Denials of Recognition: Definitions of Self and Other in the Wake of the Debt Crisis

This paper explores the many different ways in which the Eurocrisis has resurrected old patterns of ascriptions, prejudices and most fundamentally denials of recognition, whose progressive disappearance was perhaps the core raison d’etre of the EU in the first place. It starts from the premise that the EU’s most existential crisis to date may have undermined its key legitimating narrative of prosperity on the material front, but that the symbolic and political fallout of the crisis may be as critical, namely putting into question what the EU is essentially about: a union of citizens and demoi who are continuously re-negotiating and contesting their understandings of themselves, as national citizens as well as Europeans, but also of their ‘others’, or counterparts in and of other demoi. The paper analyses these issues through the explorations of Greek and German newspaper coverage of the crisis between 2010 and 2012 while situating them in a broader historical perspective.