Educational Media Research

Vogrinčič, Ana; Mitja ČepičForeigner and Foreignness in Textbook Literature

A textbook as subject of critical discourse analysisOne of the pioneers of critical discourse analysis, Teun A. van Dijk, depicts this rather young research field as investigating the role of discourse in the (re)production of dominance, whereby dominance is defined as abused power or “the exercise of social power by elites, institutions or groups, resulting in social inequality” (1993: 249-250), be it cultural, class, gender, political, ethnic, racial, or otherwise. Power may, in various, more or less (in)direct and more or less covert ways, also manifest itself at discourse level. Analysts are above all interested in what role precisely individual linguistic structures, speech strategies and other characteristics of text, speech, verbal interaction and communication events generally play in the processes of power reproduction, most notably in connection with discoursive strategies of elites which effectively maintain the dominant position and status quo of inequality and hold social dominance. The latter may be legitimised by laws, reinforced by the police, as well as ideologically sustained and reproduced by media and textbook literature. Control over knowledge significantly helps to formulate the interpretation of the world, making critical analysis of the media and education discourse which indirectly construct (and control) knowledge, all the more relevant and important.It is therefore understandable that, within the context of so-determined critical discourse theory, textbooks provide a particularly important study subject. All the more so, since they constitute the prescribed reading material of the school – the state’s ideological apparatus number one (Althusser, 2000) – which is par definitionem a mechanism of social power. Even though one can argue today that, in the latter half of the 20th century, this role was taken over by the media, education institutions still remain one of the leading tools that serve a wide variety of ideological purposes. The representation of a foreigner or foreignness is – we can safely say – a standard subject of the study of critical discourse theory. It is by default the presentation of the other or others with all possible implications of nationalisms, stereotypes and other negative emphases.Our analysis will focus on selected extracts from one of the history textbooks prescribed (within Slovenian’s education system) for the eighth grade of a nine-year elementary school (an average age of eight grade pupils is 13).[1] We will aim to support the thesis that the concept of a foreigner relates to some as-if-self-evident assumptions leading to a positive perception of ourselves (i.e. Slovenians), often by explicitly and implicitly contrasting or even creating ‘our’ positive characteristics by the negative representation of others or foreigners.The Problem of ContextUnlike “mere speech”, which is exclusively underlined by grammatical norms, discourse is also placed in the confines of social and cultural rules and therefore more appropriately defined as public speech or “language in use” (Brown and Yule, 1996: 1). This means that discourse does not constitute an individual’s linguistic choice, as holds true of mere speech (Benveniste, 1988), but a speaker (should), in order to avoid sanctions, observe a whole plethora of – most often invisible – regularities and instructions drawn from a wider context which remain active in the background and which are internalised during the socialisation process. Discourse is therefore always socially determined and therefore one of the basic methodological premises that discourse researchers ought to accept and incorporate into both the concept and implementation of their research in at least most general form, is the consideration of contexts, i.e. (complex) situations in which discourses are formed and take place. Or, to use Fairclough’s words: “[…] analysis of text should not be artificially isolated from analysis of institutional and discoursal practices within which texts are embedded” (1995). The problem arises when we attempt to limit the context or determine its scope and when we try to include or integrate contextual variables into research methodologies. The context is a very diverse notion in both qualitative and quantitative terms. Its semantic field metastases already at the level of the text alone, through its ability to refer to a text that is directly connected with or contains a unit of connected speech or writing that is subject to our study – e.g. a paragraph, a chapter, an article, or sometimes even an entire book, speech or radio show.[2] The context grows even more uncontrollable when we include non-textual variables in it, such as discourse situations, social statuses of individuals involved, and mutual relations of power, economic and institutional conditions of discourse production, ideological assumptions of discourse construction and reception, as well as types and characteristics of social and economic formations in which discourses take place. In the light of such an evasive context even the ways in which we try to incorporate it into research methodology are rendered questionable, for which reason we wish, first of all, to set the communication situation of history textbook reading firmly in context.In the analysis at hand, our key context – strictly speaking the context of textbook reception or reading – used for the purposes of researching history textbook discourse, particularly with regard to ideological impacts of treating foreigners and foreignness that such writing may have as its consequence, was largely inaccessible. Textbook reading primarily constitutes an institutional reading of prescribed and compulsory literature: the readers have neither the power to select the textbooks to be used nor the power to determine the speed and scope of reading in view of the school calendar, but on the other hand they are obliged to memorise and reproduce a certain segment of the text as knowledge that is subject to assessment. At the same time, this reading is closely connected with instructions and with teacher’s explanation of the subject-matter. Decoding of the textbook’s text is thus directed and interpreted in advance by the authority of the teacher thereby maintaining ideological hegemony through education system. Apart from teachers, a considerable role in this process is also played by parents and, last but not least, peer groups in school, which in itself is not an isolated social sub(system) that would completely control the lives of school-age individuals, but rather shares their “attention” with other institutions, such as media, family or religious communities. Therefore, the context of reading history textbooks cannot be reduced to single-minded reproduction of predominant ideological forms, regardless of the fact that textbook contents are directly controlled by the authorities. “The final result is not necessarily such as envisaged by school or resulting from simple ideological reading. Ideological hegemony is not something that may either exist or not at a given moment. It has been (and still is) a continuous struggle the outcome of which cannot be known in advance […] people – teachers and pupils included – can act against the prevailing ideological forms” (Apple, 1992).In short, context crucially influences the ideological impact of the text, but the method used does not permit us to conduct a relevant study on it. Our investigation will therefore be more reminiscent of semiological research in Barthesian style, where analysts above all rely on their own text-reading and where an important role is attributed to investing their own knowledge of cultural context as well as indispensable ideology which may considerably differ from the knowledge and ideologies of actual addressees of the pedagogical discourse of history textbooks.Background knowledgeA specific problem in text analysis is presented by the so-called absences. “Textual analysis can often give excellent insights about what is ‘in’ a text; but what is absent from a text is often just as significant from the perspective of socio-cultural analysis” (Fairclough, 1995). Therefore, surprisingly, the contrast between presence in and absence from the text is not a sharp one, because the implicit content of a text lies somewhere halfway between presence and absence. Analysis of implicit content can provide not only valuable understanding as to what is taken as given or considered as common sense, but also gives way into ideological analysis of texts, for ideologies are generally sets of implicit assumptions (Fairclough, 1995).If we say that discoursive events work ideologically, this does not mean that they are ‘false’ (in the sense of false consciousness) or that we have access to a privileged position from which we can make judgements of the truth or falsity. What we may claim is that a discoursive event can contribute to the reproduction of power relations. Nevertheless, critical discourse analysis is not to remain indifferent to questions of truth, be it by identifying omissions, falsifications for persuasive purposes or distorted ideological representations (Fairclough, 1995).Fairclough demonstrates that the in-placeness of a discourse – i.e. the impression of the persons engaged in an interaction that matters are as they should be (that the discourse is coherent, that its constituent parts appear to belong together, that appropriate lexica are used, etc.)