Legitimation in the European Union: A Discourse- and Field-Theoretical View (Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse) 3030330303, 9783030330309

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POSTDISCIPLINARY STUDIES IN DISCOURSE

Legitimation in the European Union A Discourse- and Field-Theoretical View Amelie Kutter

Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse

Series Editor Johannes Angermuller Centre for Applied Linguistics University of Warwick Coventry, UK

Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse engages in the exchange between discourse theory and analysis while putting emphasis on the intellectual challenges in discourse research. Moving beyond disciplinary divisions in today’s social sciences, the contributions deal with critical issues at the intersections between language and society. Edited by Johannes Angermuller together with members of DiscourseNet, the series welcomes high-quality manuscripts in discourse research from all disciplinary and geographical backgrounds. DiscourseNet is an international and interdisciplinary network of researchers which is open to discourse analysts and theorists from all backgrounds. Editorial board Cristina Arancibia Aurora Fragonara Péter Furkó Tian Hailong Jens Maesse Eduardo Chávez Herrera Michael Kranert Jan Krasni María Laura Pardo Yannik Porsché Kaushalya Perera Luciana Radut-Gaghi Marco Antonio Ruiz Jan Zienkowski More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14534

Amelie Kutter

Legitimation in the European Union A Discourse- and Field-Theoretical View

Amelie Kutter Faculty of Cultural and Social Sciences European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany

Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse ISBN 978-3-030-33030-9    ISBN 978-3-030-33031-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33031-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Milorad Kovac / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my parents

Acknowledgements

The idea to investigate the construction of the European Union as an emergent polity emerged in a peculiar place: at the European University Viadrina at the Polish-German border. My previous studies on the construction of Poland’s transition and EU integration as a ‘return to Europe’ and pre-accession Europeanisation in Central and Eastern Europe had triggered my curiosity. How, against the backdrop of the EU’s heterarchical arrangement and increased heterogeneity, would understandings of political association form? The present book presents some answers. It is based on the doctoral thesis ‘Polity-construction in multilevel settings. Recontextualisation and the example of the EU constitutional debate in Poland and France’, defended at the Faculty of Cultural and Social Sciences at European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), supervised by Timm Beichelt (European University Viadrina) and Ruth Wodak (Lancaster University). The book documents a search for adequate concepts and methods that took various routes: often to Lancaster University, which became an apprenticeship in linguistic Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA); to Paris, where I explored Bourdieusian media sociology and the French public debate on the EU constitution; to Warsaw, where I witnessed the coming to terms with the EU constitutional debate among Polish analysts. Throughout the process of gestation, I have enjoyed support from a range of people, to whom I would like to express my gratitude at this vii

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point. In the first place, I would like to thank Timm Beichelt and Ruth Wodak, for agreeing to accompany that interdisciplinary experiment, and a group of people, who have contributed through commentary, integration into discussion groups, or agreement on flexible working schedules: François Bafoil, Tanja Börzel, Nicolas Hubé, Cathleen Kantner, Anja Hennig, Bob Jessop; Michał Krzyżanowski, Thomas Risse, Vera Trappmann, Antje Wiener and the anonymous reviewer. Invaluable feedback regarding my interpretation of texts in the two foreign languages came from Anaïs Bordes and Ewelina Podgórska. I would like to thank Barty Begley and Gerard Hearne for improving the clarity of my writing and Johanna Kutter-­Cañete, Laura Kutter and Vivika Lemke for consistency checks and support during intense writing periods. For putting the manuscript through the publishing procedure and for their patience with the gestation of the book, I am greatly indebted to Cathy Scott, Alice Green and Beth Farrow at Palgrave and Venkitesan Vinodh Kumar at SPi Global. Parts of the work were funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and by the German Academic Exchange Service. Crucial research was enabled by the infrastructural support of the Centre for International Relations in Warsaw, the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (CERI) in Paris, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Lancaster University. I am grateful to Rzeczpospolita for granting me free access to the newspaper’s web archive.

Contents

1 If Only It Was a Different Polity: Introduction to the Book  1 1.1 Legitimation in the European Union: Subject and Argument of the Book   2 1.2 The EU’s Legitimacy Deficit: Situating the Book in Scholarly Debate  7 1.3 The Book’s Interdisciplinary Endeavour: Four Conceptual Moves  15 1.4 From Theoretical to Empirical Exploration: The Plan of the Book  21 References 25 2 Advancing the Linguistic Turn: Premises of Conceptual Work 35 2.1 The Linguistic Turn in European Integration Studies  36 2.2 Reconsidering the Linguistic Turn in Social Studies  43 2.3 Critical Discourse Analysis: The Epistemological Entry Point 59 2.4 Analytical Strategy: The Book’s Interdisciplinary Approach  71 References 91

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3 Discursive Legitimation: Polity Construction103 3.1 Legitimation in Language Use 106 3.2 Legitimation and the Construction of Political Authority117 3.3 Legitimation and the Construction of Political Association132 3.4 Narratives of European Integration as Polity-­ Constructing Plots 142 3.5 Narratives of Polity-Building in Poland and France 153 3.6 Studying Discursive Legitimation: Summary 163 References169 4 Discursive Europeanisation: Recontextualisation179 4.1 Recontextualisation in Generic Language Use 182 4.2 Genre, Code, Field: Towards the Notion of Discourse Field189 4.3 The Discursive Constitution of News Journalism 205 4.4 The Discourse Field of Europeanised National News 218 4.5 The Discourse Field of Multilateral Negotiation 232 4.6 Studying Discursive Europeanisation: Summary 243 References252 5 The Constitution Process in the Discourse Field of Multilateral Negotiation261 5.1 Constitution Speak and Polity Construction in Intertextual Context 263 5.2 Supranational and Intergovernmental Dynamics 278 5.3 The Constitution Process in Poland and France 288 5.4 Revisiting the Constitution Process Through the Lens of the Discourse Field: Summary 304 References317

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6 Recontextualising the Constitutional Agenda in Media Debates in Poland and France323 6.1 Recontextualising Topics of EU Institutional Reform 328 6.2 Generating Salience: Converging Coverage, Diverging Debate340 6.3 Generating Consonance: Intertextuality and Plausibilisation350 6.4 The Discourse Field of Europeanised National News Revisited: Summary 377 References386 7 Constructing the Polity Nexus: Legitimation in Media Debates in Poland and France389 7.1 Polity Topics: From Functioning Institutions to Legitimate Political Association 391 7.2 Polity Duplicatis: Communitarian Rationales in Ritualised EU Commentary 398 7.3 Polity Instrumentalis: Polity Construction in Struggles About the Draft Constitution 409 7.4 (De-)legitimising the EU in National Media Debates: Summary435 References446 8 Towards a Discursive Political Sociology of European Integration: Conclusions449 8.1 Beyond the ‘Deficits’: Challenging Conventional Wisdoms on Europeanised Political Communication 451 8.2 Recontextualising Polity Construction: How the EU Is (De-)legitimised462 8.3 Discourse Fields and Discursive Europeanisation 479 8.4 Towards a Discursive Political Sociology of European Integration491 References504

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Appendix A: Samples and Subsamples509 Appendix B: Constitution Topics in Evaluative Articles511 Appendix C: Polity Topics in Evaluative Articles513 Appendix D: Laeken Declaration515  Appendix E: Introductory Speech by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to the Convention on the Future of Europe523 Index533

Abbreviations

AWS CDA CFSP DHA ECB ECHR ECJ ECSC EP EPP EPU ESDP EU FN IGC IPA IR JHA LPR LRC MEP MNR

Akcja Wyborcza Solidarność; Solidarity Electoral Action Critical Discourse Analysis Common Foreign and Security Policy Discourse-Historical Approach European Central Bank European Convention on Human Rights European Court of Justice European Coal and Steel Community European Parliament European Peoples’ Party European Political Union European Security and Defence Policy European Union Front National; National Front party Intergovernmental Conference Interpretive Policy Analysis International Relations Justice and Home Affairs Liga Polskich Rodziń; League of Polish Families Ligue Revolutionaire Communiste; Revolutionary Communist League Member of European Parliament Mouvement National Républicain; National Republican Movement xiii

xiv Abbreviations

MP MPF NATO PCF PES PiS PO PS PSL QMV RPR SdPl SLD UDF UK UMP UP US UW WTO

Member of Parliament Mouvement pour la France; Movement for France North Atlantic Treaty Organisation Parti Communiste Français; French Communist Party Party of European Socialists Prawo i Sprawedliwość; Law and Justice Platform Obywatelska; Citizens’ Platform Parti Socialiste; Socialist Party Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe; Polish Peoples’ Party Qualified Majority Voting Rassemblement pour la République; Rally for the French Republic Socjaldemokracja Polska; Social Democracy of Poland Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej; Democratic Left Alliance party Union pour la démocratie française; Union for French Democracy United Kingdom Union pour un Mouvement Populaire; Union for a Popular Movement Unia Pracy; Labour Union United States of America Unia Wolności; Freedom Union World Treaty Organization

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Bifocal procedure. (Source: Own Elaboration) 75 Fig. 6.1 Constitution topics (in % of N). (Source: Own elaboration) Topics marked by an asterisk were built from several subordinate or related topics (clockwise, starting from Social Policy). Social Policy includes Public Services, Social and Employment Policy, Social Rights, Social Europe General; CFSP/ESDP includes Solidarity Clause, European Armament Agency, EU Headquarters, CFSP General; Charter includes Antidiscrimination, Status of the Church in the Charter, Charter General; Cohesion includes Cohesion Transfers, Eastern Dimension; Economy includes EC Control, ECB Status, EU Budget, Economic Governance, Eurogroup, Taxes, Economy General; European Parliament includes EP Composition, EP General; Presidency includes Commission President, Council President, EU President. N: 474 (Le Monde), 483 (Le Figaro), 395 (Gazeta Wyborcza), 511 (Rzeczpospolita)332 Fig. 6.2 Dense constitution topics in Gazeta Wyborcza. (Source: Own elaboration)335 Fig. 6.3 Dense constitution topics in Rzeczpospolita. (Source: Own elaboration)336 Fig. 6.4 Dense constitution topics in Le Monde. (Source: Own elaboration)337 xv

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List of Figures

Fig. 6.5 Dense constitution topics in Le Figaro. (Source: Own elaboration)338 Fig. 6.6 Coverage on the EU constitution over time (absolute numbers). (Source: Own elaboration) N: 1296 (Le Monde); 1216 (Le Figaro); 862 (Gazeta Wyborcza); 1152 (Rzeczpospolita)342 Fig. 7.1 Polity topics (in % of N). (Source: Own elaboration) Topics marked by an asterisk were built from several subordinate or related topics. ‘Democracy’ includes positive references to democracy as a value (‘Democracy’) and reference to problems of democratic legitimacy (‘Alienation and Contestedness’); ‘Borders’ include all instances of delimitation towards out-groups, mostly Turkey, other accession and neighbouring countries and/or competitors, mostly the US (‘Borders and Frontiers’, ‘EU-US’) 393

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 4.1 Table 6.1

Categories and methods Discourse strategies Polity rationales Discourse fields: dimensions of analysis News and evaluation (in % of the overall coverage)

79 109 135 202 344

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1 If Only It Was a Different Polity: Introduction to the Book

If only it was a different constitution! This exclamation headed a commentary on the EU constitution published by Bronisław Wildstein in the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita back in October 2003, when the first Intergovernmental Conference on a draft version of the EU constitution was about to start. The exclamation pinpoints the dilemma that the European Union has faced to date: while its aspirations for joint problem-­ solving, prosperity and stability are largely acknowledged, there continue to be fierce political struggles about what polity such endeavours should be based on. Recent crises, such as the Eurozone crisis, the crisis of EU migration policy or the looming disaster of a ‘no deal’-Brexit may have been temporarily contained. But this cannot conceal the fact that divisions have deepened over the question of how core projects of European integration ought to be shaped in future. Moreover, several aspects of EU polity that were taken for granted appear suddenly to be at risk. The way the recent crises were managed has strained the EU’s culture of consensus-­ seeking and burden-sharing and questioned its ambition to foster the union. Alternativist and rejectionist movements, that contest the EU in its very set-up (Leconte, 2015; Topaloff, 2014), have gathered momentum. And the rise of the radical right in many EU countries, of national© The Author(s) 2020 A. Kutter, Legitimation in the European Union, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33031-6_1

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ism as a presentable governmental doctrine, and of hostility towards non-nationals suggests that “Europe is experiencing a renationalisation of political life” that potentially rewinds the project of political union (Kupchan, 2010).

1.1 L egitimation in the European Union: Subject and Argument of the Book This book establishes a different perspective, which offers itself to students of political science, sociology and discourse studies alike. The book reads recent events as a reminder that the EU is a polity in the making. The values and objectives underlying its association remain unsettled and contested. The current conjecture, then, appears as a moment of transition, rather than a lethal return of the past. It challenges and transforms the post-war compact, upon which European integration used to be based, as well as the established political forces, which used to carry it. What the compact had precariously settled currently re-emerges in the spotlight of public contestation: the tension between market-making and social protection, between supranational rules and democratic authorisation, between cosmopolitan social order and national community (Rosamond, 2017). In France and Poland, the two EU countries looked at in more detail in this book, the violent protests by the left-behinds of Emanuel Macron’s market-enhancing reforms (France) and the broad support for an illiberal government that boosts social policies (Poland) point to deeper social dislocations. In this situation, the nation and the nation-state appear as strongholds of the familiar. However, the experience of Brexit accumulated so far suggests that there is no simple return to the previous as the renationalisation scenario implies: the effort to disentangle the EU and British jurisdictions borders not only on  the unmanageable but also deeply polarises society, alienating large parts of the population, who do not give up on their multiple attachments, including their attachments to the EU. Against this backdrop, I suggest trying  a new approach to the EU’s legitimation. Considering that we deal with a transformation of the post-­

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war compact and with a dense entanglement of the European and the national scales of political association, existing approaches to the empirical study of the EU’s political legitimacy seem too narrow in their scope. Measuring popular support for existing EU institutions, the level of attachment to either the European or the national collective, or the salience of notions of political legitimacy trained on the nation-state will help to evaluate and orient political action. But as a research tool, such an approach might do little more than confirm existing ‘deficit analyses’, which attest to the EU a democracy, legitimacy, identity and communication deficit. The adjusted understandings of legitimacy, which might emerge in the age of the EU’s politicisation, will hardly be unravelled. Nor will we get to know what role the national might play in such a reformulation, as a possible source of cultural continuity that Charles Tully hinted at in his book on strange multiplicity, when spelling out the requirements for constitutional politics in multicultural entities: A constitution should be seen as a form of activity, an intercultural dialogue in which the culturally diverse sovereign citizens of contemporary societies negotiate agreements on their forms of association over time in accordance with the three conventions of mutual recognition, consent, and cultural continuity. (Tully, 1995, p. 30)

The objective of the book is to develop a framework and conduct an empirical analysis that places the reformulation of the EU’s polity and the articulation of the scales of political association centre stage. The book investigates how, and by which discourse practices, the EU is legitimised and delegitimised during controversies over EU institutional reform. It highlights the process, instead of the outcome, of legitimation, looking into the emergence of practices across contexts of political communication. Particular attention is paid to the fact that, in contrast to nation-­ states set up in the post-war era, the EU derives its legitimacy not only from efficient system performance but also from its mission to build a union among European nations (Weiler, 2012). This mission, while also enjoying popularity among the broader public, has been specified by epistemic communities who share knowledge of EU legal sources, procedures and rhetoric and have privileged access to public debates due to

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their professional positions in the political, judicial, journalistic or ­academic realms. Moreover, the EU’s polity-building mission is negotiated in the specific setting of Europeanised political communication, which is structured by the EU’s legislative and negotiation procedures and mediatised by news media targeting primarily national audiences. Hence, (de-)legitimising the EU most likely involves some sort of translation, or recontextualisation, as I call it, between different epistemic communities and fields of social practice. The book reveals how this character of political communication is implicated in the EU’s legitimation. It argues that the diversifying appropriation of EU-related issues to national debates and national polity discourse does not undermine, but enables, the construction and legitimation of the polity of the EU. Strong national biases in the discussion of EU matters signal that an EU issue is “dropped into the mess of [national] interdiscourse, as a result of which knowledge is being re-crystallised” (Link, 2003, p.  14, author’s translation).1 They indicate that the discursive-­cognitive ground is being prepared for adjusting accustomed polity discourse to the (changed) European condition. Paradoxically, divisive tendencies in struggles over the EU’s polity and categories of national politics are enhanced by Europeanised practices of political competition and communication, instead. This is unravelled through a combination of pragmatic-linguistic theory of discourse, field theory and constructionist-sociological notions of legitimation. The argument is grounded in both empirical and theoretical explorations. Empirically, the book draws on the example of the controversy over the EU constitution in the early 2000s, which enshrined the EU’s current set-up and anticipated many of today’s divisions.2 The EU constitutional  The notion ‘interdiscourse’, in Link’s understanding, denotes those bodies of knowledge and discursive practice that are commonly available through a set of commonsensical and connotative expressions (Link, 1982). 2  The Constitution process was set into motion at the Intergovernmental Conference in Laeken in December 2001. This IGC set up the Convention on the Future of Europe which, by June 2003, presented a Draft Constitution to the European heads of government. Based on this, the member states’ governments negotiated the Constitutional Treaty. It was adopted only in the second run, in June 2004, after it had failed at the first attempt, in December 2003, due to unsettled differences over the vote-weighting system applying to the Council. But it was rejected in the French and the Dutch referenda in spring 2005, and so was its successor, the Lisbon Treaty, during the Irish refer1

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debate is a watershed moment heralding the conjuncture we are currently in. It marked the beginning of a period of intensified politicisation of European integration and revealed fissures in the consensus on market-­ driven integration and open societies, which had been endorsed by centrist parties in both member and accession states throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Moreover, the upcoming accession of newcomers from the former Soviet bloc triggered struggles over the question of how the EU had to accommodate them, an issue surfacing with the parallel conflict over the US-led war on Iraq that was supported by the accession states. The study investigates how, against this backdrop, notions of legitimacy carved out during multilateral negotiations in the Convention and subsequent Intergovernmental Conferences were appropriated to media debates in Poland and France. The focus is on topics and discourse strategies occurring in core documents of the Constitution process, on the one hand, and in news articles and commentaries published in the broadsheets Gazeta Wyborcza, Rzeczpospolita, Le Monde and Le Figaro, on the other. The investigation of topics and discourse strategies of the EU constitutional debate, conducted with the help of a combined, computer-­ aided content and discourse analysis, reveals  which constructions of legitimate political authority and association prevailed. To find out why certain discourse practices recur, these insights into the EU’s discursive legitimation are put in relation to an extensive and innovative analysis of practices of news production, which considers distribution and co-­ occurrence patterns, publication output, placement, text genres, choice of authors and so on and contrasts news articles with evaluative articles and clusters of arranged debates. The two country settings were chosen because, during the drafting period of the Constitution process, Poland and France stood out due to bilateral-intergovernmental  and domestic polarisation over the EU constitution and the war on Iraq. The selected broadsheets arranged extended debates on these issues. They were associated with opposing camps in the centre of the political spectrum that supported EU integration, but were divided on its liberal imprint and power division as promoted by the EU constitution. Hence, the case endum in June 2008. After concession of some additional opt-outs from the Treaty, the document was submitted again to the Irish and finally approved in October 2009 (see Chap. 5).

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study sheds light on one of those instances of an EU-related and mutually referential controversy in national media that are seen to be crucial for the communicative construction of EU identity and legitimacy. As Poland and France hold distinct experiences of nation-building, constitutionalism and EU membership, the case study also considers those aspects of national political culture that, in the literature, are expected to inform divergent conceptions of European integration (for more details on the case study, see Sect. 2.4). Theoretically, the book follows the line of “pluralist approaches” to European integration (Rosamond, 2006) and looks for inspiration beyond established concepts. It draws on the pragmatic-linguistic theory of discourse developed within Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997) to capture emergent practices of legitimation in actual language use. From that entry point, the book develops a conception of political legitimation and political communication that accounts for the EU’s specificities. It borrows the idea from constructionist sociology that political legitimacy relies upon a complicit and symbolically violent relationship between rulers and ruled, with the former defining the terms of legitimate power execution as long as the latter abstain from challenging their definition (Bourdieu, 1991). Drawing on the political philosophy of polity-building, it is further specified what conventionalised arguments or ‘polity  rationales’ such top-down legitimation might draw on and what reflection they have found in narratives of European integration. The dynamics of Europeanised political communication, on the other hand, is approached from the perspective of field theory (Bourdieu, 1989). It is merged with assumptions about the regulative discourse (or ‘code’) and the generic language use (or ‘genre’) of a specialised practice, which have been developed in sociolinguistics and CDA respectively (Bernstein, 1990; Fairclough, 1992, p.  125ff). They are enriched with insights from existing studies of the EU political field and national journalistic fields, news discourse and EU journalism. Together, these bodies of theory reveal the symbolic-discursive constitution of the two fields of specialised practice primarily involved in EU political communication, the discourse field of multilateral negotiation and that of Europeanised national news, and show how their self-­ referential logics condition the EU’s legitimation.

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In the remainder of this introduction, the agenda of the book will be situated in the scholarly debate on the EU’s legitimation so as to prepare the ground on which the concept of legitimation can be reconsidered and rendered fruitful for a discourse study. The chapter will close with a plan of the book showing how its argument is developed in successive chapters.

1.2 T  he EU’s Legitimacy Deficit: Situating the Book in Scholarly Debate In EU studies, the struggle over the EU’s polity is usually discussed under the heading of the EU’s ‘legitimacy deficit’: the EU is seen to embody a peculiar type of political association, a polity sui generis, which carries with it specific problems of legitimacy. Several decades of investigation into the “nature of the beast” (Risse-Kappen, 1996) established the wisdom that the EU’s political system is a hybrid that bears traces of an international organisation, a regulatory state and a federal parliamentary democracy. While the EU has developed its own, supranational legal-­ political rule, it is dependent on implementation, judicial review and enforcement by its member states: a heterarchical, rather than a hierarchical, arrangement (Walker, 2002). The fact that the EU relies on both quasi-federal institutions and nationally integrated demoi initially allowed the member states to build a new political and economic architecture on well-known terrain, affirming the identities of nation-states (Weiler, 1999, p. 254). Moreover, the vertical division of powers between the supranational organs, which were mainly in charge of market-­making, and member states, which governed the politically salient realms of security, fiscal-economic policy and redistribution, was seen to balance integrationist and sovereigntist tendencies in some sort of “constitutional equilibrium” (Moravcsik, 2005, p. 349). As this model of shared sovereignty was flanked, since the 1970s, by two tracks of electoral control— one direct, ensured by the general suffrage of the European Parliament, the other indirect, ensured by nationally elected governments in the Council—it was also thought to ensure a certain form of popular-­ democratic participation  and control. However, thus instantiated, the

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EU’s political regime transformed the existing nation-bound structures. It pooled member states’ resources under priorities set jointly by EU institutions even in areas formally reserved to the exclusive competence of the member states (Genschel & Jachtenfuchs, 2013). Moreover, compliance with EU law, the hyperconsensual decision-making in a system of compound governance, and negative (deregulation-focused) integration pressured member societies into profound adjustment, especially those with simple polities (Schmidt, 2006) and coordinated economies (Scharpf, 2010). A common perception is that the emergent polity lacks features of legitimacy, which have been accepted for liberal political systems, especially democratic control, and that it remains detached and alienated from citizens’ concerns. EU scholars have rationalised and nuanced these perceptions. They seek explanation either in the EU’s specific institution-building that is set in motion top down, by governments’ agreements on EU treaties, EU legislation and judicial review, or in transnational community-building that emerges bottom up, through familiarisation with (or alienation from) EU politics or EU-related social imagination or communication. While the first group blames the EU’s institutional design for deficient legitimacy, the second assumes that EU-wide societalisation and community-building remains wanting, which pairs institutionalisation at the EU level. Let me briefly recall how the EU’s legitimacy is assessed in these two strands of thought.

Flaws in EU Institutional Design To determine what qualities EU institutions must have in order to attain some form of legitimacy, both functionalist and normative reformulations of Max Weber’s notion of legitimacy have been used. Scholars following the functionalist line and Fritz Scharpf ’s application of political systems theory to the EU, more particularly (Scharpf, 1999), expect political agents and institutions to enjoy legitimacy when these responsively take up (input legitimacy) and effectively process citizens’ demands (output legitimacy) while observing legality, procedural and deliberation

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standards (throughput legitimacy).3 In legal and political theory, on the other hand, the legitimacy of liberal government is seen to derive from express consent or affirmation of the governed, but also from legality and justifiability (Beetham, 2004, p. 110), that is, justifiability on grounds of sources of rightful government that are accepted in a society, such as democratic rule, peace among nations or distributive justice. Following these lines of thought, the EU’s issues with legitimacy emerged because EU institutions were oriented, for too long, towards output legitimacy. They trusted that citizens, in some sort of “permissive consensus” (Lindberg & Scheingold, 1970), would approve of the EU’s policy performance and the privileges of EU citizenship. The later adding of elements of direct or indirect democratic participation and inclusive governance could only partially heal this ‘democratic deficit’. As the definition and implementation of EU policies involve a plurality of elected and non-elected actors and escape the tracks of parliamentary control, the successive empowering of the European Parliament or the national parliaments did not remove the “uncompensated political expropriation” (Offe & Preuss, 2006) of electorates and elected that is involved in the EU’s mode of delegation and compound governance. Researchers, therefore, started discussing alternative institutional arrangements that might channel recent politicisation and help democratisation to catch up with integration, such as the interparliamentary dialogue established between national parliaments and the European Parliament (Fossum, 2015), rights and procedures of contestation (Neyer, 2003) or the critical corrective of a cosmopolitan public (Eriksen, 2005). Still, the EU’s institutions and decision-making modes face issues of justifiability. They are contestable not only on grounds of accepted standards of democratic rule but also because they are unprecedented and impact on accustomed national polities and social-political lives. That said, the discussion in political science and legal-political theory also asserts that, along with democratic  The definition of legitimacy in these three dimensions grounds in Max Weber’s conception of ‘legitimacy belief ’ as subjectively psychologically motivated acknowledgement of societal norms and political institutions and David Easton’s (Easton, 1953), Niklas Luhmann’s and Jürgen Habermas’ adaptations to the functionalist theory of political systems. Fritz Scharpf combined these terms with Thomas Jefferson’s plea for a government by, of and for the people (Scharpf, 1999); for elaborations see Schmidt (2006), for critical appraisals Blühdorn (2009). 3

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participation, there are further sources of legitimacy, such as accountability, legality, compromise or justifiability on grounds of political mission, in some of which the EU political system outperforms several of its member states.

The Missing Community Another entry to the debate on the EU’s legitimacy is the premise that some social integration that pairs the system integration of the European Union and bridges the gap between nationally integrated societies and the ‘surplanted’ institutions of the EU political and economic system is missing (Bach, 2008, pp. 12–16). Since the first elections to the European Parliament in 1979 demonstrated a low turnout, suggesting that European people were less passionate about European integration than was thought, research on ‘European identities’ has established itself as a separate field. A first group of studies scrutinises public opinion polls, party programmes, news coverage and publicised opinions to find out about the inclinations of EU electorates, politicians, journalists or public intellectuals to support or reject European integration in general, and EU policies, in particular (Bruter, 2005; Risse, 2010, for an overview). These studies usually endorse an empiricist understanding of legitimacy and probe Ernst Haas’ initial expectation that, as a result of familiarisation with EU politics, citizens and social actors will partially shift their political loyalties to the European power centre (Haas, 1968). Legitimacy is thus seen to follow from socialisation. It is expected to show in diffuse or specific support for existing institutions and policies or, following assumptions of political culture research, in the congruence between widely shared attitudes and the values that the EU claims to embody (Bolleyer & Reh, 2012). Varying degrees of acceptance or Euroscepticism are attributed to ideological cleavages, for example, between left and right and between open and closed societies, and opportunities opening up in the domestic and European arenas of EU-related political competition (Beichelt, 2004; Marks, Hooghe, Nelson, & Edwards, 2006; Statham, Koopmans, Tresch, & Firmstone, 2010).

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Scholars who take a constructivist stance assume, on the other hand, that the EU’s polity will only emerge from political struggles, instead of just being affirmed or rejected in its current state (Christiansen, Jørgensen, & Wiener, 2001). In line with the recent stress on  the justifiability of political orders, they investigate the construction and justification of European integration in public debate and political communication. Either they look at the salience and distribution of specific notions of legitimacy, community, identity or polity models (Hurrelmann, 2008; Lucarelli, Cerutti, & Schmidt, 2011; Nullmeier et  al., 2010), or they explore changing patterns in political and social actors’ efforts to justify and imagine European integration and EU membership (Lacroix & Nicolaïdis, 2010; Marcussen, Risse, Engelmann-Martin, Knopf, & Roscher, 2001; Sternberg, 2013). Such enquiry may be coupled with more specific discourse-theoretical assumptions, as I will show in a brief recapitulation of the research on European public spheres and identities. Research on European public spheres follows Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action and his plea for transnational media-based deliberation as a means of consensus-building within the EU (Habermas, 2002). Dissent about European integration, which political culture research would read as missing acceptance, is regarded as “a possible source of understanding as far as diverging positions, opinions and beliefs are articulated, listened to and carefully considered” (Kantner, 2003, p.  224, author’s translation). Correspondingly, scholars have sought to identify conditions conducive to deliberation in transnational forums (Doerr, 2007; Mosca, Teune, Rucht, & Martin, 2009), focus groups (Fishkin, Luskin, & Siu, 2014) or the media (for an overview see Koopmans & Statham, 2010; Marchetti, 2004; Risse, 2015). Given the limited reach of pan-European media, scholars assume national mass media to be the site where EU-related controversies play out (Schlesinger, 1999). Against more sceptical views, which hold that political communication necessarily depends on a certain level of commonality, that is, a common language, a common media system and shared collective memories (Gerhards, 2000), they suggest that an “issue-specific communication community” (Eder & Kantner, 2002) can emerge through the Europeanisation of coverage and debate in national media. Indications of such Europeanisation are seen in the convergence of agenda-setting and

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relevance attribution among European media (Boomgaarden et al., 2013; de Vreese, 2001; Kantner, 2003; Kantner, Kutter, & Renfordt, 2008; Meyer, 2005; Trenz, 2004); the visibility of events and actions issued by supranational bodies or in other member states (Koopmans & Erbe, 2004); the permeability of various social actors’ claims addressed to the EU’s different political authorities (della Porta & Caiani, 2006); and the mutual quoting and consideration of arguments from other member states’ publics (Erbe, 2005; van de Steeg, 2003). With reference to the information, control and mediation function ascribed to the media in liberal democracy theory, mass media are conceptualised as an “institutionalised forum of debate” (Koopmans & Pfetsch, 2003, p.  5) and responsible for a decisive “throughput” (Eder & Kantner, 2002, p. 86) of public opinion-making on European integration. Thus, researchers of European public spheres expect deliberation on EU affairs to bring about legitimacy, in terms of shared problem perceptions that back a common approach to problem-solving, while language and media are seen as transmitters of such transnational communication. Scholars endorsing pragmatic-linguistic or poststructuralist theories of discourse assume, instead, that context-dependent language use and signification, that is, the relations established between the signs of a language, enable and limit the ways in which European integration and its legitimacy can be imagined and contested at a specific historical conjuncture (for an overview see Carta & Morin, 2014; Torfing & Howarth, 2005; Wodak & Weiss, 2005). In line with these assumptions, scholars have explored how EU polity is being imagined “with the help of new concepts” (Schmitter, 1996, p.  122). They have revealed facets of EU ‘new speak’, such as multilingual neologisms created from different administrative languages (Born, 1999), institutional discourses enacting the work of supranational bodies (Biegoń, 2016; Carta, 2013), and the EU’s unification rhetoric and conventionalised metaphors (Musolff, 2000). Other studies have looked into the coupling and decoupling of concepts associated with modern states, a specific member state’s national identity, or a national party’s self-understanding that allowed mapping the nation into the Internal Market or the EU multilevel system (Diez, 1999; Hansen & Wæver, 2002; Horolets, 2006; Hubé & Rambour, 2010; Jachtenfuchs, Diez, & Jung, 1997; Krzyżanowski, 2010; Kutter,

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2007, 2015). Drawing on the concept of ‘Othering’, a further group of studies has explored how European in-groups are constructed through juxtaposition to an internal or external out-group (Diez, 2004; Triandafyllidou, Wodak, & Krzyżanowski, 2009). The different strands of research on European identities all confirm that political loyalties, political communication and political discourse ‘Europeanise’: acceptance or protest is addressed to European centres and symbols of power, in addition to national ones, and mobilised along similar lines in domestic politics. Moreover, patterns of vocabulary, EU rhetoric and political communication have emerged that allow for constructing overlapping horizons of interpretation. At the same time, loyalties towards national polities remain the strongest ones, constructions of European in-groups and out-groups vary considerably, and the transnational framing of problems along political-ideological lines is regularly being driven out by a framing that foregrounds essentially national and nationally opposed interests or claims for cultural recognition. The EU constitutional debate is a case in point. Against the backdrop of the upcoming expansion in 2004 and 2007, EU representatives sought to settle disputes on EU institutional reform in public instead of, as usual, by stealth (Genschel & Jachtenfuchs, 2013). The EU’s legal-institutional set up was to be finalised in a constitutional document, involving all stakeholders of EU policymaking in an inclusive procedure of treaty revision. The Constitution process was run as an EU-wide deliberative experiment and promoted as such by politicians, advocacy groups and media agents. What they came to realise, instead, was unseen levels of contestation and politicisation of European integration in both intergovernmental and domestic arenas. Once subjected to debate and a popular vote in member states, the consensual definitions of the EU’s policy objectives carved out with the help of the Convention dissolved in as many conceptions of legitimate grounds for EU association as there are intellectual-­ political camps striving for a particular project to be realised within the frames of the EU. The many studies conducted on public communication about the EU constitution all reveal that national controversies, if they occurred, were asynchronous and driven by very different concerns, even though they were related, in some way or other, to the shared topic of EU institutional reform (Gaisbauer & Pausch, 2009; Gleissner & De

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Vreese, 2005; Kurpas, 2008; Lichtenstein & Eilders, 2015; Liebert, 2007; Oberhuber, Bärenreuter, Krzyżanowski, Schönbauer, & Wodak, 2005; Sifft, Brüggemann, Kleinen-v. Königslöw, Peters, & Wimmel, 2007; Wyrozumska, 2007). Instead of overlap or rapprochement, they exposed “pluri-decontextualisation: one text, but quite different contexts” (Fossum & Trenz, 2006, p. 12). Many EU scholars saw this course of events as further proof of the EU’s ‘disconnection problem’, that is, the difficulty in mobilising popular support for the largely elitist project of European integration that extends the habitual framework of national politics. From this perspective, the rejection of the EU constitution in the French, Dutch and Irish referenda was mainly due to failures in communication. Pro-European politicians and media failed to communicate the advantages of the EU constitution and to promote a vision of European integration that would trump the massive campaign of Eurosceptic groups (Lieb, 2008; Schmidt, 2007). The Constitution process appeared to be just another example of the EU’s prevailing ‘communication deficit’ (Cerutti & Lucarelli, 2008). In the eyes of scholars of comparative politics, on the other hand, the trajectory of the Constitution process reveals that European integration has become a subject of politics as usual; it has become a subject of political competition which follows the customary lines of domestic politics: “the uncomfortable reality seems to be that a full understanding of European politics in its widest sense means an understanding of at least 26 distinct and often messy processes” (Taggart, 2006, p. 8). According to this appraisal, the contestation of European integration is primarily an expression of discontent with domestic governments and allows parties at the margins to gain leverage in domestic policymaking. EU-related media debates, then, are mainly a function of such ‘domesticisation’. In contrast, scholars endorsing ideas of deliberative or radical democracy welcome messy domestic politicisation of EU issues as it promises to entangle larger groups in critical discussion of EU institution-building. They regard polarisation along both domestic and intergovernmental lines as a necessary facet of societalisation at a European scale (Trenz, 2004). However, the hope that “creative disagreement” (Lord & Magnette, 2004) about EU matters will serve the emergence of an EU-wide problem-­ solving community suffered a blow during the EU constitutional debate.

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The asynchronous and divisive dynamics of the Constitution process seemed to suggest that deliberative politics, if introduced only symbolically, as a promotional means to enhance acceptance, in fact triggers centrifugal effects. The Constitution process appeared to confirm that “the potential for conflict in the processes of transnational governance will increase when procedures for the revealing and accommodation of diverse interpretations are missing” (Wiener, 2007, p. 188, author’s translation). Since the EU constitution failed in the Dutch and French referenda in 2005, the  prospects for a publicly deliberated and affirmed EU polity have further dwindled. EU representatives agreed the follow-up Lisbon Treaty behind closed doors after removing the constitutional symbolic, allowing for opt-outs to accommodate some governments’ opposition, and avoiding referenda during ratification where possible. Eurosceptic or alter-EU movements have been able to shift the political game in many member states and are now seen to draw on a broader basis of mainstreamed EU critique (Verney, 2015; Topaloff, 2014; Leconte, 2015). Scholars in EU political sociology started to account for these developments, drawing more attention to processes of politicisation and contestation (de Wilde & Lord, 2016; della Porta & Parks, 2013; Statham & Trenz, 2015). Legal and political economy scholars, on the other hand, have revived their critique of aspects of the EU’s legal structure that, besides deficient democratic control, have been enhanced by recent reforms and put the EU’s justifiability at risk (Bieling, 2011; de Witte, Héritier, & Trechsel, 2013; Joerges, 2013).

1.3 T  he Book’s Interdisciplinary Endeavour: Four Conceptual Moves The present book builds on the above literature in several respects. It is situated within the analytical-empirical strand in the research on EU legitimation that investigates the negotiation of legitimacy in public-­ political debate (Blühdorn, 2009, p. 21). I also endorse the idea that the EU’s issue with political legitimacy is one of precarious justifiability (Nonhoff & Schneider, 2010). With constructivist studies, I assume that

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justifiability is established or dissolved in a process of intersubjective construction. Further, I stress the constitutive role of signification and language use and highlight national media debates as a crucial site. At the same time, the book addresses aspects of EU legitimation that have been neglected so far and moves beyond some limitations of existing research. Whether focused on institution- or community-building, studies of the EU’s legitimacy seem to exemplify the tendency that Jaspers (Jasper, 2005, p. 115) generally diagnosed for the ‘cultural turn’ in political sociology: inspirations from cultural studies and theories of discourse are used to highlight symbolic, communicative and discursive aspects. However, they remain within a terrain narrowly and conventionally understood, which focuses on relations between formal political institutions and their constituencies, on the steering of the first and the legitimation by the latter. Problem assessments, evaluations and constructions of commonality are expected to emerge bottom up from social and political groups at the national level. Propelled by the interventions of discourse entrepreneurs, they will eventually converge and feed into institution-building at the supranational level. Hence, the reviewed studies presuppose that the EU has to be assessed as if it was a liberal political system that effectively manages citizens’ demands, which are articulated through and find expression in a pluralist-communicative process of societal and political consensus-building. Instead, the potential that cultural studies and theories of discourse offer for revealing the implicit and exclusive practices, upon which the (regulative idea of the) liberal political system is based, remains unacknowledged (on this potential see Reckwitz, 2004). The review of research on the EU’s institution- and community-­ building invites one to guess that with the implicit conventions of political sociology come selective conceptual choices. For instance, by using the concept of ‘identity’, which is ambiguous between individuals’ sociopsychological motivations and institutional identity or identity politics, research on European identities and public spheres actualises the dualism of the rulers and the ruled: individuals ascribe legitimacy, develop EU-related loyalties or problem perceptions, while institutions or political actors seek to influence individuals’ evaluations by means of identity

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politics and the growing repertoire of ‘legitimation policies’ that institutions adopt in response to heightened pressure to justify their actions publicly (Nonhoff & Schneider, 2010). Meanwhile, the actual hub of EU identity construction escapes the researchers’ attention, namely, the specialised epistemic community that  comprises both practitioners of EU politics and observers, such as experts, journalists and EU scholars, who have taken the lead in explicating why and how the EU’s political mission will be or has to be pursued in changing circumstances. The slogans and terms that they coin form the conventionalised intertextual register that is taken up elsewhere to relate to European integration. Moreover, even when researching transnationalisation, studies seem to stick to the ‘level imaginary’ of International Relations, which highlights the macro level of social organisation and presupposes a national-territorial entity as the natural unit, from which the transnational-supranational emanates. Yet, studies on Europeanisation incline to suspect that, in the EU context, political communication will become entangled in the “European modus operandi” (Shaw, 2001, p. 71) in the same way that jurisprudence and political decision-making are: activities will stretch levels of political-­ territorial organisation, anticipate implications in other arenas of the EU political process and reconfigure the national. Finally, the focus on problems of performance in the debate on the EU’s legitimacy deficit, be they related to input, output, throughput, legality or consent, suggests that challenges to the EU’s political legitimacy arise from unsatisfactory, but familiar, organisation. Meanwhile, the greater challenge probably arises from the fact that the EU’s modes of governance, which might even be satisfactory in terms of performance, are unfamiliar against the habitual setting of the nation-state (Deephouse & Suchman, 2008, for different challenges to legitimacy in organisations). Among the EU’s unaccustomed features is its vast “multiplicity” (Tully, 1995), with a variety of political bodies and groups referring to differently scaled constituencies and struggles for cultural-constitutional recognition. The EU is also emblematic of the postnational constellation (Habermas, 2001). It institutionalises the dispersion of state-centred political authority across territorial levels and boundaries of public and private governance and enhances the transnationalisation and devolution of social networks and political identities. A contradictory implication is

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that, as the national state no longer fills this function, the (ethnic) nation resurfaces as a reference object of societal security and the body politique (Wæver, 1996). As a consequence of the dispersion of state-centred authority and social integration, the EU also expounds the postdemocratic condition more visibly than other political organisations. ‘Postdemocracy’ denotes the paradoxical situation that democratic procedures no longer ensure accountability towards and representation of constituencies. They fail to coordinate effectively the increased complexity of social relations and cannot give expression to political subjectivities extending beyond the solid identity of the modernist subject in its individual (citizen) or collective (demos) dimensions (Blühdorn, 2009). At the same time, modes of governance and legitimation developed in exchange, which rely upon expert knowledge, depoliticised administration and reference to objective-systemic utility, are met with radicalised claims for self-determination by neo-democratic and populist movements. In response, democratic procedures are being supplemented by practices of minimal participation, such as opinion polls or citizen consultation and a political rhetoric which “re-grounds abstract legitimacy in the modernist notion of the autonomous subject” (Blühdorn, 2009, p. 43, drawing on Crouch, 2004). Finally, unlike national political systems set up in post-war Western Europe, the EU has mainly  derived legitimacy “not from process, as in classical democracy, or from result and success, but from the ideal pursued, the destiny to be achieved, the ‘Promised Land’ waiting at the end of the road” (Weiler, 2012, p. 832). The EU’s political messianism crystallises in the vision of an (ever closer) union among the peoples of Europe set up to ensure peace and prosperity; it forms part of the EU’s specific political culture and has consistently inspired EU institution-building (Weiler, 2012). In sum, the peculiar postnational condition of the European Union blurs the very categories which are presupposed in the vision of the EU as a liberal political system, such as the territorial authority concerned, the constituency to be invoked, and the institutions and procedures to be considered effective and democratic. The justifiability of EU political rule, the grounds of its legitimacy, therefore, probably gravitate around fundamental issues of political association, such as the sharing of power and the boundaries of belonging, instead of around system performance alone (see also Blatter,

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2009). Struggles over it will possibly involve efforts at democratic re-­ grounding, with political actors claiming to foster democracy or challenging such imposition, thereby redefining what is democratically valid in the EU context. They will relate not only to existing institutions, but to institutions yet to be put in place. To grasp these aspects specific to the EU’s postnational condition, the book unearths some of the unused potential that the linguistic turn offers to EU studies and performs four conceptual moves. First, it shifts the focus from the opposition between ‘political system’ and ‘political (personal and collective) identity’ or between institutional and social integration towards the notion of ‘polity’, which includes both. Polity is here understood as political association, which is based on a specific set of institutions, specific attributes of constituent communities, and specific forms of power acquisition and execution, and whose appropriateness is continuously renegotiated along competing projections of why political rule is needed. EU polity construction, or the construction of political authority and association in the EU setting, is then the discourse agency (de)legitimising political rule and order beyond the state. Secondly, the book shifts the focus from legitimacy as a state or outcome to legitimation as a process and discourse practice. It departs from empiricist understandings of legitimacy as evidence of legitimacy beliefs and from normative prescriptions of what is legitimate. Instead, it adopts the relational definition of legitimation developed in constructionist sociology. This conception allows highlighting the legitimations of professional discourse producers, not as wilful manipulations but as being implicated in and reformulating symbolically violent relations of public-political power (Bourdieu, 1991). Thirdly, the book moves from levels of territorial organisation to discourse fields of social practice, using Bourdieu’s field theory. The concept of the field is subjected to a discursive turn, so as to grasp the self-referential and discursively constituted practice contexts, between which Europeanised political communication is translocated: multilateral negotiation and national news. The book thus joins recent efforts to use field theory for highlighting meso- and micro-sociological dynamics in the reorganisation of the EU political space (Adler-Nissen, 2013; Georgakakis & Rowell, 2013). Insights into the reorganisation of EU political space are also used here, together with insights from studies

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in journalistic fields and EU journalism, to arrive at a different notion of Europeanised national news media. Instead of perpetuating the conception of national mass media as gatekeeping and priming transmitters of content gathered elsewhere, they are seen here as a microcosmos of its own. This microcosm leaves particular marks on Europeanised political communication due to its twofold implication in the competitive struggle for distinction in the national journalistic field, on the one hand, and involvement in transnational Brussels-based news production, on the other. Fourthly, I perform a move on the meta-theoretical level that enables the aforementioned conceptual shifts and also helps to translate them into primary discourse research. By adopting Critical Discourse Analysis as a specific discourse epistemology (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997), I shift the focus away from the propositional content of public-­ political communication, which predominates in EU studies. Instead, I conceive of discourse as a social practice that emerges in context-dependent language use and that constitutes the habitual and implicit ways of legitimising the EU. To perform these conceptual moves, I will draw on different disciplinary traditions. While the enquiry into the EU’s polity and legitimation is clearly situated in political science and political theory, the notion of legitimation and of fields of specialised social practice is borrowed from constructionist sociology. The discourse-theoretical approach used as a general epistemology and toolkit in the book, Critical Discourse Analysis, is rooted in linguistics and will be less intuitively accessible to social scientists than poststructuralist theories of discourse formation, which are here merely used as a second, heuristic layer. Discourse researchers, on the other hand, might have difficulty with the, usually abstract, effort at substantiation in sociological theory. However, I hope to convey to the reader that only the conjunction of these bodies of literature as well as of both empirical and theoretical exploration opens the horizon of interpretation that is needed to grasp the complex nature of the EU’s legitimation. The study adopts a problem-oriented approach, which ventures a reasoned and systematic ‘conceptual eclecticism’ (Mouzelis, 1995) in order to penetrate the problem of legitimation in the EU setting. It follows the conviction that productive thinking is best achieved by creatively putting to work the pieces and instruments that past thinkers handed

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down to us (Bourdieu, 1997, p. 65, author’s translation). Accordingly, my reception of individual works will appropriate single elements from original works that advance the study’s argument and discourse-­theoretical endeavour. I will not engage in the principled exegesis and scholarly debate that some might expect when the terms ‘legitimacy’, ‘field theory’, or ‘Bourdieu’ are dropped. Along with bridging discipline-specific bodies of knowledge, the book develops thoughts and instruments that allow us to (better) couple the micrology of textual analysis with macro-level questions of political enquiry and EU studies. Translatability in terms of methods and insights  generated is also ensured by complementing the detailed analysis of discourse practice with the perspective of (meso-level) discourse formation as an additional heuristic layer and by triangulating a larger-scale, synchronic and comparative content analysis with Critical Discourse Analysis in a computer-aided funnel method.

1.4 F rom Theoretical to Empirical Exploration: The Plan of the Book The theoretical and empirical exploration conducted in this book is presented in three conceptual chapters, which perform the aforementioned conceptual moves, and three empirical chapters, rounded up by conclusions at the end. The second chapter, following this introduction, outlines the book’s research-philosophical premises. It develops general suggestions as to how a second generation of discourse studies of the political can be advanced by fully accounting for the knowledge- and research-philosophical implications of the linguistic turn. After a brief review of discourse research in European integration studies, the chapter expounds the full implications of the linguistic turn in the social sciences and highlights the distinct discourse epistemologies and notions of the political it brought about. It introduces Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a specific discourse epistemology, which is grounded in the pragmatic turn in linguistics and, thanks to this grounding, offers a missing link in the investigation of practices of legitimation. At the end, the second chapter outlines the analytical strategy adopted to combine CDA

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with sociological theory and political enquiry and specifies the comparative case-study design, the bifocal approach and the funnel method, by which it is translated into textual-contextual analysis. The third chapter explores how political legitimation can be imagined from a discourse point of view. It starts from the conception of ­legitimation as persuasive-strategic language use developed in CDA. Borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of political power as being symbolically and relationally constituted and from political philosophies of polity-­building, the argument is developed that discursive legitimation is best conceived of as polity construction: as strategic language use that employs symbols of representative politics and rationales of polity-building to suggest that political authority and association is rightly claimed. In an excursus, established narratives of European integration and formulae of Polish and French nationhood and EU membership are reviewed as plots that construct the EU’s polity in specific ways. In a summary, the analytical categories will be explicated that are used to investigate polity constructions in the EU constitutional debate. The fourth chapter develops a discursive conception of Europeanisation. It accounts for the fact that debates on EU institutional reform, which originate in the arenas of EU decision-making, are mediatised by news media targeting primarily national audiences. The related process of Europeanisation, it is argued, is best understood as recontextualisation: as the translocation of fragments of discourse from one context of specialised social practice to another, in the course of which the fragments change meaning (Bernstein, 1990). The chapter first introduces the theorem of recontextualisation as applied in CDA to then establish how contexts of specialised practice and their bearing on fragments of debate can be grasped from a discourse point of view. Using the CDA notion of ‘genre’, Bernstein’s concept of ‘code’ or professional regulative discourse, and Bourdieu’s ‘field’ theory, it arrives at ‘discourse fields’ as a conception of discourse practice at the meso level of social organisation. These insights are deepened in an assessment of the discursive constitution of news journalism and then applied to the two practice contexts at stake in the EU constitutional debate: the discourse field of Europeanised national news and the discourse field of EU multilateral negotiation. The summary shows how recontextualisation between the two discourse fields will be assessed in textual-contextual analysis.

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In line with these conceptual clarifications, the fifth chapter investigates the drafting of the EU constitution in the discourse field of multilateral negotiation. The EU’s constitutional episode astounds, considering that all previous efforts to codify the EU’s legal and political order in a foundational document have failed. The chapter argues that the EU’s explicit constitutionalisation was enhanced by a series of speech acts, on the one hand, which portrayed EU reform as a constitutional moment, and the dynamics of the discourse field of multilateral negotiation, on the other, which streamlined controversies into a precarious consensus. The chapter first traces the emergence of EU constitution speak, its intertextual context and the polity constructions developed in core constitutionalising speech acts. It reconstructs the dynamics of constitution-drafting in the supranational and intergovernmental scenes and in the Polish and French arenas of political competition. The concluding section discusses in what ways the outcomes of constitution-drafting, such as the streamlining of the EU’s legal documents and the glossing over of conflicts over economic integration, can be ascribed to  the  internal dynamics of the discourse field of multilateral negotiation. The sixth chapter investigates the recontextualisation of the EU constitutional issue to the discourse field of Europeanised national news, and to the selected Polish and French broadsheets, more particularly. The content and discourse analysis of the selected dailies reveals that they covered events in EU and domestic arenas in a convergent manner, at the same time distinguishing themselves in thematic emphasis and arranged controversies. They translated the EU constitutional agenda into their audiences’ habitual debates on European integration, such as Europe sociale in Le Monde, Europe puissance in Le Figaro, modernisation in Gazeta Wyborcza and cultural recognition in Rzeczpospolita. The chapter shows that this narrowing follows from practices specific to the discourse field of Europeanised national news, via which journalists secure a share in the EU news of the day and position themselves vis-à-vis their competitors: practices of constructing news salience, arranging controversy, and generating consonance with the imagined audience in line with the regulative discourse and generic language use of news journalism. The seventh chapter investigates the polity constructions that emerged from the Polish and French media debates on the EU constitution. The

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content and discourse analysis of polity topics and discursive legitimation in clusters of debate reveals that the EU’s political association and authority was pondered in terms of belonging and democratic authorisation, instead of in terms of function-enhancing institutional rebalancing that had prevailed in multilateral negotiation. The vision of the EU as a responsive political system was replaced by a stress on popular and shared sovereignty (in Le Monde, Le Figaro) and equal representation in EU bodies (in Rzeczpospolita, Gazeta Wyborcza), while the idea of the EU as a civilisational frontier gave way to the affirmation of civic-communitarian (in Gazeta Wyborcza, Le Monde, Le Figaro) or cultural-communitarian boundaries (Rzeczpospolita). In ritualised commentaries on the future prospects of European integration, the EU was legitimised as a polity duplicatis, copying the model of the national polity, while in mediatised controversies on EU reform, it was legitimised as a polity instrumentalis, via which to achieve a particular membership project.  While adopting EU polity constructions to national media debate in this way, speakers adjust established EU membership projects to the changed European condition. The chapter concludes with a summary of discourse practices that are recurrently used to (de-)legitimise the EU and reflects on the role the national plays in the EU’s legitimation. The conclusions in the eighth chapter discuss what the book’s insights into the EU’s legitimation mean for the political sociology of European integration. Drawing on insights from the primary analysis, the chapter first challenges a few conventional wisdoms on European political communication, such as that of the EU’s communication deficit, and suggests reconsidering aspects of methodological nationalism that inform them. It then summarises the book’s insights into discursive Europeanisation and the EU’s discursive legitimation in a precise manner and outlines the problematic legacy that the Constitution process left to the EU.  The chapter considers how political-sociological research on European identities, European public spheres and European political competition could be re-accentuated, sketches out the contours of a discursive political sociology of European integration and proposes elements of a reflexive EU literacy that can help professionals of Europeanised political communication to better account for the EU’s multiplicity.

