, creating a complex
impact network. This is where the discourse of cyberterrorism borrows,
again, from the discourse of state terrorism in general. We have
observed in Chap. 2 that the American (anti-)terrorist rhetoric often
combines direct fear appeals with ideological descriptions of the enemy
entity. The function of these descriptions is to present the antagonistic
mind-sets or values as triggers for invasive actions (Fig. 5.1). We can
see from Jack L. Brock’s interview that in the discourse of cyberterror-
ism foreign state adversaries are frequently construed as ideological
cradles of cyber-terrorist actions, such as hacking or virus-spreading.
The destructive consequences of these actions are depicted as last in a
cause-and-effect chain, which takes the space of a single sentence (as in
[6]), or several sentences (as in [3]-[4]-[5]). Since the connection
between ‘the ideological’ and ‘the actual/physical’ is implicit in the
chain, description of the proximized impact is not confined to the final
syntactic or textual position; in fact, it often occurs at the very begin-
ning of the chain (as for instance in [6]), for emphasis and appeal.

Manipulation and Abuse

The Self–Other arrangement in Fig. 5.1 reflects the deeply manipulative
potential of cyber-terrorist discourse. As can be imagined, the extension of
the Other (ODC) category to include several types of outside agents, such
as foreign states, institutions, as well as individuals performing the actual
cyberattacks, easily blurs the boundaries of criminal or terrorist activities
and potentially justified online activism. This conflation has quickly gone
beyond the level of discourse. In an admittedly simplified approach, most
computer intrusions in the US are now classifiable under terrorism (Jarvis
2016). In legislation, the mere suspicion of terrorism gives the authorities
disproportionate rights, such as extended periods of custody without filing
 5 TECHNOLOGICAL DISCOURSE: THREATS IN THE CYBERSPACE 63

Other: Foreign states

Other:
Institu-
tions
n
tio
iza
o xim
Pr
Other:
Cyber-
Self terrorists

Discourse space

Fig. 5.1 Proximization in cyber-terrorist discourse

actual charges, or the possibility of capital punishment if convicted. The

executive branch, in turn, has the right to undertake the entire process
from accusation to punishment outside the public eye in protected and
secret military tribunals. One undoubted implication of these regulations
on online political activism is that if the state reacts to terrorism as war, any
act of disruptive or destructive activism in the cyberspace falls potentially
into the category of cyberterrorism, or even cyberwar.
The sensitivity of cyber-terrorist discourse to political manipulation and
abuse has provoked a number of voices in academia. In an important
contribution to the debate on the importance of terminological clarity
64 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

regarding cyberterrorism and online political activism, Vegh (2012) exam-

ines the potential of cyberterrorism and provides a possible model to
prepare for ‘information warfare.’ He clarifies the terminological ambigu-
ities of terrorism and crime, as applied to cyberspace, and points out the
necessarily different legislative, law enforcement and national security
responses. Vegh declares that ‘labeling every malicious use of computer
systems as “terrorism” serves only to exacerbate confusion and even panic
among users and the general public, and frequently hinders prosecution
and prevention by blurring the motivations behind the crime’ (Vegh
2012, p. 36). Therefore, it is imperative to underline that terminological
ambiguities, sanctioned by discourse practice, do have serious policy and
legislative implications. The interrogation of language used by official
sources and print news media is, argues Vegh, of utmost importance.
It seems that the print media in the US are indeed in need of a
thorough terminological revision. Since 2001, there have been multiple
cases of using terms such as ‘hackers’, ‘terrorists’, ‘cyber-terrorists’, ‘cyber-
attackers’, ‘cyber-criminals’, etc., interchangeably and indiscriminately,
with respect to all acts as well as anticipations of computer intrusions. As
a result, journalists have been able to provide their stories with increasingly
longer lists of possible terrorist targets. In a recent article asserting that the
US government is now prepared to respond militarily to any cyberattack,
the author enumerates: ‘Hackers, criminals and terrorists could gain access
to the digital controls for the nation’s main utilities, power grids, air traffic
control systems and nuclear power plants’ (Gellman 2012). He goes on to
find evidence to a potential cyberattack in the planning: ‘Routed through
telecommunications switches in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Pakistan, the
visitors who cased Bay Area computers studied emergency telephone
systems, electrical generation and transmissions, water storage and distri-
bution, nuclear power plants and gas facilities’ (Gellman 2012). Most of
these scenarios are derived from a 2001 seminal article by Barry Collin
titled ‘The Future of Cyberterrorism’ (Collin 2001) and his claims about
the apparent vulnerability of the US computer-controlled systems (from
air traffic control systems to cereal production lines). Collin’s article
describes various acts of online intrusion, naming the perpetrators inter-
changeably as ‘attackers’, ‘hackers’ and ‘criminals’. The article ends with
the assertion that, in actuality, all these intrusion acts are ‘terrorist acts’,
which must be stopped with ‘strong anti-terrorist measures’. Apart from
blurring the boundaries between different kinds of online intrusion, the
article prescribes another lexical convention. It contains an unprecedented
 5 TECHNOLOGICAL DISCOURSE: THREATS IN THE CYBERSPACE 65

number of modality markers which conflate the present and the future
into one temporal frame characterized by the continuing presence of an
outside threat. The main marker used in the text is, as exemplified above,
the verb could, which construes a grave and ominous threat existing in the
present and extending infinitely into the future. The threat is thus prox-
imized through its indefiniteness: there is no clue when to expect the
impact.