[3] – depends upon taken-for-granted self-evident background knowledge which includes naturalised ideological representations, e.g. those that appear as non-ideological ‘common sense’ (1995). It is precisely the notion of naturalisation that holds an important place in our analysis of the perception of foreign and foreignness in the elementary school history textbook. Elementary school is, firstly, a place where naturalisation of ideological contents takes place – it is, in other words, one of the key phases of an individual’s secondary socialisation – and, secondly, the treatment of foreign often unfolds in terms of ‘origin, blood, nation’, which are, within the pedagogical discourse, more attached to the ‘natural’ (or sometimes transcendental) than to the social sphere. Fairclough argues that it is possible to differentiate between individual propositions of background knowledge in terms of the degree to which they are ‘naturalized’ (1995). Along with knowledge, prejudice and convictions, relating to the language in its ideational function[4], background knowledge also comprises pragmatic and discoursive norms that are part of interpersonal function of language – they are (more or less naturalised) practices that symbolise certain ideological representations of social relations and also include rules of interaction in the classroom. Fairclough thus elaborates the notion of background knowledge, distinguishing its four dimensions, which are shared by participants in communication situations: knowledge of language codes, knowledge of principles and norms of language use, knowledge of situation, and knowledge of the world (1995).We presuppose that the users (elementary school pupils) take the content of the history textbook as irrefutably true (unless, of course, it is not refuted by another authority, i. e. the teacher), which results from established power-relations in the school context. This is also the condition under which inferences, that may be drawn from the textbook, and ideological representations resulting therefrom obtain their validity. The latter derives from the logical law, according to which a valid conclusion, deduced from true premises, is itself necessarily true. The premises, offered by the textbook, are true par definitionem, even though this is nothing but an ideological construct, resulting from the disproportion of power between social groups. The truth of the history textbook is legitimised by competent authorities – e.g. the National Education Institute of the Republic of Slovenia, which is charged with the evaluation and attestation of school literature. On the other hand, textbooks exploit ideologically-based background knowledge of pupils for the purposes of formulating ‘appropriate’ history, which in the case of attitude towards ‘the foreign’ in Slovenia – due to explicit dominance of one ethnic group – proves simpler than in more multicultural environments. “[…] In many situations [with regard to the context] recipients know that ideologically based discourse may be expected from the speakers or writers. This implies that ideological communication may be most effective when recipients do not or hardly expect ideological implications, for instance, in children’s stories, textbooks or on TV news, whose main functions are usually to be free of persuasive opinions” (van Dijk, 1998). On the other hand, Fairclough warns that the notion of background knowledge is extremely widely used and that such uncritical use alone produces ideological effects. What he finds especially problematic is that the notion of (background) knowledge, including ‘knowledge’ – which, in common use, implies facts and factual propositions where individual elements are bound together by transparent connections – is packed with beliefs, values and ideologies. Thereby, ideology involves the representation of ‘the world’ from the perspective of a particular interest (1995). In short, background knowledge must not be treated merely as factual knowledge.[5]The notion of discourse is in itself inevitably related with ideology, because, as Škiljan argues, “discourse is already by definition a collective phenomenon and builds its collective character exclusively through interpersonal communication, which is nowhere so effectively realised than in language activity” (Škiljan, 1996), which lays the ground for the process of ideologisation. Ideology is thus not realised through the language as a system, but in concrete language use (Škiljan, 1996), i.e. discourse.By undertaking discourse analysis of history textbooks with an emphasis on the treatment of foreign and foreignness, we therefore cannot avoid investigating ideologies that are recognised behind the examined representations. There are as many conceptualisations of ideologies as there are definitions thereof, and to put it in van Dijk’s words, it has almost become a routine that discussions about ideologies often begin with a remark on the vagueness of this very notion and on the resulting theoretical confusion of its analysis which is (in the preface to his book on ideologies) done by van Dijk himself as well (van Dijk, 1998). In the study prepared as an outline plan for multidisciplinary research of ideologies, he locates the latter into the “conceptual and disciplinary triangle that relates cognition, society and discourse” (van Dijk, 1998). Further on, he argues that, firstly, ideologies at least implicitly (as a ‘system of ideas’) belong to the field of thoughts and beliefs, i.e. to what psychologists refer to as ‘cognition’. Secondly: ideologies are undoubtedly social and often (though not always) associated with group interests, conflicts or social struggles. And, thirdly, many contemporary approaches relate (or even identify) ideology with language use or discourse, if only to accord for the way ideologies are typically expressed and reproduced in society (van Dijk, 1998). “In that framework ideologies may be briefly defined as the basis of the social representations shared by members of a [social, note by M.Č. and A.V.] group. This means that ideologies allow people as group members to organise the multitude of social beliefs about what is good or bad, right or wrong, for them, and to act accordingly” (1998).[6]Imagining the nationIn defining the identity, the foreign represents an image of the other which through negative identification enables us to create a simple self-definition.[7] Foreign is what is not ‘ours’, ‘native’; we can therefore be defined precisely by the dissimilarity from this other. Foreign and foreigner – foreignness – is therefore understood according to the principle of structuralist logic: i.e. that the original identity does not exist in its own right and that one becomes the one only in relation to the other, or more accurately, only in differentiation from the other.E. Said has shown this in his analysis of Orientalism, which generally constitutes a “set of beliefs”, grounded on ontological and epistemological distinction between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident’ (1996). Societies may also partly develop a feeling of their identity in a ‘negative’ manner, through conceptions of foreign, which, however, are often much to loose in demonstrating what is “there”, beyond their own territories. “All kinds of suppositions, associations, and fictions appear to crowd the unfamiliar space outside one's own” (1996). The European encounter with the Orient, Islam in particular, only fortified this anti-empirical system of representation and transformed Islam into an example of something external, in opposition to which the European civilisation has been justifying its identity ever since the Middle Ages (Said, 1996).As P. Schlesinger (in Morley and Robins, 1995) puts it, identity is as much about exclusion as it is about inclusion. All identities are constituted within a system of social relations and require the reciprocal recognition of others. In this sense the maintenance of one’s identity is a continuous process of recomposition (rather than something given) in which the two constitutive dimensions of self-identification and affirmation of difference are continuously interlocked. Identity is seen as a dynamic, emergent aspect of collective action.Our own identification and (self-)perception is therefore an impossibility, as it is (only) in the relation to other that we can articulate our identity, reflect and examine our selves. According to Said, there is no need for the representation of the foreigner to be empirical or factual – for the sake of one’s own identification the artificial construction is useful as well. Finally, the conception of a foreigner is most often two fold: there is a negative foreigner and a positive one; the one that we despise and the other that we strive to be.We will show that, in the textbook under discussion, historical (re)construction of the Slovenian identity relies on relationships towards the other and the foreign. National identity is most often established through differentiation from foreigners – the Turks, the Muslims, the Germans (…), even if during the period taught about in the textbook, some of these groups were not perceived as foreign at all. It is sufficient that their being foreign is today considered evident, i.e. naturalised.National identity is a specific form of collective identity, founded on selective processes of memory. A given group may recognise itself by remembering the shared past. When the latter lies beyond memory’s reach, what is left are testimonies and traces, yet their representations, in a similar vein as tradition (which is also not a matter of fixed or given selection of passively adopted set of beliefs and convictions), are more subject to daily politics with institutions of power choosing individual values from the past and mobilising them in modern practices (Wright in Morley and Robins, 1995). History textbooks, being a compulsory reading material of one of the central ideological state apparatuses, i.e. school, undoubtedly contribute to this construction.National identity is therefore in a continuous and flexible process of transformation. It is no wonder then that theories (see Laclau, Seymour-Smith) avoid arguing that identities are stable and fixed entities, but rather focus on the process of identification and see the content of identity as “a kind of retrospective effect of topoi, constructed in advance” (in Praprotnik, 1999). The ideological mechanism of national identities thus deliberately sets and reproduces the boundary, offering the image of a nation as a natural phenomenon, without history or origin (Praprotnik, 1999). All nations are seen as enclosed and their national identity ‘endures’ as long as its boundary, differentiating it from others, is maintained. The existence of nations is therefore not a truth discovered, but a conceptualisation of the human-made world (Praprotnik, 1999). B. Anderson has probably offered the best definition so far of nations as imagined communities: “[…] the nation is an imagined political community – imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign […], because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson, 1998). In this context, Anderson also concludes that “nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word’s multiple significations, nation-ness as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of particular kind” (Anderson, 1998). However, once a certain ‘reality’ has been established – in words or discourse – individuals treat it as something which has been present for a long time, even though nations were created only towards the end of the eighteenth century and the word ‘nationalism’ did not come into general use until the end of the nineteenth (in Anderson, 1998).[8] As race is a discoursive phenomena rather than genetically determined reality, so does the nation exist and reproduce itself above all in the form of discourse (Miller in Praprotnik, 1999). The constitution of identities is thus always based on excluding something and (violently) establishing a hierarchy between the two resultant poles. The ideological moment of these distinctions is established on the basis of separating ‘marked’ and ‘non-marked’ notions, whereby the latter express the primary meaning of the notion, while the former serve to complement and mark it (Miller in Praprotnik, 1999).