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References Adler-Nissen, R. (2013). Introduction. Bourdieu in International Relations theory. In R.  Adler-Nissen (Ed.), Bourdieu in International Relations. Rethinking Key Concepts in IR (pp.  1–23). Milton Park and New  York: Routledge. Bach, M. (2008). Europa ohne Gesellschaft. Politische Soziologie der europäischen Integration (1st ed.). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Beetham, D. (2004). Political Legitimacy. In K. Nash & A. Scott (Eds.), The Blackwell Compendium to Political Sociology (pp. 107–116). Blackwell. Beichelt, T. (2004). Euro-Skepticism in the EU Accession Countries. Comparative European Politics, 11(2), 29–50. Bernstein, B. (1990). The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse (Vol. 4). London: Routledge. Biegoń, D. (2016). Hegemonies of Legitimation. Discourse Dynamics in the European Commission. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bieling, H.-J. (2011). Europäischer Krisenkonstitutionalismus. Widerspruch, 2011(2). Blatter, J. (2009). Efficiency and Democracy: Reconstructing the Foundations of a Troubled Relationship. In I. Blühdorn (Ed.), In the Search of Legitimacy: Policy-Making in Europe and the Challenge of Complexity (pp.  51–71). Opladen and Farming Hills: Barbara Budrich. Blühdorn, I. (2009). Democracy Beyond the Modernist Subject: Complexity and Late-Modern Reconfiguration of Legitimacy. In I. Blühdorn (Ed.), In the Search of Legitimacy: Policy-Making in Europe and the Challenge of Complexity (pp. 17–50). Opladen and Farming Hills: Barbara Budrich. Bolleyer, N., & Reh, C. (2012). EU Legitimacy Revisited: The Normative Foundations of a Multilevel Polity. Journal of European Public Policy, 19(4), 472–490. Boomgaarden, H. G., de Vreese, C. H., Schuck, A. R. T., Azrout, R., Elenbaas, M., van Spanje, J. H. P., & Vliegenthart, R. (2013). Across Time and Space: Explaining Variation in News Coverage of the European Union. European Journal of Political Research, 52, 608–629. Born, J. (1999). Multilingualism and Power: Vagueness as a Strategic, Text-­ Constituting Principle in Supranational Organisations. In R.  Wodak & C. Ludwig (Eds.), Challenges in a Changing World. Issues in Critical Discourse Analysis (pp. 193–207). Wien: Passagen Verlag.

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Bourdieu, P. (1989). Social Space and Symbolic Power. Sociological Theory, 7(1), 14–25. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1997). Zur Genese der Begriffe Habitus und Feld. In M. Steinrücke (Ed.), Der Tote packt den Lebenden (pp. 59–78). Hamburg: VSA. Bruter, M. (2005). Citizens of Europe? The Emergence of a Mass European Identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Carta, C. (2013). The European Union Diplomatic Service: Ideas, Preferences and Identities (Vol. 75). Routledge. Carta, C., & Morin, J.-F. (Eds.). (2014). EU Foreign Policy through the Lens of Discourse Analysis. Making Sense of Diversity. Surrey: Ashgate. Cerutti, F., & Lucarelli, S. (2008). The Search for a European Identity: Values, Policies and Legitimacy of the European Union. London: Routledge. Christiansen, T., Jørgensen, K. E., & Wiener, A. (2001). The Social Construction of Europe. London: Sage. de Vreese, C. H. (2001). ‘Europe’ in the News. A Cross-National Comparative Study of the News Coverage of Key EU Events. European Union Politics, 2(3), 283–307. de Wilde, P., & Lord, C. (2016). Assessing Actually-Existing Trajectories of EU Politicisation. West European Politics, 39(1), 145–163. de Witte, B., Héritier, A., & Trechsel, A. H. (Eds.). (2013). The Euro Crisis and the State of European Democracy. San Domenico di Fiesole: European University Institute. Deephouse, D.  L., & Suchman, M. (2008). Legitimacy in Organizational Institutionalism. In R.  Greenwood, C.  Oliver, R.  Suddaby, & K.  Sahlin (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism (pp. 49–77). London: SAGE. della Porta, D., & Caiani, M. (2006). The Europeanization of Public Discourse in Italy. A Top-Down Process? European Union Politics, 7(1), 77–112. della Porta, D., & Parks, L. (2013). Contentious EU Politics: A Comparative Analysis of Protest Campaigns. In N. Kauppi (Ed.), A Political Sociology of Transnational Europe (pp. 18–50). Colchester: ECPR press. Diez, T. (1999). Die EU lesen. Diskursive Knotenpunkte in der britischen Europadebatte. Opladen: Leske und Budrich. Diez, T. (2004). Europe’s Other and the Return of Geopolitics. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 17(2), 319–335. Doerr, N. (2007). Is ‘Another’ Public Sphere Actually Possible? The Case of “Women Without” in the European Social Forum Process as a Critical Test

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for Deliberative Democracy. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 8(3), 71–87. Easton, D. (1953). The Political System. An Inquiry into the State of Political Science. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Eder, K., & Kantner, C. (2002). Interdiskursivität in der europäischen Öffentlichkeit. Berliner Debatte Initial, 13(5/6), 79–88. Erbe, J. (2005). ‘What Do the Papers Say?’ How Press Reviews Link National Media Arenas in Europe. Javnost—The Public, 7(2), 75–91. Eriksen, E. O. (Ed.). (2005). Making the European Polity: Reflexive Integration in the EU. London: Routledge. Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and Social Change (Reprinted ed.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Fairclough, N., & Wodak, R. (1997). Critical Discourse Analysis. In T. A. v. Dijk (Ed.), Discourse as Social Interaction (Vol. 2, pp.  258–284). London; Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: Sage. Fishkin, J.  S., Luskin, R.  C., & Siu, A. (2014). Europolis and the European Public Sphere: Empirical Explorations of a Counterfactual Ideal. European Union Politics, 15(3), 328–351. Fossum, J. E. (2015). The Crisis and the Question of De-parliamentarization in Europe. In H.-J. Trenz, C. Ruzza, & V. Guiraudon (Eds.), Europe’s Prolonged Crisis. The Making or Unmaking of a Political Union (pp. 44–62). Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fossum, J. E., & Trenz, H.-J. (2006). When the People Come In: Constitution-­ Making and the Belated Politicisation of the European Union. European Governance Papers (EUROGOV) No. C-06-03. Gaisbauer, H. P., & Pausch, M. (2009). The Gap Between Elites and Citizens in European Media Discourse. In C. Bruell, M. Mokre, & M. Pausch (Eds.), Democracy Needs Dispute. The Debate on the European Constitution (pp. 44–65). Frankfurt (Main) and New York: Campus Verlag. Genschel, P., & Jachtenfuchs, M. (2013). Introduction: Beyond Market Regulation. Analysing the European Integration of Core State Powers. In M.  Jachtenfuchs & P.  Genschel (Eds.), Beyond the Regulatory Polity?: The European Integration of Core State Powers (pp.  1–23). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Georgakakis, D., & Rowell, J. (2013). Introduction: Studying Eurocracy as a Bureaucratic Field. In D.  Georgakakis & J.  Rowell (Eds.), The Field of Eurocracy. Mapping EU Actors and Professionals (pp.  1–15). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Gerhards, J. (2000). Europäisierung von Ökonomie und Politik und Trägheit der Entstehung einer europäischen Öffentlichkeit. In M.  Bach (Ed.), Die Europäisierung nationaler Gesellschaften. Sonderheft der Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 40 (pp.  277–305). Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Gleissner, M., & De Vreese, C. H. (2005). News about the EU Constitution: Journalistic Challenges and Media Portrayal of the European Union Constitution. Journalism, 6(2), 221–242. Haas, E. B. (1968). The Uniting of Europe: Political, Economic and Social Forces, 1950–1957 (2nd ed.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Habermas, J. (2001). The Postnational Constellation. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (2002). Toward a European Political Community. Society, 39(5), 58–61. Hansen, L., & Wæver, O. (Eds.). (2002). European Integration and National Identity. The Challenge of the Nordic States. London: Routledge. Horolets, A. (Ed.). (2006). Europa w polskich dyskursach. Toruń: Adam Marszałek. Hubé, N., & Rambour, M. (2010). French Political Parties in Campaign (1989–2004): A Configurational Analysis of Political Discourses on Europe. Perspectives on European Politics and Society, 11(2), 146–166. Hurrelmann, A. (2008). Constructing Multilevel Legitimacy in the European Union: A Study of British and German Media Discourse. Comparative European Politics, 6(2), 190–211. Jachtenfuchs, M., Diez, T., & Jung, S. (1997). Which Europe? Conflicting Models of a Legitimate European Political Order. European Journal of International Relations, 4(4), 409–445. Jasper, J. M. (2005). Culture, Knowledge, Politics. In T. Janoski (Ed.), Handbook of Political Sociology (pp. 115–134). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Joerges, C. (2013). Europe’s Economic Constitution in Crisis and the Emergence of a New Constitutional Constellation. Zentra Working Papers in Transnational Studies No. 06/2012. Kantner, C. (2003). Öffentliche politische Kommunikation in der EU: Eine hemeneutisch-pragmatische Perspektive. In A.  Klein, R.  Koopmans, H.-J. Trenz, & D. Rucht (Eds.), Bürgerschaft, Öffentlickeit und Demokratie in Europa (pp. 213–229). Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Kantner, C., Kutter, A., & Renfordt, S. (2008). The Perception of the EU as an Emerging Security Actor in Media Debates on Humanitarian and Military Interventions (1990–2006). RECON Online Working Paper No. 19/2008, Arena Oslo, Oslo.

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Koopmans, R., & Erbe, J. (2004). Towards a European Public Sphere? Vertical and Horizontal Dimensions of Europeanized Political Communication. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Sciences, 17(2), 97–118. Koopmans, R., & Pfetsch, B. (2003). Towards a Europeanised Public Sphere? Comparing Political Actors and the Media in Germany. ARENA Working Paper No. 03/2003. Koopmans, R., & Statham, P. (2010). The Making of a European Public Sphere: Media Discourse and Political Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krzyżanowski, M. (2010). The Discursive Construction of European Identities. A Multi-level Approach to Discourse and Identity in the Transforming European Union. Frankfurt (Main): Peter Lang. Kupchan, C. A. (2010). The Potential Twilight of the European Union. Council on Foreign Relations Working Paper (September), 1–5. Kurpas, S. (2008). Der Europäische Reformkonvent im Spiegel der Qualitätspresse. Beispiel einer europäischen Öffentlichkeit? Baden-Baden: Nomos. Kutter, A. (2007). Petitioner or Partner? Constructions of European Integration in Polish Print Media Debates on the EU Constitutional Treaty. In N. Fairclough, G. Cortese, & P. Ardizzone (Eds.), Discourse and Contemporary Social Change (pp. 433–457). Bern: Peter Lang. Kutter, A. (2015). A Model to the World? Constructions of the EU Polity in Poland and France. Journal of Language and Politics, 14(1), 41–64. Lacroix, J., & Nicolaïdis, K. (Eds.). (2010). European Stories. Intellectual Debates on Europe in National Contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leconte, C. (2015). From Pathology to Mainstream Phenomenon. Reviewing the Euroscepticism Debate in Research and Theory. International Political Science Review, 36(3), 250–263. Lichtenstein, D., & Eilders, C. (2015). Constructing European Identity in Media Debates on the EU Constitution. Publizistik, 60(3), 277–303. Lieb, J. (2008). Die französische Kampagne zum Referendum über den Vertrag über eine Verfassung für Europa—Probleme mit der europäischen Wirklichkeit. In F. Baasner (Ed.), Von welchem Europa reden wir? Reichweiten nationaler Europadiskurse (pp. 55–75). Baden-Baden: Nomos. Liebert, U. (2007). Structuring Political Conflict about Europe: National Media in Transnational Discourse Analysis. Perspectives on European Politics and Society, 8(3), 235–260. Lindberg, L., & Scheingold, S. (1970). Europe’s Would-Be Polity: Patterns of Change in the European Community. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

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Link, J. (1982). Kollektivsymbolik und Mediendiskurse. Zur aktuellen Frage, wie subjektive Aufrüstung funktioniert. kultuRRevolution, 1, 6–21. Link, J. (2003). Kulturwissenschaft, Interdiskurs, Kulturrevolution. kultuRRevolution, 45/46, 10–23. Lord, C., & Magnette, P. (2004). E Pluribus Unum? Creative Disagreement about Legitimacy in the EU. Journal of Common Market Studies, 42(1), 182–202. Lucarelli, S., Cerutti, F., & Schmidt, V. (Eds.). (2011). Debating Political Identity and Legitimacy in the European Union. Milton Park: Routledge. Marchetti, D. (Ed.). (2004). En quête d’Europe. Médias européens et médiatisation de l’Europe. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Marcussen, M., Risse, T., Engelmann-Martin, D., Knopf, H.-J., & Roscher, K. (2001). Constructing Europe? The Evolution of Nation-State Identities. In T.  Christiansen, K.  E. Jørgensen, & A.  Wiener (Eds.), The Social Construction of Europe (pp. 101–120). London: Sage. Marks, G., Hooghe, L., Nelson, M., & Edwards, E. (2006). Party Competition and European Integration in the East and West: Different Structure, Same Causality. Comparative-Political-Studies, 39(2), 155–175. Meyer, C.  O. (2005). The Europeanization of Media Discourse: A Study of Quality Press Coverage of Economic Policy Co-ordination Since Amsterdam. Journal of Common Market Studies, 43(1), 121–148. Moravcsik, A. (2005). The European Constitutional Compromise and the Neofunctionalist Legacy. Journal of European Public Policy, 12(2), 349–386. Mosca, L., Teune, S., Rucht, D., & Martin, S. L. (2009). Communicating the European Social Forum. In D. della Porta (Ed.), Another Europe: Conceptions and Practices of Democracy in the European Social Forums (pp.  46–64). London: Routledge. Mouzelis, N. (1995). Sociological Theory: What Went Wrong? Diagnosis and Remedies. London: Routledge. Musolff, A. (2000). Mirror Images of Europe. Metaphors in the Public Debate about Europe in Britain and Germany. München: Iudicum. Neyer, J. (2003). Discourse and Order in the EU. A Deliberative Approach to Multi-Level Governance. Journal of Common Market Studies, 41(1), 687–706. Nonhoff, M., & Schneider, S. (2010). Legitimation in der postnationalen Konstellation. In F.  Nullmeier, D.  Biegon, J.  Gronau, M.  Nonhoff, H. Schmidtke, & S. Schneider (Eds.), Prekäre Legitimitäten. Rechtfertigung von Herrschaft in der postnationalen Konstellation (pp. 222–242). Frankfurt a. M.: Campus.

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Nullmeier, F., Biegon, D., Gronau, J., Nonhoff, M., Schmidtke, H., & Schneider, S. (2010). Prekäre Legitimitäten. Rechtfertigung von Herrschaft in der postnationalen Konstellation. Frankfurt (Main): Campus. Oberhuber, F., Bärenreuter, C., Krzyżanowski, M., Schönbauer, H., & Wodak, R. (2005). Debating the European Constitution. On Representations of Europe/the EU in the Press. Journal of Language and Politics, 4(2), 227–227. Offe, C., & Preuss, U. K. (2006). The Problem of Legitimacy in the European Polity: Is Democratization the Answer? Constitutionalism Webpapers, 6. Reckwitz, A. (2004). Die Politik der Moderne aus kulturtheoretischer Perspektive: Vorpolitische Sinnhorizonte des Politischen, symbolische Antagonismen und das Regime der Gouvernementalität. In B.  Schwelling (Ed.), Politikwissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft. Theorien, Methoden, Problemstellungen (pp. 33–56). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Risse-Kappen, T. (1996). Exploring the Nature of the Beast: International Relations Theory and Comparative Policy Analysis Meet the European Union. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 34(1), 53–80. Risse, T. (2010). We the European Peoples? Identity, Public Sphere, and European Democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Risse, T. (Ed.). (2015). European Public Spheres: Politics is Back. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosamond, B. (2006). The Political Science of European Integration: Disciplinary History and EU Studies. In K.  Jørgensen, M.  A. Pollack, & B.  Rosamond (Eds.), Handbook of European Union Politics (pp.  7–30). London and Thousand Oaks: Sage. Rosamond, B. (2017). The Political Economy Context of EU Crises. In D. Dinan, N. Nugent, & W. E. Paterson (Eds.), European Union in Crisis (pp. 33–53). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Scharpf, F. W. (1999). Governing in Europe: Effective and Democratic? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scharpf, F. W. (2010). The Asymmetry of European Integration, or Why the EU Cannot Be a ‘social market economy’. Socio-Economic Review, 8(2), 211–250. Schlesinger, P. (1999). Changing Spaces of Political Communication: The Case of the European Union. Political Communication, 16, 263–279. Schmidt, V.  A. (2006). Democracy in Europe. The EU and National Polities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schmidt, V.  A. (2007). Trapped by Their Ideas: French Élites’ Discourses of European Integration and Globalization. Journal of European Public Policy, 14(7), 992–1009.

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2 Advancing the Linguistic Turn: Premises of Conceptual Work

Discourse has become a buzzword in social studies. It has moved to the centre even in political science, where scepticism towards interpretive research prevails. As shown in the previous chapter, the turn towards communication and discourse has helped to conceptually grasp the emergent character of the EU polity, too. A great deal of such conceptual innovation has come with the late ‘constructivist turn’ (Checkel, 1998) in International Relations, the sub-discipline of political science from which most of the theorising of European integration is drawn. Constructivism posits that political structure and agency are constituted through social interaction which attributes both structure and agency intersubjectively approved meaning (Giddens, 1984; Wendt, 1999, p. 162f ). In political science, it (re-)opened eyes to the social ontology of political systems and implied a ‘linguistic turn’, insofar as it highlighted communication and discourse as the very site where polities, including that of the EU, are intersubjectively construed (for an overview, cf. Christiansen, Jørgensen, & Wiener, 2001). However, compared to the attention paid to the phenomenon of discourse, reflection upon the knowledge-philosophical implications of the linguistic turn and the practice of discourse research remains surprisingly scarce. This chapter first recalls the way ‘discourse’ © The Author(s) 2020 A. Kutter, Legitimation in the European Union, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33031-6_2

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has been conceived of in political science concerned with European ­integration (Sect. 2.1). In recourse to the linguistic movement in philosophy and modern language theory and its adoption in the social sciences and humanities, the chapter then shows what potentials of the linguistic turn have, thereby, been overlooked. It highlights the knowledge-theoretical revolution introduced with the linguistic turn and traces the origins of the different epistemologies that it brought about (Sect. 2.2). Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is introduced as a discourse epistemology that highlights a linguistic-pragmatic understanding of discourse still wanting to be systematically integrated into European integration studies (Sect. 2.3). In the end, the chapter outlines the analytical strategy developed for translating between theoretical and empirical exploration and for reflexively analysing the EU constitutional debate (Sect. 2.4). The aim is to sketch out premises and methodological considerations that form the basis of an advanced discourse study such as that conducted in the book. In that endeavour, I follow Doris BachmannMedick’s plea to free the linguistic turn from what was criticised as an obsession with language and constructivism, “not to re-affirm a naive reference to reality as if we had never gone through the linguistic turn, poststructuralism and deconstructivism (…), but to highlight a different kind of referentiality, one which is not hermeneutically encapsulated in kernels of meaning, but rather  is taken serious on the very surface on which it occurs, as evidence, presence, thingness and materiality (…) and can be translated into the material, social and political” (BachmannMedick, 2019, author’s translation).

2.1 T  he Linguistic Turn in European Integration Studies Most discourse analyses in European integration studies use the notion of ‘discourse’ without relating to a particular theory or definition. They refer to a bunch of utterances on a certain issue and see them as forming a discourse because of their relation to a particular topic: the discourse on migration, the discourse on the EU constitution and so on. Utterances

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are also seen to form a discourse because they are made within a ­particular social realm addressing a specific audience and group of actors, for example the public discourse, the political discourse, the academic discourse, or the communicative versus coordinative discourse of EU representatives. Turning towards language and communication, in line with this understanding, broadens the spectrum of sources from which to learn about how social actors make sense of policies in the EU’s multilevel setting. The investigation of speech and writing adds to research traditions that locate the prime motion of political action either in ideas and institutions, which are seen to provide an anchor for discourse entrepreneurs and advocacy coalitions in EU policymaking and transform through such discourse agency at the same time (Schmidt, 2011, for an overview over discursive institutionalisms), or in cost-benefit calculations (e.g. Schimmelfennig, 2001). Utterances are understood as vehicle and manifestations of these logics. They are looked at through the lens of claims making, policy framing, political rhetoric and the history of political ideas. A systematisation of such study was first provided in the concept of advocacy coalitions (Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1999), understood as an issue-specific alliance of political and social actors who share a belief system and advocate similar policy solutions throughout the cycle of policymaking (Kerchner, 2006a, for an overview). Studies that seek a discourse-theoretical grounding of European integration studies, in turn, insist that they go beyond a ‘discourse matters’ statement and beyond a utilitarian conception of language. They seek to further the constructivist argument with the help of theories of communicative action and of discourse. These are employed to prove that political action is driven by logics that do not fall into one with motivations derived from shared ideas, social appropriateness,  cost-benefit calculations or material assets. The theory of discourse most often employed for such argument is Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action (Habermas, 1981), more specifically: the idea that communication entails the possibility of deliberation, that is, the possibility that mutual understanding emerges from the juxtaposition and rational balance of opposing arguments. Following this assumption, ‘deliberative approaches’ to European integration have focused on instances of social learning and consensus building that can be plausibly attributed to the exchange of

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arguments. They thus underscore the general claim that a rationality of understanding and justification, not only of bargaining and social appropriateness, drives international and EU politics (e.g. Joerges, 2006; Niesen & Herborth, 2007; Risse, 2000). The EU is seen to have developed distinct features of ‘deliberative supranationalism’ and ‘deliberative intergovernmentalism’ that entrench such rationality in multilateral negotiation (Joerges & Neyer, 1997; Pütter, 2003) and, as an emergent postnational entity, relies on justification to a greater extent than national states. Deliberation has also been observed in multilingual discussion forums on EU matters (Doerr, 2007; Mosca, Teune, Rucht, & Martin, 2009). Trusting in deliberative rationality, scholars of European public spheres further expect an EU-related problem-solving community to emerge once different claims on EU politics are juxtaposed to each other in different national publics or mobilised in contentious politics EU-wide (Eder & Kantner, 2000; Risse, 2015). Equally influential have been discourse-analytical approaches that conceive of discourses as regimes of knowledge constituted through linguistic and other practices, which exert power in that they privilege and enact a specific vision of policy and society, while excluding others. The main inspirations come from speech act theory and Foucauldian governmentality studies. Studies following speech act theory show that specific moves of EU institutionalisation or policymaking have been enabled and locked in by illocutionary speech acts that draw on a longer intertextual trajectory. Karin Fierke and Antje Wiener investigated, for instance, how the promise that political liberalisation would be rewarded by intensified cooperation with the West, which was implied in the 1972 Helsinki Act, backed Hungary’s and Poland’s requests for EU accession after 1989 and made it difficult for EU leaders to reject such aspiration (Fierke & Wiener, 2001). The most prominent contribution of the Copenhagen School, the so-called ‘securitization theory’, equally mobilises speech act theory. It stresses that various moves of institutionalisation at the EU level and the development of techniques of EU-wide governance can be attributed to ‘securitization speech acts’, rather than, for instance, to the spillover effects stated in neo-functionalist European integration studies. These speech acts, which declare that an issue fundamentally threatens the security of the constituent collective, establish room for manoeuvre

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for extraordinary politics outside the checks of regular, democratically and nationally controlled politics or outside the regular procedures of multilateral negotiation and co-decision (Buzan, Wæver, & de Wilde, 1998). They also tend to securitise realms of political activity that do not pertain to the realm of security conventionally understood as military action and defence, such as ‘societal security’ (the integrity of the constituent collective), and classify the objects and methods needed to manage flows of movement or rate legitimate membership (Wæver, 1996). The idea that EU governance is not necessarily furthered by formal competence-­delegation only, but by specific ‘governmentalities’, has been explored in various respects (Haahr & Walters, 2004). For instance, it has been shown how the EU’s border regime has been brought about by securitisation (Bigo, 2014; Neal, 2009), that EU’s policies towards Maghreb states follow a neoliberal governmentality (İşleyen, 2015) or that Eurobarometer polling or European accounting standards or poverty risk measurements enact specific understandings of EU legitimacy, compliance or employability in the way they generate knowledge, providing data and methods that allow for the comparison of constituent entities and suggest how to supervise them (Walter, 2014). Among reformulations of Foucauldian discourse terminology, only Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory has gained attention in European integration studies. Politics, according to Laclau and Mouffe, is the struggle for the hegemony of definition under conditions of polyvalent and continuously contested meaning, an effort to establish a totalising centre (or ‘nodal point’), from which is possible “the imposition onto elements of a certain way of relating to each other” (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001/1985, p. 113). Scholars endorsing this terminology focus on semiotic operations in political communication, such as chains of equivalence or ‘empty signifiers’ that fortify the formation of a particular political-ideological project. They reveal that European integration, as a transnational political project, has been formed by semiotic operations that detach some insignia of territorial power from the nation-state and rearrange them in a way that allows EU bodies to partially reclaim them, too. Such operations include, for instance, a recoupling and linkage of concepts that helps to envision the nation within the context of the European Union (Diez, 1999; Wæver, 2005) or narratives of European

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integration that rearrange meaning (of sovereignty, territory, c­ onstituency etc.) in a way that dissolves or reinforces the national and supranational levels as competing holders of authority (Biegoń, 2016; Kutter, 2007). In sum, constructivist investigations into European integration employ theories of discourse as grand social theories that hypothesise the nature of social relations in general. From these, they derive analytical narratives about why European integration happened, which challenge established theories of European integration. Moreover, by reference to a specific grand theory of discourse, researchers also align themselves with opposing meta-theoretical positions regarding the philosophy of science to be endorsed in constructivist research. The mainstream of deliberative approaches takes a primary interest in the agency of utterances, conceives of discourse as a ‘debate’ that mediates ideas and uses mainly positivist approaches and content-analytical methods to identify ideas, identities or deliberation-enhancing qualities of speech in concrete utterances. This stance is maintained vis-à-vis ‘epistemological’ constructivists, who stress the reality-constituting and meaning-regulating effects of utterances, often combining poststructuralist positions with postmodernism and postpositivism (Diez, 1996; Torfing & Howarth, 2005; Wæver, 2004). The opposition between Habermasian and Foucauldian notions of discourse and constructionist versus radical constructionist positions structures the field of constructivist research in International Relations and European integration studies, as overviews of the research field show (Herschinger & Renner, 2015; Holzscheiter, 2014). The emphasis on meta-theoretical nuances has certainly contributed to theory development in European integration studies (Wiener, 2006). At the same time, it has narrowed the range of possibilities that the linguistic turn offers for contemporary social studies and the investigation of European politics, more specifically. The streamlining of discourse approaches according to opposing positions in the constructivist debate not only negated the overlaps between the original discoursetheoretical works but also blanked out the possibility of exploring methodologies ‘in between’ (Diez & Steans, 2005). While using theories of discourse to underscore constructivist ontologies or new­ theories of European integration, scholars also omitted further turns towards discourse and communication that have been elaborated in

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Interpretive Policy Analysis since the 1970s (Wagenaar, 2011) and in interdisciplinary discourse studies since the 1990s (Angermüller et al., 2014). These approaches run counter to the deliberative versus poststructuralist or moderate versus radical constructivist divide. They offer situated theories of discursive construction in the middle range of abstraction and, while borrowing from grand theories of discourse or sociological theory, primarily focus on the elaboration of problemrelated methodologies. The insights generated by such-oriented research into European integration have found little resonance in political science debates on the EU, so far, even though some representatives and works have started to be included in edited volumes on European integration (e.g. in Carta & Morin, 2014; Wiener, Börzel, & Risse, 2019). The neglect of the middle range in constructivist research in European integration studies coincides with a neglect of the methods of critical reading that were developed in original works or that emerged later as a result of the adoption of and experimentation with concepts from linguistics and literary theory. In fact, political science studies that empirically investigate the arguments promoted by constructivism tend to jump from macro-theory to interpretive commentary or content-analytical methods. They give thought to the  propositional content or mental schemes and types of speech acts used in political communication, while largely ignoring the ways in which such content is constructed in texts and how it is contextually conditioned. This can be illustrated by the debate on the empirical investigation of the hypothesis that deliberation, not only bargaining, was driving politics that was particularly fashionable in political science in the 2000s. In the attempt to establish whether or not communicative rationality was involved in specific instances of political decision-making or public debate, researchers investigated the occurrence and distribution of speech acts, which, following Habermas, can be associated with either strategic-teleological communication or communication focused on understanding (Holzinger, 2004), or that signal contestedness and argumentation (Liebert, 2007). These studies revealed that speakers used both types of speech acts and employed conventions of arguing. Yet they did not capture deliberation as such. Meanwhile, existing methods of critical, instead of literal, reading suited to assess deliberation in artefacts of speech and writing were ignored, such as

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pragma-dialectic research into informal logics of argumentation and their compliance with Habermas’ discourse-ethical standards of justification (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 2004). The example illustrates the general gap between the macro and the micro perspectives in social research, or, relating to the example: between questions about deliberation that pertain to the macro level of social organisation (is a rationality of understanding driving politics?) and the micrology of argumentative interaction (do the argumentative procedures in actual utterances enact standards of justification?). The example also demonstrates that habitual research practice, such as carrying out quantifying content analysis in political science whenever the study of texts and documents is at stake, may undermine a research purpose that is modelled on a broader understanding of communication. In reverse, interdisciplinary discourse studies that do provide text- and context-­ sensitive research programmes and reflexive methods often fail to show what significance their detailed analyses have for macro-level research questions. One obvious lesson is to improve the dialogue between micro and macro perspectives and complement methodologies of constructivist political science with research programmes developed in interdisciplinary discourse studies. The present book intends to make a contribution to this endeavour (see also Sect. 2.4). However, the argument that will be substantiated in the following is that the linguistic turn in European integration studies has remained incomplete or underexplored in further, more crucial, aspects. The ontological dimension of the linguistic turn is fully acknowledged in constructivist research, that is, the assumption that communication and discourse co-constitute cognition and social relations. And so are theories of discourse as grand social theories that offer a specific hypothesis regarding the political: as constituted through communicative action, discourse formation or struggle over the hegemony of definition. The method-­ related implications of linguistic turning are about to be accounted for more thoroughly. However, considerations of epistemological implications of linguistic turning remain missing. By epistemological implications, I refer to the following questions: How can one know and how can one establish scientific truth when cognition is assumed to be mediated by

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language? Given that there exist several possible answers to this question and, correspondingly, several ‘discourse epistemologies’, how do we do justice to them in research? Finally, what conception of the political follows from the linguistic turn other than the claim that communicative or discursive rationality matter? Let me show in a brief and necessarily generalising review of the linguistic turn in social studies why I regard these questions as important and why I think answering them is a prerequisite for an advanced generation of discourse research in European integration studies.

2.2 R  econsidering the Linguistic Turn in Social Studies The analysis of discourse and reflection upon adequate methods of interpretation evidently has a long tradition. Among its early sources are Aristotle’s teachings on semiotics and rhetoric as meaning-constituting practice and the virtues of medieval biblical exegesis that prepared the ground for hermeneutics as a science of interpretation (Wrana, 2014). However, contemporary discourse studies is  rooted in the linguistic movement in philosophy and in modern linguistics that took shape in the early twentieth century. This section argues that the major contribution of these schools of thought lies in the epistemological rupture it brought about, the philosophy of knowledge and science it yielded. It denaturalised assumptions about the human subject, social reality and scientific truth and produced a range of epistemologies, that is, different complexes of assumptions, terminologies and methods, that allow investigating the political from a different, discursive, angle. To appreciate and adequately employ them in contemporary discourse research, it is necessary to trace back their emergence and reception, starting from the linguistic theory and philosophy of the early twentieth century. The linguistics of that time was heavily influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure’s conception of language as a self-referential system, in which meaning is constituted through the differential relations between the signs of a natural language, not by reflection of or reference to an

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e­ xtralinguistic reality and individual psychic or cognitive disposition.1 A specific utterance (a language event, parole) was seen to only enact the system of differences that governed a language (the language system, langue) (de Saussure, 1977 [1916]). This theory revolutionised the study of language. The inherited focus on the diachronic development of languages and the transmission of meaning external to language was abandoned and replaced by the synchronic study of language-internal generative structures (Moebius, 2009, p. 420). Moreover, the assumption that meaning was yielded through systems of difference, instead of by reference to external objects or subjective consciousness, suggested itself as a theorem also applicable to culture and society as a whole. It became the core theorem of ‘(post)structuralism’, the approach to social and cultural research that later established itself in explicit opposition to early interpretive sociology, author-centred literary theory and intuition-led linguistic analysis (see below). The linguistic movement in philosophy, on the other hand, asserted that language is key to both the content and method of philosophy. Metaphysical problems were to be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language, using logic as a universal language for disambiguation (as suggested by analytical philosophy, flourishing in the 1910s–1940s), or by understanding more about the language we use, through a careful study of the expressions of language (as suggested by ordinary language philosophy, flourishing in the 1940s–1970s) (Parker-Ryan, 2017). The latter strand is associated with Wittgenstein’s turn to language use as a source of philosophical reflection and his notion of ‘language games’, in particular, which suggests that meaning is constituted through recurrent forms of language use that are woven into action and both limit action and rely upon it (Wittgenstein, 2009 [1953]). It inspired speech act theories and the investigation of performative and pragmatic-cognitive aspects of language (Austin, 1962; Grice, 1989; Searle, 1969). The new awareness of the self-referentiality and performativity of language carries with it the ontological stance that cognition and action  To give an illustration: the meaning of ‘tree’ was seen to derive from convention (a language community’s agreement to call this phenomenon ‘tree’) and from the principle of difference (the fact that the ‘tree’ was denoted as being different from, that is as not being, bush or meadow), not from physical reality that motivated some linguistic sound (Moebius, 2009, p. 421). 1

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is conditioned and constituted by language. But the implication of the linguistic turn that outlasts criticisms of the one-sided focus on language as a model for grasping the world lies in the philosophy of mind and knowledge that it opened up. In his retrospective appraisal of the linguistic movement in philosophy, Richard Rorty concludes that linguistic philosophy did not yield a new assessment, let alone a settling, of metaphysical problems, as initially expected. But it questioned some handed-down assumptions about how humans cognise themselves and gain knowledge about the world surrounding them. Above all, it questioned representationalism, that is, the assertion handed down from Locke that the objects of our perception are virtual replicas (representations) of the world external to the human mind, which are based on experiences and sensations internal to the subject, but mirror, at the same time, primary qualities of external objects. Moreover, the linguistic movement qualified foundationalism, that is, the teaching attributed, among others, to Aristotle, that knowledge or justified belief is inferred from prior, self-evident and, therefore, ‘foundational’ knowledge about one’s phenomenal states: Insofar as the linguistic turn made a distinctive contribution to philosophy I think that it was not a metaphysical one at all. Its contribution was, instead, to have helped shift from talk about experience as a medium of representation to talk of language as such a medium—a shift which, as it turned out, made it easier to set aside the notion of representation itself. (…) The term ‘experience’ as used by philosophers such as Kant and Dewey, was, like Locke’s term ‘idea’, ambiguous between ‘sense-impression’ and ‘belief ’. The term ‘sentence’, used by philosophers in the Fregean tradition, lacks this ambiguity. (…) sentences were no longer thought of as expressions of experience nor as representations of extra-experiential reality. Rather, they were thought of as strings of marks and noises used by human beings in the development and pursuit of social practices. (Rorty, 1992, p. 371)

Postrepresentationalism and postfoundationalism, or degrees of them, form the knowledge philosophy from which different epistemologies of discourse were developed. They suggest moving away from the assumption that truth and meaning are situated  in essentials (in sensations, beliefs, ideas) that only need to be understood. Instead, truth and mean-

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ing are seen to emerge from schemes and practices developed in language and communication (and other aspects of meaning-making, outlined in subsequent ‘cultural turns’), in which the researcher is entangled, too. This conception of cognition also paved the way for a different philosophy of science that accounts for contingency and introduces reflexivity as a principle of scientificity. The shift in perspective brought about a far-reaching “epistemological rupture: introducing and spreading a new vocabulary of cognition that opened up new analytical perspectives” (Reckwitz, 2000, p. 644, author’s translation) and profoundly restructured the intellectual-academic field in the humanities and social studies. As Doris Bachmann-Medick points out, this knowledge-theoretical revolution did not take the form of an explicit paradigm shift, in which basic beliefs about science were spectacularly overturned, but followed from the adoption of and experimentation with language-related insights. This experimentation yielded a variety of new approaches to perception, operational aspects of investigation, analytical categories, methods and so on. As a result of that epistemological turn, the individual’s self-conscience as well as social agents and structures were recognised and conceived of as points of intersection of communication and discourse, and investigation reoriented itself onto understanding how these points of intersection were discursively constructed and how the researcher’s involvement was to be accounted for (Bachmann-Medick, 2016).

The Route Through Hermeneutics In the social sciences and humanities, the linguistic turn has been adopted in two ways, following the route of either hermeneutics or (post)structuralism. In hermeneutics, it stimulated reflection upon adequate ways of interpreting and understanding society and prompted scholars to move beyond the inherited opposition between the hermeneutics of recovery and the hermeneutics of suspicion (Gibbons, 2008, drawing on Ricœur). The first had sought to uncover the subjectively intended or collectively validated meaning that motivates social action. It is  associated with Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhem Dilthey, in the first place, who centred on the

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meaning-making individual as both object of interpretation and subject of understanding and proposed a careful empathic examination of texts in order to ‘relive’ the original meaning intended by the author. Later strands in interpretive research challenge the emphasis on the individual’s consciousness and stress collective meaning-making through communication and signification, instead, such as American pragmatist-interpretive studies following Charles Sanders Pierce and William Issac Thomas, symbolic interactionism as established by Goerge Herbert Mead or the phenomenological-pragmatist sociology of knowledge developed by Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger. But they retained the assumption that recovering the intended and intersubjectively transcended meaning was a prime objective of interpretation (Wrana, 2014, p. 515f). The hermeneutics of suspicion, on the other hand, focused on uncovering the true meaning behind the apparent, distorted understandings of society. Its main inspirations derive from Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. They pointed to the problem of ‘false consciousness’, understood not as an erroneous assumption held by the individual, but as collective understandings that are removed from the immediate grasp of consciousness and conceal the will to power (in Nietzsche’s critique of resentment), class domination (in Marx’ critique of ideology) and repressed desires (in Freud’s critique of infantile distress) (Ricœur, 1978). Such hermeneutics of doubt can be traced from these early works through to the work of the Frankfurt School after the Second World War, on to Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence and misrecognition, in which the subordinated are seen to be complicit with the dominant in sustaining imaginings that cover up hierarchies of power. Common to the two hermeneutic traditions, the hermeneutics of faith and that of doubt, is the attempt to “burrow beneath language to that which language expresses” (Rorty, 1992, p.  10) and to ascribe to the researcher superior interpretive competence in discerning what the intended or manipulated meaning was. Scholars of the hermeneutic philosophy of the late twentieth century, including Gadamer, Habermas, Ricœur and Taylor, moved beyond the conventional philosophy of mind and ‘burrowing’ textual exegesis, ­notably by employing Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s claim that language is constitutive of human cognition and social relations. According to

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them, interpretation is a condition of human being, and the cognising subject, including the hermeneutician, is both enabled and constrained by existing traditions of interpretation (Gadamer, 2004). At the same time, it is through language and communication that these social imaginings are being reappropriated and transgressed, whether through dialogue, which gives voice to formerly excluded propositions (Habermas, 1984), or through the imaginative capacity of allegory, analogy, metaphor and narrative that open up new horizons of interpretation (Ricœur, 1973). The hermeneutic philosopher, then, will not decipher ‘hidden’ meaning, but provide criteria and methods of critical reading that help in  subejcting these imaginings to moral reflection; such as Habermas’ discourse ethics or Ricoeur’s ‘detours’ that probe the rival hermeneutics of doubt and faith. The debate on reflexive hermeneutics yielded two ‘linguistically turned’ theories of the constitution of meaning that matter in contemporary discourse research. One is pursued in deliberative studies and follows Habermas’ suggestion, derived from speech act theory and pragmatist philosophy, that communication grants a kind of rationality of understanding shared by all humans that is actualised in the demand for justification. Intersubjective meaning and truth, then, emerge from communication, in which various validity claims, but above all those relating to factual-empirical truth and moral rightness, are scrutinised with regard to presupposed standards of good argumentation, such as logic, dialectical procedure and inclusive and non-coercive dialogical settings. In the course of such a justificatory process, implicit social imaginings and backgrounded assumptions of diverging proposals undergo rationalisation and mediation, allowing for social learning (Habermas, 1984, pp. 8–42). In line with these assumptions, deliberative studies conceive of discourse as debate about practical reasoning. They assess what validity claims are made in proposals and what justificatory discourse they direct.  Ideally, they apply a pragmatic analysis of argumentation, which considers the performative position of the speaker and the dependency of an argument’s acceptability on the issue and context of expression at stake (Bohman & Rehg, 2017). The other hermeneutic theory of meaning-making is more indebted to phenomenological thought. Here, intersubjective meaning is seen to

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form through the creative appropriation of social imaginings, such as myths or ideographs, in the interactive framing of a situation. However, such collective imagination remains implicated in the social and tends to reify and vary, rather than rationalise, background assumptions (Taylor, 2004). This theory of meaning-constitution is characteristic of discursive variants of sociology of knowledge (e.g. Keller, 2013) and American interpretive studies. Discourse is here conceived of as ‘collective mental constructs’ that are revealed in symbols, concepts, narratives and frames. Correspondingly, methods of critical reading use categories from interpretive studies, the  sociology of knowledge, but also Foucauldian discourse analysis and poststructuralist literary theory to investigate collective imagination. The two hermeneutic theories of meaning invite us to conceive of politics as collective meaning-making, in the course of which shared problem definitions and identities are being formed. They offer an alternative to narrow conceptions of rational behaviour in politics or assumptions about the linear impact of material and institutional resources or ideational and cultural factors on policy formulation. The research programme consistently realising such a hermeneutic-discursive perspective on politics is Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA). It formed in the US in the 1980s in explicit opposition to the “rationality project” (D. Stone, 2012) in applied political science, that is, the teaching that the scientific-­ administrative analysis of objective demands and constraints in a policy field will establish adequate policy solutions. Instead, IPA scholars stressed the uncertainty, complexity and messiness inherent to politics and pleaded for systematically considering that trait in policy analysis and policy advice. They developed tailored concepts, such as policy narratives, causal stories, storylines or discourse coalitions, for political processes in order to grasp how agents structure the situation and their collective action interpretively when debating policy solutions (Fischer, 2003; Hajer, 1993; Roe, 1994; D. Stone, 2012; Wagenaar, 2011). Hence, the focus is not on the effective transmission of a targeted message, which most studies on policy frames in communication studies and political science endorse, but on the performative role framings, symbols, ­narration and argumentation play in bringing about horizons of interpretation and collective political action (van Hulst & Yanow, 2014).

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The Route Through (Post)structuralism The second route the linguistic turn took into the social sciences went through the adoption of linguistic structuralism and criticisms directed at this approach. Advocates of structuralism suggested that social reality (language, meaning, culture, society) was to be understood and studied in the sense established by Saussure: as a system of signs whose meanings are given by their differential position within the system. In linguistics, this view inspired a formalist study of systemic aspects of language. Examples are the phonology of the Prague school that became known for its ‘structural method’ or Noam Chomsky’s advancement of Blumfeldian ‘generative grammar’ in the US (Chomsky, 1957). Structuralism was also furthered in the narrative and literary theory of Russian formalism, founded by Vladimir Propp and Michail Bakhtin, and the Tartu-Moscow school of cultural semiotics headed by Boris Uspenskij and Yuri Lotman. Based on these examples and enhanced by the quest for ‘methodological objectivism’, structuralism became a guiding analytical framework of social studies in France in the 1960s, promulgated by the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as Michel Pêcheux, one of the pioneers of automated political discourse analysis (Angermüller, Maingueneau, & Wodak, 2014b). Two influential authors shall be mentioned here in brief because their works epitomise the epistemological rupture introduced with structuralism. The first is Lévi-Strauss, who argued, borrowing from Marcel Mauss’ analysis of gift-giving, that variance in kinship relations in indigenous South American societies may be explained as an effect of a system of reciprocity that suggests how to arrange marriages between clans (Moebius, 2009, p.  421f ). He also claimed that similarities of myths across cultures derive from a binary structure of classification (prohibition vs prescription of marriage; nature vs culture; top vs bottom etc.). He suggested that, by means of a semiotic analysis of handed-down myths, this binary structure could be revealed as a universal characteristic constituting all cultures. The other eminent reference is Althusser’s structuralist reformulation of the Marxist concept of ideology. Althusser maintained that bourgeois ideology is not a distorted representation of conditions of production, manipulated by those in power, but an imaginary

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through which people relate to the conditions of existence. It attains a materiality of its own because it is differentially reproduced in ‘ideological apparatuses’ (school, media, sports etc.), which involve the individual in material practices, and because it thereby interpellates the social subject in the individual, who recognises herself and others (or does not) in terms of that interpellation (Althusser, 1976). Hence, both Lévi-Strauss and Althusser pointed to the symbolic of social relations as something performative and independent from individual consciousness and economic-­ material conditions.2 They paved the way for a revision of the philosophy of mind that was similar to the revision later adopted in reflexive hermeneutics. Althusser’s claims obviously also challenged orthodox Marxist assumptions about the determining economic base and the reflecting ideological superstructure of capitalist societies. The controversies Althusser’s revelations triggered among Marxists, then, and the reproach of ‘idealism’ and ‘voluntarism’ they carried along (here understood as an ontological position privileging the mind over the material and the will over the ratio), are still echoed in political science dictionary entries on discourse and neo-Marxist criticisms of discourse studies today, irrespective of the fact that (post)structuralism did not negate, but denaturalised both the material and the mind (van Dyk, Langer, Macgilchrist, Wrana, & Ziem, 2014, for a discussion). The critique of structuralism that is of more lasting significance for contemporary discourse research relates to epistemology, not ontology, and was voiced by structuralists themselves (see, e.g., the review of Pêcheux’s reassessment in Helsloot & Hak, 2007). These critical appraisals of structuralism all questioned the one-sided focus on systems and the associated assumption that the meaning of utterances is determined a priori by a universal structure of difference (langue, in Saussure’s theory). Instead, they highlighted meaning-constitution through contextspecific, contingent discourse events (the aspect of parole pointed at by Saussure). We will briefly recall three different strands of advancement that yielded distinct discourse epistemologies relevant to contemporary discourse studies.  Note, however, that Lévi-Strauss, while regarding symbolic systems as super-subjective and ahistoric just as Althusser ideology, still assumed them to be internalised in mental structures of the individual, remaining somewhat true to a subject-centred philosophy of mind. 2

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In linguistics, the critical distancing from structuralism came with a turn towards the pragmatic aspects of language. Drawing from the pragmatic idea that language is always used in context, several groups of linguists disassociated themselves from ‘pure’ linguistic theory in the Chomskyan tradition with its focus on systemic aspects of syntax and grammar (Angermüller, Maingueneau, & Wodak, 2014a, p.  3f ). They took enquiry beyond clause-bound objects to the level of analysing ‘utterances’, ‘texts’ or ‘speech events’. Moreover, several of them linked this new emphasis with a more radical distancing from linguistics ‘proper’, claiming that meaning is constituted not in generative linguistic structures, but in the usage of language understood as social action, interaction and situated performance, as tied to social relations (Stembrouck, 2010). In other words: language use was understood as a social practice that was to be studied by considering pragmatic aspects of language, such as speech acts and presuppositions; and by looking at texts with regard to their production and reception, the dialogical structure and setting, polyphony and intertextuality. These different roads into linguistic discourse analysis have been established from the 1970s onwards, primarily in text linguistics, sociopragmatics, qualitative sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis and enunciative pragmatics. They draw on different theoretical sources, including American pragmatism, ordinary language philosophy and French poststructuralist pragmatics following Beneviste, but share an interest in aspects of meaning-constitution  that extend beyond language and text (Angermüller, Maingueneau, & Wodak, 2014a; Zienkowski, Östman, & Vershueren, 2011). Focused on political discourse, linguistic discourse studies obviously elucidate “the role discourse plays in a range of political contexts and practices, as well as the intrinsically political nature of discursive practice” (Dunmire, 2012, p. 736). But more importantly, I argue, their notion of discourse as ‘language in use’ has the potential to reconceptualise politics in yet another, practice-theoretical way. Thus, politics appears as a professional practice that is co-constituted by features of language use entailed, for example, in genres of political campaigning or political oratory, but also in formats such as talk shows or polit-soaps, through which politics is mediatised and performed, and which serve the struggle over the defi-

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nition of the vision and division of society, or the political, more generally (see Sect. 2.3 for an elaboration on Critical Discourse Analysis). Another response to structuralism can be seen in the cultural studies movement that spread from the Birmingham centre of cultural studies in the 1980s. In the 1950s, the founding figures, including its director Richard Hoggart, had promoted a culturalist approach to society, stressing that patterns of meaning and social relations in a current society can be disclosed by turning to cultural artefacts produced in everyday contexts and by subjecting them to a close reading using literary critique, phenomenological hermeneutics and symbolic interactionism. Using Althusser’s concept of ideology, scholars around Stuart Hall later specified the notion of culture as a  performative and power-inherent set of imaginaries, proliferated, in particular, by the mass media. But they distanced themselves from Althusser’s assumption that the meaning of cultural practices and the positioning of subjects towards them were determined by a coherent semiotic system institutionalised in ideological apparatuses. Instead, drawing from Antonio Gramsci and examples of youth subculture and fandom, they stressed the contestedness of these imaginaries and looked at how individuals and marginal groups of societies appropriated them: “how they fashion, stylise and ‘perform’ these positions [summoned upon them by dominant imaginaries] (…) or are in a constant agonistic process of struggling with, resisting, negotiating and accommodating the normative or regulative rules with which they confront and regulate themselves” (Hall, 1996, p.  14). This theory of articulation that centres on the self-positioning of the subject within context-­specific powerful social structures can be considered a separate (post-Marxist) theory of the constitution of meaning, even if later specifications largely overlap with Laclau’s and Mouffe’s discourse theory (see below). It has inspired various studies of alternative, popular, mass consumption and neoliberal culture, thus reviving, under a poststructuralist heading, topics previously investigated by the Frankfurt School (Winter, 2009, for an overview). The method of critical reading usually applied involves a conjunctural analysis, focused on specific points in time in which various contradictions of (capitalist) social formations are revealed and horizons of action open up for specific groups. It combines a  symbolic-­interactional analysis of lived experience, a hermeneutic-­

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phenomenological description of practice and (poststructuralist) discourse analysis of texts, which is applied to the study of seemingly trivial everyday practices of subordinate groups. The analysis is coupled with a range of procedures that are meant to ensure reflexivity, such as practising autobiography, review by informants and by groups beyond academia (During, 2005). Politics, in this conception, is consistently decentred, away from the centre of political activity, and ‘culturally turned’, focusing on how everyday cultural artefacts created by marginal groups enact ideology and power relations. A third line of distancing from structuralism, which addresses Saussurian semiotics, Lévi-Strauss’ methodological objectivism and Althusser’s notion of ideology alike, is associated, above all, with Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau, Jacques Lacan and Jean-Luc Nancy. They are referred to as the ‘poststructuralists’, after the title of a series of lectures at John Hopkins University to which some of them had been invited. It is through the selective reception of the work of these scholars in the US that poststructuralism became known as a controversial school of social thought; and this history of reception largely moulds the understanding of poststructuralism in political science as a radical constructivist or postmodernist approach (for a situation in the French intellectual field, see Angermüller, 2015). However, insofar as these scholars share common ground, it rather consists of a postfoundational philosophy of knowledge that is gained from a radicalisation of structuralist semiotics.3 Poststructuralists underscored the structuralist view that social relations and the social subject are constituted symbolically and relationally, through signification. But, inspired by Kristeva’s polyphonic theory of language (Kristeva, 1986), which stressed the potentially subverting creativity that is inherent in the indefinite plurality of voices and in the indefinite reconfiguration and mixtures of linguistic forms, they neutralised de Saussure’s distinction between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’ and highlighted the meaning-constituting materiality of ‘parole’ and the ‘signifier’ (Derrida, 1999; Lacan, 1977).  Other inspirations of poststructuralist thought, especially in the works by Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, include the socio-ethnology of Marcel Mauss and Robert Hertz and the surrealism of the Collège de Sociologie (Moebius, 2009). 3

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They questioned the existence of a stable linkage between signifier (the referring sound) and signified (the referred-to meaning) that, following Saussure, makes up a sign in a system of difference. Instead, they assumed that meaning emerges from references among signifiers, from a potentially endless play and variation in signification. Closures in this play suggesting, for instance, that only specific forms of sexuality can be talked about were considered temporal and partial and to result not from a system of difference, but from contingent struggles over definition. The binary oppositions that Lévi-Strauss regarded as universal structures of cognition appear as contingent formations of discourse, sustained only thanks to the temporary exclusion of the ‘Other’, in whose absence the social ‘Self ’ asserts itself (Moebius, 2009, for an overview). Similar to philosophical hermeneutics, poststructuralist social theory thus departed from a representational philosophy of mind and emphasised the postfoundational belief that points of reference, from which knowledge is inferred, are not given, but result from social negotiation, here understood not as a potentially inclusive and deliberative, but a potentially exclusive and powerinherent process.4 The notion of discourse developed in line with this epistemology is that of contingent ‘discourse formations’ specific to a topic, social formation or epoch. There are, however, different theories about how such formation comes about and, correspondingly, different methods of critical reading. Among them are, first, Michel Foucault’s assumptions about meaning-constitution in regulative discourses. These are seen to delimitate ways of adequately relating to an issue and oneself while, at the same time, triggering subversion. They regulate what can be said because they have become sedimented in self-descriptions and textual practices of a specialised social realm (order of discourse), in ensembles of physical infrastructure, programmes, teachings and so on that have been ­instituted to a specific end and are also inscribed in bodily conduct (dispositif ), or in programmes, knowledge-generating ­ techniques  In addition, it did away not only with economic determinism (as Althusser already did), but also the idea of an ideological superstructure as determining subjects’ relating to the world, thereby challenging orthodox Marxist assumptions in more fundamental ways. 4

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and subjectivities that enable authorities to govern in specific ways (governmentality). Foucault’s methods of critical reading aim to expound such sedimentation in its contradictions and ruptures, be that through an analysis of statements in extended archives of texts that deconstructs binary oppositions (discourse archaeology) or by studying how ensembles of valid knowledge have been reconfigured in the long run (genealogy). Importantly, these methods were not meant to reveal some stringent logic or system; but to  expound discursive construction as a quasi-­material, productive and contradictory process at the very surface of being, implied in practices of communication, but also in bodily comportment or physical-technological design (Kerchner, 2006b). This perspective casts an unusual view on politics, and on government, more particularly. It dispenses with the juridicopolitical conception of power and politics, which sees power as situated in and regulated by legalising institutions, and draws attention to knowledge-generating practices (e.g. statistical measures of risk and population management) and self-­management techniques through which some approaches to governing are enabled rather than others and through which political authority is produced (Lemke, 2012). The other prominent poststructuralist theory of discursive construction that offers a reconceptualisation of politics is that of ‘hegemonic articulation’ that Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau developed from Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and the poststructuralist semiology described above (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001/1985). Drawing on the example of the rise and decline of socialism in Europe, the authors showed how movements countering a hegemonic constellation may form and dissolve as a result of ‘hegemonic articulation’. Hegemonic articulations are semiotic operations implied in activist and cultural-intellectual activity that seek to establish a closure of meaning and partially and temporarily succeed in doing so, for example by establishing, in a passage through negativity vis-à-vis a common threat, equivalences between groups and demands, or by linking up to and partially fixing the meaning of polyvalent and widely known ideographs (‘empty signifiers’ in their understanding). The theorem of hegemonic articulation was initially designed as a critical theory that pointed out possibilities of overall change and leftist

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realignment in a neoliberal age in which class structures faded. But it also inspired Mouffe’s theory of agonistic politics and Laclau’s discourse theory of populism, while followers sought to articulate it with economic, social and logics of a conjuncture (Glynos & Howarth, 2007) and aspects of political analysis (Howarth, Norval, & Stavrakakis, 2000), or translated it into a more thorough semiological method for a critical reading specific to hegemony studies (Martilla, 2016; Nonhoff, 2006).

