Framing, resonance and war: Foregrounds and backgrounds of cultural congruence
| Author | Markus Kornprobst |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1354066117741675 |
research-article2017
EJ R
I
Article
European Journal of
International Relations
Framing, resonance and war:
2019, Vol. 25(1) 61 –85
© The Author(s) 2017
Foregrounds and backgrounds
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066117741675
DOI: 10.1177/1354066117741675
of cultural congruence
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Markus Kornprobst
Vienna School of International Studies, Austria
Abstract
This article addresses the communicative processes through which leaders succeed
or fail to generate public support for going to war. In order to answer this question,
I rely on the framing literature’s insight that cultural congruence helps make frames
resonate with an audience. Yet, my argument examines this phenomenon in greater
depth. There is more to cultural congruence than selecting commonplaces such as
analogies and metaphors from a repertoire that the audience widely shares. Culturally
congruent framing also features a genre and more general themes that are taken out of
such a repertoire. My empirical analysis of Tony Blair’s communicative moves to sway
the British public to fight over Kosovo and Iraq provides empirical evidence for this
framework. This study makes two important contributions. First, it highlights that public
contestations about going to war criss-cross the overly neat categories proposed by
most scholars interested in this phenomenon. Second, in identifying different dimensions
of framing, this article deepens our understandings of cultural congruence.
Keywords
Cultural congruence, framing, intervention, political communication, repertoire,
resonance
Introduction
How do leaders generate public support for going to war? In the last two decades,
International Relations scholarship has become increasingly interested in investigating
this question. Most authors contend that public support is a function of instrumental
reasons, such as low casualties and success (Gartner, 2011; Mueller, 2005). This majority
Corresponding author:
Markus Kornprobst, Vienna School of International Studies, Favoritenstraße 15a, Vienna, 1040, Austria.
Email: markus.kornprobst@da-vienna.ac.at
62
European Journal of International Relations 25(1)
view is challenged by a number of contending perspectives. Most notably, scholars
emphasise justice reasons (Berinsky, 2007; Welch, 2012), contrasting between Self and
Other (Brewer, 2009), and framing processes (Entman, 2004; Zellman, 2015).
This study develops two key arguments. First, framing overcomes the literature’s
compartmentalisation of reasons for going to war. Leaders do not follow the overly clean
conceptual lines drawn up by scholars. When they make a case for going to war, they do
not confine themselves to instrumental or justice causes, and they do not abstain from
contrasting either. The framing literature is very well suited to analyse how leaders make
use of different aspects of war justifications because it is situated at a higher level of
abstraction than the other perspectives. Framing is selecting and linking clues from a
repertoire ‘in order to perceive, identify, and label’ (Goffman, 1974: 21). Thus, framing
promotes ‘a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or
treatment recommendation’ (Entman, 1993: 52). It is up to the researcher to trace how
actors select and combine and with what effects in an unfolding situation.
Second, I contend that cultural congruence is multidimensional. Cultural congruence
is a key concept in the framing literature. In order for a message to resonate with an audi-
ence, the clues that communicators select and combine need to be taken out of a reper-
toire that is widely shared by the audience. This makes these clues ‘noticeable,
understandable, memorable, and emotionally charged’ (Entman, 2003: 417). Much of the
existing literature equates cultural congruence with catchphrases that are taken out of a
widely shared repertoire, for instance, metaphors ranging from medicine to boxing
(Lakoff, 1991). I agree that catchphrases — or, more generally put, commonplaces —
constitute an important dimension of cultural congruence. I refer to it as the congruence
of commonplaces. My analysis, however, does not stop at this dimension of congruence.
I uncover two more hidden dimensions. The congruence of themes is about interlocutors
employing broad classifications, that is, something akin to a master frame (Snow and
Benford, 1992), which are selected from a widely shared repertoire. The congruence of
genre — I borrow the notion of genre from rhetorical theory (Aristotle, 1975: 1358a–b;
Quintilian, 2001: 3.3.14) — is the most foundational one of them all. Interlocutors fall
back upon an order of basic categories of a framing process that is in sync with a widely
shared repertoire.
