The strategic use of metaphors by political and media elites: the 2007-11 Belgian constitutional crisis

On 9 December 2011 a new Belgian government was sworn in after a record-breaking 541 days of negotiations between all democratic political forces with the aim to alter the constitution and provide more autonomy to the different regions that make up Belgium. In this article, the frequent use of political metaphors by North-Belgian politicians and journalists is analysed through a critical metaphor analysis (CMA) that approaches the different metaphors at a descriptive, an interpretative and a motivational level. Four meta-categories of metaphors were identified - sports and games metaphors, war metaphors, culinary metaphors and transport metaphors. The different metaphors fed into six core frames: expressing immobility, attributing blame, the need for unity, bargaining and teasing, the end is nigh and finally lack of direction and leadership. Metaphors were instrumental in strategies to present the Flemish demands as unquestionable and common sense, while the counter-demands of the French-speaking parties were positioned as unreasonable, impossible to accept. In other words, the strategic use of metaphors, some of which resonated throughout the long period of analysis, not only served to represent complex political issues in an easily digestible language, but also shaped and influenced the negotiations through their various mediations and the ideological intentions embedded within the metaphor

Banal revolution: the emptying of a political signifier

If you type in the word ‘revolution’ in the Google search engine the top result that comes up is a chain of bars called Revolution. Other results on the first page of the search engine include a commercial radio station, clothing, a skate park and a software company. A Wikipedia page and the website of the Revolutionary Socialist Youth are the only non-commercial results Google provides us on its first page. This says as much about the business model of Google than it does about the changes at the level of meanings attributed to revolution. Revolution, it will be argued here, is a political signifier emptied of its radical connotations and currently used graciously as a brand or as a buzzword to mean change in whatever direction. As a result, revolution has been firmly incorporated into the neoliberal discourse and value system..

Young people are being short-changed by political elites and the economic system: it is no wonder they are so angry

Youth unemployment has skyrocketed and government schemes to get young people into work are literally not paying off. Bart Cammaerts argues that forcing young people to work for free unveils a cynical contradiction in the government’s appeal to young people to invest in their futures

Do banking disasters reflect rotten apples – or a rotten basket?.

What caused the banking crisis and financial system collapse in 2008-9 can easily slip off the media’s news list. It’s too complex an issue to sustain continuous media attention. But Bart Cammaerts hopes that the personalization of the issues in a lengthy new trial about a French banking disaster will help keep us focused on what went wrong.

Young people are being short-changed by political elites and the economic system: it is no wonder they are so angry.

Youth unemployment has skyrocketed and government schemes to get young people into work are literally not paying off. Bart Cammaerts argues that forcing young people to work for free unveils a cynical contradiction in the government’s appeal to young people to invest in their futures.

The government’s new Digital Economy Act will do little to prevent file sharing – the music industry must continue to innovate online if it is to survive

Nearly as old as the internet, the peer-to-peer file sharing of music online has been a constant bugbear for the music industry, with claims of billions in lost revenues over the past decade. Bart Cammaerts and Bingchun Meng have found that despite these assertions, incomes from innovative online products such as LastFM and Spotify are complementing a resurgence of interest in live music and are driving up industry revenues

Did Britain’s right-wing newspapers win the election for the Tories?

In the 2015 election campaign, almost all newspapers were extremely pro-Conservative and rabidly anti-Labour. Bart Cammaerts writes that if almost all media are so enthusiastically choosing the same ideological side, this will inevitably have a profound impact on public opinion which is dangerous for democracy

A constituency of fearful white voters has become central to the right-wing political discourse, leading to the tolerance of ‘banal’ racism

Last week Bart Cammaerts was asked by the North Belgian broadsheet newspaper De Standaard to write an opinion piece regarding the debate on race, language and political correctness in the UK (the piece was published in the printed edition of 13 May 2014). What follows is a slightly edited translation of what he wrote in which he condemns politicians, such as David Cameron and Boris Johnson, for condemning those that react against racism more than those who use racist language. He suggests this acceptance of ‘banal’ racism definitely has something to do with the growing success of UKIP