Implications of a Full Linguistic Turn From today’s perspective, controversies about the linguistic turn in social studies can be considered obsolete as intellectual traditions have blended to a  considerable degree (Angermüller, Maingueneau, & Wodak, 2014a, p. 29). However, the recapitulation above illustrates that, first, the linguistic turn yielded a range of distinct epistemological universes that continue to provide alternative inspirations for discourse research today. While they share an ontological standpoint—the conditioning and constitution of cognition and social relations through communication and signification— they differ in their specific ‘discourse epistemologies’. Each of these offers a distinct theory of meaning-constitution and associates with it a specific notion of discourse, an apparatus of more specific terms and concepts, usually adopted from speech act theory, linguistic and literary theory or poststructuralist semiology, and a practice of critical reading which suggests how to reflexively put this epistemology to work in the analysis of textual artefacts. None of these discourse epistemologies is just an ontological (discourse matters), macro-theoretical (social relations are driven by discourse in such and such ways) or meta-theoretical (realist or moderate constructionist vs radical constructionist) statement. This is important to note, given that discourse studies in political science have largely reduced the linguistic turn to an ontological, meta-theoretical or macro-theoretical claim. A second conclusion from the above recapitulation is that all discourse epistemologies keep their distance from representational philosophies of mind and endorse a postfoundational idea of how cognition works. They suggest that cognition and intersubjective meaning-making is mediated by traditions of interpretation, performative configurations of discourse

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or context-dependent patterns of language use, and do not just follow from individuals’ internalised representations of experiences, ideas or external objects. For the same reason, the idea is rejected that the researcher can position herself or himself outside of these traditions and is able, by way of a ‘divinatory’ method, to straightforwardly discern meaning from linguistic-discursive artefacts. Instead, another research practice is suggested: methods of critical reading, that is, reading procedures that not only endorse criteria of text criticism and replicability, but also apply an apparatus of categories derived from the respective discourse epistemology. Such an apparatus is meant to ensure a de- and reconstruction of the text that disrupts, instead of confirms, the researcher’s preconceived or intuitive understanding of what the text means or performs.5 The change in research practice underlines, thirdly, the distance discourse approaches keep from certain criteria of scientificity endorsed by many in the social sciences, such as nomothetic-deductive explanation, which assumes that a  scientific explanation has to reveal a general law following a procedure of logical deduction, and positivist-empiricist research designs, which presuppose that authoritative scientific knowledge about such a general law can only be derived from logical and mathematic treatment of reports of sensory experience or evidence which has been generated in an experimental setting (Benton & Craib, 2001). In the social sciences, these assumptions have been realised in research designs that mimic an experimental setting and test hypotheses about a general law alongside variables and their quantified properties by applying a standard set of methods according to criteria of representativeness and reliability. Discourse researchers that take the full linguistic turn consider such a conception of scientificity as one tradition of interpretation among many in which social researchers are implicated, however, one purporting to a model of scientificity that is particularly problematic when endorsing a postrepresentational and postfoundational philosophy of knowledge. To account for and explain specific instances of discursive construction, they tend to use dialectical models of explanation instead,  Where analysis rests on material generated from interviews, focus groups or participant observations, discourse researchers seek to additionally involve the informants in the reflection of the researcher’s insights so as to ensure that the research accounts for their criticisms, not just for that of peers in academia. 5

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and to apply abductive or retroductive inference-making. For an advanced generation of discourse research on European integration, it will be important to acknowledge this research-philosophical implication of the linguistic turn. In the following section, I will show how Critical Discourse Analysis can be understood in this spirit and used for the study presented in the book.

2.3 C  ritical Discourse Analysis: The Epistemological Entry Point Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the discourse epistemology chosen as an entry point to conceptual and empirical exploration in this book, conceives of discourse as context-dependent language use. The larger discursive unit of text, in its multimodal dimensions, is regarded as the basic unit of communication and analysis. Through it, CDA looks at more or less overt relations of power in complex social phenomena, such as racism, collective identity, gender, media or neoliberalism (Wodak, 2002). The way CDA scholars pursue this shared agenda varies strongly, though, and so do the referred-to theoretical and methodological traditions. They include classic rhetoric, with its focus on the persuasiveness and effectiveness of communication, and lines of thought from constructionist sociology, literary theory and interpretive social research. But major inspiration comes from linguistic strands of research, above all text linguistics, that is, the study of texts in their form, structure and communicative setting; sociolinguistics with its interest in the impact of the social setting on language use (class, gender, region, occupation etc.); systemic-functional linguistics with its stress on socially constitutive functions of language; cognitive linguistics and linguistic pragmatics, which look into presupposed and implied meanings and the interactional setting of communication. In this section, I will recapitulate the trajectory and main characteristics of CDA that distinguish its discourse epistemology before outlining how this approach will inform the study conducted in this book. CDA emerged in the 1980s from several local hubs (Wodak, 2002, for an overview). Among them was a group of linguists at the University of

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East Anglia in Norwich (later also the Universities of Cardiff and Sidney), including Rodger Fowler, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, who established the label ‘critical linguistics’ and were later joined by Norman Fairclough in Lancaster. This group used Michael Halliday’s systemic-­ functional linguistics as a primary source, developing from that common ground distinct individual approaches.6 Another hub emerged in Duisburg, where, on the initiative of students of German language studying with Siegfried Jäger, critical studies into right-wing and Nazi publications were conducted. These paved the way for the launch of the ‘Duisburg institute of social and linguistic studies’ (DISS), which, still, explores racist, xenophobic and gendered language use with a view to application in civic education. In Vienna, Ruth Wodak’s chair in applied linguistics became a nucleus for research in language and politics, where political speeches, electoral pamphlets and talk shows were assessed with the intention of establishing an “interdisciplinary, textlinguistic, contextualising and historically informed analysis of ideological language use (…) and [to] work out methodologies that make such language use more transparent” (Menz & Wodak 1990, p. 8, author’s translation). This work was furthered at the centre for discourse politics and identity (DPI) and later at Lancaster University, in several collaborative research projects on memory politics, racism, national and European identity and institutional communication. It was systematised in the so-called Discourse-­ Historical Approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009). The fact that most of these scholars came together in a research programme can be partially credited to Teun van Dijk. Having himself journeyed from structural to pragmatic text linguistics and on to his own socio-cognitive approach in CDA, van Dijk published on the programmatic of CDA early on (van Dijk, 1993) and gathered the community in edited volumes (van Dijk, 1997b). The label ‘CDA’ was then gradually acquired by a loose and expanding international network that met up regularly from the 1990s onwards. Since then, CDA has been consolidated as a research programme, as a couple of disciplinary debates, journals and textbooks testify. Rather than  For scholars endorsing systemic-functional linguistics, texts are socially ‘active’ in that they simultaneously represent reality (ideational function), construct social relations (interpersonal function) and provide textual coherence (textual function) (Halliday, 1978; Martin, 1985, 1992). 6

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repeating the definitions laid out in these  school-building publications, however, this section will highlight the distinct discourse epistemology of CDA. Without such situating and elucidating of its (meta-) theoretical references, I suppose, CDA would remain relatively meaningless to political research and be easily ‘dwarfed’ and stereotyped into a descriptive method that is garmented with some critical attitude. The depiction below  of CDA summarises several years of work with CDA texts. But it remains selective, in that it emphasises those works that helped me to mine the potential of CDA for political research and that revealed themselves to me during research stays at Lancaster University, where CDA used to be moulded by Ruth Wodak and Norman Fairclough.

The Discourse Epistemology of CDA To start with, CDA has firm roots in the pragmatic turn in linguistics. The pragmatic turn in linguistics marked “a clear swing from abstract and rigid dogmas of transformational generative grammar, which ruled out all aspects of ‘extralinguistic reality’, to the more practical, open and flexible approach which viewed language as an action in relation to the world around and especially to the situation concerned” (Snell-Hornby, 2010, p. 366). While ordinary language philosophy was the primary reference point of this scientific revolution, advocates soon moved beyond its narrow application in linguistic pragmatics and considered the communicative settings and social situatedness of linguistic interaction, too: Describing language pragmatically thus means going beyond the description of language as an autonomous, type-restricted principle and taking into account extra-linguistic phenomena and conditions emanating from the context and concrete situation of language use. Turning contextual and related conditions into prototypical conditions (and thus theorizing them) constitutes the pragmatic surplus. (Bublitz & Norrick, 2011, p. 4)

CDA scholars endorse the pragmatic turn in this wider understanding. They locate the moment of discursive construction in actual linguistic interaction between interlocutors (bodily or imagined): in language use. According to them, intersubjective meaning emerges from the cor-

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respondence between such interaction and the specific situational, intertextual, social-institutional and historical-political context in which it is placed (Wodak & Meyer, 2009). Explicit reference to the pragmatic turn might be scarce in CDA works (see, however, N. Fairclough, 1992, p.  68). But especially, the early writings show that  the CDA founders actively participated in pushing the insights of sociolinguistics and text linguistics towards an overall pragmatic conception of language. Van Dijk, for instance, moved from a generative-grammatical to a pragmatic reading of ‘macrostructures’ in texts when seeking to account for how text coherence is produced in implicit retakes or thematic progressions (Feilke, 2000, p. 69). In their studies on doctor-patient communication, Wodak and her colleagues advocated a ‘modern sociolinguistics’ that accounted for the entanglement of interlocutors in institutionalised power relations. By unravelling such power relations in distorted communication, they sought to dissolve misunderstandings between doctors and patients, thus moving from a classic sociolinguistic study towards a more comprehensive assessment of the  roles taken in institutionalised communication (Wodak, Menz, & Lalouschek, 1989). The latter example shows that CDA scholars were also true to another line introduced by the new linguistics of the 1970s. Then, the objective to reintroduce the social ontology of language into linguistics was not only goaded by the premise that scientific knowledge and cognition is socially mediated and needs to be thought of  in relation to its practical and social relevance. It was also linked to the aspiration to overcome inequality and widen participation in social-communicative processes (Feilke, 2000, p. 64). The emancipatory agenda pursued by CDA and the self-labelling as ‘critical’ is, indeed, inspired by this impetus of the early variants of socially aware linguistics (see below on critique). The particular heritage of the pragmatic turn in linguistics sets CDA apart from poststructuralist approaches to discourse that otherwise, just like CDA, reject the system-imaginary of language, stress the performativity of parole and draw on assumptions of polyphony and i­ ntertextuality. The dissonance with poststructuralist approaches springs from this specific epistemological tradition, I hold, not from ontology, even if this is sometimes suggested by CDA scholars, who maintain that poststructuralist discourse analysis denies the importance and ontological pertinence

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of an extralinguistic reality and enhances a relativist and voluntarist view of the world (e.g. in N. Fairclough, 2005).7 A more comprehensive account of poststructuralism (see Sect. 2.2) would probably dissolve this view. In fact, just like most of the discourse approaches introduced in the previous section, CDA subscribes to a moderate constructionist ontology and postfoundational philosophy of mind. But it is based on a distinct theory of discursive construction, or assumptions about how meaning is constituted, which is at odds with poststructuralist discourse theories. To an ideal-type CDA scholar, who believes that meaning is constituted in context-dependent linguistic interaction, it  is hugely implausible to imagine that meaning might form in self-referential plays of signifiers; and any method of reading remotely invoking abstract semiology appears to her or him as grossly inadequate to capture meaningconstitution in language use (but see combinations with notions of discourse formation in the book’s analytical strategy in Sect. 2.4). In short, the particularity of CDA derives, in the first place, from an epistemology and theory of meaning-constitution that is grounded in the pragmatic turn in linguistics. There are, however, some points that push CDA beyond its roots and also distinguish it from other forms of ‘discourse linguistics’, that is, from forms of linguistic research into social and cultural meanings that have been established since the 1990s. These distinct characteristics bring CDA close to interpretive social studies and often prompt linguists to distance themselves from CDA.

Distinct Characteristics of CDA A first characteristic of CDA is the objective to account for the social ontology of language not only by assessing social implications of spoken and written language. In addition, it seeks to describe and theorise the social processes and structures which give rise to the production of a text  Indeed, the stress that CDA puts on the distinction between ‘discursive’ and ‘non-discursive’ practices seems to result not from a fundamentally different ontological position, but from a narrower understanding of discourse as an assembly of linguistic and multimodal artefacts. In a (post)structuralist understanding, discourse encompasses the semiosis of social relations more ­generally, including non-linguistic aspects of signification. 7

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and within which individuals or groups, as social-historical subjects, create meanings in their interaction with texts (Fairclough & Kress, 1993, p. 2ff, quoted in Wodak, 2002). In that endeavour, the founders of CDA have consistently linked up to social studies and subscribed to different research traditions therein (Wodak & Meyer, 2009, for an overview). They eclectically appropriated concepts from sociology and social theory, including grand theories of discourse. The early CDA texts stand out in this endeavour. For instance, in his first book on discourse and social change, Norman Fairclough set out to bring together “linguistically-­ oriented discourse analysis and social and political thought”, above all Foucauldian discourse analysis (N. Fairclough, 1992, p. 62). He arrived at a three-dimensional analysis, which looked at social functions of texts from the view of systemic-functional linguistics (analysis of texts) and situated these with discursive conventions of a social realm (analysis of discursive practice) and with social relations that constitute that realm more generally (analysis of social practice). Fairclough later spelt out this combination in more detail (N. Fairclough, 2004) and explored, together with Lilie Chouliaraki, what potential selected theorems of social theory offer to CDA (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999). Siegfried Jäger, coming from a sociolinguistic background, combined Leontiev’s action theory and Foucauldian discourse archaeology, along with Jürgen Link’s structuralist analysis of collective symbols, and arrived at a programme of text analysis informed by Foucauldian terms, tailored for the investigation of mediatised political discourse (Jäger, 1999). Ruth Wodak early on integrated her pragmatic-linguistic approach with aspects of the Frankfurt School. She set up interdisciplinary research projects that followed the vision of an integrated critical social theory, used Habermas’ discourse ethics, and linked CDA to methods of interpretive research (Wodak & Krzyżanowski, 2008). The second characteristic of CDA is the conception of discourse as a power-inherent social practice. The quote below from an introduction to CDA co-authored by Fairclough and Wodak has become a core reference in this regard: CDA sees discourse—language use in speech and writing—as a form of ‘social practice’. Describing discourse as social practice implies a dialectical

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relationship between a particular discursive event and the situation(s), institution(s) and social structure(s) which frame it: the discursive event is shaped by them, but it also shapes them. That is, discourse is socially constitutive as well as socially conditioned—it constitutes situations, objects of knowledge, and the social identities of and relationships between people and groups of people. It is constitutive both in the sense that it helps to sustain and reproduce the social status quo, and in the sense that it contributes to transforming it. (N. Fairclough & Wodak, 1997, p. 258)

The notion of practice developed here is derived from a pragmatic understanding of language and a belief in the social ontology of language, not from sociological practice theory, even if links can be established to the latter (see Chap. 4). Let me explicate this point in a brief paraphrasis of the quote given above. Conceiving of discourse as ‘practice’ implies understanding discourse both as an  ‘event’ of action, for example an actual utterance or move in speech or writing, and as a conventionalised action repertoire, which links up to institution complexes, but is realised only in the act of speaking or writing. While the aspect of an event or speech act refers to discourse as agency and the moment of constructing a particular topic or problem, the aspect of a conventionalised action repertoire refers to discourse as structure and sedimented ways of talking about a subject. In the notion of discourse as a social practice, the familiar opposition between ‘discourse’ and ‘practice’ thus collapses (as suggested by the pragmatic conception of language) and so does that between ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ (as suggested in constructionist conceptions of social reality). Attention moves, instead, to the systematic involvement of a particular instance of speech and writing in the broader social setting, while the prior focus is on the social implications that the instance of speech or writing thereby reveals. Language use forms part of a broader social practice and as such becomes socially relevant, as ‘discourse practice’. Both in the dimension of discourse agency and in that of discourse structure, discourse practices are seen to be socially efficacious: they are not only part of social action, for example of journalistic reporting, but also ‘entextualise’ it in specific ways, for example in the text genre of a quote story. They simultaneously reflexivise this action, for example by putting the act of reporting in relation to notions of journalism and its

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role in late modern societies, thereby opening up processes of signification which extend the particular action and may stabilise or alter existing social practice (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999, p. 28; van Leeuwen, 1993, p.  193). The co-constitution of an  utterance and its context is, however, not one  of linear causality or determinism, but mediated through conventionalised practice complexes (‘orders of discourse’, in Foucauldian terms) and patterns of cognition (Wodak & Meyer, 2009, pp. 19–21). Macro- and micro-linguistic forms unfold performativity in a complex, rather than linear way: “we can attribute causal effects to linguistic forms, but only through a careful account of meaning and context” (N. Fairclough, 2004, p. 13). CDA’s conception of politics relies on this understanding of discourse as practice: politics is conceived of as a specialised social practice co-­ constituted through language use with its social implications and reflexivising potential. Similar to politolinguistics, CDA scholars acknowledge that there is a typical lexicon of political language, a specific rhetoric and set of recurrent speech acts (van Dijk, 1997a), they also stress practical reasoning as a distinguishing trait (I.  Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012). However, the distinct CDA perspective on politics unfolds once these linguistic-discursive features are investigated with regard to how they contribute to the constitution and transformation of politics as a social practice (van Dijk, 1997a). Politics then appears as constituted by communicative events that relate to certain typical activities (e.g. a meeting of the Council configuration, a parliamentary session, a press conference) (van Dijk, 1997a). These communicative events oscillate between backstage coordinative and front-stage representative politics and are enacted in specific text genres (Wodak, 2009). They include: law-making as enacted in laws and guidelines; an collective political actor’s internal will formation laid down in party or government programmes; ­politicians’ selfrepresentation performed in press conferences, talk shows or TV soaps; political marketing and propaganda as proliferated in campaigns; and administrative-executive action as embodied in decisions and procurements (de Cillia & Wodak, 2005). The research interest driving a CDA of political discourse concentrates on how these (official) political artefacts mediate and recontextualise political struggles (for the limits of this conception, see Sect. 2.4).

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The third characteristic, which is distinct CDA, is the explicit critical stance CDA takes towards inequality, social exclusion and repression that is  apparent in discrimination, co-optation or colonisation. In the first place, this critical stance simply asserts a normative standpoint, “in particular views of the ‘good society’ and of human well-being and flourishing, on the basis of which it [CDA, A.K.] evaluates existing societies and possible ways of changing them” (N. Fairclough, 2010, p. 7). Explicating such an axiological premise of research forms part of professional reflexivity in interpretive research (Creswell, 2007, p. 15f ). The label ‘critical’ thus signals the intention to make research interests and values explicit in a self-confident way, in an academic environment, where the researcher’s normative involvement is still bracketed in the name of scientific objectivity and where issue is taken with CDA’s ‘critical bias’ based on that ground (e.g. in Spitzmüller & Warnke, 2011). The other meaning of ‘critical’ relates to CDA’s emancipatory impetus. It is drawn from the Western tradition of critique, which travelled from the text criticism of biblical exegesis to the  Enlightenment and Kant’s critique of reason, through to Marx’ critique of political economy and the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School (Wodak & Chilton, 2005). Following this tradition, CDA aims to “produce and convey critical knowledge that enables human beings to emancipate themselves from forms of domination through self-reflection” (Wodak & Meyer, 2009, p. 7). More specifically, CDA seeks to yield knowledge on the role language use plays in reproducing and overcoming domination: “the defining features of CDA are its concern with power as a central condition in social life, and its efforts to develop a theory of language [use, A.K.] that incorporates this as a major premise” (Wodak & Meyer, 2009, p. 10). In line with this objective, CDA scholars developed a practice of critique: a method of critical reading that seeks to go beyond a mere act of negative revealing and unearth, in the process of analysis, knowledge relevant for the investigated communities and for transformative action. Reisigl and Wodak, for instance, suggest focusing on inconsistencies and (self-) contradictions in language use that signal power struggles (immanent critique) and on manipulations that appear problematic from a normative point of view (socio-diagnostic critique) so as to eventually point out the unrealised potential of emancipation and widened social-political

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participation (prospective critique) (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001, pp. 32–34). Fairclough maintains that such a prospective critique starts from a focus on language use and extends to a critique of society as a whole, by relating observed patterns of language use, in an effort to explain their occurrence, to other elements of social reality (explanatory critique). He suggests a method of critical reading that moves “from normative critique of discourse (…), focused upon its contradictions, via explanatory critique of aspects of the existing reality constituted as dialectical relations between these features of discourses and other social elements, towards transformative action (…) to change [or advocate change to] the existing reality” (N. Fairclough, 2014). So far, three theoretical sources have been employed for such a critical reading, with the ethics of alterity still awaiting adoption in CDA (for this, see Moebius, 2004). One source is a reformed version of ideology critique, which draws on Terry Eagleton’s reformulation of ideology (Eagleton, 1991) or Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1991). With Eagleton and Bourdieu, the complicit nature of conventionalised assumptions of the world is highlighted, which  both dominant and marginalised social groups use wittingly–unwittingly to assert themselves in power relations. Critique, then, pertains to the careful de- and reconstruction of conventionalised forms of language use that signal or perform presupposed assumptions of the world. Another source of critique is Habermas’ discourse ethics, and the ideal speech situation more specifically, employed as a normative template for a pragma-­dialectic analysis of argumentation (Forchtner & Tominc, 2012). Using it as a backdrop, supposedly compelling reasoning in right-wing populism that conjures up a scenario of overall threat is then not only exposed as fallacious, but as a method of scandalisation that strategically undermines rational argumentation (Wodak, 2015). Finally, Bhaktar’s critical realism can be employed as a source to direct a sort of dialectical reasoning, which juxtaposes discriminatory or ideologically mainstreamed discourse to processes of structuration, thereby revealing how that discourse is implicated in more general relations of social and political power (N. Fairclough, 2014). The three characteristics of CDA—the conceptual integration of the broader social setting in the analysis of language use, the notion of dis-

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course as social practice, and the particular endorsement of emancipatory critique—have informed the middle-range concepts and analytical categories through which CDA scholars look at multimodal texts and the context of text production and reception (for an overview, see Wodak & Meyer, 2009, pp. 28–31). I will outline four strands of conceptualisation that I found run through the individual approaches to CDA. The  first  relates to the construction and hierarchisation of social subjects and relations. It is grasped, for example, in van Leeuwen’s social actor analysis, which looks into the grammatical-lexical means by which mentioned persons or groups are fore- and backgrounded and endowed with or denied agency (van Leeuwen, 1996), in Fairclough’s systemic-­ functional category of interpersonal functions of texts enacted in similar grammatical-lexical means, but also personal deixis and style (N. Fairclough, 1995, p. 64f ), or in the category of ‘strategies of representation’, co-developed by Wodak and Reisigl. Strategies of representation are selection procedures that construct groups,  by  naming them, predicating (characterising, evaluating) and referencing them (e.g. through deictic means and part-whole tropes) in a specific way relatively consistently across texts (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001; van Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999). Secondly, CDA scholars have developed categories that grasp how claims to interpretive authority over a specific subject are persuasively constructed and potentially drive out alternative interpretations. To this end, they look at informal argumentation in  either a proceduralschematic and pragma-dialectic view (I. Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012) or by focusing on conventionalised content- and context-specific conclusion rules, or ‘topoi’ (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001); they also investigate other means of enhancement that rely on conventionalised argumentative figures (‘strategies of argumentation’) or more implicit linguistic means of persuasive speech (see Sect. 3.1 for an elaboration).8 Thirdly, thematic mainstreaming and thematic proliferation is scrutinised, usually

 A CDA category, which sits in between the construction of interpersonal relations and the construction of interpretive authority, relates to the author(s) own self-situation, for example the signalling of belonging and positioning through stylistic means (N.  Fairclough, 1995) or through strategies of perspectivation and mitigation (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001). 8

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with a view to how strands of semantic-propositional content intersect and translate across different realms of social practice. Van Dijk’s category of the ‘topic’ or ‘macro-proposition’ captures this dimension at the textual level. It denotes the summarising idea that gives a sequence of sentences semantic coherence (van Dijk, 1984, p. 56). In the DiscourseHistorical Approach, a ‘macro-topic’ signifies the thematic-propositional prism in which various texts and utterances are bundled, and to which adjacent topics align (Wodak, 2001). Somewhat similar are Jäger’s ‘discourse strands’ modelled on Foucault’s enonciations (Jäger, 1999) and Fairclough’s ‘discourses’, that is, construals of the physical, social or mental world that are brought about, among other things, through lexical and semantic features of texts (N. Fairclough, 1995). Fourthly, the construction of accepted ways of expression, of producing and comprehending texts, is studied in ‘genres’, that is, in the specific formatting and structure of text types and the voice, style and modality that these types of text promote. They are seen to enact a specialised activity that links up to professions, organisations and institution complexes (N. Fairclough, 1995, p. 13f ). These shared lines of investigation are, however, rather differently ‘packaged’ depending on the primary theoretical tradition chosen (pragmatic vs cognitive vs systemic-functional linguistics) and the primary focus of research. The Discourse-Historical Approach, for instance, emphasises the concept of discourse strategies, along with topics and genres. Borrowing from pragmatically turned socio- and cognitive linguistics, discourse strategies are here understood as a textual selection procedure that follows a specific communicative-pragmatic purpose (see also Sect. 3.1). Through it, various forms of discourse agency have been looked at, whether these relate to the construction of groups, arguments, author’s positioning or the professional-institutional sphere in which the text is produced. At a more abstract level of interpretation, insights into discourse strategies are used to ascertain what macro-strategies of identity-­ ­ building (and identity politics) might be at work, that is, whether and how a group’s political self- and other-representation has been perpetuated, destroyed or rebuilt over a certain period of time in a specified collection of artefacts from various fields of public-political com-

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munication (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001). Applying this programme to the fields of racism, xenophobia and right-wing populism, national and European identities, language and history politics, Wodak and coauthors link up to  conduct research on the construction of difference and the ‘Othering’ of social groups. From a rather different perspective, which is concerned with neoliberal discourse and the critique of capitalism more generally, Fairclough looks into similar moves at linguistic and textual levels, that is, to establish how macro-strategies of depoliticisation and politicisation are semiotically realised (N. Fairclough, 2009). The different packaging also applies to the conceptualisation of contexts in CDA, that is, how the context of expression and reception that is cued in by the texts  is to be accounted for and, together with them, constitutes intersubjective meaning. Scholars have developed various text-context models through which to de- and reconstruct this co-constitution. They focus on the entextualisation of situation and action (van Leeuwen, 2009), mental and context models by which speakers and listeners adapt to the socially appropriate (van Dijk, 2009), the contextual dimensions of texts (co-text, intertext) and interaction (situative, socio-institutional, political-historic) (Wodak, 2002) or levels of abstraction of discursively constituted social organisation (textual, discursive, social practice) (Fairclough, 1992).

2.4 A  nalytical Strategy: The Book’s Interdisciplinary Approach At various points, CDA scholars stress that CDA, because it systematically analyses the key role language plays in political struggles, has a lot to offer to political science (for an overview, see Dunmire, 2012). Indeed, CDA potentially balances out the typical blind spot of discourse research in political science that also applies in European integration studies: the widespread neglect of the textural materiality of discourses, a neglect that results from the conventional focus on the propositional content of political debates and ideas, political ideologies and practical reasoning (see Sect. 2.1). While content analysis only  takes into account those aspects of

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semantics or syntax that fit predefined categories abstracted from the text, CDA is attentive to the entire ‘texture’ of analysed texts, including phenomena such as text genre, modality, style, speech acts, turn-taking, rhetorical figures, markers and triggers for presuppositions or allusion and so on (for an overview, see Wodak, 2008, pp. 7–10). Unlike classic content analysis, which does not differentiate between forms of text and communication, linguistic CDA treats each text differently according to its structure and function. (Nowak et al., 1990, p. 32)

Moreover, the concepts and categories which CDA scholars developed in the middle range of abstraction, such as discourse strategies or genre, provide a bridging vocabulary that makes selected aspects of linguistic micrology accessible to social research. However, the more far-reaching potential which CDA offers for political enquiry and for which it is chosen as a point of departure in this book lies in CDA’s discourse epistemology. First, the concept of discourse as practice, constituted in routined language use, and of meaning-­constitution as taking place in the correspondence between text (utterance) and context (of expression and comprehension), promise to capture the implicit discursive constitution of political agency and structure that both the mainstream utilitarian conception of language (as a means for transmitting ideas and intentions) and poststructuralist notions of signification ignore. Hence, adopting CDA’s theory of meaning-constitution, I will be able to see and comprehend emerging practices of the EU’s legitimation as they take shape in specific debates on EU institutional reform. Secondly, the assumption about the co-constitution of text and context and the theorem of recontextualisation facilitate a discourse-theoretical explanation of the phenomenon of translation that I investigate. It illuminates why discourse fragments diversify in meaning when appropriated from one context (e.g. multilateral negotiation) to other contexts (e.g. mediatised national controversies in different member states). And thirdly, the method of critical reading developed in CDA promises to unravel not only tendencies of exclusion in the investigated semiotic artefacts of Europeanised political communication, but, through them, it potentially exposes blind spots in existing research, too, helping to develop the polit-

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ical sociology of European integration towards a more reflexive research practice. That said, there are a couple of limitations in CDA that make it difficult to mine this potential of CDA for an advanced discourse study of the political. First, CDA’s analytical focus and instruments are sharp in revealing how inequality is produced through artefacts of political communication and how politics is constituted in textual-contextual interaction; but they do not necessarily “answer genuine and relevant political questions and deal with issues that are discussed in political science”, the target that van Dijk once set for CDA to be able to “sell” itself to political science (van Dijk, 1997b, p. 11f ). Inequality and emancipation might be the axiological concern of a discourse researcher in political science and the detailed study of (everyday) language use in political contexts a crucial part of investigation. But her analytical interest usually centres on discursive rationalities of political agency and structure, that is, why and how a political movement, a specific policy, governmentality or polity became paramount or sidelined, due to what constitutive and performative role that discourse practices played in bringing these political phenomena about. While there is abundant literature on aspects of political discourse in CDA and thorough conceptual work on categories of textual analysis, there is little discourse-theoretical consideration of how these genuine questions of political science are to be examined through a CDA lens. Secondly, CDA’s productive conceptual eclecticism often appropriates concepts and research traditions from an adjacent field of study in only superficial manner, which makes it difficult to develop a meaningful interdisciplinary dialogue. For instance, in CDA studies on ‘legitimation’, you might find references to Max Weber, Berger and Luckmann or organisational theory, but neither a grounding of the borrowed concepts nor a genealogy of CDA’s own linguistic-pragmatic understanding of legitimation (see Sects. 1.2 and 3.1, and Kutter and Nonhoff (2014) for a distinction and discussion). Finally, in matters of philosophy of science, CDA studies reveal an astonishing undecidedness. Norman Fairclough distances himself from nomothetic-deductive ­theorising, proposing dialectical reasoning instead, and Wodak and Krzyżanowski clearly situate CDA in the spectrum of interpretive social research and outline abductive-retroductive research procedures. At the same time, applications often strive for positivist-empiricist research

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standards, for example for representativity in the compilation of electronic corpora (Mautner, 2009). This section outlines how the potential of CDA’s discourse epistemology can be unearthed for an advanced discourse study of the political, while overcoming the aforementioned hurdles to interdisciplinary dialogue. More specifically, I suggest pushing CDA more towards a decidedly postpositivist research programme, by detailing an ‘analytical strategy’, which situates the research subject in axiological, research- and knowledgephilosophical terms and specifies its conceptualisation and implementation in primary research. I further propose ways of translating between political science research questions that pertain to the macro level (how is the EU’s postnational polity legitimised?) and the  meso level of social organisation (how do differently scaled and constituted realms of specialised social practice condition polity construction?), on the one hand, and the micro-level research questions of CDA, on the other (how does a concrete instance of linguistic interaction enhance a certain polity construction?). On the level of conceptualisation, I suggest juxtaposing CDA’s notion of discourse as practice to the notion of discourse as formation. By discourse formation I understand relatively stable configurations of discourse practices that constitute sedimented knowledge. I investigate such discourse formation in imaginaries and narratives of polity-­building, on the one hand, and, on the other, in meso-level formations of specialised social practice as theorised by Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu. The perspective of discourse formation provides a more abstract heuristic layer, through which insights on discourse practice can be reviewed and deconstructed as forming part of a larger constellation. Coupled in a ‘bifocal procedure’, the two perspectives on discourse inform each other (see Fig. 2.1). On the level of methods and research design, I suggest triangulating the detailed, linguistically informed method of critical reading and the  abductive procedure of CDA with a tailored computer-aided social science content analysis. While the analytical tools of CDA ensure a high level of case-, text- and context sensitivity and informs the ­definition of content-analytical categories, computer-aided content analysis allows for a comparative assessment of larger numbers of texts and generates the overview that is necessary for some sort of generalisation. It also produces insights into the distribution of specific propositional content that enables a grounded selection of a smaller set of texts, which are

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discourse practice

conceptualisation

informs

guides

informs

informs

reconstructtive analysis

instructs

instructs instructs

synoptic analysis

instructs

Fig. 2.1  Bifocal procedure. (Source: Own Elaboration)

then subjected to discourse analysis.9 Below, I will explicate the analytical strategy and the design of the primary research in more detail.

Analytical Strategy The decision to endorse a postpositivist philosophy of science usually springs from the acknowledgement of postfoundationalism, that is, from the premise shared by the discourse epistemologies presented here that human cognition is always mediated by intersubjective meaning-­ making (see Sect. 2.2). With it comes the conviction that any science and any scientist is bound to established and historically specific traditions of  Triangulation is here used not as a means to achieve a more accurate interpretation, but to enhance a more complex reading of the texts, based on the mutual information of the methods. 9

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interpretation, and that these can be disentangled only through a systematic and collective effort of reflection. Hence the scepticism towards positivist research philosophies dominant in the social sciences. In positivist research, only those insights are accepted as scientific that are based on evidence that was generated by quasi-experimental (empiricist) methods, following universal criteria of scientificity (reliability, replicability, representativity), while applying them to data sets, which have been built to be representative of the subject studied. Usually coupled with nomothetic-­ deductive reasoning, positivist research centres on theories, on the one hand, which hypothesise a law-like feature, and universal methods and methodological standards, on the other, through which to reliably test the stated hypothetical relationship  (Benton & Craib, 2001). From a postpositivist perspective, in contrast, only those insights are scientific that have been produced by reflexive methods and facilitate a complex reading of the issue investigated which extends, instead of confirms, conventional ways of interpretation (Andersen Åkerstrøm 2003). In contrast to other research-philosophical approaches that have developed in reaction to positivism in social research, postpositivist studies insist on exact and replicable methods as well as on a compilation of investigated material, which systematically and plausibly supports the research objective (Creswell, 2007). The emphasis thus moves from proving compliance with known methodological standards to proving  transparency in an abductive research procedure. Such a research procedure constantly moves back and forth between theory-building and empirical analysis and follows a problem-specific ‘analytical strategy’. An analytical strategy constructs the researcher’s perspective on the subject of investigation in an explicit way; it specifies “how the [researcher] will construct the observations of others to be the object of his or her own observations” (Andersen Åkerstrøm, 2003, p. xiii). It determines from what research-philosophical viewpoint and macro-theoretical assumptions one’s study starts and how these inform the conceptualisation of the research subject. Specific to a discourse-analytical strategy, it is additionally important to  point out what theory of discourse guides the study, which defines how one expects the social reality to be (co-)constituted

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through acts of uttering and signification, that is, one’s theory of meaning-­ constitution. Based on these general epistemological decisions, one will need to adopt middle-range theories about the discursive construction of the subject of investigation that are concrete enough to inform categories and methods of discourse analysis and abstract enough to translate insights back into the macro-theoretical framework (Kutter, 2018). The decision to take CDA and its conception of discourse as social practice as an entry point to conceptual and empirical exploration carries with it three  premises: a moderate constructionist ontology, which believes in the intersubjective construction of the cognised world (though embedded in the non-semiotic); a linguistically turned philosophy of mind, which sees language as constitutive and formative in human cognition and action; and a theory of intersubjective meaning seen as being constituted in language in use, in context-dependent linguistic interaction. The axiological stance motivating the study of EU legitimation and orienting the practice of critique is grounded in normative assumptions about good (constitutional) government in multicultural and complex societies. It borrows from the ethics of alterity (for this, see Moebius, 2004) and the political theory of (political-moral) recognition of multiplicity—multiple cultures, constitutions, constituencies and claims for political authority situated in a territory—which has been spelt out for first and second nations in Tully’s work (Tully, 1995) and in assessments of postnational political association, including that of the EU (Fossum, 2005; Wiener, Dunoff, Havercroft, & Kumm, 2019). Accordingly, the recognition of multiplicity and the consideration of the ‘alter’ (the necessarily excluded, but presupposed) of one’s self-conception may help to resolve social conflicts by restoring respect and justice between parties and building political association in complex societies. Such a conception of society may, due to its insistence on difference, actually reproduce inequality and conflict, in particular if political-cultural recognition is thought of and granted without addressing asymmetries in structural or economic power (Bohman, 2007). But it is useful as a regulative idea, through which to scrutinise arrangements, practices and discourses of recognition with regard to how they reproduce particularistic-exclusive political orders (Bartelson, 2013).

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The book’s normative endeavour is to review critically, from a discourse- and field-theoretical view, how this is (not) achieved in the context of the European Union, at a point in time when the EU’s postnational polity was an explicit subject of debate. Conceptual work starts from the notion of discourse developed in CDA. Following CDA, I conceive of discourse as a semiotic component of social practice which is constituted in actual instances of (face-to-face or imagined) linguistic interaction, through the correspondence between the characteristics of (multimodal) texts, on the one hand, and the situational-­ interactional, social-institutional and historical-intertextual context, on the other, in which these texts emerge. As text and context are always co-dependent in meaning-constitution, the meaning of utterances will change once they are relocated to a different context, or recontextualised. Moreover, as part of social practice, context-dependent utterances are inscribed in and co-constitute power-vested social relations, regardless of the individual speaker’s authentic and sincere intention, which we need to assume for any communication to take place. This does not imply that the individual is incapable of transgressing the power effects of discourse, as critiques of discourse approaches often remark. Rather, it implies that the individual draws on various pragmatic constraints and established discursive practice. The conception of discursive legitimation and discursive Euro­ peanisation provided in this book draws on this notion of discourse. Legitimation is, first of all, understood as a “meta speech act” typical of public-political discourse (van Dijk, 1997a), a specific type of discourse agency, which is revealed when looking at ‘topics’, that is, semantic macrostructures of texts, through which thematic mainstreaming and proliferation can be assessed, and ‘discourse strategies’, that is, text-spanning communicative-pragmatic plans that further the speaker’s claim and interpretive authority, thus following middle-range concepts of the Discourse-­Historical Approach (see Table 2.1, first row). Europeanisation, the translation between EU-specific and national interdiscourse that I assume to condition the EU’s legitimation, is conceived of as meaning-­ transforming recontextualisation between different contexts of expression that each qualify by a particular discourse structure. That structuring can be captured in a ‘genre’, that is, in a set of conventions of language

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Table 2.1  Categories and methods

Content analysis Practices of Construction of legitimation problems of polity-building: selection and weighing of polity topics

Practices of news production

Construction of salience: selection and weighing of constitution topics, embedding topics, repeatedly referred-to events; publication volume, in-depth coverage, placement Arrangement of debate: text genres, mutual referencing, provenance of authors

Source: Own elaboration

Discourse analysis (discourse practice) Construction of political authority: pro bono and ad populum arguments and strategies of representation constructing representatives and represented Construction of political association: argumentation warranted on polity rationales, strategies of argumentation and plausibilisation Construction of consonance: strategies of plausibilisation linking to national or partisan interdiscourse, e.g. via allusion, illustration, mythopoesis

Discourse analysis (discourse formation) Imaginaries of representation (delegation, disinterested service, unity of represented and representative) Narratives of (national, EU-) polity-building classifying and emplotting rationales of good political rule

Classification and processing of newsworthiness Management of intertextuality and interdiscursivity

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use typical of the practice context at stake. The transformation of meaning that takes place in the course of recontextualisation can be scrutinised in the selection and weighing, rearrangement and addition of meaning and text that is associated with that specialised genre, for example with practices of constructing news salience and complicity with the target audience in news journalism (see Table 2.1, second row). But this micrology of language use and the micro level of abstraction are juxtaposed, in a ‘bifocal procedure’, to sociological theories on legitimation as an aspect of macro-level political association and based on specialised practice as meso-level fields of structured symbolic interaction, theories which draw on (post)structuralist thought and the perspective of discourse as a formation of knowledge. Political legitimation is understood, from Pierre Bourdieu, as symbolically violent, but complicit, construction of relations of political power that relies on classifications of good political rule, in other words the symbolically violent construction of political authority and political association. The legitimising language use revealed with the help of CDA is reviewed with regard to the constructions of political authority and association it mobilises. It is assessed with regard to how these constructions invoke the imaginary and intertextual configuration of polity-building, for example in narratives of polity-building that put  a rationale for political rule in a temporal-causal plot  (see Chap. 3 for a full elaboration and Table 2.1, first row, third column). The insights into meaning-transforming recontextualisation gained through the perspective of genre are reviewed, on the other hand, through the lens of discourse fields. The notion of discourse fields articulates the pragmaticlinguistic notion of genre with the (post)structuralist concept of code ­following Basil Bernstein and Bourdieu’s field theory, so as to grasp the discursively constituted contexts of specialised social practice which condition the construction of political authority and association. The way national news media generate news salience, for example through publication volume, placement and attribution of specific news values, and the way they generate consonance with the target audience, mobilising national interdiscourse, for example through allusion and illustration, is thus seen to not only follow from pragmatic-­communicative exigencies of effective construction and transmission of news. Instead, it is seen as an implication of the self-referential formation of news journalism, for example of

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classifications of newsworthiness and ways of managing intertextuality, which participants apply as a means of distinction within the field (see Chap. 4 for a full elaboration and Table 2.1, second row, third column). The juxtaposition of the perspective on discourse formation to the practice-focused perspective of CDA in a bifocal procedure balances the specific blind spots of the two discourse epistemologies. The CDA perspective brings to light the ‘texture’ and context dependency of any utterance, which a formation analysis tends to ignore, therefore often falling short in grounding its ‘critical reading’ of texts. Formation analysis, in turn, provides tools for dismantling unquestioned understandings of the problem under study (such as political legitimation or the settings of news discourse) that often tacitly inform the CDA of discourse practice. The perspective of formation analysis, added as another layer of interpretation, thus increases the reflexivity of CDA. Moreover, such a combination helps to form categories and hypotheses at different levels of generalisation and to  translate between levels of abstraction. Concepts generated from bird’s-eye view of the formation of discourse allow the formulation of general expectations regarding the research problem that correspond to political scientists’ macro-level research questions. They help to generate focused, critical knowledge on the research problem that would not be achieved by a simple literature review or a purely inductive-­ seismographic analysis (see Fig. 2.1).

 esign of Primary Research: Comparison, Case Study, D Method Triangulation The coupling of linguistically informed CDA and political enquiry is also ensured by the selective integration of traditions of empirical research: a comparative design typical of political science is combined with the design of an explorative case study that embraces CDA’s abductive research procedure. Moreover, the method of critical reading developed in CDA is triangulated with qualitative content analysis, the method of textual analysis in social sciences. This combination ensures both in-­ depth, text- and context-sensitive analysis and a larger-scale comparative assessment that links up to macro-level research questions of political

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enquiry and provides the necessary overview for a grounded downsizing of the text collection to a set of articles to be scrutinised by detailed discourse analysis. As outlined in the introduction to the book, the empirical exploration of EU legitimation draws on the example of the EU constitutional debate in its early period, when the Constitutional Treaty was drafted and adopted (2002–2004). The study looks into how the constitutional agenda and polity constructions, carved out during EU multilateral negotiation, were appropriated to mediatised debate in Poland and France. The object is to establish whether and what polity constructions emerged, which accommodated EU-specific discourses of institutional-­ constitutional engineering with national polity discourse, thereby (de-) legitimising the EU in specific ways. The first step, the reconstruction of the agenda, dynamics and polity constructions in EU multilateral negotiation, draws on secondary analyses of the Constitution process and a discourse analysis of polity constructions in core documents of that process. The second step, the analysis of the recontextualisation of that agenda in mediatised debates in Poland and France, draws on a qualitative content analysis of the news coverage of the EU constitutional issue that was provided by the broadsheets Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita, Le Monde and Le Figaro between January 2002, when the Convention was set up, and July 2004, when the Constitutional Treaty was adopted. The content analysis investigates the overall sample (altogether 4265 articles) with regard to characteristics of news coverage (volume and timing of publication, intensity of coverage, text genres, placement) and, separately, major contents (constitution topics, polity topics, embedding topics, repeatedly referred-to events) pondered in the subset of evaluative articles (1863 evaluative articles). It is complemented by a discourse analysis of a set of journalistic reports and commentaries on the ­ inauguration of the Convention published in March, 2002, which ­ launched the respective editorial lines on the EU constitution and heralded continuously intensifying coverage of the EU constitution (see Chap. 6). In a third step, which establishes what polity constructions and discourse practices of legitimation emerged from the media debates, the selection and weighing of ‘polity topics’, that is, general problems of polity-­building in evaluative articles, is assessed and a Critical Discourse

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Analysis is conducted of clusters of debate arranged by Gazeta Wyborcza and Le Monde on the most controversial issues of the Draft Constitution in autumn 2003 (see Chap. 7). The newspaper articles were compiled manually from the Lexis Nexis database (for Le Monde and Le Figaro) and the newspapers’ web archives (for Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita).10 The compilation was search word-driven: newspaper articles were retrieved from the databases by means of a search strategy, which combined constitution-related search words with Boolean operators in a way that had proved to match articles on the EU constitution, but not other subjects with similar wording.11 The articles were fed into the software atlas.ti, together with core documents of the drafting period of the Constitution process, including the Laeken Declaration and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s inaugural address to the Convention (see Appendix A for samples and sources). The research conducted on the basis of this archive is designed as an explorative case study that draws on two countries as contexts, in which the subject of analysis—the EU’s discursive legitimation in national media debates—is situated. It is comparative in the sense that it “systematically utilises data from two or more nations” (Kohn, 1989, p. 20), and it uses this material “to ascertain whether similar or dissimilar processes occur in diverse nations” (Kohn, 1989, p. 24).12 However, contrary to the standard approach in comparative politics, it does not restrict exploration  I wish to thank the subscription service of Rzeczpospolita for having granted free access for the duration of a month. 11  The following tailored search strategies were developed for the different databases. Gazeta Wyborcza: “konstytucja europejska” or “konstytucja dla Europy” or “konwent” or “traktat konstytucyjny” or “Traktat ustanawiający Konstytucję dla Europy” or “europejska konstytucja”; Rzeczpospolita: konstytucj∗ europejsk∗, Konwen∗, europejsk∗ konstytucj∗, konstytucj∗ dla Europy, konstytucj∗ UE, trakta∗ konstytucyjn∗, Traktat ustanawiając∗; Le Monde and Le Figaro: constitution européenne OR traité constitutionel OR convention NOT convention européenne des droits de l’homme. 12  Kohn points to three different types of country-comparison: along with being contexts of a subject of analysis (see above), countries may also feature as object or as unit of analysis. In the former case, the focus is on understanding the specificity of a country, how (institutions in) country X compare to (institutions in) country Y; in the latter case, countries are classified along one or more dimensions (GNP, political regimes etc.) in order to understand how social institutions and processes are systematically linked to variations in national characteristics (Kohn, 1989, p. 20f ). This latter type of country-comparison is preferred in the ‘comparative method’ applied in comparative politics and sociology. 10

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to description and classification as a preliminary step for later deductive hypothesis-testing or prediction on the basis of multiple country cases.13 Instead, exploration is used as the core research strategy to achieve analytic generalisation, that is, to compare empirical insights with a previously developed theory and to adjust, expand and generalise this theory on the basis of empirical findings (Yin, 2003, p. 32f ). The exploration is based on a within-case analysis and scrutinises the dynamics of recontextualisation and polity construction for each country and media outlet separately. The outcomes of this exploration are contrasted with each other at different stages of the research, so as to establish similarities and dissimilarities that might hint at common trends of polity construction or at national and partisan differences. The drafting period of the Constitution process was selected as a case because, in this period, EU treaty revision and polity-building was rendered a subject of explicit, public debate. In contrast to the later campaigns on ratification in the member states, which were dominated by domestic political competition, debates in the drafting period were still linked by shared events of decision-making, including Convention consultations and negotiations at follow-up intergovernmental conferences. The constitutional debate in the drafting period is also telling for EU legitimation because it showed the first fissures in the liberal consensus of the 1980s and 1990s and triggered continued politicisation. Poland and France were chosen as national contexts of that debate because they stand out with their domestic and bilateral polarisation on the EU ­constitution. Their mediatised debates were also partially mutually referential—conditions that, following research on European publics, enhance a European, rather than only a nationally focused, debate on shared concerns. Hence, the Polish and French debates were likely to show a lively struggle over the EU constitution and reveal why, in that struggle, the common European template and ‘constitution speak’ diversified and on what polity constructions that fed. Moreover, while both countries have a long tradition of liberal modern constitutionalism, their experiences in nation- and state The ‘comparative method’ favours multiple-case studies where ‘nations’, ideally, figure as controlled variables and where generalisation is based on statistical (population-based) frequency. It focuses on between-case-studies, ranging from (inductive) description and generation of typologies to deductive hypothesis-testing and prediction (Landman, 2008, pp. 4–11). 13

