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Abstract
The Irish Republic's economic success story has been simultaneously regarded as antithetical to and indicative of neoliberal hegemony. The question of the neoliberal pedigree of the Irish case is explored here from the perspective of mediatized representations of political economy. The paper's argument is advanced in three distinct stages. First, it outlines a theoretical and methodological rationale for the analysis itself. Second, it formulates a summary account of neoliberalism as discourse(s) and ideology, introducing a key analytical distinction between ‘transparent’ and ‘euphemized’ neoliberal discourses. Third, it presents an empirical overview of how neoliberal assumptions are articulated through mediatized representations of political economy. The article shows how the ‘Celtic Tiger’ can be understood as a case of neoliberal hegemony, as long as it is recognised that neoliberalism is hegemonically constituted through a plurality of (inter)discursive forms and rhetorical strategies. In addition, the paper highlights the constitutive role of media representation, especially the media rhetoric of Irish political leaders, in the production and reproduction of an Irish neoliberalism.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank both reviewers, as well as Lincoln Dahlberg and Pat Brereton, for their feedback on an earlier draft of this article. I would also like to thank Peadar Kirby for inviting me to present the argument in outline form to the MA students of the international relations programme at Dublin City University.
Notes
1. The Celtic Tiger is the metaphor commonly (over)used to describe the Irish ‘economic miracle’ of the early 1990s onwards. The official Tiger narrative is typically structured around the following explanations of Irish success: ‘consistent macro-economic management of the economy, investment in education, social partnership, EU structural funds combined with the fiscal discipline imposed by the Maastricht criteria and, of course, very high levels of inward US investment’ (Kirby, Citation2001, paragraph 3).
2. Neoliberalism is typically used as a shorthand signifier by those assuming a critical disposition towards the ascent of a reductive market logic as the organizing principle of global political economy since the 1970s and 1980s. Harvey's (2005, p. 2) outline definition is indicative:
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Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by [state-sponsored support of] strong private property rights, free markets and free trade.
3. This paper's understanding of ‘the political’ follows Hay's (2002, p. 3) twinned definition of big ‘P’, politics as institutional politics, and small ‘p’, politics as cultural practice.
4. A rich application of a field theory perspective is outside the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, the concept of ‘fields’, Bourdieu's term for describing how different social identities (journalist, economist, politician, etc) operate according to different relational logics vis-à-vis their position in the social, does inform the analysis (as it does the theoretical rationale for critical discourse analysis formulated by Chouliaraki & Fairclough, Citation1999).
5. My use of the term ‘discourse’ follows Fairclough's (2003) distinction between its use in a general sense (to mean language and semiosis in toto) and it use in a specific sense (to refer to particular discourses: neoliberal, socialist, etc).
6. While a focused exploration of the connection is outside the scope of this paper, I would suggest that Billig's (1995) ‘banal nationalism’ thesis is both directly and analogically relevant to the critical study of neoliberalism. One can usefully speak of a ‘banal neoliberalism’, for it too has its ideological power more in mundane rhetorical reproduction and identification (also see Weltman, Citation2003), much of it appealing to signifiers of national identity, rather than manifestly ideological gestures and practices.
7. This particular dispute has been described (Gilbert, Citation2004) as an argument between those who affirm (Fairclough, Jessop, & Sayer, Citation2003; Jessop, Citation2004) and those who reject (Laclau & Mouffe, Citation1985/2001) a formal ontological distinction between the discursive and the extra-discursive. Briefly, Laclau and Mouffe (Citation1985/2001) see discourse as synonymous with social practice, and therefore do not reduce it to a purely linguistic/semiotic category. In contrast, Fairclough and Jessop treat discourse/semiosis as a specific aspect of social practice and therefore avoid collapsing the distinction between practice and discourse. However, while the basis of a theoretical dispute is clear, even those affirming a distinction between the discursive and the extra-discursive do not represent the latter as discrete from discursive processes. In other words, both sides would agree that the object ‘neoliberalism’ is in part discursively constituted – the key question, of course, is to what degree!
8. Importantly, Laclau Citation(2004) and Bourdieu Citation(1992) understand ‘logic’ (or, more correctly, a ‘hegemonic’ logic) very differently to how it has been traditionally understood in scholarly discourse. Logic, in Laclau's account, is not some epistemological domain separate from rhetoric, but a master term for understanding the interplay of rhetorical, grammatical, and (in the more traditional sense) ‘logical’ elements.
