2018-11-19 Tutkimus: Suomen ja Ruotsin pääministerien pakolaispuheet 2015-2016

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Suomen ja Ruotsin pääministerien solidaarisuuspuheelle äkkiloppu syksyllä 2015

Suomen pääministerin Juha Sipilän ja Ruotsin pääministerin Stefan Löfvenin puheissa tapahtui täyskäännös syksyllä 2015 niin sanotun pakolaiskriisin jatkuessa. Kriisin alkuvaiheen tunteikas ja pääministerien omista kokemuksista ammentava solidaarisuuspuhe vaihtui rationaalisiin faktoihin nojaavaan retoriikkaan, jossa pakolaisista puhutaan lukuina ja yhtenä joukkona.

Näin kahden pääministerin syksyn 2015 pakolaiskriisiin liittyneitä puheita, lausuntoja ja kannanottoja analysoidaan juuri julkaistussa tutkimuksessa Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology -tiedelehdessä. Kannanottoja seurattiin kesään 2016 asti.

Tutkimuksessa havaittiin, että erityisesti pääministeri Sipilän puheessa alkaa syksystä 2015 esiintyä enemmän erontekoa "todellisten avuntarvitsijoiden" ja muiden, "ei aidosti hädänalaisten" välillä.

Tutkimuksessa tarkasteltiin, millä tavalla pääministerit esittävät itseään ja muita suhteessa pakolaiskriisiin. Vertaileva analyysi paljasti, että Sipilän ja Löfvenin retoriikassa oli paljon samankaltaisuuksia, vaikka maiden aiemman maahanmuuttopolitiikan sallivuudessa ja tutkimushetken hallituskokoonpanoissa oli eroa.

Ruotsissa hallituksessa olivat sosiaalidemokraatit ja vihreät. Löfvenin retoriikassa Ruotsin tiukentuvasta maahanmuuttopolitiikasta syytettiin oppositiossa olevia ruotsidemokraatteja ja poliittista oikeistoa.
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Kansan Uutiset 19.11.2018

Inari Sakki, Katarina Pettersson: Managing stake and accountability in Prime Ministers' accounts of the "refugee crisis": A longitudinal analysis

Pikavilkaisulla kyseinen diskurssianalyysi vaikutti yllättävän (vrt. tekijät) kiihkottomalta. Rasismikin mainitaan vain kolme kertaa. Tosin joitain selkeitä asiavirheitä sattui heti silmään. Suomessa ei tosiaankaan "korvattu avoimia rajoja massiivisella rajavalvonnalla", ja Ruotsinkin osalta tuo on melkoista liioittelua. Turvapaikkapolitiikan kiristykset jäivät suurimmaksi osaksi vain lupauksiksi, ja hallituksen maahanmuutto-ohjelma osoittautui hallitukselle pelkäksi paperiksi jo muutama viikko sen julkistamisen jälkeen.

Samoin kirjoituksessa toistetaan legendaa, että Ruotsilla olisi Suomeen verrattuna liberaalimpi turvapaikkapolitiikka, kun Suomi on oikeasti ollut viimeiset kymmenen vuotta se liberaalimpi maa. Tämä vain korostuu nykyään, kun Suomen hyväksymisprosentit ovat olleet tänä vuonna tärkeimmillä turvapaikanhakijakansallisuuksilla noin kaksinkertaiset Ruotsiin verrattuna.

Mutta muuten ihan hyviä havaintoja, kuinka pääministerit ovat väistelleet turvapaikkapolitiikan kipukohtia keskustelua ohjaamalla tai ihan vain vaikenemalla.

6 CONCLUDING DISCUSSION

In this section, we discuss the conclusions we draw from the analyses above and elaborate upon their implications for the discursive study of political rhetoric on refugees. Our analyses of the two PMs' discourse about the 2015 refugee crisis demonstrates not only how the crisis and the different agents involved in it—asylum seekers, Finnish/Swedish people, the EU, other countries, and the PMs themselves—were constructed but also how these constructions were oriented to perform particular actions. In both countries, in the beginning of the refugee crisis a discourse of refugees in need was constructed to portray the PMs in a favourable light and as examples of humane and solidary helpers and, thus, to attribute responsibility for the crisis to all Finnish and Swedish citizens—including the PMs themselves. Humanization (Kirkwood, 2017) and avowing sympathy (Nightingale et al., 2017; Sambaraju et al., 2017) have been shown to characterize parliamentary debates about the refugee crisis in the UK and in Ireland. As in this line of research, in the present study, sympathy for refugees was contingent upon the context in which it was located. In the Finnish PM's discourse, for example, sympathy was expressed mostly at the beginning of the crisis, before the refugees arrived in Finland, and on the other hand, after the crisis in spring 2016, when the number of newcomers decreased to normal levels. Thus, the more distant the crisis, the more positive accounts of "refugees" seemed to become (see also Goodman et al., 2017). The Finnish and Swedish PMs' discourse brings forth the same dilemmatic pattern that has been found in previous research: It is possible to treat others as humans, whilst nevertheless refraining from providing support for or inclusion of those regarded to be from "beyond the national borders." As previous research (Leudar et al., 2008) has emphasized, discursive constructions about refugees and asylum seekers—especially those articulated in the mass media or by influential political actors—are not "merely" discourse. Rather, these constructions have implications for the ways in which refugees and asylum seekers construct their own identities and ultimately, thus, for their wellbeing as well as for their possibilities to be included in society.

