The mediatization of the conflict is a fundamental factor to understand the feedback and feeding between identities, conflict and communication. This process, already studied and applied to other social and political issues, especially acts articulating a set of narratives of conflict, which can evolve to fruitful scenarios of democratic progress, but also can took a useless and eroding form.
Despite the common understanding that nationalists’ claims are firmly rooted in symbolic argumentations and frames, the author defends that in the current financial crisis –and specifically in the Western European democratic scenarios (read Scotland, Flanders and Catalonia)– the self-determination rationale take a neatly pragmatic position which pushes the unionist discourse to a more symbolic sphere. The main argument is that the discourse backing self-determination colonizes the pragmatic framing of the conflict.
During the session, the author offers a set of cases and data to illustrate how the pragmatic frames and the mediatization of the conflict act, especially in the context of the conflict between Spain and Catalonia, but also with examples from the Scottish and Flemish contexts.
Acknowledgement: This paper is part of the project titled ‘The media construction of political and territorial conflicts in Spain. Study of discourses and narratives’, CSO-2010-20047, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.
