General Visions of Europe As Legitimations of European Project

We identify, in the LEMEL corpus, articles expressing a general vision of Europe. These are the articles that discuss the European project as a whole and that address several questions about European integration. Few in our corpora, they nevertheless give a very interesting vision of European identity, as it is presented in the national media agenda setting. We rely here on comprehensive corpora collected on European issues in the LEMEL project in the autumns 2014 to 2016.

First, by applying the discursive institutionalism theory of Vivien Schmidt (2008), we aim to understand who are the « policy actors in discourse », the « sentiant agents » that play the deliberation, contestation, and legitimization of the EU’s policies in the discourse – politicians, intellectuals, journalists, representatives of the civil society or of the economic sphere. Furthermore, we focus on the forms of « ideas and discourse » about Europe’s identity and history present in this part of our corpus.

Secondly, we interrogate the media dispositive that builds this story of the legitimation of Europe. This journalistic texts (mainly composed of political or intellectual discourses) are founding a certain historicity of Europe, most of the time unconsciously. This Geschicklichkeit of Europe, as Heidegger defined it, is enhanced by the mediatic coverage and it plays an important role in the sustainability of the European project.