Securitization,power,intertextuality: Discourse theory and the translations of organized crime

Abstract

While a range of recent accounts have suggested developing a more contextualist conceptualization of securitization theory, few analyses have actually provided detailed operationalizations of the interplay of language, power and context in securitizations. By suggesting and specifying a way of analysing securitizing moves in relation to intertextual linkages with popular culture, this article examines such interplay in processes of securitization. In doing so, the article not only suggests a contextualist operationalization of securitization theory but also hopes to contribute to studies on discourse, intertextuality and pop culture in international relations more generally.

Keywords

securitization intertextuality power organized crime popular culture

Introduction

This article conceptualizes and illustrates the notion of a politics of intertextuality with regard to securitizations by examining the decisive period for the framing of organized crime in early US security discourse. This early securitization represents the point of entry of organized crime into a global threat discourse and its establishment as a global threat frame (see Woodiwiss, 2001: 362–89). From (and on the basis of) this early securitization in the USA, a particular interpretation of organized crime spread to various local (national, regional and global) sites worldwide, became translated into these locales, adapted to respective local particularities, and ultimately established itself as natural and hegemonic.¹ The local act of attaching a distinct meaning to organized crime in the USA thus significantly prestructured the discourse that followed and was therefore at least partly constitutive for the global action of securitizing the phenomenon, establishing organized crime firmly as a contingent collective interpretation, stabilized and temporarily fixed in a specific name.

Yet, this decisive period of framing in early US security discourse is itself only one intervention within a much longer temporal sequence. As much as subsequent discourses have drawn upon and translated the US discourse (see, for example, Stritzel, 2011b), so did the US discourse only translate representations in previous and parallel discourses. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of securitizing moves in relation to organized crime is the high degree of synchronic and diachronic intertextuality in the form of various linkages between political, literary, media, academic and cinematographic discourse, as well as linkages between present and past representations throughout an exceptionally long sequence of evolution. Furthermore, this intertextuality of organized crime is also strongly intertwined with various dynamics of sociopolitical power. In fact, it is difficult to find a securitization that is intertextually as rich as that of organized crime but at the same time so strongly and directly power political. Myth, popular culture and power politics are here entangled in interesting ways, traceable in securitizing moves, political struggles and careful orchestrations of public spectacles.

Analysing these entanglements and the politics of meaning involved has traditionally been the home ground of various reflectivist (mainly critical constructivist, post-structuralist and international political sociology) conceptualizations of discourse in international relations and security studies (for overviews, see, for example, Milliken, 1999; Fierke, 2007), which understand social dynamics and political decisionmaking as a process of creation, contestation and change of meaning, as a result of which the power of language and meaning become an essential part of sociopolitical practice and reflectivist academic analysis.

A principal line of division within reflectivism concerns what Anna Holzscheiter (2010) has referred to as the difference between a dominant problematization of ‘power of discourse’ (i.e. a traditionally post-structuralist focus on the constitutive effects of discourse on subjectivities, usually seen as broad, historically specific structures or structurations of meaning) versus an alternative, less developed problematization of ‘power in discourse’ (i.e. the sociopolitical resources and power positions of actors, their political struggles and processes of authorization at specific moments in time to create, challenge, change or amend existing meaning structures, potentially establishing new discursive hegemonies in history). Such a principal taxonomy within discourse theory of ‘power of discourse’ versus ‘power in discourse’ resembles reading perspectives on discourse through structuration theory on the basis of the (in)famous structure–agency problematique in the social sciences.²

This article suggests a way of analysing the entanglements of organized crime by drawing on securitization theory. Yet, while the concept of securitization can be utilized to study these entanglements in principle, the theory suffers from the lack of both a broader social theory of discourse and a more specific theorization of sociopolitical processes. By providing these theorizations, this article develops a specific methodology for studying securitizing moves in relation to intertextual linkages with pop culture and the power politics of intertextuality, which will be illustrated with references to translations of organized crime in early US security discourse.

Discourse, agency and sociality: A social theory of securitization

If one follows the taxonomy suggested above, then the post-structuralist position (despite its own internal diversity, which is often deliberately overlooked; see, for example, Hansen, 2006: xviii; Herschinger, 2011: 7; Der Derian and Shapiro, 1989: xiii) is marked by a focus on the constitutive power of discourse, which constitutes subjectivities and thereby excludes certain ways of thinking and speaking (within certain historical periods and/or geographical locations). In this sense, post-structuralists stress that discourse ‘delineates the terms of intelligibility whereby a particular reality can be known and acted upon’ (Doty, 1996: 5), which represents a certain form of power in social relations (for an overview, see Barnett and Duvall, 2005).

However, at least for many post-structuralist scholars in international relations, this general perspective on discourse also suggests a principal scepticism towards or clear rejection of a meaningful notion of agency and/or instrumental and strategic action within discourse. For these scholars, in particular those who see themselves in the tradition of Foucault (curiously against Foucault’s own perspective/position),³ this claim follows from a focus on the constitution of the social subject through the discursive establishment of social order – that is, a conceptualization of discourse through which subjectivity and social order are inseparately constituted together. As a consequence, speakers mainly appear as representations (or passive bearers) of broader hegemonic discourses that govern subjectivities, and their individual speech acts thus merely reproduce and instantiate rather than truly ‘produce’ these subjectivities. In the light of this, any reference to powerful agency within discourse and thus a seemingly extra- or non-discursive ontology is immediately accused of ‘being caught within modernist assumptions’ and therefore ‘epistemologically wrong’ (Ashley, 1989: 275), ‘epistemologically naïve’ (Hülsse and Spencer, 2008: 574), or at least philosophically contradictory/incommensurable (Howarth and Torfing, 2005).