THE ANALYSIS AND ITS METHODS

Grice's Principle of Cooperation
The theory of cooperation and related maxims formulated by H. P. Grice, proved to be very useful in analysing history textbooks. First, the distinction should be made between explicit messages or explicatures, which are actually uttered or articulated, and implicatures, implicit meanings, which are inferentially reconstructed by readers and thus indirectly accessible by reasoning. Explicatures relate to the meaning Grice describes with “he said that…”, while implicatures relate to the meaning expressed as “he let me know that…” (in Justin, 2001). The basic notion of Grice’s conceptual apparatus is an implicature that takes on two forms: one is conventional, the other is conversational. While conventional implicatures relate through simple reasoning operations to conventional meanings of employed words, conversational implicatures are based on a set of rules and principles: on the principle of cooperation and categories of quantity, quality, relation and manner. Grice demonstrates that the speaker can, by violating maxims, guide the listener to the contents – conversational implications – which cannot be inferred from conventional meanings of words by instrumentality of simple reasoning. Grice defines the Cooperative Principle as follows: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged” (1999). As for individual categories, Grice describes them by means of maxims.
Category of Quantity is determined by two maxims: firstly, make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange); and secondly: do not make your contribution more informative that is required.
Category of Quality is determined by a super-maxim: try to make your contribution one that is true; and by two more specific maxims: do not say what you believe to be false, and do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Category of Relation is composed of one single command: Be relevant.
Category of Manner is defined by a short supermaxim: Be perspicuous!, and by four maxims: Avoid obscurity of expression; avoid ambiguity; be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity); be orderly (Grice, 1999).
In examining the attitude towards the foreign we used Grice’s conceptual apparatus as a tool for analysis of those fragments of the text in which certain implications were recognised as crucial conveyors of ideological representations. In this regard we should point out that such an analysis opens serious questions concerning the situation and context in which textbooks are usually used, and therefore allows us to immediately refute the assumption on equality (in terms of power) of both participants in the interaction.[9] The power is by far not balanced, since the bulk of it rests with the authors whose writing is not expected or likely to raise doubt about its content, at least not by the side of the intended readers – the pupils. As it appears, the observance of maxims is ensured in advance, whereby the responsibility for any potential misunderstanding does not lie in the authors, but in the reader himself, who most often does not even possess the appropriate knowledge or analytical tools for detecting any possible violations.[10]
However, our role is not to stand as observers of the pupil reading the textbook, but to act as analysts focusing above all on the text itself. Since in this case the discourse situation is unfolding between us and the textbook, the relation of power is therefore more equilibrated than in a typical situation at school.

The use of Grice’s conceptual apparatus is illustrated on the basis of selected examples taken from the analysed textbook, Vzpon meščanstva (Eng. The Rise of the Bourgeoisie). On page 14 therein stands:

[Example 1]
“The French were forging alliances with every state which was hostile to the Habsburgs, even with the Turkish Empire [inserted emphasis]”.

What is violated in this sentence is the maxim of relation; if the French were forging alliances with all the enemies of the Habsburgs, then it would be relevant to either list all the enemies of the Habsburgs or not mention any at all. Following Grice’s theory, the principle of cooperation is, in principle, observed; therefore the reader has to accept the implication that has its interpretative anchor in the adverb even, which determines the meaning of the entire sentence. In its mildest interpretation it signifies the peculiarity of the alliance with the Turkish Empire, but much more radical conclusions are also possible – e.g. concerning the traitorous, opportunistic conduct of the French. The cooperation with the Turks is therefore nothing short of a scandal, because by the adverb even they are made distinct from others, implicitly conventional allies. Viewed through such a prism, the French belong to the same cultural and civilization bestiary as the Habsburgs and their European enemies, but they can by no means be linked with the Turks. Therefore we cannot, by sheer common sense, infer from the statement that the French were forging alliances with everybody and that they would also forge one with the Turks. This alliance thus deserves to be explicated separately.
The following example illustrates the violation of the maxim of quantity: the excerpt tells us more than is required by the given context:

[Example 2, p. 130]
“In order to encourage and support each other, they [Slovenian intelligentsia, note by M.Č. and A.V.] organised themselves in societies. The most important among them was the circle of baron Žiga Zois [original emphasis], an industrialist and entrepreneur, the son of Italian father and Slovenian mother […] [inserted emphasis]”.

