The “Buen Vivir” and “Twenty-First Century Socialism”

Abstract

In this article, I draw from Critical Discourse Analysis and Cultural Political Economy to examine the representation of “post-neoliberal” politics in UK broadsheet newspapers during their reporting of the 2013 and 2014 presidential elections in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela. In doing so, I seek to assess the role this reporting plays in the promotion of the selection and/or retention of different political and economic imaginaries in the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. I argue that in right-of-centre newspapers (and, to a lesser extent, The Independent), the de-legitimation of the three countries’ post-neoliberalising projects had the effect of promoting support for the retention of both neoliberal capitalism and liberal democracy in the United Kingdom while, in The Guardian, the simultaneous legitimation and misconstrual of these projects as Europeanised versions of social democracy served to promote the selection of a less radical, broadly Keynesian, social democratic imaginary as an alternative route to economic recovery.

KEYWORDS:

• cultural political economy
• (de)legitimation
• Fairclough
• (post-) neoliberalism
• UK broadsheet newspapers

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks to Dr Maria Kyriakidou, Professor Brian Doherty, and the two anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on this article.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

* This research was originally conducted as part of a MA dissertation at the University of East Anglia, Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies, Norwich, UK.