By George Kaplan
A top spinning on a knife’s edge. Such is the state of world order, but that is not how it’s often described.
When the world is on the brink, how do diplomats and policymakers communicate? With language that is stale and austere in imagery, and lacking in precision. When faced with a nuclear apocalypse, it wouldn’t be unexpected to read a diplomatic dispatch that states “It is prudent to acknowledge the notable possibility of stringent escalation across all modalities if conceivable scenarios are effectuated.” For the field of diplomacy, that clasp securing the weak layers of social fabric binding a broken and writhing world order, intentionality and clarity of speech has never been more important, and never further from the present state of the field.
A year ago, when reviewing essays for a major academic contest, I came across a passage that exemplified the problems I was seeing: “Just like how the advancement of multilateral values strengthened collective efforts on issues crossing spacial borders of nations, publicity campaigns furthering longtermist causes could enhance responsible actions regarding problems encompassing moral borders of nations.” George Orwell wrote in his essay Politics and the English Language that “Modern writing at its worst does not consist of picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists of gumming together long strips of words which have been set to order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.” It is self-evident that Orwell’s description applies to the passage I gave, and indeed to many of the essays I reviewed and writing I read in the sphere of international relations more broadly. So what can be done to remedy this phenomenon? For a satisfactory answer, we must turn to the foundations of language.
We begin with words, the building blocks of language. Words themselves have no set meaning. Take a word like “force.” Is it an abstraction? Is it happening to something, or has it happened in the past? Well, let’s see if using it in a sentence clears anything up. “Force.” No, no clarity. A single word in a vacuum means nothing, because it could mean any number of things, and the ambiguity voids certain meaning. Let’s add another word, the word “use,” to make the phrase “use force.” Suddenly, the meaning becomes clear. Not only do we now have an instruction, we have an instructor and a recipient. The diverse meanings of “use” and “force,” when in conjunction modify each other, with the first word being an open command and the second word following it up with what to do. These sets of words are the foundation of meaning. But meaning cannot only be stripped if too few words are used, but also if too many are used. Take the examples used previously as textbook cases of the two ways many words can fail. With the diplomatic dispatch, phrases “like stringent escalation across all modalities” use precise-sounding words that nonetheless do not point to any discoverable objects, and are so vague as to hardly point to any meaning at all. This leads to one form of confusion. The other form is created by my second example. Phrases like “Just like how the advancement of multilateral values strengthened collective efforts” seem to make sense at first glance, but upon further study degrades into meaningless word-chaining. What is being advanced? What values? How are they being strengthened? No specific subject or actor is identified, no concrete example is given, and no clear cause-and-effect relationship established. Each term is abstract and could mean almost anything, and the sentence can’t be tested and verified in any way. So, how can the complex topics of international relations be conveyed without toeing the line of meaningless humbuggery? No doubt books can be written on the subject, but here the focus is on a perhaps neglected corner of communication: metaphors.
Metaphors are combinations of words that evoke complete and vivid pictures in the minds of their recipients. The metaphor “hammer and tongs” is three words, but evokes a complete mental video of a smith raining blows down on a piece of white-hot metal. No other form of the English language is quite so dense and clear, both attributes desperately needed in the befuddled realm of political language. Writers intending to integrate metaphors should begin by attempting to pinpoint the essence of their points, instead of describing them. If the purpose of a sentence is to describe the ferocity of a coup, find and employ imagery of comparable effect. In this way, essence can be encapsulated simply and communicated with unmatched candor. With metaphors, sentences like “The government collapsed unprecedentedly quickly in the face of its people’s violent ferocity” can simply become “the people fell on their regime like a guillotine’s blade” and phrases like “a comprehensive dialogue fostering harmonious international relations” transforms into “building bridges instead of walls.”
IR, like many types of political writing, has in part fallen prey to vagary, ostentation, and platitudes, but like Orwell, I have “hope that such decadence is curable.” Perhaps metaphors can serve as the shot of adrenaline necessary to jolt the field of international relations from its present verbal lethargy, and prepare it for coming times where political clarity will be sorely needed.
Footnotes:
1. And the rest of that particular policy essay was written along the same lines, and provided no
more clarity than the provided excerpt.
References
Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” Horizon, vol. 13, no. 76, Apr. 1946, pp. 252-265.
