Some patterns of appraisal in the discourse of foreign policy making

The chapter investigates ideology in historical foreign policy making discourse using the appraisal framework, and shows how the theory can contribute to raising awareness of potentially problematic aspects of intercultural communication. A qualitative and quantitative appraisal analysis for attitude is conducted on a corpus of British foreign policy documents from the 1950s and 1960s. The documents are mainly internal diplomatic correspondence and reports and relate to the Persian oil crisis and the independence of Kuwait. Analysis for explicit and implicit attitude (authorial and attributed affect, judgement and appreciation, negative and positive) showed the frequency of each type of attitude, both authorial and attributed, and how the British foreign service officials construe themselves and their Persian and Arab interlocutors. The attitudinal profiles which emerge for each group in the British camp conform to cultural / national / racial stereotypes typical of the colonial era which is in transition at the time in question.