Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2015

This introductory contribution frames the theoretical and methodological endeavour of the special issue. The underlying goal of the special issue is two-fold: On the one hand, it aims to shed light on the diversity of discourse theories and related toolkits for analysis. On the other hand, it aims at applying these approaches to the European Union’s (EU) discursive practices, with special attention to foreign policy discourses. All contributions revolve around a central focus: the manifold ways in which various EU institutional, national or societal actors employ different discursive strategies (such as justification, legitimation, and argumentation) related to foreign policy with bilateral partners; within multi-lateral milieus or vis-á-vis domestic audiences. In the last section, the contributions to this special issue are briefly summarised.

The legitimacy crisis that existing institutions of global governance are undergoing has led the European Union (EU) to place the idea of “effective multilateralism” at the heart of its foreign policy doctrine. This article draws inspiration from debates on the notion of power in International Relations to expose the normative dilemmas behind multilateralism in EU foreign policy. To do this, the article systematically analyses the metaphors on the EU’s role in global governance that are present in political speeches that address the question of multilateralism during the period 2004 to 2011. This analysis shows that the most sedimented metaphor on the EU’s role as a promoter of multilateralism – the EU as MODEL – is precisely the one that entails the most serious normative concerns from the perspective of the ideal traits of multilateralism described in the literature.

After the end of the Cold-War, the EU started advancing its Common Foreign and Security Policy and Common Security and Defence Policy (CFSP/CSDP), making them part of reform that eventually led to the Lisbon Treaty. The article argues that this endeavour was above all a project of polity-construction: it endowed European integration with new purpose, imagining the EU as a polity that legitimately asserted itself globally as a civilising power. The article investigates how such polity-construction was generated during multilateral negotiations on the EU constitution and what different meanings it took on once inserted in national media debates in Poland and France. The argument is made that EU community-building is more adequately captured when looked at as ‘recontextualising polity-construction’, triggered top-down in legitimations of EU institution-building, than as ‘identity’ emerging bottom-up from societal imagination.

This contribution focuses on the implications of the institutional reform advanced by the Lisbon Treaty for the framing of discourses of European institutional actors. The article adopts a focused linguistic strategy aimed at identifying patterns of pronominal selection as useful tools to depict both the ways in which different EU actors in Brussels elaborate their sense of belonging, and also patterns of horizontal and vertical inter-institutional cooperation and conflict. The article firstly introduces the data and methodology employed in the analysis. Secondly, it sheds light on the main institutional arrangements established in the aftermath of Lisbon. Thirdly, it illustrates how referential/nomination strategies are on aggregate realised by interviewees. Finally, it presents an analysis of pronominal selection and contextualises the difficulties of individual actors working for the EU’s institutions in dealing with the current institutional structure.

To date, the concept of ‘European identity’ remains quite vague and obscure. Who is European and who is not? What values do Europeans share, and who is included in or excluded from the European community? This paper deals with the renegotiation of European identity/ies and the simultaneous increase of discourses about national security and nationalism in Europe, especially during the financial crisis since 2008. We first discuss a range of theoretical approaches to European identity from an interdisciplinary perspective. In a second step, after summarising the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and especially the concept of topos, we illustrate the link between discursive constructions of European identities and cultural ‘Others’ via some recent examples of European and national debates on migration and economic issues. More specifically, we first analyse a speech by Geert Wilders on immigration and multiculturalism after the clashes in Tunisia in 2011 and the subsequent arrival of many refugees in Italy; secondly, we focus on a speech about British relations to the European Union in the 21st century by the British Prime Minister, David Cameron. It becomes apparent that debates about European identities – especially since the financial crisis of 2008 – have increasingly been accompanied by debates about both more traditional racialised cultural concerns and more recently, about economic security, leading to new distinctions between ‘Us’, the ‘real Europeans’, and ‘Them’, the ‘Others’. In this way, the socio-political unification of Europe is challenged – once again.

This article analyses European Union policy discourses on climate change from the point of view of constructions of identity. Articulated in a variety of policy-related genres, the EU rhetoric on climate change is approached as example of the Union’s international discourse, which, contrary to other areas of EU policy-making, relies strongly on discursive frameworks of international and global politics of climate change. As the article shows, the EU’s peculiar international – or even global – leadership in tackling the climate change is constructed in an ambivalent and highly heterogeneous discourse that runs along several vectors. While it on the one hand follows the more recent, inward-looking constructions of Europe known from the EU policy and political discourses of the 1990s and 2000s, it also revives some of the older discursive logics of international competition known from the earlier stages of the European integration. In the analysis, the article draws on the methodological apparatus of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) in Critical Discourse Studies. Furthering the DHA studies of EU policy and political discourses, the article emphasises the viability of the discourse-historical methodology applied in the combined analysis of EU identity and policy discourses.

This article proposes a theoretical approach to investigate the European Union’s identity as a provider of peace operations, i.e. its Common Security and Defence Policy identity (CSDP). Analysing the discursive construction of the EU’s CSDP identity enables to understand (i) what kind of actor the EU is in terms of conducting peace operations vis-à-vis other actors in the field; and (ii) how the EU affects and is affected by the character of the global “enterprise” of peacebuilding. The EU’s CSDP identity is seen as a process of becoming that is continuously told and acted. Taking cue from a pluralist approach to discourse analysis I explore how through the twin-processes of telling and acting identity it is possible to unravel the EU’s role identity in conducting peace operations. The purpose of this paper is to lay the theoretical groundwork for studying the EU’s CSDP identity, utilising operation Artemis as a case study.

This article focuses on the discourses of the main centre-right political party group (EPP-ED, EPP) in the European Parliament on Turkey’s accession to the European Union. It utilises the analytical framework of the Discourse-Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Analysis to mainly concentrate on the articulations of ‘culture’ and ‘cultural identity’ in the discussions over Turkish accession in official parliamentary debates and in-depth personal interviews with the members of this group. It is argued that a relational theorising of identity allows for analysis of the ways in which a cultural ‘Europe’ is articulated through current discussions on Turkey in the mainstream right-wing European Parliament discourse and thus reveals the cultural borders that are enacted with reference to Turkish membership within this group.