This article holds that this is a partial and unnecessarily dogmatic reading of the complex reality of discourse dynamics and the multiplicity of different analytical lenses through which one might engage with those dynamics.⁴ Furthermore, even within an explicitly post-structuralist conceptualization of discourse, such as that outlined above, single agents can well be seen as ‘dislocated’ within a given social order, discursive fields can be understood as only imperfectly constituted and severely ruptured, and subjectivities can be multiple, overlapping and thus contradictory. All these deviations from the idea of a ‘total discourse’ perfectly governing our subjectivities create room for a better understanding of agency, change and transgression within discourse. And, if this is the case, then the challenge rather seems to be to conceptualize and specify agency and the dynamics of sociopolitical struggle within broader discursive formations with which these more specific dynamics are closely intertwined. This can be done from various perspectives.

The perspective chosen in this article may be read as a discursive constructivist conceptualization of discourse, broadly defined. In essence, such a position refuses to limit analysis to an analysis of text or language, and the implication that comes with that of reconstructing the production of meaning solely via reconstructions of references to and delineations from elements within particular textual fields. However, while instead insisting on the relevance of a social space of discourse, it also refuses to limit sociopolitical analysis to an analysis of broad macro-structures or logics of formation of discourse at the expense of a meaningful concept of agency and power in discourse.

Such a more sociological (ultimately structurationist) conceptualization of discourse is arguably most clearly articulated by scholars in the tradition of critical discourse analysis (see, in particular, Fairclough, 1992; see also Fairclough and Wodak, 1997; Weiss and Wodak, 2002; Wodak, 2001; Wodak and Meyer, 2001),⁵ which in turn stands in a longer tradition of neo-Marxist readings of discourse (see Purvis and Hunt, 1993) with various resemblances to the early works of Jutta Weldes in security studies (see, in particular, Weldes, 1996). Unfortunately, this rather well-established and comprehensive strand of discourse theory in applied linguistics has so far been largely ignored in international relations and security studies (for exceptions, see, for example, Holzscheiter, 2010; Stritzel, 2007; see also Jackson, 2005), with most discourse scholars in international relations typically relying rather loosely on a few ‘post-structuralist classics’ such as Campbell, Ashley, Walker, Der Derian or Shapiro.⁶

For critical discourse analysis scholars, text analysis is always the (insufficient) starting point of one’s analysis that needs to be supplemented by broader sociopolitical and genealogical/historical research. In contrast to post-structuralism, critical discourse analysis conceptualizes linguistic practices as embedded in and thus related to but ultimately subordinate to social practices: discursive practices are here specific practices within a broader social realm. Critical discourse analysis thus ultimately prioritizes the social sphere and conceptualizes discourse more narrowly as signifying practices within the realm of the social:

Linguistic action is social action of which texts are the outward manifestation. The text is the basic unit … the starting point…. Language is a means to instantiate, to realize and to give shape to (aspects) of the social (Kress, 2001: 35).

Consequently, the way in which discourse is defined differs from the way in which it is understood in post-structuralist approaches: ‘[discourse is] a complex bundle of simultaneous and sequential interrelated linguistic acts, which manifest themselves within and across the social fields of action as thematically interrelated semiotic, oral and written tokens’ (Wodak, 2001: 66, emphasis added). Overall, this view leads to a sociological conceptualization of discourse in its generic dimensions of power of discourse and power in discourse.

When read through such a notion of discourse, traditional securitization theory (Wæver, 1995; Buzan et al., 1998) can be seen as articulating a strongly actor-centred perspective on discourse in security studies, one that resembles the perspectives of conversation analysis and pragmatics in applied linguistics (see Howarth and Torfing, 2005: 6), while second-generation scholars of securitization theory typically articulate a more structurationist, sociological perspective (see, in particular, Balzacq, 2005, 2011; Stritzel, 2007, 2011a,b; Salter, 2008). Originally proposed by Ole Wæver (1989, 1995) and subsequently extended in collaboration with Barry Buzan and Jaap de Wilde (Buzan et al., 1998), the notion of securitization can at its core be read as an attempt to conceptualize the act or process of turning something into a security issue. Despite many controversies over various details of the theory in recent years, the principal conceptual composition of the theory initially simply envisaged that a modus of security as existential threat for issues is articulated through the mechanics of a ‘speech act’: by uttering ‘security’, an actor, usually a state representative, characterizes a particular case or development as extraordinarily important, and thereby moves the given case/development into a special field of security where extraordinary means can be applied.⁷

The actor-centrism of this articulation of securitization is twofold. First, it is implied in the sociopolitical claim that single actors (usually state representatives) can constitute a new social reality simply by ‘declaring’ a state of emergency for issues, in a way similar to the declaration of a marriage in a wedding. This reading presupposes a rather strong notion of the authority of a speaker and of ‘authorized language’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 105–16), which some have interpreted as an exclusive or at least predominant focus on leaders and leadership in securitization theory (for a prominent reflection on these issues, see Williams, 2003). Yet, for the Copenhagen School, this aspect is at the same time balanced by the sociolinguistic position, again ultimately actor-centric, that a fundamental transformation of social reality is possible through the mechanics (and the performative magic) of an act of speech. In other words, for the Copenhagen School, the way to study securitization is to study language that takes the form of presenting something as an existential threat to a referent object and political constellations – that is, ‘a combination of language and society, of both intrinsic features of a speech and the group that authorises and recognises that speech’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 25, 32).

