Friends and foes: The construction of national and supra-national identities in contemporary Romanian public discourse

This paper investigates the construction of Romanian national identity after the fall of the communist regime through the use of the discourse-historical approach advanced by Wodak (e.g. Wodak et al. 2009). The object of the analysis is represented by a corpus of eleven speeches issued by the Romanian presidents between 2002 and 2009. The results show that a new, supra-national type of identity emerges in Romanian official discourse, being based on the membership to international organizations membership and on its involvement in joint military actions and programmes. The supra-national identity is constructed and activated in regard to a specific form of menacing diversity, represented by terrorist organizations.