Since indications about the origin of the parents of historical personalities in the textbook are unusual and rare, we conclude that, in this case, we are dealing with an excessive piece of information, even more so because this particular fact is not especially relevant with regards to the given context. In our opinion, Zois’ family background entails a series of implied motives that are typical of nationally- and ideologically-centred readings: e.g. the motive of a convert who left behind his native land – fatherland – to join us (a foreigner who became one of us), but what we can also discern is a reminiscence of the Slovenian phrase, used to underline someone’s strong national pride, saying that ‘He drank Slovenianness with mother’s milk’.
Grice’s theory (and its derivatives) has otherwise met with sharp criticism, since it is grounded on the premise of an equal dialogue speech situation, where both participants engage with approximately equal social power, which is extremely rare in social practice. Fairclough draws our attention to the fact that Grice himself has explicitly exposed the limitations of his theory, stressing that it should be elaborated if it was to have a broader validity.
Grice’s theory provides a tool that enables us to detect those places in the discourse that refer the reader to certain ideologically-based readings. However, the question that is posed in this connection is where the material entailing of such implications comes from.

Relevance theory and inferential reasoning
Statements, texts, discourses are always and by definition semantically incomplete, underdetermined or enigmatic. They are insufficient constructions that necessitate a certain number of tools from the reader’s interpretative repertoire, enabling him to successfully anchor their meaning. Words do not entirely determine the meaning of what is uttered, because almost every language statement conveys more cognitive meaning than it explicitly expresses it. The meaning that the speaker or writer invests in the utterance exceeds and sometimes also differs from the (literal) sentence meaning. The addressee must therefore in addition to decoding the textual and sentence meaning, also infer from other aspects of meaning, which, however, are not necessarily explicitly uttered. In this connection we are interested in ways in which the reader or listener recognises and inferentially (re)constructs the non-uttered, non-explicit parts of speaker meaning, i.e. how, in our case, the reader complements a semantically incomplete statement through the process of inference or deduction.
Making inferences from explicit information on what is implicit includes various aspects. According to the classic pragmatic theory of Austin, Searle and Grice, the addressee deduces the lacking part of information from the context. (S)he associates the literal utterance with the indirect meaning and thus infers the entire message on the basis of knowledge about situation in which the communication is happening (the speaker, referee, etc.).
The relevance theory, developed in the 1980s by D. Sperber and D. Wilson (1993),[11] places the context – quite on the contrary – in parentheses and rather focuses on the relevance of speaker’s message. It presupposes that what(ever) has been communicated is relevant, for which reason we search the context in which the communicated message gains the largest possible degree of relevance. Therefore, the essential role in inferring the meaning of what has been said or written is that of the background knowledge (reciprocal contextual concepts, background suppositions[12] and collective knowledge) which decisively steers the inferential process. The reader or listener[13] chooses from her/his cognitive environment, i.e. the repository of background suppositions, those pieces of information that afford the statement the most likely meaning. The criteria as to what this piece of information is the ease of obtaining a required piece of information, combined with the greatest possible impact the new piece of information has on addressee’s cognitive environment. In that case, a new piece of information amplifies (elucidates, enriches) the meaning of the statement and improves the addressee’s knowledge; it dispels old assumptions or reinforces them with a new piece of evidence. The degree of relevance of a statement is thus defined by the relationship between the effort required for the processing of an assumption, and the effect achieved in the addressee’s cognitive environment. Most important in this respect is that if the reader or listener is to fill in for the missing part of the context through inference, (s)he has to look for that particular piece of background information for which (s)he (reasonably) thinks that has been used by the speaker and understandably considers it as an implicit part of the speaker’s statement.
According to relevance theory, the literal meaning of the sentence is regarded as semantically incomplete and therefore we are encouraged to seek the missing part through inference. Consequently, our point of departure is always the incompleteness of the statement, regardless of the density of information already contained within it in a given context. In such an instance the reasons for an extensive and detailed provision of information (and any possible connected data-disproportion) in content-based implications would be examined through the employment of inference. Following the theory of relevance, this is precisely what we are most interested in – i.e. locating the relevance of such information-rich message.
Inference processes which we constantly refer to in our interpretations of the relevance theory are in fact the most simple reasoning operations of deducing conclusions from given premises which we regularly perform in our everyday conversations. Sperber and Wilson actually consider background assumptions as premises for deductive reasoning which complement a statement, read or heard. The premises are selected in order to most effectively increase the relevance of the message. The text thus literally forces the reader to use a specific assumption; (s)he does not necessarily have to believe in it, but (s)he must employ it to properly understand the given statement. Nevertheless, the repeating of the same or related premises evoked by the texts may in time result in imposing certain beliefs. With a deliberate combination of explicit and implicit meanings writers and speakers may partly determine or at least influence the selection of background assumptions that readers will use as premises (in Justin, 2001). When interpreting semantically incomplete textbook discourses, pupils can thus activate a wide range of ambiguous assumptions that quietly pile up in their long term memory and indirectly influence the reorganisation of their background knowledge. Van Dijk calls such an influence on one’s cognitive environment or mental space mind-managing.[14] Even if a dialogue, such as: “Does John drink tea?” – Sure, he’s an Englishman after all”, does not necessarily lead us to believe the implicit premise that all Englishmen are enthusiastic tea consumers, we are forced to accept it, because it is precisely on this premise that the answer, combining the implicit and explicit premise, obtains the truly significant informative effect by creating a shared context and relating the two speakers to one another.[15]
In the case of history textbooks, controlled influence on the cognitive environment of their users is even further amplified, because the authors of the text are, as a rule, members of the same socio-cultural environment as its readers, and are thus much more able to presume which assumptions the readership has access to, as well as determine to which of these presumptions they will ascribe the role of implicit premises.
With a series of examples we will try to demonstrate how sense can be brought to semantically incomplete statements by activating background knowledge. In doing so, our further aim will be to illustrate how national identity is constructed ‘retrospectively’ through the discourse.