DISCOURSE OF CYBERSPACE VERSUS DISCOURSES

OF HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT
Compared to health discourse and environmental discourse, the discourse
of cybersspace reveals, technically, a similar DS arrangement. First, it
broadens the conceptual ‘Self’ camp to include as many IDC agents
(people, governments, economies, computer-controlled systems) as pos-
sible. Thereby, it extends the landscape of threat over a vast territory of
home entities, prompting them to react. Second, it amplifies the threat by
making it at the same time conspicuous and indefinite. On the one hand,
there are plentiful adversaries (hostile governments, institutions, indivi-
duals) and thus plentiful sources of the potential impact. On the other,
none of these adversary groups is specific enough to constitute, as has been
said, a threat of clear temporal outlines. This is where the discourse of
cyberspace and cyberterrorism meets directly with the discourse of climate
change: both of them draw upon people’s inner fears and threatening
speculations.
There are however some differences as well. Compared to health dis-
course and, especially, environmental discourse, the discourse of cyber-
space contains practically no axiological element. Unlike the rhetoric of
climate change, for instance, it does not prescribe clear links between
postures and actions of the antagonistic groups; nor does it link its fearful
anticipations to the negligence and inaction on the part of the home
group. It seems that the external impact construed in the discourse of
cyberspace and cyberterrorism is so extensive and appealing that it needs
no further warrant, except analogy. Indeed, conceptual analogies and
historical flashbacks are frequent in cyber-terrorist rhetoric, establishing a
connection between cyber-terrorist actions and ‘real-terrorist’ acts, such as
9/11. The number of analogies in cyber-terrorist discourse is in fact
significantly higher than in health and environmental discourses. This
66 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

makes cyber-terrorist rhetoric rely on predominantly spatial and temporal

strategies of proximization, which serve to construe the past events as
premises for the current and future actions.

NOTE
1. www.computerworld.com
 CHAPTER 6

Immigration and Anti-migration

Discourses: The Early Rhetoric of Brexit

Abstract The focus of this last chapter is on immigration, a theme that has
been salient in public discourse of the modern UK, especially the ‘Brexit’
rhetoric, where it encroached on issues of national sovereignty, democracy
and economic prosperity. The chapter shows that the British immigration
discourse is to a large extent a discourse of uncertainty and ever-growing
anxiety, as well as xenophobia and hatred, involving a strong Self–Other
distinction and organized ways of othering. It relies on discursively con-
structed threat and fear generation mechanisms, such as proximization,
which perform a coercive function. The chapter analyses data from state
political and media discourses, including speeches by David Cameron and
Nigel Farage, as well as newspaper editorials and commentaries.

Keywords Immigration
Anti-migration discourse
Brexit
UK

referendum debate

This last chapter is being written shortly after a momentous event in the
history of the modern Europe: the UK’s referendum on EU membership.
On 23 June 2016, after a long and heated campaign, 52 % of the British
people cast their votes in favour of leaving the Union. Voting for ‘Brexit’,
they put an end to the 24-year long period of UK’s membership in the EU
as one of its founding states. The promise to hold the referendum was first
announced by the British PM David Cameron in January 2013, subject to

© The Author(s) 2017 67

P. Cap, The Language of Fear, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59731-1_6
68 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

the condition that the Conservative party win the next general election in
2015. The year 2013 was thus the first year of the ‘proto-referendum’
debate, defining the main themes, attitudes, ideological positions and
their representations in public discourse for the following three years. In
this chapter we focus on immigration, a theme that has been particularly
salient in UK’s discourse of 2013, encroaching on several other issues such
as national sovereignty, democracy and economic prosperity. As will be
shown, the immigration discourse in 2013 Britain is to a large extent the
discourse of uncertainty and ever-growing anxiety, as well as xenophobia
and hatred, involving a strong Self–Other distinction and organized ways
of othering. Much of this discourse is characterized by linguistic opera-
tions that draw upon spatial cognition and construed movement, such as
proximization. We support these claims by examining the following data:

• Prime Minister David Cameron’s speech at Bloomberg on

23 January 2013. As noted by Todd (2015), this speech sets the
terms for the debate over the rest of the year and virtually the entire
period preceding the referendum;
• Parliamentary debates on the European Union (Referendum) Bill
2013. This Bill stipulated that a referendum on the UK’s member-
ship of the EU must be held before the end of 2017. The Bill was not
introduced by the government because the Liberal Democrats (cur-
rently in coalition with the larger Conservative Party) did not agree
with Cameron’s referendum commitment. Instead, a Conservative
backbencher introduced the legislation as a Private Member’s Bill.1
The Bill completed its passage through the House of Commons on
29 November 2013, but failed to make it through the House of
Lords. While a Private Member’s Bill, the debate included contribu-
tions from the Foreign Secretary William Hague and the Shadow
Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander. The debates analysed are the
second and third readings of the Bill;
• Nigel Farage’s party conference speech from 20 September 2013. As
the leader of the hard eurosceptic United Kingdom Independence
Party (UKIP), Farage holds an important position in the British
discourse on Europe (Todd 2015). His party conference speech
sets out the UKIP position and foretells the tone of his later con-
tributions in the referendum campaign;
• Newspaper editorials from The Times, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and
The Sun.
 6 IMMIGRATION AND ANTI-MIGRATION DISCOURSES… 69

In what follows, we first characterize the main points and voices in the
2013 discourse, and then re-examine the particular texts and phrases for
instances of proximization.

