«Amicable actions can thwart escalatory processes, or rather, maintain or restore peaceful channels of communication»

Zohar Kampf, Lee Aldar, Roni Danziger y Mia Schreiber
«The Pragmatics of Amicable Interstate Communication»
Intercultural Pragmatics, vol. 16, n.º 2 (2019)

Intercultural Pragmatics | De Gruyter Mouton | Berlín - Nueva York | ALEMANIA - ESTADOS UNIDOS

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«ABSTRACT

»This paper proposes a research agenda for studying the building blocks of amicable communication and their role in fostering sociability between states. Against the backdrop of linguistic-pragmatic, international relations, and communication theories, it first theorizes the state as a communicating actor in social interactions and conceptualizes amicable actions and their potential to advance relations in interstate communication. On the basis of 2,180 amicable statements performed by a variety of international actors in a range of communicative contexts, a classification according to variations, intended goals, and prevalence of amicable actions is suggested.

»The findings show a preference to perform interstate communication through solidarity-oriented and expressive actions. Asserting friendship and thanking were found to be the most popular actions, frequently utilized by international actors in a range of ceremonial contexts. Paying respect and expressions of honor were found to be the most frequent strategy for showing one’s deference to the other’s sovereignty and autonomy. In the conclusions, we argue for the importance of studying the pragmatics of interstate communication and point to factors that need to be confronted in the future in order to answer the overarching question: Under what conditions do amicable actions achieve their ends?

[...]

»CONCEPTUALIZING AMICABLE ACTIONS IN INTERSTATE DISCOURSE

»We suggest the notion of being amicable as a bridging concept between politeness and diplomacy. Amicable communication is performed via specific tools and governed by specific goals, both of which are prolifically represented in the literature of linguistic pragmatics and linguistic anthropology. In this study, we adopt the basic assumptions of politeness theory (Brown and Levinson 1987; Goffman 1967; Locher and Watts 2005; Watts 2003) in conceptualizing the goals of amicable actions, and of speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1976) in defining these actions as the basic units of relational interstate communication.

»Resorting to these well-established theories will allow the identification and classification of the variety of amicable actions, first on the basis of their goals and second on the basis of their potential to transform political relations.

»Goals and functions of amicable actions

»In formulating efficient diplomatic messages, states' officials are concerned not only with constructing an image "of a unified social collective that is able to speak with one voice and act as a singular, independent agent" (Musolff 2018: 261), but also in projecting an image of cooperative actor within the intentional community (Author). These two identity-building concerns of states, can be seen as corresponding with politeness theorists' formulation of the needs guiding the participants in human communication: the need for involvement and appreciation, and the need for independence and recognition (Brown and Levinson, 1987; Goffman, 1967). Originated from the social need of individuals to be part of a community, involvement is manifested in a variety of communicative contexts in the form of pragmatic strategies of solidarity that underline what social actors have in common (Scollon et al., 2001).

»Brown and Levinson (1987) formulated an exhaustive list of solidarity-oriented strategies that include various means for manifesting appreciation. The list includes three meta-strategies: claiming common ground, expressing willingness to cooperate, and fulfilling others’ wants, supplemented by sub-strategies such as sharing concerns, expressing a compatible stance, and showing appreciation. Utilizing these strategies allows international actors to perform solidarity with other actors, and thus relates to efforts for building consensus in political and diplomatic communication (Chilton 1990).

»On the other hand, the need for independence and recognition is responded to with strategies of deference (Scollon et al. 2001), acts that underline respect for another actor’s agency (Chilton 1990). An actor’s need for independence and recognition originates from the desire for territorial integrity and self-determination and is enacted through strategies that recognize the other’s autonomy, including minimization of imposition, paying respect, and showing regard for territory (Brown and Levinson 1987).

»Utilizing these strategies allows an actor to perform deference to self-determination and others’ free will, and thus can be related to territorial security and freedom of action in international contexts (Chilton 1990). Taken together, both solidarity- and deference-oriented actions share an overall goal of managing amicable relations in interstate discourse.

»Later studies in linguistic-politeness have criticized Brown and Levinson's theory, and added a discursive and constructionist layers to the traditional description of facework (Locher and Watts 2005; Watts 2003). Accordingly, the foundation of interactional norms and community construction is found in the concept 'relational work', defined as the communicative efforts actors “invest in negotiating relationships with others” (Locher and Watts 2005: 10).

»In human interaction, most relational work is considered as unmarked and routine. It is perceived as appropriate to a specific context, thus maintaining amicable relations on the basis of the communicator’s adherence to the expected norms of sociability. Conversely, relational work may be considered as marked when the actor’s verbal behavior is evaluated by the addressee as socially unexpected, in either negative or positive manners (Watts, 2003).

