Polite protectionism, or deglobalization?

Abstract

This study aims to explore persuasion and emotion in Western political discourse, as triggered by the passing of the American IRA, an utterly protectionist act, ostensibly aimed at curbing inflation and fighting climate change. An ad hoc corpus has been compiled containing propagandistic speeches by Joe Biden and responses to this law by EU leaders Von der Leyen and Vestager. A contrastive analysis was carried out, to unveil the lexical traits of persuasive and politically correct language, and then to analyse emotional polarity in either subcorpus. Finally, a discussion on narratives through the deployment of metaphors, personifications and presuppositions was undertaken. The ultimate goal of this study is to make translators and interpreters aware of the discursive traits deployed in modern political discourse defending or reacting to economic protectionism and unilateralism, and thus to reveal the inevitability of the defragmentation and deglobalisation trends that have started looming worldwide.