Calling for Germany’s Action and Criticizing These Calls: A Greek German Comparison of Requests in the Eurozone Crisis Debate

Germany has taken a leading role in the crisis management and the European politics in relation to Greece which is stricken particularly hard by the crisis. The presentation analyzes how Germany’s role in the crisis management is publicly discussed in Greece and Germany. Empirically, the presen­tation uses a standardized procedure of analyzing attribution of responsibility (discursive actor attribution analysis) which reconstructs as its unit of analysis the answer to the question “Who makes whom responsible for what?” in newspaper reporting. Based on the data of a German Greek project covering 2009-2013, the presentation focuses on the public requests who should act in which way and considers Germany as an addressee in comparison to other addressees for both countries.* Preliminary analyses of this ongoing project show that crisis manage­ment issues are more discussed in Germany than in Greece. The German government on par with EU institutions is the primary addressee for requests. In Greece it is rather the national Greek govern­ment which is addressed by requests. EU institutions and the German government are less addressed in the Greek public sphere. However, given the formal importance of EU institutions the prominence of Germany and German chancellor Angela Merkel in person/position is remarkable. Further analysis will be more detailed on temporal developments and on identifying specific senders who address Germany more often.

* Currently, the project is under way of getting funding for an extension. It is likely that for the conference in 2016, a more complete data set will be available.