9. Fowler Citation(1991) describes nominalization as a commonplace kind of clause transformation, whereby predicates (verbs and adjectives) are syntactically realized as nouns and noun phrases. Nominalization can assume various dense, complex forms and, from a critical discourse studies perspective, can be used to abstract agency and cement ideologically loaded presuppositions (Fairclough, Citation2003).
10. While in many ways interchangeable with the term ‘discourse’, ‘rhetoric’ is used here to emphasize a particular concern with strategies of audience identification (Burke, Citation1950/1969).
11. To cite this as an indictment of my analysis would, I'd suggest, gloss over the need – especially within the confines of a journal article – for a generalizing, and hence somewhat reductive, analysis of a phenomenon as empirically complex as neoliberalism.
12. I foreground here the particular cases of the UK and US because, unlike, for example, in the case of Chile, neoliberal political agents needed formally to secure electoral consent.
13. The features listed in should not be understood as exclusively neoliberal and, in their general character, most of them can be considered core tenets of Western civilization, the capitalist system, and liberal democracy.
14. This is not, of course, purporting to be an exhaustive account of neoliberalism's political identity, nor am I suggesting that these binary distinctions (such as the simplistic Othering of state and market) are not open to deconstruction. My interest here is instead in sketching the function of these binaries within a neoliberal imaginary.
15. Frank Citation(2001) describes the endurance of this rhetorical strategy, particularly in the US, as ‘market populism’: that is, the labelling of anyone who dares question the logic of a market-led social order as ‘elites’.
16. My use of the term ‘doxa’ follows Bourdieu Citation(1992), who uses it to signify the commonplace, taken-for-granted assumptions of any social and political order.
17. It is important to emphasize the heuristic nature of the analytical distinction between transparent and euphemized neoliberal discourses. Political success, in a liberal democratic context, in some sense demands a labour of euphemization, and even a firebrand neoliberal such as Thatcher sought to soften her ideological posture with pragmatic, commonsense, and nationalist rhetorical appeals (Hall, Citation1988).
18. This caveat is important. The distinction between transparent and euphemized neoliberalism is analytical, not ontological. Moreover, identifying the binary at work is not a sufficient analytical end. It is instead meant to function as an analytical crutch for helping make sense of how neoliberal discourses are differently articulated.
19. Of course, social partnership itself can be understood as an ideology, but not, I suggest, in the confrontational, doctrinaire fashion of transparent neoliberalism.
20. The consensual nature of Irish politics has a complex history with origins in the tribal, more than ideological, antagonism between the two main political parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael.
21. Ahern is the leader of Fianna Fail, the senior partner of the coalition government, co-formed with the Progressive Democrats, that has been in power since 1997.
22. Here I follow Salzer-Morling's (Citation1998) understanding of narrative as a key controlling and integrationist device in the construction of an official identity.
23. RTE is Ireland's state-owned, public service broadcaster.
24. The television and radio interviews have been transcribed simply to record the accuracy of the words clearly uttered. Hesitations have not been recorded. The marker ‘…’ denotes gaps in the interview, while the exclamation mark denotes emphasis.
25. Interestingly, the dominant historical narrative would attribute much of this fiscal irresponsibility to the actions of the single party Fianna Fail government that was elected to power in 1977.
26. For instance, while still leader of Fine Gael, Bruton sought to interrogate a hegemonic Celtic Tiger ‘success’ narrative with the party's 1998 Celtic Snail campaign, which, as a political marketing strategy, was widely ridiculed in media assessments.
27. Of course, suspicion of a certain kind of intellectual should not be understood as blanket anti-intellectualism. The hegemonic construction of a neoliberal political programme, especially in the US and Britain, owed much to the increased public visibility of a new class of ‘conservative intellectuals’, which, as a descriptor, some saw as ‘virtually a contradiction in terms’ (Hames & Feasey, Citation1994, p. 234) up until the 1970s. Consider, too, Bertie Ahern's highlighting of his admiration for the US sociologist Robert D. Putnam (Brennock, Citation2004), and the close symbolic relationship between Tony Blair and Anthony Giddens (Bourdieu & Wacquant, Citation2001).
28. Interestingly, McCreevy has had a chance to project his political identity on to a wider European stage since his appointment as EU Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services in 2004.