Retrospective argumentation

Political communication, within the field of argumentation, belongs to the deliberative genre, i.e. it is future-oriented. However, van Eemeren has recently asserted that “political theorists recognize that the argumentation put forward in political discourse is also often about past performances and requires a retrospective account” (2013, p. 28).

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discursive reconstruction of the past and its influence on the present (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001). Therefore, some studies focus on the narration of success stories (Heer et al., 2008; Wodak et al., 2009) and the effects of these in promoting unification. Other studies

examine apologetic narratives and the effects that these have on the discursive construction of a more inclusive ‘We’ (Forchtner, 2014).

This study is mainly interested in legitimating controversial past actions and decisions. Past events in this study are not historical events, as in the aforementioned studies, that have become part of the collective memory of a nation. Instead, the past actions and decisions of concern to this study are those that belong to the immediate past and whose social and political effects are still in the making. The data analysed in this study refer to unilateral past actions and decisions taken by Nasrallah (or on behalf of his political party) and that were met with controversy, criticism and discontent. More specifically, this thesis analyses Nasrallah’s strategic use of retrospective argumentation, not only as a means to legitimise past actions and decisions but also as a defence strategy to rebut opponents claims. His speeches are, thus, attempts to redeem a problematized validity claim to rightness in order to restore the legitimacy (Habermas, 1990) of already taken actions or decisions.

Fairclough and Fairclough (2012) note that argumentation advanced to justify past actions develops “in relation to a counter-argument, whose claim was that the action should not be performed, because it would lead to negative effects” (p.134). Accordingly, the arguer has to show that negative effects, predicated by opponents, have not materialized and that the intended goals behind the action have been achieved. Consequently, the claim that the action was right is empirically verified (ibid.). Fairclough and Fairclough’s proposal for

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justifying past actions entails criticisms, in terms of negative consequences, were put forward prior to the doing of the action (deliberation over possible courses of action). The arguer, then, embarks on justifying the criticized past action by showing that the cited negative consequences have not materialized, and in case they have, they have not undermined the intended goal.63

Hassan Nasrallah’s retrospective argumentation takes a different path. First, Nasrallah’s criticized actions or decisions were taken unexpectedly and unilaterally. There has been no prior deliberation concerning the nature of the action or decision, the reasons and motivations underlying them, nor the goals that these actions or decisions are expected to achieve. Second, opponents’ arguments and claims are advanced only after concrete, rather than anticipated, negative consequences have emerged and have, in many respects, undermined the goal. Nasrallah’s strategy for legitimating a past action or decision can be seen to have the following dimensions: (i) downplaying and trivializing the impact of negative consequences of the action, i.e. showing that the goal is more important than the materialized negative consequences; (ii) capitalizing on emerging positive consequences to show that these outweigh the negative ones cited; and, (iii) magnifying the negative consequences of failing to act via the construction of a hypothetical future scenario.

This set of positive and negative consequences is embedded within an overall legitimating strategy of referring to publicly shared moral values and beliefs, on the one hand, and

63 _{From a different perspective, Walton (1990, 2003) maintains that retrospective reasoning is often used in}

legal and ethical argumentation. In the legal domain, the retrospective use of practical reasoning starts from the agent’s actions and reasons backwards to determine what might have been the agent’s real intentions and commitments that led to the action. Similarly, retrospective ethical reasoning aims to judge whether a past action can be justified as being right or wrong, taking from the facts or known circumstances a starting point to arrive at a moral/ ethical evaluation (Walton, 2003).

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group-specific (Hezbollah’s immediate audience) religious duties and commitments that motivated the action/ decision, on the other. This is, in my view, one of the main

functions of Nasrallah’s charismatic discourses, via which rescue narratives are exploited to unify a disintegrated nation around a threat to national unity. Based on this moral legitimation, the negative consequences of doing an action or taking a decision are provisionally accepted, given the moral and religious values that motivate the criticised actions or decisions. The conclusion of this chain of reasoning is: doing or deciding (A) was right. This, in turn, allows Nasrallah to rebut the oppositions’ claim – that doing or deciding (A) was wrong. The overall structure of Nasrallah’s retrospective argumentation is presented in Figure 4.3, below.

Before concluding this section, I have to elaborate on the nature of arguments from positive and negative consequences advanced by Nasrallah, since these are predominantly used in his retrospective argumentation. The figure above shows that Nasrallah defends a descriptive standpoint (action A was right) using a normative or evaluative argument, i.e.

Rebut Counterclaim: Doing (A) was right

Positive Consequences of Doing (A) Negative Consequences of Failing to Do (A) Relatively Accepted Negative Consequences of Doing (A) Opponents’ Counterclaim: Doing (A) was

wrong

Negative Consequences of Doing (A)

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premises that point to the (un)desirable consequences of carrying out an action or

adopting a policy or a plan. The combination of a descriptive standpoint and a normative argument, as van Eemeren et al. (2009) explicate, leads to an inappropriate use of the scheme of causality. In this case, Nasrallah is using ad consequentiam. van Eemeren et al. (2009) identify two variants of this fallacious scheme. The first mimics the argument scheme from positive and negative consequences, while the other mimics the argument scheme reductio ad absurdum.64 This means that Nasrallah’s arguments from positive and negative consequences amount to the first variant of ad consequentiam. The negative consequences that Nasrallah enumerates as being a result of failing to act amounts to the second variant of ad consequentiam (the argument points to the negative consequences of the contrary to of the standpoint).

In this section, I present my model for integrating pragma-dialectics within the DHA’s analytical framework. In the next section, I outline the procedure followed in

implementing the proposed model.