»On the one hand, relational work can be negatively marked in cases in which the verbal actions are perceived as offensive in a specific context. Alternatively, it can be positively marked, in cases in which the verbal action is overtly amicable (as demonstrated in cases in which a state leader is reported to be the first to congratulate a newly elected head of state, Author). Ultimately, adopting a linguistic-politeness approach to purposive communication between states (Author; Goffman 1967; Kádár 2013) as involving languagebased rituals (in the form of apologizing, praising, congratulating, etc.) entails adherence to basic interactional norms (Watts 2003).

»Types of amicable actions

»The most prevalent way to communicate solidarity and deference in an unmarked or positively marked way is via speech acts, defined as the basic units of human communication realized in context in order to perform certain acts, such as apologizing, thanking, and condemning (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989). Since the 1970s, speech act theory has been applied prolifically, first in linguistic pragmatics and later, since the 1990s, in other disciplines, including communication, political science, and international relations (e.g., Buzan et al. 1998; Habermas 1984; Thompson 1995). And yet, since the theory was mainly developed in the fields of philosophy and linguistics, there is still much to learn about the consequences of speech acts in political contexts (Chilton and Schäffner 2002).

»Political speech acts are the appropriate tools for analyzing amicable communication for at least four reasons.

»First, they are grounded in normative scripts that inform a community conduct (Lakoff 2000). Studying them thus facilitates understanding the social, political, and moral positioning of an actor vis-à-vis acts, events, and other members in the international community.

»Second, speech acts serve as a resource for political actors to shape and manage relationships with others, for example, by empathizing with the suffering of others by condoling them (Fenton-Smith 2007; Hall 2015) or building bridges of trust with opponents by greeting them (Author; Young 2000).

»Third, speech acts are important because they constitute a resource by which the news media inform citizens about political actors’ intentions and future actions needed to be taken in order to bring about a better future (Authors).

»Lastly, speech acts are pivotal actions around which political rituals and processes are constructed (Author); studying their role in producing solidarity and deference is important for our understanding of the enactment of interstate relations.

»The performative quality of speech acts can be seen in the analysis of “the relative weight that language or the (real or imaginary) world have on each other” (Duranti 2015: 14). Searle (1976) classified all possible speech acts into five categories, distinguished, among other aspects, by the direction of fit between words and the world, i.e., whether language is trying to catch up with the way the world is or is trying to change the world.

»Accordingly, representatives include different types of assertions that represent the addressor's subjective state of mind; their direction of fit is words-to-world because they follow the facts rather than constructing them.

»Directives manifest the effort of addressors to get their audiences to do something in the world; their direction of fit is world-to-words, since in order to be successful, the world must change to match the speaker's words (order, request, etc.).

»Commissives include speech acts that create an obligation for the addressor to take some course of action in the future; their direction of fit is world-to-words because they are performed in order to express the commitment of the addressor to change the world in line with the uttered words.

»Expressives are speech acts that manifest the feelings and stances of the addressor. They assume a certain state of affairs in the world (in apologizing, for example, we accept that an offense has occurred), thus their transformative nature is found in calibrating the relationship between the communicating parties (Lakoff 2000).

»Lastly, declaratives, bring about a change in the world by virtue of having been successfully performed by an authorized party in appropriate circumstances and with sincere intentions.

»On the basis of linguistic-pragmatics theories, we define interstate amicable actions in the following way: “unmarked and positively-marked verbal acts performed in various international contexts by state representatives so as to manifest their intention to secure solidarity or to express deference, with an overall aim to initiate, maintain, reinforce, or restore relations between states”.

»We now turn to providing tools for studying the pragmatics of amicable interstate communication. For this empirical endeavor, we formulated the following three guiding questions that allow us to identify and illustrate the building blocks of amicable communication and their intended goals in international politics: What are the prevalent types of amicable actions in interstate relations? What kinds of logic guides their performance? And what is their potential to advance peaceful relations?

»[...]

»CONCLUSION: SETTING AN AGENDA FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

»The above categories represent the verbal pillars of interstate amicable communication and are a first attempt to elucidate the pragmatics of sociability in international relations. Their significance stems from highlighting what seem to be neglected yet widespread communicative tools for managing relations in international affairs. All together, they provide a comprehensive list of available means in the verbal toolbox of states for performing amicable relations. When communicating amicably, state actors apply intermediating means in the form of verbal actions that display solidarity or deference toward others.