Very few discursive studies have taken a longitudinal approach (see Goodman et al., 2017, for an exception). In the present study, such a perspective allowed us to analyse the changes and continuities in the discourse during the 1‐year period after the beginning of the refugee crisis in Finland and Sweden. As the analysis shows, some changes occurred abruptly, and some evolved more slowly. For example, in both countries, although somewhat earlier in Finland as compared to Sweden, following the drastic increase in the number of asylum seekers in September 2015 the rhetoric took a sudden shift in a harsher direction, focusing on the costs and problems of the crisis for the nation‐state. By contrast, in the Finnish PM's rhetoric, the division between "real" and "bogus" refugees developed more gradually. This division did not appear in the discourse of the Swedish PM, where, rather, a gradual shift towards talking of refugees in numbers and masses, rather than as human beings, occurred.

In both Nordic countries, the blame for the refugee crisis was attributed to the international community, to the European Union, and "other countries" that were portrayed as avoiding responsibility. Thus, in the same way as in Sambaraju et al.'s (2017) study of the Irish political debate on refugees, a supranational category—specifically the EU—served as a rhetorical resource that allowed speakers to argue both for the inclusion of refugees and for them to be kept outside the national borders. Indeed, supranational identities, alongside the constructions of nations (e.g., Augoustinos et al., 2002; Every & Auguoustinos, 2007; Reicher, Haslam, & Rath, 2008; Reicher & Hopkins, 2001a, 2001b), may be used in the rhetorical management of stake and accountability.

Both Nordic PMs aimed to present themselves in a positive light and as active agents—as helpers, protectors of law, problem solvers, and as fathers of their nations. But it seems that it was not always beneficial to come across as agentic—especially when faced with a controversial topic such as a harder asylum policy. In such cases, they tried either to silence the entire topic or attribute the responsibility to other agents, to the EU or to the countries who "do not share their responsibility." One can also avoid responsibility for "bad politics" by hiding behind law and judicial systems, as we saw in the Finnish PM's rhetoric. Moreover, our analyses demonstrated that PMs may flexibly deploy the rhetorical strategies of "out‐there‐ness" (Potter, 1996), and thus, externalize agency when they engage in negative evaluations of the Other.

Our comparative analysis demonstrated significant similarities in the Finnish and Swedish PMs' talk, especially with regard to the transfer from a discourse of pathos and ethos, describing refugees in terms of individualism and humaneness, to a discourse of logos, emphasizing rationality, justifying sharpened immigration policies, and homogenizing refugees. However, as our longitudinal approach allowed us to illuminate, the shifts in the discourses occurred at different points in time in the two PMs' talk, reflecting the historical, social, and political contexts in which the talk was produced. In other words, the different historical paths of the two countries' immigration policies, with Sweden having a history of liberal immigration policy, thus requiring more defensive and offensive rhetoric when arguing for its sharpening, as well as the specific political situation; for example, what the position of the populist radical right was, had implications for the PMs' discourse. The Swedish PM could feasibly scapegoat the SD and the political right in opposition, whereas the Finnish PM, with the populist radical right as a government partner, engaged more heavily in distinctions between "real, needing" and "false, undeserving" refugees (e.g., Capdevila & Callaghan, 2008; Lynn & Lea, 2003), and in the double rhetorical strategy of positive ingroup‐representation and negative outgroup‐representation—the good Finns against the problematic refugees—that is a common feature of populist rhetoric (e.g., Reicher et al., 2008; Sakki & Pettersson, 2016; Van Dijk, 1993). Together, these findings highlight the importance of studying political discourse as part of its surrounding historical, social, and political context. As this is the central emphasis of CDP (cf.,e.g., Edley, 2001), the approach enabled a particularly rich exploration of the political discourse of the PMs' at both the micro and macro levels. As we hope to have demonstrated in our analyses, Aristotle's perspective on rhetoric and CDP are compatible approaches, with partly overlapping notions: CDP provides fine‐grained, sophisticated tools for the analysis of discourse, whereas Aristotle's notions concerning broader patterns of rhetoric were particularly useful for our analyses of changes and continuities in the discourse. These tools, together with our longitudinal approach, permitted us to analyse how the PMs' discourse evolved in relation to the changing social and political situation.

Intriguingly, the two Nordic PMs gave statements and interviews about the refugee crisis only when the situation so demanded—otherwise the topic was either left to the Interior Minister or to the populist voices. Regarding the topicality of the issue, it was striking to us how little rhetoric by the PMs about the refugee crisis was available. Our corpus may seem large, but it is important to note that usually the same interview or statement was circulated in several media. We conclude that the refugee crisis was a topic that the PMs did not want to engage in. One of the major challenges of any qualitative analysis, not only of discourse analysis, is precisely the question of how to study such silences and gaps. However, CDP is not devoid of tools, as Billig's (1987) idea of the two‐sidedness of rhetoric suggests considering also those arguments that are argued against or left implicit. If a topic is discursively mitigated or completely avoided, it may be a sign of its great significance for the speaker—such as the measures taken for hardening immigration or asylum policies. Provided the amount of such silences in our material, as well as the dilemmatic character of the two PMs' discourse, and given the significant political influence of any country's PM, we strongly encourage further social psychological research into political leaders' discourse on asylum and immigration.