Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 21, Issue 2, 2022

In this article we introduce our special issue of the Journal of Language & Politics on the (de)legitimisation of Europe. We start by outlining the rationale and research that led us to the special issue. In Section 2 we set out the contextual framing of the contributions, i.e., the crisis of legitimacy that European institutions and indeed the entire European project, have faced for the last decade and a half; crises that have been brought about by different events and actors and have resulted in centrifugal and centripetal processes. Next, we outline our theoretical approach to legitimation, which combines politico-sociological perspectives with discursive and communicative ones. This is followed by Section 4, which introduces and weaves together the contributions to the special issue. Finally, in Section 5 we briefly discuss the findings with regard to the aims and goals of the issue and also suggest potential next research steps.

This article illuminates the far-right populist Alternative for Germany's (AfD) performances of delegitmisation vis-à-vis EUrope and legitmisation of itself/the nation by articulating two paradigmatic, transnational crises: climate change and COVID-19. It asks: ‘how does the far-right AfD perform these two crises to legitimise itself and delegitimize others?’ and ‘what similarities/differences exist between the performance of these two crises in terms of topics, narrative (genres) and their linguistic realisations?’. To explore AfD’s de/legitimisation efforts, written texts and videos by AfD representatives through which they intervene in discourses about climate change in 2019 and COVID-19 in 2020 are analysed. The analysis identifies a two-dimensional process of narrative delegitimization, vilifying national and backgrounding EUropean ‘others’, and illustrates that a comic-romantic emplotment of ethno-national rebirth pre-configures the largely same topics and topoi. In so doing, the article, furthermore, takes another step towards the conceptual integration of narrative (genre) into the Discourse-Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Studies.

In this article we study the discursive construction of the EU managerial role in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in four Spanish newspapers: two published in mainland Spain – El Mundo and El País – and two published in Catalonia – La Vanguardia and ARA. By doing a qualitative study of newspapers, this article aims to identify which discourse strategies are used when informing about the actions and decisions taken in European political and economic fora. The analysis identifies the three main generic frames which are used in news pieces: morality (mostly as a call for solidarity), economic (mostly as preventing possible harm), and conflict (focused on divide(s) within (EU)rope). The activation of these frames in the news pieces contribute to an implicit legitimation of the existence of (EU)rope as based on two core values – solidarity and cooperation – together with a delegitimation of the actions performed by some European institutions.

This paper presents a case study of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s delegitimisation discourse on the European Union in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. We focused on how the EU and its member states were depicted metaphorically in PM Orbán’s weekly radio interviews. Relying on the discourse dynamics approach, we identified the metaphorical expressions the PM used to legitimise the crisis management of the Hungarian government and delegitimise critical comment from international voices in the context of the European Union. Our results showed that supranational bodies were depicted as authority figures and this image was reinforced by the use of particular verbal motifs. Rhetorical ambiguity was also found regarding Western Europe, whereas the notion of friendship was propagated when referring to the relationship between Hungary and the Visegrád countries Czechia, Poland, and Slovakia.

The European project has always played a pivotal role in Italy’s politics and Italian political discourse. The European Union (EU) represented the primary vehicle through which to regain international legitimacy. From this perspective, the intensification in the last few years of the Eurosceptic and populist discourse of Matteo Salvini’s Lega has marked a critical turning point. This article contributes to an understanding of such process from critical discursive and historical perspectives. Building on the concept of recontextualization as elaborated in CDS but also more generally appealing to conceptual history and Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) frameworks, this study deconstructs the Lega’s Euroscepticism diachronically, interpreting populism as a key discursive element of the Lega’s Far Right ideology. We thus highlight how the Lega’s Eurosceptic discourse and the recontextualisation of the European legitimisation process present a dramatic change and seem highly indicative of a new ideological and extra-party cleavage of ‘sovereignism’.

The article analyzes how the leaders and the candidates of the main parties in Romania built a European field of power and subject positions in the context of the 2019 European elections. We adopt the premise that the (re) positioning of these politicians towards the EU is part of their ongoing strategies of (de) legitimization. In this respect, the study focuses on how they assign themselves a “European authority” in relation to audiences through their positioning as actors in the field. On the basis of a mainly critically discursive methodological framework, we analyze a corpus consisting of electoral messages on Facebook. The research reveals the ways in which the political actors build claims, representations and positionings about the EU through naturalizing (a) symmetric relations, statuses, and symbolic power hierarchies.

This paper investigates how Brexit was de/legitimised by different Labour actors in a corpus of texts published after the referendum (2016–2020). It thus contributes an intra-party perspective to understanding discursive dynamics of European (dis)integration by building on the notorious ‘European question’ historically debated inside Labour and on the polysemy of Brexit constructed by/reflected in such discourses. The analysis, conducted at lexical-semantic and discursive-pragmatic levels, points to distinct strategic, ideological and ambivalent forms of de/legitimation of Brexit in the discourses of Labour. While strategic and ambivalent de/legitimation point to the Brexit debate being mainly driven by political communication logics, ideological de/legitimation highlights a deeper struggle inside Labour over EU-rope, especially in relation to international vs. national conceptualisations of socialism. While EU-rope was de/legitimised (and Brexit legitimised) by advocates of ‘socialism in one country’, reverse stances tended to be adopted by supporters of ‘international socialism’.

This paper examines the reasoning lines in PM Alexis Tsipras’ political discourse in critical moments of SYRIZA’s tenure as the ruling party in Greece. Adopting a CDS perspective, we zoom in on the patterns that underlie the (de)legitimization of the crisis-ridden EU in three seminal speeches by PM Tsipras during the Greek/EU financial crisis. To this end, we integrate systemic-functional and cognitive linguistic tools with a view to scrutinizing representational meaning, before turning to employ the notions of endoxon and topos/locus as a means of studying the particular argumentative inferences, triggered by the respective discursive representations. Through this lens, we show how the overall argumentation can be seen as supporting the (de-)legitimation of dominant EU austerity perspectives while transforming SYRIZA into a pro-austerity voice.

Using the example of the European Union’s foundational myth that post-war cooperation led to peace, in this paper I attempt to develop both a theory of mythopoetic legitimation and an analytical framework for its analysis. I start from the position that mythopoesis is a form of legitimation through history or, more specifically, through selective narratives of history. I utilise Berger and Luckmann’s social constructivism to show that myths are deeply sedimented narratives that integrate existing (objectivated) phenomena into a cohesive story. I then propose a framework for critically analysing myths as legitimation strategies. After detailing the EU’s origins story, the remainder of the paper operationalises the framework by analysing how the EU’s foundational myth is used in three, very different contexts: Brexit, the coronavirus pandemic, and a State of the Union address. In doing so, I argue that the EU has become a prisoner of the past it has mythologised.