Given the intersection of our interest in leaders’ uses of national narratives, I am grateful to Ronald Krebs for his careful reading of my work and his suggestions for future directions, a number of which echo issues I raised in my review of his book.
As to what falls within the official narrative and what elements are open to change: National narratives are complex, multi-stranded, and hence require nuanced analysis to determine their boundaries. Krebs looked at one strand—that of national security understood in the traditional sense—but there are, depending upon case, many others: political ideology; economic philosophy; the role of the military; key episodes of national history; as well as those that I focused on—the founding story (which can itself have multiple parts), the ethnic, cultural and religious components of identity, and the conception of national unity. I presented two country cases—comparable material on Jordan informed, but was not included in, the published work—and for each I studied three strands of the narrative. My work suggests a number of potentially generalizable findings, among which is the fact that founding stories seem particularly resistant to change and that, unlike what previous works on narratives have suggested, defeat in war does not seem to trigger revisions. However, further investigation is needed to extend the analysis regarding the possibilities of rescripting other narrative strands in these same countries, as well as to test these findings in other cases.
A related issue is that of the multivocality of many of the narrative’s constituent elements. Analysis of these varied resonances requires not only careful readings of a large number of texts, but also a deep familiarity with a society’s language(s), history and culture. My cases offer several examples of leaders’ attempts to play on different registers of an existing element to legitimize what, ex ante, would have appeared unthinkable. Anwar Sadat managed discursively to turn military defeat in the 1973 October war into one of Egypt’s greatest victories; and in 1988 when King Husayn announced Jordan’s disengagement from the West Bank, he repurposed basic concepts from the hegemonic discourse of Arab solidarity to justify an otherwise heretical departure from Arab unity.
As for the limits of rescripting, those elements that have been longest and most widely emphasized should, by virtue of the presumed degree of inculcation among the public, be the most resistant to reformulation: basic identity characteristics, official national history, and the borders of the homeland. However, and related to Krebs’ question regarding the relationship between an effective legitimating narrative and policy debate, the outcry triggered by Egyptian President al-Sisi’s April 2016 announcement that Egypt would “return” to Saudi Arabia control of two islands is instructive. First, it shows that leaderships do miscalculate regarding influence of the existing narrative and its boundaries: a hypernationalistic military regime whose primary source of legitimation is a narrative claiming defense of the homeland should have anticipated a broad rejection of a relinquishment of sovereign territory. Second, however, it demonstrates that the state was more than prepared to repress those who dared to protest its transgression.
The coercive power of narratives is, of course, of a different order than that of tanks and guns. Much of what remains unexplained in Krebs’ and my analyses relates directly to the sources, forms and practice of this power. Our studies both clearly show that students of politics have much more work to do to explain the bases and workings of this narrative coercion.
