European Identities in Discourse

A Transnational Citizens' Perspective

Franco Zappettini

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350199118
• eBook ISBN: 9781350042971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Based on empirical research, this book closely analyses how European identities are discursively produced. It focuses on discourse from members of a civic association active in promoting democracy and attempting participation in the transnational public sphere. Unlike previous books that have addressed the question of European identity from top-down stances or through methodological nationalism, this book engages with the multifaceted concept of transnationalism as a key to the negotiation of 'glocal' identities. Applying a discourse historical approach (DHA) through a transnational reading, it shows how grassroots actors/speakers construct their different cultural and political affiliations as both world and European citizens. They negotiate institutional identities and historical discourses of nationhood through new forms of mobility, cultural diversity and the imagination of Europe as a proxy for a cosmopolitan civil society. These discourses are ever more important in a fractured and polarised Europe falling prey to contrary discourses of nationhood and ethnic solidarity. Highlighting how transnational narratives of solidarity and the de-territorialisation of civic participation can impact on the (re)imagination of the European community beyond tropes like 'Fortress Europe' or intragovernmental politics, this important book shows how identification processes must be read through historical and global as well as localised contexts.

1

Introduction

1.1 The case for investigating the emergence of ‘new’ European identities

From mainly representing a philosophical concern, identity has increasingly been interpreted as a multifaceted social and discursive construct dependent on historic, economic, political and cultural contingencies. While for a long time ethnic and national identities have represented established referents of groupness, in recent years an increasing interest in the exploration of identity construction has emerged in many social disciplines in the wake of major societal changes throughout the period of ‘late’ or ‘post’ modernity (Lash 1990, Giddens 1991, Beck, Giddens and Lash 1994, Bauman 2000, MacLuhan, Gordon and Nevitt 2005). Processes of globalization¹ and de-industrialization, the commodification of lifestyles, the merging of public and private spheres, the rise of the ‘network society’ and the decline of ‘grand’ narratives² (cf., inter alia, Habermas 1987, Lyotard and Benjamin 1989, Castells 1996b) have all had a profound impact on the negotiation of collective and individual identities by making them more uncertain and ‘fractured’ (Hall 1996)³ and, at the same time, more dynamic and open to new arrangements.

In particular, social processes related to, for example, increasing cross-border interaction, virtual mobility and the ‘glocalization’⁴ of practices have been reflected in a ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences (Soja 1989, Urry 2003, Warf and Santa 2009) whereby scholars have focused on the impact that the deterritorialization of cultural practices has had on the reconfiguration of social spaces, on the consequent (re)definition of community (Appadurai 1995) as well as on the development of a new ‘politics of space’ (Rumford 2008).

In this context, one of the most active areas of research on identities has focused on the impact of transnational flows and practices on the way we make sense of who we are in the social world (Vertovec 2001, Levitt and Schiller 2004, Vertovec 2007, Beck 2008, Rembold and Carrier 2011). Transnational processes have had a major impact on geopolitical orders, as well as on established notions of affiliations, belongings and imaginaries of communities, challenging, in particular, social identities constructed around nationhood (Featherstone 1990, Basch 1994, Albert 2001, Sassen 2002) and encouraging more self-reflexive and cosmopolitan views of the world and society (Beck 1994, Beck 2006, Held 2010).⁵ If we follow Robertson’s (1992) argument that globalization is about individual awareness of the processes of global interdependence just as it is about the processes themselves, then globalization prompts us to (re)position ourselves in relation to the ‘oneness of the world’ and, likewise, to create new meanings of the relations with the communities to which we understand ourselves belonging (Rumford 2008).

Moreover, such individual perspectives are crucially being brought into and are reflected in the political arena where they are creating new loci of debate about the politics of belonging and solidarity (Castles and Davidson 2000, Westwood and Phizacklea 2000, Yuval-Davis 2006, Bauböck and Faist 2010). The politics of identity in modern democracies has thus been confronted with new antinomies and tensions between the particularism and universalism of identity and space (Wodak 2010, Pries 2013), the quest for world and local societal orders (Robertson 1992) and the paradox of recognizing inclusion through the regulation of exclusionary boundaries (Connolly 1991).

In the European context, the changes of ‘late’ modernity have taken on further connotations in relation to the integration project of the EU which has been predicated on post-national⁶ narratives and which has manifested itself in economic, social and political fields typified, for example, by the removal of borders and the emergence of supranational forms of governance. While transnationalism has received much attention in migration and cultural studies (especially in relation to diasporas) the impact of transnationalism on European identities has often been explained with the theory of the Europeanization of society (see p. 29) which assumes that social integration and the development of a European demos ⁷ and a common European identity will occur as a functional by-product of the convergence of legal, economic and political systems. From such perspectives nationhood has often been assumed a relatively stable key component of European identity that can be recontextualized and accommodated with other loyalties (Herrmann, Risse-Kappen and Brewer 2004, Risse 2010). For most scholars in the field of European politics, however, the question remains whether a European demos has been consolidating at a transnational level (Cederman 2001, Eriksen and Fossum 2002, Cerutti 2003), especially in the wake of the global financial crisis and the resurgence of populism which has clearly shown the limitations of neoliberal policies driving the integration process and the weakness of the European social project (Delanty 2014, Calhoun 2017).