FROM SOVEREIGNTY TO IMMIGRATION

The immigration and anti-migration themes in UK’s 2013 discourse are
never addressed in isolation from the general theme of Britain’s sover-
eignty and democracy. This theme is dominated by those who proclaim
dissatisfaction with what they see as negative consequences of EU mem-
bership for UK’s political and socio-economic freedoms. David Cameron
is an important voice here, addressing issues of sovereignty and democracy
in detail during his Bloomberg speech. He makes an explicit link between
identity and foreign policy as follows:

(1) I know that the United Kingdom is sometimes seen as an argumenta-

tive and rather strong-minded member of the family of European nations.
And it’s true that our geography has shaped our psychology. We have the
character of an island nation – independent, forthright, passionate in
defence of our sovereignty. We can no more change this British sensibility
than we can drain the English Channel. And because of this sensibility, we
come to the European Union with a frame of mind that is more practical
than emotional. For us, the European Union is a means to an end –
prosperity, stability, the anchor of freedom and democracy both within
Europe and beyond her shores – not an end in itself. (Cameron 2013)

Cameron goes on to note that ‘there is a gap between the EU and its
citizens which has grown dramatically in recent years. And which repre-
sents a lack of democratic accountability and consent that is felt particu-
larly acutely in Britain’. He similarly affirms that ‘there is a growing
frustration that the EU is seen as something that is done to people rather
than acting on their behalf’ and that ‘democratic consent for the EU in
Britain is now wafer thin’. This leads him to conclude that ‘we need to
have a bigger and more significant role for national parliaments. There is
not, in my view, a single European demos. It is national parliaments,
which are, and will remain, the true source of real democratic legitimacy
and accountability in the EU’ (Cameron 2013). These excerpts show
Cameron advocating British exceptionalism and enacting political distinc-
tion by reference to an ‘independent’ and ‘forthright’ country that is an
70 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

‘island nation’. This reference to an ‘island nation’ is a form of intertex-

tuality, in that it is a programmatic deictic catchphrase, bringing to mind
Churchillian wartime speeches. Cameron rejects the notion of a ‘single
European demos’ (a single ‘European self’) and prioritizes national parlia-
ments, thereby privileging the ‘national self’ and rejecting a shared sense
of European identity. Doing so, he apparently confirms Marcussen et al.’s
(1999, p. 628) observation that ‘classical Anglo-Saxon notions of political
order emphasize parliamentary democracy and external sovereignty’ and
that ‘there is not much room for “Europe” or “Europeanness” in British
political space’. This naturally implies that any act performed in the inter-
est of ‘Europe’ is potentially anti-British and can be considered a threat
(Todd 2015).
Conservative backbenchers take these arguments further still, often
arguing for a defense of British sovereignty through reference to history
and especially the World War II. Richard Shepherd (C(onservative))
asserts:

(2) This vote, what we decide and what people in the future decide will
determine the character and strength of our national constitutional history,
which is being threatened. Why should we defer in such an adventure, when
this is the most remarkable and ancient of all the democratic communities
within western Europe? Why? (Hansard 2013–2014, p. 1201)

William Cash (C) makes an intertextual reference to Churchill, stating:

‘People have fought and died. The only reason we live in the United
Kingdom in peace and prosperity is because, in the second and first
world wars, we stood up for that freedom and democracy. Churchill
galvanised the British people to stand up for the very principles that are
now at stake’ (Hansard 2013–2014, p. 1210). Finally, Gordon
Henderson (C) argues:

(3) It is inconceivable that only 30 years after the end of the second world
war, the British people would have willingly embarked on a programme to
hand over swathes of their hard-won sovereignty to another state, and let us
be clear: that is what the European Union aspires to be. (Hansard 2013–
2014, p. 1232)

The references to World War II and Churchill serve to consolidate the

national self. They stress the centrality of the moment and prescribe the
 6 IMMIGRATION AND ANTI-MIGRATION DISCOURSES… 71

future course of action. The historical flashbacks activate reasoning by

analogy: what makes current policies legitimate is, above all, their con-
sistency with the long accepted principles and solutions. The past is thus
proximized as a lesson to heed in the uncertain future. As Daddow
(2006, p. 320) notes:

This is the kind of commonsense history everyone knows even if they are not
historians . . . the kind that tells us all we need to know about Europe from
Britain’s martial past; its encounters with the Spanish Armada, at the battle
of Trafalgar, with Napoleon at Waterloo, after the let-down of Munich in
1938 and against Hitler’s Germany during the Second World War.