A second generation of securitization scholars, while building upon the core ideas of traditional securitization theory, have challenged and significantly extended the ideas of the Copenhagen School (see Balzacq, 2011; Stritzel, 2007). Sociopolitically, scholars post-Copenhagen typically argue that the authority of a speaker is not always perfectly consolidated and secured, so that it is often necessary to consider and theorize more complex processes of authorization within discourse. Relatedly, sociolinguistically, scholars post-Copenhagen often argue that the performative power of a speech act cannot only be captured in the abstract but needs to be contextually located within broader structures of meaning and power, both synchronically and diachronically. In other words, speech acts need to be related to and analysed within the context of specific social settings and textual fields, as well as broader historical sequences and continuities. Within securitization theory, there has thus been a development away from single speech acts and abstract grammars of security to more contextual and dynamic understandings of articulations of security, and from static understandings of a speaker’s authority to more contextual and dynamic conceptualizations of processes of authorization in discourse.

Overall, second-generation scholars have thus moved an excessively actor-centric conceptualization of discourse in traditional securitization theory towards a social theory of securitizations based on a structurationist reading of discourse. Yet, this reconceptualization of securitization theory is currently only slowly transforming into a more specific analytical framework and methodology for securitization studies (for a reflection on methodological implications of second-generation securitization theory, see Balzacq, 2011), and no attempt has been made so far to investigate and conceptualize the explicitly intertextual dimensions of securitizing moves and processes of authorization.

The intertextuality of securitizing moves and processes of authorization

In what follows, I argue that the sociological reading of discourse outlined above can be utilized to develop a more specific framework of analysis that captures processes of securitization and the politics of intertextuality with regard to securitizations.⁸ At its core, intertextuality stresses that texts are always situated within and against other texts, which are in turn situated within and against other texts and meanings, and so on indefinitely. From an intertextual perspective, the creation of meaning is thus read as being always located within broader structures of meaning and evolutions/sequences that are ultimately unlimited.

While this basic view on the nature of meaning is typically used within post-structuralism to disrupt the assumption of a stable meaning and to highlight that meaning is never complete or fixable (for an overview and critique of post-structuralist readings of intertextuality, see Allen, 2000), the sociological reading of discourse outlined above would instead stress sociopolitical aspects of socially and politically producing intertextual links. With that a sociological/critical discourse analysis reading of discourse brings intertextuality back to its much more sociological origins in the works of Bakthin before, as Allen (2000: 56–60) has shown, the idea became rearticulated into a merely textual concept through the translations/transformations of Bakthin’s ideas by post-structuralist Julia Kristeva: ‘Whilst Bakhtin’s work centres on actual human subjects employing language in specific social situations, Kristeva’s way of expressing these points seems to evade human subjects in favour of the more abstract terms, text and textuality’ (Allen, 2000: 36).

Methodologically, a critical discourse analysis perspective on intertextuality thus leads to a combination of (1) (often cross-disciplinary) text analysis, broadly defined, which involves a reconstruction of linkages between texts (‘inter-textuality’ in the terminology of Fairclough) and discourses (‘inter-discursivity’ for Fairclough) and the various flows of influence and mutual constitution between different discursive genres, including political, pop-cultural, media, academic and/or literary genres; and (2) sociopolitical analysis that involves a closer examination of the sociopolitical resources and power positions of actors, as well as their political struggles and processes of authorization in specific locations and historical periods.

On this basis, the role of intertextuality in processes of securitization can be conceptualized along two principal dimensions: I argue that, sociolinguistically, intertextuality can play a central role in contextualized descriptions of the principal linguistic rules of a securitizing speech act: claim, warning, demand and propositional content; relatedly, sociopolitically, intertextuality contributes to the constitution of authority and processes of authorization in discourse. These dynamics are particularly relevant for linkages between political discourse and popular culture because, as Weldes (2003: 7) has pointed out, popular culture is closely intertwined specifically with politics, as the plausibility and persuasiveness of official representations of issues depend on the ways in which publics understand them: intertextual links between political discourse and popular culture create congruence between official representations and peoples’ everyday experiences and/or popular perceptions of issues.⁹ Specifically, I argue that intertextuality can be found in ‘securitizing moves’ and with regard to ‘authorizations’.

Securitizing moves and intertextuality

Securitization scholars are distinct among discourse scholars more generally not only because of their relatively strong actor-centrism but also because of the centrality they attribute to the study of securitizing moves, both as central units of analysis and as a fundamental starting point for the study of securitizations. This resembles the centrality of closely studying the central unit of ‘the text’ within critical discourse analysis. Securitizing moves are marked by ‘a specific rhetorical structure (survival, priority of action “because if the problem is not handled now it will be too late, and we will not exist to remedy our failure”)’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 26).

As Vuori has argued, this rhetorical structure or illocutionary logic of securitizing speech acts can be more formally explicated as a generic sequence of claim, warning and demand, which is typically supported by the propositional content of proof and/or reasons for the claim/warning:

generic claim: something is dangerous (potentially an existential threat);

generic warning: if something is not done, the danger/threat will be realized;

generic demand: something should be done;

propositional content: proof and/or reasons are provided to support the claim/warning (adapted from Vuori, 2008).

