The Paradox Of Political Time: Strategic Narratives, Urgency & Public Diplomacy

We cannot deny that we are in the midst of a decisive change in the media and information environment. This change is partly owing to the sheer mass of information that is produced and reproduced every second and the ever-decreasing costs of information production and dissemination. The factor that may seem most dominant however is that of speed. As opinions can be moved swiftly, sometimes beyond the grasp of what is sensible, we have to understand public diplomacy in the context of a wider debate on the formation and re-formulation of (international) order.

These (re-)formulations in a post-structural reading afford continuity by the contingency of stable patterns of acceptable behavior. If stable patterns of acceptable behavior are eroded, in light of the speed with which opinions can form and reform, we have to ask about the implications for (international) order and public diplomacy. More so, we have to ask whether “political time […] is out of sync with the temporalities, rhythms and pace governing economy and culture?”[i]

A brief reading on the literature of political time perceives it as either cyclical in leadership authority typologies,[ii] an inherently strategic aspect of institutionalised processes,[iii] or as a means through which transformation is understood.[iv] Additionally, political time is understood to provision longevity, legitimacy, and lends value to a set of processes that have special importance to liberal democratic principles. Any core idea about the legitimacy of state actors, any understanding of value and norms, is immanently tied to temporal scope through time. Even transformative processes are imbued with normative assumptions about political time. Actors place themselves within sequences, organize identities around consistent narratives, unwaveringly standing the ‘test of time.’ Conversely, time has (instrumental) political value. As news cycles travel faster and public diplomacy in continuous need to re(-act) to information produced, how can longevity, as providing for core aspects of democratic order, be understood in the ecologies of time of the 21st century? If order requires political time, have we lost the main currency to legitimize democratic political purchase?

These questions are not only reflective of philosophical and psychological inquiries into the implications of the speed and mass of information society and policy-makers are facing. The philosophical and psychological becomes pressingly relevant for those actors, working in the field of public diplomacy. Credibility is increasingly equated with speed. In fact, a lack of immediate reaction is itself a political statement. There is a pronounced, ‘silently agreed upon’ need for reacting swiftly and decisively. Conversely, the sense of urgency provides little political time for reaction and formulation of coherent ideas. Similarly, if reaction is continuously anticipated, as well as expected there is little political time afforded to see through events as they occur. Sense-making of the event in the 21st century media ecologies begins instantly.

Set against the backdrop of these developments the concept of strategic narratives has gained prominence not only within academic research.[v] It promises to understand in more detail the role of communication at the intersection of power and order – in a changing communication environment and media ecologies of the 21st century – that has hitherto been an understudied factor within international relations research. Within this environment, strategic narratives provide a tool to manage and forge meanings of order and disorder. As Miskimmon et.al. outline: “[…] strategic narratives are tools that political actors employ to promote their interests, values, and aspirations for the international order by managing expectations and altering the discursive environment. These narratives define “who we are” and “what kind of world order we want.””[vi]

This is particularly relevant for states that operate within that order, not least because the power to order is closely related to the legitimacy and authority of the actor in question. As Price outlines: “new technologies, political upheavals, changed concepts of human rights—all these conspire to make this an important moment for rethinking and reformulating speech freedom and regulation in a global environment. The ability of any state fully to control the images that permeate its territory is questioned everywhere.”[vii] In the (re-)making of this international order, a lot is at stake – touching upon the fundamentals of (national) identity, the international system and economics – which thus necessitates understanding the contours it is taking.

Events that are acknowledged as relevant for the international order, or impacting international actors are often considered as disrupting order,[viii] not least in their narrative construction as such.[ix] We have to be aware that no event is meaningful, if a tempo-spatial reality does not narrate, mediate and structure its meaning and ultimately gives shape to this materiality either at the given moment in time or through its ritualization or memorialisation.

More importantly, “images, signs and statements contribute to allowing the world to happen. Images, signs and statements do not represent something, but rather create possible worlds.”[x] The notion of different possible worlds is more politically immanent than the spiritual resonance of this sentence suggests. From a philosophical point of view the political event announces, opens, a space which foreshadows an alternative possible reality. This uncertainty we counter with the epistemic regimes of knowledge at our disposal.

Simply put: we make sense of the unknown with strategic narratives that provide a structure through which sense is achieved. We thus semantically negate the impossible with possible discursive knowns. “It is at this point that the ‘conflict’ is confronted with dominant values. The implementation of new possibilities for living runs into the existing organisation of power and established values. In the event, one sees what is intolerable about an era and the new possibilities for living that it contains at the same time. The mode of the event is the problematical.”[xi]

Strategic narratives then navigate world of possibilities. Crucially however, strategic narratives need time. Political time. In fact, their deployment is not simple, and a complex world requires strategic narratives that can navigate through complexity. Meaning-making of events as they occur is thus not only a tool but imbued with political responsibility and ultimately legitimacy. If public diplomacy requires reaction instantly and continuously, it will hamper the ability with which we can craft, deploy and disseminate strategic narratives that make sense of events as they occur.

Yet, public diplomacy crucially requires belief in the strategic narratives, public diplomacy actors disseminate. How can we establish this belief? If the very urgency that requires belief seems to undermine the ability to establish it, we are facing a situation in which political time and urgency have interlocked in a vicious circle. Simply put, how to balance speed and accuracy?

It is difficult to find answers in a blog this length, and ultimately it is answers society will have to find at large and researchers more specifically. I would like to suggest nevertheless avenues for research and social meaning making of these ‘transformative’ times.