In sum, Great Britain is linked to democratic ideals through being

described as ‘the most ancient and remarkable of democratic commu-
nities’. The continental Europe is in turn framed as a threat to the
‘[British] national constitutional history’ and to the principles of freedom
and democracy for which ‘Churchill galvanised the British people to stand
up’. This conceptual arrangement provides a solid ideological groundwork
for all policy issues, including immigration.
Interestingly, Nigel Farage uses notably similar imagery and identity-
based arguments to the Prime Minister Cameron and the Conservatives in
building his hard-Eurosceptic case. Like Cameron, Farage claims that the
UK is different because of its geography:

(4) The fact is we just don’t belong in the European Union. Britain is
different. Our geography puts us apart. Our history puts us apart. Our
institutions produced by that history put us apart. We think differently.
We behave differently. . . . The roots go back seven, eight, nine hundred
years with the Common Law. Civil rights. Habeas corpus. The presumption
of innocence. The right to a trial by jury. On the continent confession is the
mother of all evidence. (Farage 2013)

Farage’s words are a clear example of deictic ‘othering’, and cementing the
IDC-ODC distinction based on historical and ideological differences.
Farage appeals to the weight of ‘seven, eight, nine hundred years’ of history,
in which ‘Britain is different [from continental Europe]’. He uses ethical
dimensions of identity to differentiate between a British tradition of pre-
sumption of innocence and jury trial from a continental system based on
confession. In the same speech Farage also affirms that ‘We know that only
72 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

by leaving the Union can we regain control of our borders, our parliament,
democracy and our ability to trade freely with the fastest-growing econo-
mies in the world’. Implying lack of control of the ‘[UK] borders’, he sets
up a link to the immigration theme, framing it as an issue of extreme
urgency and consequentiality. Like Cameron, he employs identity and
cultural differentiation (Todd 2015) to serve his political cause of increasing
UKIP’s electoral strength and achieving a British exit from the EU.
These concerns about British sovereignty and democracy are echoed by
both The Times and the Daily Mail. An editorial from The Times argues
that ‘a union worth preserving would be one that valued national sover-
eignty, not only for this nation but for any that wished it, and which was
willing to reform to advance the prosperity of its members’. (The Times; 24
January 2013). The Daily Mail is more strongly critical:

(5) According to José Manuel Barroso, any country that wishes to re-claim
powers from Brussels risks taking Europe back to the ‘divisions’ that led to
the First World War. Doubtless, the president of the EU Commission is
worried that, if the voters of Britain are given a say over our future member-
ship by David Cameron, the verdict may not be to his liking. So, with typical
contempt for democracy, he raises the spectre of the ‘trenches’ to try to
intimidate us back into line. Yet it is Mr. Barroso’s claim that the EU has
brought ‘peace’ to Europe that is most risible. For the painful reality is that,
by imposing the hopelessly-flawed single currency on its citizens, the EU has
sparked terrifying social and economic unrest across great swathes of the
continent. (Daily Mail; 13 September 2013)

The Daily Mail editorial includes a classic Eurosceptic trope: reference to a

major European figure (Barroso), delegitimization of his or her personal
position and, consequently, delegitimization of the general position of the
entire adversarial party. The argument involves, again, a social element
(‘EU has sparked terrifying social and economic unrest across great
swathes of the continent’), which paves the way for discussion of social
policy issues, especially immigration. Immigration and anti-migration are
thus natural follow-ups in the debate over vital national issues such as
sovereignty and democracy, and their discussion tends to inherit all the
major concerns and fears surrounding the national themes.
As rightly noted by Todd (2015), fears about immigration feature more
heavily in newspaper editorials than in the Parliamentary discourse,
though a number of backbenchers mention it. Those who do bring up
 6 IMMIGRATION AND ANTI-MIGRATION DISCOURSES… 73

the issue in connection with the debate on Europe generally do so from a

negative perspective. The Times, the Daily Mail and The Sun all devote a
considerable number of editorial column inches to problematizing immi-
gration, while in his party conference speech Nigel Farage describes immi-
gration as ‘the biggest single issue facing the [UK]’ (Farage 2013).
In the Parliamentary debate, Andrew Percy (C) makes reference to the
impact of ‘uncontrolled flow of EU immigration’ (Hansard 2013–2014,
p. 1177), while Priti Patel (C) argues that immigration rules ‘have been
imposed on [Britain]. We have not had a say’ (p. 1236). Adam Afriyie (C)
combines these two perspectives, asking ‘How many times do we hear
complaints about untrammelled immigration from EU countries as we no
longer have the power effectively to control our own borders?’ (p. 1215).
He goes on to assert that ‘people want to know that their Government are
already fighting to get control of the [UK] borders’ (p. 1238). These
concerns are not limited to those on the right of the political spectrum.
For example, Ian Davidson (L(abour)) states:

(6) We have to have control over our borders, which means saying to our
European colleagues that we do not accept unfettered free movement of
people if it is not in the United Kingdom’s interest at any particular given
time. (Hansard 2013–2014: 1205)

The theme of the ‘loss of control’ is consistent through the immigration

references in the 2013 Parliamentary debate, provoking the British media
to develop it further. The Times, although the least negative of the three
right-leaning newspapers when it comes to immigration, acknowledges
the calibre of the problem, connecting it to other immigration-related
issues:

