Narrating Politics as Myth

Narratives are virtually omnipresent in social relations (including aca­demia and politics). They can appear in very different forms and within various genres and subgenres, particularly when the lines between fiction and non-fiction are blurred (Culler 1984).

Through narration, ways of perceiving reality can be changed (Fludernik 1996, 36). Political myths are a specific form of narratives in that they build on strong, symbolic pictures to carry significance and have clear historic dimensions (e.g. Munck 2002; Teschke 2003). Operating with the often vaguely used notion of myth, one can roughly distinguish a posi­tivist use from a post-positivist use of the concept, with the latter being ‘ideological narratives that draw on deep-seated beliefs about the nature of reality’ (Little 2007, 51).

In a positivist way the concept is used, for example, to state that civil society organisations (CSOs) are overestimated as salutary political actors in world politics (e.g. Frankenberg 2008, 14ff; Heins 2002, 85). This is in line with colloquial understandings of myth as something supernatural and fictitious or imaginary, unreasonably exaggerated, and idealised. In contrast, we seek to explore the effects of CSP as a specific form of political narrative, thus concurring with a post-positivist understanding of myth.

What Political Myths Are

Rather than as a detachment from reality (Dahl 1998, 31), myths should be understood and analysed as narratives that make something seem to be true (Weber 2001, xvi, 2).

Accordingly, a myth has certain characteristics that make it stand out as an especially powerful narrative. The first is significance (Bottici 2007, 7-8). It operates by transporting a strong symbolic picture. The myth of global civil society, for instance, provides ‘a “co-ordinated picture” bring­ing together a series of images and sentiments with great intensity, thus providing us with an instant perception’ (Munck 2002, 349).

Secondly, a myth usually involves a historical dimension. On the one hand, myths are historic stories in the sense that they link the past, the present, and the future, through references to certain versions of the past and the anticipation of future events, possibly as desirable ends (Little 2007, 71-2). On the other hand, continuous repetitions in a process, ‘ over time’, establish a myth (Dahl 1998, 30, original emphasis). Myths must be reiterated and at times readjusted by adding new or rather updated narrative elements to the core narratives of the myth. Ultimately, a myth is a historic story, although it is often made to appear ahistorical. Barthes emphasises the ability of myths to present themselves as ahistoric by veil­ing their origins and the dependence on particular social and political contexts: ‘myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it, things lose the memory that they once were made’ (Barthes 2009, 169). A myth, thus, is both situated in a certain temporality and detached from it.

Thirdly, a myth follows a certain pattern of narration and usually includes a certain configuration of protagonists and antagonists, although this is often missing in modern accounts of political myths. Tudor (1972) points to the role of heroes in political myth, stating that they are rarely individuals but rather social groups (including whole nations, ethnic groups, or others) that can be united against a common enemy or in order to overcome some common ordeal. The social impact of struggles can generate political myths that create protagonists around the communities affected by these struggles.

What Political Myths Do

Political myths turn the radical subjectivity of storytelling into collec­tive experience and help stabilise expectations, identities, and knowledge. Mythical narratives in politics include or exclude certain groups, create hierarchies between them, and produce subject positions. Political narra­tives are therefore always characterised by, and/or constitutive of, power relations (cf. Goetze, Chap. 5). Myths produce meaning (and signifi­cance) and, at the same time, work to exclude alternative renderings of reality (Munck 2002, 349). Through this process, myths convey a sense of political realities that eludes further critical questioning and have a particularly compelling impact on political practices. Throughout history, political myths have been employed to legitimise political systems as a whole and political decisions that depend on these systems. They still rely on powerful proponents and a continuous practice of telling and retell­ing for the sake of stabilising political systems, by giving ‘a persuasive account of how this is going to happen’, and generating support (Little 2007, 70-71).

Myths function in different ways: they give advice about the appropri­ate behaviour in a given societal context, guide moral decisions, and cre­ate a sociocultural framework that supports a certain social order. Their ahistoricity and validity in more than one particular context legitimises political orders by naturalising certain practices, processes, or ideas:

Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact (Barthes 2009, 169-170).

Thus, myths structure reality and respond to very particular problems. Barthes’ understanding also implies a depoliticising function of myths in politics. Their constant reiterations and actualisations, the spread of the mythical narrative across different social segments, and their reproduction in different contexts make them seem factual instead of political or politi­cally motivated.

The Narration of Myth

The normalisation and naturalisation, i.e. depoliticisation, of certain ideas and concepts is sustained by narrating them and thereby suppressing other possible narratives. Narratives can create (the fiction of) authenticity, his­toricity, authority, and social acceptance (Kreiswirth 2000, 310), trans­forming ‘what is particular, cultural and ideological (like a story told by an IR tradition) into what appears to be universal, natural, and purely empirical’ (Weber 2001, 6). These functions of narratives are facilitated by the way they help us make sense of the complexity of information we are confronted with, by interpreting it in a certain, (seemingly) coherent way, affecting how people feel, how they make sense of reality, and how they relate to others (Fludernik 1996, 27; Patterson and Monroe 1998, 315— 316). Thus, a political myth is able to produce and reproduce the objects and subjects of its own narrative—at least in its particular social context.

The idea of the fantasmatic logic (Glynos and Howarth 2007; Laclau 2005) can be used to account for the depoliticising effects of myths. The term originates from the Essex School of discourse theory, referring to one analytical field of social inquiry—the social—which impacts on the field of the political. The radical contingency of the social constantly challenges the identity of subjects, causing the need for stability. The fantasmatic logic contributes to protecting subjects’ identities and denies the possibil­ity of politics by depoliticising social reality. It helps ‘to maintain existing social structures by pre-emptively absorbing dislocations, preventing them from becoming [politicised and transformed]’ (Glynos and Howarth 2007, 146).

To sum up and to make these theoretical underpinnings fruitful for our narration analysis, we can differentiate two functions of political myths: first, they serve as a narrated rendering of political practice and veil the contingent nature of events; second, they legitimise political systems by depoliticising their central claims. We seek to show in what follows how fantasmatic logics are at work in the myth of CSP in global governance.