[Example 3, p. 25]
“The inhabitants of these lands long continued to present themselves as Carniolans, Carinthians and Styrians. The 16th century, however, witnessed the strengthening of the awareness of belonging to the Slovenian nation and the deep-rootedness in the territory in which they lived. This was their homeland – fatherland. [...]
Homeland awareness was further heightened by the constant Turkish threat. All layers of the population participated in the struggle against the Turkish invasions. But in order to make this struggle even more effective, the Habsburgs joined Styria, Carinthia and Carniola into a special administrative unit which became known as Inner Austria and had its centre in Graz [all emphases inserted].”

The key notion of our analysis of this excerpt is awareness, i.e. awareness of belonging to the nation and homeland. By means of a simple inference we can, from the manifest content, make inferences about certain peculiar characteristics of this awareness as well as the nation itself. From the assertion that the sixteenth century witnessed the strengthening of the awareness of belonging to the Slovenian nation we can infer that both the Slovenian nation and awareness thereof existed already in some period preceding the sixteenth century, albeit in a rather weak (as opposed to strong) or latent form. The logical assumption of such a deduction is that nations also existed in some indefinite past if not from old. This is, in fact, the background knowledge which we must use if we want the quoted statements to convey some meaning. And this is precisely the idea which B. Anderson particularly draws our attention to when concluding that the nation takes over the role of religious thought and transforms fatality into continuity. Nationality came to be conceived as a natural and eternal entity, even though historians argue that the idea of a nation as is known to us today did not emerge before the end of the eighteenth century.[16] The example demonstrates clearly enough how the explicit element of the discourse forces the reader to accept implicit premises which then ultimately provide the explicit part of the message with its validity. This especially holds true for an elementary school pupil who (with rarest of exceptions) has no background to refute the contents of the textbook.
This is by far not the only background assumption embedded in the above-quoted excerpt. Standing in opposition to the ‘true’, albeit latent awareness of belonging to the Slovenian nation is the ‘false’ awareness and identity – Carniolan, Carinthian and Styrian. We can deduce such assumption simply from the semantics of the sentence: “The inhabitants of these lands long continued to present themselves as Carniolans, Carinthians and Styrians”, which can be read as the introduction to a subordinate clause: “even though they were (in fact) Slovenians.” Crucial for our interpretation is the opposition – that can be recognised as an element of general, commonsensical knowledge – between being and presenting oneself as someone. Whereas the self-representation includes human volition and choice on the one hand or external constraint on the other and at the same time deals with unreliable, superficial appearance, being in that case represents the hidden knowledge our consciousness has yet to reach. The representation of Carniolan, Carinthian and Styrian identity as a matter of mere appearance in comparison with Slovenian identity is according to historical facts yet another modus of naturalisation and essentialisation of Slovenianness.
There are even more background assumptions. In order for (‘non-nationally conscious’) members of a nation to develop awareness of their true identity, special historical circumstances are required, for example, struggle against the common enemy (according to background belief). The ideological premise is that, in times of danger, groups (nations) join their forces and that during such periods the concealed (if not even neglected) core identity springs to light: “homeland awareness was further heightened by the constant Turkish threat”.[17] In this context, the Turkish threat is not a historically coincidental ‘catalyst’ of awareness, since it is precisely the Turks who are presented as enemies, foreigners, the others par excellence. They serve ‘us’ as the negative on the basis of which we define ourselves and through which we not only constitute ourselves as Slovenians, but also as Europeans, westerners, and Christians (cf. Mastnak, 1998).
The above-analysed example illustrates the thesis that (national) identity, as much as any other, results from the opposition to the other or foreign. Next quotation establishes the same strategy. It is the excerpt from the textbook subsection Who spoke Slovenian dealing with this question in the eighteenth century.

[Example 4, p. 127]
“The situation was appreciably different in larger and coastal towns, where German and Italian were the prevailing languages. Well-to-do and eminent citizens were foreigners, Germans and Italians, and to a lesser extent also Slovenians who rose to equally prominent ranks through education or entrepreneurship [inserted emphases].”

The background assumption or hidden premise, which renders the quoted excerpt logically readable, is that the foreigner in the Slovenian territory is anyone not speaking Slovenian, irrespectively of whether or not (s)he had been born here or had lived here for a number of years, and irrespectively of the Slovenian territory being part of a larger political unit (e.g. the Habsburg Monarchy). Foreignness therefore is not a matter of political or, to put it another way, administrative belonging, not even of “native land”, but exclusively a matter of language and of another essential background assumption that should be taken into account: blood. What is therefore assumed is that Slovenian speakers had some kind of exclusive right to be natives in Slovenian-speaking areas, while the remaining population were foreigners, if not foreign bodies (let us not forget that we are dealing with the developments of the eighteenth century!). Today such a definition may be made only indirectly, i.e. by the reader deducing it from the context by means of simple inference. The definition of a foreigner deriving purely from the language or ethnic belonging is, regardless of other circumstances in modern times, completely unacceptable, both legally and from the point of view of individual’s rights.
It is also possible to infer from the second sentence of the excerpt that Slovenians were morally superior to foreigners, as some of them rose to become wealthier and eminent citizens through education or entrepreneurship. With regard to the fact that there is no explicit explanation for the wealth and prominence of foreigners (the latter is absent from the text, cf. Fairclough), the assumption is forced on us that foreigners had (or even acquired) their wealth and prominence owing to their (foreign) origin and not because they had earn it honourably – as Slovenians had. To put it briefly, what we find in this instance are two very clearly constructed poles: ‘we’, diligent, hard working, honourable[18] Slovenians, who are nevertheless pushed in an unjustly inferior position on our own soil, and ‘foreigners’ who had ‘occupied’ the territory that had been forever destined for us and illegitimately (if not illegally) held their sway over it – in spite of their moral inferiority.
Examples presented thus-far reveal the two principal oppositions whereon rests the construction of the idea of being a Slovenian: the opposition between Europe and the Turks, as well as the opposition between ‘Slovenians’ and ‘foreigners’ who live in the same territory and are identified as Germans and Italians (and elsewhere also as Hungarians). These are, furthermore, the main historical enemies against whom Slovenians had formed as a community.[19]

Ideological structures in discourse
National identities constructed through the relation towards foreigners and the foreign can also be identified through the analysis of certain explicit discourse structures. However, when we talk about ideological discourse structures (van Dijk, 1998), we do not claim that there are special structures of discourse through which ideologies materialise, but rather endeavour to demonstrate how some discourse structures may in certain contexts serve the purposes of expressing ideology-based beliefs and practices.
Example of such discourse structures are topics or semantic macrostructures that have a major influence on the formation of mental models, necessary to guide the interpretation or reading of discourses. Topics are usually explicated at prominent places in discourse, i.e. in titles or headlines. In the textbook under investigation we came across the title Defence of Christian Europe, which introduces the description of military operations and defence against the Ottoman army on the territory of the present-day Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia (p. 42). The topic directs the reading, ‘transforming’ it from a reading about military confrontations in the sixteenth century, into reading about defending ‘our’ faith, identity or civilisation against ‘them’, ‘others’. The role of the topics is to attribute global coherence[20] to the discourse, but in spite of the meaning that they possess as an ideological structure of discourse, the majority of ideological beliefs are nevertheless included in structures falling within the so-called category of local meanings.
Van Dijk identifies four means in the strategy of ideological communication that are realised through structures of local meanings:

1. expressing/emphasizing positive information about ‘us’,
2. expressing/emphasizing negative information about ‘them’,
3. suppressing/deemphasizing positive information about ‘them’,
4. suppressing/deemphasizing negative information about ‘us’ (1998).