»These means can be classified according to the potential transformation they bring about in interstate relations. If performed under specific conditions, expressives may reinforce affinity; representatives may change how others remember the past, understand the present, or imagine the future; directives may match relationships with others to the addressor’s wants; commissives oblige the addressor to a specific amicable course of behavior; and declaratives may bring about peace.

»Our analysis of the pragmatics of interstate amicability suggests a preference to manage interstate relations through solidarity-oriented and expressive actions. Asserting friendship and thanking were found to be the most popular actions in our corpus, frequently utilized by international actors in a range of communicative contexts. Paying respect and expressions of honor were found to be the most frequent strategy for showing one’s deference to the other’s sovereignty and autonomy.

»The efforts to map the full gamut of amicable actions, and indeed the language of interstate sociability, is a significant first step in understanding their applicability. The complementary goal is to identify the conditions under which amicable actions achieve their ends. In order to develop a new research agenda for studying the role of language in advancing relations between states, several factors must be considered in future studies.

»Situation-related challenges

»Future studies may choose to go down one of the two following paths: analyze the differences between and the advantages of utilizing amicable actions in formal, mediated, private, and other types of interactions; or analyze utilization of amicable actions in case studies that exemplify gladdening (holidays, etc.) or saddening (calamities etc.) circumstances, their distinct deployment in routine interstate communication or in processes of de-escalation. Studying how amicable actions are applied in each context will hopefully allow us to reveal what and how communicative resources are utilized to maintain or restore bilateral or multilateral relationships.

»Intention-Related Challenges

»The problem of sincerity is probably the thorniest of all, namely, being unsure whetherthe speaker means to advance amicable relations, if the words uttered are nothing but cheap talk (in the less harming scenario), or conceal ill intentions (in the worst-case scenario). The issue of sincerity was evident in our study in the context of the Iran nuclear deal, especially in what the international news media titled as Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani's "charm offensive" and in accusations made by Israeli officials that Rouhani's aim was to distract "public opinion from Iran’s uranium enrichment" via sweet talk. One way to confront this challenge would be to adopt Watts' (2003) framework for analyzing how sincerity is negotiated, namely, how amicable actions are contested discursively by their recipients and perceived as insincere and manipulative.

»Interpretation-Related Challenges

»Sincerity is but one problem related to the interpretation of amicable actions. Other contextual features are related to the timing and location of performance. Analyzing case studies of audience reception in which an action achieves its amicable goal (as in the cases of Israelis acceptance of Anwar Sadat's conciliatory gestures, Mitchell, 2000; or of King Hussein of Jordan's apology for the Island of Peace massacre in 1997) will allow us to discover what types of communicative resources have a better chance to restore interstate relationships.

»Power-Related Challenges

»Hierarchies and power differences are another important factor when considering the force of amicable actions. It is inherently different for a powerful actor to express solidarity with a less powerful actor than the other way around: While a powerful actor complimenting a less powerful one can come across as patronizing, a less powerful actor complimenting, thanking, or asserting friendship with a more powerful one may come across as obsequious. Future studies can thus apply available efforts to account for hierarchy differences in international relations, to situate states in a power hierarchy, and to analyze how amicable actions may reconstruct these hierarchies.

»News-Media Challenges

»Adopting a peace journalism framework allows us to point out reporting strategies that potentially facilitate the consequences of amicable actions. Thus, for example, amicable actions can be seen as part of a solution-oriented framework suggested by scholars of peace journalism (Galtung, 2006). The case of the Hainan Island incident, in which linguists were involved in ending a diplomatic crisis by formulating an amicable gesture that would resonate with both American and Chinese political and cultural values, can serve as an example for how framing of such an event as a diplomatic victory for both sides may play a role in the potential of amicable actions to prevent further escalation (Zhang, 2001).

»Culture-Related Challenges

»The typology suggested here is also stripped of cultural considerations, namely, how specific cultures perform and perceive amicable action. Ignoring the issue of culture was explained at the outset of the paper by the argument that diplomatic communication is largely based on universal protocols (Jönsson & Hall, 2003). However, in order to adequately conceptualize amicable communication in world politics, there is a need to further study how cultural preferences play a role in constructing interstate relations. On the one hand, cultural differences may result in misunderstanding, for example in cases that two culture with differing cultural speaking-styles are involved in peace negotiation (Zupnik, 2000). On the other hand, designing messages that fit the target audiences' cultural resources, as in the case of the Hainan Island incident described above, may result in de-escalation of conflicts.

»Taking these considerations into account, will provide a richer understanding of how and when amicable actions can thwart escalatory processes, or rather, maintain or restore peaceful channels of communication. Studying them will hopefully open a new research agenda and provide applicable tools for foreign affair policymakers who wish to exploit their disarming potential».