Narrating Europe: (Re‐)constructed and Contested Visions of the European Project in Citizens' Discourse

Abstract

Changes in public opinion and civil society over the last decade have shown that citizens, particularly in old EU Member States, have developed more complex attitudes towards European integration. While the European project was previously generally described as a teleological depoliticized project, aiming at building peace and comforting growth, different competing visions of the European project are nowadays acknowledged and surface among the public on occasions, like referendums or treaty negotiations. While EU official narratives are documented by studies on the European institutions or the visions of leaders and parties, their empirical analysis at the citizens' level is still fragmented. Using focus group data in four countries (France, Portugal, Italy and Belgium) and three social groups (21 group interviews), we provide a comparative qualitative answer to how citizens envision European integration. Our results show that, first, official narratives do not fail to reach citizens, but they are also loosened, contested, and do not systematically produce a sense of common belonging. Second, they highlight the importance of socio-economic contexts, as well as national and personal experience in the re-appropriation of these narratives.

From Realpolitik to Gefühlspolitik : strategically narrating the European Union at the national level

“…As such, we call for a shift of the locus of analysis from Realpolitik to Gefühlspolitik in order to capture these crucial dynamics. Still, more research is needed on how political actors instrumentalise affective narratives to render their political actions acceptable to citizens and explore how these narratives resonate with audiences (see Beaudonnet et al, 2022 for a notable exception). To that end, a more substantial engagement between and integration of the (qualitative) literature on EU narratives and (quantitative) scholarship on political communication and EU politicization can further our understanding of how actors narrate the EU and how this affects the European public.…”

“…As a result, a plethora of different stories have been constructed to narrate European integration (Tonra, 2011) which necessarily co-exists at the domestic level with diverse national narratives. Therefore, not all EU narratives resonate in the same way with national, European, and international audiences: some of them are widespread whereas others only echo on certain fringes of society (Beaudonnet et al, 2022). Either way, in the context of European politics, these narratives can be strategically utilized by national governments to convince their populationsand themselvesthat they are doing the right thing in the best possible ways, as well as to justify policy decisions and general orientations.…”

Two and a Half Tales of Europe: How the European Commission Narrates Peoplehood in Migration and Citizenship Policy

“…While some of these works use the term narrative, studies in recent years rely on it centrally in theory and empirics when studying political discourse (Manners and Murray 2016; Cloet 2017; Kaiser and McMahon 2017) and citizens' perceptions (Beaudonnet et al 2022). Within this ‘narrative turn in European studies’ (Bouza García 2017), the question of whether and how the Commission (re)narrates European peoplehood in its migration and citizenship policies has received less attention.…”