Individual moves of this ‘ideological square’ are manifested in the text by the detailedness and the level of descriptions, as well as by using the implicit versus explicit. Belonging in the same category is the local coherence of a discourse, which can be ideologically biased. Van Dijk describes the following example: a newspaper report on street riots takes criminal actions committed by black youth as the cause of the conflict, while utterly failing to mention anything about, for instance, the brutal treatment of the police, which may have actually triggered the riots (1998). In a similar vein, our next example shows how an ideologically biased coherence may obscure even the inconsistency in examination.
The subsection European East and West provides a concise depiction of the political situation in major countries in the European continent in mid-eighteenth century. Quoted below are the first and the last paragraph of the subsection concerned:

[Example 5, pp. 100-101]
“The most developed and most powerful countries lied in the West: the first among them was Great Britain the unparalleled maritime and colonial power in mid-18th century world. Closely following in its economic and political prominence was France, which, however, drifted towards an ever deeper crisis after the death of Louis XIV. In colonial power, maritime trade and wealth, the United Kingdom had its rival in the Netherlands: its cities and ports were important maritime, colonial and banking centres. Spain and Portugal, former major colonial powers, were rapidly losing their power at that period – in spite of their vast colonial estates in Central and Latin America […]
In the East, there were Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Russia was scarcely populated and its peasantry was poor and non-free. Turkey extended to the western borders of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the immediate vicinity of Karlovac. In the 18th century, it remained in control of almost the entire Balkan Peninsula, with various European nations living within its borders: Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Bosnians, Montenegrins and Albanians [original emphases].”

Grounded on completely different topics in depicting individual states, the chapter closed by the excerpt can be regarded incoherent as a whole. Whereas it is characteristic that in the first paragraph the “West” is presented through reiterating the political and economic order, power and colonial estates, etc., while omitting any mention about the situation among the population, we can say that exactly the opposite is true of the last quoted paragraph. The authors underline the situation of the peasantry in Russia (which indeed represents an economic category), while the Ottoman Empire is merely described through its Balkan territory inhabited by various European nations. At this point the difference between Europe and the Turkish Empire is established explicitly, while nations are retrospectively constructed and imagined as natural and eternal entities, again through the negative definition – Europeans as non-Turks. At another level, the opposition is outlined between colonies as legitimate forms of territorial occupation and exploitation (‘we’ possess the colonies), and non-legitimate Ottoman conquests. All these differentiations presuppose the division between Christianity and Islam. We are confronted with an ideological square, in this instance by using both lines of emphasising: ‘our’ (Western) power and achievements versus ‘their’ misery and greed-driven conquests. The two remaining lines in the ideological-discoursive square are presented through the absent text: in the given context, history of the ‘West’ is a history of the ruling, leaving the subordinated and colonised no room whatsoever, which is clearly an example of toning down our bad actions and traits. The history of Russia and Turkey is, to the contrary, a history of the conquered and enslaved peoples, without any successes and faculties worth mentioning – the positive achievements of the other are suppressed. Let us, for the sake of drawing an interesting comparison, quote another paragraph:

[Example 6, p. 111]
“By the end of the 18th century, the Habsburg Monarchy thus comprised almost the entire Central Europe inhabited by various nations: Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Italians, Belgians, Slovenians, Croats, Serbs, Slovaks, Ukrainians and Rumanians. When all these territories merged into a single consolidated unit, the Habsburg Monarchy became one of the most important European states.”

The differences between this paragraph and the last one in the previous quotation are minimal, but no less significant: firstly, in the use of the phrase that the Balkan Peninsula was in Turkish hands, which connotes the non-legitimacy of the Turkish rule; and secondly, in the information that various European nations lived within the borders of the Turkish state, whereas, obviously, those living in the Habsburg Monarchy were self-evidently European, which automatically lays the ground for the construction of the Turkish or Muslim foreignness. The excerpt is illustrative because it points, through analysis, to ideological effects of relatively minute semantic shifts.
Probably the most investigated element of the local meaning is the lexicalisation, i.e. selection of words to express individual notions. A paradigmatic example is the selection between ‘terrorist’ and ‘freedom fighter’. In this framework, we also encounter such phenomena as mitigation and euphemism. In our research we have, for instance, come across the euphemism ‘non-free labourer’ signifying a slave (textbook, p. 90).
Returning to example 3, we encounter the naturalisation of national identity by finding a rhetorical metaphor of ‘rootedness in the territory’, but also the lexicalisation in the selection of the archaism fatherland. The metaphor of ‘rootedness’ gives an imagined community, i.e. a nation, an essentialist character[21] in the nationalist discourse and establishes a necessary and continuous connection between the nation and the territory on which it lives. At the same time, roots are a term primarily used in botanical science, i.e. the domain of natural phenomena, which in this particular case makes naturalisation in the discourse quite explicit. The word fatherland[22] sets the territorial demand further within the framework of patriarchal social order, the land of the fathers, and through regression – the land of their fathers ad infinitum – into the distant past. The regressive chain establishes the continuity (cf. Anderson) of a lineage which is determined by the nation on the one hand and masculine gender on the other.
We find an instance of lexicalisation also in the use of the word phrase Turkish threat, which appears very often in the textbook. The Turkish threat or Turkish incursions embody the evil, precluding any positive association whatsoever. Even though the Turks are frequently mentioned in the textbook, they are continuously presented as confined to the attribute of the phrase (Turkish threat), while nothing is revealed about their culture, religion, political order in the Ottoman Empire, Turkish art or science. A specific role in this respect is played by the Muslim faith, which for us Christians poses only one of the elements of the Turkish threat and conveys no positive content in its own right. The Turks occupy the place of the absolute other (the enemy)[23], the pure negative, which serves as the background for ‘our’ positive self-definition. In van Dijk’s ideological square, they are represented merely at places that provide for emphasising the negative and suppressing the positive. In a majority of cases, the Turks are treated in a dehumanised manner: in terms of grammatical categories, they do not function as agents, i.e. active subjects, leaders of military campaigns and warfare as European conquerors are typically described. Instead, the Turkish threat is conceived as a predicate of a specific state – that of danger. Consequently, they do not appear at the same level as persons or people, but are, in the light of given descriptions, more reminiscent of natural disasters; they are, in a nutshell, stripped of any subjectivity, which is also clearly illustrated by the following excerpt:

[Example 7, p. 26]
“When the Turkish threat was over, they [i.e. the nobility, note by M.Č. and A.V.] built castles surrounded by parks and gardens. New or improved walls protecting the cities from the Turkish threat were mainly erected under the direction of Italian architects [inserted emphases].”

