THE ‘CIVILIZED WORLD’ FACING AN ‘IDEOLOGY OF TERROR’: ROMANIAN OFFICIAL DISCOURSE ON INTERNATIONAL SECURITY ISSUES
THE ‘CIVILIZED WORLD’ FACING AN ‘IDEOLOGY OF TERROR’: ROMANIAN OFFICIAL DISCOURSE ON INTERNATIONAL SECURITY ISSUES

Summary/Abstract: International security issues represent a topic of foremost importance for a great number of states, especially after the terrorist acts in September 2001. Such issues strongly influence state politics regarding both internal and foreign affairs and, at a symbolic level, they influence the statal actors’ attempts to position themselves on the international stage and to legitimize the chosen position. This is also the case for Romania which faced a major adjustment of its foreign affairs strategy after the fall of the communist regime and in connection with the beginning of the strategic partnership with the United States. This study concerns the Romanian ‘official’ approach to the international security topic. The corpus is formed by 21 speeches held or attributed to the last three Romanian presidents, between 1996 and 2011. Presidential speeches represent a highly formalized type of institutional communication or ‘elite discourse’ in Van Dijk’s terms. The present study aims to examine (1) the representation of identity and otherness in connection to the international security topic and (2) whether there are any differences between the three presidents’ speech styles in regard to this discursive representation. The analysis is primarily focused on the role of negation and personal deixis as means of evaluation and positioning of the speakers in the institutional discourse.

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