Download or read book Winning Hegemony. A Discourse-Theoretical Perspective on Political Strategy and the Trade Politics of the European Parliament written by Thomas Jacobs and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 'Hegemony and Socialist Strategy' (1985), Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe laid bare how the ongoing 'crisis of Marxism' is the product of essentialism and an unwarranted investment in established truths and taken-for-granted wisdoms. They called for a new form of left-wing thought that accepts the contingent, open-ended, and fundamentally political nature of society, as they believed that only such a perspective could renew the hope for a progressive hegemony. The successors of Laclau and Mouffe developed their ideas into a coherent ontology and a practical approach to discourse analysis, known as post-Marxist or poststructuralist Discourse Theory (PDT). But as PDT evolved, its centre of gravity shifted. Reflections about political strategy and about how the Left can win hegemony in the current social conditions, which were at the core of 'Hegemony and Socialist Strategy', were replaced by discussions concerning the allegedly underdeveloped normative, ethical, and methodological dimensions of the work of Laclau and Mouffe. While these discussions are valuable in their own right, they also partially distract from what I consider the most potent aspect of PDT: its ability to inform strategic analysis and to ground a post-Marxist theory of political strategy. Meanwhile, in the actual political arena, the progressive forces to whom Laclau and Mouffe sought to give a boost continue to go from loss to loss. As I wrote this doctoral dissertation, Alexis Tsipras, Yannis Varoufakis, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Pablo Iglesias, Iñigo Errejón, Jeremy Corbyn, and Bernie Sanders all reached for power from the Left, and came close, before ultimately falling short. But their defeats are not a recent thing. The missteps that caused the Left's downfall in pivotal moments are well-known. As Adler- Bell (2020) wonders, what would history look like “[i]f the Communards had stormed Versailles, if the work of Radical Reconstruction had been completed, if the Soviet Union had exorcised its totalitarian demons, if the Spanish Republic had survived the civil war, if the Prague Spring had been allowed to flourish, if Allende had survived the coup, if Mitterand [sic] had resisted the call of rigueur, if workers had seized power during this or that general strike [...].” Traverso (2017) suggests that that the history of socialism, anarchism, communism, Marxism, and their likes is best described by a “dialectic of defeat” spanning two centuries. This “dialectic of defeat” has many drivers, most of which are idiosyncratic, but one of the more recurrent ones ought to be widespread notion that “the working class and ordinary people will choose the left when the facts are properly laid out.” Progressives tend to believe that “the left is the truth, and people can learn it” (Hak 2017, 55). This is a dangerous belief, for the assumption that one is right and one's opponents are wrong, implies that one's victory is immanent to reality. It effectively dispenses with the need for strategic reflection about the necessary and sufficient conditions for political success. A melancholic relation with defeat as something heroic (Traverso 2017) and a stubborn belief in the rationality of its idea (Hak 2017) thus prevent the Left from asking the questions that can lead to victory - questions that I believe have to do with political strategy.It is my dissatisfaction with how post-Marxists, Discourse Theorists, left-wing politicians, and progressive activists all neglect strategic thinking that led me to write this doctoral dissertation, and place the notion of political strategy at its centre. In particular, I will argue that PDT and post-Marxist philosophy enable a unique definition of political strategy, one that allows us to explain society as the product of hegemonic politics. This way, they open up a novel and encompassing perspective for strategic thought, that can inform both academic and real-life reflection about how the Left wins hegemony. Throughout this manuscript, I elaborate this perspective, by working towards two goals: the development of PDT into a framework for strategic analysis, and the construction of a general post-Marxist theory of political strategy.The first part of this dissertation works on a theoretical level. Through a series of interventions in the literature on PDT and post-Marxism, I develop the ontological, epistemological, and methodological infrastructure that is needed to expedite their use for strategic reflection. In article I, I lay out the basic premises and the key concepts of PDT and post-Marxism. Article II tackles one of the main theoretical issues plaguing PDT: 'the problem of institutions', which alleges that PDT struggles with theorizing social stability. By retooling the logics framework (Glynos & Howarth 2007; 2008), one of the most popular approaches for applying PDT, in a way that enables it to capture politicization and depoliticization, I disprove claims that other paradigms such as Discursive Institutionalism (Schmidt 2008) would be better at explaining continuity. I introduce a second modification into the logics framework in article III, where I replace 'fantasmatic logics' by 'heterogeneous logics'. This move was inspired by the need to account for non-antagonistic forms of politics, and by the incompatibility of an overly strong focus on personal subjectivity with PDT's definition of political strategy. Article IV concludes the theoretical part of this doctoral dissertation by tackling the 'methodological deficit' of PDT and by introducing 'topic modelling', the corpus-linguistic method that I will draw on in my case study.In the second part of this doctoral dissertation, I test the discourse-theoretical framework for strategic analysis that was constructed in the first part through a case study focusing on the trade politics of the European Parliament. I compiled a corpus of all speeches on international trade delivered in the Parliament's plenary sessions between September 1979 and May 2018, and used topic modelling to build a 'topic model' of this corpus. The procedure through which this corpus was compiled and processed can be found in annexes A, C, and D, while the topic model itself can be found in annex B. I then used this topic model as the basis for an empirical inquiry into the political strategies surrounding the discursive construction of 'political agency' (article VI), 'protection', 'multilateralism', and 'development' (paper VII). The groundworks for these empirical analyses were laid in article V, which discusses the use of poststructuralist theory in EU studies and political economy.Together, these theoretical and empirical articles and papers show how PDT can be used as a framework for the analysis of the strategic dimension of discourses, articulations, and practices. In the Conclusion of this dissertation, I go one step further, and I try to level up this framework for the analysis of concrete strategies into a more general, overarching theory of political strategy. This theory should be able to inform further discourse-theoretical and post-Marxist research on political strategy, but it should also expedite a set of lessons, principles, and insights that can help progressive politicians and activists reflect on how to win hegemony and how to realize the better world that they dream of.