(7) As the country prepares for a fresh influx of migrant workers from
Romania and Bulgaria, their impact may or not may not become a serious
social challenge. . . . In a new Times poll of attitudes on Europe and
immigration, anxieties that Britain lacks control over its borders are the
overwhelming concern of voters asked what Mr. Cameron should focus
on when renegotiating the European relationship . . . .Our poll shows that
voters of all political persuasions are far more concerned about the impact
of new immigration on housing and public services than on crime, inter-
ethnic relations or even the availability of jobs. (The Times; 23 November
2013)
74 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

This excerpt illustrates another theme of the immigration discourse: ‘wel-

fare chauvinism’. The term ‘welfare chauvinism’ was coined by Anderson
and Bjørklund (1990) to describe the perspective that state support should
be restricted to national citizens and not provided to ‘others’. While The
Times represents, altogether, a moderate expression of welfare chauvinism,
the stance of the other papers is more direct:

(8) Ministers continue to duck questions about the scale of a new wave of
immigration from Eastern Europe. So Migration Watch, a respected inde-
pendent campaign group, has worked it out for them. The organisation
estimates that up to 350,000 from Bulgaria, the EU’s poorest country, and
Romania will arrive over the next five years. Under EU rules, we are power-
less to deny them entry or benefits once restrictions are lifted next January.
(The Sun; 17 January 2013)

A Daily Mail editorial similarly complains of ‘yet another sovereignty-

sapping power grab’ from an ‘EU elite’ which is ‘trying to seize
control not only of Britain’s borders, but also the welfare state’
(Daily Mail; 7 November 2013). Both Daily Mail and The Sun
address mainly the spatial dimension of identity, raising the prospect
of great numbers of impoverished migrants arriving from Balkan coun-
tries over the following years. These arrivals are linked to a set of EU
rules that prevent the UK from denying the migrants either entry or
benefits. In another November editorial, the Daily Mail goes on to
picture immigration in terms of a direct threat to national identity:

(9) For well over a decade, opinion polls have shown substantial majorities
in favour of cutting immigration to a rate at which it can be comfortably
absorbed. Yet in this supposed democracy, politicians have simply ignored
those who elected them. Indeed, less than eight weeks from today, under
orders from the EU, the Coalition plans to throw open our borders to any of
29 million Bulgarians and Romanians who choose to settle here. With our
national identity at stake, the time to start listening is now. The first step
must surely be to defy Brussels and declare that the UK is full up. (Daily
Mail; 22 November 2013)

The Daily Mail and The Sun editorials bring together the main themes of
British immigration discourse, construing fear via reference to loss of
control and powerlessness against waves of immigration from the
Continent. They are thus a great example of perhaps the most common
 6 IMMIGRATION AND ANTI-MIGRATION DISCOURSES… 75

metaphor running through British immigration discourse: one which

recruits the CONTAINER schema to conceptualize the country
(Charteris-Black 2006; Hart 2010). Charteris-Black (2006) presents evi-
dence that metaphors construing UK as a container are a conventional
feature of the discourse on immigration, reflecting and reinforcing an
underlying cognitive arrangement.
The importance of the CONTAINER metaphor in political discourse
and British immigration discourse in particular warrants a quick theoretical
trip to understand where rhetorical powers of the metaphor reside and
how they get activated. Conceptually, argues Hart (2010, 2014), the
CONTAINER schema emerges from ubiquitous and reoccurring experi-
ences with the state of containment:

Our encounter with containment and boundedness is one of the most

pervasive features of our bodily experience. We are intimately aware of our
bodies as three-dimensional containers into which we put certain things
(food, water, air) and out of which other things emerge (food and water
wastes, air, blood, etc.). From the beginning, we experience constant phy-
sical containment in our surroundings (those things that envelop us). We
move in and out of rooms, clothes, vehicles, and numerous kinds of
bounded spaces. We manipulate objects, placing them in containers (cups,
boxes, cans, bags, etc.). In each of these cases there are repeatable spatial and
temporal organisations. In other words, there are typical schemata for
physical containment. (Hart 2010, p. 160)

The CONTAINER schema consists of three structural elements: an interior

and an exterior defined by a boundary. The interior also includes a
CENTRE-PERIPHERY structure, and the container has, in addition,
volume, which is to say a FULL-EMPTY structure (Charteris-Black 2006;
Hart 2010, 2014). This cognitive arrangement holds important implications
for political discourse. First, it follows from the nature of the CONTAINER
schema that something is either in or out of the container; and second, the
experience of containment typically involves protection from, or resistance to,
external forces. As noted by Hart (2010, 2014), the conventional character
of metaphors based on the CONTAINER schema increases credibility and
pragmatic appeal of discourses and texts where they occur.
In the Daily Mail and The Sun editorials, the CONTAINER metaphor
involves lexical items and phrases such as ‘wave [of immigration]’,
‘absorbed’, ‘throw open’, ‘borders’ and ‘full up’. These items and phrases
76 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

construe a scenario that justifies a restrictive immigration policy. The

scenario comprises a structured set of inferences, such as the following:

• the country has a limited capacity;

• continued immigration could cause the country (the ‘container’) to
‘rupture’;
• immigration will continue as, ‘under orders from the EU’, the
government are ‘throwing open’ the country’s ‘borders’;
• the country is thus under a real and growing threat;
• the only way to offset the threat is to force the government to ignore
the ‘orders’ and maintain a tough immigration policy.

