Weaponizing narrative: Russia contesting EUrope’s liberal identity, power and hegemony

Abstract

Europe has always occupied a special place in Russia's storytelling of the 'self' and the 'other'-from Russia being portrayed as 'part of Europe' to it being cast as a 'better Europe' or an alternative to Europe that stands for conservative values or a different model of regional cooperation, including such as the Eurasian Economic Union. This article explores the recent shift from discursive contestation to subversion-all around the conflict in Ukraine and in a broader framework of a Russian matryoshka-style struggle against Western liberal-democratic hegemony and the EU's liberal identity, power and influence in what Russia regards as its' 'near abroad'. It demonstrates the growing weaponization of the narrative replacing the pursuit of conventional narrative-contestation practices. In doing so, the article develops an original methodology combining qualitative (contentanalytical) and quantitative (digital corpus-analytical) narrative enquiry, including the use of the GDELT-powered 'big data' analysis.

Information manipulation and historical revisionism: Russian disinformation and foreign interference through manipulated history-based narratives

“…The Russian Federation “attaches great importance to the dissemination of a strategic narrative supportive of Russian foreign policy and its appeal stems from its ability to blend with already existing, frequently socially conservative, nationalistic and anti-Wester discourse among target audiences abroad” ( Nilsson, 2021, p. 63 ). Tyushka (2022) has shown how the narratives “became weaponized as part of Russia’s matryoshka-style multi-layered conflict in the simultaneous fight against Ukraine’s sovereignty, European normative power and enlargement as well as a lasting (geo)political standoff with the ‘West’ following the loss of the Cold War” (p. 17). Similarly, the Russian Federation employs historical-based cleavages and political divisions in foreign countries to favour far-right political parties in those countries, and narratives justifying their domestic and expansionist foreign policy based on fabricated parallelisms with what the Kremlin alleges to be happening in the West.…”

Portrait of liberal chaos: RT’s antagonistic strategic narration about the Netherlands

“…This ties into Russia’s portrayal of Europe as a decadent, deviant space where norms have degenerated (Tyushka, 2021) and, within this, how the Netherlands has long been afforded a leading role in Russia’s construction of European liberalism. For example, Edenborg (2018) discusses Russian media’s coding of Dutch society in 2013, where a reporter mentioning ‘Dutch tolerance’ was underlaid by more nefarious intentions by implicitly associating the Dutch normalization of LGBTQ issues to paedophilia.…”

“…Strategic narratives can be intended for and received by different audiences. In this case, narratives projected by a foreign language, internationally-orientated outlet such as RT can be considered as targeting foreign audiences – although similar narrative content of European failure is also commonly received by the Russian domestic audience in national news outlets (Tyushka, 2021). Given the rise in the discourse around the potential security threats conferred by Russian malign information influence on Dutch society, especially with recent investigations detecting churnalized content in Dutch social media spaces (AIVD, 2021; Government of the Netherlands, 2020a), one of the most pertinent foreign audiences to explore here would be the Dutch domestic audience.…”