ABSTRACT
Texts are simultaneously unique and united: each makes its own particular construction of identity, weaves a series of differentiations and juxtapositions, and couples them to a spatially, temporally, and ethically situated foreign policy. Yet, the inimitability of every individual text is always located within a shared textual space; all texts make references, explicitly or implicitly, to previous ones, and in doing so they both establish their own reading and become mediations on the meaning and status of others. The meaning of a text is thus never fully given by the text itself but is always a product of other readings and interpretations. This process, coined by Julia Kristeva with the concept of intertextuality (Kristeva 1980), is both theoretically and methodologically significant for discourse analysis of foreign policy. It highlights that texts are situated within and against other texts, that they draw upon them in constructing their identities and policies, that they appropriate as well as revise the past, and that they build authority by reading and citing that of others. It points analytically, politically, and empirically to seeing official foreign policy texts—statements, speeches, and interviews—not as entities standing separately from wider societal discourses but as entities located within a larger textual web; a web that both includes and goes beyond other policy texts, into journalism, academic writing, popular non-fiction, and, potentially, even fiction.
