In her careful review of my book, Narrative and the Making of US National Security, Laurie Brand raises a number of thoughtful and important questions. Before I try to answer, I want to highlight how much Brand and I have in common—despite our divergent regional expertise, analytical foci, and theoretical tastes. Not only do we both believe that dominant narratives—whether national narratives, in her case, or narratives of national security, in mine—shape political processes and outcomes, but we both (I think) believe that they matter in more or less the same way: by making possible the legitimation of certain policies and rendering impossible the legitimation of others. We both see the articulation and rearticulation, or scripting and rescripting, of political narratives as resting on leadership, albeit confined at different times to varying degrees. We have even both reached some similar conclusions, despite the different political systems we explore—notably with respect to the narrative impact of military operations ending in (perceived) defeat and victory.
I suspect Brand would further agree that narratives are nested and that the fixing of meaning that inheres in narrative scripting requires, at the same time, the socially sustainable fitting of a lower-order, less capacious storyline into a relatively settled, higher-order, more capacious storyline. In our books, Brand and I attend to different levels in this nesting, and both of us pay less attention to the relationships between these levels. In short, we approach our subjects largely in parallel, and our analytical foci are complementary. There is a real opportunity here for productive dialogue—which we will just begin to explore within this forum and which I hope we will continue beyond its bounds.
I have opened with this preamble because what unites the participants in this dialogue is far greater than what separates us. This may not be apparent as we settle into the usual pattern of critique and response. But it is worth emphasizing.
Brand’s review raises three points that I would like to address here: how we know whether narrative situations are settled or unsettled; how much analytical leverage we can gain by delving into the content of narratives; and what role a range of other, more material factors play in explaining a particular narrative’s rise to dominance or its fall from that perch.
First, as Brand notes, much hinges in my account on the distinction between settled and unsettled narrative situations. In settled narrative situations, there is a dominant narrative, in whose terms elites generally legitimate their preferred policies. In unsettled narrative situations, debates are comparatively unstructured, as multiple legitimate narratives swirl about (pp. 32–36). In the book, I employ varied methods to ascertain the nature of the narrative situation—human and computerized content analysis, public opinion surveys (more the questions posed than the answers provided), contemporary observers’ assessments, and audience response (pp. 60–61, 195–200). For decades, policymakers have tracked public opinion, if only to manipulate it. They could in principle employ my methods in real-time to track the opportunities for narrative scripting and rescripting. Contra Brand, there is nothing inherent in the method that renders the analysis purely ex post. Brand is right that narrative situations are properly placed along a continuum of more or less settled, rather than the dichotomy I adopt for analytical convenience. To this, I plead guilty—albeit in very good company.
Second, Brand asks what renders alternative narratives more or less sustainable beyond the conjuncture of narrative situation, speaker authority, and rhetorical mode on which I place my theoretical bets. I would expect Brand to be skeptical that there are substantive constraints on narration, since, as I wrote in my review, her conception of narrative seems to be thoroughly instrumentalized. I agree that we cannot construct generalizable theories identifying certain narratives as more or less plausible based on their content. My view runs contrary to that of political psychologists, who advance general accounts of resonant frames, and of narratologists, who offer guidelines to good storytelling (pp. 52–55). But this does not mean that where there is a (leader’s) will, there is a rhetorical way—a view that I think Brand might endorse. Narrative constraints go beyond the deeper national identity narratives in which they are nested. Their constraints are rooted in the logic of path dependence. They lie at the intersection of past articulations, the expectations those articulations produce, and observed events. As in other path dependent accounts, we must identify those elements via induction before we can generate more specific claims. That is why, even though my theoretical discussion of these matters is brief, they feature prominently in the case studies.
Third, Brand proposes other factors and processes—elites’ capacity and interests, straightforward coercion—to explain the dominance of particular narratives. I agree that successful narrative projects normally require the support of those who have large megaphones and are prepared to use them. I can hardly deny that some narrative projects become dominant because competing voices are squashed. Perhaps, in the repressive regimes Brand studies, that is typical: narrative opponents are thrown in jail or disappeared or intimidated into silence. But if there is no conceivable space for opposition, if brute force is the order of the day, if it is coercion all the way down, that is where we should put our analytical focus—not on the regime’s narration and its quest for legitimacy. I don’t think Brand herself believes this, or she would not have written her book. In many authoritarian regimes, not just democracies, there is space for opposition and thus meaningful, if constrained, contestation. Opponents often have substantial resources at their disposal and nevertheless either fail to gain traction or choose not to employ them. This is the universe of cases that I find puzzling and to which my theory speaks.
We have just begun to write the story of narrative in comparative politics and international relations. I expect the conversation will continue beyond this Critical Dialogue.
