RHETORIC, POLITICS AND SOCIETY GENERAL EDITORS: A. Finlayson; J. Martin; K. Phillips DEBATES, RHETORIC AND POLITICAL ACTION Practices of Textual Interpretation and Analysis Claudia Wiesner, Taru Haapala, Kari Palonen Rhetoric, Politics and Society Series Editors Alan Finlayson University of East Anglia Norfolk, United Kingdom James Martin Goldsmiths, University of London London, United Kingdom Kendall Phillips University of Syracuse Syracuse, New York, USA Rhetoric lies at the intersection of a variety of disciplinary approaches and methods, drawing upon the study of language, history, culture and philosophy to understand the persuasive aspects of communication in all its modes: spoken, written, argued, depicted and performed. This series presents the best international research in rhetoric that develops and exemplifies the multifaceted and cross-disciplinary exploration of practices of persuasion and communication. It seeks to publish texts that openly explore and expand rhetorical knowledge and enquiry, be it in the form of historical scholarship, theoretical analysis or contemporary cultural and political critique. The editors welcome proposals for monographs that explore contemporary rhetorical forms, rhetorical theories and thinkers, and rhetorical themes inside and across disciplinary boundaries. For infor- mal enquiries, questions, as well as submitting proposals, please contact the editors: Alan Finlayson: [email protected] James Martin: j.martin@ gold.ac.uk Kendall Phillips: [email protected] More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14497 Claudia Wiesner • Taru Haapala • Kari Palonen Debates, Rhetoric and Political Action Practices of Textual Interpretation and Analysis Claudia Wiesner Kari Palonen University of Jyväskylä and Technical University of Jyväskylä University Darmstadt Jyväskylä, Finland Darmstadt, Germany Taru Haapala University of Jyväskylä Jyväskylä, Finland Rhetoric, Politics and Society ISBN 978-1-137-57056-7 ISBN 978-1-137-57057-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57057-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956403 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub- lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover illustration: © EyeEm / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom P reface ‘Nothing is more interesting than politics’. This does not seem to be a popular claim today, as ‘politics’ rather has a bad reputation and ‘popu- lism’ is on the rise. In the present volume we defend this claim, and we hope that our readers will be intrigued to learn the reasons for taking such an interest in politics, to analyse and study it and be consciously engaged in it, at least as ‘occasional politicians’, to quote Max Weber (1919, 41). To say that politics is interesting already presupposes that we do not know in advance what is meant by politics. If there were a well-known and commonly shared definition for ‘politics’, debates on what is meant by politics or ‘the political’ could reach a definite conclusion simply by check- ing the lexicographical authorities. This is not the case. During the past 150–200 years when parliamentary and democratic forms of politics have been high on the agenda of a number of debates, among scholars as well as the more or less professional political agents themselves, the concept of politics has been continuously contested. Politics, therefore, is something that cannot be understood simply by looking at what is said about it in a dictionary. On the contrary, the writing of dictionaries and giving defini- tions to concepts are themselves a political activity, a rhetorical move in a debate in history and in the contemporary context of using concepts. We also cannot distinguish certain views of politics on the basis of the positions of political actors. There is not one typical governmental or oppo- sitional view, or a right or left view of politics, that has historically strug- gled for supremacy. How politics or the political should be understood is a matter for debate. Politics is a controversial concept, and politicians, scholars, journalists as well as citizens at large may make contributions to v vi PREFACE the controversy. They may contest certain uses of the concept or invent new ones, even without necessarily intending to do something new. The debate is ongoing in the sense that there is no final authority to decide when the debate is over nor is there any a priori limit to the possibilities for inventing new perspectives on the concept of politics. The conceptual history of politics underlines its contestedness. Expressions using ‘politics’ or ‘political’ can be traced back to the ancient Greek polis, to the city-republic as a political form, as opposed to ‘despotic’ monarchies and imperia (on the opposition between politikós and despo- tikós see e.g. Aristotle’s Politics [Ta politikà], on the commentaries see e.g. Meier 1980; Finley 1983). But the history of the concept in the different European languages has not been just a translation from the Greek: the different languages have developed their own vocabularies with different conceptual resources. Above all, the ancient and early modern thinkers could not have understood politics as a contingent activity, as this concep- tual horizon was new, introduced in the course of the nineteenth century in particular (see esp. Palonen 2006). This horizon of seeing politics as a contingent and controversial activity is the one within which we move in this volume. Seeing politics as an activity, what we do in this volume is to analyse the practice of debating as a