First, there is no inherent logic to urgency in relation to (social) media. The meaning of urgency we have attached to new tools of public diplomacy efforts is not inherent to these tools. As such the (strategic) narratives that make sense of media transformation and social media are closely tied to that of urgency, immediacy and instantaneous reaction. If we can forge strategic narratives that have at heart an interactionist logic, in which we qualify order not by means of stable relationships that are imbued with power-normative understandings but rather begin to perceive public diplomacy as a mechanism for genuine human interaction, we may be more equipped to hold up democratic legitimacy in times of ‘transformation.’ This ties in closely with a skimming down of democratic processes towards mere electoral participation.

A democratic order from an interactionist standpoint however, functions through the exchange of expectations, ideas and ideals. If we bring political time back into the equation of such an interactionist logic, we can conceive of this political time as a groundwork for trust. Of course, public diplomacy cannot close itself to a communication environment, as currently developed and developing. But we can change the logic inherent to these tools and make possible a transformation of their use towards what they have the potential to bring about: genuine human interaction and communication.

Adding to this first point, we have to re-examine what the purpose of public diplomacy truly is. It is not, from this interactionist perspective, a one-way street of communicating political strategies. It is not, a one-way street towards acceptance and persuasion. Rather, we should make sense of it as a means to engage publics as diplomatic actors, in which a public’s sense of expectations towards ‘global’ actors are factored in as political capital.

Second, political processes need time. I argue that it is not with speed we can manage transformative processes. As we make sense of events as they occur, as we make sense of these events as disruptive and transformative, we may need to slow down our sense-making and draw on strategic narratives that grapple with the inherent complex nature of events unfolding. Naturally those strategic narratives that make sense through simple bifurcations are those easily remembered. Yet, I argue that we can craft narratives of order that go beyond mere binaries of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘righteous and evil’. It is in these binaries, I find, we may lose out on the balance between urgency and credibility.

Third, if we incorporate political time into our analytical reading and research, we may find that there is nothing too exceptional about the transformational quality of the what we consider a transformation. As we make sense of events unfolding, we are always part of our historical subjectivity. This is not to argue that there is nothing truly exceptional about the speed and reach of information, but it is to argue that times are always transformative. In fact, it is the core notion of time. Further to this it is in the space in between time moving and reproduction of meaning that we find agency. As Butler argues: “in a sense, all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat; ‘agency,’ then, is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition […] it is only within the practices of repetitive signifying.”[xii]

As such, we need to understand that we are actors with agency in processes of transformation. This is particularly relevant for the field of public diplomacy. To draw on Wendt, speed is what we make of it. It is particularly the actors within and researchers on public diplomacy but even more so we as citizens that will have to resignify urgency towards something that makes genuine human interaction possible.

Works Cited

[i] Wolin, S. (1997), What Time Is It?, Theory & Event, Vol. 1, No. 1

[ii] Skowronek, S. (2011). Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprise and Reappraisal, Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas.

[iii] Goetz, K.H. (2012), Political Time in the EU, in Jones, E. et.al. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the European Union, Oxford: Oxford University Press

[iv] Strong, T. (1990). The Idea of Political theory: Reflections on the Self in Political Time and Space (Loyola Lecture Series in Political Analysis). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press; see also: Cohen, E. (2018). The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

[v] Antoniades, A., Miskimmon, A. & O’Loughlin, B. (2010), Great Power Politics and Strategic Narratives, Centre for Global Political Economy, Working Paper No.7; Miskimmon, A., O’Loughlin, B. & Roselle, L. (2017), Forging the World – Strategic Narratives and International Relations, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Freedman, L. (2006), Networks, Culture and Narratives, Adelphi Papers Series, Vol.45, No.379; De Graaf, B., George D., and Ringsmose, J. eds. (2015), Strategic Narratives, Public Opinion and War: Winning Domestic Support for the Afghan War. London: Routledge; Krebs, RR., and Jackson, PT (2007), Twisting Tongues and Twisting Arms: The Power of Political Rhetoric, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 13, No.1, pp. 35–66; Price, M. (2015), Free Expression, Globalism, and the New Strategic Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

[vi] Miskimmon, A., O’Loughlin, B. & Roselle, L., (2017), Forging the World – Strategic Narratives and International Relations, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, p. i

[vii] Price, M. (2002), Media and Sovereignty: The Global Information Revolution and its Challenge to State Power, Cambridge, MA.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, p. 3

[viii] See for example Crotty, W. (2003), Presidential Policymaking in Crisis Situations: 9/11 and Its Aftermath, Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp.451-464; Aradau, C., & Munster, R. (2011), Politics of catastrophe: Genealogies of the unknown (PRIO new security studies), London; New York: Routledge;

[ix] see Hay, C. (2010, Chronicles of a Death Foretold: The Winter of Discontent and Construction of the Crisis of British Keynesianism, Parliamentary Affairs, Vol. 63, No. 3, pp. 446-470.

[x] Lazzarato, M. (2003), Struggle, Event, Media, [Online], Available at: https://transversal.at/transversal/1003/lazzarato/en, [Last Accessed: May 4, 2018]

[xi] Lazzarato, M. (2003), Struggle, Event, Media, [Online], Available at: https://transversal.at/transversal/1003/lazzarato/en, [Last Accessed: May 4, 2018]

[xii] Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble, New York: Routledge, p. 145