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building and macroregional integration are diametrically opposed, which promises to bring to light, through comparison, what role nationally handed-down imaginings of representative politics and polity-building play. As a site of debate and relevant practice context, national news media in the broadsheet print segment were chosen, more specifically: the national reference papers Gazeta Wyborcza and Le Monde, which are said to align with the liberal left of the, then, pro-European centre in the Polish and French political spectrums, and Rzeczpospolita and Le Figaro, which are said to interpellate conservative audiences across the Polish and French right wings.14 The choice was made for national broadsheets because they are specialised in arranging debate among national and partisan audiences and distinguish themselves by relatively strong adherence to professional standards of news journalism. Even though they already  struggled with digitisation and the related decrease in revenue from advertising in the early 2000s, they had not yet lost agenda-setting to social media. As broadsheets, they retained—as they do today—their reputation and significance as facilitators of domestic public-political debate, including on EU politics (see also Sect. 4.4). The methods that, in combination, promised to grasp differential recontextualisation and polity construction were, on the one hand, the linguistically informed text-analytical procedures of Critical Discourse Analysis and the Discourse-Historical Approach, in particular, and (quantifying) qualitative content analysis, on the other. The first is strong on internal validity and detailed, text- and context-sensitive insights: it reveals the implications of macro-textual structures (strategies, topics, text genres), reconstructed from micro-linguistic features. The second is strong on generating overviews and categories suitable for comparison: it identifies major propositional contents in texts without indulging in the specific texture of a text. Below, I will outline how the two methods were used in the study.  This political-ideological cleavage is ‘lived’ differently in the two national contexts. The two French dailies, then, still sorted themselves into the traditional right-left opposition of French domestic politics, with Le Monde endorsing a social democrat editorial line and highlighting speakers from the left-wing coalition and Figaro readers. 14

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Qualitative content analysis is a hermeneutic procedure of text interpretation. In use, the reader attributes previously (deductively-­inductively) defined categories (‘codes’) to major propositions occurring in the analysed text, drawing on the annotator’s given or trained background knowledge and text comprehension. The categories can vary in their degree of abstraction. Applied to artefacts of news discourse, they may comprise aspects like ‘meta data’ (e.g. author, publication date, source), propositional content (e.g. a proposal for EU reform) or the author’s (assumed) schemes of interpretation. What propositions are to be related to what content category is specified in a codebook. It is meant to ensure that annotators recognise similar variants of text passages as matching predefined categories, so that they remain consistent in their annotations across the research process.15 The resulting standardised interpretations are subsequently quantified and statistically assessed with regard to the frequency, distribution and correlations of particular categories. The ‘qualitative’ component consists in the effort of comprehensive interpretation which considers the full text, rather than single words or word clusters (Mayring, 2008). It can also be, and is in this book, applied in a less prescriptive manner, which is open to categories that occur while reading the texts, following the hermeneutic procedure of Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Criticisms of this classic social science method of textual analysis, which have been raised from the beginning, remark that high standardisation comes at the cost of a valid, text-­adequate interpretation and that a theory of meaning is missing that guides the reader when associating a certain meaning to a text passage (Fühlau, 1982; Nowak et al., 1990; P. J. Stone, 1966). From the angle of the linguistically turned and postpositivist research philosophy adopted here, the assumption is particularly problematic, in that annotators can easily intuitively discern meaning from texts; that the annotators’ interpretations are streamlined without exposing and reflecting upon text comprehension and backgrounded research traditions; and that frequency or statistical significance is regarded as (sole) indication of relevance.  Content analysts endorsing an empiricist, quasi-experimental setting additionally carry out sophisticated annotation tests and subsequent reinstructions of annotators to ensure ‘intercoder-­ reliability’ (Krippendorf, 2004). 15

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Therefore, content analysis is employed as a complementary method of textual analysis that is informed by and supports the textual analysis and method of critical reading developed in CDA. The obvious advantage of content analysis, its potential to facilitate a ‘structural analysis’ (Jäger, 1999) of a larger text collection, is used in this study to generate an overview over recurring contents and highlight the similarities and dissimilarities in the overall coverage of the Constitution process provided by the four newspapers. More specifically, the content analysis establishes what aspects of the EU constitutional agenda were taken up by the newspapers and what proposals for institutional reform (‘constitution topics’) or general problems of polity-building (‘polity topics’) were pondered, with what differences in emphasis and associated contents, be that topics mentioned in relation with the EU constitution (‘embedding topics’) or repeatedly referred-to events, such as the ‘Letter of the Eight’ that proclaimed most accession states’ support for the Iraq War of the Bush administration. Along with this ‘media content’, as communication scholars call it, aspects of news production are analysed on the basis of ‘meta data’ of journalistic publications, such as information about the author, the date of publication, section, text genre, inclusion of ‘EU constitution speak’ and mutual referencing. The comparative assessment of this meta data, when related to insights into  media content, helps to establish how journalistic practice differed and with what implications for the debate on the EU constitution (see Table 2.1, first column). The aforementioned shortcomings of content analysis are handled in this study, first, by restricted application: content analysis is only applied to phenomena, such as topics and meta data, that do not require elaborate hermeneutic interpretation and can be relatively unambiguously annotated. Helped by the semi-automated annotation function, the query tool and the co-occurrence analyser of atlas.ti, text passages were annotated with corresponding information and the matches subsequently quantified and assessed in terms of distributional statistics and regular co-occurrence. Where possible, annotation was run semi-automatedly, by mining character strings that unequivocally related to a specific content category. For instance, the character string ‘entretien’ or ‘rozmowa

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przeprowadzi∗’, was used to identify the text genre ‘interview’.16 Other annotation decisions were more complicated and required careful reading along the lines of CDA, such as the decision as to whether a text qualified by description and narration (as news genres do) or by evaluation and argumentation (as evaluative genres do) or whether the constitution topic Vote Weighting (of votes in the European Council) was indeed the main semantic macro-structure of an article. The shortcomings of content analysis were, secondly, balanced by an abductive research procedure, which moved back and forth between texts and conceptual work when building content categories and which trusted on criteria of Grounded Theory, such as groundedness (frequent annotation) and density (frequent co-occurrence with other annotated categories) to maintain or reframe a content category. Thirdly, I repeatedly subjected my annotation decisions to cross-lingual contrasting: codes, which I initially had assigned only to Polish or only to French texts because they were bound to nationally linguistically specific wording or journalistic practice, were reviewed with regard to how they might also matter in the other national-linguistic context. For instance, while Polish speakers related to each other and drew on previously made statements when discussing the EU constitution, French speakers did so only rarely. Consequently, I had to abandon pinning clusters of debate down to mutually referential argumentation and find another way of delineating clusters of debate, which applied to both national contexts. All the coding decisions were discussed with French and Polish native speakers, drawing on examples of texts. This avoided flaws in interpretation ­resulting from non-native text comprehension and added an intersubjective form of balancing to the procedural balancing of my interpretations that I had achieved through the aforementioned abductive-contrastive coding logic.17 Based on a descriptive-statistical assessment of the annotated content categories, further rounds of content analysis were implemented and the  Semi-automated coding in atlas.ti is based on a search function. It searches given words combined in Boolean operators, identifies text passages entailing the search words and annotates them depending on the reader’s confirming/rejecting decision. 17  At this point, I wish to express my special thanks to Anaïs Bordes and Ewelina Sokołowksa, who gave invaluable support in our discussions of selected coding decisions. 16

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overall text collection downsized to smaller sets of articles that were to be discourse-analysed. For instance, most meta data were assessed for the entire text collection to gain a fair picture of overall coverage practices. However, the annotation and analysis of authorship and of the topics of the EU constitutional debate were limited to evaluative text genres, because I was primarily interested in ‘media debate’, that is, in publications which commented on and evaluated the Constitution process, and in establishing who was given voice by the respective newspaper in these media debates. The smaller set of journalistic reports and commentaries on the inauguration of the Convention, whose discourse analysis was supposed to reveal how journalists recruited the EU constitutional issue to national and audience-specific interdiscourse, was selected because these articles launched the individual newspapers’ editorial line on the Constitution process and formed part of a first peak of coverage of the EU constitution. The set of non-journalistic commentaries on the Draft Constitution was selected because the assessment of content categories had shown that these contained the most salient and dense topics and formulae of ‘constitution speak’ and because they formed part of clusters of debate, that is, series of interrelated commentary which come closest to ‘debate’ as an exchange of arguments (see Appendix A for samples and sources). This selection of texts was subjected to the method of textual analysis and critical reading established by CDA. It is informed by (new) linguistic theories and focuses on micro-linguistic forms, such as  aspects of grammar and syntax that ensure the  cohesion and coherence of texts, tropes or phrases that cue in the pragmatic-cognitive context. However, the focus is on how these linguistic forms are  enacted, excluding or emphasising particular aspects of meaning and, thus, potentially reveal social effects (see also Sect. 2.3). They are re- and deconstructed from the text by shifting the focus from one linguistic-discursive phenomenon to the other until a full understanding of meaning-constitution in a single text is reached (see Chap. 3 for a demonstration of this method of critical reading). The insights are then fixed in notes that are later used to form an overall narrative of the analysed texts. What excluded or highlighted meanings are investigated entirely depends on the individual research project and the analytical categories built along these lines.

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In this study, the discourse analysis is instructed by the theorising on discursive legitimation and Europeanisation, as specified in the analytical strategy above (see also Chaps. 3 and 4). The discourse analysis of clusters of debate focused on structures of argumentation (claim, grounds, warrant), informal argumentation (e.g. the fallacy pro bono publico), as well as discourse strategies of representation, argumentation and plausibilisation, which further a text’s communicative-pragmatic plan. Taken together, these analytical categories were expected to show how commentators constructed aspects of political authority (the represented, the representative, the disinterested service to the represented etc.) and highlighted a particular form of political association, invoking specific rationales of (good) political rule as emplotted in narratives of polity-­building (see Table 2.1, second column, first row). The journalistic commentary on the inauguration of the Convention, on the other hand, was scrutinised with regard to meaning-transforming instances of recontextualisation, or discursive Europeanisation, such as selection, weighing, rearrangement, addition. Particular attention was drawn to strategies of plausibilisation (employing, e.g., allusions, illustration, mythopoesis), which were expected to link unrelated bodies of knowledge, including EU-specific discourses of institutional engineering and national polity discourse, thereby generating consonance with the target audience (see Table  2.1, second column, second row). The obvious advantage of such a method is its text sensitivity and the higher degree of reflexivity gained by the CDA-specific and linguistically informed standards of text critique. At the same time, CDA struggles with small-scale text collections and ‘critical bias’. The selection of a few ‘most telling’ texts is often not transparent, and the generalisation of findings remains speculative. The immanent, socio-diagnostic or prospective critique that the researcher builds on the interpretation of a few texts might be, as a result, imbalanced and misleading. The extension of sources, triangulation of methods and review by the social groups under investigation are possible ways of dealing with these problems and establishing standards of scientific quality suitable for interpretive social research (Wodak & Meyer, 2009, p. 31). In this study, the discourse analysis of selected aspects of news discourse and polity construction is coupled, as demonstrated above, with a  social science content analysis of

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‘meta data’ and ‘media content’ that borrows from comparative political science and communication studies. In a funnel method, which employs insights from the content analysis for downsizing, smaller sets of articles are drawn and subjected to discourse analysis, to be subsequently situated, again, with the insights generated on a large scale, by a content analysis of the entire text collection. Such a grid of empirical discourse research, implemented as part of a concise analytical strategy, can be taken as a model for conducting an advanced discourse study. An advanced discourse study should be knowledgeable of the full implications of the linguistic turn and the specificities of the different discourse epistemologies and apply the research philosophies and research practice corresponding to the chosen discourse epistemology in a problem-oriented way. The programme for a discourse study developed in this chapter resists the tendency to fall back behind already-­ established discourse-analytical knowledge “as if we never had gone through the linguistic turn, poststructuralism and deconstructivism” (Bachmann-Medick, 2019), which has come with the mainstreaming of ‘discourse’ in the social sciences. The discourse study sketched out here accounts for both the encompassing shift of perspective and the methods of critical reading, which the first generation of discourse approaches introduced, and the methodological stringency which the second generation of discourse studies strives for. In addition, it problematises and specifies epistemological and research-philosophical implications and emphasises consistency in interdisciplinary design. It stresses that a discourse study comes as a package: it relies on both problem-oriented theorising and layered, detailed empirical analysis. The ensuing chapters will show how this research programme is applied to the specific problem of legitimation in the postnational setting of the European Union.

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Stembrouck, S. (2010). Discourse Analysis. In L. Cummings (Ed.), The Routledge Pragmatics Encyclopedia (pp. 120–122). London: Routledge. Stone, D. (2012). Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (3rd rev. ed.). New York: W. W. Norton. Stone, P. J. (1966). A Perspective on Content Analysis. In P. J. Stone, D. Dunphy, M. S. Smith, & D. M. Ogilvie (Eds.), General Inquirer: A Computer Approach to Content Analysis (pp. 3–19). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Taylor, C. (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Torfing, J., & Howarth, D. (Eds.). (2005). Discourse Theory in European Politics: Identity, Policy and Governance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tully, J. (1995). Strange Multiplicity. Constitutionalism in the Age of Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van Dijk, T. (1984). Prejudice in Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins. van Dijk, T. (1993). Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis. Discourse and Society, 4(2), 149–283. van Dijk, T. (1997a). What Is Political Discourse Analysis? Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 11(Special Issue on Political Linguistics), 11–52. van Dijk, T. (Ed.). (1997b). Discourse as Social Interaction (Vol. 2). London; Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: Sage. van Dijk, T. (2009). Critical Discourse Studies: A Sociocognitive Approach. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (2nd ed., pp. 62–86). London and New Delhi: Sage. van Dyk, S., Langer, A., Macgilchrist, F., Wrana, D., & Ziem, A. (2014). Discourse and Beyond? Zum Verhältnis von Sprache, Materialität und Praxis. In J. Angermüller, M. Nonhoff, E. Herschinger, F. Macgilchrist, M. Reisigl, J. Wedl, D. Wrana, & A. Ziem (Eds.), Interdisziplinäre Diskursforschung. Ein Handbuch (Vol. 2, pp. 347–363). Bielefeld: transcript. van Eemeren, F.  H., & Grootendorst, R. (2004). A Systematic Theory of Argumentation: The Pragma-Dialectical Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van Hulst, M., & Yanow, D. (2014). From Policy ‘Frames’ to ‘Framing’: Theorizing a More Dynamic, Political Approach. The American Review of Public Administration (Online First Version), 1–29. . van Leeuwen, T. (1993). Genre and Field in Critical Field Analysis: A Synopsis. Discourse and Society, 4(2), 193–223. van Leeuwen, T. (1996). The Representation of Social Actors. In C. R. Caldas-­ Coulthard & M.  Coulthard (Eds.), Text and Practices. Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis (pp. 32–70). London and New York: Routledge.

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van Leeuwen, T. (2009). Discourse as Recontextualisation of Social Practice: A Guide. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (2nd ed., pp. 144–161). London and New Delhi: Sage. van Leeuwen, T., & Wodak, R. (1999). Legitimizing Immigration Control: A Discourse-Historical Analysis. Discourse and Society, 1(1), 83–118. Wæver, O. (1996). European Security Identities. Journal of Common Market Studies, 34(1), 103–132. Wæver, O. (2004). Discursive Approaches. In A.  Wiener & T.  Diez (Eds.), European Integration Theory (pp. 197–215). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wæver, O. (2005). European Integration and Security: Analysing French and German Discourses on State, Nation, and Europe. In J. Torfing & D. Howarth (Eds.), Discourse Theory in European Politics: Identity, Policy and Governance (pp. 33–67). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wagenaar, H. (2011). Meaning in Action. Interpretation and Dialogue in Policy Analysis. Armonk and New York: M.E. Sharpe. Walter, J. (2014). Europa regieren—Regierungen Europas: Perspektiven einer gouvernementalen Analyse im Anschluss an Foucault. In A. Vasilache (Ed.), Gouvernementalität, Staat und Weltgesellschaft. Studien zum Regieren im Anschluss an Foucault (pp. 171–195). Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Wendt, A. (1999). Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiener, A. (2006). Constructivist Approaches in International Relations Theory: Puzzles and Promises. Constitutionalism Webpapers, ConWeb No. 5/2006. Wiener, A., Börzel, T., & Risse, T. (Eds.). (2019). European Integration Theory (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wiener, A., Dunoff, J., Havercroft, J., & Kumm, M. (2019). Global Constitutionalism as Agora: Interdisciplinary Encounters, Cultural Recognition and Global Diversity. Global Constitutionalism, 8(1), 1–11. Winter, R. (2009). Cultural Studies. In G. Kneer & M. Schroer (Eds.), Handbuch Soziologische Theorien (pp. 67–85). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Wittgenstein, L. (2009 [1953]). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans. and G. E. M. Anscombe & R. Rhees, Eds., 4th ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Wodak, R. (2001). The Discourse-Historical Approach. In R.  Wodak & M.  Meyer (Eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (pp.  63–94). London: Sage. Wodak, R. (2002). Aspects of Critical Discourse Analysis. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik, 36, 5–31.

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Wodak, R. (2008). Introduction: Discourse Studies—Important Concepts and Terms. In R.  Wodak & M.  Krzyżanowski (Eds.), Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social Sciences (pp. 1–29). Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Wodak, R. (2009). The Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wodak, R. (2015). The Politics of Fear. What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage. Wodak, R., & Chilton, P. (2005). Preface. In R. Wodak & P. Chilton (Eds.), A New Agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis (pp. XI–XVIII). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wodak, R., & Krzyżanowski, M. (Eds.). (2008). Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social Sciences. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Wodak, R., Menz, F., & Lalouschek, J. (1989). Sprachbarrieren. Die Verständigungskrise in der Gesellschaft. Vienna: Wiener Zeitschriftenverlag. Wodak, R., & Meyer, M. (2009). Critical Discourse Analysis: History, Agenda, Theory and Methodology. In R.  Wodak & M.  Meyer (Eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (2nd ed., pp.  1–33). London; Thousand Oaks; New Delhi; Singapore: Sage. Wrana, D. (2014). Diskursanalyse jenseits von Hermeneutik und Strukturalismus. In J.  Angermüller, J.  Angermüller, M.  Nonhoff, E. Herschinger, F. Macgilchrist, M. Reisigl, J. Wedl, D. Wrana, & A. Ziem (Eds.), Diskursforschung. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch (Vol. 1, pp. 511–536). Bielfeld: transcript. Yin, R. K. (2003). Case Study Research. Design and Methods. Thousand Oaks; London; New Delhi: Sage. Zienkowski, J., Östman, J.-O., & Vershueren, J. (Eds.). (2011). Discursive Pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

3 Discursive Legitimation: Polity Construction

The European Union (EU) is considered to possess only partial political legitimacy. Its institutions fall short of some standards accepted for liberal political systems, and its foundational principles remain unsettled and contested. In other words, the EU’s legitimacy is questioned not only because what seems familiar in its organisation is unsatisfactory. It is also challenged because its potentially satisfactory organisation is unfamiliar against the backdrop of the habitualised form of political organisation: the nation-state and its procedures of democratic authorisation.1 In European integration studies, such questioning is not necessarily regarded as proof of a ‘legitimacy deficit’, however. On the contrary, ‘creative disagreement’ is thought to bring about new or accommodated understandings of what a legitimate polity beyond the state might be (Lord & Magnette, 2004). In line with this expectation, empirical research on the EU’s legitimation has devoted growing attention to public debates about  The distinction between challenges of performance as related to the familiar vs. challenges of values as related to the unfamiliar has been developed in the sociology of organisations (Deephouse & Suchman, 2008) and adopted to a discourse-analytical perspective by Vaara and Tienari (2008). It somewhat resounds in the distinction between acceptance (of policies and system performance) and justifiability (of a given system) in the political sociology and political theory of the European Union. 1

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EU politics, instead of only to opinion polls, so as to find out how ­discussants imagine, evaluate or justify the EU’s legitimacy. So far, studies have focused either on justificatory discourse in the ‘legitimation policies’ of EU institutions and advocates of European integration (Bellier, 2001; Biegoń, 2016; Sternberg, 2013) or on publicised opinion and politicians’ statements in the different member states. The latter body of research seeks to find out what known concepts are used by speakers when they talk about the EU, including polity models, such as a federation, confederation or multilevel polity (e.g. Diez, Jachtenfuchs, & Jung, 1998), concepts of democracy or postdemocracy (Barnickel, 2019; Skully, 2011), political science categories of political legitimacy, such as input or output legitimacy (Nullmeier et al., 2010), or notions of political community, including value-based, rights-based or problem-solving communities (Kantner, 2016; Renfordt, 2011). The salience and distribution of these concepts in public-political debate, aggregated per member state or group of speakers, are considered to reveal the evaluations and judgements participants embrace regarding the EU’s legitimacy or political identity. Hence, while endorsing the communicative turn, scholars researching the EU’s public legitimation (implicitly) hold on to a Weberian conception of legitimation as conscious-intentional acknowledgement of political rule by rule-takers, and vice versa, as efforts of rulers to influence such judgements. Propositional content is seen to straightforwardly reveal such mental constructs (see also Sect. 1.2). These academic conventions will be set aside in this chapter. While retaining the focus on ‘creative disagreement’ in public-political debate, I will shift perspectives from outcome (legitimacy) to process (legitimation) and from propositional and evaluative content, which is indicative of legitimacy, to discourse practices of legitimation, which are used to construct or deconstruct political authority and political association beyond the state. Public-political debates on EU politics stand out with a multiplicity of claims for political authority and cultural recognition. They stress desirable future association, rather than only current system performance. Moreover, EU-related debates are characterised by continuous translation between contexts of Europeanised political communication, in particular between arenas of multilateral negotiation, where classifications of EU politics are generated in the first place, and national media debates, the

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primary site of commentary on EU politics (see Sect. 1.3 for more details on the EU’s specific setting). The objective of this third chapter is to explore how political legitimation can be grasped conceptually from a discourse-theoretical perspective that accounts for these specificities. It aims to work out concepts and analytical tools that capture how the unfamiliar of the European Union is accommodated with the familiar of the national state, or how justifiability is produced and dissolved for the political authority and association of the European Union. Taking the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the exploration starts from the idea that the meaning of legitimate political authority and association emerges only in concrete instances of linguistic interaction and reveals broader implications only by intertextually linking up with existing discourses about polity-building and by cueing in the historically specific context of expression. The exploration ends with the conclusion that, in the EU context, discursive legitimation is best understood as polity construction: as discourse agency that suggests political authority and political association beyond the state are legitimate by invoking general assumptions about why political rule and association are required in the first place. The theoretical exploration is structured in three steps. Each of them will be illustrated by an exemplary discourse analysis of fragments from Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory speech to the Convention on the Future of Europe. This speech turned out to be one of the core constitutionalising speech acts of the Constitution process and became a prime reference of the Polish and French media debates investigated in this book. The exploration starts from the understanding of legitimation used in CDA, which refers to conventionalised practices of persuasion in political speech and public commentary (see Sect. 3.1). In order to capture strategies of persuasion that relate to political legitimation, the chapter borrows from constructionist sociology. It uses the idea developed by Pierre Bourdieu that, in contemporary liberal democracies, political legitimacy relies upon a complicit and symbolically violent relationship between representatives and represented, with the former defining the terms of legitimate power execution as long as the latter abstain from challenging their definition (see Sect. 3.2). Based on this understanding of political legitimation, the chapter then explores what discourse

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formations and intertextual configurations might be invoked in practices of persuasion to produce or maintain specific definitions of legitimate political authority and association. It assesses imaginings of legitimate power conferral, drawing on Bourdieu’s analysis of delegation as a core concept of representative politics. Drawing on the political philosophy of polity-­building, it is further specified what conventionalised arguments for specific forms of political association or ‘narratives of polity-building’ practices of legitimation might draw on (see Sect. 3.3). In an excursus on narratives of European integration as polity-constructing plots, it is shown how classic arguments for polity-building have come to bear upon EU practitioners’ and EU scholars’ justifications and explanations of European integration (see Sect. 3.4). Along with this EU-related intertextual repertoire, narratives of national polity-building and EU membership handed down in Poland and France are considered (see Sect. 3.5). On the basis of these clarifications and after summarising the three steps of the argument, categories are outlined for the discourse analysis of polity construction in the documents and commentaries selected for textual analysis (see Sect. 3.6).

3.1 Legitimation in Language Use In linguistic discourse studies, ‘legitimation’ refers to practices of persuasion in linguistic interaction that are used to enhance the credibility of the speaker’s vision and his or her authority to credibly promote such a vision vis-à-vis a particular audience. It is considered to be a characteristic feature of public-political discourse, involved in substantiating, but also in subverting, symbolic power and social exclusion (Kutter & Nonhoff, 2014). Van Dijk suggests conceiving of it as a type of meta-speech act enacting political struggle: One of the more prominent overall political acts (…) will be that of ­legitimation. This is however not a speech act in the strict sense, but a complex social act or process that may be accomplished by other speech acts, such as assertions, denials, counter-accusations, and so on. (van Dijk, 1997, p. 37)

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Argumentation forms part of legitimation  defined as such. Argumentation furthers a proposal that is based, as a rule, on a premise or warrant, a conclusion, with grounds given in support of the conclusion (Toulmin, 2003). However, legitimation is not limited to argumentation, it also draws on a large variety of linguistic forms that, depending on the context of the utterance and the conventions of persuasive speech current therein, enhance the speaker’s communicative plan.2 Unlike justification, which refers to a specific type of argument that seeks to establish validity and truth and that follows rules of rational argumentation as formulated, for instance, in Habermasian discourse ethics (Habermas, 1984) or pragma-dialectics (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 2004), legitimation relies on implicit and routinised forms of enhancement and includes fallacious argumentation. An example of a routinised form of legitimation is that of a ‘topos’. Drawing on Aristotle and Kienpointer, CDA scholars understand by topos a cognitive compression of an argument, a commonsensical shortcut to a conclusion in argumentation, which everyone in a speech community can recognise and return to, like to a common place (as the literal meaning of ‘topos’ suggests). For instance, the topos of danger conventionally suggests urgency, while the topos of usefulness calls for performing a particular action because of its possible utility (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001, pp. 75–80). Fallacious argumentation is argumentation that thwarts criteria of rational argumentation. It occurs, for instance, when a truth claim is raised on the basis that it has not been refuted (argument ad ignorantiam) or when presenting an antagonist’s viewpoint in a distorted way so as to refute or delegitimise it easily (straw man fallacy) (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001, pp.  69–74). Legitimation may employ even more implicit means, such as presuppositions (Wodak, 2007) or allusions and wordplay, which are used by the speaker to suggest a logical linkage where there is none or to invoke familiarity and complicity with the audience (see plausibilisation strategies below). These forms of legitimising language use can be de- and reconstructed on a more abstract level using the concept of discourse strategies. Discourse strategies further the communicative-pragmatic plan of a  In contrast, Fairclough and Fairclough (2012) claim that argumentation implied in practical reasoning is a totalising feature of political discourse. 2

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s­ ingle text or utterance in correspondence with a historic-specific context of expression (drawing on Wodak, 2001, p. 73). The concept is rooted in sociolinguist research on the cognitive schemata people employ when building and comprehending texts, while trying to capture the content (precise information) and pragmatics (appropriate ways of talking) of a particular situation (Gumperz, 1982; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). ‘Schemes’ or ‘frames’ determine the selection of information on the basis of prior knowledge—whether this is related to the currents of everyday life or norms of formal ordering of information (e.g. as habitualised in news reports) (Wodak, 1996, p. 111f ). ‘Strategies’, on the other hand, refer to the ways a selection is carried out and implemented linguistically throughout a text: strategies (…) govern the actor’s use of lexical, grammatical, sociolinguistic and other knowledge in the production and interpretation of messages in context. (Gumperz, 1982, p. 35)

In their studies of national identity construction and racism, van Leeuwen, Wodak, de Cilla and Reisigl identified a set of discourse strategies, that is, linguistic-textual structures, that proved salient in speakers’ attempts to construct, perpetuate or dissolve a specific vision of collective identity. I will explicate only those relevant to this book. The communicative plan promoted in a text can be reconstructed, first, by tracing back the representation of objects and actors: which actor or object is foregrounded or backgrounded, how he or she is named (nomination), specified (modification) and referenced or grouped with something or someone (reference, e.g. by means of a ‘pars pro toto’-synecdoche) (de Cillia, Reisigl, & Wodak, 1999; van Leeuwen, 1996). These strategies will show us how an author portrays and evaluates a given object or actor and how he or she constructs audiences and in- and out-groups. Secondly, by analysing the different linguistic means of argumentation, the author’s construction of proposals can be retraced. Using Habermas’ theoretical explications of legal discourse and argumentation, three types of argumentative strategies can be isolated: argumentation that draws on a personal authority (e.g. General de Gaulle, the Pope) or on impersonal authority (law, rules, customs and conformity); rationalisations referring

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Table 3.1  Discourse strategies Strategies

Objectives

… of representation

Naming, labelling Identification, Modification in adjectives and nomination adverbs, attribution of negative Attribution of qualities or positive traits, passive or Construction of active sentences in-groups, referencing Membership categorisations, metonyms, synecdoches, deixis Rationalisation Substantiation of a depiction, proposal, or Authorisation truth or validity claim Moral evaluation Illustration, allusion, evocation, Construction of wordplay, mythopoesis suppositions and connotations

… of argumentation … of plausibilisation

Devices

Source: Adapted from van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999); plausibilisation added

to utility, necessity and experience, or that raise truth claims qua (scientific) definition or explanation; finally, moral evaluation that refers explicitly to values or to ‘moral abstractions’ (van Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999) (see Table 3.1). Of particular interest in this book is, however, what patterns of language use contribute to the linking and reconfiguring of polity discourses from different practice contexts. In the absence of an established term, I called this strategic-discursive dimension the ‘strategy of plausibilisation’. By this term I mean to recognisably isolate those uses of linguistic forms that construct allegedly necessary linkages, both between texts and between propositions, within a text or across texts. I found them to be particularly salient in the text collection  investigated, which primarily comprises journalists’, but also politicians’, contributions, and was confirmed in this observation by various studies on news discourse (Fowler, 1991; Link, 1982; Matouschek, Wodak, & Januschek, 1995), but also by studies on implicit-indirect political rhetoric (Wodak, 2007). Strategies of plausibilisation create coherence, in that they add connotations, for example through illustration, wordplay, allusion, evocation or narrative mythopoesis. By these means, a commonsensical portrayal or problem definition is enhanced to integrate abstract, novel or unrelated content. Let me point out the different devices of plausibilisation strategies.

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Illustration enhances a portrayal or argument by employing the collectively shared pictural register of a society, the ensemble of widespread metaphors, exempla, tropes and mythopoetical narratives (‘collective symbols’ in Jürgen Link’s terms, Link, 2001, 2003). Following Link, in particular the chaining of illustrative means in isotopies (following semantic similarity) and catachreses (breaches of isotopies), allows for the  selective integration and popularisation of abstract, specific and novel matters and for dedifferentiation and redifferentiation of discourse more generally.3 Plays on words (often on fixed expressions and tropes) or stereotypes and narrative mythopoesis are illustrative means of similar pragmatic relevance and effect. An allusion is based on implicit connotations of the language used, not on explicit linkages between contents, and is therefore fully dependent on the situational context and the reader’s or listener’s comprehension and interpretation of that context (Matouschek et al., 1995, p. 56f ). It creates a second level of meaning in a text by referring to specific persons, matters, fixed expressions or texts, assuming that they are known and recognisable to (some) readers. Its distinguishing trait is the metaphorical integration of the ‘text in hand’ and the ‘external text or event etc.’ in the reader’s mind into something new that is distinct from its constituent parts (Pasco, 1994, p. 13f ). The pragmatic function of allusion is, hence, the intensification and enhancement of the meaning implied by the author, a demonstration of the author’s wit and knowledge, and a suggestion of membership and complicity to the reader who is competent to recognise the allusion and to experience the metaphorical extension of meaning (Gfrereis, 1999, p.  6).4 Evocation simulates features of text  Link’s work on collective symbols, known primarily via Siegfried Jägers’s adoption, is rooted in structuralist models and has been criticised for its essentialising depiction of culture. This does not lessen, however, the relevance of his ideas on isotopies and catachresis as intertextual and plausibilising devices, which can reasonably be connected to intertextuality research and pragmatics. 4  Allan Pasco distinguishes two triggers of literary allusion: a ‘synoptic allusion’ is activated by one brief reference and intensifies one or two traits of the referenced work. For instance, the title of Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza calls to mind the blind Samson, both in the bible and in Milton’s play. An ‘extended allusion’, on the contrary, does not synoptically integrate the referenced work and the text at hand, but suggests creating a new conception while maintaining the individuality of the constituent parts. For instance, “in the course of experiencing Anouilh’s Antigone, though the integrity of Sophocles’ version persists, and though we recognize the specific events and coloring of 3

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c­ omposition and style known from other contexts and recalls the (reading) experience made within that context to enhance the particular representation of the argument in the current text. The meaning of what is uttered is carried less by the lexical meaning of the terms chosen than through the dramaturgic construction of the text that recalls experiences made in other contexts, e.g. the dramaturgy of a fairy tale (…) or of a fictional detective story. (Matouschek et al., 1995, pp. 55, 84f, author’s translation)

Hence, while their textual function is to link different discourse fragments, the pragmatic function of these plausibilising means is to enhance the implied meaning and interpretation and to actualise integrative symbols which are assumed to be shared by the targeted epistemic community. To illustrate how legitimation in language use can be de- and reconstructed through the lens of discourse strategies, I will draw on fragments from the introductory speech that the president of the Convention on the Future of Europe, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, delivered on the occasion of the launch of the Convention on 28  February 2002 (Giscard d’Estaing, 2002, see also Appendix E).

L egitimation in Giscard d’Estaing’s Introductory Speech to the Convention Giscard d’Estaing’s speech, apart from opening the session and outlining the plan of work, provided an interpretation of the agenda of institutional reform that member states had adopted at the preceding European summit in Laeken in December 2001, in the so-called Laeken Declaration. Giscard d’Estaing also specified the mandate of the Convention on the Future of Europe, whose instalment and tasks member states had agreed in Laeken. Using the lens of discourse strategies, I will demonstrate in the following how Giscard d’Estaing developed a persuasive communicative plan throughout his speech, mobilising collective action among the play being performed, we find that the allusive addition of Sophoclean fate adds extraordinary depth and power to the theatrical destiny” (Pasco, 1994, p. 7).

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Conventioneers and appealing to them to proactively endorse their mandate. I will focus on one text passage, in particular, in which Giscard d’Estaing’s communicative plan crystallises. It is repeated and varied throughout the speech, but first introduced right after the salutations, which welcome Conventioneers in the three official languages of the EU (French, German and English), and in additional languages of the EU-15 plus Polish. The text passage became a core reference of journalistic commentary on the EU constitution in Poland and France (see Sect. 6.3 in Chap. 6). It conjures up a moment of decisive choice and places that choice in the hands of the Conventioneers: You are the members of the Convention on the future of Europe. You are the ‘Conventionists’ of Europe. You therefore have the power vested in any political body: to succeed, or to fail. On the one side, the yawning abyss of failure. On the other, strait is the gate to success. If we fail, we will add to the current confusion in the European project, which we know will not be able, following the current round of enlargement, to provide a system to manage our continent which is both effective and clear to the public. What has been created over fifty years will reach its limits, and be threatened with dislocation. If we succeed, that is to say if we agree to propose a concept of the European Union, which matches our continental dimension and the requirements of the 21st century, then you will be able to leave here and return home, whether you are Italo-European, Anglo-European, Polish-­ European—or any of the others—with the feeling of having contributed, modestly but effectively, to writing a new chapter in the history of Europe. (Appendix E, line 24–38)

Let me show how, using various strategies of representation, Giscard d’Estaing constructs his audience as a political body that may make a difference. First, by naming them in specific ways and employing deictic means such as the possessive ‘of Europe’, he moves the Conventioneers from being members of a consulting body with a long official title to being an assembly of continental scale that has an obligation towards

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Europe as a whole. This image is qualified by further nominations. Taking up the multinational-multilingual theme in the salutations, Giscard d’Estaing addresses the attendees as European nationals (or hyphen Europeans), having national and European provenance (e.g. “Italo-­ European”), and hails them as delegates gathered in that very nature, as diverse Europeans. He reinforces this appeal by switching from the pronoun “we”, which references the general collective of institutional engineers including the speaker, to the pronoun “you”. Later in the speech, Giscard d’Estaing explicates what this portrayal of the Convention already suggests. He imagines the Convention as a collective that is not defined by the delegates’ representative functions or national briefs, but by a “Convention spirit”, to which delegates commit as diverse Europeans (Appendix E, line 247–267). He suggests that this spirit might yield a foundational document that not only ensures the smooth functioning of EU institutions after enlargement, but also boosts a feeling of belonging in all hyphen Europeans (Appendix E, line 123–144) (see also exemplary analysis in Sect. 3.2). Hence, the strategies of representation employed signal the communicative plan that will span the speech: the mobilisation of collective action, which goes beyond the agenda of the Laeken Declaration and results in a reform proposal, if not a foundational document, of communitarian national-European aspiration.5 In the quoted fragment, this plan is condensed, and the overall argument enhanced by various strategies of argumentation and plausibilisation. The argument could be summarised as follows: Conventioneers urgently need to work out a new concept of institutional set-up (conclusion), given that the existing one is challenged by enlargement, the requirements of the twenty-first century and (added later in the speech) the  growing alienation of EU citizens (grounds), since only by comprehensively adjusting to challenges will the EU survive (warrant). The claim could be refuted on the ground that the warrant is wrong because the EU will still survive without any further treaty revision, considering that the then existing Treaty of Nice already provided for necessary adjustments and was approved in ratification and accession referenda (an argument promoted,  A further plan spanning the speech seems to be to persuade Conventioneers to endorse the speaker’s aspiration and concept of (consensus-pushing) leadership. 5

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for instance, by the Polish government). Giscard d’Estaing employs a range of legitimising strategies that bolster his plea against such potential challenge. To underline the urgency of a joint effort at constitution-drafting, Giscard d’Estaing uses linguistic devices that suggest consequentiality and necessity, such as the conditional clauses “if … then”, the inserted adverbial clause “following enlargement …” and the topos of threat that is conjured up in a scenario of dislocation (rationalisation). The joint effort appears altogether more compelling and worth pursuing in light of the values of effectiveness and clarity, which Giscard d’Estaing repeatedly mentions as organisational principles and measures of success. Thereby, he cues in the core slogan of the Laeken Declaration, which stipulates that “the Union needs to become more democratic, more transparent and more efficient” (Presidency-of-the-European-Council, 2001; see also Appendix D, line 97), along with the EU’s constitutional principle of unity in diversity (moral evaluation). Moreover, he refers to common knowledge, in the expression “which we know will not be able…”, and invokes established practice, that is, the tradition of writing the history of European integration in successive chapters of treaty revision (impersonal authorisation). This authorisation is advanced in a later paragraph (Appendix E, line 80–83), in a success story of European integration, according to which all crises and blockades have eventually been overcome by reform, in a linear and continuous progression from treaty revision to treaty revision (narrative mythopoesis). However, the most persuasive means is probably the illustration provided at the very beginning of the quoted paragraphs. Giscard d’Estaing uses the image of a crossroads to point out two options from which the Convention has to choose: one direction leading into a yawning abyss, symbolising failure; the other leading through a gate, symbolising success (illustration). Let me show how this metaphor contributes to the plausibilisation of Giscard d’Estaing’s communicative plan. Throughout the speech, the dichotomy of opposite choices is rendered palpable by semantic-isotopical chaining: success is associated with arriving at a comprehensive proposal of institutional design, if not a foundational document, that is intelligible to all and ensures the EU’s capacity to act after its enlargement, in terms of being able to both make adequate

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decisions and speak with one voice internationally. Failure, in turn, is spelt out in terms of not arriving at a proposal. It is negatively evaluated as equalling a state of “confusion”, “dislocation”, a mere “free trade zone” or “disintegration” into insignificant isolated states. In this juxtaposition, Giscard d’Estaing intertextually references and dramatises the problem assessment outlined by member states in the Laeken Declaration. And he links up to debates salient at that time, which problematised the coherence in EU foreign policy and portrayed enlargement as threatening integration and efficient decision-making. This intertextual context renders the dichotomy and its associated meanings recognisable, but they are not necessarily logical. The suggestion implied in the metaphor of the crossroads, that there are only two alternatives to choose from, is a fallacy (black and white fallacy). In fact, more choices were available, including the option to stabilise what was already in place, which was what the Laeken Declaration de facto mandated, and the option to arrive at a proposal without meeting the challenges, which is what critics said happened with the proposed Draft Constitution and the later Constitutional Treaty. Yet, the connotations of the metaphor of the crossroads and the way Giscard d’Estaing uses them allow him to take the argument beyond logical scrutiny. The highly conventionalised figurative meaning of the crossroads, which points to a crucial binary choice, arouses a sense of urgency and responsibility. But more importantly, by opening the introductory speech with the crossroads metaphor, Giscard d’Estaing straightforwardly places his speech in the figurative register of European integration, in which road metaphors have come to intelligibilise a teleological process of unification (Musolff, 2000), and which is very likely to be recognised as such by the audience. He advances that connotation by twisting the metaphor towards the future, chaining “gate” with “a new chapter”, “a fresh start” (Appendix E, line 122), so that choosing the gate appears as a passage to the future. In that imagining, moving beyond the current state becomes the compelling choice, no matter what the exact outcome of reform will be. And stretching the Convention’s mandate and role becomes a compelling plan of action, too. With the help of the crossroads metaphor and other rhetoric means applied throughout the speech, Giscard d’Estaing suggests that the Convention’s mandate should be extended  beyond the confines of

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function—ensuring institutional reform towards a communitarian project that everybody feels committed to; while the Convention should not limit itself to a consultation body that delivers on a to-do list, but become  a constitutional assembly that engages in an “intellectual re-­ assessment” of European integration and crafts a constitution out of it. Hence, by mobilising for proactive collective action in constitution-­ drafting, Giscard d’Estaing also invokes a (new) collective actor, the Convention. He endows it with purpose, identity and voice in a political act—treaty revision—that is habitually and contractually dominated by the member states and the constituencies ratifying the new treaty, following the rules laid down in the EU treaty (then  the Treaty of Nice). Observers of the inaugural meeting of the Convention attest to Giscard d’Estaing’s appeal being performative. It was appreciated by the audience and signalled to the wider public and reluctant government representatives that the Convention was not going to be a talking shop, but a serious player in the Constitution process (Norman, 2005). The analysis illustrates how discursive legitimation might be understood from the angle of CDA: as discourse agency that fosters and substantiates a certain communicative plan (here: persuading Conventioneers of a proactive understanding of their mandate) in the interaction with an (imagined) audience by means of depicting involved agents and settings in specific ways (representation) and by applying established practices of argumentation, referring to either reason, authority or values (argumentation), or by using more implicit means, such as narration, illustration, allusion and evocation (plausibilisation). The discursive (de-)legitimation of the EU, then, comprises all types of discourse agency that persuade or dissuade from maintaining a specific form of political authority and association beyond the state (e.g. qua reference to the European ideas or standards, Wodak & Weiss, 2005); and that are pursued explicitly or implicitly in the communicative plans of specific instances of context-dependent linguistic interaction. Hence, the perspective of CDA points to ‘discourse practices of EU legitimation’, that is, regular and accepted ways of promoting one’s stance about the EU’s desirable polity, which render a specific conception of a polity beyond the state more intelligible and persuasive than another. However, there is little consideration in existing CDA studies of how such legitimising discourse practices relate to politi-

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cal legitimation proper. The following sections will show how a link can be established using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence in representative politics and by considering existing symbolic-discourse formations that classify legitimate political authority and legitimate political association.

3.2 Legitimation and the Construction of Political Authority The concept of symbolic violence is useful for considering how the legitimising discourse practices described in the previous section render relations of power legitimate, and relations of political power, more particularly. It offers itself as a middle-range theory via which to relate legitimising discourse practices to political legitimation and reflect upon how they might construct or dissolve political authority. Symbolic violence is a concept that Pierre Bourdieu developed as part of a more general consideration of how inequality is reproduced in capitalist societies and liberal democracies in the late twentieth century, where force is (usually) no longer used to establish social hierarchies. Following Bourdieu, symbolic violence is “a gentle violence, imperceptible and invisible even to its victims, exerted for the most part through the purely symbolic channels of communication and cognition (more precisely misrecognition), recognition, or even feeling” (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 2). It is implied by those tangible acts of denomination and classification that are performed in linguistic forms, but also in gestures, rituals and appeals to bodily behaviour that emanate from artefacts, architecture or style, by which different groups in a society recognise themselves and each other as being more or less prestigious and powerful (Schmidt & Woltersdorff, 2008, p. 12f ). By using these classifications for self-evaluation and taking them for granted, both the powerful and the powerless misrecognise the arbitrariness of such classification and, thereby, recognise it as legitimate. Those who are relegated by classificatory practices recognise them, in that they confine themselves to the habit of the subordinate, showing timidity and selfcensorship and meeting the violent degradation they experience with

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self-inferiorisation or resentment. Those, on the other hand, who are in a position to set the classifications, because they are renowned for having the necessary specialised skills and symbolic power, enjoy authority only as long as the arbitrariness is not revealed and as long as subordinate agents do not reclaim the power of definition. Hence, the concept of symbolic violence provides an idea of legitimation and power that goes beyond the performativity and persuasiveness of linguistic forms and the social exclusion they exert in a specific context. It points to the relationality and complicity of the powerful and the powerless in legitimising power relations. Legitimation is here understood as the process of intersubjective meaning-making by which the  subordinated and the  superordinated ‘bracket’ the arbitrariness of their asymmetric relations and treat them as self-evident, not so much because of some explicit consensus or propagandistic manipulation, but because these power relations seem plausible against the background of the overall structures, rituals and styles of a specific society at a certain point in time. In Bourdieu’s words: Legitimation of the social world is not, as some believe, the product of deliberate and purposive action of propaganda or symbolic imposition; it results, rather, from the fact that agents apply to the objective structures of the social world structures of perception and apprehension which are issued out of these very structures and which tend to picture the world as evident. (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 21)

In his discussion of representative politics of liberal democracies of the twentieth century, Bourdieu applies this idea of legitimation to the more specific problem of political legitimation. Following his assessment, the core ‘structure of perception’ of representative politics is the concept and practice of delegation, that is, the conferral of decision-making power onto a representative or representative organisation by individuals who do not professionally engage in politics. It is the act, from which, public decision-making authority is primarily, though not exclusively, derived in liberal democracies. This authority is recognised as legitimate on the provision that the representative gives expression to the views and p ­ references of the represented mandatories and dissolves his or her own particular interests in the disinterested service of the common cause of the repre-

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sented group. Delegation is symbolically enacted by rituals of power conferral, such as elections, and rituals of declaring disinterested service, such as the oath of office. It draws on the commensensical dualism of rulers and ruled and is scientifically rationalised in patron-client models and theories of interest mediation, party politics or voting systems. Following Bourdieu, these rituals, common-sense conceptions and scientific rationalisations blur the hierarchies that are produced in the very act of delegation: the (apparent) relation between representatives and represented, the latter being imagined as a determining cause (‘pressure groups’ etc.) or final cause (‘causes’ to be defended, interests to be ‘served’ etc.), conceals the relation of competition between the representatives and, thereby, the relation of orchestration (or of pre-established harmony) between the representatives and the represented. (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 183)

In other words, by suggesting that the representative gives expression to and disinterestedly serves the demands of the represented, the imaginary of delegation brackets a couple of features of arbitrariness of power in representative politics. First, the demands of the represented do not exist, as such, prior to the moment when they are being surveyed, polled, aggregated, decided upon and declared by the representative organisation, which itself gains its cause of action in that very moment. Secondly, such a definition harks back not only to what is imagined as the constituency’s demands, but above all to the internal logic and professional practice of the political field, field-specific exigency to seek distinction from a competitor: “the principle of division [i.e. the vision of how society should (not) be, A.K.] put forward for popular judgement, for approbation outside the field, lies to a large extent within the field, in the competition among the individual and collective agents engaged in the field” (Bourdieu, 2005, p. 39). Hence, the representative formulates the vision and common cause in a way that facilitates relational positioning visà-vis competitors and enhances opportunities for collective action and office-­seeking in the political field (see also Sect. 4.2 on Bourdieu’s concept of the field). As a result, the apparent congruence or harmony between the preferences of the represented and the programme of the

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representative owes less to the aggregation and mediation of the interests of the represented than to ‘homology’: to the fact that, in comparison to other representative organisations, the chosen one seems to be the closest ally in specific social struggles. The authority of the representative thus relies on a “political mimesis” of social struggles, on the apparent congruence between the poles of social struggle and those of the spectrum of political-­ideological competition: “the struggles of the representatives [which hark back to a large extent to the logics of the political field, A.K.] can be described as a political mimesis of the struggles of the groups or classes whose champions they claim to be” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 182). In this view, delegation is symbolically violent because it claims to empower the represented in the political field with the help of the disinterested service of a delegate, while at the same disempowering them. The represented not only explicitly confer power  on the representatives in the act of delegation, but are disempowered because they become confined to the role of political consumers who choose from a product that has been shaped according to the competitive logic of the political field. The field-­specific political game is so detached from their concerns that it appears to them not necessarily unintelligible, but pointless, to engage with. Following Bourdieu, this disempowerment is particularly felt by the “politically less competent”, who dispose of only few resources and little know-how that would allow them to assume voice and engage in the political game themselves. They are faced with the dilemma to either entrust themselves entirely to a specific representative organisation or, when alienated, withdraw from political life altogether (Bourdieu, 1991, pp. 171–174). Hence, the institution and practice of delegation may, in fact, conceal the alienation between represented and representatives and reinforce the hierarchy between politically more competent and politically less competent citizens. But, as long as delegation is the way both representatives and represented see and do representative politics, they are complicit in legitimising political authority thus constructed. Against the backdrop of the current crisis of established political parties that used to carry the European project, Bourdieu’s assessment of representative politics appears to unfold immediate plausibility. It ­suggests that voters or party members have become alienated from established parties, not only because they are dissatisfied with their performance

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(as most analyses suggest), but because these have become professionalised to a degree that their programmes are more defined by distinction within the political field than by the concerns and social struggles of the represented: so the political mimesis fails. Bourdieu’s assessment also elucidates the fragility of the EU’s overall legitimacy. As has been shown in European integration studies (see Sect. 1.2), both electors and elected suffer “political expropriation” (Offe & Preuss, 2006) in the course of EU decision-making, because the decisions struck in the different arenas result from a complex process of policy formulation, determined not only by the elected, but by multiple veto players and stakeholders inside and outside majoritarian institutions. Against this backdrop, any representative claim that declares boosting an electorate’s demand is easily demasked in its symbolic violence. The imaginary of delegatory democracy is challenged at almost any point of EU decision-making. Moreover, Bourdieu’s assessment seems to provide backing for the popular diagnosis that the EU is troubled by a ‘communication deficit’. His analysis can be used to explain such  a deficit as resulting not only from politicians lacking determination to defend the European cause in public, but from the self-­ referentiality of the EU political process and its “coordinative discourse” (Schmidt, 2008), which is unintelligible to those not professionally involved in EU politics. On a second glance, however, such use of Bourdieu’s assessment seems misleading. The context of the European Union, in fact, exposes the fact that Bourdieu’s critique of delegation is bound to the French national political system of the 1980s, which placed political power in centralised majoritarian institutions and favoured polarised competition in a two-­party system. The “structures of perception and apprehension” (the concept of delegation), which Bourdieu suggests correspond to “objective structures of the social world” (power relations in representative politics) (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 21), are in the course of being fundamentally transformed, and developments in the French party system give witness to that, too. In the European Union, political power is derived in various ways (or it is derived from these sources more explicitly than in the national contexts): from regulatory delegation in the case of the Commission and the European Central Bank; from legal standards in the case of the European Court of Justice; from compromise built among multiple, also non-majoritarian, actors; or from

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an obligation to lessons from the past and pan-European ‘political messianism’ (Weiler, 2012). In addition, along with delegatory democracy, deliberative and participatory democracy have been mainstreamed as a norm and an imaginary against which legitimate power execution is judged and in line with which representative organisations, among them EU bodies, seek to reimagine themselves (Sternberg, 2013, pp.  128–152). Finally, being ‘politically incompetent’ and disregarding the established codes of political competition and political communication have become a way of selfempowerment widely assumed by formerly inactive or alienated political subjects, facilitated by the rise of social media and the alternative publics and colloquialised styles of communication they enact. Hence, Bourdieu’s assessment seems to perpetuate binary categories (represented vs representative, politically competent vs politically incompetent) which are, in fact, far from self-evident and about to undergo politicisation and transformation. Hence, if I draw on the concept of symbolic violence and Bourdieu’s assessment of representative politics in the following, I am not using it as a truth-telling device, but as a heuristic tool that allows for reflection on the construction of political authority within the European Union. First, the concept of symbolic violence in representative politics offers a constructionist and relational understanding of political power and political legitimation and specifies how the professional discourse producers looked at in this book, the politicians, officials, journalists and experts concerned with EU politics, might be involved in the construction of political authority beyond the state. Political power, or the authority to take public decisions, is here seen to derive from social construction, from the institution and interpretation of acts of power conferral. Such an  interpretation is generated especially by those who professionalise and are acknowledged as professionals in politics and political commentary. Contrary to what is understood by political legitimation in empiricist studies, legitimation is here not limited to acknowledgement by rule-­takers, who accept the rules in accordance with their legitimacy beliefs. Instead, the rulers themselves are seen to contribute to legitimising political authority in decisive ways, together with the professionals in expert, media and academic fields, who have specialised in explicating and rationalising the social world. Politicians, more specifically, contribute to legitimising public decision-making power

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when issuing representative claims, thereby classifying the represented collective, its demands and the ways of doing justice to them in political action. Those having specialised in political analysis and advice, on the other hand, contribute to defining what legitimate power execution is when evaluating such representative claims. However, this is not to argue that the power of definition of the ‘politically competent’ resides in “deliberate and purposive action of propaganda or symbolic imposition” (Bourdieu, 1989, p.  21) or in the performativity of legitimising language use alone. The concept of symbolic violence safeguards us from jumping to this conclusion and introduces a relational and mediated understanding of legitimising activity. It suggests that the ability of the politically competent to define criteria of legitimate power acquisition remains conditioned upon the complicity of the patients of such power, their readiness to (temporarily) retreat to the role of the political consumer and withdraw from the taking on the power of definition themselves. Moreover, the power of definition of the ‘politically competent’ is enabled and conditioned by complexes of classificatory practices (or discourse formations) that render the retreat and political expropriation of the ‘politically less competent’ self-evident and that correspond to the structures of representative democracies and professionalised politics at a specific historic conjuncture. Among them are, in Bourdieu’s view, the symbolic and practice of representative delegation, which classify subcategories of delegation (represented, representatives, representative relations). Another such classification is the image of the political market, in which electoral success or public opinion’s approval of a political brand, which is distinguished against the brands of competitors, evidences political authority. The representative claim may undermine itself and delegitimise political authority if, measured against these imaginings and the way professional politics is conducted, it appears as arbitrary self-empowerment. Potentially, the effort to symbolically discursively construct political authority hence entails its delegitimation and undermines the credibility of an office-holder or public speaker. Political legitimation, from that perspective, is the intersubjective-interpretive agency that keeps the complicit relations of power intact, while delegitimation exposes them as arbitrary, deconstructing imaginings and discourse formations of legitimate power conferral.

