Harmony and Melody in Discourse on European Cohesion

Abstract

International audienceFrom a corpus constituted by the five Cohesion Reports written by the European Commission, the article, using the methods of textual analysis, highlights the production of a European discourse on the territories participating to a process of institutionalization. Thus, starting from various authors analyses who validate the idea of institutionalization, the authors propose here to further explore this idea, using a method based on a lexical analysis software. The aim is then, on the one hand, to assess the extent to which the discourse of the Commission has elements of stability to justify the idea of institutionalization or, in the other hand, the elements of change over time that could compromise the very idea of institutionalization. The authors present the following results: the Commission discourse has important features of stability. Nevertheless, beyond this finding, there are changes at work. Their expression is rendered possible by the polysemy of the notions mobilized, and they are driven partly by a "rational" representation, but above all by the interplay of the succession of tensions and mind- shaping contexts in the construction of Europe

The concept of solidarity in cohesion policies of the European Union and Hungary

“…As previous research has shown, this approach is valuable in providing knowledge of how the concept of solidarity is mobilised in different ways in different textual sources (for a similar approach with different empirical material see Prokkola, 2020;Zappettini, 2019; for an analysis of similar EU textual material on different concepts, see Damurski and Oleksy, 2018). Elissalde et al (2014) as well as Zappettini (2019) have also shown how key analytical categories (discourse topics) as well as argumentations can be mapped with this methodology. Varr o ( 2008) has also pointed out how through an analysis of such discourses we can also understand politics of re-scaling.…”

Does territory really matters and, if so, how?

“…In addition, it being a polysemic term, the notion of territory, in its different lexical forms and, in particular, as a qualifier (territorial), has become a major reference both in the EU vocabulary and in applied research on spatial development at the EU scale. In the periodic EU 'Cohesion reports' for instance, we can identify five usages and meanings: a country, a unit to manage public funding, a space with peculiar features, a political project ('territorial cohesion'), and a term related to impact assessments of actions on space4 (Elissalde et al, 2013).…”

Territorial Cohesion and Regional Competitiveness: Defining Key-Notions in the EU's Regional Policy

“…3 This survey was conducted in 2011 within the project ESPON 2013 entitled Capitalisation and dissemination of ESPON concepts (CaDEC).…”

“…First of all, the institutional setting encourages the European authorities to bolster their legitimacy by developing a specific discourse, which is relatively stable over time and is upheld by recurrent notions. However contingent changes in political orientations negotiated with the Member States in the course of time lead to alterations in the meaning of these notions [3].…”

“…The analysis was conducted on the responses to a questionnaire addressed to players in spatial development in different European countries 3 . Here the aim is not to propose a representative sample, but rather to 2 …”