Attitudes Towards Europe

Language in the Unification Process

Colin Good, Andreas Musolff, Ruth Wittlinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351575010
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An innovative collaborative research project conducted jointly at Durham University and the Istitut fA r deutsche Sprache in Mannheim, Germany. It focuses on the study of public debates on economic and political integration of Europe, in both Britain and Germany and how these debates have developed in the post war period up to the 1990s. The following topics are investigated: Euro-discourse and the new media, British national identity in the European context, representations of Germany in the context of European integration in Margaret Thatchera (TM)s autobiographies, European debates in post-World War II Germany, the European debate in and between Germany and Great Britain, the career of the neologism Euro in German Press Texts and the metaphorization of European politics. The study links to Internet implications, providing the basis for further contrastive and comparative research on public discourse in the field of European politics.

Part 1: British Discourse on Europe

1 British National Identity in the European Context

GERLINDE MAUTNER

Introduction

European integration is a multifaceted problem involving not only a variety of political, economic, and legal issues, but also causing disturbances of a less palpable nature, such as clashes of mentalities and crises of identity. The 'hard' factors, such as the introduction of the common currency and the harmonisation of tax laws for example, are all safely in the hands of experts. In those areas, politicians, bureaucrats and academics are continuously engaged in processes of analysis, strategic planning, and policy making. 'Soft' factors, on the other hand, are less obviously amenable to intervention. After all, emotional commitment to Europe cannot be created by decree, and conditions for 'Europeanness', essentially a state of mind, cannot be stipulated, fulfilled or rejected like the Maastricht criteria. Instead, we are dealing with elusive categories such as identity and nationhood, which are expressed through symbols, rituals, beliefs, and discursive practices rather than through material and quantifiable manifestations. Nonetheless there can be no doubt that these intangible issues are having a major impact on the progress, or lack of it, of European integration. 'National identity', Odermatt (1991, p. 220) argues, 'based as it is on us-them divisions, is the biggest stumbling block on the way towards a united Europe'.

It is on this symbolic level that linguistics and specifically discourse analysis, can make a substantial contribution to elucidating the opposing forces that help and hinder the growth of cohesion in Europe. In this struggle between integrationist and isolationist tendencies - present all over Europe, but particularly prominent, perhaps, in Britain - both centripetal and centrifugal forces leave traces in discourse, and it is the aim of this chapter to investigate those that are linked specifically with questions of national identity.

This chapter is part of a larger project (Mautner, 1997) on British Euro-Discourse, a study based on about 350 leader articles from four national newspapers (The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mirror, The Sun) and covering the period from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, as well as a host of supplementary data, such as advertisements and political speeches. The analytical tools used were a combination of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and computer-supported corpus linguistics. The resulting synergies are two-fold: a machine-readable corpus helps broaden the empirical base beyond the limited corpus sizes generally associated with qualitative discourse analysis. In turn, the theoretical framework, analytical categories and interpretative procedures typical of discourse analysis are instrumental in re-embedding the data in the context it has been stripped of by being run through a concordance program. The two-track approach also allows for maximum flexibility, with each track being given more or less salience depending on whether a particular question put to the text lends itself more to in-depth qualitative analysis of small samples of data or to the extraction of quantitative evidence from a larger collection of text. Generally speaking, the more direct the link between lexical patterns and extra-linguistic phenomena - that is, between what is in the text and what is outside it - the more leverage is to be gained from investigating the collocational profiles of individual items.

Given that the concept of 'national identity' is as complex as its discursive reflexes are elusive, only limited benefits can be derived from looking at the concordances for individual keywords. Accordingly, the present chapter is primarily qualitative in orientation, tracing linguistic manifestations of identities being threatened, clashing, and re-asserting themselves.

National versus European Identities

Why is it that European integration is causing a crisis of identity? The answer lies partly in the ideology of nationalism, which, according to Smith (1991, p.74) is based on the following premises:

1. The world is divided into nations, each with its own individuality, history and destiny.
2. The nation is the source of all political and social power, and loyalty to the nation overrides all other allegiances.
3. Human beings must identify with a nation if they want to be free and realise themselves.
4. Nations must be free and secure if peace and justice are to prevail in the world.

All of the keywords involved here - individuality, history, destiny, loyalty, identification, freedom, etc. - do not bode well for the development of cohesion and a sense of common fate among Europeans. The nation, by definition, claims undivided allegiance from its citizens, and it asserts this claim through a variety of institutions, such as parliament, supreme court etc., as well as through official symbols, such as flag, anthem, and currency, to name but a few. The European Union has followed suit, though, creating its own version of all these symbols and thus providing an additional challenge to traditional nation-states, which are already under considerable threat because of the many limitations to their sovereignty imposed by the EU. Traditional nation-states thrive on exclusive and uncompromising identification and allegiance, and this is precisely what 'Europe' is perceived to be interfering in. Identity has become an issue because it is in crisis (cf. Mercer, 1990, p. 43), with uncertainty and a sense of uprootedness easily fostering exaggerated patriotism, prejudice and xenophobia. 'In European culture', Morley and Robins (1995, p. 90) point out, 'the longing for home is not an innocent Utopia'. It needs to be borne in mind that, as Billig (1995, pp. 78-79) explains, 'nationalism' is not only 'an ideology of the first person plural, which tells "us" who "we" are' but also 'an ideology of the third person. There can be no "us" without a "them". [...] The national community can only be imagined by also imagining communities of foreigners.

