ABSTRACT
Peace is one of the fundamental principles and aspirations of humankind. Political actions are almost exclusively justified by reference to peace. This was also the case at the time of the Cold War. Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact declared that their main objective was to guarantee peace and security, for which a stable balance of military power was seen as a prerequisite. ‘Peace’, ‘security’, ‘stability’, and ‘balance’ have for a very long time been used as keywords in political discourse. A question of interest to a linguist is the semantic characterization of such keywords and key concepts. In what follows, a textlinguistic approach was used to identify the recurrent macropropositions that determined the semantic profile of relevant key concepts of the East-West debate during the Cold War. These macropropositions will be presented. Special attention will be given to the cognitive role of the balance metaphor in this context. The discussion concentrates on the debate as reflected in the mass media in the 1980s, mainly related to military aspects.
