Resilient Europe? The Impact of the Financial and Refugee Crises on Solidarity and Shared Identity Among EU Member States

Over the past few decades an extensive literature has studied and documented the development and diffusion of a sense of shared European identity and solidarity among European Union member state publics. Reactions to the Eurozone crisis and the more recent refugee crisis call into question the strength of shared identity and solidarity: there is no love lost between Greece and Germany these days, and recriminations fly (and borders are closed) between Schengen members over the handling of refugee flows.

This paper measures changes in the portrayal of different EU member states over time in the mainstream media in those member states. Specifically, I examine how member state nations are portrayed in top newspapers in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, from 2005 to 2015. These four countries are not only the largest EU member states; they also find themselves in different positions with regards to the two major crises, allowing us to see how the effects of the crises on perceptions of fellow member states vary across member states.

I construct a unique corpus of more than a million newspaper articles from these four countries, collecting all references to other member states. I use automated machine coding techniques to analyze systematically, across member states and over time, changes in how member states are portrayed in these newspapers. The resulting data offer an unprecedented insight in the nature and causes of those changes, and allow us better to understand how resilient shared identity and solidarity in Europe really are.