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Such conceived, political legitimation helps to refocus the discourse analysis of legitimising language use. This is the second heuristic gain the concept of symbolic violence in representative politics provides to the present study. It suggests focusing the analysis on those legitimising discourse practices through which the imaginings of power conferral are sustained or adjusted. It raises the question of  how, through these practices, ‘delegation’ is articulated with other imaginings of legitimate power conferral and how the categories of represented and representatives might be adjusted to accommodate the postdemocratic nature of EU governance. More particularly, the construction of political authority could be studied in the following features of legitimising language use: • strategies of representation (nomination, modification, referencing) that constitute the ‘represented’ and the ‘representatives’, qualifying them as being united and congruent in specific demands; • strategies of argumentation (rationalisation, authorisation, moral evaluation) and plausibilisation that persuade in favour of a specific common cause shared by represented and representatives; • further instances of legitimising language use that signal the disinterestedness of the representative, such as the highly conventionalised topoi of the common interest, including pro bono publico (in the common, public interest), pro bono eorum (in their interest) and pro bono nobis (in our interest), or fallacies like argument ad populum, which suggest that something is accurate because of it being the vox populi of the masses, widespread opinion or consensus; • strategies of plausibilisation that enhance complicity with the audience by coining specific expressions, figures, illustrations or allusions known in the speech community. The aim of such study is not, however, to pattern-match (and reify) the occurrence of ‘representative talk’. Instead of stopping at a descriptive reconstruction of these forms, the concept of symbolic violence urges us to review and deconstruct these discourse practices with regard to the symbolic violence they may entail, that is, how they accommodate political expropriation and in what ways this relates to the self-referential logics of the field of social practice at stake. In the following, I will demon-

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strate, in exemplary fashion, how the insights gained from Bourdieu’s assessment of symbolic violence in representative politics can be used to expose the discursive construction of political authority. The analysis of Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory speech, which I conducted in the previous section (see Sect. 3.1), will be enriched with further quotes from the speech and reread in light of how representative relations might be constructed therein.

 he Construction of Political Authority in Giscard T d’Estaing’s Speech The fragment of analysis in the previous section (Sect. 3.1) showed that Giscard d’Estaing’s speech was geared towards convincing the Conventioneers of a proactive understanding of their mandate and towards constituting the Convention as a self-confident collective agent. We saw that this agent is forged by a compelling cause of joint action: the necessity and historical task to make the European Union fit for the future, constructed by various argumentative strategies. The analysis below will show that the agent is also formed through various discourse strategies, mainly strategies of representation (nomination, modification, referencing), that endow that agent with political authority by ascribing to it some representative task. To begin with, Giscard d’Estaing backgrounds the actual act of power conferral—the mandate laid down in the Laeken Declaration—and the representative relations that, de facto, constitute the Convention. He does so not only by explicitly calling upon the Conventioneers to disregard the briefs of the institutions by which they were delegated: the member states’ and accession states’ governments and parliaments, the European Parliament, subnational bodies and the Commission (Appendix E, line 252–256). He also continuously backgrounds these institutions by only mentioning them in a row with other agents, such as the civil society, different generations of Europeans or individuals, thereby putting them in perspective with other relevant, if not more relevant, voices (referencing). In the place of the formally given, the president of the Convention constructs alternative representative relations. First, he gives the impression that Conventioneers somehow speak for their respective national prov-

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inces, homelands or constituencies. As the qualifying feature of the Convention, Giscard d’Estaing repeatedly foregrounds national diversity and Europeanness, for example when saluting the Conventioneers in various titular languages of the European Union, when naming them as hyphen Europeans (e.g. Italo-European) and when listing, on various occasions, different European nationalities, including those of the accession states, as if due recognition could (only) be given to the attendees when highlighting their national provenances in equal and proportional ways. Hence, at various points in his speech, Giscard d’Estaing suggests that national-cultural diversity is something shared by Conventioneers (modification, construction of complicity). What is more, he seems to imply that Conventioneers are delegated from their national provinces when announcing to them that, in case of successful constitution-drafting, you will be able to leave here and return home, whether you are Italo-­ European, Anglo-European, Polish-European, or any of the others, with the feeling of having contributed, modestly but effectively, to writing a new chapter in the history of Europe. (Appendix E, line 37–38, emphasis added)

The suggestion that someone is coming from and returning to a homeland, which is defined in national-European terms, instead of from/to the seat of the delegating institution (the respective capital, Brussels, Strasbourg etc.), triggers a familiar image of international delegation and implies that Conventioneers have come together as delegates to a multinational assembly similar to the Convention of Philadelphia that laid the foundations for the US. At the same time, Conventioneers are portrayed as forming a larger whole, at points simply called ‘Europe’ or ‘our continent’. This whole extends the Convention and includes all possible stakeholders of European integration as well as the EU populace, which is qualified by demographicbiographic features and different levels of involvement in the European project. Such forming of an in-group between Conventioneers and ‘Europe’ is achieved through referencing and modification in extended enumerations, in which binary qualities (member vs candidate, eldest vs youngest, cruel confrontations vs freedom and opportunity) are brought together, exemplifying the multitude and heterogeneity of all those affected by the Constitution process, for instance in the following quote:

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I shall conclude with a call for enthusiasm, a call to you, members of the Convention, and to the leaders of the Member States and the candidate countries, and to all the citizens of Europe, to the eldest, who were the victims of the cruel confrontations of the past, and to the youngest, who dream of a wide area of freedom and opportunity opening for them in Europe. (Appendix E, line 42–46)

This larger European whole, not the delegating institutions, is the imagined entity towards which the Convention is responsible in Giscard d’Estaing’s depiction. On behalf of that entity, the Convention has to act when drafting a reform proposal, regardless of the fact that it is not entitled to negotiate or legislate in the end. The sense of obligation towards ‘Europe’ is underlined by the use of the argument pro bono publico and pro bono eorum: “We must remedy them [the shortcomings of the decision-­ making machinery, A.K.] in the interest of Europe [publico], but also in the interest of the world [eorum]” (Appendix E, line 103–104) (topos signalling disinterestedness). A sense of obligation is also created in recurring mythopoesis about European integration as a success story that originates in the Enlightenment, was mastered by the founding fathers and so on, and whose continuation the Convention is called upon to facilitate. Obligation towards the achievements of the past (overcoming cruelties) and towards the future of the European idea (area of freedom) sounds in the quote above, too, when the European aspirations of the eldest and the youngest are mentioned and past and present rationales of European integration ‘read into’ them (narrative mythopoesis). There are two further ways in which Giscard d’Estaing generates political authority for the Convention, constructing more explicit representative relations between ‘Europe’ and the Conventioneers. On the one hand, he portrays the Convention as a deliberation-enhancing moderator, which does disinterested service to ‘Europe’ by also surveying the aspirations and aggregating interests of those who are not necessarily represented in the EU political process. On the other, he portrays the Convention, more classically, as trustee of the demands and needs of the European populace, doing disinterested service by responding to these demands and acting in congruence with them. The role of moderator emerges from the rather long text passage, in which Giscard d’Estaing lists the innovative methods the Convention will adopt in the first “lis-

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tening phase” of consultations to mobilise input from all quarters of European society, such as the civil society forum, interactive surveys, the Internet forum, and the Convention for the Young People of Europe (Appendix E, lines 145–191; taken up again in lines 262–267). The passage is characterised by a repetitive use of verbs that are related to dialogue and considerate interaction. They depict the Convention as being involved in a dialogical and nonpartisan relation to “interlocutors” in “the outside world”. The outside world that needs to be listened to is, again, constituted by enumerating and ranking the composite groups of the Convention, complemented by others, among whom those voices are highlighted as particularly listen-worthy that are not organised in the EU political process: We must embark on our task without preconceived ideas, and form our vision of the new Europe by listening constantly and closely to all our partners, governors and governees, economic and social partners, representatives of regional authorities—already present here—members of associations and civil society represented in the forum, but also those who have no other identity than that they form part of Europe. In listening, we must pay special attention to two groups: young people (…); and the citizens of the candidate countries, who will be both discovering the European Union and learning how it works. (Appendix E, line 153–162)

Giscard d’Estaing attributes to the Convention a particular representative task by highlighting it as an alternative-complementary channel for generating inspirational input for EU institutional reform. And he does so by means of evocation, that is, by portraying and arranging Convention consultations as if they were a public deliberation or government hearing, referring to the ethos and procedural standards of deliberative democracy and inclusive modes of new governance. The role of a trustee of the needs and wishes of Europeans is highlighted at various points of the speech. The many stakeholders of European integration are consistently portrayed as having certain “needs”, “demands”, “expectations”, “wishes”, “imaginations” and “dreams”. The Convention, on the other hand, is portrayed as accounting for these demands in the drafting of the reform proposal, listening to and taking up “what Europe wants” (Appendix E, line 171). The demand that

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Giscard d’Estaing prioritises is EU citizens’ assumed desire to “retain their natural attachment to their national identity” (Appendix E, line 139f ). In his problem assessment, he suggests that this desire is as pressing as the need to render the EU efficient in decision-making and in international politics; he underlines this assessment by reframing the theme of national diversity that he introduced with the salutation of the Conventioneers; and he reframes it again in the questions that he suggests should guide the Convention’s survey on European public opinion: Do they want a Europe tending towards homogeneity—a more uniform Europe—driven forward by a process of harmonisation? Or do they prefer a Europe which would keep its diversity, while respecting cultural and historical identities? (Appendix E, lines 172–177)

The questions have a purely rhetorical character and open up an alternative that is to be refuted from the start, considering that the EU officially aims for unity in diversity instead of any sort of homogeneity and uniformity, in particular in regard to cultural and historical identities. Yet, being rich in allusions to established debates about European integration, the questions pre-empt a certain interpretation of what the mandate for institutional reform is that can or cannot be derived from Europeans’ wishes. On the one hand, Giscard d’Estaing invokes the popular image that European integration is a zero-sum game, in which more integration means less nation, and according to which there are only two ways of positioning: wishing to rewind or wishing to advance the same sort of European integration that has been established. On the other, Giscard d’Estaing recalls the effort to ‘harmonise’ standards of production across the European Community, which failed in the 1980s and was replaced by an approach of mutual recognition of national standards, giving way to negative (regulation-removing) integration as a general approach to European integration. Using the term ‘harmonisation’ and linking it to cultural homogenisation, Giscard d’Estaing casts doubt on positive integration (the adoption of new EU-wide regulation), which integration- or federalist-minded Conventioneers might wish to push  for. Hence, by reading certain wishes and demands into the represented, Giscard d’Estaing anticipates established categories of debate and narrows the range of reforms to be considered, tacitly favouring a confederal arrange-

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ment and the perpetuation of negative integration. In both roles, that of the moderator of unknown demands and that of the trustee of known demands, the Convention derives its authority from demands and proposals that come from the bottom-up, issued by societal actors and taken up by the Convention. Giscard d’Estaing thus perpetuates the dualism of governors and governed or state and society that is at the core of the imaginary of delegation and conventional conceptions about how political legitimation works. In conclusion, we could say that the concept of symbolic violence in representative politics, applied as a heuristic tool for rereading legitimising language use in Giscard d’Eistaing’s speech, allows us to speculate how political authority is discursively generated in an EU arena, vis-à-vis an audience that includes all veto players of EU policymaking. What is striking is the great extent to which Giscard d’Estaing makes use of the imaginary of delegation (and deliberative reformulations) to underline the constitution-drafting authority of the Convention, despite of the fact that this authority was derived from treaty mandate. At the same time, he flexibly redefines what the characteristics of the represented are, alternating between European nationals, diverse stakeholders of European integration, two generational groups of stakeholders of the European idea, and a rather uniform demand-issuing European populace. With reference to the success story of European integration, he also introduces the complementary concept of obligation and a form of disinterestedness that is not derived from the congruence with representative’s wishes, but from (lessons from) history and international partners’ expectations. Yet, by suggesting that these are congruent with the two groups of stakeholders of the European idea, this source of political authority is somewhat integrated with the imaginary of representative delegation. By mixing representative delegation, inclusive modes of new governance and international delegation, Giscard d’Estaing stretches the concept of delegation beyond its roots in electoral democracy and intelligibilises other forms of representative relations that suit the EU setting, and that of the Convention more particularly. The definitions of legitimate power conferral thus promoted are no less symbolically violent than those of electoral delegation that Bourdieu assessed and that are familiar in the national context. At the time the

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speech was delivered, accession states had proved a greater degree of conformity with EU rules in ten years of accession preparations than any established member was ever required to. But, while they are honoured when talk is about the success story of European unification, they are relegated in a reference to their novicity, which marks them as a yet to become accustomed Other. They are also consistently ranked after established members in Giscard d’Estaing’s enumerations, which somewhat reifies the lesser prestige and voice they were ascribed in the Convention, for example when they were only belatedly admitted to an observer’s post in the Presidium. The obvious contradiction with the portrayal of the deliberation- and inclusion-enhancing moderator was exposed not only by Polish national conservatives, who demasked the Convention as a continuation of the power abuse which they judged had already prevailed during the accession negotiations (see Sect. 5.2). Civil society organisations also claimed  to have been co-opted for the Convention’s self-­ promotion, instead of being fully included (Pérez-Solórzano Borragán, 2007). The symbolic violence that remained unexposed, however, is Giscard d’Estaing’s naturalisation of national identities and his prioritisation of nationalist fears of European integration. Giscard d’Estaing’s depiction of “what Europe wants” is violent to all those who cannot or do not want to relate to one of the titular nations of the European Union, who have criticisms of European integration other  than sovereigntist concerns and who see no point in being confined to choosing either from unaltered modes of integration or less integration or from a confederation or centralised federalism. Importantly, the perspective developed by Bourdieu invites the reader to move beyond the deconstruction of such obvious impositions. Instead, it suggests exploring why the exclusions that are implied in ­specific constructions of political authority might be ‘bracketed’ and why the endowment of political authority is considered plausible by the audience, nevertheless. The Convention was able to assume political authority and decisively influence EU institutional reform, despite the perception of arbitrary self-empowerment. Most Conventioneers, indeed, developed the ‘Convention spirit’ that Giscard d’Estaing had appealed to. Drawing on Bourdieu, we could speculate that this was because Giscard d’Estaing’s constructions of political authority

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employed (accurately or not) taken-­for-­granted imaginings of the political process that are recognisable and intelligible to all (think of Giscard d’Estaing’s saying that Conventioneers “leave here and go home”) and because they were brought to the fore in a specific situative and field context, against which the particular use of established imaginings seemed compelling. Giscard d’Estaing gave his speech in the context of widespread criticism of intergovernmental decision-­making, or integration by stealth. In that context, any method of EU consensus-building that involved a broader set of actors and a public corrective, such as the Convention method, seemed a compelling and more legitimate choice. The portrayal of the Convention as enabling another, and better, representative relation and a more inclusive mode of consensus-building, hence, also fosters a competitive claim for political authority within the EU political field, vis-à-vis the established bodies of the European Union and the governments’ prerogatives, in particular, that they derive from their institutional role as ‘masters of the treaties’ during treaty revisions. The analysis of the introductory speech at the Convention also demonstrates that the construction of political authority not only involves imaginings of power conferral, but also more general assumptions about the adequate political association upon which the political process should be premised. For instance, when stressing that both the process and the outcome of Convention consultations ought to produce a strong feeling of attachment to the European Union, Giscard d’Estaing alludes to a communitarian vision of political association (see also analysis in Sect. 3.3). The following section will explore how political legitimation might work through the construction of legitimate political association.

3.3 Legitimation and the Construction of Political Association Discursive legitimation, the argument developed in this section, relies not only upon discourse practices that generate decision-making authority. Electoral delegation and deliberation, two of the authority-generating imaginaries whose discursive constitution we explored in the previous section, are premised upon the idea and practice of liberal democracy,

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and, hence, a conception of how political association is desirably and appropriately constituted. Whenever claims for political authority are made or evaluated and whenever political processes are classified and analysed, assumptions about desirable political order are involved. Pointing to the dichotomy of democracy versus autocracy as the chief classificatory divide in both the academic discipline of comparative politics and the political ideologies of the twentieth century, Gosepath et  al. state: “description and classification has always been part of polemical-political argument about which normative aspects of political order should be stressed” (Gosepath, Hinsch, & Rössler, 2008, p. 1275). In this section, I will recapitulate the polemical-political arguments about political association, which are likely to be employed in struggles over the EU’s legitimacy, and consider how they might refocus the analysis of legitimising language use. It is argued that, along with the complex of formation of classificatory practices that define legitimate political authority and its acquisition, for example in the concept of delegation, discourse practices of legitimation ought to be reflected with regard to classifications or discourse formations that define legitimate political association. The question of why humans (should) form a political association and how, through what institutions and what type of political community, has been pondered at least since antiquity; and answers have proliferated in various traditions of political thought. Their common subject is ‘polity’, which, in contemporary understanding, denotes a set of convictions and institutions that consolidate power and coordinate social relations among a particular collective within a given territory or realm of social activity, and which exists thanks to a collective of subjects orienting themselves towards a common governance-object (Corry, 2010). Since Aristotle, thoughts on polities relate to characteristics of the constituent political community that guarantee cohesion and  adequate power-­ regulating institutions, as well as to relations between constituencies and the constituted powers or criteria of legitimate power execution. Propositions and arguments addressing these themes have historically formed in the struggle for a political organisation that is independent of divine logics, clerics, despots, crown and nobility and introduces new sources of legitimate government. The struggle has formed what Michel Foucault calls the juridico-political or juridico-discursive understanding of power, that is, the assumption that “power must be exercised in accor-

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dance with a fundamental lawfulness” and is best realised in a state (Foucault, 1980, p. 88, quoted in Lemke, 2012, p. 11). This understanding came along with text-based, secular, rational (in Weber’s terms) and institutionally differentiated legal discourse, which was initially used to institute and coordinate ecclesiastical organs and later adopted for political bodies to orient and control binding decisions (Poggi, 2004, drawing on Harold Berman). The juridico-political imaginary of the state helped to plausibilise emancipation from clerical or kinship rule and paved the way for the liberal state, which focused on managing populations by regulating individuals’ freedoms rather than by disciplining them in an authoritarian fashion. At the same time, it proved symbolically violent in the sense that it backgrounds the parallel development of governmental techniques that entangle and subjectivise humans in specific ways that make them governable (Foucault, 2007). Following Horn, there are five main propositions  in political philosophy that provide reasons for power consolidation and social integration in juridico-political regimes, and which continue to inform polity-building (drawing on Horn, 2003, pp. 22–31): • anthropological: a politically constituted community is a necessary condition for a satisfactory individual life due to the social condition of human beings (Plato, Aristotle; taken up by socio-psychological approaches to political theory); • utilitarian: state-like political orders are indispensable for the efficient and just provision and distribution of public goods (Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick; taken up by regulatory theory, political system theory and theories of global justice); • strategic-contractualist: state-like political orders follow from an enlightened individual cost-benefit calculation, which suggests that a government be entrusted with power consolidation against the background of threatening violence or property loss (Hobbes; taken up by Gauthier and realist and rationalist political theory); • moral-contractualist: state-like political orders are an instrument for the enforcement of public will and fundamental rights derived from natural law and human reason (Locke, Kant, Rousseau; taken up by liberalism, democracy theory, and (legal) theories of modern constitutionalism);

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• communitarian-intersubjective: political orders are constitutive for the emergence of a collective identity and tradition (Hegel; taken up by communitarian approaches to political theory and advanced towards postfoundationalism by theories of deliberative democracy). These propositions make up the rationales of modern statehood (or Staatsbegründungen). They each start from a certain motivation, derive an objective and suggest solutions and methods of polity-building, thereby also providing a certain definition of the constituency, the institutional architecture and legitimate relations between the two (see Table 3.2). While an anthropological approach starts from the sociability of human beings and identifies local communities as a constituency to be involved in decision-making, utilitarian approaches assume the need and demand for public goods as qualifying the constituency—a community of beneficiaries—and institutions ensuring efficient and just provision of these goods. Anthropological conceptions tend to stress involvement as a  polity-building modus and consider facilitating conditions (e.g. Aristotle’s oligarchic city state), whereas utilitarian conceptions see bottom-­up demands and top-down distribution as polity-building mechanisms and regulatory agencies as an  appropriate institutional solution. Contractualist approaches generally assume consent by the governed as method of polity-building, setting out  a consented legal basis for relaTable 3.2  Polity rationales Motivation Anthropological Utilitarian Strategic-­ contractualist Moral-­ contractualist Intersubjective-­ communitarian

Objective

Solution

Method

Zoon politicon Individual Agora accomplishment Misallocation Wealth Technocracy Cohesion Anarchy, War Security, Prosperity Sovereign state

Involvement

Natural law Human rights

Freedom Constitutional Self-­determination state

Consent

Given or evolving bonds

Sociality Gemeinschaft

Source: Own elaboration

Regulation Redistribution Consent

Symbolic Identification, representation deliberation

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tions between the constituency and its political institutions. But, depending on the attributes they ascribe to the constituency, they arrive at different conclusions as regards appropriate institutions. A strategic-­ contractualist approach assumes that self-interested human beings consent to a monopoly of physical power and legal authority (Hobbes’ Leviathan) in order to ensure security and prosperity. In contrast, moral contractualists stress human and civil rights and self-determination as attributes of a political community, which need to be protected by a functional division of power and a  direct or representative democracy. Finally, communitarian-intersubjective conceptions assume a moral-­ political community, which is pre-existing or formed through interaction and communication, and political institutions embodying that community and fostering its development. The classic polity rationales have encroached upon contemporary definitions of legitimate government, whether that might be efficient performance with regard to security, welfare and law enforcement; rule of law and accountability; procedural justice or democratic participation. A characteristic of modern nation-states, modern constitutionalism and nationalism as historical polity-building doctrines is the pooling of all polity themes and polity rationales in the figure of the state as an internationally acknowledged territorial unit (Gosepath et al., 2008, p. 880f ). This powerful configuration and the different experiences of nation- and state-building that are entrenched in national polities tend to suggest themselves as models for any building of political association, also outside the nation or state context. Scholars of ‘new constitutionalisms’ point out that classic polity rationales and modern constitutionalism serve to plausibilise the establishment of legal orders beyond the state, while these, in fact, selectively enforce only economic freedoms (Gill, 1998). Political debates on European integration, too, have touched upon the  themes and principles of polity-building and employ state formation as a reference (Diez, 1999; Jachtenfuchs, 2002; Jachtenfuchs, Diez, & Jung, 1997; Wodak & Weiss, 2005). They often raise the question of “whether the EU has statehood or should possess it and whether the EU should be attributed the same normative status as member states or should rather be considered a derivative institution” (Jachtenfuchs, 2002, p. 45, author’s translation). I will elaborate, below, how classic polity rationales have

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encroached upon political doctrines and analytical narratives of European integration (see Sect. 3.4) and what particular embodiment they have found in accounts of nation-building, state formation and constitutional struggles in Poland and France, the two national settings investigated in this book (see Sect. 3.5). At this point, however, I will consider how themes and rationales of polity-building, as a complex of classificatory practices or elements of a discourse formation, can inform a rereading of legitimising language use. The above review of recurrent polity rationales revealed that they have a certain argumentative-narrative structure (see Table 3.2). Polity rationales suggest that a specific type of polity and polity-building method is advisable (conclusion), given that humans and human life are structured in specific ways (e.g. as being essentially anarchic or endowed with natural rights and sociability) (warrant), and examples from the history of state formation might be employed for substantiation (grounds). Legitimate political association, hence, seems to be constructed and classified in ‘analytical narratives’ of polity-building, that is, temporal-causal narratives that relate a particular outcome (an expected or realised form of polity) to particular reasons and starting conditions. Their ‘plot’ relies less on the dramaturgy of narration, however, than on philosophical-­ scientific presuppositions and a recombination of ideal-type historical examples in line with them.6 Using the lens of analytical narratives, the level of abstraction can be raised: instead of focusing on certain known propositions of a political theory (such as redistribution in utilitarianism or human rights in moral contractualism), the focus opening up through this heuristic tool is on  A narrative, more generally, is the depiction of a causal or temporal sequence of events related to an intriguing event or phenomenon. It links complication (the introduction of a difficult situation or puzzle) with a solution and provides evaluation (Labov & Waletzky, 1967). Poststructuralist reformulations of this definition stress that such ‘plot’ is, however, not a universal semiotic structure, but emerges only in the course of narration (cf. Baroni, 2007; Ricœur, 1983). The notion of ‘analytical narrative’ is taken from Bates, Greif, Levi, Rosenthal, and Weingast (1998) and McLean (2003). They use ‘analytical narratives’ as a research strategy, not as a heuristic tool of deconstruction as I do. They argue that scientific reasoning should rely on dense historical description, which is, however, informed by macro-theoretical assumptions such as rational choice. These assumptions, in turn, instruct the formation and selection of ideal-type historical examples. ‘Plotting’ here involves constructing an argument through the reconfiguration of established plots alongside alternative macro-theoretical assumptions. 6

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discourse strategies that link and rearrange themes and rationales of polity-­building in causal narration. At the centre of the analyst’s attention are, then, the links established between specific attributes of humans or human agency that are shared by a specific collective, on the one hand, and methods and outcomes of polity-building, on the other. The shift of perspective from the propositional content to the narrative-causal composition of narratives of polity-building will permit exploring recombinations of polity themes and polity rationales in constructions of political association beyond the state. Let me show what insights can be generated when applying this lens to Giscard d’Estaing’s speech at the inaugural meeting of the Convention.

 he Construction of Political Association in Giscard T d’Estaing’s Speech In the analysis of Giscard d’Estaing’s speech conducted so far, we saw that the president of the Convention uses several discourse practices of legitimation to convince fellow Conventioneers of a proactive understanding of their mandate: he conjures up a decisive moment, in which the Convention appears as a game changer (see Sect. 3.1), and endows that political agent with political authority by suggesting that the Convention acts as a representative of and in congruence with the preferences of all the stakeholders of European integration (see Sect. 3.2). The construction of a representative function is further backed and the significance of the Convention’s work enhanced by invoking polity rationales in a way that envisages and intelligibilises political association beyond the state and establishes the Conventioneers as an avant-garde drafting the foundations of such an association. For the current illustrative purpose, I will outline the use of only one narrative of polity-building that runs through the speech (for further details, see Sect. 5.1). It sounds in the motive of national diversity or multinationality that recurs at various points in the speech. Whether in the salutations or in the portrayals of Conventioneers and Europeans, Giscard d’Estaing highlights national diversity and the intermingling of European and national as the essential and shared characteristic of the Conventioneers and the to-be-represented. From this

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conception of the attributes of the EU’s political community, Giscard d’Estaing derives his conclusion as to what type of polity and polity-­ building method ought to be furthered by the Convention. This causal argument is presented in a mythopoetical narrative, in the quote below. In the text passage, the end of the Cold War is seen as a turning point. The motive of European integration that supposedly prevailed before—a stress on integration as a means to overcome national identities—is juxtaposed with a motive of European integration that supposedly will become predominant afterwards and will be reinforced by the entry of further members with the upcoming enlargement—a stress on national identities to be guarded and accommodated with integration: there is, in my view, one prime reason [for Europe marking time, A.K.]: the difficulty of combining a strong feeling of belonging to the European Union with a continuing sense of national identity. This difficulty already exists today. But it will be accentuated by the number and diversity of States taking part tomorrow in the life of the European Union. This requirement is relatively new. During the first decades of the union of Europe, when national identities were still strong—to the point of fuelling bloody confrontations in order to protect or extend them, and when only a small and relatively homogeneous Europe was involved—the only concern was to further European integration. Since the 1990s, we have witnessed the growth of another need: the need for compatibility between the desire to be part of a strong European Union, and to remain solidly rooted in national political, social and cultural life. We must ensure that governments and citizens develop a strong, recognised, European ‘affectio societatis’, while retaining the natural attachment to their national identity. It was in light of all these aspects that the Laeken European Council decided to create the Convention of the Future of Europe assigning to us the task of preparing for the reform of Europe’s structures and—if we prove equal to the task—setting us on the path towards a Constitution for Europe. (Appendix E, lines 125–144)

From this temporal narrative, Giscard d’Estaing develops a causal argument that fosters, in its warrant, a communitarian vision of political associa-

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tion. The argument can be paraphrased as follows: judging from the need to retain national attachments that has recently emerged and considering that more national identities will call for recognition after enlargement (grounds), we will need a constitution that allows Europeans to identify with European integration without giving up on their national attachments (conclusion), because, in order to flourish, cultural and societal bonds need recognition and constitutional embodiment (warrant). Giscard d’Estaing imagines the political association of the European Union to be grounded in a strong feeling of belonging to both nation and the EU, and that alienation can be healed by fostering ‘dual’ identification. That identity, in particular in its national aspect, is culturally defined, that is, as habitual ways of doing “national political, social and cultural life”.7 In the last paragraph of the given quote, however, Giscard d’Estaing’s communitarian narrative of polity-building is linked with a contractualist polity-building method: the drafting of a constitution. The idea that a European constitution, symbolising a pan-European social contract, will allow Europeans to develop a feeling of belonging has been introduced by European federalists, who have repeatedly and unsuccessfully, pushed for a European constitution. Giscard d’Estaing ­seemingly invokes this tradition, among other things, in the term ‘affectio societatis’, which denotes the common will of legal persons or entities coming together in a new legal entity. But, in contrast to the German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, who took up this federalist line in his speech at Humboldt University Berlin in 2000, Giscard d’Estaing avoids any explicit reference. At a later point in his speech, he refers, instead, to the Messina conference in 1955 (Appendix E, line 286f ), which has come to symbolise the overcoming of decision-making deadlock among member states and marks the beginning both in the mythopoetical success story of European integration and in Giscard d’Estaing’s story of incessant progress through continuous treaty revision. At Messina, the foreign ministers of six member states (later to be remembered as the ‘founding  In the speech, Giscard d’Estaing does not transpose this culturalist conception of social bonds to the European level. However, in his later campaign against the EU’s decision to grant to Turkey candidate status amidst the electoral victory of the Islamist party AKP, he explicitly stresses the Jewish-Christian heritage as decisive criterion of belonging, thus promoting the culturalist ‘Carolingian’ conception of EU cohesion purportedly also endorsed by the founding fathers. 7

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members’) agreed on a declaration that committed participants to economic integration and paved the way for the founding Treaties of Rome. Hence, when Giscard d’Estaing invokes the contractualist-­communitarian understanding of constitution-drafting, he does so primarily to locate the Convention’s work in the established tradition of treaty revision as a process of constitutionalisation driven from within EU institutions. Nevertheless, such a reading renders the conception of the Convention as a constitutional assembly intelligible, and the different representative roles that Giscard d’Estaing attributed to the Convention merge into one: that of an agent endowed with the task of mobilising European identity-building, whether by attentively involving as many as possible in the constitution-drafting process (the deliberation-enhancing moderator), by accounting for widespread sentiments (the responsive institutional engineer), or by paying tribute to national provenance (the multinational assembly). Hence, the political-interpretive authority and the representative relations that Giscard d’Estaing assigns to the Convention are premised upon a particular, communitarian-­ contractualist, construction of political association (for further constructions, see Sect. 5.1). We will see later on that the communitarian-contractualist vision of the EU is not actually what Giscard d’Estaing, the Convention or the intergovernmental conferences proposed as a template for institutional-­ building (see Chap. 5). The Draft Constitution indeed further ‘constitutionalised’ EU law, in that it integrated the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and a preamble as binding suprapositive references and streamlined the EU’s existing legal texts into a constitution-like systematic. However, the characteristic institutional balance between federal and confederal elements and the EU’s economic constitution was kept nearly unchanged, and the involvement of non-institutional actors remained marginal, in fact. The allusion to a (federalist) vision of uniting Europeans in a social contract did not have any institutional consequences, it simply rendered Giscard d’Estaing’s plea for a constitutional document palpable: it enhanced a constitutional conception of treaty revision and rendered the Convention’s task palpable. However, what is interesting from the CDA perspective adopted in this book is not to expose Giscard d’Estaing’s arbitrary and potentially delegitimising self-­

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empowerment of EU institutions and Conventioneers as constitutional engineers, but to explore why the constitutional imaginary proved to be so compelling that it could structure and mobilise collective action at the Convention and beyond. At the time that Giscard d’Estaing delivers his speech, the communitarian-contractualist imaginary is widely employed in talk about EU institutional reform, a practice that reveals a performativity of its own that extends beyond the speaker’s audience-specific communicative plan. The ‘constitution speak’ and implied polity constructions, apparent from the brief analysis, rely on a multitude of intertextual references. In Giscard d’Estaing’s speech, some are cued explicitly, such as the Laeken Declaration, the Messina conference or ‘harmonisation’. Others remain implicit, such as the allusion to the EU’s constitutive principle of ‘unity in diversity’ that sounds in Giscard d’Estaing’s many variations on the theme of multinationality. In all these instances, Giscard d’Estaing invokes EU-specific discourses and draws on already-existing adoptions of polity rationales to European integration to substantiate his construction of legitimate political association. The following two sections will review such likely intertexts of the EU constitutional debate in more detail. Before recapitulating the national constitutionalisms and narratives of state formation and EU membership handed down in Poland and France (see Sect. 3.5), I will review narratives of European integration that have been developed by practitioners and academic experts concerned with EU politics.

3.4 N  arratives of European Integration as Polity-Constructing Plots The objective of this section is to explore what EU-specific polity discourse is likely to be employed as intertext in the EU constitutional debate, focusing on the doctrines and narratives of European integration that have been developed by EU practitioners and EU academics up until the EU’s constitutional episode. If we follow the general assumption that those who are professionally involved in setting out the principles of (di-) vision of society, the politicians, journalists and social scientists, are also chiefly involved in defining and constructing political authority and

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association, and if we follow the assessment that EU integration has been driven by (legal, administrative, academic) specialists, their accounts of European integration need special consideration as a relevant intertext of the EU constitutional debate. In the following, I will develop the argument that the ‘theories of European integration’, which have become canonical in European integration studies and tend to be implied in political struggles over European integration, can be considered ‘polity-­ constructing plots’ that use classic polity rationales to construct legitimate political association beyond the state. This reading is developed through the lens of ‘narratives of polity-building’ introduced in the previous section and uses Ben Rosamond’s discussion of theories of European integration as main reference (Rosamond, 2000). In their overall structure, theories of European integration are temporal-­causal narratives that relate a particular outcome (an expected or realised form of European integration) to particular reasons and starting conditions. However, their narration is strongly formatted by scientific presuppositions. This is what Bates et  al. call ‘analytic narratives’: they lend structure and plausibility from macro-theoretical assumptions, such as rational choice, rather than from the dramaturgy of narration (Bates et al., 1998; McLean, 2003). Plotting here involves constructing an argument through the reconfiguration of established plots alongside alternative macro-theoretical assumptions.8 Seen through the lens of analytical narratives, the theories of European integration and their ­ reflection in political doctrines appear as efforts to reformulate principles of modern statehood against the background of changing geopolitical conditions, reconfiguring classic polity topics and polity rationales. Throughout the last fifty years of imagining and explaining European integration, three overlapping shifts seem to have occurred: a first reconfiguration, where (some of the) classic polity rationales were attributed to the supranational level of EU governance; a second, where the driving force of the nation-state within the EU setting was dispersed; and a third, where the presuppositions of the realist-rationalist project were  Hence, the scheme of analytical narratives allows the capture of polity construction on the more abstract level of discourse formation that is not accessible through the study of particular polity themes or polity rationales. It offers an additional level of reflection which helps in estimating the implications of the recombination of polity themes and polity rationales. 8

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‘de-­essentialised’ and called into question (for a similar phasing related to subjects of investigation, however, see Diez & Wiener, 2004; for situating the phases in the genealogy of social and political sciences, see Rosamond, 2007). Let me show this in more detail. Initial debate about the possibility of ‘unifying’ the European countries was entrenched in polemical argument (both in social sciences and politics) about how to overcome the ‘systemic errors’ that had led to Fascism and the two world wars. Those advocating an idealist programme of democratic internationalism—that is, who believed in the amelioration of conflict by means of constitutional engineering and spread of liberal values—identified the nation-state and the state-centred international system as warrant of nationalism and as causes of disaster. They sought institutional mechanisms that would render the nation-state obsolete or less conflict-generative. Those continuing to believe in the inevitability of ‘realist’ power politics as naturally resulting from material assets and national prestige blamed the pre- and interwar system of failed balance of power and sought mechanisms to improve interstate cooperation (Rosamond, 2000, p. 21). The pioneering ‘theories of European integration’—federalism, functionalism, transactionalism, and neo-functionalism—can be read as programmes of anti-realist thinking that sought to disperse the statebased international system. Federalism and functionalism were particularly strong as (contested) political doctrines that mobilised political elites for the ‘European idea’; while transactionalism and neo-functionalism were designed as formal scientific theories in line with the behaviourist trend of that time (Rosamond, 2000, p. 50). All four theories, however, operated at the border between theory and advocacy and strove to establish particular views both in the scientific and the political universe. And all of them used classical polity rationales to argue for political association beyond the state. Federalism is an elastic concept that includes centripetal approaches, which stress equality among component units, central (top-down) coordination and unitary integration, and centrifugal approaches, which advocate autonomy of the component units and confederal (bottom-up) arrangements (Schmidt, 2004). The shared assumption is that vertical distribution of power helps to balance functional-regulatory exigencies

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(provision of security and welfare) and the self-determination of component units and individuals.9 The emergence of this system is imagined according to one of the following: societal-procedural conceptions which expect autonomous local structures to develop a larger system of representation (Althusian tradition); contractualist conceptions which expect federal systems to result from rational agreement among autonomous units (Kantian tradition); or functional-institutional conceptions that focus on the mechanisms fostering and stabilising federal systems (US federalist tradition). Hence in theory, the federalist mindset also accommodates ‘confederal’ conceptions which argue for downward devolution of competences for the sake of more efficient and tangible problem-solving (Burgess, 2004, p. 30). The political projects imagining a federal future for the European continent reflect some of these strands (Burgess, 2004, pp. 31–34; Rosamond, 2000, pp.  26–29). However, the ‘federalist formula’ that emerged as a political programme in the 1940s and 1950s foregrounded contractualist and functionalist lines and drove confederal-centrifugal conceptions from the scene. Accordingly, merging the European nation-states in a federal system was a lesson to be drawn from the two world wars that had exposed the failure of nation-states to secure lasting peace and prosperity. Following the US example, the federal European state should emerge from a constitutional process approved by the European populaces. It was supposed to generate efficiencies of scale through limited centralisation and upward devolution of policy competence, balanced by democratic impulses and by vertical and horizontal checks (Rosamond, 2000, p. 26). The new order was expected to prevent aggrandising politics and international conflict by shifting state functions onto a new supranational unit. This should disaggregate the fatal link between the claim for self-determination of a nation, on the one hand, and the physical and material power of the state, on the other. While European federalists were aware of their marginal position as “small nuclei of nonconformists” (Spinelli, 1972, p. 68), who had arisen from the experience of Résistance,  The projection of a federal system as securing individual freedoms and pursuit of happiness qua horizontal and vertical checks is a conceptual innovation introduced by the US federalists who pled for a US federal constitution in 1787–1788 (cf. Gosepath et al., 2008, p. 322). 9

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they assumed disapproval of the nation-state to be widespread. In particular, the ‘gradualists’ among them hoped to mobilise people’s support for the federal idea and to bypass the resistance of the stakeholders of the old system, the national governments (Rosamond, 2000, p. 29). Hence, federalists made much use of strategic-­contractualist reasoning when advocating a new political order. This impetus has driven various moves of integration, even though the actual outcome of institutional engineering never lived up to contractualist imagination, but remained restricted to a (more federal) rebalancing of the existing components of the EU system. ‘Neo-federalists’ expected that the EU’s institutional constellation (the precarious balance between community- and intergovernmental logics, the democratic deficit) will revive this impetus and will enhance strategic-contractualist solutions (Pinder, 1991), and the EU’s constitutional episode, temporarily, provided plausibility to this reading. At its pioneering period in the 1950s, federalism was contested even among proponents of European unification, because it was feared that it reproduced the failings of territorial states on a larger scale. Transactionalism, functionalism, and the succeeding neo-functionalism provided alternative scenarios that sought to transcend or circumvent state-like organisation. Karl Deutsch, who introduced transactionalism, assumed that the state system failed because of an absence of communication among European states and societies, understood in the sense of cybernetics as flow and control of information. The increase in communicative interaction among people, rather than the emergence of international organisations (whether functional or territorial), would help to build trust and reduce the risk of confrontation. Depending on technical capacities and capabilities of communication, reciprocal acknowledgement and mutual responsiveness might grow and result in ‘pluralistic security communities’ which are loyal to each other independent of formal organisation. ‘Amalgamated security communities’ relying upon an institutional merger of previous units, on the contrary, might trigger divergent social mobilisation (Deutsch, 1964). The intersubjective-­ communitarian, or rather, intersubjective-cosmopolitan, reasoning in Deutsch’s thought has been actualised recently in studies on European public spheres. Drawing on Habermas’ theory of communicative action, they expect transnational problem-solving communities (rather than

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loyalties) to emerge from engagement with shared agendas (rather than from improved communication techniques); they stick to assumptions about the consensus-facilitating effects of reciprocal acknowledgement in communication and its prior importance compared to formal (democratic) institutions (Eder & Kantner, 2000; Eriksen, 2005). Functionalism, initiated by David Mitrany in the 1930s, rested upon the diagnosis that realist doctrines, since they were focused on the augmentation of national prestige and influence, distracted from efficient allocation of resources and thereby spurred confrontation. Peace among Europeans, he suggested, would only be ensured by functional, task-­ oriented international regimes, which satisfied the welfare needs of interdependent societies. He expected these regimes, once commissioned by national governments, to evolve through the self-selection of administrative-­ technocratic procedures. Thus, functionalism clearly employed utilitarian reasoning to render intelligible technocratic-­regulatory institutionalisation beyond the state. Neo-functionalist reformulations remained true to this rationale (Haas, 1958, 1964; Lindberg, 1963; Schmitter, 1971). However, they qualified the implied automaticity and stressed the additional importance of purposeful, self-interested actors that pushed for regional integration. In particular, representatives of sectoral interests were expected to use the opportunities which opened up with the new routines and procedures of supranational regimes and to form alliances with Eurocrats and experts in their field in order to press for further integration. Hence, neo-functionalism linked to rationalism as a meta-theory in the social sciences and its application to political competition in pluralist systems. It also connected to the strategies of the founding architects of the European Community, in particular with the Monnet method of incremental, economy-led evolution of supranational, regulatory regimes (Rosamond, 2000, p. 50). More recently, neo-­ functionalist reasoning has been used to explain the incremental autonomisation of EU law (its gaining of supremacy and constitutional status) as a result of continuous jurisprudential work of self-interested EU judges, who took advantage of their niche and expert position (Burley & Mattli, 1993). Their mission was also a utilitarian one, shared with the European Commission: to improve anti-discrimination and consumers’ rights through EU legal governance.

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Political science scholars thus integrated into the analytical narrative of neo-functionalism legal scholars’ investigation into the EU’s ‘integration by law’ (Haltern, 2004). They observed that, since the European Single Act in 1987 and the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, the EU treaties have inspired legal reasoning and design similar to constitutional statecraft: “in critical aspects the Community has evolved and behaves as if its founding instruments were not a treaty governed by international law, but, to use the language of the European Court of Justice, a constitutional charter governed by a form of constitutional law” (Weiler, 1999, p. 221). The quasi-constitutional character of EU law goes back to provisions of the Maastricht and the Amsterdam Treaties that laid down the principles of supremacy and direct effect.10 Subsequent doctrinal work of EU lawyers and the case law of the European Court of Justice established a unifying legal imperative which intermingled national and European law and which universalised the economic freedoms of the Common Market, appealing to their more general normative content such as ­anti-­discrimination (Bankowski & Scott, 1996). Hence, European law took on constitutional functions in that it maintained legal validity and certainty in the relationships between individuals and state or supra-state structures (Birkinshaw, 2003, p. 3). It regulated power authorisation and power separation by drawing on universal and EU-specific legal sources. Legal scholars regard this outcome as “purposive side-product” of European integration: in the shadow of the “benign neglect” of the member states and drawing on the tacit support of other EU bodies, the European Court of Justice was “extraordinarily successful at inducing legal and political elites to reproduce the modes of reasoning it had applied” (Longo, 2006; Stone Sweet, 2004, p. 243). The period under investigation in this book can be regarded as the climax of such self-­ asserted constitutionalisation: for the first time, politicians publicly claimed that the constitutional character of European law had to be  The principle of ‘supremacy’ stipulates that, in case of conflict, EC law will always be given precedence over national law. It was established by the judgement of the CJEU (then ECJ) on the Costa vs. ENEL case in 1964 and reaffirmed by the judgement on the British Factortame case in 1990. The principle of ‘direct effect’, which was first established in the case of Van Gend en Loos vs. Nederlandse Administratie de Belastingen (1963), says that EC law and CJEU judgements apply to individuals as well as to member states, which established the possibility of litigation before the CJEU for individuals. 10

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unveiled and codified in a ‘constitutional momentum’ of formal constitution-­drafting (see Sect. 5.1). Neo-functionalism, meanwhile, received many criticisms and triggered series of academic debate. In the 1960s and 1980s, it gave rise to alternative analytic narratives which likewise endorsed rationalist assumptions, but arrived at different conclusions depending on their ontological-­ ideological standpoint. The utilitarian justification of a ‘functionalist’ mode of economy-led integration—prosperity and cohesion thanks to the Common Market—was challenged by scholars applying a historical-­materialist paradigm. Ernest Mandel, Stuart Holland and Peter Cocks argued that negative economic integration helped to perpetuate late capitalist modes of capital accumulation and the implied relations of exploitation. It would lead to a concentration in the financial and industrial sector, with community institutions only serving and regulating their concerns (Cox, 1980; Holland, 1980; Mandel, 1967). They attacked the uncritical import of liberal economic orthodoxy into neo-functionalism, in particular the celebration of dominant ideological coalitions between ‘proactive business elites’ and Eurocrats. Cocks warned that their activities and the continuing interpenetration of national economies would not only entangle national politics (as suggested by neo-functionalists), but essentially reorganise state power as an instrument of transnational profit monopolies (Rosamond, 2000, p. 84f ). This argument, while rarely integrated into the official canon of ‘integration theories’, has gained salience in the leftist and alter-globalist critiques of economic internationalisation and of the EU’s deregulatory policies since the 1990s. It has been modified and elaborated in the international political economy and in regulation-theoretical and neoGramscian studies of European integration (Bieler, 2002; Bieling, Jäger, & Ryner, 2016; van Apeldoorn, 2002). Instead of following the post-Marxist line of critical revision, political scientists’ disputes centred on the likelihood of further integration, feeding the divide between ‘supranationalists’ and ‘intergovernmentalists’. These disputes no longer expounded the problem and desirability of regional integration, but contested the centre of authority which was in control of (further) integration. The first group, the supranationalists, expected internal dynamics of supranational institutions to push inte-

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gration, relying on neo-functionalist and neo-institutionalist assumptions; the second group expected integration to halt or to remain restricted to ‘low politics’, thus refuting the spillover hypothesis of the neo-­ functionalists. Intergovernmentalists maintained that confederal arrangements were the more likely outcome. Stanley Hoffman substantiated this claim from a realist perspective, pointing to the divergent geopolitical-­material interests of the member states and the prevalent importance of national prestige as they appeared in Charles de Gaulle’s policy of the empty chair or the Luxembourg compromise (Hoffmann, 1966). Andrew Moravcsik, instead, chose a liberal paradigm, arguing that domestic political dynamics and sectoral interests would eventually decide about the decision-making outcome at EU level, even though entanglement in supranational institutions had changed the calculus (Moravcsik, 1993). The two interventions reintroduced a narrative that attributes particular importance to states and national governments, due to their established polity-being: as collective actors entitled to speak for the entire populace in the name of ‘national interests’, as a result of domestic political will formation and renewed social contract (Rosamond, 2000, p. 77). What is more, the intergovernmentalist interventions reformulated as scientific-analytical argument what had been a normative-political dispute (whether states should continue to be decisive actors). Thereby, they actualised the divide between internationalists and realists and rendered it a discipline-constitutive controversy. Now that the hybrid character of the European Union is common sense in European integration studies, the quarrel has shifted to the epistemological level; and the question is whether bargaining or learning and persuasion is the more convincing explanation, be that in intergovernmental or supranational settings (Rittberger & Schimmelfennig, 2005). Hence, rather than the source of authority, the different modes of rationality are expounded, questioning presuppositions of the realist project: the givenness of (national) interests and the predominance of logics of consequentiality (as opposed to logics of social appropriateness, for instance). This shift has also given room to approaches that, starting with Puchala’s ideas on the concordance system (Puchala, 1972), have tried to conceive of the EU as a political system of a special kind. Within that spectrum, multilevel governance and meta-­ governance approaches take an interesting mediating position. Instead of

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arguing that either intergovernmental or supranational logics and actors will prevail, they point to the intermingling of actors at different levels of territorial government (including the regional level, empowered by EU structural funds) and hold that coordination between these relays, rather than delegation or federalisation, is the EU’s polity-building modus (Hooghe & Marks, 2003; Jessop, 2007; Kohler-Koch & Jachtenfuchs, 2004; Wallace, 2005). The narrative of multilevel governance no longer rests upon the opposition of nation-state and supranational dynamics, but questions the underlying assumptions of this opposition: instead of hierarchical (territorial or functional) government, it assumes heterarchy and fragmented, loosely connected, legal regimes; instead of clear-cut ideological coalitions, it considers actors from various fields of society to be involved in negotiation; and, in addition to national and supranational loyalties, it stresses those at regional and local levels. While there may appear to be echoes of federalist thinking in MLG [multilevel governance, AK] language about tiers of authority, MLG does not seek to depict a polity governed by constitutional rules about the locations of power. (Rosamond, 2000, p. 111)

Rather, multi-governance narratives seek to account for multiple modalities of authority, fluidity and uncertainty. In so doing, they not only revoke the actorness of the nation-state as power and regulation ­monopoly (as do integrationist narratives, whether of federalist, neo-­functionalist or neo-institutionalist kind), but disperse the linkage between polity rationales, on the one hand, and hierarchical government, on the other. To sum up, with the exception of intergovernmentalism, the theories of European integration can be read as causal narratives which break up the union between the modern nation-state and classic polity rationales. They shift selected polity rationales to a super- or supranational level (federalism, transactionalism, (neo-)functionalism), locate polity-­ building dynamics in the supranational setting itself (neo-functionalism, neo-institutionalism), or disperse polity attributes across levels of territorial government and societal organisation (multilevel governance). This reconfiguration allows the projection of a polity onto the European level. Moreover, the narratives suggest particular ways of (not) accommodating the national and the super- or supranational level of political order.

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Intergovernmentalist and federalist imaginations compete about exclusive polity attributes for either the national or the supernational level. From an intergovernmentalist perspective, supranational bodies are only intelligible if they work as agencies that assist the member states in selected tasks; from a federalist perspective, member states are plausible only as subordinate (federal) entities. Both draw on ‘modern statehood’ and claim for themselves the experience of state- and nation-building either prospectively (federalism) or post-factum (intergovernmentalism). The opposition of exclusive attributions is softened in transactionalist and (neo-)functionalist imagination: only certain polity attributes are dissolved out of their national entanglement, while others remain exclusive attributes of the national polity. The opposition is dispersed to the greatest extent in multilevel imaginations where principles of modern statehood are turned postmodern: they are de-essentialised and realigned across levels of territorial government and policy networks. Hence, in reformulating classic polity rationales, the narratives also construct possibilities of mediation and co-optation between the two main levels of government within the EU setting. They suggest reconfiguring either the legitimate level of territorial government and constituency, the source of legitimate policymaking (national governments or supranational procedures), or its logics (driven by material interest, cost-benefit calculation or consensus-oriented communication and social norms). These three sites of reformulation are also potential sites of political-ideological struggle. Indeed, despite increasing scientification, these polity-constructing plots continuously feed into EU expert discourse and easily translate into one or the other political doctrine, for example intergovernmentalism into sovereigntist programmes, supranationalism into integrationist programmes, multilevel governance into regionalist advocacy for devolution or secession. They crystallise in existing slogans or in plays on them (Europe of the nations, … the people, … the regions) and suggest themselves as guidelines in cases of decision-making deadlock. They also serve as references for the definition of national EU membership projects, that is, competing definitions of policies to be pursued by member state representatives in EU institutions to serve ‘national’ preferences and accommodate the national polity. Given their importance for political

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mobilisation and justification, it is likely that narratives of European integration and narratives of EU membership are a decisive intertextual reference for debates on the EU constitution. In the following section, I will review the national narratives of polity-building that are inscribed in the constitutional struggles of Poland and France and consider the narratives of EU membership that have formed in domestic political competition.