distinct form of politics. We understand the concept of ‘debate’ broadly, referring to a wide range of activities that can be explicit and implicit, living and frozen, regulated and irregular, and so on. Debate can as well as be debate between many or few agents, or debate as in a debate event in the sense of a single actor’s action to intervene in an ongoing debate. The book offers typical as well as untypical examples of debate viewed as a political activity. The examples are related in part to our own previous or ongoing research, the convergence of which also prompted us to write this book together. We realised that nobody had written a book on how to analyse debates politically, and our publisher Palgrave Macmillan also understood that this was the case. While we aim at indicating possible paths, approaches and practices for studying politics and debates, this is no ordinary textbook. We share Robin George Collingwood’s well-known view, in his posthumously (1946) published The Idea of History, that textbooks often treat the read- ers as children who are expected to learn what is taught to them, keeping them, as he puts it, in a condition of statu pupillari. As opposed to such a view, we hope to encourage the independent and critical thinking of PREFACE vii our readers, which might lead far away from what we have presented or anticipated in this book. This book is based on our common engagement in such projects as: The Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change; The Politics of Dissensus: Parliamentarism, Rhetoric and Conceptual History (the Academy of Finland research project); the Marie Curie proj- ect Conceptualizing representative democracy in the EU polity by re-thinking classical key conceptual clusters for the EU multi-level polity (EUPOLCON); the Standing Group Political Concepts of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR); and most recently, the Finnish Distinguished Professorship project Transformations of Concepts and Institutions in the European Polity (TRACE), directed by Professor Niilo Kauppi. The book is also extraordinary in so far as we have tried to turn our different career lengths, academic tracks, generational experiences of politics and practices in analysing debates to our advantage in our combined efforts to write this volume. We are scholars in the Continental academic tradition. Although the opposition between Anglophone and Continental political thought and philosophy has become very relative in recent debates, our teaching and research are still shaped strongly by the German (CW) and German- indebted Finnish (TH, KP) academic cultures. We consider however that, for the purposes of this book, it is more convenient to use examples that are based on sources written or spoken in English. This is seen in most of the examples presented in the book, especially the ‘exercises’ con- ducted in Chapter 4. The Hansard documentation of the British House of Commons debates from 1803 to 2003 has provided the main source for two sections, the Oxford and Cambridge Unions the source for another section (see also Haapala, forthcoming 2017), and the English version of the European Parliament’s Rules of Procedure for another (cf. Palonen and Wiesner 2016). Our work is also inspired by a number of continental classics, Hannah Arendt and Max Weber in particular, or contemporary political thinkers, such as Reinhart Koselleck and Pierre Rosanvallon. Our principle has been to quote from the sources in their original language, although we have paraphrased the passages in English and referred also to the existing trans- lations, in so far as they are available, both in the references and in the bibliography. This book is not a volume with three editors but a joint volume of three scholars. We think, however, that the metaphor of ‘division of labour’ is viii PREFACE misleading to describe the art of cooperation practised in this volume. Even if only one of us wrote the first drafts of the first three chapters, the others have commented extensively on each of them and revised them so thoroughly that none of them can be attributed to one of us as the main author. To some extent the situation is different in Chapter 4, in which we have used our different scholarly background and profiles. However, the first example in that chapter also illustrates how each of us, when looking at one and the same debate in the British House of Commons, has found and focused on different aspects of it. Altogether, we hope to have grasped some of what makes politics so interesting, and to be able to transmit this to the interested reader. Darmstadt, Germany Claudia Wiesner Jyväskylä, Finland Taru Haapala Jyväskylä, Finland Kari Palonen c ontents 1 Understanding Debate as Politics 1 1.1 The Conceptual Aspect of Politics 3 1.2 Politics as an Activity 5 1.3 Four Aspects of Politics: Politicisation—Polity; Politicking—Policy 9 1.4 Types of Politics—Types of Debate 12 1.4.1 D ebate, Discourse, Dispute, Discussion and Dissensus 14 1.4.2 D ebate as pro et contra and as a Peaceful Form of Struggle 16 1.4.3 ‘ Live’ and ‘Virtual’ Debates 18 1.4.4 D ocuments as Contributions to Debates 19 1.4.5 P olitical and Academic Debates: Similarities and Differences 21 1.5 The Presence of Politics in Texts and Debates 23 2 Reading Debates Politically 25 2.1 Political Literacy 26 2.2 P arliamentary Debate as an Ideal Type 29 2.2.1 On the History of Parliamentary Debates 31 2.2.2 Extensions of Parliamentary Debates 34 2.2.3 Limits of Debate 36 2.2.4 Restrictions of Debate Inside Parliaments 37 2.3 Forms, Dimensions and Characteristics of Debates 41 ix