Charlotte Galpin

Performing Brexit: How a post-Brexit world is imagined outside the United Kingdom:

Theresa May’s claim that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ demonstrates the malleability of the concept. The referendum campaign showed that ‘Brexit’ can be articulated to a variety of post-Brexit scenarios. While it is important to analyse how Brexit gives rise to contestation in the United Kingdom, Brexit is also constructed from the outside. Brexit signifies more than the technical complexities of the United Kingdom withdrawing from the European Union. It works both as a promise of a different future and performatively to establish a particular past. Brexit works as a frame with potential to shape perceptions in three domains. The first is identity. How does ‘Brexit’ shape national and European identities in distinct national environments? The second is how Brexit shapes understandings of geopolitical reality and influences conceptions of what is diplomatically possible. Third is the global economy. How does ‘Brexit’ work within intersubjective frames about the nature of global economic order?

The Spiral of Euroscepticism: Media Negativity, Framing and Opposition to the EU

Media scholars have increasingly examined the effects of a negativity bias that applies to political news. In the ‘spiral of cynicism’, journalist preferences for negative news correspond to public demands for sensational news. We argue that this spiral of cynicism in EU news results in a ‘spiral of Euroscepticism’, taking media autonomy seriously to understand how media logics and selective devices contribute to the shaping of public discourse about the EU. We review the literature on the media and EU legitimacy to show how media frames and their amplification on social media can account for the salience of Eurosceptic opinions in the public sphere that then push parties to contest the EU in predominantly negative terms.

Has Germany Fallen Out of Love with Europe

This chapter argues that, contrary to expectations raised by the ‘normalisation’ debate, the crisis in Germany reflects both its post-war European identity and the incorporation of ordoliberal values into understandings of Europe. While both German elites and media actors present the Euro crisis as a broad European crisis threatening the very project of European integration, the crisis has also seen the development of a particularly German flavour of European solidarity and the ‘good European’ based on an ‘ordoliberal ethic’ of economic discipline and individual responsibility. Hostility to Greece in the conservative and populist press can be understood in this light–rather than signalling a strengthening of German national identity, this instead represents the development of a new Northern European identity from which Greece and other southern Europeans are excluded.

Converging towards Euroscepticism? Negativity in news coverage during the 2014 European Parliament elections in Germany and the UK

ABSTRACT In the run up to the 2014 European Parliament elections, the new Spitzenkandidaten process and European-wide party campaigns were considered a mechanism to create a more engaged European public. However, right-wing Eurosceptic party groupings gained a significant minority of the seats in the 2014 EP elections. We place this in the context of media and public sphere dynamics of politicised EP elections that have given selective salience to Euroscepticism. We discuss two interrelated media biases that explain this convergence of public debates towards Euroscepticism: a media negativity bias in the selection and tonality of EU news and a media polity bias that privileges contestation of the constitutional make-up of the EU over political and policy-based debates. To investigate these media biases empirically, we analyse EP election news during the 2014 European Parliament elections, taking Germany and the UK as ideal-type cases. We find that the UK news demonstrates a strong negative bias towards the EU polity, whereas in Germany EP debates focus more strongly on EU politics and policies and in fact demonstrate a positivity bias with regard to assessments of the legitimacy of the EU polity.

Marching for Europe? Enacting European citizenship as justice during Brexit

ABSTRACT This article examines pro-European mobilisation in the United Kingdom following the European Union (EU) referendum. It develops a framework that combines Isin’s ‘acts of citizenship’ with Nancy Fraser’s three dimensions of justice – redistribution, recognition and representation – to examine the way in which Brexit has served as a mobilisation trigger for claims about European citizenship. Drawing on data from a survey of participants of an anti-Brexit march in London, it argues that Brexit can be seen as a process that makes people aware of the ‘right to have rights’ as EU citizens. While some protesters experience Brexit as a struggle over the substance of justice within the United Kingdom, many of the ‘48%’ experience Brexit as a serious injustice that results from what Fraser calls ‘misframing’ in the context of struggles over the boundaries of the political community. In this sense, economic, cultural as well as political forms of injustice amount to a sense of personal grief over being ‘misframed’ in a UK outside the EU.

Comparing European Identities in Germany, Ireland and Poland

This chapter sets the stage for a study which offers rich empirical data on the early stages of the Euro crisis. It reviews the existing literature on the different and competing facets of elite and media discourses on European identity in Germany, Poland, and Ireland before the crisis and explains and justifies the choice of case studies. It also outlines the materials chosen for analysis–political speeches and press releases and broadsheet and tabloid newspaper articles, the time periods chosen–the first Greek bailout, Ireland’s bailout and the agreement of the Fiscal Compact–alongside the qualitative method of frame analysis.

Identity Continuity: Actors, Institutions and Interests

This chapter argues that the various constructions of the crisis reflect existing European and national identities because of the legitimation strategies of different national actors. Contradicting the notion that identities change dramatically during ‘critical junctures’, it argues that the Euro crisis has resulted in limited changes to European identity discourses because political and media actors draw on existing identities and ideas in order to make sense of the crisis. It then outlines the variety of domestic constraints that limit the possibility of change, including national historical narratives, economic ideas and interests and the pressures of party politics. Finally, it comments on the role of identities in the broader resilience of ideas about the economy as well as the continued survival of the single currency.

The Battle for the European Core: Polishness as Europeanness?

This chapter argues that the crisis debates in Poland primarily strengthen the existing polarisation between those who view European and Polish identity as two sides of the same coin, namely Civic Platform and the pro-European press, and those who passionately defend Polish identity and sovereignty from Poland’s historical enemies in Europe, Russia and Germany–notably Law and Justice. Debates about the crisis reflect a struggle over the meaning of sovereignty, which then constrains the discourse of pro-European actors who reinforce the fears about Polish sovereignty and independence.

Irish Identity and the Utility of Europe

Ireland had a rather different experience of the crisis–one as a ‘debtor’ nation and the recipient of an EU bailout. This chapter finds that crisis is primarily constructed as an Irish crisis, touching on fundamental questions about Irish identity. Where the crisis is understood as a wider European crisis, it reflects the original motivations for Irish membership of the EU. In Germany, crisis policies are debated in terms of European solidarity, whereas in Ireland, they are primarily debated in terms of the economy and the extent to which they serve Irish national sovereignty. In the populist press, this often results in anti-German sentiment and a strong perception that the smaller peripheral countries are being dominated by the larger core ones.

European Identities at Times of Crisis

Combining a social constructivist approach to identify with discursive institutionalist understandings of the ideational change, this book considers European identities to be ‘multiple’ and coming in ‘national colours’ but argues that the conceptualisations of change at ‘critical junctures’ are insufficient for understanding the change and continuity at a time of crisis. Instead, the chapter calls for a focus on ‘communicative discourse’ in the public sphere to take account of the role of actors in the construction of crisis and the public contestation between political elites and the media. The chapter then outlines the way in which identities are likely to be reproduced in public debates through the meaning given to Europe and the construction of the ‘Other’, positing that dramatic change at a time of crisis is highly unlikely.