There is no shortage of alternative models attempting to neutralise the apparent incompatibility of national and European identities. The catchphrases bandied about in this context include 'multiple allegiances' (Picht, 1993, p. 84), 'concentric identities' (Garcia, 1993, p. 15), 'fuzzy frontiers' (Cohen, 1994, p. 7), and 'dual loyalties' (Wallace, 1993, p. 101). Schlesinger (1992, p. 321), too, pleads for allegiances to become 'actively multifold'. On paper, both the cognitive and the emotional appeal of such models is considerable. Pitted against the reality of the starkly nationalist mindset, though, none of these conciliatory approaches cuts much ice with the self-proclaimed defenders of national independence.

Even where some allowance is made for the co-existence of identities, a rank order is usually implied, relegating Europeanness to a subordinate position and giving precedence to what are clearly perceived as 'primary' identities rooted in regional and national affiliations. The following letter to the editor of The Guardian is a case in point:

I am Welsh first, British second and European third. [...] I have not forgotten or forgiven the country which was the cause of so much suffering. I resent the future of this country being governed from abroad, and the effect that will have over future years on a way of life which is particular and perculiar [sic] to England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Because, while logic and economy seems to lead that way, one's heart wains [sic] otherwise. That is a strong motivation. (The Guardian, 17 July 1990, p. 18)

In this extract, four motifs emphasising emotional distance towards Europe co-occur: (1) the ranking of identities, as mentioned above, (2) reminiscences of World War II, highlighting the status of Germany as an enemy, (3) the uniqueness of the regions of Britain and Ireland, and the implication that this is being threatened by Europe, (4) a dichotomy between logic and economy on the one hand, and the heart on the other. The head-versus-heart motif, incidentally, is not restricted to the nostalgic musings of readers writing to their daily paper. John Major, too, once went on record with a similar declaration bearing vivid testimony to his less-than-enthusiastic approach towards European integration:

I am more a European in my head than in my heart, but I want to see Europe succeed. (John Major in an interview with Hugo Young, quoted in The Guardian, 25 March 1994, p. 24)

What is, quite literally, 'half-heartedness' about Europe frequently involves the desire to strengthen the borders, both physical and figurative, around nations, to highlight differences and downplay similarities with one's neighbours. The us-versus-them distinction, functioning as an elementary bipolar classification scheme (Leggewie, 1994, p. 53), is one of the key argumentative patterns in the construction of the self and the other. A textbook example of this pattern is included in the following statement made by the Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin in a TV debate:

This goes to the heart of the matter. Because European integration redefines who is we and who is them. And most people in this country regard British people as us and other European countries as friendly neighbours but them.

(The Big Debate, 4 June 1995, 8 p.m., BBC 2)

Thus, pressure from above to move closer together is answered by counter pressure from below to stay apart, with xenophobia among the more sinister side effects.

The irony, of course, is that attempts to keep Europe at arm's length and assert the independence of nation-states are likely to fail eventually because of the many economic interdependencies created by trade, telecommunications, transnational mergers, and a growing levelling out of differences between formerly distinct cultures, sub-cultures and markets. Interestingly, the unifying impact of globalisation also affects the internal cohesion of nations. As Billig explains,

The nationally imagined identity is diminishing in importance, as compared with imagined 'life-style' groups of consumers. The result is that the processes of globalisation, which are diminishing differences and spaces between nations, are also fragmenting the imagined unity within those nations. (Billig, 1995, p. 132)

The internal fragmentation caused by globalising forces is yet another reason why nations are in crisis and looking to replace lost certainties by renewed patriotism at odds with pan-European sentiments.

Arguably, none of this is unique to the political and cultural landscape of Britain, and indeed, the phenomena described here do occur all over Europe in some form or other. However, there are elements which are characteristic of the discursive construction of a specifically British identity in the European context, and these will be discussed in the sections below.

The Island Myth and Atlanticism

Geographically, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is located on a group of islands off the Western Coast of Europe. Under conditions of highly developed transport and telecommunications systems, a country's position on the periphery of a region rather than at its centre would not, as such, have to be of any particular political relevance - if, that is, it weren't for the symbolism that the concept of the island carries. It functions as a metaphor signifying safety, defence against intruders, secludedness and, by implication, difference. As a literary topos it is firmly established in the national consciousness - witness, above all, John of Gaunt's monologue on this sceptred isle in Richard II - and thus readily available to be activated as a specifically anti-European motif within the framework of conservative (with a small c) Eurosceptic discourse.

The island myth, though dealt with under a separate heading here, is closely connected w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Attitudes Towards Europe - Einstellungen zu Europa
• PART I: BRITISH DISCOURSE ON EUROPE
• PART II: GERMAN DISCOURSE ON EUROPE
• PART III: COMPARATIVE STUDIES