Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2009

In this article, the author explores how the question of Europe has been established on the domestic scene. The article focuses on referenda on EU-related issues held in three EU member states, ranging from Ireland in 2001, to Sweden in 2003, and finally France in 2005. In all three cases, the national populations voted against the will of a majority of their representatives, and chose not to follow the defined EU agenda towards greater integration. The study includes analyses of the national news reporting in the three cases as well as responses from Brussels. The author infers that the three No-votes, in the perspective of the political elites, were interpreted as incentives to further the integration process, spelling out a message of that Europeans want Europe, even if some people (i.e. the No-voting majorities) were considered yet to learn what it means to be, act and think as Europeans in Europe.

Starting with Rene Descartes and Albrecht Dürer, Europeans obsessively contemplated, registered and expressed their being-in-the-world and assigned those self-expressions a universal cognitive value. Such generalized personal accounts as Cartesian cogito ergo sum or John Locke’s memory- based theory of personal identity formed the basis of sweeping statements about nations and epochs. For instance, the turn-of-the-century decadent deconstruction of subjectivity brought to life the myth of a smooth transition from the 19th century individuated (‘I’-based) Self to the 20th century shared (‘We’-based) Self. To correct this uninformative and factually inaccurate social description of personal identity, I suggest searching for social identities beyond the realm of self-reflection. In this light, a cursory survey of first-person statements found in books, journals and newspapers published in major European languages between the First and the Second World Wars, is subjected to various kinds of discursive analysis in the light of the chosen topic. As a result, a few politically and aesthetically privileged self-identifications of Europeans give way to a diverse social hierarchy, providing a possible strategy for linguistic description of social identity beyond the European terrain.

This article examines the impact of national borders on public discourses, based on a case study of the struggle surrounding Turkey’s application to join the European Union (EU). Comparing opinions, reasons and interpretation patterns in quality press commentaries about enlarging the EU beyond the Bosphorus, the article confirms the importance and robustness of national cleavages between the German and the French public spheres on the one hand and the British public sphere on the other. Whereas Turkish membership was predominantly rejected on the continent, the British commentators strongly and almost unanimously supported Ankara’s request. These similarities and divergences, I argue, are first and foremost the result of competing visions of Europe’s finality, especially regarding various constitutional ideas and cultural principles. Against this background, the Turkey question was partly exploited as an instrument to advance or to suppress different concepts on the future of European integration.

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.

In this article we examine some linguistic characteristics of two speeches made by Tony Blair, in the British (2004) and the European (2005) parliaments. These speeches can be characterised as visionary speeches on Europe and European integration. By introducing a polyphonic perspective, we will point to specific linguistic features, such as polemic negation by ‘not’ and contrastive-concessive constructions by ‘but’, revealing different types of hidden interaction in which explicit and implicit voices are interwoven. Combined with the identification of pronominal references (to self and others), this perspective helps to spell out the complex relationship between text and context, in particular how to define a relevant context in a text analysis, and how the text itself constitutes its context. The theoretical framework used for analysing the speeches will be linguistic polyphony, as developed in the ScaPoLine theory.

The aim of this article is to analyse a policy document in which the Swedish Liberal Party attempts to substantiate the proposal to introduce a Swedish language test for naturalisation by referring to academic production. Taking this specific text as a case in point, the article draws upon Critical Discourse Analysis and Foucault’s notion of governmentality to show how the rationalisation and legitimation of a particular political proposal is inextricably related to processes of knowledge production. Governmentality will also allow us to understand that language requirements for citizenship are a tangible manifestation of an advanced liberal political rationality in late modernity.

Our study deals with the meaning of history in the process of construction of one’s self, particularly focusing on the role of historical identity, defined as the psychological awareness of family and cultural inheritance, received by the group in which individuals happen to be born. Since it is determined by the time and place of birth, historical identity may not be chosen, it may only be recognised as more or less meaningful. A psychological confrontation with one’s historical identity — no matter whether it is accepted or refused — is always a specific feature of the construction of one’s self. Starting from these assumptions, we conducted a number of focus group discussions among Italian participants. In order to highlight the evaluative dimensions of discourses, texts were submitted to the APPRAISAL system. All focus group discussions confirmed the difficulties in facing Italy’s collective responsibilities during WWII, suggesting that the protective function of historical identity is still at work down the generations; but they also show a less frequent use of affective resources by the younger generation, indicating a slow progress towards mature in-group reconciliation.