3.5 N  arratives of Polity-Building in Poland and France Poland and France, the two countries chosen as a national setting to the EU constitutional debate, dispose of distinct traditions of constitutionalism, linked to different experiences of nation-building and state formation. These traditions are likely to make up an important intertextual background of the EU constitutional debate—carried forward in documents of various kind, speculative speeches of politicians, cultural-­ collective symbols of constitutional moments and constitutional struggle. I will briefly summarise instances that have moulded Polish and French constitutionalisms, attached conceptions of statehood and nationhood, and derived formulae developed to accommodate these conceptions with European integration.

Nation- and State-Building and Constitutionalism Poland and France were the two continental-European countries to first establish modern constitutions of republican aspirations. They both adopted a constitution in 1791. However, since then, constitutional developments have taken different paths in the two countries. In the crucial period of nation-building in the nineteenth century, they came close to Meinecke’s opposite ideal types (for Meinecke’s definition and its criticism, see Gosepath et al., 2008, pp. 875–879). France claimed to be an état-nation, which relied upon a unitary state as guarantor of civic values and national sovereignty (since the 1880s also popular sovereignty). Famously condensed in Ernest Renan’s definition, the model of the politi-

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cally constituted nation was eked out against the Restoration and enforced both as principle of internal power regulation and as imperialist expansion.11 Being under the foreign rule of European empires, Poland, on the contrary, was cultivated as a cultural nation, celebrated as emotional value in Polish romanticist literature and attached to a spiritual mission in the Polish messianic movement. It was to be sustained independently from structures of government (but with the help of the church) whether in the Polish homeland or in exile, through a struggle for cultural and confessional prevalence (in particular against Russification and Germanisation, and later also Soviet-type socialism) and through participation in fights for national independence elsewhere, under the slogan “for our freedom and for yours” (za naszą i waszą) (Walicki, 1982).12 To date, political elites in both countries derive a universal mission from these experiences of polity-building, defined in terms of civic values as embodied by a unitary state in the French case (l’exeption française) (Ratka, 2009), and in terms of freedom fight and moral values in the Polish case (Adamczyk & Gostmann, 2007, p.  86f ). This mission has its root in national constitutional history and republican-constitutional moments. For Poland, the adoption of the 3rd of May Constitution in 1791 marked the climax of three centuries of constitutional struggles between the nobility and the electoral monarchy (for the following, see Davies, 1996, pp. 654–660; Wandycz, 2001). In the course of these struggles, the Polish and Lithuanian nobility (szlachta, boyari) had successively gained co-determination rights and established a pan-Polish bicameral system (sejm-senat) which took over all legislative and executive functions, with the king being only the commissioned representative of the executive. It also successively established jurisdiction independent from the church and the king. There are various events rooted in this era which  “Une nation est une âme, un principe spirituel. Deux choses qui, à vrai dire, n’en font qu’une constituent cette âme, ce principe spirituel. L’une est dans le passé, l’autre dans le présent. L’une est la possession en commun d’un riche legs de souvenirs; l’autre est le consentement actuel, le désir de vivre ensemble, la volonté de continuer à faire valoir l’héritage qu’on a reçu indivis” (Renan, 1983 (1882)). 12  A document of that time out of which the first lines have prevailed in the Polish anthem is Dombrowski’s Mazurka, the song of the Polish League in the Napoleon Army: “Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła kiedy my żyjemy. Co nam obca przemoc wzięła, szablą odbierzemy” (Poland has not perished yet so long as we still live. That which alien force has seized, we at sabre-point shall retrieve). 11

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became integral to collective memory and popular culture: The first one ought to mention is the act Nihil novi nisi commune consensu (nothing new without the common consent), which was adopted by the Sejm in 1505. It obliged the Polish king to seek the entire parliament’s consensus on most issues, thereby empowering the ordinary nobility.13 Another moment is the ‘Golden Liberty’ of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1764). The Commonwealth coupled constitutional acts of the nobles’ republic (pacta conventa) with strong regional autonomy to include parts of present Eastern Poland, the Baltic Countries, Belarus, Western Ukraine and Western Russia. It ushered in an era of freedom in terms of privileges for the nobility, but also in terms of religious tolerance and peace. The provision of the liberum veto, which entitled any deputy in the Sejm to stop meetings and nullify the legislation already adopted, ensured unanimous consent among equal representatives of the different local entities (Rohac, 2008). In the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, it became a symbol for anarchy as mightier magnates and middlemen of the elected foreign kings and the rising empires used the institution to obstruct effective consensus-making. The 3rd of May Constitution was to remedy these deficiencies, by introducing majority voting, extending political rights to the bourgeoisie and providing for a strict separation of powers. But it was suspended under the pressure of Russia and Prussia and came too late to prevent the Polish partitions (1772, 1793, 1795), which would abolish Polish and Lithuanian statehood until 1918 (Kasparek, 1980, pp. 40–51). As “last will and testament of the expiring Fatherland” (the co-authors of the constitution Ignacy Potocki and Hugo Kołłataj in their 1793 report), it was, nevertheless, an important reference source for later constitutional engineering, but above all a symbol of (lost) national independence. As such, it was also an important reference to the changes to the Polish constitution referred to as the April Novelisation in the aftermath of the  The slogan (in Polish ‘nic o nas bez nas’) has found numerous reformulations in popular culture, for example in the title of Kieślowski’s documentary on the aftermath of the workers’ 1970 uprising. It has served as shortcut for demands for co-determination towards local administrations and on the international level. The latter is true, in particular, for the Second Polish Republic (1918–1938) and the 2 + 4 negotiations about German unification in 1990, when Polish negotiators struggled hard to obtain observatory status in parts of the negotiations between the US, the Soviet Union and the two German states on the post-Yalta territorial order (Kutter, 2001). 13

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Round Table Agreements in 1989, and to the Small Constitution of 1992, which together removed the ‘democratic-centralist’ provisions of the Constitution of the Polish People’s Republic (Sanford, 2002). The current Polish constitution has all the elements usually included in foundational documents of Western-type liberal democracies (representative democracy, secularism, rule of law and human and civil rights, including social rights and the objective of sustainable development, and a free market society); it establishes a unitary state, while at the same time providing for devolution and minority protection; and regulates a semi-­ presidential system with a directly elected president and two parliamentary chambers (sejm—senat). In addition, it highlights particular rights violated during communist rule such as the right to strike, property and informational rights, family farming and civic association (Sanford, 2002). The constitution came into force in 1997, after five years of bitter fights about notions of Polish-hood to be defined therein and the tribute it should pay to communitarian or liberal traditions, to Christian-­ Catholic faith or agnostic-atheist convictions, to natural law or legal positivism, and to radical decommunisation or reconciling integration (Brier, 2009). The eventual compromise formulated in the preamble refers to all Polish citizens and balances reference to Christian belief and heritage with reference to ‘other convictions’ and sources of civic values. The preamble entails a Nominatio Dei that, in conjunction with the granted human and civil rights, functions as suprapositive counterweight to legal positivism.14 However, as it is followed by reference to Christian heritage and by various church-friendly provisions such as the constitutional protection of heterosexual marriage, of religious uprising and education, the Nominatio Dei also reads as expression of ‘friendly secularism’, which expresses governmental support for a particular religion and anchors the polity in the tradition of that religion (Zgromadzenie_Narodowe, 1997). Since its coming into force, both the division of powers and the formal perpetuation of the Catholic Church’s role as moral authority (filled informally during communist rule) seemed to have gained acceptance  Reference to the suprapositive is crucial also in other constitutions drafted after the turnover of an authoritarian and totalitarian regime, for example in the constitution of the German Federal Republic. 14

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across political camps and in public opinion. They also survived the constitutional controversies linked to the Kaczyńskis’ first government during the years 2005–2007 (Zoll, 2010). However, since Kaczyńskis’ party Prawo i Sprawedliwość (Law and Justice) gained a parliamentary majority and presidential office in 2015, the 1997 constitutional arrangement has come under attack, and several constitutional freedoms and elements of rule of law have been weakened. Unlike the current Polish constitution, the current constitution of the French Fifth Republic (in force since 1958) was drafted secretively by the cabinet, supervised by Charles de Gaulle. General de Gaulle had been appointed head of state after the government of the Fourth Republic (1946–1949) had collectively resigned in reaction to the coup of the French military in Algeria. As a consequence of de Gaulle’s initiative, government-building was henceforth bound to electoral majority and to a directly elected president. The formerly strictly parliamentary republic was turned into a presidential system. In addition, it was complemented by a constitutional court to oversee legislation. In 1971, the constitutional court would further limit the legislative autonomy of the parliament providing that legislation can fail on the grounds that it does not comply with various rights provisions taken from the preamble of the constitution of the Fourth Republic, thus asserting them as higher law binding upon legislation and installing constitutional law and review as separate domain of politics (Stone Sweet, 2007). Apart from these changes, the constitution remains faithful to its republican predecessors. In the preamble, it refers both to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) and to the preamble of the Constitution of the Fourth Republic (1946–1948), which, in turn, refers to the Third Republic (1870–1940) and additionally enacts social rights (Conseil_constitutionnel, 1958). The ensemble of constitutional documents (bloc de constitutionalité) reify what Höhne called the “republican synthesis” of French polity-building (Höhne, 2003): the combination of a secular unitary state, popular sovereignty and a volontaristic conception of the nation. While unitarism dates back to the centralised policies of the Ancien Regime in matters of language, taxation and religion, its current conception was formed during the French revolution, core

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moment of French polity-building. The Tricolore (liberté, egalité, fraternité), the constitutional motto, named what the mission of the unitary state should be: guaranteeing universal rights across its territory, levelling out class privileges, and banning any interference in secular government, which ought to be constituted by the will of the people. “The established understanding of the sovereign nation [as an abstract figure represented by the king] has been reformulated in the course of the French revolution; on the basis of the idea of the social contract, it assigned sovereignty to the people” (Scholl, 2006, p. 177, author’s translation). This conception, condensed in the Jacobinian battle cry unie et indivisible (referring to the indivisibility of both the nation and its will), fuelled the struggle against the restoration of monarchy and the church’s influence in the nineteenth century. Crucial moments of this struggle were legal acts which codified laicité (or ‘hostile secularism’), banning any intermingling of public and religious life, for example in public education, civil law and public law (1905) (Baubérot, 2005). Principles of constitutional government and republican commitment had to be renewed after the years of collaboration with the Nazis in the Vichy Regime (1940–1944). The social rights, added with the Fourth Republic, gave rise to a new mission of the unitary state as welfare state which installed an extended public service to ensure both equal living conditions and social integration. De Gaulle’s contribution was to have created a refounding republican myth staging Resistance as pan-national movement, which only worked as long as the strengthening of nationalist parties did not provoke a critical assessment of French chauvinism of the 1930s–1940s and of Nazi collaboration (Höhne, 2003). The republican synthesis of the post-war period—more precisely, unitarism—was also to be challenged by new regionalisms and the Muslim immigration from the former colonies. While moderate devolution has taken place (facilitated by EU legislation on local and European elections), the social integration of Muslims has largely failed and has triggered a (scapegoat) debate on French ius soli and laic assimilation (Durand, 2005; Lorcerie, 1996). During the period under investigation, against the background of the 9/11 attacks in New York, a law was drafted prohibiting the wearing of veils in public institutions, thereby reinforcing the model of ‘hostile secularism’ (Farine, 2004).

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F ormulae of National EU Policy and Membership Aspiration Several aspects of Polish and French concepts of polity and constitutionalism have been challenged with progressing internationalisation and European integration, notably the strong stress on national sovereignty and independence. The specific EU policies, pursued by Polish and French governments in the name of a ‘national interest’, appear as efforts to absorb these challenges. In the Polish case, the formula of the ‘return to Europe’ (to Western standards of liberal democracies and market society) paradoxically suggested that Poland’s entry in the European Union would increase its independence and significance, understood in terms of emancipation from Soviet hegemony and in terms of increased room of manoeuvre for catch-up development (Normann, 2008). The architects of simultaneous transformation and Europeanisation held that accession to the EU would enhance Poland’s capacities as a nation-state, because accession implied investment, trade and financial transfers, and a feeling of belonging, which would allow the construction of administrative and market structures and the stabilisation of the new democracy. This ­reasoning, supported by the majority of the population and consistently pursued as a core foreign policy objective by governments of different ideological background, allowed the implementation of harsh transition policies (Kutter, 2001). In addition, this reasoning welcomed redistributive policies (structural funds, regional policy, Common Agricultural Policy) and the strengthening of EU institutions that are in charge with cohesion, while at the same time insisting on negative economic integration and low levels of positive integration in socioeconomic policies. This instrumental strategy had, however, also a normative or moral dimension. It was linked to the promise of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, which, at the time it was agreed, assured economic support on the part of Western European countries in exchange for liberalisation and democratisation in Eastern European countries under communist rule. With reference to this promise of the Helsinki Final Act and following quick liberalisation and democratisation after 1989, the political elite of Central European states pressed for EU accession and trade concessions (Fierke & Wiener, 2001). In Poland,

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EU entry (along with NATO membership) has also been perceived as overdue acknowledgement of Poland’s belonging to the liberal international community of the West and as (poor) compensation, also in financial terms, for the imposition of the Yalta agreements by the anti-Hitler coalition, which had cut off Poland from the Western project, subjecting it to Stalinist reparation and resettlements. The different aspects of this EU policy—European integration as vehicle for catch-up transition and international acknowledgement— resonated with conceptions of ‘Europe’ widespread in political and public discourse which saw integration with the EU as an opportunity or mission and historical destiny. However, ambivalence about the implied conception of European belonging increased with the start of tough and unrewarding accession negotiations and with growing opposition to EU accession among those concerned about national sovereignty and national legal-constitutional particularities. The ambivalence showed in perceptions of threat and cultural distance as well as in distinctions between ‘Europe’ as geographical or cultural unit, on the one hand, and the EU as neo-colonial power, on the other, a power that supposedly followed a similar totalising progressive ideology as did the Soviet hegemon (Adamczyk & Gostmann, 2007; Buchowski, 2006; Horolets, 2006a, 2006b; Krakowiak, 2006; Krzyżanowski, 2003, 2008; Lipiński, 2010; Zając, 2006). During the period under investigation, in the run-up to the accession referendum, this polarisation was particularly strong. The conservative opposition pushed through the parliament a declaration to be attached to the accession treaty that assured that Polish legislation on ‘moral issues’, in particular regarding abortion, bioethics and the privileging of heterosexual marriage, be untouched by EU law (Gaisbauer, 2005, 2010). This approach to ‘moral politics’ has since then marked one of the ‘red lines’ of Polish EU policies and has been reinforced after the reaccession to power of the party Prawo i Sprawedliwość (PiS), then led by Jarowław Kaczyński. It resulted in an opt-out by the Polish government from some provisions of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. Hence, in what was persued as membership project by successive Polish governments up until EU accession, we can see a conflicting combination of classic polity rationales: strategic-contractualist rationales that suggest

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joining the EU’s polity-building is necessary to protect Polish statehood against Russia’s influence and geopolitical marginalisation; utilitarian rationales that justify membership for reasons of a better, modernisation-­ enhancing allocation of resources; and a communitarian rationale that has a universalising civic-cultural dimension and a defensive cultural dimension. In France, EU membership has been equally constructed as flowing from strategic-contractualist concerns in the beginning. EU membership was regarded as a strategy to contain German and US predominance and safeguard the French state and nation from macroregional and geopolitical marginalisation. Joining the Internal Market under provisions of previously rejected competition policy and negative integration was justified for similar utilitarian reasons as Poland’s economic liberalisation and EU accession, namely to better cope with pressures for modernisation and rationalisation that resulted from globalisation and to steer and buffer adjustments within European economies of scale. However, the implied competence delegation and sharing of sovereignty with the supranational level is subject of ongoing controversy that has a long, also legal, history (Höhne, 2003, p.  27; Ratka, 2009, pp.  28–30, 69–83; Stanat, 2006, p. 77f; for the following).15 The principle of proactive civiccommunitarian universalism, which welcomes political integration as a means of accomplishing French values, conflicts with the principle of undividable sovereignty which forbids competence delegation. This conflict became first an issue when the newly established government of Charles de Gaulle launched an initiative for political integration, notably in defence issues, to balance the militarisation of West Germany and the newly founded supranational European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). But, despite redoubled effort in 1961 and 1962 and support from almost all political groupings in the French parliament, no agreement could be reached with the other ECSC members on the European  Only in 2006, the French Constitutional Court explicitly accommodated national constitutional sovereignty with a definition of shared sovereignty. The Decision 2006-540 DC states that, while the constitutional norms of the French Republic prevail in the national legal order, the integration of France with the European Union implies to recognise the supremacy of certain EU norms, provided that they respect the rules and principles of the constitutional identity of France. 15

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Political Union (EPU). The failure is mainly attributed to de Gaulle, who rejected majority voting and the inclusion of NATO in the planned defence institutions, both with reference to national sovereignty. De Gaulle’s intergovernmentalist approach was strongly contested in the French national assembly at that time.16 Hitherto, the problem of whether unanimity has to be abandoned for the sake of political integration and to what extent competence delegation is compatible with national selfdetermination has troubled French politics. But this struggle has also helped to find gradual definitions of shared sovereignty, ranging between undividable; dividable in particular policy realms if beneficial to French objectives; and generally dividable and conducive to French objectives (Jachtenfuchs, 2002, p. 81). Another recurrent concern with national constitutional principles is the predominantly ‘negative’ mode of economic integration in the Internal Market, that is, its limitation to deregulatory policies supervised by the Commission and to independent monetary control by the European Central Bank. Both clash with traditions of economic stimulus, positive market regulation and positive discrimination attached to the unitary state, its industrial policy and public service. Europe espace has become a key pejorative term to identify such deficiencies, juxtaposed with Europe puissance and Europe sociale. Agreement on the neoliberal conception of the Internal Market, the ‘liberal consensus’ between partis de gouvernement (PS, UMP/RPR), formed only after the failure of stimulus instruments had revealed the interdependence of the French and European economies in the 1980s (Höhne, 2003, p. 27). But it has since then been linked to the promise that a gouvernance économique and social policy will be established at European level, as part of a broader conception of the EU which ensures both competitiveness and social achievements in the era of globalisation (Grossman, 2007; Seidendorf, 2008).  Pierre Pfimlin, prime minister at the end of the Fourth Republic in 1958, and who would go on to become president of the European Parliament in the 1980s, said, after he and the other ministers from the MRP party resigned from the cabinet of Prime Minister Pompidou in reaction to de Gaulle’s blockade of the European Political Union: “L’Europe des Etats nous ramène au XIXe siècle, au congrès de Vienne. L’Europe politique sera sans avenir si elle serait soumise définitivement à la loi de l’unanimité.” 16

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3.6 Studying Discursive Legitimation: Summary What does Europe want? Such a question can be seen in the fragmentary analysis of Giscard d’Estaing’s speech inaugurating the Convention, and it is never innocent politically. It carries along conventionalised practices of political legitimation, such as typical ways of constructing the ‘demanding’ collective and the way it ought to be represented disinterestedly, in line with specific assumptions about political association. In Giscard d’Estaing’s speech, the to-be-represented appeared, among other things, as a worried populace fearful of the loss of national identity, who needed consideration in a confederal arrangement, which was to be mindfully worked out by the Convention. The objective of this third chapter was to systematically explore how such instances of language use could be grasped conceptually and understood as an act of political legitimation from a discourse-theoretical perspective. So far, research on the EU’s legitimation in public debate has primarily focused on the salience of propositional content and known concepts of political legitimacy and community in (national) publicised opinion or on promotional d ­ iscourses of EU institutions and advocates of European integration. The aim of the chapter was to elaborate a perspective and conceptual-­analytical toolkit that accounted, instead, for practices of (de-)legitimation, which accommodate the unfamiliar of EU politics with the familiar of the national state, and which emerge in the translation from the context of multilateral negotiation to that of national media debates, the primary site of public-political commentary on European integration. The CDA perspective, I posited, offers an alternative, and still missing, entry point to such investigation. CDA assumes meaning emerges in concrete instances of context-dependent linguistic interaction and focuses on discourse as a practice, being both agency in the act of speaking and structure in the way that agency draws on conventionalised patterns of language use. This ontological-epistemological perspective was pushed theoretically towards an understanding of political legitimation, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, in its application to the representative politics of the twentieth century, and the political philosophy of politybuilding. This was done in three steps.

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In the first step, I introduced the understanding of legitimation developed in CDA. Legitimation is here defined as a  meta-speech act comprising all forms of language use that foster and substantiate a certain communicative plan in the interaction with an (imagined) audience: by depicting involved agents and settings in specific ways (strategies of representation), by applying established practices of argumentation, referring to either reason, authority or values (strategies of argumentation), or by using more implicit means, such as narration, illustration, allusion and evocation (what I termed ‘strategies of plausibilisation’). Following this conception, the discursive (de-)legitimation of the EU comprises all types of discourse agency that persuade or dissuade from maintaining a specific form of political authority and association beyond the state, and that are pursued explicitly or implicitly in the communicative plans of specific instances of context-dependent linguistic interaction. Recurring patterns of such legitimising language use might hint at ‘discourse practices of legitimation’, that is, widespread and accepted ways of promoting one’s stance about the EU’s desirable polity that privilege or silence particular visions of political association and attribute voice to some rather than to others. In the second step, I developed a discourse-theoretical understanding of political legitimation, that is, the legitimation of public decision-­ making power, drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence and its application to representative politics in the liberal democracies of the twentieth century. The concept points to the relationality and complicity of the powerful and the powerless in legitimising power and ascribes a strong role to ‘professional discourse producers’ in maintaining classifications, by which members of society recognise themselves and each other as more or less powerful. Legitimation is here understood as the interpretive process by which subordinated and superordinated ‘bracket’ the arbitrariness of their asymmetric relations and treat them as self-evident, not so much because of some explicit consensus or propagandistic manipulation, but because these power relations seem plausible against the overall structures, rituals and styles of a specific society at a certain point in time. Political legitimation, from that perspective, is the intersubjective-­ interpretive agency that sustains such an accommodating arrangement in the public-political sphere. In turn, political power is delegitimised when

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political mimesis fails, that is, when political competition is no longer seen to mirror actual social struggles and when, measured against the imaginaries of legitimate political power conferral, the interpretations of office holders and the politically competent appear as arbitrary self-­ empowerment. Translated into a middle-range theory for re-reading legitimising language use, ‘imaginaries of legitimate power conferral’ can be seen to be (re-)produced in discourse practices that construct a representative relation. The exemplary analysis of Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory speech showed that relevant discourse practices of legitimation include the following: strategies of representation that portray represented and representatives in a way that suggests congruence in concerns and preferences; conventionalised (fallacious) arguments that signal disinterestedness; and discourse strategies of plausibilisation that construct consonance and complicity between the speaker and the (imagined) target audience. Given that representative claims (or evaluations of them) are tied to assumptions about the frames in which political power can be legitimately attained, I extended the view beyond representative politics and asked what imaginings of political association might be involved in ­discursive legitimation. Such imaginings are likely to be more pronounced in the EU context and in debates on EU institutional reform. Not only is the legitimacy of the claim for political authority problematic in that context, but also taken-for-granted ways of forming political institutions and political community. I reviewed ‘polity discourse’, that is, the themes and propositions that form the repertoire of arguing for a particular political association in political-philosophical debate. They have evolved with the historical struggle over secular state formation. Along with the imaginings of representative politics, they make up what Michel Foucault called the ‘juridico-political’ imaginary of power and the liberal state, which is, nowadays, codified in constitutions and also employed to (de-)legitimise political association beyond the state. Three major issues, or ‘polity topics’, are usually pondered in debates on political association and also run through scientific classifications of polity: desirable attributes of the constituent collective, power-regulating institutions and criteria for appropriate power execution. At least five strands of argument for political association usually link these ‘polity topics’. I termed them ‘polity

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rationales’, reframing the German term Staatsbegründungen: anthropological, utilitarian, strategic contractualist, moral contractualist and intersubjective communitarian. Each of them can be regarded as an ‘analytical narrative’, that is, a narratively constructed causal argument that concludes from specific characteristics of the (situation of a) constituent community what type of political institutions should be built and by what method. Translated into a middle-range theory and heuristic tool for re-reading legitimising language use, narratives of polity-building direct the view towards strategies of argumentation and plausibilisation that generate supposedly logical causal connections between attributes of the constituent collective and the derived set of institutions and methods of institution-building (see Table 3.2). Based on these insights, I reviewed existing narratives of polity-building that, as intertexts and alluded-to examples, are likely to be involved in any construction of political authority and association during debates on EU institutional reform. These are, on the one hand, analytical narratives of European integration, which have been developed in specialist-scientific accounts of European integration in close relation to political struggles over European integration. On the other, I looked at and narratives and symbols of national ­polity-­building (state formation, nation-building, constitutional struggles) and formulae of EU membership that have been handed down in Poland and France, the two national contexts investigated in the book. These intertexts are likely to be employed in strategies of argumentation and plausibilisation that construct legitimate political association. To conclude, the three-step exploration has produced a particular discourse-­theoretical understanding of political legitimation, which we can condense into the statement: discursive legitimation is polity  construction. Discursive legitimation is discursive agency that constructs political authority for the speaker or a political body by suggesting that she/he or it derives that authority in line with and for the sake of a desirable way of polity-building. This desirable way is rendered intelligible by invoking taken-for-granted imaginings of political process and political association and by using intertexts from existing polity discourse. The political authority of the speaker or body is only intelligible and legitimate against that implied understanding of polity, and vice versa, the understanding of legitimate political association revealed in the

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construction of political authority. Polity construction is not a rhetoric decorum of strategic action that follows from institutional, material, social or cultural resources. It is politically efficacious in itself, in dependence on the context of expression and comprehension. It exerts power in its symbolic violence, by ‘bracketing’ the arbitrariness of relations between holders and patients of political-interpretive power and by developing dynamics and performativity well beyond the individual speech act of legitimation. The above explorations also yielded a toolbox for the discourse analysis of polity construction in the setting of the European Union. In this book, it is tailored to the EU constitutional debate in Poland and France; but, with adjustments, it offers itself for application beyond the case studied in the book. Generally speaking, a discourse analysis of political legitimation focuses on how, through what patterns of legitimising language use, political authority and political association are constructed in an actual setting of linguistic interaction. A rough inductive assessment of polity topics that might or might not occur in relation to the issue of debate (here: EU institutional reform) helps to establish, first, what type of ‘polity discourse’ is brought up in the material investigated, that is, whether and what problems of political association are touched upon. In the ­present study, I used a computer-aided qualitative content and co-occurrence analysis to establish what polity topics showed up in the investigated texts and how they linked to ‘constitution topics’, that is, specific suggestions for institutional reform to be laid down in the Draft Constitution and the Constitutional Treaty (see Sect. 2.4, Table 2.1). Secondly, selected texts are subjected to a detailed discourse analysis of legitimising language use, following analytical categories of CDA. Its objective is to reconstruct the speaker’s communicative plan from her strategic-persuasive use of linguistic forms and the cued-in context of expression. This part of the analysis assesses the argument that fosters the speakers’ communicative plan (conclusion, grounds, warrant) and deand reconstructs strategies of representation, argumentation and plausibilisation that enhance the argument or bridge its logical gaps (see Sect. 2.4, Table 2.1). In addition, the context of expression is considered to which such language use relates pragmatically, including aspects of generic text composition and institutionalised social practice, intertextuality and his-

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torical-political setting. In the exemplary analysis of Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory speech, we could see, for instance, that he arrived at a construction of the Convention as a multinational assembly by employing ‘context’ in various ways. He used and varied the protocol and genre of official welcoming addresses in the European Union, saluting the Conventioneers in the administrative languages of the EU, but also in a selection of further languages that exemplified multinationality (genre, institutionalised social practice); he referred to the Messina conference 1955 to invoke the memory of EU constitutional moments (intertext), and drew on widespread criticism of the intergovernmental method of decision-making (historical-political context). The explored polity topics and discourse strategies are scrutinised, thirdly, with regard to how they regularly and recurrently construct political authority and political association, so as to establish a typology of patterned polity construction in the EU’s different contexts of political communication (see the typology in Sect. 8.2). However, the analysis does not stop at a descriptive reconstruction of patterned discourse practices of EU legitimation. Getting back to the concept of symbolic violence and the derived expectation that polity constructions are classificatory practices that maintain power relations in the political sphere, these practices of EU legitimation are deconstructed in their symbolic violence. More precisely, they are re-read with a focus on whom they relegate and whom they empower, and what possible power asymmetries they background. In the present study, the interest of deconstruction is, above all, in how the category of the represented is adjusted and how polity rationales are applied so as to normalise political authority and association beyond the state. Finally, instead of reifying this analytical procedure as some universal truth-producing method, it is situated and problematised as a particular, theoretically instructed, choice from a box of heuristic tools that, above all, facilitate reflection on the subject studied. The three fragments of analysis of Giscard d’Estaing’s speech at the inaugural meeting of the Convention illustrated the analytical procedure. In addition, they generated preliminary insights into what motivated the conceptual work of this chapter in the first place: they generated insights into how the unfamiliar of the European Union is accommodated with the familiar of the national state, bracketing what might be judged illegitimate

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power seizure against the backdrop of the familiar, or how justifiability is produced for the political authority and association of the European Union. Thus, the scrutiny of legitimising language use revealed that Giscard d’Estaing skilfully employed the figurative register of European integration to plausibilise his call for stretching the Convention’s mandate. The representative role that he ascribed to the Convention to underline this call relied upon various strategies of representation, in which actual representative relations with the delegating institutions were backgrounded and the Convention highlighted as being obliged towards the European idea or alternatingly to represent national provinces, diverse stakeholders of European integration and the EU populace. Moreover, the scrutiny of narratives of polity-building highlighted that Giscard d’Estaing mobilised communitarian and contractualist polity rationales, using references to the Euro-federalist tradition, to suggest that the Convention filled all these representative functions in its role as a multinational constitutional assembly. Hence, we could see how the category of the represented becomes blurred and how polity topics are linked in a way that renders the conferral of constitution-drafting authority onto the Convention a perfectly intelligible, and legitimate, option. The following chapter will deal with the other conceptual-analytical concern of the book: how to capture the contexts of social practice involved in the EU’s (de-)legitimation, more precisely, how to conceptually grasp the contexts of Europeanised political communication, between which such polity constructions are translated and in which they become more or less meaningful and performative.

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Kutter, A. (2001). Polens Rückkehr nach Europa. Deutungsmuster in der öffentlichen Auseinandersetzung 1989–1990. MA dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin. Kutter, A., & Nonhoff, M. (2014). Legitimation. In J. Angermüller, M. Nonhoff, M. Reisigl, D. Wrana, & A. Ziem (Eds.), DiskursNetz: Wörterbuch der interdisziplinären Diskursforschung (pp. 241–242). Berlin: Suhrkamp. Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis. In J. Helm (Ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts (pp.  12–44). Seattle: University of Washington Press. Lemke, T. (2012). Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique. London: Boulder. Lindberg, L. (1963). The Political Dynamics of Economic Integration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Link, J. (1982). Kollektivsymbolik und Mediendiskurse. Zur aktuellen Frage, wie subjektive Aufrüstung funktioniert. kultuRRevolution, 1, 6–21. Link, J. (2001). Karl Kraus im Kampf mit der Phrase oder Versuch über den Anteil der Katachrese an der modernen Kultur. kultuRRevolution, 43, 50–55. Link, J. (2003). Kulturwissenschaft, Interdiskurs, Kulturrevolution. kultuRRevolution, 45/46, 10–23. Lipiński, A. (2010). Europe as a Symbolic Resource. On the Discursive Space of Political Struggles in Poland. KFG Working Papers No. 10. Retrieved from ­h ttps://www.polsoz.fu-berlin.de/en/v/transformeurope/publications/ working_paper/wp/wp10/index.html. Longo, M. (2006). Constitutionalising Europe: Processes and Practices. Adlershot: Ashgate. Lorcerie, F. (1996). Dissonance Normative: à propos de la crise de la laïcité en France. Revue méditerranéenne d’études politiques, 2, 7–19. Lord, C., & Magnette, P. (2004). E Pluribus Unum? Creative Disagreement about Legitimacy in the EU. Journal of Common Market Studies, 42(1), 182–202. Mandel, E. (1967). International Capitalism and Supra-Nationality. In R.  Miliband & J.  Saville (Eds.), The Socialist Register (pp.  27–41). London: Merline. Matouschek, B., Wodak, R., & Januschek, F. (1995). Notwendige Maßnahmen gegen Fremde? Genese und Formen von rassistischen Diskursen der Differenz. Wien: Passagen Verlag. McLean, I. (2003). Two Analytical Narratives about the History of the EU. European Union Politics, 4(4), 499–506. Moravcsik, A. (1993). Preferences and Power in the European Community: A Liberal Intergovernmentalist Approach. Journal of Common Market Studies, 31, 473–524.

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4 Discursive Europeanisation: Recontextualisation

Within the setting of the European Union (EU), constructing a common polity implies contested accommodation of at least two scales of territorial organisation—the national and the supranational—and claims for political authority and cultural recognition related to them. In European integration research, such accommodation has been labelled ‘Europeanisation’, though with discipline-specific variation. In political science, Europeanisation is usually understood in neo-institutionalist terms, as the diffusion and incorporation of formal and informal rules, paradigms or ways of doing things in member societies that were defined in EU policymaking before (Radaelli, 2000, p. 4). Originating in legal compliance studies, this research investigates why states comply with supranational law and EU policies to varying degrees and with highly “differential impact”, that is, with strongly divergent adjustments in national law and political process (Héritier, 2001). Explanations are primarily derived from actor-centred institutionalism in line with the Comparative Method: variance in compliance between EU countries used to be primarily explained by the political opportunities that arise from the misfit between EU and domestic law and political structure, inclining some domestic actors to absorb EU law or mobilise it, but not © The Author(s) 2020 A. Kutter, Legitimation in the European Union, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33031-6_4

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others (Börzel & Risse, 2003; Falkner, Hartlapp, Leiber, & Treib, 2005), and by the qualities of EU conditionality in accession states (Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier, 2005). In the meantime, further perspectives have been added that highlight broader social implications of (conditionality-induced) policy transfer (Kutter & Trappmann, 2006), and investigate its contestation (Schwellnus, 2009) and discursive appropriation in member states (Wodak & Fairclough, 2010). Sociological approaches to European integration perceive Europeanisation in horizontal terms, as a process of transnationalisation that is also, but not exclusively, connected to the EU.  It is studied from either a microsociological perspective, which focuses on the emergence of practices that transgress the boundaries of the national state, a macro-sociological perspective on the formation of a European society at large or a meso-level perspective that takes an interest in the development of transnational social movements, European publics or transnational fields and networks of interaction, often also highlighting the communicative-discursive aspects of such transnationalisation (Mau, 2015, for an overview). The phenomenon investigated in this chapter cuts across and transgresses these understandings of Europeanisation. What I seek to grasp conceptually in the following pages is a discursive process of Europeanisation, which is triggered by utterances related and specific to EU institution-building and appropriated in member societies’ debates even before EU institutional reform is adopted, let alone ratified by and implemented in member states. This process takes place in political communication, which is ‘horizontal’ and Europeanised to a large extent and, at the same time, largely confined to mediation by national mass media. The relevant phenomenon is translation between specialised discourses of institutional engineering developed by EU-related epistemic communities, on the one hand, and ‘interdiscourses’ in nationally operating media, on the other, that actualise the common sense of a nationally defined epistemic community. We are talking, hence, about the accommodation of language use and discourse practice developed in differently scaled contexts of professionalised social practice, but not of policy transfer from the supranational to the national level of territorial organisation. We are talking about diversifying appropriation of discourse fragments, but not of transnational rapprochement that studies of European media

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publics or European practice networks explore. Moreover, the ‘national’ and the ‘European’, which are presupposed as given categories in existing definitions of Europeanisation, if not as taken-for-granted units of analysis, are here suspected only to emerge as relational categories, from that diversifying appropriation. The objective of this chapter is to develop an understanding of such discursive Europeanisation, applying the perspective of an advanced discourse epistemology and moving (further) beyond methodological nationalism. Bernstein’s notion of recontextualisation allows the development of such a perspective. Following Bernstein, the meaning of discourse fragments changes when they are relocated from one context of social practice to another; they turn into something else while being subdued to the regulative discourse of the receiving practice’s context (Bernstein, 1990). The theorem of recontextualisation gives some systematic understanding to Fossum’s and Trenz’ impression that the EU constitution had been “pluri-decontextualised” (Fossum & Trenz, 2006, p. 12). It offers a discourse-theoretical explanation as to why meanings, which were associated with the EU constitution in the context of multilateral negotiation, change and diversify when adopted in another practice context, such as that of national media debates. The two contexts, on the other hand, between which recontextualisation takes place, are best perceived as discourse fields. They are implicated in the translation not only by their generic discourse practice and professional regulative discourse, but also by the way these are used by participants as field-specific ‘cultural capital’ for social and professional distinction. The chapter elaborates this argument in four steps. It first introduces Bernstein’s recontextualisation theorem and reviews applications in CDA. Drawing on an example from the Polish broadsheet Rzeczpospolita, it shows how recontextualisation can be studied in aspects of ‘genre’, that is, conventionalised patterns of language use specific to a specialised social practice (Sect. 4.1). Generic patterns of language use and the concept of code are then reviewed through the lens of Bernstein’s concept of ‘code’ and Bourdieu’s ‘field’ theory. Juxtaposed with each other and articulated in the notion of ‘discourse fields’, they help to grasp, from a discourse perspective, the meso-level contexts of specialised social practice that are involved in Europeanised political communication, and in the EU con-

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stitutional debate more particularly (Sect. 4.2). These insights are then deepened in an assessment of the discursive constitution of news journalism (Sect. 4.3) and applied to the two practice contexts at stake in the EU constitutional debate: the discourse field of Europeanised national news (Sect. 4.4) and that of EU multilateral negotiation (Sect. 4.5). The summary explicates how recontextualisation between the two discourse fields will be studied in a  textual-contextual analysis (Sect. 4.6). Students of European integration studies can see in this chapter how a discourse study of Europeanisation can be conducted. To discourse researchers, it shows how one can move from discourse agency to discourse structure without relapsing into structuralist imagination, and develop an analytical language that speaks to studies of the meso and macro levels of social organisation.

4.1 Recontextualisation in Generic Language Use The notion of recontextualisation used in this study is based on Basil Bernstein’s work on educational discourse. Bernstein was a British sociologist, who became known among sociolinguists in the 1960s thanks to his studies on class-related linguistic difference and school education.1 In Bernstein’s understanding, recontextualisation denotes the de- and relocation of discourse fragments from one context of social practice to another, as a result of which the discourse fragments change their meaning: In the process of the de- and relocation, the original discourse is subject to a transformation which transforms it from an actual to a virtual or imaginary practice. (Bernstein, 1990, p. 184)  In the social sciences, Bernstein has remained unknown. For an appraisal of Bernstein’s work that historically situates and criticises its (mis-)reception as a theory of verbal deficits of working-class children in US educational psychology and the emphasis of this reception in Wiliam Labov’s work, see Bolander and Watts (2009). Bernstein’s work on ‘sociolinguistic codes’ has primarily been read in light of this reception, while his later work on the structuring of pedagogic discourse has barely been taken into account. 1

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This statement suggests not only that social practice is highly differentiated and specialised in symbolic interaction (a Durkheimian assumption), but that any taking over of discourse between specialised practice contexts will change that discourse and convert it into something new, even unrelated to the originating context, due to the specific discursive constitution of the receiving context. As pointed out in the introduction, this theorem gives a systematic understanding to Europeanisation: as a  change in meaning that results from transposition between different contexts of specialised (and discursively constituted) social practice. The objective of this section is to work out a first, rather practical, understanding of how recontextualisation between practice contexts of the Europeanised political communication can be understood from the perspective of CDA, that is, when focusing on discourse as language in use and highlighting language use that is ‘generic’ for a professional practice. A quote from Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s speech, which is already known to readers from the previous chapter (see Chap. 3), and a fragment from a Polish news article, which recontextualises this very quote, will be used for exemplary analysis. On the basis of this initial exploration, I will then develop the argument about Europeanisation as recontextualisation between discourse fields in subsequent sections. The notion of recontextualisation as meaning-transforming relocation of discourse fragments has found strong resonance in CDA: it renders palpable the assumption that any utterance is context-dependent and that its meaning will change once the context of expression changes. A first strand of reception in CDA uses recontextualisation in the sense of ‘resemiotisation’ (Iedema, 2003, p. 197). Here, the focus is on the gradual, synchronic change of linguistic-discursive practices within a particular realm in late modern societies, for example in bureaucratic organisation (Hall, Sarangi, & Slembrouck, 1997; Iedema, 2003), school education (Chouliaraki, 1998) or public broadcast media (Fairclough, 1995b, pp.  142–149). Somewhat recalling Bernstein’s idea of the change of school curricula from a clearly delimitated and hierarchical to a more complex-inclusive ‘code’ (see Sect. 4.2), these researchers have identified the emergence of more inclusive-interactive, but also more opaque, means of social control, attributing them either to a rationalising structuration of bureaucratic organisation (Iedema, 2003, p. 196ff) or to the

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interpenetration of practices from different fields of social activity to intertextuality and a mix of genres (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999, p. 93f ). A second strand, which will be partially used in this book, conceives of recontextualisation as the transposition of text fragments between different pragmatic settings of linguistic interaction. It may involve a transition from aural to written moments; between different actor constellations; across time, institutional routines or scales of territorial government; and it is analysed as a change in the content and structure of texts that signals participants’ struggle over language use (Wodak, 2000; Wodak & Fairclough, 2010). The focus is on how the receiving setting is cued into, or ‘entextualised’ in, the transposed text, with its situative-circumstantial, institutional, relational-symbolic, historic, mental-cognitive and bodily aspects (van Dijk, 2006; van Leeuwen, 1993, 2009; van Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999; Wodak, 2000). Theo van Leeuwen’s adoption provides some precision on how such change can be investigated in texts. He used the term recontextualisation to describe the modification that the practice of management training underwent when integrated into general leadership discourse (van Leeuwen, 2009). Accordingly, recontextualisation implies selection, such as the omission of an aspect of the represented situation or the silencing of the agency of a participant, for example in a passive construction. It also implies weighting, which shifts the emphasis to a specific trait of the represented situation or action, for instance by fore- or backgrounding and (determining, personalising) specification or (aggregating and collectivising) generalisation. Further, transformation may show in a rearrangement of the sequence or components of the represented event or action. Finally, recontextualisation implies addition in terms of evaluation, justification, emphasis or  plausibilisation (van Leeuwen, 1993).2 Let me show how one can trace, through these categories of recontextualisation, the transformation of meaning that texts or fragments of discourse undergo when de- and relocated from one context of expression to  Van Leeuwen’s systematisation of these transformative moves is far more detailed. I have grouped them under the headings of the four more abstract categories of selection, weighting, rearrangement and addition, which are amenable to media content analysis that will be implemented in the primary research of this book. 2

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another. For illustration, I will draw on the example of two quotes from Giscard d’Estaing’s inaugural speech that vary the crossroads metaphor analysed earlier (see Sect. 3.1), and I will show how they were recontextualised in a report by the Brussels correspondent Jędrzej Bielecki published in Rzeczpospolita on 1 March 2002 (for a more detailed analysis, see Sect. 6.3).

 hange of Meaning Through Recontextualisation: C Bielecki’s Report The news article has the heading “What Union, What Europe?” and is formatted as a quote story that combines parts from Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory speech along with comments on the Convention issued by other politicians, above all by the two Polish Conventioneers. In the lead to the quote story, Bielecki draws on the following paragraphs from Giscard d’Estaing’s speech, here given in the official English-language version provided by the Convention. Where the official translation deviated from the original, the literal translation is given in square brackets: If we succeed, in 25 years or 50 years—the distance separating us from the Treaty of Rome—Europe’s role in the world will have changed. It will be respected and listened to, not only as the economic power it already is, but as a political power which will talk on equal terms to the greatest powers on our planet, either existing or future, and will have the means to act to affirm its values, ensure its security and play an active role in international peace-keeping. (Appendix E, lines 104–109) (…) If we were to fail, each country would return to the free trade system [to the logic of free trade]. None of us—not even the largest of us—would have the power to take on the giants of this world [would have enough weight to take on…]. We would then remain locked in on ourselves, grimly analysing the causes of our decline and fall [Each of us would remain alone with himself, grimly analysing the causes of our decline and of the situation of being dominated]. (Appendix E, lines 294–296)3  The original reads thus: “Si nous échouions, chaque pays retournerait à une logique de libre échange. Aucun de nous, même les plus grands, n’aurait un poids suffisant vis-à-vis des géants du 3

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Bielecki merges and paraphrases these quotes. The lead says: The decision which Europe makes now will determine whether, in fifty years, Europe will be a power, which forms the destinies of the world, or just a free trade zone that submits itself to the will of others—said Valéry Giscard d’Estaing yesterday in his function as president of the Convention, which was launched to tackle the reform of the European Union. Meanwhile, Polish delegates fear that decisions will be made without the participation of our country. (Bielecki, 2002)4

Bielecki chooses to include in his quote story fragments from Giscard d’Estaing’s speech, in which the crossroads metaphor of progress versus decline is related to the EU’s international role. This is a distinct and strategic choice, which is different from that of his colleagues in Gazeta Wyborcza, Le Monde and Le Figaro (see Sect. 6.3). Bielecki’s paraphrase keeps several elements from the original paragraphs: he mentions the fifty-year time frame, the crossroads metaphor and the implied blackand-white fallacy, the dichotomy between international power on the one hand and a free-trade zone on the other, and Giscard d’Estaing’s equivalencing of the latter with ‘being dominated’. At the same time, several aspects of the speech are deleted. For instance, the statement that a stronger international role would correspond to the economic power that the EU already has is deleted. And so is  Giscard d’Estaing’s explication of what such a role would entail, such as talking on equal terms, affirming itself, or providing for security and peacekeeping. Moreover, the disintegration and isolation of members into insignificant individual states, which results in the situation of being dominated suggested in the speech, are erased. Being dominated directly follows from the choice of a freetrade zone in Bielecki’s report (deletion). monde. Nous resterions alors chacun face à nous-mêmes, dans une interrogation morose sur les causes de notre déclin, et de notre situation de dominés.” 4  The original in Polish language runs thus: “Od decyzji, które teraz podejmie Europa, zależy, czy za 50 lat będzie potęgą kształtującą losy świata, czy tylko strefą wolnego handlu, poddającą się woli innych—powiedział wczoraj przed Konwentem powołanym do spraw reformy Unii Europejskiej jej przewodniczący, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Polscy delegaci obawiają się tymczasem, że rozstrzygnięcia zapadną bez udziału naszego kraju.” Judging from the grammar, Bielecki portrays Giscard d’Estaing as the head of the EU rather than of the Convention, which I will ignore at this point.

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By way of these omissions, but also by a semantic re-accentuation, which exaggerates the international role (“forms the destinies of the world”) and dramatises a decline (“subjects itself to the will of others”), an image of power and subjection is associated with the EU as a whole, which is not given in the speech (weighting). The conjunction “meanwhile” not only directs the reader from Giscard d’Estaing’s speech to the Polish delegates’ assessment, but also juxtaposes the EU as a monolith to the Polish ‘national we’ (“our country”). In this juxtaposition, the decision the EU strikes for its future (in the speech and in the beginning of the lead to the report) becomes a decision potentially struck over the head of Poland (in the end of the lead to the report); and the threat of being dominated moves onto Poland (rearrangement, addition). Hence, the conjuring up of a moment of decisive intervention, which is meant to mobilise Conventioneers to foster the EU’s international role in Giscard d’Estaing’s speech, turns into the conjuring up of a threat for Poland of being overruled in Bielecki’s paraphrase, invoking the memory of Poland as having been repeatedly deprived of co-determination (see Sect. 6.3 for a full analysis).

 enre: Specialised Social Practice as Generic G Language Use A fully fledged CDA of this instance of recontextualisation would seek to explain the previously sketched out transformation of meaning by considering the many contextual dimensions of Bielecki’s report. Following Wodak’s method of layered contextualisation (Wodak, 2001), for instance, one would consider the co-texts that enhance Bielecki’s reading, such as his adjacent commentary that picks up the image of power politics; the intertexts, such as the Polish Conventioneers’ press conference, that he selectively cues in; the pragmatic context of constructing news for an audience that is imagined to have specific conceptions of nationhood (fighting for co-determination) and EU membership (sovereigntist); the historical-political context of parallel accession negotiations, which give plausibility to the reading of power asymmetry and so forth. An important part of such an assessment would focus on linguistic-textual means

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that are typical of the socio-institutional context, such as the generic language use of news journalism. From this perspective, the transformation of meaning observed in Bielecki’s report is co-produced by the methods of text composition typical of news journalism. Combining quotes from different news-givers’ statements in a quote story is a conventionalised means to produce an authorised and balanced account, but it requires the journalist to make a strategic selection and ‘invent’ some logical coherence and textual cohesion between the quotes, rearranging them syntactically and adding interpretation. The convention of giving a gist of the report at the beginning, in a lead, requires radical condensation of narration, among other things by using conjunctions or allusions, which often suggest linkages or oppositions where there were none (see also Sect. 4.3 on news discourse). Such constraints and textual-linguistic conventions of professional-institutionalised practice have been called ‘genre’ in CDA. ‘Genre’ captures the discursive-linguistic features constituting a particular social practice. In its narrow sense, as developed in literary studies, for example for the genre of drama, poetics or prose, it refers to a “set of texts with recognisable formal and stylistic similarities, which relates to some common communication situation” (Fowler, 1991, p. 227). These generic formats employ certain textual strategies which cue readers to expect a particular kind of discursive experience, a particular view on the represented world. From the viewpoint of CDA, genre is to be conceived of much more broadly, as a range of relatively stable linguistic-discursive devices that together enact a specialised social practice: “a socially ratified way of using language in connection with a particular type of social activity” (Fairclough, 1995a, p. 13f ). While the schematic structuring of texts, voice, style and modality form part of such a repertoire, Fairclough stresses, drawing on Bachtin and Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘order of discourse’, that genre is not the sum of these elements, but rather the mode of governing polyphony, intertextuality and interdiscursivity that is constitutive for a specialised social practice. Scholars who draw on cognitive linguistics and pragmatics think of genre in terms of scripts of action which have been habitualised for particular situations and are actualised in specific forms of language use (van Leeuwen, 2009), or which have become sedimented in a distinctive repertoire of text genres that serve, again and again, the same pragmatic purpose and constitute a particular

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activity typical of a given realm (Wodak, 2001). For instance, as political speeches are geared towards mobilising collective action and support in broader and heterogeneous audiences, they stand out by persuasive language and rhetoric refinement.  Diplomatic declarations, on the other hand, qualify by systematic vagueness to bridge positions and resolve conflict, unlike party programmes, which emphasise party-specific terminology so as to enhance collective identity and enshrine cohesion among factions. Hence, in CDA, genre denotes the semiotic-pragmatic aspect of the socio-institutional dimension of a context of expression. Recontextualisation is here understood as, context-dependent reformulation that results from adjustment to generic language use, among other things. However, Bernstein’s idea of ‘context’ as a realm-specific regulative discourse (or ‘code’) that is constituted through particular ways of classifying and processing knowledge is backgrounded in such a study of recontextualisation or deliberately replaced by the concepts of setting, register or genre (see Fairclough, 1992, p. 68, for a typical criticism of the classic sociolinguistic understandings of ‘code’). For the purpose of this study, the grounding of ‘recontextualisation’ in its structuralist beginnings is, however, crucial. Via (post)structuralist imagination, I posit, it is possible to capture the meso level of specialised and institutionalised social practice. This will be shown in the next section. It introduces Bernstein’s concept of ‘code’ and Bourdieu’s concept of ‘field’.

4.2 G  enre, Code, Field: Towards the Notion of Discourse Field The two concepts—Bernstein’s ‘code’ and Bourdieu’s ‘field’—offer a systematic understanding of how specialised-professional practice is shaped at the meso level of social organisation, through the discourse formation of professional knowledge (code) and the symbolic structuration of social relations (field). The concepts originate in the two authors’ early research on teacher-pupil relations and the pedagogic profession (Bernstein, 1975; Bourdieu, 1989, p.  14, quoting Bourdieu et  al., 1965) and draw on Durkheim’s holistic-functional understanding of social differentiation

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and some aspects of Lévi Strauss’ structuralism or later poststructuralist reformulations. They presuppose that late modern societies are functionally and  socially differentiated and structured relationally through systems of classification that are based on a logic of difference (Swartz, 1996, p.  84). However, while Bernstein develops a semiotic theory of mesolevel discourse formation, in which professional knowledge is produced by its own logic of difference, Bourdieu sketches out a theory of mesolevel symbolic structuration, which is driven by differential-relational positioning. In field theory, professional knowledge is understood as a personal and collective acquisition that becomes performative because of the beliefs invested in it by field participants and society as a whole, while ‘discourse’ remains a weak concept. Discourse, is the mere expression of  speaker’s intentions and unconscious structural interests. It  is constrained by both considerations of adequacy in a pre-structured constellation (speakers align with the ‘doxa’ of a field) and the speaker’s overall or specialised literacy (their  ‘linguistic capital’ and ‘cultural capital’) (Diaz-Bone, 2010, p. 69f ). The objective of this section is not to situate these concepts in discussions about the adequacy of assumptions about functional differentiation and binary oppositions or Bourdieu’s legacy in general (Susen & Turner, 2001). Nor do I intend to develop a synthesis of discourse theory and field theory (for this see Diaz-Bone, 2010) or implement a fully fledged field analysis (as suggested in Georgakakis & Rowell, 2013a). Instead, and in analogy to my use of the concept of symbolic violence in discursive legitimation (see Sect. 3.2), I will unearth the potential that the concepts of code and field have, as middle-range theories and heuristic tools, for pushing the analysis of recontextualisation beyond discourse-analytical micrology (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999, pp. 106–112 for a similar argument) and for furthering Europeanisation research beyond macrolevel considerations. It is argued that, when juxtaposed and articulated in the notion ‘discourse field’, the concepts of genre, code and field help to grasp, from a discourse perspective, the meso-level contexts of specialised social practice that are involved in Europeanised political communication.

