Anna Marchi

Establishing the EU: the representation of Europe in the press in 1993 and 2005

This paper investigates how the European Union was represented in three British newspapers over two different time periods: 1993 and 2005. The Treaty on European Union, which led to the creation of the European Union, was signed in 1992 and entered into force in 1993. The Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe was signed in 2004, and like the Maastricht Treaty was subject to ratification. However, unlike the Maastricht Treaty, it was rejected in referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005 and therefore was not implemented. These two events were chosen for their importance in the history of the European Union and because they allow for a diachronic comparison of the construal of Europe in the British press. Two sub-corpora were used in the study, the first, SiBol_93, contains approximately 92 million tokens from three broadsheet British newspapers collected in 1993 and the second, SiBol_05, contains approximately 150 million tokens collected from the same sources in 2005. Each of these corpora covers the year after the signing of the treaties and therefore the period in which the ratification was discussed. The corpora were investigated using Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) which involves a shunting between quantitative and qualitative analytical approaches and starting points (see, for example, Partington 2004, forthcoming; Baker 2006). Our findings show that while there is no simplistic positive to negative reversal of evaluation, there is certainly a marked decrease in the newsworthiness of Europe and the European Union, and the problem the European Union faces is primarily one of visibility.

Churchill, Fulton and the Anglo-American special relationship: setting the agenda?

Churchill is often deemed to have failed at Fulton in delivering ‘the crux’ of what he came to secure, namely a special Anglo-American relationship based in both interest and ‘fraternal association’. As other contributions to this special edition demonstrate, there are good grounds for this verdict. However we ask whether, and if so in what ways, Churchill was actually able in and through the Sinews of Peace speech to set the agenda and frame the terms of discussion for the later emergence of a special relationship. To do this we treat the special relationship as a discursive construct and by combining diplomatic history with corpus-assisted discourse studies map discourse features of the Sinews of Peace speech against media discourse on Anglo-American relations in the early 1950s.