No place like home?: The role of the media in the framing of EUrope

Media representations of the EU provide significant clues as to how citizens make sense of the EU/Europe, wherefore analyses of such representations are central to European studies as such. This paper aims to explain how the media represented the EU at the onset of the European constitutional process. To that end the paper employs a modified version of frame analysis which includes a corpus linguistic identification of dominant topical frames and a close discursive-rhetorical reading of the formal framing of the topics. The analysis shows that the news coverage offers the readers no sense of belonging to the EU. On the one hand, citizens are represented as being disengaged from the European integration process. On the other hand, the EU is not represented as a stable entity. Instead, the EU is defined as the very process which citizens are said to shun.