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Code: Specialised Practice as Regulative Discourse Bernstein’s objective was to understand how pedagogy, due to its discursive formation and curricular organisation, affected individual learners’ ability to cope with the education system, and whether the ‘pedagogic code’ perpetuated class difference in offering privileged voice to middleclass children. Bernstein claims that specialised-professional practice, such as that of pedagogy, is maintained through a ‘code’. The code is defined by rules of classification, which imply ways of relating concepts and elements relevant to the social practice at stake; rules of framing, which regulate the ways the knowledge so constituted is to be processed in an interpersonal relationship; and rules of distribution suggesting which roles can be taken on by whom in the field, depending on the position in the social stratum he or she takes or identifies with (Bernstein, 1993, pp. 21–35).5 Together, these rules establish the professional code that renders meaningful the specific activity of professionals within this field and vis-à-vis other fields of social activity. The particular knowledge of pedagogy, for instance, crystallises in curricula. They define which subjects might be taught to whom and where (‘classification’) and how to select, organise, pace and time the knowledge transmitted and received in the pedagogical relationship (‘framing’) (Bernstein, 1975, p. 89). In so doing, curricula also distribute possibilities of acquisition and articulation, or voice; curricula suggest what roles teachers and pupils can assume in the pedagogic relationship (‘distribution’) (Bernstein, 1990, p. 168).6 Along with classroom settings, linguistic interaction and textual production are functional in maintaining and transforming pedagogic discourse; they reproduce the classification of relevant knowledge, the framing of teaching methods and the distribution of roles:  Bernstein’s definition of ‘framing’ refers to the context-specific way of doing or to the ‘packaging’, not to cognitive-substantive dimensions or interpretative schemes as developed in framing theories following Erving Gofmann. For a discussion of ‘frames’ as opposed to the more text-bound ‘discourse strategy’, see Sect. 3.1, Chap. 3. In his later work, Bernstein adds various additional principles to that of classification, framing and distribution. I will keep, however, to Bernstein’s most basic discourse-ordering ‘rules’. 6  However, such regulative principles should not be regarded as fixed, despite their thick institutionalisation through vocational training and everyday professional practice. As they allow for variation and always entail something ‘yet to be voiced’, they simultaneously create the possibility of transformation through contradiction (Bernstein, 1993, p. 44). 5

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[T]he selection, creation, production and changing of texts are the means whereby the positioning of subjects [in pedagogic discourse] is revealed, reproduced and changed. (Bernstein, 1993, p. 17)

The degree of classification and framing (strong versus weak) enacted in such linguistic-discursive activity is what sets a specific specialised discourse apart. The “classification principle creates the specific recognition rules whereby a context is distinguished and given its position with respect to other contexts” (Bernstein, 1993, p. 35). When classification is strong, that is, when knowledge items such as subjects, objects and events at stake in the field are clearly defined and isolated, the field-specific knowledge generated  will be highly exclusive and hard to acquire  for externals and novices. When classification is weak, that is, when acceptable relationships between categories are rather blurred, intersection with other discourses is likely. Bernstein considers pedagogy to distinguish itself through weak classification: the knowledge created therein is limited to the ways of bringing in bodies of knowledge from other fields for the purpose of selective transmission in the pedagogical relationship (Bernstein, 1993, p. 183f ). Within a specialised discourse, degrees of insulation of categories (subjects, objects, events) establish divisions and sub-discourses. For instance, a ‘collection approach’ to pedagogy, which draws on a formal canon of strictly isolated knowledge items (pupil-age-class-subjects-methods-­ teachers), requires a formal structure of departments, each in charge of a particular subject of teaching. An ‘integrated approach’, instead, which is constituted through blurred boundaries between these categories, requires coordinative networking that defines the legitimate range of boundarycrossing. While the collection approach establishes clear-cut hierarchies and roles (that participants need to draw on, but that they also can play upon), the integrative approach gives hierarchies a negotiated, but also a more opaque, character (Bernstein, 1993). The degree of ‘framing’ is another criterion for distinguishing a professional discourse. Framing establishes the range of possible ways in which the classified meanings may be enunciated in an interactive setting. “Where framing is strong, the transmitter explicitly regulates the distinguishing features (…), which constitute the communicative context.

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Where framing is weak, the acquirer has a greater degree of regulation over the distinguishing features” (Bernstein, 1993, p. 36). Strong framing may be crucial to maintain a professional discourse, which is weakly classified, vis-à-vis other professional discourses: while subject matters to be taught are relatively interchangeable, the way they are processed and transmitted is not. Within a classroom or newsroom, framing also can take on weaker forms, allowing for more control over interaction on the part of the acquirer. However, as Chouliaraki has shown in her study of classroom genres that attribute room for manoeuvre to the pupil (e.g. individualised teacher-pupil talks), more subtle means of framing such as the frequent use of modality can nevertheless perpetuate paternalising modes of education (Chouliaraki, 1998). In brief, the code concept assumes that a context of professional practice is discursively constituted and delimitated from other practice contexts by its regulative discourse (or code). It suggests how relevant knowledge items are to be identified and classified, how they are to be transmitted and what skills are required for participation in the profession. Regulative discourses of specialised social practice ensure control over professionality either by strong classification, that is, by highly specialised internal classification systems which are difficult to understand for externals and novices, and/or by strong framing, that is, highly specialised methods and formats of knowledge transmission, which only internals have learned to handle. These may be combined in a ‘collection approach’, which renders the hierarchy of knowledge items, processing methods and interpersonal roles clear and explicit, or in an ‘integrated approach’, which allows for multiple combinations of knowledge items, methods and roles. Bernstein’s major intention was to show that the integrated approach, which he found to be promoted in new methods of school teaching, requires a greater literacy and potentially excludes those who did not have a chance to acquire it before school, and thus reintroduces hierarchies in the pedagogical relationship which it meant to abolish (Bernstein, 1990). In the context of this study, however, Bernstein’s theory of professional discourse is illuminating for other reasons: it points to professional practice as being constituted by self-referential classificatory systems, not only by the pragmatic purpose of an instance of interpersonal and linguistic

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interaction that CDA highlights. These classificatory systems might explain why a certain feature of language use has become ‘generic’ to a profession. Moreover, Bernstein hints at the fact that professional practice, understood as regulative discourse, is not bound to established professional institutions or corporate and legal regulations, but may, in fact, be efficacious in various institutional and interactional settings, including transnational spaces and Europeanised realms. Finally, Bernstein’s concept of the professional code privileges a certain understanding of recontextualisation: the de- and relocation between contexts of social practice is primarily understood as de- and relocation between regulative discourses. The relocation of discourses in a particular specialised realm of social practice, consequently, implies their subordination to the regulative discourse of that realm; and the transformation of relocated discourses is a result of that subordination.7 The strength of Bernstein’s theory—precision in the semiotic constitution of a specialised social practice—also marks its limits. It is restricted to holist (structure-focused) considerations of the semiotic formation of specialised knowledge and how it regulates the selection of relevant content and the distribution of voice. We learn little about the actual practices of textual production which Bernstein assumes are reproducing and changing the pedagogic code and which are captured in the notion of genre in CDA. Moreover, while the code concept makes some assumptions about how the regulative discourse induces internal divisions and distributes voice, thereby connecting to more general social divisions, it is silent on how it is used or changed in the interactions of the agents involved.

 Note that Bernstein himself often goes beyond such pinpointed definition. For instance, he also refers to recontextualisation as de- and relocation of pedagogical expertise produced in ‘the upper reaches of the education system’ to the ‘lower reaches’ of objectified educational practice (Bernstein, 1986; quoted in van Leeuwen, 2009, p. 147). Recontextualisation as subordination to regulative discourse is most consistently applied in Chouliaraki (1998). 7

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F ield: Specialised Practice as Field-specific Cultural Capital This latter aspect of professional practice, that is, its constitution through the agents’ structured symbolic interaction, is at the heart of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social ‘fields’ (champs). Similar to Bernstein, Bourdieu draws on Durkheim’s ideas of social differentiation and assumes that such differentiation is, in part, brought about by systems of classification that are oriented on binary oppositions, such as included versus excluded, dominant versus dominated, orthodox versus heterodox and so forth (Swartz, 1997, p. 84). However, his major concern is to bring the “relational mode of thinking” of structuralism (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 16) to fruition for an analysis of society that mediates between the subjectivism and constructionism of ethnomethodology and the objectivism of (macro) sociology. The concept of ‘field’, modelled on the spatial representation of a force field in physics, allows him to imagine society as a social topology constituted by the symbolic-relational positioning of agents. They define ‘their place in society’ by correlating the position they have in objective structures of society (class, structural homology) with the disposition they possess, according to shared perceptions, in relation to other members of society (habitus). Society as a whole is imagined as a space of positions of power that agents occupy depending on the recognition (or overall ‘symbolic capital’) they have achieved in the eyes of peers and society because they dispose of certain resources, such as economic assets (‘economic capital’), social networks (‘social capital’) and authority derived from public office (institutional-political capital) or from education and training (‘cultural capital’) (Bourdieu, 1989). By detailing position and disposition in their interactions, social agents form configurations of social relations (or fields) endowed with habitualised collective meaning. Hence, a field is “a set of objective power relations imposed on all those who enter this field, relations which are not reducible to intentions of individual agents nor even to direct interactions between agents” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 230). Within the overall social space, realms of social practice have formed that specialise in a professional activity, such as politics or journalism,

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and follow their own political economy of recognition. They are delimitated from each other by the specific cultural capital (or know-how and skill) for which that practice is valued in society and which is required for legitimate participation in the field. According to Bourdieu, the economic and political fields have genuine sources of power, the one operating on the basis of economic assets, the other on the basis of a legally sanctioned monopoly of symbolic power, which endows them with an additional capacity to dominate. Fields of ‘cultural production’, on the contrary, entirely rely upon the social recognition of the distinct value of their ‘products’, such as curricula in pedagogy or news in journalism, to maintain their symbolic power. These fields “can be differentiated both according to the kinds of specific capital that are valued therein and by their degree of relative autonomy from each other and in particular from the dominant economic and political fields” (Benson, 1999, p.  464). However, the political and economic fields also need to be recognised for their specific expertise (how to mobilise collective action; how to generate profits) in order to maintain their autonomy against tendencies of, for example, state capture, corruption, clientilism or mediatisation. As with Bernstein’s code, field-specific cultural capital marks the relative autonomy of the field of social practice, as well as possible interactions (or interdiscursivities) with other fields. But, while the boundaries and internal divisions of the code are defined by internal classificatory and framing rules, the boundaries of the field are constituted by the belief a participant and the society invest (or do not invest) in the field’s particular cultural capital. “A field’s autonomy is to be valued because it provides the preconditions for the full creative process proper to each field” (Benson, 1999, p.  465). The stronger the participants’ commitment to the theoretical and practical knowledge of the profession is, the more autonomous the profession appears, while an instrumental use of that skill for other fields’ logics indicates heteronomy and potential cooptation.8 Knowledge of and compliance with professional values and techniques that have evolved in the long run are, at the same time, a personal acquisition, which is conditional for participation in the field:  Note the similarity between autonomy and heteronomy in Bourdieu’s field concept and strong and weak classification in Bernstein’s code concept. 8

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[T]oute l’histoire du champ est immanente au fonctionnement du champ. Et, pour être à la hauteur de ces exigences objectives, en tant que producteur mais aussi en tant que consommateur, il faut posséder une maîtrise pratique ou théorétique de cette histoire. (Cited in Chartier, 2003, p. 39, emphasis added)9

The practical or theoretical command of the field’s history is the source of social prestige in terms of professional reputation. Next to assets, social contacts, education and institutionally endowed symbolic power, it allows for social distinction vis-à-vis competitors. Whether as individual or collective agent, competitors gain symbolic power in the field either by adhering strictly to what is considered the skill and value proper of the profession, that is, drawing on the autonomous principle of professional legitimation, or by using their specialised skills for what is at stake in other fields of social practice, aligning with a heteronomous principle of professional legitimation. Bourdieu expected professional practice, in particular in fields of cultural production, to continuously oscillate between the two poles of professional legitimation (Bourdieu, 1993b/1983, p. 40). In his engaged writings at the end of the twentieth century, Bourdieu considered economic logics to have penetrated most fields of cultural production, but also politics, as a heteronomous principle of professional legitimation, pointing to audience ratings as a measure of journalistic success or to political branding as a skill particularly valued among politicians and political commentators. Moreover, in what we could call an early account of mediatisation, field researchers maintained that the practice of economically heteronomous news media, that is, of selectively boosting media attention for the sake of profit-generating audience ratings, had reigned as a heteronomous principle of professional legitimation in other fields. They observed that the skilful use of spin-doctor designs, which ensure the right sound bite or image at a given moment, was attracting more peer recognition than the struggle for party-internal coherence in politics, and that, in academia, well-rated media attention  “[T]he entire history of the field is immanent within the functioning of the field. To be equal to the functional demands of the field, as producer but also as consumer, one needs a practical or theoretical command of this history” (author’s translation). 9

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and “media fast thinking” or mediatisable linguistic capital (how to talk the media) was increasingly valued as a measure of professional success (Bourdieu, 1998; Champagne, 2005; Marlière, 1998).10 Couldry pushes this further towards a Bourdieusian conception of mediatisation. He claims that, due to technological change and increased pressures for public justification, the media’s pervasive capacity for “consecration, that is the media’s ability to sanctify certain things as having primary importance” has been built up as “media meta capital”: media consecration defines across different fields of social practice how symbolic power can be achieved within these fields (Couldry, 2003).11 Let me briefly sketch out what, against this scenario of heteronomy of late modern societies and liberal democracies, might be the logic and proper skills of the fields of specialised social practice that are considered in this book. Agents in the political, the journalistic and the social science fields, Bourdieu suggested, all struggle over symbolic power, that is, the power to define and qualify schemes of interpretation (in Bourdieu’s terminology: the principles of vision and division), by which social agents recognise themselves as members of a society (see also Sect. 3.2). Those, who deal professionally in making things explicit and producing discourses—sociologists, historians, politicians, journalists, etc.—have two things in common. On the one hand, they strive to set out explicitly practical principles of vision and division. On the other hand, they struggle, each in their own universe, to impose these principles of vision and division, and to have them recognized as legitimate categories of construction of the social world. (Bourdieu, 2005, p. 37)

Hence, the discourse production of politicians, academics and journalists, their effort to provide explication and interpretation, is geared towards gaining the recognition of both peers and more general publics. The “own universe”, the field of professional practice, gives credit a­ ccording  Note, however, that awareness for field-specific virtues, both political and journalistic, has risen again in the 2010s with the debate on the crisis of political representation and fake news. 11  Couldry thus draws an analogy to what Bourdieu called the meta-capital of the state, that is, its peculiar capacity to wield symbolic power over how power is achieved in various realms of social activity and how these realms interrelate. 10

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to its own principles, credit which also ensures more general recognition. Conversely, approbation outside the field, which  manifests itself, for instance, in a high number of votes or a high reputation among readers and news givers, is rewarded by peer recognition. Such two-sided recognition may be eased, but also thwarted, by ‘homology’, that is, the commonality that derives from the fact that field representatives, their peers and their audiences draw on a similar class background, education and provenance. In the journalistic field, which will be looked at in more detail in the next section, discourse production is focused on constructing news for a specified audience, while peer recognition is granted if, thereby, the journalist or news organisation can “appropriate the readership, (…) the earliest access to news, the scoop, exclusive information, and also distinctive rarity” (Bourdieu, 2005, p.  44). Hence, while discourse production is tailored to what is imagined as the target audience it equally harks back to the competition among professionals who seek to get prime access to news, set and prime the agenda, and thereby influence intermedia agendasetting (see also Sect. 4.3). The political field, on the other hand, is focused on a “struggle for the monopoly over the legitimate use of objectified political resources (the law, army, public finances) (…), by mobilising in an enduring way the greatest possible number of agents endowed with the same vision of the social world and its future” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 181). The skill valued here is the capacity to simultaneously yield a representation of the world, an idée-force, which mobilises many followers, and get hold of positions from which power can be wielded over followers. Politicians thus need to be able to perform persuasive political brands and programmes and, at the same time, outperform competitors, by employing charisma or the authority derived from posts or delegation (Kauppi, 2005, pp. 29–38). In the struggle for the recognition of voters or supporters and peers, “nothing is more threatening for the holder of symbolic capital than the alter ego, the rival who puts forward a programme capable of depriving the capital holder of his very existence” (Bourdieu, 2005, p. 39). Hence, Bourdieu’s conclusion that political polarisation, the investment in a binary logic of opposing poles (change vs order, progressive vs conservative, heterodox vs orthodox), is a requirement of political competition that

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derives from the competitive logics of the political field itself, instead of from preceding social mobilisation. Yet, to win approbation outside the professional field, politicians’ polarised struggle has to correspond to actual struggles and antagonisms in a society. This “political mimesis”, understood as the entrenched habitus of politics, rather than a conscious strategy, may be eased by homology, but also demasked if homology seems to be more pronounced between the competing representatives than between representative and represented (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 182). To sum up, Bourdieu’s field theory offers a meso-level conception of specialised social practice which highlights the structured symbolic interaction of professionals. It suggests conceiving of a context of professional practice as a microcosm in its own right, which gravitates around specific stakes according to its own political economy of recognition. It is distinguished from other fields of specialised practice by its field-specific cultural capital: the theoretical and practical knowledge, the expertise, skill, professional self-conception, ethos and memory thanks to which the profession has come into existence and has been valued in the first place. This field-specific capital sets the qualifications and credentials necessary for participation in the field. Drawing on it, participants compete for professional reputation, peer and public recognition. They establish positions and hierarchies of professionality by using field-specific capital either for the sake of the profession’s values and ethos, gaining recognition for their professional autonomy (e.g. l’art pour l’art as autonomous legitimation of the artistic profession), or by skilfully employing professional expertise in line with logics external to the field, gaining recognition for this very reason (e.g. l’art bourgeois as a heteronomous legitimation of the artistic profession) (Bourdieu, 1996). But their activities and discourse production are also conditioned by relations with other fields of specialised social practice; by the degree to which field-specific activities have been colonised (heteronomised) by logics external to the field or emancipated (autonomised) from them or colonised activities in other fields. Thus, field theory conceives of heteronomy not only in terms of direct control by representatives from other fields of social practice (e.g. through economic ownership or political control and censorship). Instead, it invites us to understand heteronomy as the modelling of field-specific activity on the standards and exigencies of another field (heteronomous

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l­egitimations of the profession), the mainstreaming and structuring of activities in other fields on the model of the field being investigated (meta-capital) and as convergence in the provenance and habitus of representatives from different fields (homology). Used as a lens and middle-range theory to review generic language use, the field concept thus suggests relating conventionalised patterns of language use not only to a typical pragmatic setting and script of action, such as the exigency to sell news to a specified audience (the perspective of genre), and not only to the regulative discourse that informs language use in such typical professional-pragmatic settings (the perspective of code), but to the specific expertise and vocational mission, or cultural capital of a specialised practice and the way it is employed in the relational positioning in a field at a given historical moment (the perspective of a field) (see Table 4.1). A certain occurrence of recontextualisation is, then, not only an adaptation to a given genre or regulative discourse, but the result of relational positioning between professionals within and beyond the field, who draw on field-specific cultural capital for generating professional reputation. Accordingly, we would expect that the new meaning of relocated discourse fragments is also yielded by an ongoing “detailing of position and disposition” within the field (Benson, 1999, p. 469).

Recontextualisation and the Notion of Discourse Fields Taken together, the perspectives of genre, code and field facilitate a more complex reading of what is going on in the course of recontextualisation and an explanation of its particular outcomes. For illustration, let us briefly return to the example of recontextualisation analysed in the previous section: Bielecki’s news report on the inauguration of the Convention. The report quoted two passages from Gicard d’Estaing’s speech that used the crossroads metaphor to conjure up a moment of decision between a rise to international power and a decline to disintegrated and, therefore, powerless member states. The analysis scrutinised the selection, weighting, rearrangement and addition, which Bielecki carried out in textual composition, semantic emphasis and linguistic devices. It showed that, as the result of such recontextualisation, the meaning of the quotes was

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Table 4.1  Discourse fields: dimensions of analysis Discourse field Social practice

Discourse production

Genre (patterned language use)

Code (classification and framing)

Field (topology)

…of EU multilateral negotiation

…of Europeanised national news

Influencing the negotiation outcome, mobilising collective action across scales, phases, factions of EU decision-making Idées-forces of European integration, drawing on intertexts of European integration Constructing representative claims: pro bono publico Europae Interpellating multiple, scaled audiences: flexible deixis and synechdoches, metaphors and narrative mythopoesis of European unification Concealing conflict: vagueness

Holding consecration power over EU news and the national news of the day

EU news, drawing on multilevel sources and national interdiscourse

Generating news salience for a national audience: complexity reduction in textual composition and weighted selection Generating consonance with a national audience: plausibilisation qua allusion, illustration, narrative mythopoesis News values Political opportunities in Objective, balanced multilevel and compound gathering and decision-making Teleological reading of treaties representation of news Governing of intertextuality and interdiscursivity Autonomous vs Popular-parliamentarian, heteronomous technocratic, corporate professional legitimation legitimations of political Segment-specific authority positioning Opposing national interest Opposing partisan clusters alignment Opposing partisan alignment

Source: Own elaboration

considerably transformed. In Bielecki’s report, the choice appeared to be between rendering the EU a dominant international power and accepting its subjection to the will of others, and it moved on to the suggestion that this choice was made over the head of Poland, subjecting Poland to the will of the EU (see Sect. 4.1).

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The analytical perspective of genre explained such an outcome by the specific practices of textual composition that allow journalists to reduce complexity (e.g. in the lead to a news story, by squeezing a lot of information into gerundial constructions), manage intertextuality (e.g. using the text genre of a quote story) and generate complicity with the target audience (e.g. triggering the image and memory of an overruled nation) for the purpose of effective transmission to an imagined audience. These linguistic-textual conventions, which entextualise a specific professionalpragmatic situation and script of action, unfold performativity in that they enhance a new interpretation and suggest linkages where they did not exist before (see Sect. 4.1). The perspectives of code and field, on the other hand, provide a contextualising explanation as to why such professional conventions are used in the first place and how they are discursively and interactionally constituted at the meso level of social organisation. The perspective of code suggests relating the patterns of language use in Bielecki’s report to conventions of classifying and processing journalistic knowledge. The way he selects extracts from the speech, weighs news givers and adds connotation could be seen to correspond to classifications of news value in news journalism, and the value of proximity, more particularly, which qualifies as newsworthy what seems close to the alleged concerns of the audience. The particular composition in a quote story, on the other hand, invokes the processing norm of balanced (or ‘objective’) reporting, according to which several views on the subject have to be revealed to the audience. The field perspective, finally, pins Bielecki’s interpretation down to the relational positioning of Rzeczpospolita and Bielecki himself, that is, the effort to produce an account of the inauguration of the Convention and a principle of vision and division, which is distinct from that of competitors, but ensures a share in the EU news of the day and demonstrates mastery of field-specific capital (see also next Sect. 5.3). Along with the more complex story of recontextualisation, the juxtaposition of the three concepts produces an understanding of contexts of specialised practice that moves beyond the limitations of each individual perspective. It moves beyond the focus on linguistic interaction and ­pragmatic setting in CDA’s notion of genre, the abstract semiotic logics of discourse formation that is characteristic of Bernstein’s code concept,

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and beyond the weak concept of discourse that is typical of Bourdieu’s field theory. While the field concept adds the moment of structured symbolic interaction, which is missing especially in the concept of code, code and genre suggest how a field is distinct not only by the beliefs and assumptions invested in it, but also by its peculiar regulative discourse and conventionalised discourse practice. Juxtaposed with each other and used as complementary insights from different intellectual-epistemological traditions, the three concepts invite us to think of contexts of specialised social practice as discourse fields. Discourse fields, then, are spaces of structured interaction, social topologies, which specialise in a specific type of discourse production, such as the construction of news or a mobilising idée-force, and which are themselves discursively constituted. They are maintained by conventionalised patterns of language use that relate to the pragmatics typical of the linguistic interactions in that space (genre) and to the regulative discourse applying therein (code), which together continuously produce, reflexivise and entextualise the specific expertise, ethos and self-understanding cultivated in that space of interaction (field-specific discursive capital). What is said and how and who is given voice in what way in this interactional space is partially conditioned by these constitutive discourse practices. But it also depends on how involved agents make use of them in relational positioning, whether they align more with autonomous or heteronomous professional legitimation when seeking to obtain peer and public recognition, and what interactions are maintained with other fields of specialised practice, the way intertextuality and interdiscursivity are organised in the field through the combination of weak versus strong classification or framing, and how degrees of autonomy, heteronomy or meta-capital are, thereby, sustained (see Table 4.1). When applying these insights to Bernstein’s primary definition of recontextualisation between specialised realms of social practice, we can conclude that selection, weighting, rearrangement and enrichment of discourses from the originating context of social practice will correspond to the code and genre of the receiving context of social practice, that is, to its principles of framing and classification; its particular generic ­features; and to the relational positioning of actors involved in the field. Through recontextualisation, the discourse fragments become an ‘imagi-

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nary practice’ not only because they are further reflexivised (as van Leeuwen points out), but also because they are subdued to discursive practices that serve another (self-referential) pragmatic purpose and correspond to another regulative discourse and established topology of social-symbolic relations. This context of a ‘discourse field’, hence, will largely condition how particular discourse fragments become recontextualised. The following section will elaborate these thoughts for the context of social practice that is of particular importance to this study: the context of news journalism.

4.3 T  he Discursive Constitution of News Journalism The imaginary practice created in news media, the site of recontextualisation primarily analysed in this study, is ‘news’. It is a representation of events or statements on an issue that no longer follows the chronology of an occurrence or the logics of the field in which it came up, but converts that occurrence into a public event. News is meant to cue the curiosity of a wider audience and has the potential to set the agenda across various fields of social practice. News is, in general terms, new information of recent events; and in terms of journalism more particularly, it is information about recent events that are selected in the course of editorial process as being of interest to or may affect a larger group and re-narrated not only for the sake of information, but also entertainment. Hence, ‘news’ is the information that is made part of the news agenda and that gives an (imaginary) account of past events. (Reah, 1998, p. 4f )

The production of news is a well-researched subject. Communication studies, sociology of organisations, and political economy have explicated the various constraints and social functions news production is responding to (Curran, 2000; Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Louw, 2001; McNair, 1995; Pfetsch & Mayhöffer, 2006). As a rule, however, the conception of media as the gatekeeping and priming ‘sender’ of elsewhere-generated

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content prevails, as do assumptions of the linear impact of ‘external’ influences on media content such as news factors (communication studies), organisational constraints (sociology) and political or economic patronage (political economy). The ‘Copernican view’ of media (Schulz, 1989 cited in Koopmans & Pfetsch, 2007), that is, of the construction of social reality by the media, has primarily been applied with regard to evaluation provided by individual journalists in editorials and the alleged priming effect of that evaluation on audiences’ appraisals of current problems (de Vreese & Boomgaarden, 2006; Eilders, 2000; Trenz, Conrad, & Rosén, 2007). If, however, we adopt the view that news media are not only transmitters or opinion-makers, but that news journalism represents a distinct social-semiotic practice creating its own, often self-referential image of the world (Nowak et al., 1990, p. 125), these concepts do not lead very far. Bourdieu, when delimiting his approach from that of political economy, defined the challenge of conceptualisation thus: [T]o understand what happens in journalism, it is not sufficient to know who finances the publication, who the advertisers are, who pays for the advertising, where the subsidies come from, and so on. Part of what is produced in the world of journalism cannot be understood unless one conceptualizes this microcosm as such. (Bourdieu, 2005, p. 55)

The three perspectives on specialised social practice introduced in the previous section—code, genre, field—help to conceive of news as a practice of its own, characterised by its symbolic-discursive constitution (see Sect. 4.2). This section will explore the symbolic-discursive constitution of news journalism, rereading insights from research on news discourse, communication and journalism in the light  of genre, code and field. While one can draw on rich literature for single perspectives, the full potential of their combination has not yet been explored.12 I claim that, together, they provide an understanding of how news, as a highly specialised discourse field, is involved in discursive Europeanisation.

 For a call to combine field and code and code and genre, see Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999, pp. 98–119). 12

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The Genre of News Journalism Unlike communication studies, which usually focus on media content, its selection, weighting and evaluative framing, news discourse studies take an interest in the way these contents of privileged media attention are constructed through textual-linguistic devices and contexts of expression. They take an interest in ‘genre’, understood not only as text genres, that is, as texts that have recognisable formal and stylistic similarities and relate to a common communication situation, but more generally as a range of relatively stable linguistic-discursive devices that together enact a specialised social practice (Fairclough, 1995a, p.  13f ). Most scholars take a pragmatic approach, assuming that the specific practices of text composition and representation correspond to the exigency of news production, that is, to the exigency to reduce complexity and to create comprehensibility for the sake of effective distribution to a wider audience. In her study on ‘politics as usual’, where the genre of TV soaps on politics is explored as a frontstage dimension of politics, Wodak states the following, for instance: Emotionalisation, personalisation, decreased distance and dramatisation allow for easy identification and comprehensibility. (…) These carefully crafted media performances offer viewers a sanctioned gaze from the outside, on the work and life of politicians. They are official genres, designed for the public; revealing the many ways politicians like to present themselves. (Wodak, 2009, p. 163)

Features of more traditional text genres in print journalism, which is the focus of this study, can also be conceived of in that way: they help to narrow down complex information to easily recognisable formats, often at the expense of precision on actual events. This is true for the wording of headlines, for instance: the repetitive reuse of a minimum of words renders headlines memorable and striking, but without being necessarily precise about the story that follows in the text body (Nowak et al., 1990, p. 125; Reah, 1998, pp. 13–16). A news report, which is meant to give a first draft of history in a conventionalised pattern of narration, is often, in fact, arranged according to the more chaotic genre of gossip, which

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highlights the  sharing of opinions and judgements, seeking to assert shared assumptions about appropriate behaviour and moral values (White, 2003). Following Fowler, it is due to this pragmatic function, that is, the efficient suggestion of complicity with an assumed audience, that allusions—the means of constructing plausibility—are so widespread in media discourse (see also Sect. 3.1). Evidently, allusions convey a lot of significance in a short space; and they are important clues to the cultural assumptions a newspaper makes about its readership. (Fowler, 1991, p. 228)

In a similar vein, various studies have revealed that the formatting, which is suggested by journalistic textbooks and corporative codes of conduct, in particular the strict separation of ‘news’ as a  neutral and balanced account and ‘opinion’ as one-sided evaluation, is far from clear-cut. News and opinion differ in the  degree of explicitness of evaluation and in the degree of narrativity or argumentativity, but not so much in evaluative content or the manipulation of interpretation (Fowler, 1991, p. 227; Nowak et al., 1990, pp. 122–128). In fact, the insights which this study generates in the EU constitutional debate in Polish and French broadsheets suggest that news text genres, which qualify by a greater degree of description and narrativity, and opinion text genres, which qualify by a greater degree of argumentativity, together, constitute a specific practice typical of ‘quality’ news journalism: the practice of staging and stimulating ‘media debate’. Media debates are accumulations of pieces of evaluation on a specific topic that is recurrently taken up. They are arranged by news media in the follow-up to a scoop in order to maintain the audience’s attention and stimulate controversy’s interest. In such media debates, news text genres and evaluative text genres enact a highly reduced version of a controversy: news text genres invoke the editorial line according to which debate is arranged and facilitated; the pieces of self-authored or invited commentary, on the other hand, while being strictly ­moderated according to the editorial line on the topic, evoke the practice of argumentative exchange or deliberation.

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Apart from complexity reduction in specific text genres, news discourse studies have revealed intertextuality and genre mix as constitutive features of news discourse: “one striking feature of news discourse is the [variable] way in which it weaves together representations of speech and writing of complex ranges of voices” (Fairclough, 1995b, p. 77). From this perspective, journalistic texts appear as intersections of various texts strategically exploiting other texts. Such intertextuality is created, as a rule, through quotation, paraphrase or montage of fragments of texts previously occurring in other contexts of social practice or already published by other news media. They are linked in “quote stories” by means of direct or indirect speech and changing modality (Nowak et al., 1990, pp.  122–128). In addition, news discourse merges discourse practices applicable in other contexts with its own, news producing, discourse practices: through a mix of text genres, for example in a political interview, which combines features of political speech with journalistic framing, or through evocation, for example when evoking deliberation in the case of media debates (Fairclough, 2000; Lauerbach, 2004). Novel or abstract knowledge from other fields is also mediated by sophisticated means of creating connotation, generated by a rich registry of illustrative means widely and conventionally used in a society for the description of more abstract phenomena. Often employed in the form of chains of pictorial expressions from the same semantic field (isotopies) or in the form of catachresis, this imagery helps to suggestively link content that does not necessarily relate directly to the same problem and to enhance a particular interpretation of an event or problem (Link, 1992). This rich figurative register is manifest, as I have shown earlier, not only in rhetorical tropes such as metaphors, synecdoches, catachreses or pars pro toto phrases, but also in allusions, evocations and narrative mythopoesis (see Sect. 3.1).

The Journalistic Code The perspective of the code invites us to see the generic features depicted earlier not only as the effect of pragmatic constraints implied by the imperative to sell news to (implied) audiences—a mostly implicit assump-

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tion of many studies on news discourse. Rather, media-specific language use appears as corresponding to a specialised regulative discourse, which maintains a profession. The contradiction between journalistic textbook knowledge (e.g. the norm of objectivity and balanced representation), on the one hand, and actual routines of journalistic practice, on the other, is then less a problem of violated journalistic ethics (though it is certainly also that) than a problem of the production and control of knowledge, which has wider implications. Textbook knowledge, as well as its undermining, is, then, a constitutive feature of the maintenance of a profession and its specialised mission in a society. When we apply Bernstein’s ideas on classification and framing to journalistic practice, its ‘regulative principle’ (in Bernstein’s terminology) is a mixture of weak classification, which facilitates large-scale distribution of all kinds of content, and simultaneous strong framing, which secures the journalist’s control over that distribution process. Journalistic practice appears as a ‘recontextualising principle’ similar to pedagogic discourse: it is constituted through ways of “appropriating other discourses and bringing them into special relations with each other for the purposes of their selective transmission” (Bernstein, 1993, p.  183f ). While various types of content, styles and text genres can be selectively integrated and flexibly combined, the way of combining them is governed, either in the formatted manner suggested by journalistic textbooks or through the many ways of organising intertextuality (Fairclough, 1995b; Scollon, 1998, p. 231f ). Journalistic classification relates to the distinction of ‘news’, which is worth transmission, from ‘non-news’, which will be abandoned in the course of the editorial process. It distinguishes more relevant from less relevant news, ‘hard news’ (information-focused coverage of political and economic events) from ‘soft news’ (entertainment-focused coverage of events mostly going on in domains of culture, sports and leisure). Newsworthiness is measured in terms of ‘general interest’, defined by a range of assumptions about the attributes of news (news values) which are likely to attract the audience’s attention, so-called news values. They include novelty, proximity, celebrity, controversy, leverage (Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Lanson & Stephens, 1994). Depending on what resonance the so-attributed news is expected to have in the targeted audience, the

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news will be further categorised: it will be ranked in terms of relevance and assigned to established semantic or topic domains (politics, economy, feuilleton, society, culture, sports and leisure; international, domestic, local etc.). The classification principles of newsworthiness and topic domains have become institutionalised in departments and sections of programmes or newspapers, similar to what Bernstein observed for the institutionalisation of curricula in pedagogy. The boundaries between news, non-news, hard or soft news, and different topic domains are, however, blurred: previously soft news could easily turn ‘hard’ and a major political event can become a subject of feuilleton or TV soap and vice versa. Moreover, with digitisation, the ‘departmentalisation’ of news production seems to give way to a new professional role and ideal type of a multimodal and multitasking journalist, who manages a news story across the many layouts and modalities of a publishing house, including print and online genres or audiovisual and moving pictures, and accumulates prestige thanks to her or his cross-capacity competence (Lin, 2012). Nonetheless, it is the classification of news and related decisions on newsworthiness that inform specific ways of processing the news. Journalistic ‘framing’ (in Bernstein’s terminology) relates, first of all, to the ordering of news and ensuing debate: “In news, ordering is everything, but chronology is nothing” (Bell, 1991, p.  169). The ranking according to newsworthiness shows in the varying salience and weighted visibility attributed to an issue in terms of frequency of publication, volume and length of attributed time or space, placement (e.g. most prestigiously on the first page, la Une, or in the prime time slot): “The amount, placement, and length of EU stories can provide insights into how much importance journalists ascribe to the coverage of European affairs” (Peter, Semetko, & De Vreese, 2003, p. 307). But the attributed relevance also shows in further elaboration and in-depth discussion, possibly involving more domains and departments over a longer period of time. Peter et al. point to the “invisible importance” of EU news items in television programmes: they might not be placed prominently, but are attributed considerable space and time (Peter et  al., 2003). Journalistic relevance attribution is also manifest in the arrangement of texts. While only a few news stories seem to strictly follow the ‘instalment method’ or ‘inverted pyramid’, which constructs a downward spiral through the available

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information (van Dijk, 1988, p. 43), both news and evaluative texts seem to evoke this method as a formal principle of text composition when adding, in a cumulative manner, more and more information or arguments or when starting with a lead (Matouschek, Wodak, & Januschek, 1995).13 In addition to relevance attribution, journalistic framing also stipulates how newsworthy information is to be gathered and represented in order to avoid bias, thereby invoking the standards of ‘objective’ coverage established by US and British investigative journalism (Neveu, 2004, p. 11ff). The principle of ‘objectivity’ or ‘balanced information’ suggests drawing on at least two news-giving sources, which represent opposing voices: confronting an interview partner with the views of her or his critics; and arranging commentaries or talk shows in such a way that both a pro- and a contra-position on a particular issue are represented. It also suggests clearly separating information, for example by visibly distinguishing balanced information (news) from (explicitly) one-sided ‘opinion’ in corresponding text genres and through placement in corresponding sections of the programme or newspaper. Another rule of thumb derived from the principle of objectivity relates to the necessary components which the re-narration of an event should include in order to be ‘complete’ rather than ‘selective’, coined as the ‘five Ws’ of a journalistic story (what, who, when, where, why). Hence, the lens of classification and framing reveals, in the first place, the canonical aspect of the regulative discourse of news journalism as it has evolved since the 1950s. This regulative discourse echoes principles of objective science and claims to thereby ensure the information, mediation, advocacy and community functions assigned to (mass) media in modern liberal democracies. Similar to Bernstein’s ‘collection approach’ in pedagogy, it draws on a formal canon of (theoretically) strictly isolated knowledge items and methods of processing. As Neveu stresses in the following quote, ‘objectivity’ might be a professional myth, but a myth which has become a professional norm. Along with gathering and ordering news in a quasi-scientific way, this norm suggests producing an objec This pyramid style goes back to the US journalism of the 1880s and marks the movement of journalists from being stenographers recording events to interpreters (Bell, 1991, p. 168). It seems to be least applicable in French journalism, where articles tend to start with a (lengthy) recalling of the background before coming to the kernel of news. 13

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tivising view of the individuals and dynamics involved in the recounted events, so as to set journalistic reporting clearly apart from anything that might resemble gossip (Neveu, 2004, p. 11). The lens of classification and framing also reveals the ‘integrated approach’ in journalistic regulative discourse, however. The many means of creating and governing intertextuality, genre mix and connotation then appear less (or not only) as violating and undermining the norms of good or objectivising journalism, than as far more complex devices of control of information. Like the ‘integrated approach’ to curriculum design in pedagogy, these devices potentially assign voice to those previously objectified, for example in interactive media genres or through colloquialisation of speech. At the same time, for navigating them, more skills are required (Fairclough, 1995b, pp.  142–149). As Jürgen Link pointed out, the subversion of canonical classification and framing is as constitutive of media discourse as complexity reduction. What he observes on the textual level as creating cohesion and coherence—the use of pictorial expressions in a method of catachresis—is, to his mind, likewise a more general organising principle of popularising ‘interdiscourses’: a “strangely twisted combination of [pictorial] fragments, which disrupt the one-dimensionality of dominant isotopies” (Link, 2001, p. 55). What Karl Kraus identified as ‘canting’ in the mass media of the nineteenth century—for example saying that someone had earned his spurs in the dugout or that an encirclement of an army had shipwrecked—Link considers to be a regulative principle of media discourse. These “meanders of catachresis” are used to generate connotation and familiarity, on the one hand. On the other, they disrupt established classifications, causing both a moment of puzzled attention and a connection of unrelated elements. Link holds that such arrangement of collective symbols allows absorbing subcultural discourses into media discourse, so that it functions as a hub for the redifferentiation of discourse contributing to cultural revolutions (Link, 2003, p. 13). At the same time, the arrangement of collective symbols also facilitates the normalisation and mainstreaming of discourses on a particular subject (Jäger & Jäger, 2007; Jäger & Link, 1993). These aspects of journalistic practice are underexplored in media studies, but they might be important for grasping the transformation and enrichment of meaning that result from recontextualisation in news media.

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The Journalistic Field From the perspective of field, the mentioned ambiguities of journalistic practice result from the heteronomy of the journalistic field and the trajectory of its development. Modern political journalism established itself in the nineteenth century with journalists claiming (and audiences approving) that their service of political-investigative journalism and media debate had a value of its own compared to the information provided by the palace spokesman, the city chronicler and court recorder, the advertiser on the marketplace, or socially engaged reportage or fiction. To demarcate their cultural capital, journalists explicitly referred to informational rights, pluralist debate and the corporative code of transparent techniques of news gathering and news representation (Bourdieu, 1993b/1983; de Burgh, 2000). Journalistic expertise was later professionalised through journalistic training and self-regulation by professional associations regarding, for instance, the protection of sources. However, “the degree of autonomy varies considerably from one period of national tradition to another[;] (…) it depends on the value the specific capital of writers and artists [or journalists] represents for the dominant fractions (…) within the field of power (…) and in the production and reproduction of economic capital” (Bourdieu, 1993a/1980, p. 40f ). News journalism has always been torn between political and economic pressures. It emerged in a specific historic constellation in the nineteenth century, when new political liberties coincided with widened literacy, industrialised printing and stock markets generating financial investment. But also the traits of heteronomy that are characteristic of journalism to date hark back to that historic constellation. Early publications were funded by political groupings and used as mouthpieces for the opposing political projects of the time (royalist vs republican, socialist vs capitalist, church-friendly vs laic etc.); they inscribed themselves in the partisan logics of political competition. The rise of industrial printing and financial investment, however, rendered mass media a profitable business and advertising a major source of  revenue. In consequence, large-scale distribution became a ‘heteronomous’ professional legitimation alternative to investigative-political journalism: a professional repu-

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tation could now also be gained by reaching out to large audiences and wealthy sponsors. An implication of this development was the orientation towards mass audiences and the development of tabloid journalism, which was less focused on partisan politics and centred, instead, on entertainment and consumer advice, developing simplified and concise language for efficient transmission (Kuhn, 2011, p. 6). Since then, the two professional legitimations of journalism—one adhering to high standards of journalistic skill and ethos (autonomous professional legitimation), the other prioritising large-scale distribution (heteronomous professional legitimation)—have found numerous reformulations (Bourdieu, 2005, p. 39f, see also Sect. 4.4). As a lesson drawn from the political instrumentalisation of mass media during the two world wars, transnational professional associations and rules of accreditation were introduced in Western Europe along with media regulation that was meant to ensure freedom of speech and external and internal pluralism. The 1960s brought about socially responsible journalism as a new autonomous legitimation, while revelations, linked to intrusive journalism, became a characteristic of the tabloid press (de Burgh, 2000, pp. 48–61). After television had been privatised in the 1980s, the heteronomous legitimation of large-scale distribution found an actualisation in the ranking of media products according to audience ratings (one might add: clicks and likes) and the profit and acknowledgement derived from them (Bourdieu, 1998). Together with the internationalisation and concentration of media ownership, this development has reinforced pressures to rationalise the editorial process (Champagne, 2005). At the same time, technological change and trends towards more participatory or responsive politics have given rise to new professional roles and legitimations. They exist alongside institutional news journalism and blur established boundaries of the professional, for example Web-based community journalism or social media journalism. Technological change has also accelerated mediatisation, that is, the orientation of activities in other fields of specialised practice towards media consecration, paralleled by the ramification of media spin (Bourdieu, 2005, p.  41). This development endows established mass media and social media with unknown consecration power or even meta-capital, but also exposes journalism to new threats of capture (Couldry, 2003, see also Sect. 4.2).

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Hence, the field perspective directs our attention to the contingency of journalistic discursive-cultural capital. The modes of professional legitimation derived from that capital are not set in stone, but accommodate professional autonomy with changing political-economic constellations at a given moment in time. Such accommodation is not a mere reflection of external pressures, but mediated by news agents’ and audiences’ symbolic interaction. The field perspective further suggests that autonomous and heteronomous modes of professional legitimation are also a function and result of relational positioning of participants within the field, who draw on these professional roles as a source of social and professional distinction. In the competition for consecration power, qualifying as ‘high quality’ or ‘high turnout’ or as more or less partisan, established or alternative is a means of social distinction, along with forming part of a particular segment with its respective expertise and skill (print, audio, audiovisual, electronic). What prestige the different departments and sections of a news organisation embody, or the different news organisations and individual journalists, also depends on whether they align more with the autonomous or with a heteronomous mode of professional legitimation (Neveu, 2004, pp.  35–42). These means of social  distinction are used to obtain agenda-setting and consecration power in the overall media field: “The extent to which a particular medium or media enterprise is able to exercise such consecrating power is an indicator of its relative weight within the field” (Benson, 1999, p. 469). The internal dynamics of relational positioning bred self-referential practices that, similar to the subordination to the regulative discourse of the profession, may distort the pragmatic purpose and ascribed social function of news production. For instance, the practice of intermedia agenda-setting secures every single news medium a share in the distribution of the top news of the day; but, at the same time, it homogenises news agendas and hampers external pluralism. The fact that Parisian political journalists made it part of their professional habitus to surround themselves with ‘homologues’ from political parties (representatives of the same social strata and education) may have increased their fieldinternal prestige, but potentially undermined their  professional autonomy (Bourdieu, 1994, pp. 28–36). The use of particular generic means identified by news discourse studies, the relating to and construction of a particular audience is, from this perspective, less an exigency and prag-

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matic constraint and less an implication of a specialised regulative discourse than a means of obtaining distinction in the field and consecration power in the relation to peers and representatives of other fields of social practice. Taken together, the insights generated through the lens of genre, code and field provide some precision on how news journalism is constituted discursively symbolically and what renders it a ‘discourse field’ of specialised practice. News journalism is a space of possible social relations and interactions that centre on the construction of news and the competition for consecration power, that is, over the definition of what is to be sanctified as news and who will get a share in setting the news agenda of the day. While that activity is certainly conditioned by the overall politicaleconomic constellation and institutional arrangements as outlined in studies of media systems, the way these pressures are played out in the field and accommodated with professional practice is largely determined within the field, in the relational positioning among individual journalists and news organisations, segments or programmes that seek recognition from peers and audiences. The main source of professional and social  distinction is field-specific cultural capital: expertise, which is employed either in the strict sense to underline professional autonomy, for example by keeping close to transparent techniques of news gathering and news representation, the norm of objectivity and so forth; or in the service of logics external to the field, for example for boosting large-scale distribution and audience ratings, which promises to attract advertisers and increase profit. The discourse perspective derived from the concepts of genre and code suggests, however, that such field-specific cultural capital is not just a set of habitualised assumptions about professionality which journalists ­internalise when socialising in the field. From a discourse perspective, the cultural capital of news journalism is a set of generic discourse practices and a genuine discourse formation that journalists continuously employ and reproduce in their professional activities and relational positioning. The generic textual-linguistic practices construct news and interpellate target audiences by reducing complexity and by generating audience-specific consonance through a range of sedimented text genres and patterns of language use. These generic practices correspond to the pragmatics and scripts of action typical of journalism, that is, the efficient transmission of

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news to a specified audience and the construction of complicity with that imagined audience. But they also relate to the regulative discourse of news journalism, both in its canonical aspect, which suggests how to classify, distinguish and properly process salient news, and in its integration aspect, which suggests how to organise interdiscursivity, in particular by actualising and recombining the figurative register shared in the targeted epistemic community (see Table 4.1, second column). However, a particular piece of journalistic work does not simply ‘realise’ or enact an established regulative code and discourse practice. Instead, it ‘entextualises’ how the individual journalist or news organisation employs fieldspecific discourse practice for relational positioning and social distinction within and beyond the field. Moreover, the overall prestige and reputation, which individual news journalists or news organisations acquire due to accumulated field-specific capital, may become a source of symbolic power for representatives of other fields, too. They  capitalise on being consecrated media attention by that acclaimed journalist or news organisation and on modelling their activities on media practice, demonstrating their media literacy. Keeping these general insights into the discursive constitution of news journalism and relations with other fields in mind, the following section will look in more detail into the specific constellation of news production in Poland and France during the period of investigation, and how it is likely to be involved in Europeanised political communication.

