Laurent Beauguitte

The EU and Its Neighbourhoods: A Textual Analysis on Key Documents of the European Neighbourhood Policy

Over the last twenty years, European Union (EU) actorness at both regional and global scales, has become a fruitful topic of analysis in the field of political science, and more specifically in international relations and political geography. Critical geopolitics dedicated many substantive papers on EU discourses and representations. Our paper aims at providing a complementary way to study texts issued by the EU and to question EU actorness by adopting an approach based on textual analysis. The corpus examined includes the seven communications on the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) issued between 2003 and 2013. These communications provide essential information regarding relations between the EU and its immediate neighbours. The textual analysis allows several relevant characteristics of discourses to be highlighted: stability and changes, actors, spaces and scales mentioned. The outcomes of the analysis confirm previous research on the subject: The ENP appears as a bilateral state-centric policy, missing global scale, and neglecting the role of regional powers like Turkey or Russia.

Spatial Aspects of Personification in International News

Together with politics, international news is often considered to be one of the most prestigious fields of journalism. However, making international news attractive is increasingly difficult. Today, one of the main strategies employed by journalists consists in mentioning individuals in the news. The reader is supposed to identify with the mentioned individual(s), and the story is expected to be more successful as a consequence. This paper investigates the interest of using quali-quantitative content analysis to study the semiotics of international news. We analyse six daily newspapers from three developed countries and examine three complementary aspects of the relation between individuals and international news: the level of personification, the type of individual mentioned and the geographical scale to which individuals is connected.

Studying Networks Geographically: World Political Regionalization in the United Nations General Assembly (1985–2010)

The author investigates the political regionalization process on a world scale. It is assumed that political actors must work increasingly often on a supranational basis, a constraint that explicable by the globalization process, understood not only—and not primarily—as an economic or financial phenomena but rather as the rise of global issues demanding a governance shift. The chapter begins with a brief overview of network analysis in geographical studies, where two main traditions exist: one focused on technical networks, the other on flows. The previous decade showed an increasing hybridization of methods from both social network analysis and complex networks studies. The author then presents the field of observation (the United Nations General Assembly—UNGA—from 1985 to 2010) and the methodological choices made. Network analysis appears relevant as decisions in the UNGA imply negotiations between actors. Because nearly all states are present at the UNGA, this institution allows one to observe patterns of cooperation on a world scale both dynamically and thematically. A variation of the CONCOR method (research of equivalence) for weighted matrices allows the author to map the geographical clusters revealed by voting positions. A second analysis examines patterns of speeches, considered as bipartite graph, and reveals the growing importance of regional groups at the UNGA. Lastly, theoretical models of cooperation among actors are proposed.

The USA and the UK (1970–2010): Ordinary Trading Partners?

Beauguitte and Richard posit, on the one hand, that the UK’s European membership has affected its trade with the USA. On the other hand, they assert that the rise of emerging economic powers in Asia has had a significant impact on the USA’s trade with the UK. Using different models, they prove their postulate and demonstrate that the intensity of the UK–US trade in goods has been declining for the past 30 years. Furthermore, although trade in goods between the two countries is substantial, it is by no means neither unique nor exceptional.