Fantasies of Politics and Democracy in Anti-Syndical Discourse: on terrorist strikes, blackmailing the government, and taking the hard-working citizen as hostage

De Cleen, Benjamin;Zienkowski, Jan
(2016) 32nd EURICOM conference: Communication & Culture Colloquium on discourses, identities, practices, materiality — Location: Piran, Solevenia (14.October.2016)

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  • De Cleen, BenjaminVUB
    Author
  • Zienkowski, JanUSL-B
    Author
Abstract
This paper focuses on the delegitimation strategies used by union critical voices in recent debates about union actions against Belgian austerity politics. We distinguish six sets of delegitimation strategies that share a series of family resemblances. These include: (1)strategies that depict unions as conservative anachronisms that are out of sync with the realities of our times; (2) strategies that psychologize and individualize unions as self-centred, irresponsible and child-like actors; (3) criminalization strategies that depict unions and unionists as vandals, as hostage takers and/or as terrorists; (4) a collection of strategies that opposes unions to a homogenized and nationalistically defined general interest; (5) metapragmatic delegitimation strategies that criticize union identity by means of a criticism of union discursive practices; and (6) more direct metapolitical claims that question the democratic character of the unions and/or their practices. We will show that political statements that label unions as actors who ‘take citizens hostage’, ‘blackmail the government’ and even commit ‘terrorist acts’ are based on political fantasies that tilt the debate to the level of what we call ‘metapolitics’, where the meaning of politics itself and institutionalized relationships between capital, government, civil society and citizens can be reconfigured. In order to do so, we focus on union critical voices articulated in three mainstream Flemish newspapers by means of an operationalization of Essex style discourse theory.
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  • ICSUniversidad de Navarra

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De Cleen, B., & Zienkowski, J. (2016). Fantasies of Politics and Democracy in Anti-Syndical Discourse: on terrorist strikes, blackmailing the government, and taking the hard-working citizen as hostage. 32nd EURICOM conference: Communication & Culture Colloquium on discourses, identities, practices, materiality, Piran, Solevenia. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/93266