Yet, while such a general linguistic model is helpful in terms of providing a basic understanding of the principal linguistic rules of a securitizing speech act, these generic rules are often not sufficient for efforts to fully understand the performative magic of real-world securitizing speech acts in particular contexts. Specifically, in order to understand the social success of particular securitizing moves at a particular point in time in a particular location, it is usually important to also study more closely the particular pragmatics of specific conversational strategies applied in the specific communicative event in which actors typically draw upon various sociolinguistic resources available to create resonance with an audience’s expectations through emotional appeals, historical analogies and/or various forms of symbolic, often culturally highly specific, language. Within critical discourse analysis, this aspect is referred to as ‘contextualization’ or ‘recontextualization’, defined as a mode of speaking about the subject that adapts to the specific institutional environment in which the speaking subject is handled (see Holzscheiter, 2010: 76–8).

An abstract model of securitizing speech acts thus translates into the following typology of contextualized securitizing moves:

claim: contextualized description of the danger/threat;

warning: contextualized description of the consequences of inaction;

demand: contextualized description of an action plan;

propositional content: contextualized presentation of proof and/or reasons.

As part of these contextualizations, popular culture can provide an important resource as well as a general background of meaning that helps to constitute public images of issues and a constructed reality for elites and publics alike (Weldes, 2003: 7). Intertextual links (and links to popular culture in particular) can thus be used in securitizing moves to convince audiences and facilitate securitizations.

The typology of abstract versus empirical securitizing speech acts is summarized in Table 1.

Table I.

A typology of securitizing speech acts

Generic speech act	Securitizing speech act (abstract)	Contextualization (empirical)
Claim	Something is dangerous (potentially an existential threat)	Contextualized description of the danger
Warning	If something is not done, the danger/threat will be realized	Contextualized description of the consequences of inaction
Demand	Something should be done	Contextualized description of an action plan
Propositional content	Proof or reasons in support of the claim/warning	Contextualized presentation of proof and/or reasons

Authorizations and intertextuality

It is a well-known and well-documented problem of early securitization theory that, beyond a few, largely programmatic claims, Wæver, Buzan and De Wilde have not defined any specific theory of the sociopolitical process of securitizations. Securitization scholars have therefore usually added rather eclectically insights from additional theories, prominently theories of political agenda-setting, social mobilization and/or (elements of) the practice theory of Pierre Bourdieu.¹⁰ Yet, regardless of the specific operationalization of the sociopolitics of securitizations, the general point is usually simply to acknowledge and specify discourse in its dimension of a social space of discursive productions in which meaning is negotiated, contested and/or controlled through structure–agency relations of power. Crucially, in this conceptualization, an essential social sphere of producing meaning is a realm of fundamental sociopolitical asymmetry and thus of struggles over access to, influence in and control over a relevant political conversation. This is at the heart of numerous political and sociological theories about politics, including (but not limited to) the works of Bourdieu that Buzan et al.’s (1988) Security: A New Framework for Analysis only briefly touches upon (see, for example, Schattschneider, 1975; Bachrach and Baratz, 1963; Lukes, 2004; Kingdon, 1995).

The fundamental underlying question for securitization scholars is here ultimately ‘Who is authorized to speak authoritatively with regards to securitizations?’, and it is fair to assume that in strongly institutionalized settings relevant actors are typically ‘security elites’, such as heads of state and government, senior ministers, top foreign policy officials and diplomats, or ‘security professionals’ from the military, police and/or intelligence services (see Huysmans, 2006: 154–5; Bigo, 2000; Buzan et al., 1998: 35–42). Overall, such an explicit focus on particular security agents is justified by Wæver and his colleagues on the basis of the (empirical) assumption that security is ‘very much a structured field in which some actors are placed in positions of power by virtue of being generally accepted voices of security, by having the power to define security’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 31).

Yet, such an abstract, a priori selection of agency/agents within securitization theory can easily become too static and exclusive, particularly when it comes to capturing novel and/or unconventional practices in less institutionalized settings. This is particularly true for times of high uncertainty and insecurity with regard to the available knowledge on a particular perceived threat – that is, in a scenario where an existing social field can be assumed to be significantly ruptured and traditional security agents are not necessarily well located in a social field that is new and evolving. For such contexts, Villumsen (2010: 15–16) suggests that we focus instead on a more flexible framework that examines empirically which actors actually held what kind of social capital and how they mobilized the valued types of capital in the specific field in question – that is, how specifically actors mobilized valued types of capital that allowed them ‘to wield a power, an influence, and thus to exist in the field, instead of being considered a negligible quantity’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 98). In other words, in these contexts of significantly ruptured or not yet consolidated social fields, positions of power within discourse to ‘define security’ should not simply be assumed but should rather be an essential element of empirical analysis itself: an assumption of authority should be replaced by the empirical study of processes of authorization.

Intertextual links and popular culture can contribute to this process of authorization within a ruptured and/or not yet consolidated social field because popular culture and intertextuality more generally produce and reproduce the knowledge structures that help define and redefine legitimate speakers in a discourse (see also Hansen, 2006). Accordingly, intertextual linkages can help actors adapt to the sociopolitical and sociolinguistic demands of a particular context, and in this way improve the legitimacy to speak authoritatively with regards to perceived threats and to be accepted as legitimate voices in the relevant political conversation.

Translations of organized crime in US security discourse

The following case study on US translations of organized crime aims to illustrate the dynamics outlined above. After a brief analysis of the political context and its processes of authorization in the USA, the article will turn to a closer examination of securitizing moves. On this basis, the role of popular culture and intertextual linkages will be analysed and explicated in relation to the suggested framework of analysis.