Probing the plausibility of this theoretical framework, I examine Tony Blair’s efforts
to win over the British public to go to war over Kosovo and Iraq. I argue that this yields
empirical evidence for the generative mechanism that links the three dimensions of cul-
tural congruence to resonance. During the Kosovo crisis, Blair’s framing was highly
culturally congruent throughout. He fell back on the military intervention genre that is
found in the dominant British repertoire: prior to the intervention, he emphasised cause;
at the onset, he hiked up contrast; and during the war, he returned to stressing cause. His
framing was also thematically congruent, putting justice causes ahead of instrumental
ones, as well as targeted demarcation (against Milošević) ahead of an all-encompassing
one (against the entire Serb people). Last but not least, Blair selected commonplaces
from the dominant repertoire such as the appeasement analogy. This high cultural con-
gruence facilitated Blair’s attempts to set the tone in the public debate. Political elites
from different parties and journalists from different media outlets echoed his framing.
Public opinion was on his side.
Kornprobst
63
During the Iraq crisis, by contrast, Blair’s framing was not culturally congruent
throughout. While his messages put to use the widely taken-for-granted military inter-
vention genre during the entire crisis, he relied on themes and commonplaces that were
less familiar to his audience during much of the pre-war debates. He tried to make an
instrumental cause stick with the public (threat to national security) and specified it
with a key term that was anything but a commonplace (‘pre-emption’). In mid-Febru-
ary 2003, that is, only a few weeks before the onset of war, the prime minister revisited
his framing. Moving towards a justice cause as well as invoking commonplaces of
Britain as the guardian of international order and human rights, his messages added
thematic and commonplace congruence to the congruence of genre. From then on, his
messages continued to feature a high level of cultural congruence. At the onset of war,
Blair emphasised the ritual targeted demarcation over the justice cause, praising British
soldiers and vilifying the opponent leader. During the war, he reverted back to stress-
ing his justice causes. Adding cultural congruence made a major difference for Blair.
As long as his framing lacked thematic and commonplace congruence, he was severely
criticised. Britain witnessed its greatest anti-war demonstrations ever. When he
switched his framing around and increased its cultural congruence, however, his mes-
sages came to resonate.
This article makes two key contributions. The first one pertains to the literature on
how leaders generate public support for going to war. We should not assume that all there
is to winning over the public to go to war is emphasising a certain cause or a certain
demarcation throughout. The concept of framing provides analytical opportunities for
tracing how the actors we study put together and adapt intersubjectively compelling
messages, including how they move from certain causes to others and even from causes
to contrasts, and vice versa. The second contribution adds to our understanding of the
framing literature’s central concept of cultural congruence. The phenomenon has fore-
ground and background dimensions. Scratching at the surface of cultural congruence,
authors tend to reduce the concept to what they find in the foreground of a debate. What
I refer to as the congruence of commonplaces is squarely located in this foreground. It is
easily visible for the actors who communicate with one another, as well as the analysts
who try to make sense of the actors’ communicative encounters. Yet, we need to dig
deeper. Background dimensions — themes and genres — are less visible but certainly no
less consequential.1 If the order of basic categories of frames (genre) and/or the classifi-
cations for elaborating on these categories (themes) are not culturally congruent, frames
cannot resonate. Even more so, my empirical findings suggest that the background is
ontologically prior to the foreground. The selection of, say, incongruent themes (back-
ground) predisposes actors to select incongruent commonplaces (foreground).
This article is organised into six sections. First, I discuss the existing literature on war
and public support. Second, I address the strengths and weaknesses of the framing litera-
ture in further depth. Third, I revisit the concept of cultural congruence. Fourth, I...
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