These inferences are prompted, let us repeat, by the conventionality of the

CONTAINER metaphor, which strongly facilitates reception of the con-
veyed insight. There are also other reception facilitators, emerging, once
again, from the conceptual characteristics of the CONTAINER schema.
As noted by Chilton (2004), the CONTAINER schema entails exclusivity
such that members have to be in or out and that it entails protection by
means of exclusion, as opposed to any other means available to human
societies. This makes people accept and adapt to the reality pictured in the
CONTAINER metaphor on account of their territorial instinct and in-
group allegiance. Since, under the CONTAINER schema, the entity
construed as ‘container’ is presupposed to cover a given territory and
those inside the container are presupposed to own the territory it covers,
the CONTAINER metaphor reinforces the general aura of stability and
permanence associated with that entity. This is yet another reason why
metaphors conceptualizing countries in terms of bounded entities are
extremely frequent in political discourse and immigration discourse in
particular. While the Daily Mail and The Sun editorials provide typical
examples, the metaphors surface widely in other British papers as well:

(10) Britain is facing a nightly tidal wave of asylum seekers from Cherbourg,
France’s second biggest port. (Sunday Telegraph; 25 August 2013)
(11) Illegal entrants are at the gates but Gibraltar is standing firm. (Sunday
Times; 8 December 2013)
(12) Britain is full to bursting point. The Government’s own figures show
that the UK has the highest levels of immigration in its history: in the last ten
years, over two millions were added to the UK population, and the expan-
sion shows no signs of slowing. (The Observer; 8 December 2013)
 6 IMMIGRATION AND ANTI-MIGRATION DISCOURSES… 77

Finally, the 2013 immigration debate includes examples of discourse

where threat, fear and public anxiety are neither metaphorized nor other-
wise mitigated; they are made fully explicit:

(13) Today The Sun reveals the shocking figure that nearly one in five of all
rape or murder suspects is foreign. The sheer scale of crimes committed by
foreigners is astonishing. Confront politicians with an embarrassing statistic
and they try to get off the hook by talking about ‘context’. So here’s some
context for that crime figure. A report published today shows that, because
of a loophole in the immigration rules, more than 20,000 foreigners from
outside the EU come to live here every year. It doesn’t take a genius to work
out that the two figures might be connected. The more foreigners who live
here, the more likely it is that crimes will be committed by foreigners. The
Government is trying to get a grip on immigration. The numbers overall are
down. But crime figures like this show just how vital it is that loopholes are
closed and sanity is restored to immigration. (The Sun; 6 January 2013)

PROXIMIZATION
The examples (1)–(13), comprising governmental, parliamentary and media
voices and opinions, as well as a telling voice from the UKIP leader Nigel
Farage, give a fair picture of the 2013 ‘proto-referendum’ discourse in the
UK. Overall, this discourse can be characterized as conceptually bipolar,
recognizing the Self–Other distinction, and enacting this distinction with
regard to ideological and policy issues. It seems that the presence of con-
ceptual dichotomies in the 2013 discourse is a stable feature of the debate,
unaffected by any twists or heated exchanges. Both radical voices (such as
Farage’s or The Sun’s) and more moderate positions (such as Cameron’s or
Shepherd’s) presuppose the distinctiveness of the British state, though in
different argumentation patterns. The moderate voices use it to construe an
essentially ideological appeal to remain consistent with historical legacy,
which emphasizes Britain’s sovereignty and political autonomy. This can
be seen from the argument in Cameron’s speech in (1). On the other hand,
radical Eurosceptics use it in a more instrumental manner, to present
immigration as well as other forms of external influence (including EU
policies), as a tangible threat to the daily functioning of the country.
The stability and permanence of the in/out distinction in the UK
discourse constitutes the main deictic prerequisite for strategies of
proximization to occur. The examples (1)–(13) contain a broad range
78 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