The political context in the USA and its structure of authority

To understand the political context in the USA, it is important to note that organized crime was initially established in that country against the background of a structure of formal authority that was highly fragmented and dispersed. From the 19th century up until the early 20th century, approximately 40,000 single police units worked alongside each other without effective coordination or substantial enforcement duties at the federal level. This resulted in severe challenges for law enforcement that became worse with an increase in criminality and corruption in the second half of the 19th century. At the same time, these issues were initially only hesitantly dealt with at the political level, and individual states only hesitantly began to reform their enforcement systems, created their own police forces and began to address the issue of interstate cooperation to fight more professional and permanent forms of crime (see Moore, 1974: 2–16; Woodiwiss, 2001: 236; see also Glaab and Brown, 1976).

The highly fragmented structure of authority in the US context had two main consequences for the process of securitization that followed. First, the authority of securitizing actors was not (yet) consolidated and centralized, and thus not clearly defined by any clearcut institutional position (Bourdieu, 1991). Initially, it was thus neither the security bureaucracy (Bigo, 2000) nor the political leadership (Wæver, 1995) that could effectively position themselves as authorities. This situation was exacerbated by significant internal disagreements within the security bureaucracy, as the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) under J. Edgar Hoover was for a long time strictly opposed to the idea that organized crime existed in the USA (see Smith, 1975: 187). The early US campaign against organized crime that eventually intensified into a process of securitization was instead at least initially dominated by several grass-roots initiatives, mainly related to the so-called citizens’ crime commission movement outside the formal institutional realm of US politics. Although this private initiative could attract many well-respected public figures, it was in effect itself strongly dominated by a small number of individual actors, most notably the Chicago Crime Commission of former FBI agent Virgil W. Peterson, whose extraordinarily strong initial position of power was primarly due to his detailed knowledge of crime, and former FBI agent Daniel P. Sullivan of the Crime Commission of Greater Miami, who founded the Miami Crime Commission in 1948 with the advice and collaboration of Peterson (see Moore, 1974: 85–7). Second, relatedly, the crucial power resource information/knowledge for assessing the nature of organized crime as an evolving threat image in the USA was not itself already centralized within formal structures of authority within the US bureaucracy, with the result that there was a strong need for politicians and professionals alike to gain and exchange this resource with access to the relevant political conversation.

The Kefauver Committee and the politics of intertextuality

When early initiatives to securitize organized crime by the citizens’ crime commissions reached Washington, DC, in the late 1940s, the attention moved to the Congress, where more and more voices called for a nationwide congressional investigation. Initially, the issue was discovered by both Republican Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, who was considering both crime and communism as subjects dramatic enough to further his political ambitions, and Democrat Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, who was searching for political contacts outside Tennessee and wider public recognition and status, presumably to put himself in a better position in relation to the nomination for presidential and/or vice-presidential candidate for the 1952 elections. However, on 5 January 1950, it was Kefauver who was successful in overcoming significant initial opposition from both Republicans in the Congress and competitors within his own party to formally introduce Senate Resolution 202, which called for the Judiciary Committee to direct ‘a full and complete study and investigation of interstate gambling and racketeering activities’ (Congressional Record, 5 January 1950), which would henceforth be simply referred to as ‘the Kefauver Committee’.

However, the initiative continued to be part of a intense political struggle that went on for several months before the committee could actually be established (see Moore, 1974: 49–60). While the Republicans used procedural tricks in an attempt to marginalize the Democrats and gain the lead in the initiative against organized crime, many senior Democrats, especially majority leader Scott W. Lucas of Illinois and Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, refused to support Kefauver, as the issue of organized crime had already become too important while Kefauver was considered too young and inexperienced to be granted leadership. Yet, by portraying the committee’s investigations as a technical low-key study that he would conduct in close cooperation with federal agencies, by using the press as an accomplice to put additional pressure on the Truman administration, and by profiting from the unexpected killing of two criminals in a Democratic clubhouse in Kansas City – which was reported extensively in the newspapers – Kefauver finally managed to overcome the resistance and established the crime commission under his leadership.

For the analytical perspective of this article, it is important to note that from the very beginning the work of the Kefauver Committee was strongly influenced by three dominant actors who were accepted as principal ‘knowledge agents’ in relation to organized crime and thus strongly dominated the information flow within the committee. Apart from Peterson and Sullivan, it was mainly Harry J. Anslinger and his Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN, the predecessor of the current Drug Enforcement Administration in the USA) who shaped threat constructions within the Kefauver Committee, in particular at later stages of the hearings. We now know from several detailed historical reconstructions (see, in particular, Moore, 1974; Gorman, 1971; Woodiwiss, 2001) that the three actors not only supplied the Kefauver Commission on a continuous basis with large amounts of data, but also that they suggested detailed lines of inquiry, helped to pursue leads, planned entire hearings, provided flowcharts, summarized information, briefed journalists and committee members, acted as experts in public hearings, and corresponded intensively both formally and informally with Kefauver throughout the investigations. In addition, towards the end of the hearings, Anslinger held secret executive sessions with the members of the Kefauver Committee, supplied them with a confidential master list of 800 criminals he thought to belong to organized crime, and permanently delegated FBN agents to the committee who briefed the committee members on a continuous basis for the investigations. Furthermore, we know from previously classified documents that Peterson and Anslinger for several years systematically cultivated close relationships with newspaper editors and what the FBN officially referred to as ‘friendly writers’ while strategically marginalizing and obstructing alternative voices within the media (see Bernstein, 2002: 122–4). In this context, friendly writers and editors agreed to send their stories on organized crime to the FBN for approval prior to publishing, in exchange for exclusive information on interesting FBN cases. In a similar way, the film industry in Hollywood also routinely submitted draft story outlines to the FBN in exchange for vital factual information in order to create ‘authentic plots’ for their film audiences.

