ABSTRACT
It is necessary to preface the empirical chapters of this work with a brief discussion regarding the relationship between ‘policy’ and ‘narrative’. In the following chapters these terms are used interchangeably or simultaneously, but it is important to recall at the beginning that they mean different things. Simply put, policy is the chosen path of a government, an initial statement of intent and a framework for the ways, means and ends of strategy, and should act as a guiding light for operational activity. Narrative, on the other hand, should be understood as how policy plays itself out over time in the form of a story, and contains all the elements of a ‘storyboard’ or ‘script’, including rationales, justifications, counter-arguments, rhetorical devices, and cultural and personal idiosyncrasies of a multiplicity of narrators. Policies inform narratives insofar as they are the starting point from which a narrative takes shape and evolves, but because narratives are the unfolding of policies over time, they also inevitably impinge upon the static nature of policy by breathing life into it and serving as the means by which policies respond to unfolding events that affect its coherence and validity. In order words, while policies determine narratives in their point of origin, they do not wholly constitute them. Thus, it is possible to speak of ‘policy narratives’ as all that is said about and in defence of a policy following the point at which the policy is first put into practice. It is also important to distinguish ‘policy narratives’ from ‘strategic narratives’ in the sense that narratives are not always ‘strategic’, a point the following chapters will repeatedly make clear. As the purpose of the following chapters is to chart and analyse the evolution of policy narratives as they unfold against the exigencies of the transnational dilemma, I have consciously taken the step of treating all articulations of policy as contributing to the overall narrative of that policy: a ‘policy narrative’.
