This chapter approaches discourse analysis as a distinct perspective for political analysis, in particular it focuses on discourse analysis in the study of European Union (EU) politics. Discourse analysis has, over the past two decades, transformed from a marginal and scattered research endeavour towards a vibrant set of approaches to understanding EU politics. The promise of discourse analysis is that it allows not only for political discourse to be captured, but also provides a perspective through which novel interpretations of politics can be made. Some of the issues discourse analysis directs the attention to include questions of political identity, social and political discursive cleavages, the constructions of political hegemonies, political framing and agenda-setting, and the role of media discourse in politics (Howarth 2005: 321). Such issues are not the exclusive research domain of discourse analysis, but are also areas of focus for other theoretical positions and analytical perspectives. Yet, discourse analysis has played a crucial role in developing the research agendas in the first place, some of which have indeed been adopted and even subsumed under other methodologies and theoretical perspectives.
The current chapter is organised as follows. The first section outlines key elements of discourse analysis as a field of research. This is followed by a section presenting and discussing discourse analysis in the context of EU studies in terms of the scope of the research, different approaches and key research themes. A section then outlines what discourse analysis cannot be used for, followed by a section outlining the aims of the book and the approach to discourse analysis adopted within. The final section presents the structure of the remaining of the book.
What Is Discourse Analysis?
While discourse analysis is a rich and very diverse field of research, a few common features exist. First, discourse is the research object of any discourse analysis (Lynggaard 2012: 88). Hajer (1995: 44) defines discourse as “a specific ensemble of ideas, concepts, and categorizations that are produced, reproduced and transformed in a particular set of practices and through which meaning is given to physical and social realities.” This is an understanding of discourse emphasising the structure and production of collective meaning systems. Others such as Schmidt (2008) highlight the role of actors in producing discourse. She claims that: “Discourse is not just ideas or ‘text’ (what is said) but also context (where, when, how, and why it was said). The term refers not only to structure (what is said, or where and how) but also to agency (who said what to whom)” (Schmidt 2008: 305). Regardless of some variation in emphasis in terms of conceptualisations of what constitutes discourse, common to any approach to discourse analysis is a focus on the production of collective meaning systems.
Second, discourse analysis is committed to the study of the products of discourse. Discourse analysis is devoted to questions of how discourse produces positions (or not) for agents to speak and act in discourse, how discourse produces knowledge and knowledge practices and ways of legitimising relationships between authority and the public (Milliken 1999: 229). The discourses dealt with in this book are essentially those that produce political authority allowing for EU institutional actors to act politically, but also actors outside the formal decision-making structures including non-governmental organisations, business associations, experts and researchers, independent agencies, think tanks, and the media. The book also addresses questions of how discourse produces rules for what is considered legitimate political behaviour and policies and the type of knowledge or expertise deemed relevant in EU policy-making.
Third, discourse analysis aims to uncover the structure and boundaries of discourse. The structure of discourses and how different meaning systems interrelate—for example, in terms of overlaps and mutual conflicts—communicates something about the severity of political conflicts, and the potential for coalitions and compromises (Milliken 1999: 230). There are of course variations as to the exact emphasis placed on these various features of discourse analysis depending on the theoretical origins, and the empirical and analytical ambitions of individual studies. Yet, taken together, discourse analytical endeavours are devoted to the study of the development of the discursive structures and boundaries and their effect on actor positions, knowledge, authority and legitimacy in an area of social reality or, for the purpose of this book, in EU politics.
Discourse Analysis in the Study of the EU
Scope of Research
Discourse analysis has established itself as an important perspective on EU politics over the past two decades. As a field of research, it has come a long way since Diez (1999), in a special issue of Journal of European Public Policy on “the social construction of European integration” claimed that: “The role of language has as yet been largely neglected in studies of European integration” (Diez 1999: 598). The increased interest in discourse analysis is illustrated by the inclusion of discourse analytical perspectives in general and theoretically informed textbooks and the number of articles concerned with discourse in specialised journals in the field of EU politics. Looking first at textbooks, which all have subsequently been published over several editions, Jeremy Richardson’s ‘European Union: Power and Policy Making’ (1996) is an example of an early inclusion of a chapter that, in addition to actors’ interests, assigns ideas a prominent role in understanding EU policy-making. Wiener and Diez (2004) produced probably the first textbook offering a distinct chapter on discourse approaches (Wæver 2004). Discourse analysis is typically represented in textbooks as one among a number of approaches to governance in the ‘new Europe’ (Rosamond 2003), or discursive institutionalism is presented as the most recently arrived institutional approach among the new institutional schools of thought (Saurugger 2014: 95–99). Perhaps most notably, it seems to be a practice of the past to lump discourse analysis together with social constructivism or the broader notion of sociological institutionalism. The editorial choices of whether to give attention to discourse analysis and, if so, how much attention, no doubt reflects the theoretical and analytical interests of the textbook editors and authors in question. Yet, the increased inclusion of discourse analytical perspectives on EU politics is illustrative of it no longer being a marginal body of literature that is of interest only for the narrow circles of the already converted.
Another way to assess developments in the use of discourse analysis as means for understanding EU politics is to review journal articles published in this area. Graph 1.1 is a simple count of such articles published in the Journal of European Public Policy (JEPP), Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS)...