Peterson and Sullivan’s perspective on organized crime in the USA was strongly focused on major ‘crime syndicates’ and whether there was some kind of contact or transaction between them. Although they could not provide evidence for nationwide collaborations, they argued that there were occasional transactions and loose arrangements, from which they concluded that nationwide patterns of racketeering could be identified (see Peterson, 1952). While Peterson and Sullivan thus mainly directed the focus of the Kefauver Committee towards nationwide patterns of organized crime, Harry J. Anslinger and his Federal Bureau of Narcotics introduced a strongly mafia-centred reading of US organized crime. Historians and sociologists argue today (see, for example, Kenney and Finckenauer, 1995: 8; Woodiwiss, 2001: 246–7; Albanese, 2004: 12) that Peterson’s perspective significantly exaggerated the degree of collaboration between crime groups that were essentially local phenomena and that he misperceived the degree of centralization within these groups, while scholars could find no substantial evidence in support of Anslinger’s perspective (Moore, 1974: 133–4, 241–2).

However, in light of their strong influence as principal knowledge agents within the US discourse, it is perhaps still not very surprising that the conclusions of the Kefauver Committee on the nature of organized crime in the USA nevertheless in effect simply combined the individual perspectives on organized crime held by Peterson, Sullivan and Anslinger. In its Third Interim Report, the committee thus described organized crime as a ‘nationwide crime syndicate known as the Mafia’ that was characterized by ‘tentacles in large cities’ and various ‘international ramifications’. These syndicates were held together by the Mafia as ‘the cement’ of organized crime and as ‘a secret and ruthless conspiracy’ (US Congress, 1951: 147–50).

While the Kefauver Committee hearings only mark a relatively short period of time in early US security discourse, it is fair to say that they constitute a decisive period for the framing of organized crime in the USA, one that helped to initiate a process of intensification and centralization in the political discourse that followed (see, for example, Smith, 1975; Woodiwiss, 2001). It was this process that eventually forced the influential FBI under J. Edgar Hoover to side with a growing coalition of securitizing actors in order to regain leadership in the initiative, and it let Robert Kennedy provide the necessary political backing for the campaign (see Wilson, 1978: 202–3; Smith, 1975: 187). In the early 1960s, a strong coalition consisting of the FBI, the FBN and a proactive Attorney General Robert Kennedy could thus work together to securitize organized crime in the USA.

Authority and sociopolitical processes of authorization in the USA

Overall, the sociopolitical dynamics in the USA can be described as a rare case of rather detailed and reliable historical evidence to illustrate that close, highly asymmetric social assemblages of ‘knowledge agents’, security professionals, the media and Hollywood significantly amalgamated directly sociopolitically fact, fiction and politics in the USA, and this way shaped public and elite perceptions on the meaning of organized crime as a security threat.

With regard to the construction of authority and sociopolitical processes of authorization, the dynamics in the USA exemplify the importance of struggles over access to and control over a relevant political conversation. At the beginning of the Kefauver investigations, the existing security field in the USA was significantly ruptured, and traditional security agents, in particular security elites, were initially not yet well located within what was then an evolving field. This opened space for unconventional actors, who exchanged knowledge on organized crime for political access and in this way effectively dominated the construction of meaning with regard to organized crime. It was thus the crucial social capital of knowledge that wielded a power, an influence, and thus allowed Peterson and Sullivan – but also Anslinger – to exist in the field instead of being considered a negligible quantity.

The importance of these principal ‘knowledge agents’ outside the realm of formal authority only changed through the dynamics of the process of securitization itself, which strengthened the position of traditional actors, particularly security elites and security professionals. In other words, it was through the process of securitization that the field became consolidated and an element of fixity was established. The securitization of organized crime had turned from a grass-roots movement outside the formal structures of authority in the USA into a matter of high-level political leadership primarily executed and brokered by Robert Kennedy.

Popular culture contributed to these dynamics as a principal background of meaning that helped to constitute public images of organized crime as an international conspiracy of the mafia. Yet, this fundamental background of meaning was carefully scripted and closely edited. The dynamics in the USA thus illustrate a case in which a pop culture–politics nexus is not only textually present (see, for example, Grayson et al., 2009) but also in various ways closely intertwined with operations of ‘power in discourse’.

A closer analysis of the specific language of securitizing moves in the USA will show that, in addition to providing a general background of meaning, popular culture also provided an important resource for securitizing actors in securitizing moves to be accepted as legitimate voices and to convince their audiences to securitize organized crime. Yet, in order to understand the power of these securitizing moves, it will be necessary to first take a closer look at the cultural context itself and its ‘communicative ecology’.¹¹

The cultural context in the USA and its communicative ecology

Last week homely, rawboned Estes Kefauver, always eager to please, was trudging through California, doggedly intent on the trail of Big Crime. His gait was steady and a little flat-footed. His hair was mildly astonished, as befitted a wary Tennessee mountain man inspecting the sinful sight of the big cities.

