There are words which belong to the world of power whose deepest meanings are masked as they pass into every day use. That is true in semantic terms. And it is also often true in ideological terms. If we keep on talking about a globalised society, alter-globalisation, equal opportunities, or zero tolerance, are we any the wiser about what they mean? And are we also aware how consciousness is formatted the more and more abundantly the words and expressions flow through public discourse? To decode The New Words of Power, Pascal Durand (a specialist in the critical analysis of information at the ULg) has gathered together the contributions of some seventy authors, linguists, political scientists, historians, anthropologists, journalists, etc. The analytical alphabet book, published by Aden, that they together offer us is a gun held to the temple of a certain singular contemporary way of thinking.

Active social model? Alter-globalisation? Bologna Process? Complexity? Flexibility? Integration ? Knowledge society? Zero tolerance ? Certain words, certain expressions end up sounding hollow through repeated use. Whether or not they are of recent coinage, or alternatively of old stock, borrowed from a foreign language or of French origin, used in their common sense meaning or used in a deviated form, all these words which have currency in the milieu of power (political, economical, media based or cultural) have their roots in a semantic universe which is generally poorly understood and often ideologically connoted. ‘This A-Z’, says Pascal Durand by way of introduction, ‘brings together over one hundred and thirty congealed words, expressions and phrases which, by dint of being boiled down to repetition within political discourse and the discourse of the press, succeed in making people generally forget that they are ideologically marked forms.’ Some examples?

In a society which is inherently unequal, promoting equal opportunities consists of providing correctives to equal rights in order to promote access to education and employment for disadvantaged members of the population (the working class, immigrants, women, etc.). Initially aligned more with social democratic ideas, the concept has today been largely recuperated by certain sections of the European right. In France, 2006 was designated ‘the year of equal opportunities’ by Dominique de Villepin’s government. ‘One understands all the more that contemporary neo-liberalism has seized on this measure in so much as it inspires a policy which allows it to brush over the brutal effects of some forms of exclusion (the uprising in the suburbs) and to move to a selection of ‘talents’ in line with the spirit of the market economy (such is the social lottery: opportunities for all and may the best win).’ For the author of the article, Jacques Dubois (Emeritus Professor at the ULg), equal opportunities is a masquerade aimed at masking society’s fundamental inequalities.