As has already been said, this is only one of the statements in which the phrase Turkish threat appears as the reason for the multitude of troubles cast on the ‘Slovenians’. However, what makes the paragraph even more interesting is the fact that this word phrase appears twice at a very close interval, which is otherwise regarded as a matter of poor style, but we also think that constant repetition – iteration – (not entirely consciously) functions as a rhetorical device that only further reinforces the conception of the (absolute) other.[24]

Conclusion
In the conclusion we shall first try to explain which interpretations of our analysis we wish to avoid, and dismiss beforehand any possible implications which we did not intend to trigger. What we especially want to avoid is constructing a ‘negative’ nationalism and thereby establishing a mirror image of the ideological square, according to which we would glorify the quality of the others by reiterating our own weaknesses and flaws. Our intention, in brief, was not to expose the good actions of the Turks, Germans or Italians, and point to the negative traits of the Slovenians, because we were simply not interested in any ethic evaluation whatsoever of the conduct of various social groups. The theme of this paper is the discourse – writing about foreigners and foreign in one of the textbooks used in elementary schools in the Republic of Slovenia. Even though we initially predicted that our research could not include contextual qualifiers that decisively influence the reception of selected material in the target population, our interpretation could still, at places, incorporate some relevant context-related elements that concern general (background) knowledge on pedagogical discourse. Nevertheless, we would also like to reiterate that all the readings performed (constituting the point of departure for our research) were our readings, which is why we cannot consider ourselves competent to discuss how the same excerpts would be read by elementary school pupils.
In the analysed examples we were continuously confronted with the relation between ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘ours’ and ‘foreign’ (or ‘other’), which, however, cannot embrace all the types of thematising the foreign in the history textbook. As a rule, foreign is hard to define – this notion can generally be depicted by means of a negative definition (what is foreign is not ‘ours’), implying that this easily and frequently used label possesses no positive substance, while its content can be randomly attached to any given situation. The customs of a neighbouring region can be perceived as foreign, as are foreign the habits and rituals observed by distant peoples, whereby the notion of foreignness can by far not be related to topography alone, but – as is often the case – much more to religion, political order, ways of life, etc. The substance of foreign is, in fact, determined and defined by social context and relations of social power. We focused on analysis of the type of foreigness that (per negationem) explicitly serves for the identification of our selves, of what belongs to us and what is familiar. However, the authors of the textbook often use the notion of the foreign differently, i.e. in a manner that is contradictory to the subject under their discussion and in a manner in which ‘foreign’ does not stand in opposition to ‘ours’. This can, for instance, be noticed in their presentation of the rule of Louis XIV (pp. 86-89. p. 21 in the article). We could establish as our working hypothesis that, in that example, foreign is presented as, broadly speaking, ‘our’ history; it is the history of an important European Court of a certain era, and through this Europeanness we also recognise ourselves.
In this connection we find it especially problematic that in spite of the vagueness of the foreign and foreignness (as well as identity determinations, such as Slovenian and European) in the analysed material, these notions are nowhere defined, explained or critically elucidated on the basis of concrete situations underlining individual historical eras. As a result, the notion is applied solely in its current meaning and scope, i.e. atemporally and ahistorically, which is especially problematic when it comes to history textbooks. Identities thus stiffen into detrimental definitions; their constructedness, historicity and, not lastly, fluidity become obliterated.
On the basis of the analysed excerpts it can be concluded that the notion of a foreigner or the other is caught between various categories that significantly determine our attitude and discoursive practices when talking about ‘them’.
Therefore, it is the others (as we have named them) who are absolute, in which case otherness is completely negative, because we do not have anything significant in common (e.g. religion or at least a broader identity such as European). As a rule, such foreigners are enemies with whom we cannot, precisely because we do not have anything in common, make peace – at least until we have pushed them far enough, so that they can be deemed as no longer posing a threat. Among such enemies are the Turks, who constitute us as Europeans and as Christians. Today they are increasingly replaced in their role as enemies by Muslims. After the fall of the Iron Curtain – which had throughout the Cold War very tangibly defined the other of the developed Western Europe – the latter have become the closest clearly definable foreigner.[25]
After the absolute other, come – as we can temporarily name them – the distant others, with whom we, likewise, share no significant characteristics, but who neither threaten us nor act as our enemies due to geographical distance and their usually minimum social power. Such is the treatment of the Indians and that of ‘primitive’ peoples in the analysed textbook. Whereas it is true that in relation to this group of foreigners we are humbled by the feeling of historical guilt, this does not necessarily and automatically make them subject to more in-depth discussion.
Contrary to the aforementioned categories, we share with others who are closer to ‘us’ important definitions, such as Christianity or Europe. In this group of foreigners one can also find enemies who pose a direct threat and with whom we find ourselves constantly entangled in wars – even to annihilation – and yet, we never consider them as absolute enemies. Circumstances allowing it, we can become allies, with such changes occurring during relatively short time intervals, also in a period of one single generation. In the case of absolute enemies, however, centuries-old events will not fall to oblivion that easily. Within the European milieu, the future of closer foreigners (European nations) is presented as an idealised cohabitation of the entire continent, irrespective of constant antagonisms.
The analysed examples reveal an extremely simplified model of relations between ‘us’ and others or foreigners that is repeatedly applied in various texts and its different layers used in a large spectrum of contexts. The model is based on the atemporal conception of the foreign, stemming from ideological (nationalist) constructions of identity, from imagined and naturalised communities. We do not claim that the afore-described model is derived from the analysed text, since it can be encountered in the discourse of media, administration and governing elites. However, the material concerned should be, precisely due to the role it plays in secondary socialisation, regarded as an important instrument, by which the relations towards the other are formed.