From these perspectives, and building on Featherstone (2003), Delanty and Rumford (2005) have argued that the process of identification with Europe as a transnational referent has to account for wider dynamics than economic integration and has to be explained/analysed through the processes of cultural and territorial reorganization of communities depending on shifts in ‘cognition, discourse, and identity’ (Delanty and Rumford 2005, p. 7) of cross-national networks. According to Delanty and Rumford (2005) the analysis of the ‘Europeanization’ of society is therefore best approached from social constructivist and reflexive perspectives and in the wider context of globalization, where practices of late modernity can also be understood within the historical context of transition from national to post-national – and arguably cosmopolitan – forms of conceiving the organization of political communities and social orders (cf. Delanty 1995, Linklater 1998, Held 1999, Habermas 2001, Habermas 2003, Beck 2008, Delanty 2013). Furthermore, as Delanty and Rumford (2005) point out, in a global context, no one single institutional or civic actor is exclusively capable of controlling the process of identification with European referents and, therefore, while normative aspects must be taken into account in the construction of Europe(anness), a wider variety of actors has also to be acknowledged. In this vein, an emerging European identity is best interpreted as a dynamic interplay between structural and agentive forces made up of institutions, citizens and global actors, ‘reflexive’ processes and cosmopolitan imaginaries. In an investigation of the recent transformation of European identities Krzyżanowski (2010) concludes by claiming that, at a discursive level,

identities are increasingly moving away from top-down and often highly-ideological and normative projects and are becoming strongly diversified along context- and actor-specific lines. (p. 201)

One key insight of Krzyżanowski’s research is that, in the complexity of late modernity and the diversification of Europe, identities emerge discursively as a combination of the individual, the social, the agentive and the structural dimensions of society and are therefore equally driven by ‘individual experiences [and] collective visions’ (2010) with no preordained arrangement. From a similar stance, Checkel and Katzenstein (2009) argue that

European identity construction is occurring at the multiple intersections of elite projects and social processes; at both supranational and national-regional levels; within EU institutions but also outside them, in daily practice and lived experience. (p. 226)

Acknowledging that the development of Europeanness occurs at multiple sites thus offers many possible standpoints for its examination. (Delanty 2013), for example, suggests that

rather than look for identity as an underlying structure of meaning or a holistic system or a cultural system, it is best evidenced in specific sites of communication. In the case of European identity one such place to look for it is in debates about Europe. (p. 265)

This study builds on the aforementioned insights, attempting an investigation of Europeanness from bottom-up⁸ and transnational perspectives. Although a large body of research exists that has investigated European identities from several angles, the transnational/cosmopolitan and bottom-up perspectives remain overlooked by mainstream research in CDS as it will be further argued. It is therefore the aim of this book to contribute to the advancement of knowledge on the discursive construction of European identities by offering insights from the specificity of these standpoints.

The data for this study is derived from focus groups and individual interviews conducted with members of a NGO called EA that characterizes itself as a ‘transnational’ association of citizens. EA’s main aim is the promotion of citizens’ democratic participation in the debate on ‘European’ issues with a view to exert influence on European policy-making and thus to ‘build a Europe of justice, democracy, and solidarity’⁹ from bottom-up. One of the original themes of EA’s ‘mission statement’ is the proposition that

in an increasingly closer Europe understood as a space of exchange, rather than in geographic or ethnic terms … the nation-state is no longer the appropriate political form in which to define democratic decision-making and active citizenship¹⁰

and consequently political decisions concerning European citizens must be taken transnationally rather than (inter)nationally.¹¹ The salience of investigating this particular organization lies therefore in the fact that, unlike the general public, EA constitutes a community of citizens with a distinct investment in ‘Europeanness’ while, at the same time, their discourses are likely to offer ideological and social perspectives on European issues that are different from the institutional ones.

1.2 Book aims and objectives

The main aim of this study is to contribute to the existing body of CDS literature on the interaction between language and society in particular by taking forward the work of a group of CDA scholars that have focused on the transformation of discourses of Europe, most notably Ruth Wodak (Wodak 2003, 2004, 2007, 2010) and Michał Krzyżanowski (Krzyżanowski and Oberhuber 2007, Triandafyllidou, Wodak and Krzyżanowski 2009, Krzyżanowski 2010). This aim is articulated in three objectives: the first is to investigate how transnational perspectives shape the imagination of the European community in relation to local and global ‘places’ and ‘others’; the second objective is to illuminate how Europeanness is (re)produced at a bottom-up level by providing insights into the relation between linguistic devices, social practices/structures and political agency; thirdly this study attempts to formulate a critique of the transformation of nationhood and new forms of European democracy withi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Exploring Identities in Discourse: Conceptual Tools
• 3 Unpacking Transnationalism
• 4 Operationalizing the Methodological Approach
• 5 Results
• 6 Discussing and Summarizing the Findings
• 7 Conclusions
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright