The Discourse of the New World Order: ‘Out-Casting’the Double Face of Threat

Abstract

This article suggests that a productive way to make sense of the discourse and actions surrounding the 11 September 2001 attacks, and thereafter, is to view them within the larger context of the discourse of the ‘New World Order’. This involves an intertextual analysis of President Bush’s speeches since 11 September, along with speeches made by the previous presidents, George Bush Senior and Bill Clinton. Our focus is on a significant element of this discourse – the definition of a moral order, as constituted vis-‡-vis the identification and explication of two faces of threat: Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. We propose a way of analyzing the constitution of the ‘twin terrors’ through ‘out-casting’, a macro-strategy that encompasses the four micro-strategies of ‘enemy construction’, ‘criminalization’, ‘orientalization’ and ‘(e)vilification’, all which rest upon a logic of binarism. We argue that such a discursive bipolarity perpetuates, in the post-Cold War international system, a blueprint for heightened difference and conflict.