of lexical markers of inside-deictic-centre (IDC) entities, such as

‘Britain’, ‘British people’, ‘our citizens’ and, finally, ‘we’ – the most
direct marker of inclusion and in-group consolidation. At the same
time, they contain lexical markers of outside-deictic-centre (ODC)
entities, both those immediately encroaching on the IDC territory
(immigrants) and those externally and internally responsible for influx
of immigrants (EU, plus liberal and/or EU-friendly political groups
and politicians within the UK). The lexical items and phrases marking
these two ODC groups are, for example, ‘EU Commission’, ‘Jose
Manuel Barroso’, ‘our European colleagues’, ‘Brussels’, as well as
‘[British] politicians ignoring [opinion of] those who elected them’.
As can be seen from the last phrase, the latter group can be considered
a ‘home ODC’ sub-group. It is related to the IDC group, and some of
the member entities (such as ‘ministers’ in the UK government) can
belong to either camp depending on who construes a given discourse.
While David Cameron’s speech in (1) positions the British government
and its members clearly in the IDC group, The Sun’s editorial in (8)
(‘Ministers continue to duck questions about the scale of a new wave of
immigration from Eastern Europe’) places UK’s cabinet on a par with
ruling European bodies.
The main and defining element of proximization, the symbolic move-
ment, can be observed in most of the examples (1)–(13). There are
however two kinds of this movement, or shift, representing respectively
axiological and spatial proximization. Whichever strategy is used depends,
again, on the moment of the debate, type of argument, and political
predispositions of the speaker. Axiological proximization serves to con-
strue past behaviours, actions and events as memorable lessons for the
future. It sets up a dynamic, temporal-ideological connection between the
past, the present and the future, stressing the centrality of the present as
the timeframe in which the future is decided. The ideological element is
used to construe consistency of the present postures and actions with the
long-established beliefs and values. Axiological proximization is thus, as in
Shepherd’s (2), Henderson’s (3) or Farage’s (4) discourses, an instrument
to claim the rationality of the current Eurosceptic posture on account of
the British heritage and the moral principles it contains and prescribes.
Lexically, axiological proximization involves emphasizing the uniqueness
of the British constitutional history (viz. [2]: ‘the most remarkable and
ancient of all the democratic communities’), defining the meaning of
historical legacy for the future functioning of the country (viz. [1]:
 6 IMMIGRATION AND ANTI-MIGRATION DISCOURSES… 79

‘because of this [character, sensibility], we come to the European Union

with a frame of mind that is more practical than emotional ( . . . )’, and
finally, outlining current threats to that legacy and thus to the country’s
future (viz. [3]: ‘a programme to hand over swathes of [British] hard-won
sovereignty to another state’).
In comparison, the reality of spatial proximization is not the past nor the
future, but rather the ‘here and now’, which is geographically and
geopolitically threatening and thus needs an immediate response in
terms of specific policy or policies. As a legitimization device, spatial prox-
imization draws on fear-generating events and images and, in contrast to
axiological proximization, rarely involves an elaborate argument. The exam-
ples (1)–(13) demonstrate that instances of spatial proximization occur in
discourses which address the alleged consequences of EU policies (such as
the increase in British immigration rate), rather than their underlying causes
(which are addressed in ideologically loaded discourses involving axiological
proximization). They show that in the 2013 public debate in Britain, spatial
proximization is an essentially coercive strategy, appealing to fear and general
anxiety about the basic social issues, such as personal safety and economic
security. Technically, the prime lexico-grammatical carriers of spatial prox-
imization are metaphoric phrases conceptualizing the country as a
CONTAINER of limited capacity and thus physically threatened by an
external impact. Conceptual metaphors are particularly pervasive in media
discourse, such as newspaper editorials (viz. examples [8]–[12]), which
employ appealing, hard-hitting phrases (‘nightly tidal wave’, ‘[getting] full
to bursting point’) to construe the ‘invasion’.

NOTE
1. Private Members’ Bills are presented by individual MPs or members of the
House of Lords (‘Private Members’). They must go through the same
procedures as Government bills in order to become law, but much less
time is made available for them in the Parliamentary calendar. Most of
them fail because there is not enough time for them to progress, rather
than because of active opposition.
 CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

Abstract This chapter briefly summarizes the main findings of the book
and outlines analytical prospects. It reflects on the growing popularity and
effectiveness of threat-based rhetoric in legitimization discourse. It pro-
vides a positive assessment of Proximization Theory as a critical-linguistic
tool of analysis of threat-based discourse in various thematic domains.

Keywords Legitimization discourse
Threat-based rhetoric
Proximization

Theory

This book has confirmed a deeply strategic character of public commu-

nication. As has been postulated in the opening chapter, public discourse
subsumes systematic ways in which interests of the top actors, such as
politicians, institutional and organizational leaders, lawmakers, and the
media, are enacted linguistically. Public leaders use recurrent rhetorical
patterns to exercise their power in the service of a social consensus, which
entails legitimization of proposed policies and inclusion of the audience in
actions prescribed by these policies. The present book has demonstrated
that policy legitimization is characterized by the discursive construction of
fear, which involves recognition of a gathering external threat and mobi-
lization of the home group to approve the use of preventive measures.
Threat and fear are thus core elements of public communication.

© The Author(s) 2017 81

P. Cap, The Language of Fear, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59731-1_7
82 THE LANGUAGE OF FEAR

In the book we have identified the most important strategies of threat

construction and fear generation in different discourse domains, such as
health, environment, cyber-technology and social migration. The analysis
has revealed that a vast majority of these strategies are common to all the
four discourses, allowing a conclusion that they may occur in still other
domains. The most typical strategy involves setting up a dichotomous
representation of the geopolitical space, marking a territorial as well as
ideological opposition between the two symbolically construed camps: the
‘good Self’ and the ‘bad Other’. The cornerstone element of this strategy
is the construal of movement of the ‘Other’ to invade the space of the
‘Self’. This construal has been identified in all the discourses analysed,
notwithstanding their thematic features. It seems that the discursive con-
struction of an ominous ‘external’ impact is an effective instrument of
coercion across seemingly different domains, from preventive medicine, to
management of climate change, to social migration and immigration.
The findings of the book have been produced within the framework of
Proximization Theory (PT). The discourses analysed in the case study
chapters (Chaps. 3–6) have been a new territory for PT, whose original
focus was state political discourse, and the discourse of state intervention
in particular. It appears that PT has been generally successful in accounting
for the extended spectrum of discourses, and that its explanatory power
has not been fully exploited yet. The major challenge for the future
applications is, it seems, a finer, more precise account of the source, or
rather sources, of the external impact. The analysis of the four discourses
in the book has revealed considerable conceptual differences with regard
to the status of entities perceived as ‘foreign’ and ‘adversarial’. While the
discourse of immigration tends to trace the source of the ‘impact’ and its
reasons outside the Self camp and in the Other camp, the discourse of
climate change finds many of the reasons in the ideological posture of the
Self camp. This picture is even fuzzier in cyber-terrorist discourse, which
frequently erases geopolitical as well as geographical distinctions and
affiliations. Altogether, while PT seems to have done mostly a good job
describing coercion and legitimization patterns in the discourses explored
in the book, some features of these discourses have contributed new and
exciting data for future upgrades of the theory.
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 INDEX