----------------------

[1] Vodopivec P. and Žvanut M. (2000): Vzpon meščanstva (Eng. The Rise of the Bourgeoisie). Used for the same purposes is the textbook Novi vek (Eng. The Early Modern Age), written by J. Cvirn, E. Hriberšek and A. Studen, and published by DZS in 2001.
[2] Some authors refer to this type of context as to a co-text (Brown and Yule, 1996).
[3] Even though Fairclough refers to spoken interaction, including indicators (markers) of politeness, we believe that these concepts may also be easily used in analysing written, literary material, such as textbooks.
[4] Fairclough adopts the notion of ideational meaning from J. Halliday.
[5] Critical discourse analysis operates with a range of terms denoting the ‘absent’ elements of discourse which can be deemed as crucial in interpreting what has been said. Some concepts are broader and others narrower, for instance: collective knowledge, background assumptions, general knowledge, common contextual conceptions, etc. Whereby various authors use different terms; we continuously use the term background knowledge.
[6] The author himself highlights that we do not only need an adequate definition of ideology, but an in-depth theory of ideology as well. Note should be taken of his emphasis that ideologies do not convey concrete contents and practices, or materialised discourses, but that the relationship between ideologies and practices is reminiscent of that between grammar or discourse rules and the actual language use.
[7] In the paper, the image of a foreigner is used interchangeably with the image of the other. We are aware that the concept of the other is broader and carries numerous theoretical (i.e. psychoanalytic) implications that are not taken into account here.
[8] Anderson also tries to elucidate the reasons for which nations have become such naturalised, fatal entity binding individuals and their presumed, yet long-deceased ancestors into a ‘common’ community. He says that “in Western Europe the eighteenth century marks not only the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of thought [...] nothing makes fatality more arbitrary [...] what then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning [...] few things were (are), better suited to this end than the idea of nation” (1998).
[9] The situation is rendered more complicated by the fact that, in our case, we are not dealing with direct eye-to-eye interaction, representing the basis of Grice’s investigation, even though his concepts are, in our opinion, also
transferable to the context of textbook reading.
[10] This conclusion entails an important consequence for the theory of implicature, since de iure inability to violate maxims significantly limits the field of conversational implicature and makes space for conventional implicature. The latter results from simple reasoning operations and is thus in our view less sensitive to critical assessment – simple formal logical steps afford conclusions a certain degree of naturalness, for which reason we can quickly find ourselves in the field of naturalised ideological representations.
[11] Sperber and Wilson’s theory of relevance may be paralleled with one of the many Grice’s maxims, i.e. the maxim of relation, which requires from participants in a communication process to be relevant, and presupposes that each statement communicates a presumption about its relevance.
[12] In this contribution, we use the terms supposition and assumption synonymously; we also use such terms when referring to premises. Background assumptions are understood as units of background knowledge.
[13] As J. Justin points out, Sperber and Wilson’s theory primarily relates to speech discourse, but their methodological apparatus does not comprise anything that would hinder the application of the theory to written texts (2001).
[14] Influence on an individual’s cognitive environment or mind-managing relates to the kind of discourse that stimulates, develops or strengthens the norms, values, beliefs and views in favour of the dominating group. According to van Dijk, cognitive environment or social cognition functions as an intermediary between micro- and macro-levels of society, between the discourse and action, between an individual and a group; it relates to the combination of mental operations and common conceptions of the social order and social relations. The above-described understanding of cognitive environment derives from van Dijk’s tripartite scheme discourse-cognition-dominance, which he presents in the introduction to critical discourse analysis (1993: 249-283).
[15] However – unlike the simplified illustration above – implications that should afford explicatures the greatest possible relevance are most often ambiguous and vague. Sperber and Wilson talk about ‘special circumstances’ under which participants in a communication share the same assumptions which nevertheless include stereotypes and national pride (from Justin, 2001).
[16] “Theorists of nationalism have often been perplexed, not to say irritated, by these three paradoxes: 1) the objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists; 2) the formal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept – in the modern world everyone can, should, will have a nationality, as he or she has gender – vs. the irremediable particularity of its concrete manifestations, such as that, by definition, ‘Greek’ nationality is sui generis; and 3) the ‘political’ power of nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherence” (Anderson, 1998).
[17] In this particular context, homeland is nowhere explicitly equated with Slovenia, but we still think that the readers would most often interpret these two concepts as one and the same.
[18] These are all attributes that Slovenians apply to themselves as 'generic'.
[19] Yugoslav antagonisms, which have also contributed to the construction of Slovenianness mainly in the second half of twentieth century, are not treated in this textbook.
[20] We can only talk about a coherent text when its individual parts somehow ‘belong together’. Local coherence relates to smaller textual units, e.g. the sequence of several sentences or paragraphs, while global coherence relates to wider units, e.g. chapters in a book.
[21] The root metaphor has its (logical) extension in the metaphor of a (national) tree, its branches, budding and, naturally, also in the metaphor of a dried out branch denoting current outsiders, personae non gratae. The latter metaphor was recently used in Slovenian homophobic discourses.
[22] In Slovenian the use of the word fatherland is considered archaic.
[23] The notion of absolute other (as the enemy) is introduced intuitively. It presents the other (the enemy) who has nothing whatsoever in common with us, as opposed to the other (the enemy) with whom we are bound together at least within a broadest possible framework, e.g. Christianity or Europe. Whereas in different historical circumstances, an alliance with the latter can be forged, this is not possible in case of the absolute other or is at least interpreted as an act of treason (see example 1). What is most striking from this point of view is that, in the textbook, we encountered incomparably more anti-Turk than anti-German sentiment, in spite of the relative closeness of the horrors of World War II.
[24] The repetition of the phrase Turkish threat is both in terms of its structure and effect reminiscent of the constant repetition of the scene in which the two planes hit the WTC towers in New York City. The spectacular scene provides, time and time again, the argument in favour of the political and military engagement.
[25] Europe has always been represented as Europe against the chosen others – the Turks, the Soviet Union, and throughout, of course, also against the US. In new Europe, such exclusivism continues and, during the period of internal integrations, the construction of European identity rests even more on the opposition to non- or anti-European. “Faced with one another, Europeans were Germans, Britons or Swedes, but faced with other skin colours and religions, Europeans saw themselves as white, Christian and Enlightened” (Malcomson in Morley and Robins, 1995). This has led to the construction of the Pan-European nationality, which is also counterposed to the Japanese and the US, but Japan is nevertheless far away, while America stands as a symbolic border to the West. As a consequence, what can only remain to be (understood as) a new substitute for the Iron Curtain is Islam. This is also reflected at the level of current political issues concerning the accession of Turkey (bearing an especially heavy historical burden in relation to Europe) to the European Union. Having said that, it is not so surprising that it was already in 1995 that Morley and Robins started to write about notable (European) anxiety and suspicion towards the Islamic world, detecting ever growing intolerance for the Muslims.

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Zitierhinweis:
Vogrinčič, Ana; Mitja Čepič. „Foreigner and Foreignness in Textbook Literature“ Eckert.Analysen 2009/3.
www.edumeres.net/urn/urn:nbn:de:0220-2009-00593.