Discourses on and of Europe Debates and controversies

European integration goes back over 62 years including the European Coal and Steel Community. For a long time it remained closed to popular concern, and was mainly a matter for the political class and a few professions directly affected such as civil servants, financial and industrial elites and exporters, and specialist lawyers. Everything changed when the political and economic elites decided to transform the common market, with its famous common agricultural policy, into an Economic and Monetary Union. This project and the adoption of a single currency made it necessary to change public attitudes and therefore to undertake an exceptionally far-reaching communication policy to convince as many people as possible of the benefits. Even before the signature of the Maastricht Treaty by heads of state and government in December 1991, Europe lost its public ‘anonymity’, as new arguments and terminologies arose within public debates and fundamentally different positions were taken up around the meaning and direction of integration: neoliberalism versus social socially redistributive policies; national sovereignty versus supranationalism; a Europe of states versus a Europe of regions; and left versus right. A strong bipolarisation of attitudes emerged in the construction of straightforward choices for or against European integration either as a principle, or in the form it had taken since the Single Market of 1985. Even among advocates of European integration, debates have been intense: widening versus deepening; federalism versus confederalism; supranational versus intergovernmental; singlespeed versus multi-speed Europe. These debates are older but have become more urgent as integration has developed. Since 2010, the post-Lisbon shift towards new economic governance structures and policies has accentuated the contested nature of European power, symbolised for example by the highly controversial troika, as economic and social cleavages have hardened: rich versus poor, banks versus the people.
The conference will gather together academics from these disciplines in order to explore, whether synchronically or diachronically, the discourses of actors whose positions on European integration diverge and conflict. These controversies and antagonistic positions help us to understand the real nature of European nature. Which types of conflictual discourse endure, which fade away or become superceded? Which appear across countries and which are nation-specific? Which develop through mutual confrontation and may even be enriched by it? Which conflicts are particularly salient today? Which themes, styles, arguments, symbols and artefacts are most commonly used? Which actors and which social groups use which arguments? Who supports European integration, who rejects it? Who supports Europe, who rejects it ?
We will also be invited to ask ourself what is the role of the mass medias discourses in the construction of problems related to Europe (i.e. Integration of Turkey) and also in the mediatization of the debates, presented as controversies.
Conversely, how are pro-integrationist discourses mobilised by political actors in order to create consensus around European policy-making? How and why are ‘alibi’ or ‘external constraint’ discourses developed by national political actors in relation to the EU? How are discourses of economic rationality and ‘responsibility’ presented? How are discourses of European integration presented in the context of economic globalisation? How does political and economic policy discourse relate the national and European levels of policy? How are political and economic discourses on Europe produced as ways of defining the sphere of political controversy and contestation, and demarcating it from the sphere of consensus?
As well as political and media discourse, the conference will also look at ‘profane’ public spaces for contestation and debate such as discussion forums and social media. Civic discussion and deliberation, both formal (through surveys, online consultations) and informal and dispersed (such as through Facebook or blogs), will become more important as the EU purposively develops its own consultative and participatory tools and mechanisms. But civic voices may also become more contestatory, through the use of petitions or citizen initiatives. Polemical discourses may thus be seen as a means of democratisation.
Papers are invited from a wide range of perspectives, including discourse analysis in its multiple forms and methods, and political science approaches to understanding actors, institutions and policies, and not excluding other disciplinary approaches. The common focus will be the production of discourses on Europe whether in its present or past forms, and without any preconceived ideas about the type of discourse or corpus of text. As Europe is a multilingual space (the EU recognises no less than 24 official languages), papers on multilingual corpuses will be particularly welcome.