A Cyber-space discourse, 65–66

Analogy, 9, 10, 22, 23, 30, 44, 58, 65 Cyber-terror, 54–55, 57–58
Anti-migration discourse, 67–79
Anti-terrorist discourse/rhetoric, 9,
16, 19, 29, 32, 44, 45, 46 D
Assertion, 11, 12–13, 22, 64 Daily Mail, 68, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76
Axiological proximization, 17, 21, 22, Deictic center, 5, 8, 23, 25, 34, 38
23, 24, 25, 42, 50, 51, 52, 78, 79 Deictic Space Theory (DST), 4, 9, 14,
15, 16, 17, 26
Deixis, 18
B Delegitimization, 2–3, 26, 72
Brexit, 67 Dimensions of deixis, 5
Bush, G.W., 21, 22, 23, 24, 57 Discourse ontologies, 4
Discourse Space (DS), 4, 13, 16, 17,
18, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 32, 34, 38,
C 39, 61, 65
Cameron, D., 67, 68, 69, 70, 71,
72, 78
Cheater detection module, 10, 11 E
Climate change (discourse of), 41, 42, Editorial, 68, 72, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79
43, 46, 56, 65, 82 Electronic Pearl Harbor, 57, 58–59
Clinton, W. (Bill), 6, 7, 8 Environmental discourse, 41–52, 65
Coercion, 2, 3, 13, 26, 27, 37, EU (European Union), 67, 68, 69, 70,
39, 82 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79
Consistency theory, 10 Evidentiality, 12, 16, 24, 46
CONTAINER metaphor, 75, 76
Credibility, 10–13, 27, 75
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), F
27, 42 Farage, N., 68, 71, 73, 77, 78

© The Author(s) 2017 89

P. Cap, The Language of Fear, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59731-1
90 INDEX

H O
H1N1 virus (swine flu), 35, 36 Other/ Othering, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12,
Health discourse, 29–39, 41, 51, 52, 13, 15, 17, 23, 31, 32, 42, 46, 47,
57, 65 49, 51, 68, 71, 82
Historical flashbacks, 22, 57, 65, 71 Out-group, 15, 17
Outside-deictic-center (ODC), 16,
17, 18, 23, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35–36,
I 38, 39, 42, 46, 47, 51, 52, 56, 61,
Ideological distance, 13 62, 78
Immigration, 67–79, 82
Implicature, 11, 23
In-group, 17, 78 P
Inside-deictic-center (IDC), 16, 17, Physical distance, 4
18, 20, 23, 24, 31, 32, 33, 36, 38, Proximization, 15–27, 42–46,
39, 46, 47, 56, 65, 78 47, 77–79
Interventionist discourse, 3, 11, 19, Proximization Theory (PT), 16–20,
29, 30, 31, 34, 37, 46 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 41, 51, 54,
Iraq, 11, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 57, 60, 82
Islamic State (ISIS), 3, 9

R
K Rasmussen A.F., 43, 44–45,
Kosovo, 6, 8, 9 46, 51
Rhetorical Structure Theory
(RST), 50, 51
L
Latitude of acceptance theory, 10
Legitimization, 2–3, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, S
16, 18, 22, 24, 26, 27, 34, 36, 37, Saddam Hussein, 21, 23, 24
49, 79 Schwarzenegger, A., 47, 48,
50, 51
Self, 2, 3, 4, 5, 15, 16, 31, 32, 39, 46,
M 47, 49, 65, 82
Metaphor, 23, 30, 33, 36, 39, 75 Source-tagging, 13
Spatial proximization, 17, 19, 23, 57,
78, 79
N Spatial proximization framework, 18,
NATO, 43 19, 20, 45
9/11 (September 11), 9, 16, 21, 23, STA model (of proximization), 18
54, 57, 59, 65 The Sun, 68, 73, 74, 75, 76,
Nixon, R.M., 30 77, 78
 INDEX 91

T W
Technological discourse, 53–66 War on cancer, 3, 29–39
Temporal proximization, 17, 34, War on terror, 20, 21, 33,
42, 46, 49, 57 46, 56
Text World Theory, 4 Weapons of mass
The Times, 68, 72, 73, 74 destruction (WMD), 11,
24, 60
U Weapons of mass
UK referendum (2016), 67 disruption, 59–60