The quote above is taken from a description of Kefauver in Time magazine on 16 March 1951 that persisted as a powerful image within US discourse throughout the two presidential campaigns in which Kefauver was involved following the investigations. It combines two principal representations that have strong roots in US pop culture: (1) the narrative of the ‘American Hero’ in his fight against ‘evil’ and (2) the concept of ‘sinful cities’, which in the quote above is implicitly contrasted with the ideas of rural America and the ‘simple man’. The notion of the American Hero has a long tradition in US politics and popular culture, in that it typically places politicians or actors more generally in the role of cowboy, sheriff and/or ‘moral entrepreneur’ – that is, as a frontiersman forced to take the law into his own hand to fight evil. As such, the American Hero and the frontier masculinity that it conveys represents an idealized version of a ‘moral vanguard’ for American values in an ultimate fight of good against evil and morality against decadence and roguery (for examples of similar cultural constructions in the ‘war on terror’, see Jackson et al., 2011: 50–73; Croft, 2006). In the gangster story genre, such constructions of immorality and decadence as a threat to American life, values, society and moral integrity are typically materialized in a number of pop-cultural icons that include the Thompson machine gun, card games, black limousines and a particular dress code (on the gangster genre in American culture, see, for example, Ruth, 1996).

More conceptually speaking, the quote from Time magazine illustrates a narrative that is independent of the direct control of any singular actor or group. The quote needs to be read as a part of larger cultural movements that are important in ‘perpetuating a particular commonsense knowledge’ (Jackson et al., 2011: 52) and a broader context within which definitions and understandings are constructed, disseminated and accepted. Yet, these rather broad cultural tropes, images and narratives can also be used by securitizing actors more directly in order to communicate specific ideas, build political consensus or convince audiences. As a closer analysis of securitizing moves in the USA will show, principal securitizing actors have heavily drawn upon this reservoir of a pop-cultural communicative ecology in the USA, which they combined with narratives of US exceptionalism and civic nationalism.

Securitizing moves and the politics of intertextuality

It is fortunate for the analysis that follows that the principal securitizing actors that could be identified above have all articulated their constructions of organized crime in books published in the 1950s and early 1960s. My analysis of the language of moves to securitize organized crime in the USA is thus based on these principal primary sources: Peterson’s (1952) Barbarians in Our Midst, Anslinger and Oursler’s (1962) The Murderers, Kefauver’s ([1951] 1968) Crime in America, McClellan’s (1962) Crime Without Punishment and Kennedy’s ([1960] 1994) Enemy Within. While it is of course possible to discuss in greater detail multiple sociolinguistic aspects of threat constructions in these books, the analysis here is deliberately focused on the role of intertextual linkages and pop culture. And it is at this level of heavily drawing upon the pop-cultural communicative ecology of the gangster film, of anti-hedonism and of US exceptionalism that the following quote from Robert Kennedy’s famous attack against the Teamster union of Jimmy Hoffa in Enemy Within is most striking:

[They] have the look of Capone’s men. They are sleek, often bilious and fat, or lean and cold and hard. They have the smooth faces and cruel eyes of gangsters; they wear the same rich clothes, the diamond ring, the jewelled watch, the strong, sickly-sweet-smelling perfume…. As Mr. Hoffa operates it [the Teamsters Union is] a conspiracy of evil…. If we do not on a national scale attack organized criminals with weapons and techniques as effective as their own, they will destroy us. (Kennedy, [1960] 1994: 75, 162, 253, emphasis added).

The quote clearly and rather excessively illustrates the principal merger of a pop-cultural narrative of ‘the mafia’ with a distinctly US way of securitizing threats, grounded in distinct cultural-political traditions of US exceptionalism and nationalism. Specifically, Kennedy is here effectively asking for an assertion of traditional Americanism by implicitly contrasting the hardworking and honest American and his simple pleasures with the bourgeois urban lifestyle of morally decadent city life and the excessive pleasures of sex, drugs and gambling as they are conveyed and represented in a certain dress code, expensive watches or luxurious rings.

While this passage may be excessive and in its intensity unique, similar constructions that combine the myth of the mafia informed by and disseminated through popular culture with a narrative of US exceptionalism and nationalism also pervade articulations of the threat by Peterson, McClellan, Aslinger and Kefauver. For example, Anslinger claimed:

[This] is a report to the public on an enemy who seeks to destroy whole segments of our communities…. As the smaller mobs destroyed each other, the shadow of one grew larger with each new ‘execution’. This was the Grand Council of the Mafia, with its plan of an international cartel controlling every phase of criminal activity. (Anslinger and Oursler, 1962: 9, 17)

Kefauver held:

Behind the local mobs which make up the national crime syndicate is a shadowy, international criminal organization known as the Mafia, so fantastic that most Americans find it hard to believe it really exists…. I have not lost faith in the ability of the people of America, when aroused, to see danger signs which confront them and to spike such dangers…. It does not take particularly keen perception … to see how once mighty nations of other continents, after the infection of criminal and political corruption sets in, have sunk to the point where democracy and national strength are utterly lost. (Kefauver, [1951] 1968: 12–17, emphasis added)

And McClellan argued:

They can be aptly described as violations of the moral and spiritual codes upon which our nation was founded. These transgressions have never been defined by statute, nor proscribed by legislation, nor punished by the processes of justice. Yet they remain with us, sometimes changing outwardly with the times, waxing and waning in importance as public values are altered…. This duty is increasingly clear as the world conflict between the forces of freedom and those of enslavement becomes more bitter and savage year by year. The willingness and capacity of the Congress to measure up in courage, in wisdom, and in the caliber of statesmanship that the crisis demands will clearly determine whether our national purpose will eventually be attained – whether we survive or perish. (McClellan, 1962: 269–71, emphasis added)

