Abstract

This dissertation studies speeches by the EU Commissioners for Trade and for Humanitarian Aid and Development on Economic Partnership Agreeements (EPAs) between the EU and African, Caribbean and Pacific countries (ACPs) from a Critical Discourse Analysis perspective. Its line of inquiry focuses firstly on the discursive representation of (future) economic consequences of EPAs, then on who is discursively included in decision making and thirdly on forms of address to recipients of the speeches, including intertextual references.

With this study spanning much history and ideally requiring familiarity of texts produced by economists, NGOs and media with opinions on EPAs, I choose to use the “discourse historical approach” and the consequent “triangulation” (Reisgl and Wodak, 2001; Wodak et al, 1999; Wodak 2001).

Thus, the argumentation of these densely rhetorical speeches is compared to the arguments of the other aforementioned text producers. Debates around trade liberalisation and globalization are key. This paper particularly ponders the position of Ha-Joon Chang (2003) who argues that industrial countries, including EU countries first reached high development and then liberalised, of the United Nations Development Programme (2003) which maintains that trade liberalization is a result of development, not a prerequisite.

The analysis considers rhetoric, including argumentation and fallacies; at sentence level, pragmatics, including presuppositions, implicature and speech acts. These analytical tools find unity in considering context to go beyond the semantics of the texts and deem language to be a verbal activity. Furthermore, metaphors are analysed from cognitive linguistic and argumentative perspectives.

Analysis of the speeches indicates several contentious standpoints in the Commissioners’ rhetoric on the benefits of trade liberalisation and the usefulness of aid (at least in comparison to economists’ analysis). It analyses deixis (“us” / “them” groups), metaphors and modality in how pressure is seemingly applied on ACPs to sign EPAs and, thirdly, investigates how the speakers react to critique from other politicians and media sources using ‘path’ metaphors.