The Virtue of Collective Sacrifice: Antagonism and Moral Values in the Legitimation of Austerity Policies in Italy and Spain during the Eurozone Crisis (2010-2013)

During the economic crisis in Southern Europe, we have witnessed the convergence of various national governments towards austerity policies, which has raised concerns about the meaning of democracy itself (since political alternance does not translate into different policy choices anymore) and has drawn scholars' attention to the discursive strategies pursued in order to depoliticise and legitimate unpopular economic policies. However, from a critical theory perspective, the post-political claim of neoliberalism is ultimately impossible and scholars must grasp neoliberal discourse in general, and austerity discourse in particular, as a hegemonic discourse that obscures its own political nature. Rooted in this theoretical perspective, this paper aims to scrutinise the reappearance of antagonism within the austerity discourse itself. The hypothesis that will be tested is twofold: first, that national leaders tend to redirect antagonism towards abstract and external entities that require a unified reaction from society as a whole; second, that this symbolic preservation of social unity is constantly reinforced through the use of a strong moral register that depicts austerity as a moral imperative. The empirical demonstration will combine lexicography and metaphor analysis and focus on a large corpus of speeches of Mario Monti, José Luis Zapatero and Mariano Rajoy between 2010 and 2013.