The securitizing speech act: Linguistic rules and their articulations in the USA

If one relates these quotes to the generic elements of a securitizing speech act (claim, warning, demand and propositional content), it becomes clear that intertextual linkages with pop culture are particularly strong at the level of ‘claim’ and ‘propositional content’. Indeed, the contextualized description of the danger becomes almost inseparable from and seems to replace the presentation of proof or reasons for the claim, which neither Anslinger, Peterson, Kefauver nor Kennedy could actually provide. This aspect is particularly striking in Kennedy’s quote, which most heavily draws upon the gangster film genre to securitize organized crime. With regard to the generic claim that something is dangerous (potentially an existential threat), one finds a contextualized description of the danger that is in fact identical with the pop-cultural representation of ‘the gangster’: ‘[They] have the look of Capone’s men. They are sleek, often bilious and fat, or lean and cold and hard.’ With regard to the generic warning that if something is not done the danger/threat will be realized, one finds a contextualized description of the consequences of inaction that is rather general and vague: ‘they will destroy us’. This move clearly presents organized crime as an existential threat. Kennedy’s move here resembles Kefauver’s claim/warning that ‘democracy and national strength [will be] utterly lost’ and McClellan’s claim/warning that ‘we’ may not ‘survive’. Vagueness is also evident with regard to the generic demand that something should be done – that is, a contextualized description of an action plan that stresses that the USA should ‘attack organized criminals with weapons and techniques as effective as their own’. Finally, with regard to the propositional content that proof and/or reasons are provided to support the claim/warning, one finds instead, again, a strongly and explicitly pop-cultural description of the danger: organized crime is a threat because ‘they have the smooth faces and cruel eyes of gangsters; they wear the same rich clothes, the diamond ring, the jewelled watch, the strong, sickly-sweet-smelling perfume’.

The generic linguistic rules of securitizing speech acts and the intertextuality of their actual articulations in the US context might thus be summarized as in Table 2.

Table 2.

Securitizing speech acts (generic versus contextualized versus articulated)

Generic speech act	Securitizing speech act	Contextualization	Articulation in the USA
Claim	Something is dangerous (potentially an existential threat)	Contextualized description of the danger	‘They have the look of Capone’s men’/‘They will destroy us’
Warning	If something is not done, the danger/threat will be realized	Contextualized description of the consequences of inaction	‘They will destroy us’
Demand	Something should be done	Contextualized description of an action plan	We should attack them ‘with weapons and techniques as effective as their own’
Propositional content	Proof or reasons in support of the claim/warning	Contextualized presentation of proof or reasons	They are sleek, bilious, fat, lean, have smooth faces, cruel eyes, wear rich clothes, diamond rings, jewelled watches and strong perfume.

Conclusion

Organized crime in the USA is an interesting and rather colourful case that makes it possible to study securitizing moves in relation to intertextual linkages with pop culture that are excessive, and at times quite bizarre, yet simultaneously rather strongly and directly power political. The historical data are sufficiently rich and reliable to move beyond tempting conspiracy theories or theoretical speculations on the links between language, pop culture and power politics in securitizations to actually study their interrelatedness. In the case of securitizing organized crime in the USA, it would be as insufficient to focus on the power politics of securitization alone as it would be to study only the securitizing language in the US locale. What makes the case study so interesting, apart from the excessive use of pop culture by securitizing actors, is the fact that power politics, intertextuality and securitizing moves are so closely intertwined.

Sociopolitically, the element of struggle and control over the relevant political conversation and the initial construction of the threat was decisive, and it was here that very few actors dominated the information flow and successfully established their particular reading of the perceived threat in elite and public conversations on organized crime. Yet, the principal knowledge agents – Anslinger, Peterson and Sullivan – also went beyond that and directly controlled and manipulated the media and cinematographic discourse through systematically exploiting asymmetries of knowledge on organized crime and the wishes of journalists and Hollywood to construct ‘authentic plots’. The most valued social capital in the initial stages of the securitization process was thus knowledge, which principal knowledge agents exchanged for political access. It was this rather fungible resource rather than any predefined institutional position that ‘wielded a power’ in the discourse.

The impact of popular culture was to construct a principal background and plot structure of meaning that helped legitimate speakers and convince audiences in the USA. Its influence in securitizing moves was thereby particularly strong at the level of claim and propositional content of describing the danger and presenting proof or reasons for the securitization. In fact, one could argue that the rather excessive references to the gangster story genre actually replaced the provision of proof and/or reasons in securitizing moves.

Theoretically, this article mainly hopes to contribute to the rapidly evolving second-generation scholarship on securitization by suggesting and specifying a framework of analysis suitable for studying securitizations and the politics of intertextuality with regard to securitizations. Yet, beyond securitization theory as such, this article can also be read as a more general invitation to linguistic constructivists and post-structuralists alike to pay more attention to the constitutive operations of power in discourse and the sociopolitical agency of intertextuality. Current divisions within reflectivism between post-structuralist and sociological readings of discourse are valuable, because the two sets of approaches provide different lenses through which to view the complex reality of discourse in international affairs. Yet, as I hope this article has managed to illustrate, these divisions should not prohibit attempts to study language and sociopolitical dynamics. At least in the case of securitizing organized crime in the USA, language and sociopolitical operations of ‘power in discourse’ are best studied in conjunction.

Footnotes

Funding

The research presented here received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Holger Stritzel is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of St Andrews. Recent publications include ‘Security, the translation’ in Security Dialogue, ‘Security as translation: Threats, discourse, and the politics of localisation’ in Review of International Studies, and ‘Towards a theory of securitization: Copenhagen and beyond’ in European Journal of International Relations. A book entitled Security in Translation: Securitization Theory and the Localisation of Threat is forthcoming with Palgrave.

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