ABSTRACT
In this book, the process combining securitizing moves and audience acceptance is theorized as an intersubjective process of legitimation. As noted in the theory chapter, the production of a consenting audience, which leads to acceptance of emergency measures beyond rules that would otherwise have to be obeyed, is seen as a joint act in which securitizing actors and audience participate (Chapter 2). Once the securitizing move has been launched, the reception of the securitizing narrative is shaped by the discursive terrain already existing among the audience, while there is also room for change in the discursive terrain and appropriation of the narrative. ‘Audience acceptance’ does not happen at one point in time or one moment: it is an ongoing process of legitimation through which the representation of something as an existential threat acquires a hegemonic position at the expense of other, less threatening, representations. This ‘happens’ when the description of the threat as ‘existential’ and of ‘the point of no return’ and ‘way out’ indicated in a securitizing move has acquired sufficient resonance in representations of the audience to enable emergency action to be undertaken legitimately. Obviously, an empirical study cannot fully capture the dynamic social processes suggested in this explication. However, we can get an idea of certain aspects of intersubjective dynamics (change and appropriation of the narrative) by studying changes in audience representations over a given timespan: here, September through to December 1999. In the next three chapters, I focus on revealing how the intersubjective process unfolded by investigating similarities, differences and changes in representations in and across the texts of various audience groups and comparing these to the official narrative extracted in Chapter 5. This makes it possible to establish how far the process of producing a consenting audience evolved during autumn 1999 and how it happened. This chapter presents the texts of members of the Russian political elite who were not in government, but who held or campaigned for seats in the Federal Assembly of Russia.1 As shown in Chapter 6, the new 1999 official representations of Chechnya and Russia fitted certain positions in the Russian discursive terrain fairly well. In particular Putin’s imagery of Russia resonated with dominant representations among the CPRF and the New Right. Moreover, representations of Chechnya as a dangerous Other were nothing new in Russian
discourse. This fertile discursive terrain certainly worked towards ‘acceptance’ of the official narrative by the Russian political elite during autumn 1999. On the other hand, the analysis of elite discourse below shows that the process that led up to agreement on the gravity of the Chechen threat and the necessity of a new war was indeed an intersubjective one. Putin’s narrative was not only replicated, but also reformulated and accentuated in the representations offered by members of the Russian Federal Assembly that autumn. In the following, I uncover this process by focusing on the extent to which representations of the Chechen ‘threat’ (including representations of Maskhadov), ‘the point of no return’ and ‘the way out’, as well as representations of ‘Russia’ given by Federation Council and State Duma members during autumn 1999, overlap with those in the 1999 official narrative. I first trace how the alternative position on Chechnya, identified as the ‘discourse of reconciliation’ in the interwar period, all but disappeared from the language of members of the Russian Federal Assembly during autumn 1999. Then I move on to what emerged as the dominant position in political elite discourse: how it matched and underscored official claims about the new relation between Chechnya and Russia and the most appropriate ‘way out’, but also how it differs from those. The focus in this chapter is on linguistic narratives. However, the abstract situation of a policy being established as legitimate also has implications for formal acts undertaken as part of the ‘emergency measures’. Once the legitimacy of a policy has been established, this may lead to its being legally and formally authorized. Thus seen, audience acceptance entails an emerging overlap in representations, an overlap that also finds its expression in concrete formal acts such as passing a law or agreeing to a change of policy. The former will be explored in this chapter; the latter, in Chapter 10.