4.4 T  he Discourse Field of Europeanised National News National news media are, arguably, not the most authoritative and influential source of information on EU politics. In fact, specialist papers like The Financial Times, The Economist, Wall Street Journal Europe and European Voice or television programmes such as Euronews and arte are better known and valued for their  EU competence and EU advocacy (Statham, 2008). As my own research showed, these news outlets often figure as EU-informed sources of national news media. Moreover, with

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digitisation and the development of fragmented virtual publics, national mass media have continuously lost significance as agenda-setting actors and a fourth estate. Nevertheless, given their concern with issues of ‘general interest’ and their physical distribution across the territory of a national jurisdiction in the respective titular language, researchers expect (only) national mass media to generate the sort of general, EU-related, media public that might watch and feed back into EU policymaking (Schlesinger, 1999). A field perspective further suggests that national news media, and broadsheets, in particular, continue to be important for EU-related political communication, despite their diminishing overall significance, because they are specialised in the mediation of national political debates and potentially endow those who raise claims on EU politics with news salience and prestige in national audiences. Because of this specialisation, they were selected as a site for the study of discursive Europeanisation in this book. The objective of this section is to establish how the broadsheets selected for analysis, Gazeta Wyborcza, Rzeczpospolita, Le Monde and Le Figaro, were likely to position themselves during the EU constitutional debate and speculate what implications that might have for recontextualised discourse fragments. The argument is made that their context of professional practice is best characterised as a ‘discourse field of Europeanised national news’: a space of structured interaction that is oriented towards the role of  conceptions and professional standards, the regulative discourse and generic language use of institutional news journalism, which was described in the previous section. Activities in that space centre on the construction of news for a national audience, that is, they highlight issues of assumed relevance and curiosity for an audience that stretches across a national jurisdiction. They do so by using national interdiscourse and drawing on the historically grown field-specific capital and structure of the national journalistic field and its shifting configuration of professional autonomy and heteronomy. At the same time, agents in the field adjust these activities in a way that ensures access to and participation in the transnational, mainly Brussels-based, production of EU news. In the following, I will explore this dual implication, drawing on studies in EU journalism and European media publics, on the one hand, and comparative research in national media systems and selective insights from the

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primary analysis, on the other, that give an idea of the selected newspapers’ involvement in their national journalistic fields during the period of investigation. EU news production has established itself as a Brussels-based transnational field, which gravitates around information about EU politics. It includes not only the officially accredited European press corps that has been meeting at the so-called Midday Briefing of the European Commission since its establishment in the 1960s. Participating also are policymakers and administrative staff who are in charge of communication in EU institutions, advocacy groups and a growing number of communication agencies, often run by former employees of the Directorate-General of Communication, who offer their information services to firms, lobbyists and educational institutions (Aldrin, 2013). National news organisations used to enjoy a special position in that field. As they were trusted as rapporteurs of institutional events with a strong pro-integrationist leaning and distributors of EU news in the national publics, they enjoyed close relations with European Commission officials and had exclusive access to the Commission’s press conference (see also Hubé, 2018). Today, a more complicated web of activities has emerged, which is accessible to a variety of information professionals and which the Commission seeks to proactively feed with self-designed PR materials via direct channels, such as social media (Aldrin, 2013). Still, national news media remain important voices for EU authorities and function as proxies of an informed EU public and national publicised opinion which is to be considered in policymaking (Baisnée, 2003, p. 114). To sustain access to and participation in EU news production, national news media have oriented part of their editorial resources towards the centres of the EU political process. Judging from the authorship of the articles published on the EU constitution, the four newspapers investigated in this book covered EU issues as a team. It was composed of one Brussels correspondent and correspondents in fellow EU member states’ capitals, who were charged with reporting on the spot, and one or two individuals in the home editorial office, usually from the politics or opinion department, who were responsible for editing press agencies’ reports or co-authoring longer pieces together with the correspondent. Correspondents based in Brussels operate in a ‘clubby’ microcosm that has the air of a transnational newsroom: correspondents from

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all member states share offices and daily routines, participate in the same press events and consult the same sources, helping each other out (Mancini et  al., 2007, pp.  188–122). They are highly knowledgeable about and deeply socialised in EU-specific processes and specialist discourse. But their microcosm is also strongly stratified according to the status and type of the news organisation, the seniority and celebrity of the individual journalist, and, chiefly, nationality, as correspondents from the same member state form special interest groups that are targeted by the Brussels dependencies of political actors from that very member state. In relational positioning, journalists use these positions, somewhat mirroring the cleavages of EU intergovernmental politics, and work  with correspondents from small or newcomer countries, forming alliances to secure similar access to information as press agencies hosted in big member states (Mancini et al., 2007, pp. 122–124). Even though Brussels correspondents struggle to have their EU news acknowledged as relevant by their home offices, national news media in EU member states have come to account for the EU’s dual power base and multilevel policymaking in ‘Europeanised’ media content. They highlight those EU-related events and statements that are issued to the domestic public (Adam, 2007). At the same time, they also attribute visibility to issues arising at the EU level and in fellow member states. They do so to an extent, which corresponds to the extent of supranationalisation of a policy realm (Koopmans & Pfetsch, 2007), and with greater intensity than, for instance, US news media even when international, not EU-specific, issues are concerned (Kantner, Kutter, & Renfordt, 2008). Europeanisation also shows in text-generic features. National news media have developed Europeanised text genres to issue EU politics across news departments, such as news reports that compare the state of affairs in different EU member states, ‘open letters to the European public’ (see Sect. 6.2) or European press reviews that construct the figure of a European reader who rearticulates several national views in an overall frame of interpretation (Le Bart, 2004). At the same time, such EU coverage continues to follow priorities set by the home editorial office, which applies an explicitly national angle (Gleissner & De Vreese, 2005). Even Brussels correspondents, who are socialised with the expertise and collective identity of an EU-related

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media public, have been observed to align with the priorities and practices endorsed by national journalistic training and the patron organisation: “apart from the language barrier, national professional and political cultures still determine EU coverage, while each national press continues to organise itself according to its own principles, which in turn produces a particular method of covering Europe” (Baisnée, 2003, p.  115). The lens of the discourse field suggests that this results not only from socialisation with national journalistic culture, as maintained by Baisnée, but from the fact that EU correspondents and their employer organisations compete for recognition above all in the national journalistic field. They have to prove proficiency in that context, bringing EU expertise into line with proficiency in playing the national journalistic field. Therefore, understanding their activities also requires assessing the disposition and position they hold in their respective national journalistic fields. In order to situate the four selected broadsheets, I will review portraits of the Polish and French media landscape with a view to the characteristics that have been outlined for the analysis of national journalistic fields, such as the formation of the profession and field-specific capital, the configuration of heteronomy, and the resulting structure of relational positioning (Benson, 1999). I will highlight features that were relevant to the period of investigation, when landscapes of national political competition had only started to restructure and when digitisation and social media had only started to revolutionise political communication. What Polish and French journalism have in common is that they institutionalised comparatively late. There are examples of journalistic writing in the eighteenth century that were independent from court reportage, such as Cardinal Richelieu’s Gazette, the republican and royalist pamphlets that were read in Parisian coffee houses during the early revolutionary years, or the few periodicals read by aristocratic circles and educated city dwellers in Poland. However, as a profession, news journalism only established itself in the late nineteenth century in France and in the early twentieth century in Poland, when widened literacy, industrialised printing technologies and financial investment in news production coincided with more conducive political conditions. These were heralded by the 1881 press statute in France, which introduced formal guarantees of freedom of opinion, and the end of Austrian-Hungarian, German and

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Russian occupation and related censorship laws in Polish territories after 1918 (Dobek-Ostrowska, 2012, p. 27; Kuhn, 2011, p. 6f ). Related to the long history of repression by state authorities in both countries, acknowledged journalistic expertise did not originate in investigative journalism, as in the UK and the US, but in satire, political writings and engaged social reportage provided by acclaimed writers, such as Claudine Colette, Émile Zola, Maria Ilnicka or Bolesław Prus (Dobek-Ostrowska, 2012, p.  27f; Neveu, 2004, p.  14). Le Figaro, which  has existed since 1826, exemplifies this trajectory. Having started as a satirical paper, which subverted the censorship of the monarchy in a republican spirit, it became famous as a hub for France’s writers of the late nineteenth century, at least as long as these pleased the tastes of the Parisian middle class of mainly conservative orientation. The memory of these founding moments of the profession is reflected in specific understandings of cultural capital and professional roles. It shows in the continuous appreciation, by Polish and French journalists and audiences alike, of rhetorically refined political commentary, extended debate, in-depth analysis and feuilleton. Another legacy can be seen in the fact that a clear-cut legal and corporate definition of the journalistic profession is missing in the two countries. The proliferation of journalism schools and study programmes since the 1920s notwithstanding, training is not standardised or obligatory, and professional associations have continuously failed to agree on corporate codes of conduct. This facilitates a diversity of communication jobs and professional role conceptions, including that of the information provider, the enlightening interpretive authority or the writer-manqué (DobekOstrowska, 2012, p. 43; Neveu, 2004, p. 14). However, the topology and the balance of autonomy and heteronomy that the four selected newspapers drew on formed in more recent times. During the period of investigation, general freedoms, responsibilities and formal accreditation were formally granted in both Poland and France, by resolutions of the Council of Europe, national constitutional and press law as well as statutes of professional associations, while self-regulated control of media accountability remained fragmented. In Poland and France, unguarded patronage by governments and owners of news organisations was rare, with the exception of the notorious struggles over the political control of the public broadcasting authority. While there were

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several incidents of politicians using libel trials to silence journalists in both countries, unlawful ‘anti-terrorism’ police raids against editorial offices in France, and a major case of (unsuccessful) bribery in Poland, the so-called Rywingate, the overall legal, political and economic conditions were seen to ensure press freedom.14 Both French and Polish journalists considered the quality of their work to be endangered not by patronage and censorship, but by commercialisation, manifest in a market-driven editorial process, dependency on advertising and high time pressure and job insecurity (Baisnée, Balland, & Zambrano, 2017, p. 81f; Stępińska & Głowacki, 2014). Nevertheless, they held opposing views on professional autonomy. French journalists considered themselves to be independent from political and economic pressures, while enjoying little trust among the public (Baisnée et al., 2017, pp. 82, 84f ), as opposed to Polish journalists, who had a very low regard for their profession and professional independence, but were appreciated by the public (Dobek-Ostrowska, 2012, p. 40). Such self- and other conceptions, one might suspect, reflect collective experiences with the heteronomy of the journalistic profession. In part, they were shaped in the founding years of the Fourth French Republic in the late 1940s and of the Third Polish Republic after 1989. In both countries, these periods were characterised by strong “political parallelism” (Hallin & Mancini, 2004, pp.  26–30). More precisely, structures of political competition developed in parallel with those of the national journalistic field. Political or religious groupings ran their news organisations or sustained strong ties to them, and advocates of a particular policy acted as politicians and journalists at the same time. However, while in France this constellation transformed into state-controlled media plurality, which could also draw on the historical experience of less politicised tabloid journalism, the continuous experience of Polish journalism was to participate in or be pressured by political agendas. And while change  This is suggested by Freedom House reports for the years 2002–2004 (Deutsch Karlekar, 2004). In Poland, the situation has changed since the Law and Justice party (PiS) assumed power in 2005–2006 and again in 2015, introducing legislation that allowed installing allies of the party in several media outlets. Poland’s media are now considered to be only partially free in Freedom House reports. In France, since the 2010s digitisation has decreased plurality (with several news outlets closing down) and fastened up concentration in ownership in the hands of wealthy business leaders, which is feared to induce self-censorship among journalists. 14

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in media regulation and economic-technological transition has yielded a similar configuration in Poland and France in recent years, change was more encompassing and produced more professional precarity in Poland. In France, the major concern of the founders of the Fourth Republic was to induce a clear-cut break with Nazi collaboration and the Vichy regime. Part of the breaking with the past was the destruction of the prewar media system, by redistributing the stakes and the confiscated means of production to those news organisations and journalists who did not collaborate with the Nazis, among them Le Figaro, or to those who had professionalised in clandestine news production during the war and were now rewarded with opportunities to launch their press groups and newspapers. Among the latter were a range of communist and Catholic papers, but also Le Monde, which was launched on de Gaulle’s initiative in 1944 to replace the discredited pre-war national paper of record Le Temps (Kuhn, 2011, pp.  10–13). Over the years, a statist media policy was entrenched. It meant to guard against ownership concentration and ensure internal pluralism in public broadcasting and external pluralism in the segment of regional and national ‘general interest’ newspapers. Some features of that policy were still in place in the period of investigation, such as the stopwatch control of time allocated to parties during election campaigns in public broadcast, or the subsidies and state-controlled printing and logistics systems for ‘general interest’ papers, but also the genuine mixture of partial employee ownership, on the one hand, which symbolised autonomy in economic terms, such as in the case of Le Monde, and ownership by large French media groups, on the other, such as in the case of Le Figaro, then owned by Socpresse. The approach of statecontrolled media plurality and the educational mission of public broadcasting, which were grounded on the statist and anti-capitalist ideals of the National Council of Résistance, “continued to influence both the attitudes of various media policy stakeholders and the framing of different elements of media policy throughout the second half of the twentieth century and even into the first decade of the twenty-first” (Kuhn, 2011, p.  10). This approach has been controversial since it enabled partis de gouvernement (parties having the potential to be voted in government) to influence broadcasting regulation. It is also considered to have enhanced a bias which harks back to ‘homology’, that is, to the clinging together of

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Paris-based journalists, politicians and officials, recruited from the same class and elite educational background. It was observed during the campaigns for the 2002 presidential election and the 2005 EU constitutional referendum (Kuhn, 2011, p. 77f ). Moreover, once digitisation and international mergers caused a wholesale restructuring of the sector in the 2000s, the statist media policy did not prevent ownership concentration and plurality-reducing consolidation in the print sector, which was witnessed earlier in the Polish context.15 But it marks a state-sanctioned appreciation of public interest orientation and pluralism in journalism, backing journalists who endorse that orientation in conflicts over editorial process. In Poland, the transition from communist to liberal-democratic rule and a market society, which was initiated by the Roundtable Agreement adopted by the communist Polish People’s Party and the oppositional movement Solidarność in 1989, was based on a controversial reconciliatory approach to transitional justice. Only persons running for or holding public office were obliged to declare whether they had been involved in the secret service of the Polish People’s Republic. As a consequence, journalists well regarded in communist times continued their careers in successor media now privately or publicly owned, alongside traditionally more independent Catholic papers and newly founded media run by Catholic fundamentalists or former dissidents, the latter being esteemed for their work in the clandestine ‘second circuit’ or Solidarność (DobekOstrowska, 2012, pp. 29–31). The reputation that journalists enjoyed in Polish society during the period of investigation likely reflects the celebrity of single journalists of communist and anti-communist provenance (Dobek-Ostrowska, 2012, p. 40). But it did not account for the state of heteronomy of the profession, which was shaped by the media regulation introduced in the early 1990s. That regulation followed the same normative assumptions of plurality protection and public service broadcast as in France, but trusted in privatisation, competition law and the (EU Internal) market to govern plural Those press titles survived that found investors with larger-than-press portfolios and successfully introduced partially paid online editions. Le Figaro was taken over by the aviation industry and military supplier group of the conservative-leaning billionaire Serge Dassault in 2004; Le Monde was purchased by three left-leaning millionaires and business leaders in 2010. 15

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ity and raise the necessary financial means. In the print segment, regulation focused on destroying the monopoly of the giant state-owned press consortium. The auction-based privatisation privileged existing editorial collectives, but also allowed for resale to foreign investors by a larger than usual margin. In broadcasting, a duopoly of private and public service stations with stronger protection of national ownership was established, the latter overseen by a regulatory authority and relying on advertisements, instead of on licence fees, as a major source of funding (Klimkiewicz, 2004). This set of policies facilitated the emergence of a plural media landscape, which is, however, concentrated in terms of ownership. In the period of investigation, the owners included Swedish and German media groups, which owned the larger portion of the print segment, the two major Polish media groups ZPR Media and Agora, the latter being founded by former dissidents and running Gazeta Wyborcza, but also public service broadcasting media and subsidised media owned by social, educational or religious institutions, among which Catholic media maintained a relatively strong position (Klimkiewicz, 2004). Rzeczpospolita is an exemption to the rule of state-enforced private and market-driven ownership of print media. Introduced as a paper of record by the communist government in the 1980s to complement the communist party’s organ Trybuna Ludu, borrowing the name from a 1920s conservative paper, its public ownership was partially retained, with the Polish state holding minority shares up until 2011. The four newspapers selected for investigation occupy a relatively comfortable position in the rapidly transforming journalistic field. This is particularly true for the period of investigation when digitisation had only started to revolutionise the print segment. As national reference papers with a substantial circulation, they found investors or survived as part of larger consortiums, usually without suffering editorial independence. This position in the topology of the national journalistic field owes less to circulation, however, than to the particular prestige and symbolic capital that others invest in the four newspapers because of their particular qualities.16  In the period of investigation, the distribution of Gazeta Wyborcza was between 400,000 and 550,000 copies a day; that of Rzeczpospolita amounted to 250,000; see http://www.mediadb.eu/ 16

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First, they qualify as traditional national mass media in the sense that they highlight issues of ‘general interest’ to a broad, instead of a specialised or personalised, audience, with general interest being defined in terms of relevance for a collective that is given by national territory, jurisdiction and titular language. With the exception of Gazeta Wyborcza, which publishes daily supplements for twenty-four Polish towns, the newspapers centre almost exclusively on events of relevance for the national constituency and are highly capital-focused. Within the segment of the national press, they compete for a narrow audience of similar social strata, with most of the readers being well-educated, politically active city dwellers in higher professional ranks (Dobek-Ostrowska, 2012, p. 31). For this reason, because they distribute news to this audience, and because they offer a platform for voices addressing this audience, they are appreciated as multipliers and proxies of national publicised opinion by politicians and representatives of various groups, fellow journalists, EU officials and communication researchers. But, compared to other national ­newspapers, they enjoy a surplus of prestige as national reference papers, valued for their historical merits in establishing press freedom, for their potential to set the national agenda and for maintaining institutional news journalism, complying with higher standards in terms of journalistic ethics and employing regulative discourse and generic practice accordingly. This is at least how they were seen by analysts during the period of investigation. They placed Rzeczpospolita (up until 2006) and Gazeta Wyborcza among the few ‘quality’ news media in Poland (DobekOstrowska, 2012, p. 40) and attest to Le Monde and Le Figaro that they align more with internal intellectual logics of the field than with the external exigency to sell a cultural symbol (Champagne, 2005). The fact that Le Monde and Gazeta Wyborcza adopted their own codes of conduct underlines that the newspapers themselves seek social distinction on these grounds, also explicitly complying with international trends of formalised archiv-test/zeitungsportraets/gazeta-wyborcza.html; Wyrozumska (2007) and Möller (2009). Following the rise of the Springer tabloid Fact and the Rywin affair in 2002–2003, which involved the publisher Adam Michnik, Gazeta Wyborcza is said to have lost popularity and opinion-making power. Le Monde’s distribution has continuously decreased to 340,000 copies per day and Le Figaro’s to 350,000 copies per day. Due to publication in the afternoon, Le Monde does not reach other French cities before the next day; see http://www.mediadb.eu/archiv-test/zeitungsportraets/ le-monde.html.

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media accountability (Baisnée et al., 2017). The four dailies additionally set themselves apart as ‘broadsheets’, which attribute considerable space to in-depth analysis, evaluation, opinion and feuilleton (see also Sect. 6.2).17 During the period of investigation, part of such a profile seemed to be a European focus, for example in self-representations on their Web pages and by allotting considerable space to EU news in their politics, economy and opinion rubrics. As my own analysis showed, this selfrepresentation is acknowledged by others, including in other member states, who attribute agenda-setting importance to these dailies in EU-wide political-public matters (e.g. by quoting them repeatedly) and try to have a say on their opinion pages. At the same time, opinion-making seems to be one aspect where the four newspapers seek social distinction from each other. Thus, Le Monde and especially Gazeta Wyborcza tended to launch debate by revelations of political scandals and engaged proactively with opinionated interventions. Their counterparts, Le Figaro and Rzeczpospolita, took a more moderate overall position, fuelling controversy in opinion sections instead. The other, more obvious, means of social distinction within the ­broadsheet segment is strong partisan alignment. It is enabled by the fact that print media, unlike public broadcasters, do not have to comply with regulatory provisions for internal pluralism and, unlike regional newspapers, cannot distinguish themselves with reference to local communities, but compete for the same national news and a narrow audience. Partisanship is also rooted in the parallel development of structures of political competition and journalism in decisive moments of nation- and state-building, in which diverging projects of nationhood (and EU membership) were promoted in close affiliation, if not personal union, of politicians and journalists. The institution of the Fourth French Republic was linked to political struggles between communists-socialists (reigning in the 1940s), on the one hand, and conservative Gaullists (gaining power in the 1950s), on the other. They waged war over how the heritage of the Résistance and the legacy of the pre-war Third Republic were to be accounted for in  After the publishing format of broadsheets has changed from broadsheet to compact format or Berliner format in the 2000s, the term ‘broadsheet’ relates to the emphasis on analysis and opinion only. 17

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modernised constitutional design. Up until recently and with later modifications, this binary right-left opposition has been reproduced in the French majority voting system and in media partisanship, especially in the print segment, which is not regulated regarding internal pluralism. Le Figaro aligned with right-wing Gaullism and liberal-conservative audiences and explicitly (but controversially) took sides with governing conservative parties, sparing them critical exposure. During the EU constitutional debate, it invited voices from a broad right-wing spectrum, including the radical right, while its editorial line was clearly moderate and delineated from more radical right-wing publications, such as Le Point. Le Monde, officially impartial, used to align with a centre-left readership and gave privileged voice to representatives of the Parti Socialiste, while keeping up a more liberal editorial line compared to L’Humanité, the then still active paper of the French communist party, and Libération, which had established itself in 1973 as a voice of the New Left (Kuhn, 2011, pp. 10–13). The polarised partisanship that is characteristic of contemporary Polish journalism is grounded in the anti-communist struggles and transitions of the 1980s and 1990s. The single-party system of the Polish People’s Republic had shown its limits when Solidarność was temporarily legalised as an  oppositional faction in 1980. The party’s monopoly dissolved entirely in the partially free elections in 1989, giving way to a highly ­volatile multiparty system. Its formation was largely driven by the officeseeking contest of old and new political leaders, who launched parties and changed alliances in order to pursue their careers in public administration, thereby seeking to instrumentalise news media for their purposes (Dobek-Ostrowska, 2012, pp. 41, 44). Two dividing lines formed in the struggle over the type of nationhood and political-economic regime to be constitutionalised (Grabowska, 2004, for the following). One prevailed during the 1990s and confronted the alliance of successor factions of Solidarność (Akcja Wyborcza Solidarność, AWS) to the social-democrat alliance (Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej, SLD), which was formed from the remainders of the communist party and smaller leftist factions. The two alliances were polarised on the question of how to reckon with the past, whether strong decommunisation (AWS) or reconciliation (AWS) was the order of the day and whether the new liberal order was to be

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flanked by a culturally more closed (AWS) or more open society (SLD), by Catholicism (AWS) or secularism (SLD), and by more libertarian (AWS) or social-democrat (SLD) economic regulation. The other ran through AWS and opposed liberal, liberal-conservative and nationalconservative factions in the struggle over the legitimate succession of Solidarność, decommunisation and the appropriate form of EU membership. This second cleavage was consolidated in the 2000s, after AWS was marginalised in elections, followed by SLD. Their defeat gave way to a binary opposition between liberal conservatives gathering in the party Platforma Obywatelksa (PO, Citizens’ platform), which principally endorsed the chosen path of transition and EU membership, and national conservatives gathering in the party Prawo i Sprawedliwość (PiS, Law and Justice), which fought against open societies as promoted by the EU and for a general overhaul of the  political order on national-conservative terms. This shift in political competition starts to unfold in the period investigated, with conflicts over the EU constitution working as a major catalyst (see also Sect. 5.2). While public broadcasting is said to have aligned with the  government, whatever party or coalition was in power, national print media reflected and engendered these divisions. Gazeta Wyborcza, which was founded as the election campaign paper of Solidarność, used to be appreciated for revealing political scandals, exposing latent controversies in Polish society and priming political change. It also occasionally supported a candidate of liberal or reformed-communist political couleur during election campaigns. In the period of investigation, it stood out because of its articulate liberal line regarding human and civil rights and a European open society, while alternating between market liberalism, socialdemocrat and capacity-building philosophies. It maintained that profile against more leftist papers, such as Trybuna, the former mouthpiece of the Polish  People’s Party, or the weekly Polityka, but above all against national-conservative factions of Solidarność. These found a platform, among others, in Rzeczpospolita, the former paper of record of the communist authorities, which had already taken up trends of more conservative social policy and memory politics in the 1980s and maintained a moderate conservative line against more radical right-wing publications such as Nasz Dziennik (Möller, 2009; Wyrozumska, 2007). The effort to

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maintain these distinct partisan positions and boost the prestige of a national reference paper and high-quality news journalism, while calibrating the dual implication in the nationally grown journalistic field and the transnational field of EU news production, is likely to have shaped the four newspapers’ recontextualisation of the EU constitutional agenda. The following section will explore how the specific practice context of EU multilateral negotiation possibly conditioned the formation of the constitutional agenda.

4.5 T  he Discourse Field of Multilateral Negotiation The field perspective has already been applied with considerable rigour and depth to different facets of EU politics. Having started from general considerations about the formation of the European power field (Cohen, 2013; Kauppi, 2005), field studies now explore the emergence of EU-specific credentials (or ‘capital’ in Bourdieu’s terminology), by which agents in the EU’s different institutions and adjacent realms of professional activity qualify for participation in the field of ‘Eurocracy’ (Georgakakis & Rowell, 2013b), rise to European-global circles of power (Kauppi & Madsen, 2013) or take part in the EU-internal diplomatic field (Adler-Nissen, 2014). The sketch of the ‘discourse field of multilateral negotiation’ that I attempt to draw in this section borrows from these highly instructive studies, but also pushes them further, using the insights into the discursive constitution of professional practice developed in previous sections. In doing so, I seek to grasp spaces of structured symbolic interaction and specialised practice that emerge ad hoc among the individual professional tribes of the EU, notably when these have to collaborate outside established routines and become entangled in a grand moment of EU institution-building, such as during the Constitution process.18 Drawing on the idea that specialised practice is constituted  Kauppi’s claim that Bourdieu’s concept of field is too rigid for an analysis of European integration, referring to a relatively closed arena of social activity (Kauppi, 2005, p. 14), is thus somewhat reproduced in my assessment of the field of multilateral negotiation. 18

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through generic language use and regulative discourse, which may well unfold performativity beyond institutional contexts, I seek to move beyond the preoccupation of existing field analyses with institutionally entrenched professional practice (diplomacy, bureaucracy, politics, journalism) and internalised professional habits that correlate to sociological attributes. Let me quickly recapitulate the major insights that field studies in EU politics have generated before sketching out the ‘field of multilateral negotiation’ that I suspect was involved in Europeanised political communication during the Constitution process. The perspective of ‘fields’ suggests that the multiple interactions related to European integration have gradually yielded a transnational field of power and ‘Eurocratic’ statecraft. This field has become part of agents’ habitualised strategies, no matter on what level of territorial organisation they operate and what constituency they claim to represent. When describing the diplomatic interactions of member state representatives in the Council, Rebecca Adler-Nissen states: Of course, (…) diplomats identify (at least formally) with their own country, as their professional task is to defend national interests abroad. However, when national representatives meet in Brussels, the [national, A.K.] state is no longer the structuring and dominant field of power. (…) It is the transnational field in which they meet which defines their positions. (Adler-Nissen, 2014, p. 51)

The European field of power can be characterised as a dynamic social topography, which relies upon a dual power base, the national capital and EU capital, and which draws on two political cultures: one characterised by attachment to national symbols, rituals and pasts, and the other aspiring to something that does not exist yet, a representation of Europe and its future. In this field, individuals have developed novel practices and habits. They reconfigure ‘political capital’ (credentials derived from formal mandate, informal status and personal reputation) and reinvent themselves by pragmatically switching the context of interaction and transforming national representation into supranational or subnational representation and vice versa (Kauppi, 2005, pp. 4–21). The genesis of this European field of power is situated in the interwar period, when,

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against the backdrop of a wholesale transformation of the Euroatlantic balance of power, leaders from various professional quarters in Europe and the US mobilised for a European federation and set up several overlapping institutions and associations. The struggles they faced over the type of institutions to be established (parliamentary vs corporativesyndical-functional vs technocratic) and the principle of legitimation these ought to embody (parliamentary-popular representation vs representation of function and expertise) brought about the structuration of the EU power field. They followed opposing strategies, which catered to reproduce the specific capitals each of these elites held at the national level (Cohen, 2013). For instance, the specific design of the European Communities, especially the strong role of the High Authority, the predecessor of the European Commission, owes its existence to the ambition of bureaucratic elites “not to let Europe rest in the hands of politicians” (Cohen, 2013, p. 108f ). They sought to establish an institution different from the Council of Europe, in whose design parliamentary representation had prevailed. The establishment of the Common Assembly and Consultative Committee, on the other hand, were concessions made to politicians and corporate actors to ensure their support. Regardless of the progressing institutional differentiation, political-institutional capital was accumulated across these organisations as delegates used to occupy posts in all assemblies in parallel in the 1940s–1960s (Cohen, 2013, p. 108f ). This early configuration changed once the European Parliament was no longer composed of national parliamentarians, but elected directly by EU-wide general suffrage, and after the European Council, the forum where heads of government and state agree on general guidelines and enlargements in unanimity was instituted as an intergovernmental check, and consequently justified as a means to ensure indirect democratic control by national electorates (Goebel, 2013, pp. 124–131). Since then, the two underlying principles of popular sovereignty and democratic representation, that is, the indirect authorisation by national electorates and the direct authorisation by the EU electorate, have been continuously rebalanced in institutional reform. They are embodied in the intergovernmental mode of decision-making of the European Council, where unanimity gives expression to the exclusive sovereignty of member states, and in the co-decision method (now ordinary legislative procedure),

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which symbolises the shared sovereignty of member states and EU institutions at the supranational level, involving the European Parliament, the Council (of ministers) as co-legislators and the Commission cabinet with an exclusive right to legislative initiative. Contemporary struggles over EU legislation draw on elements of this entrenched social topography of the European field of power. Within its different institutional contexts, politicians, officials, diplomats, experts, EU communication professionals and so on have developed EU-specific capitals. While investing in specific EU institutions in the course of their transnational careers, they have obtained credentials which allow them to legitimately take part in the European power field, with relative autonomy from other (national and subnational) power fields. Through their activities, they constitute what Georgakakis and Rowell call the ‘field of Eurocracy’, in analogy to Bourdieu’s studies of state bureaucracy. While struggling to impose political priorities, they contribute to the codification and institutionalisation of EU-specific rules of interaction, thereby simultaneously constructing the new, European, centre of physical and symbolic power. They also define the hierarchies within the respective professional field, that is, the bones of contention, the skills and resources required and the boundaries between insiders and outsiders of the field (Georgakakis & Rowell, 2013a, p.  8). In the Council, for instance, ­member state representatives tend to frame a national position with reference to some kind of common European good in order to make it and themselves acceptable in the club. They assume the role of “polity-constructing technocrats”, who detail EU legislation in the name of a “Europe of results”, instead of only negotiating predefined national interests, as classic state diplomacy and theorems of two-level games would suggest (Adler-Nissen, 2014, p. 158f ). Hence, Georgakakis’ claim that EU politics, at least before it became heavily politicised in the 2010s, is best described as a bureaucratic field in Bourdieu’s terms, that is, as comprising all activities that contribute to the crafting of (European) statehood. In this view, members of the European Parliament act as bureaucrats élus rather than as politicians competing for approbation of opposite visions of society. Their professional reputation stems, above all, from seniority in the European Parliament and the capacity to broker cross-faction consensus in a diverse environment (Beauvallet & Michon, 2013).

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Commission officials tend to act as bourgeoisie de Robe.19 They derive prestige primarily from office, which is obtained in the highly selective concours and granted for a lifetime, but also from high cultural and linguistic capital, from mobility across member states and General Directorates and from commitment to a public service that adheres to the values of new governance—a composite capital which, however, is currently undergoing change (Georgakakis, 2017). Where professional reputation is less clearly drawn from supranational institutions, such as in the context of intergovernmental negotiations, EU-specific habits have evolved nevertheless. Participation in the Council, for instance, appears to imply unspoken acknowledgement that EU decision-making is important on its own terms (Adler-Nissen, 2014, p. 52f ). When seeking to advance their positions in the Council, state representatives anticipate future collaboration and the partners’ domestic constraints and orient themselves towards compromise somewhat following a “consensus-reflex” (Lewis, 2005). Moreover, there is a teleological interpretation of EU treaties, according to which fulfilling the treaties and developing them in the spirit of continuous integration, seems to be the doxa of the field. In that setting, diplomatic capital and the related potential influence on decision-making derives from the respect for informal norms of problem-solving and consensus-seeking, rather than just from size, voting weight, economic power or proximity to the position of the European Commission—factors that are usually considered to make up a state representative’s prestige (Adler-Nissen, 2014, p.  160f ). As a result, national interests are no longer formulated in domestic will formation and then negotiated at the EU level, as established theories of EU decision-making suggest. Instead, the formulation of national interests forms part of the struggle for  social distinction and dominance in the transnational field of EU-internal diplomacy (Adler-Nissen, 2014, p. 158f ). In the context of the Constitution process, the habitus, capitals and field-internal hierarchies specific to individual institutional bodies of the  The term bourgeoisie de Robe emerged in (the historiography of ) French state administration of the seventeenth century, when members of the bourgeois estate, who held posts in the judicial, financial and police administration of the monarchy and usually augmented their cultural capital through education and cultural patronage, were granted nobility after twenty years of service. 19

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EU were brought into a new interactional setting. It differed from routine in three respects. First, given that treaty revision was at stake, negotiations centred, qua definition, on questions of the EU’s polity and finalité, and, thus, on explicit, instead of collateral, EU polity-building. As negotiation outcomes had to prevail, in the end, in the debates and procedures of ratification current in the different member states, domestic politics was anticipated in negotiations from the start, endowing member states, the ‘masters of the treaties’, with particular institutional power. Secondly, since ordinary treaty revision was complemented by upstream Convention consultations, multilaterality increased and participation extended beyond the circle of member state representatives (involved in the ordinary treaty revision procedure) and beyond the EU’s political institutions (involved in the ordinary legislative procedure), including also members of national parliaments and subnational assemblies (see also Sect. 5.2). In consequence, treaty revision was rephased into periods in which alternatingly supranational (in the Convention, during meetings of ministers), intergovernmental (during IGCs) and domestic (in the run-up to adoption and ratification) political dynamics prevailed, but which all remained implicated in the agenda and discourse of constitution-drafting. Thirdly, since the treaty revision was staged as a public event and deliberative enterprise, the exigency to publicly justify reform proposals increased and thus the need to seek approbation beyond the field of specialised activity. As a result, the dynamics of the EU political field outlined by Kauppi and Cohen were arguably more salient than in the usual politics of Eurocratic statecraft. More precisely, the simultaneous struggle over an idée-force of EU polity, which mobilises many followers, and over positions from which power can be wielded over followers (Kauppi, 2005, pp. 29–38), was likely to be more pronounced, just as the relational positioning alongside the binary poles of political competition that structure the EU political field. In the following, I will try to show that the articulation of the Eurocratic, the diplomatic and the political field of the EU during the Constitution process can be best captured in the concept of the ‘discourse field of multilateral negotiation’. The interactions of politicians and officials involved in the Constitution process formed a field-like topography of social relations, because they related to a common frame and purpose, drew on a certain specialised

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expertise as well as relational positioning alongside field-internal hierarchies. They centred on multilateral negotiation, that is, on combining divergent positions into a joint agreement and document within an environment of multiple negotiation partners, each representing a particular constituency or share of power in the EU’s political system. What was at stake for all participants in the field was securing a certain share in the negotiation outcome. This required them to mobilise and steer collective action not only by brokering or hindering compromise among the institutional interests of the multiple bodies and factions, but additionally by rallying for the (publicly) most appealing vision of EU polity. Hence, their discourse production centred on EU polity-building, while that discourse is likely to have followed logics internal to the field, such as the relational positioning alongside competing modes of professional legitimation, employing field-specific discursive-cultural capital. Those participants were presumably better equipped for multilateral negotiation than those who had already accumulated symbolic capital in the Eurocratic, EU-diplomatic and domestic political fields and who were familiar with the habitus and doxa of Eurocratic statecraft, such as the habitus of seeking consensus in nationally linguistically diverse gatherings and the knowledge of how to deal with the mainstream teleological reading of EU treaties. In the context of the Constitution process, such knowledge had to include the agenda and mandate of the Leaken Declaration, which stipulated the set of necessary reforms and became a sort of specialised doxa defining the range of legitimate or deviant voices. However, the relevant knowledge and skills required for participation in the field of multilateral negotiation were, probably, about yet something else, namely proficiency in the field’s regulative discourse and generic language use. They possibly gravitated around identifying, classifying and processing those opportunities for mobilising collective action within the extended treaty revision procedure, which allowed advancing one’s institutional power and preference for EU polity-building. The fact that agents involved in EU politics hold a conventional wisdom in strategic options of negotiation and politicisation within the EU setting has been shown in existing studies. EU scholars have observed that parties in government refrain from addressing controversial EU issues both in parliament and vis-à-vis

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national media, anticipating costly confrontation with EU partners in ongoing negotiations. This is especially the case when they lack a comfortable parliamentary majority and risk the mobilisation of EU issues by opposition parties. In turn, attacking the government’s EU policies has proved a successful strategy for radical and marginal parties to increase their share of votes, in particular during elections to the European Parliament or EU-related referenda, when posts in government are not at stake (Hooghe, Marks, & Wilson, 2002). Centrist oppositional parties, on the contrary, usually politicise national EU policy by dismantling the government’s ‘containment’, rather than by attacking the government’s political-ideological policy choice. However, this strategic positioning seems to change. As Beichelt notes (Beichelt, 2004), in Central Eastern European member states, where party politics have been fluctuating over the past three decades, with politicians flexibly shifting factions or parties and voters frequently changing their preferences, the agenda and strategies of radical and Eurosceptic parties may well travel from the margins to the centre of policymaking. In the meantime, such transformation has become a common trend in European domestic politics. Still, the mentioned descriptions of strategic positioning in EU multilateral negotiation capture only domestic political actors’  ‘two-level games’ (Putnam, 1988). They ignore that more actors are involved in EU decision-making and play their own games including at the supranational level, as was the case during the Convention (Gaisbauer, 2005, p.  307). Supranational bodies may decisively influence agenda-setting and policy formulation in case of intergovernmental conflict (Copeland & James, 2014). These observations basically underline what Shaw called a “European modus operandi” (Shaw, 2001, p.  71): political and legal action in one arena inculcates implications for action within the other arenas of EU policymaking, and knowledge of such a differentiated action repertoire likely forms the field-specific cultural capital in multilateral negotiation. Once the EU’s policymaking arenas are collapsed into one, as happened during the extended treaty revision procedure, in particular during the Convention phase, the most relevant knowledge becomes the understanding of how to switch between these tactical options and between the peer groups and audiences to be mobilised; how to govern the interdependency of differently scaled and instituted political dynamics. The core

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skill that is necessary for participating in EU multilateral negotiation is the ability to adequately apply habitual patterns of language use that are recognisable in the respective communicative-pragmatic setting. Switching is involved between national and supranational representation and between nation-centred and the EU’s future-oriented political cultures: one characterised by attachment to national symbols and interdiscourses, the other drawing on a shared rhetoric and specialised expertise (Kauppi, 2005, pp.  4–21). During the Constitution process, not only member state representatives had to prove proficiency in such switching, who are expected to play ‘two-level games’ anyhow. Parliamentarians, too, were more significantly involved in these switching practices than any interparliamentary dialogue had forced them to be before. They had to alternatingly speak as members of a political family or as representatives of their parliamentary body in the Convention, as representatives of the Convention vis-à-vis their parliamentary peer group, a national or an EU-wide audience. Another aspect of switching, a pragmatic constraint of any political context, is the alternating between backstage coordinative politics and frontstage politics (Wodak, 2009). In the EU, the first is characterised by procedural knowledge and terminology specific to EU coordination as entextualised in proceedings, drafts, declarations and agreements. Frontstage politics, on the other hand, is focused on ­persuasion and interpellation of general and specific EU audiences and actualised in typical text genres of political mobilisation amenable to multimodal mass mediation, including speeches, statements made at press conferences, interviews, talk shows, tweets and so on. The analysis of Giscard d’Estaing’s inaugural speech to the Convention (see Chap. 3) already hinted at some aspects of EU generic language use that might constitute the ‘switching’ practice. Among them were the construction of double belonging in ‘European nationals’, part-whole tropes (synecdoches and metonymies) and a complex deixis denoting the dimensions and constituent entities of territorial power within the EU. Moreover, we could see that Giscard d’Estaing employed both more specialised knowledge of the EU’s alleged legal-political teleology, recalling Messina as a  core intertext and starting point of EU treaty-making, and more commonly known unification rhetoric, such as the road metaphors and mythopoetical narration about the success story of European integration.

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Blame games over who spoilt the joint negotiation performance and the European interest, which have been shown to discipline deviance and rebalance orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the EU-diplomatic field (AdlerNissen, 2014), could similarly be regarded as a generic discourse practice of ‘switching’ and of translating between competing claims for territorial authority. These patterns of language use correspond to the pragmatic constraint of addressing multiple audiences and roles and actualise certain conventional wisdoms and regulative discourses of how to manipulate the opportunities for  collective action within the EU.  Whoever is proficient in such discourse practice, we suspect, disposes of a particular resource in multilateral negotiation, a sort of field-specific capital. This capital, specific to the discourse field of multilateral negotiation, can be expected to be employed in the struggle for the desirable vision of EU polity and European societies, and to be detailed with positions that are taken alongside the binary poles of political competition characteristic of the EU political field. Among them are the competing legitimations of postnational political authority (political-parliamentarian vs technocratic vs corporative) and decision-making (intergovernmental vs supranational), which are embodied by different EU institutions; the competing claims for representation of ‘national interest clusters’ that are reproduced in the EU-diplomatic field (big vs small, net payers vs net receivers, founding vs accession states etc.); and the stereotyped polarisations on visions of (European) society that researchers found run through the party constellations in member states and the European Parliament, such as layered support for European integration (radical vs moderate vs constructive EU critics vs EU-philes; Statham, Koopmans, Tresch, & Firmstone, 2010); sovereigntist vs integrationist alias realist vs anti-realist conceptions of international cooperation; and partisan alignment between left wing vs right wing and open vs closed society (Marks, Hooghe, Nelson, & Edwards, 2006). By taking positions alongside these dividing lines, participants of EU multilateral negotiation distinguish themselves in terms of institutional interests and political-ideological preferences. But, ironically, even though engaging in a transnational field of social relations, they thereby also reproduce ‘the national’ in terms of a jurisdiction, constituency, culture and public associated with the nation-state. In the context of EU politics,

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the national is, just as the European, a relational category. It is being redefined when divergent preferences are confronted and aligned in the name of some common European good, following the EU-specific habitus of consensus seeking in intergovernmental and supranational arenas (Adler-Nissen, 2014). It emerges through the practice of switching, when the national is juxtaposed with the European or envisaged as enacting the European, and vice versa. However, the field perspective alerts us to the fact that, beyond such Europeanisation of the national, field-internal competitive logics may paradoxically reinforce, instead of only redefine, the national in terms of a doctrine of a nationally distinguished strategic interest. Stressing the national has become a means of social distinction among participants of the field by which they mark competing claims for political authority within the set of EU institutions and align with national electorates and with what is declared sacrosanct in EU treaties, that is, the legal and cultural recognition of member titular nations. Not surprisingly, this is most obvious in the relational positioning of member governments. When proclaiming ‘red lines’ of national interest, which only arise in intergovernmental negotiation from juxtaposition with other red lines of national interest and with a European interest, they distinguish themselves recognisably from other member governments and the institutional preferences of supranational bodies. They thereby signal a point of reference to their national electorates and national businesses, by which these can identify not only as (not) benefiting from the government or the party whom they endowed with a majority in national elections but also as nationals that differ from other European nationals in terms of stereotyped ‘national interests’. The same can be said about governments’ coalition tactics, that is, their proclaimed taking of sides with competing ‘national interest clusters’, be these representing big versus small member states, net payers versus net receivers or others. The opposing groups of member states are stereotypically associated with specific institutional preferences. For instance, small members are seen as endorsing supranationalisation, while big members are seen  as pressing for a stronger role for the Council. These associations de facto blur during the actual process of negotiation: preferences are aligned before even being subjected to a  formal vote, in which case such coalition-taking would make sense. But still, they are of the utmost importance in frontstage relational positioning. They allow marking one’s negotiation preference as

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nationally instructed and enhance a particular conception of the respective member state as being different from or similar to others and thus as being a relevant category of EU decision-making. We can see ‘the national’ also being reinforced by supranational institutions’ negative relating to ‘national interests’, as opposed to an aggregated European interest which they claim to represent. This is particularly pronounced in the confrontation of European Parliament and Council during a co-decision or when exclusive national competence is delimitated against shared sovereignty in struggles over power division. These dimensions of relational positioning are likely to be present during treaty revision as well. They all highlight the titular nation-state as a self-contained and taken-for-granted reality. Even Giscard d’Estaing, in his function as president of a supranational assembly in charge of organising a consensus between institutional bodies, felt urged to primarily relate to national pride and provenance in order  to mobilise a vision of comprehensive treaty revision and acknowledgement of his leadership in that endeavour (see Sect. 3.2). The instituted reinforcement of the national through relational positioning in the discourse field of multilateral negotiation is certainly not the only implication that field-internal logics have for the EU’s polity construction, in particular if we consider the salience of doxa and the discourse practice of switching as a particular resource of symbolic power, which cuts across the accustomed routines of EU political struggle. Chapter 5 will explore through empirical reconstruction what aspects of the EU constitutional debate, its political agenda and patterned ‘constitution speak’ can be plausibly related to the detailing of position and disposition in the discourse field of multilateral negotiation (see Chap. 5). The subsequent concluding section will reflect, instead, on how recontextualisation can be studied after the originating and the receiving contexts of political communication on the EU constitution have now been spelt out.

4.6 Studying Discursive Europeanisation: Summary This chapter has sought to grasp, theoretically and through some illustrative analysis, the conditioning context(s) of the EU’s discursive legitimation. The exemplary analysis of Jędrzej Bielecki’s news report in

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Rzeczpospolita showed that quotes taken over from Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory speech underwent considerable adjustment, discernible in the selection and weighting, rearrangement and addition of textual composition and meaning. Once appropriated to Bielecki’s quote story, the warning of decay and disintegration, by which Giscard d’Estaing sought to persuade Conventioneers of a proactive mandate in his speech, became a warning about Poland being excluded by big member states in Bielecki’s report. In this translation, the author apparently reassured the readership in sharing, and sharing with Rzeczpospolita, certain historically symbolically laden presuppositions about the Polish nation within the European context, which were plausible against the backdrop of accession negotiations and the nomination of the Convention Presidium. The main endeavour of this chapter was to conceptually penetrate such instances of translation and understand why they occur in the way they occur. Such translation is arguably crucial for the EU’s legitimation, because it both exposes and accommodates potentially incongruent ­bodies of knowledge and conventions of language use that relate to different and differently scaled discourse communities and fields: EU discourses of institutional engineering, on the one hand, and national interdiscourse, that is, the illustrative-connotative register which recalls the common sense of a titular nation in a member state and is cultivated by national news media, on the other. Patterns of translation might also explain why the Constitutional Treaty was “pluri-decontextualised” (Fossum & Trenz, 2006), or differentially appropriated, once discussed in the different member states. In other words, the chapter sought to grasp phenomena that cut across established notions of Europeanisation, be those neo-institutionalist explanations of the “differential impact” (Héritier, 2001) of EU norms on national jurisdictions in political science or the EU-related transnationalisation of communication and practice in sociology. The described phenomenon of translation is, first, primarily discursive because it was triggered in debates on EU institutional reform long before that reform was adopted, legislated, implemented or legally enforced. Secondly, it takes place not between levels of territorial government or between nations, but between different and differently scaled epistemic communities and fields of practice which cling together in strongly Europeanised political communication. Thus, EU

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institutional reform is conducted in a context operating on a “European modus operandi” (Shaw, 2001, p. 71): it factors in the different arenas and phases of EU decision-making—supranational, intergovernmental, domestic—and anticipates mediatisation by news media oriented primarily towards domestic political agendas. National news media, in turn, while targeting national audiences in a national journalistic field, have adjusted their practices of news production in a way which allows them to get hold of a share of the EU news of the day. Hence, the endeavour was to capture translation between these differently scaled contexts of political communication. The exploration started from the premise endorsed in CDA that intersubjective meaning, including that of practices of legitimation, is always co-constituted by the context of expression in its various, also discursive, dimensions. The social implications of these practices cannot be understood without a thorough detailing of the texts studied and the contexts in which and across which they occur. Therefore, CDA studies usually carefully contextualise the investigated semiotic artefact situating it, for instance, in alternating historic-political, socio-institutional, situationalpragmatic settings or co-texts and intertexts. I showed that a clearer understanding of the text’s social implications can be gained when drawing in, as an additional heuristic layer at another level of abstraction, the perspective of discourse formation. More particularly, theories that highlight meso-level professional practice, such as that of the ‘code’ (Bernstein, 1990) or the ‘field’ (Bourdieu, 1989), when articulated with the CDA concept of ‘genre’, illuminate why the registered selective and excluding procedures occur in the texts investigated. Thus, conventionalised patterns of language use recurring in a certain realm or practice context can be explained not only as corresponding to a typical pragmatic setting and script of action, such as the exigency to distribute concise and resonant news to a specified audience, as the perspective of genre suggests. They can also be seen to enact and vary a professional ‘code’ or regulative discourse, that is, ways of classifying and processing knowledge; or as offering a source of social  distinction (or field-specific discursive capital) employed in the relational positioning and political economy of recognition actual in a field at a given moment in time. In that way, insights

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gained through the micrology of language use can be translated into the meso-level study of professional practice and its Europeanisation. The exploration yielded two conceptual innovations and a framework for the study of discursive Europeanisation. First, it brought about the notion of discourse fields. The notion captures, from a discourse-theoretical perspective, the meso-level contexts of specialised practice that I assumed to be involved in Europeanised political communication and the EU’s discursive legitimation: EU multilateral negotiation on institutional reform, with its intertextual references of EU polity-building, and related controversies in the member states’ domestic contexts, mediatised by national news media that, through their professional practice, cultivate national and partisan interdiscourse. I adopted the idea from Bourdieu’s field theory that each of these contexts forms a space of structured symbolic interaction, whose existence and activities rely on peers’ and society’s recognition of a particular set of credentials of professionality, or field-specific capital. What is produced in the field is shaped by the way participants use this resource for competitive-relational positioning ­vis-à-vis peers and representatives of other fields, alongside established cleavages and modes of professional legitimation. To put it in Bourdieu’s words, “[t]he essential part of what is presented in L’Express and Le Nouvel Observateur is determined by the relationship between L’Express and Le Nouvel Oberservateur”, while the overlap of that relationship with that between the two readerships owes less to responsiveness towards readers’ preferences than to the “homology between the space of the microcosmos of production and the encompassing social space” (Bourdieu, 2005, p. 45). I turned to the field concept discursively, however, so as to account for the emergent and more dynamic social topologies of the EU that unfold performativity beyond the confines of nationally grown professional institutions and habitus. I showed that field-specific capital, upon which participants draw to maintain professional reputation, is more than a set of habitualised assumptions about professionality, which participants internalise when being socialised in the field. In fact, it is discursively constituted by generic patterns of language use that relate to the pragmatic constraints typical of professional activity (genre) and to the field’s regulative discourse, that is, the conventions of classifying and processing

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professional knowledge (code); in short, by discourse practices that continuously produce, reflexivise and entextualise the specific professional expertise, ethos and self-understanding (field-specific discursive capital). By drawing on these practices in relational positioning, participants maintain a specific discourse field. Discourse fields, then, are spaces of structured interaction, social topologies, which are specialised in a specific aspect of discourse production, such as the construction of news or of a mobilising political idée-force. What is said and how and who is given voice in what way in this interactional space is conditioned by the constitutive discourse practices, the genre and the code of the field. But it also depends on how involved agents make use of these discourse practices in relational positioning, when seeking to distinguish themselves from or excel competitors. Moreover, it depends on regular interactions with other discourse fields, on the way intertextuality and interdiscursivity is organised with them, sustaining a certain degree of autonomy, heteronomy or meta-capital. The articulation of genre, code and field also yielded a clearer notion of discursive Europeanisation and provided a discourse-theoretical explanation of why discursive Europeanisation tends to be differential in different (national) contexts. With Bernstein, discursive Europeanisation can be understood as recontextualisation: as the meaning-transforming transposition of discourse fragments between contexts of specialised practice, in the course of which the original practice (e.g. of multilateral negotiation) is transformed into a virtual practice (e.g. of news production drawing on representations of multilateral negotiation). This chapter qualified and specified this theorem, suggesting that this change of meaning takes place because the discourse fragments are appropriated and subdued to the configuration of the receiving discourse field. The selection, shift in emphasis, rearrangement and enrichment that discourse fragments experience in the course of recontextualisation likely result from the linguistic conventions, regulative discourse and internal competition of the receiving discourse field. Bielecki’s report, while taking over much of Giscard d’Estaing’s wording, is, then, not just an account of the Convention’s inauguration and the Polish delegates’ criticism. It turns a piece of political persuasion into news, following journalistic classifications of what is newsworthy for a national audience of conservative-

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sovereigntist orientation, drawing on generic language use, such as allusions (here to the overruled nation) that generate consonance with the target audience, thereby seeking to distinguish Rzeczpospolita from competitors. Hence, Bielecki does not merely reflect an event, but creates it, drawing on the practice of (Europeanised, but nationally integrated) news journalism. More practically, the conceptual exploration yielded a framework and procedure for the empirical study of discursive Europeanisation. In a first step, the researcher establishes how the originating and receiving contexts of specialised practice are constituted as discourse fields. The researcher figures out what is at stake in participants’ relational positioning and what their discourse production focuses on. She or he considers the constitutive generic language use as well as the regulative discourse, to which it might refer, and takes into account in what field-internal topology and configuration of heteronomy this specific discursive capital might be used for relational positioning (see Table  4.1). In the second step, the investigated instance of discourse production in the originating discourse field is reconstructed, for example the formation of the constitutional agenda in multilateral negotiation, and related to the field’s configuration and discourse practice. In the third step, the recontextualisation in the receiving discourse field is re- and deconstructed by juxtaposing the selection, weighting, rearrangement and enrichment, revealing in the investigated texts the configuration and discourse practice of the receiving discourse field. In a synoptical analysis, the insights produced are used to reflect upon what ‘imaginary practice’ emerged from that recontextualisation and with what, possibly problematic, social implications. Two discourse fields were sketched out in this chapter in a preliminary manner that I assumed to be involved in the EU’s discursive legitimation: the practice context of EU multilateral negotiation and that of Europeanised national news. They were sketched out by  drawing on existing analyses of EU fields and Europeanised political communication. The practice context of multilateral negotiation can be characterised as a transnational space of structured symbolic interaction, in which participants seek to influence the negotiation outcome that concerns the EU’s institutional set-up and finalité, in a setting of multiple stakeholders and veto players, who voice competing claims for political authority and cul-

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tural recognition in the name of some institutional or constituency’s interest. They influence the negotiation outcome by mobilising collective action and brokering a compromise (or strategically withdrawing from such action) across the EU’s differently scaled arenas and phases of decision-making (supranational, intergovernmental, domestic) (see Table 4.1, row ‘Social practice’). This practice has become institutionalised, to some degree, by the EU’s ordinary legislative procedure. But it was particularly articulate during the temporary arrangement of the Constitution process. Given that the Constitution process was a treaty revision procedure, it anticipated the final vote of the heads of government and state and, hence, the domestic political competition related to adoption and ratification in member states. The preceding Convention consultations reinforced multilaterality, while the staging as a deliberative exercise increased the pressure to justify proposals and actions publicly. Hence, in the context of the Constitution process, the logics of several EU-related fields intersected: the EU-diplomatic field, where some delegated national or institutional ‘interest’ is defended as being common and European; the field of Eurocracy, where EU-specific legislation and administration are being established drawing on EU-specific habitus and expertise; and the EU political field, where participants struggle over the prevalence and public approbation of an idée-force for the vision and division of European societies, by aligning with competing legitimations of EU authority (politicalparliamentarian, regulatory-technocratic, corporative) and political cleavages (big vs small, net payers vs receivers, integrationist vs sovereigntist, rejectionist or alternativist etc.) that have been established in the EU political field since the 1950s. We can assume that participants who held political capital and acknowledged experience in EU diplomacy, Eurocracy or multilevel political competition disposed of considerable symbolic capital and, from that, derived voice and influence in negotiations. However, the extended treaty revision procedure forced them to engage in interaction beyond their accustomed field contexts and in explicit (rather than only collateral) polity-building. To a greater than usual extent, they were involved in a shifting between the EU’s different public-political audiences, epistemic communities and arenas of decision-making.

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Discursively, this shifting practice is presumably constituted through a mixture of patterns of language use that correspond to the pragmatics of the aforementioned EU-related fields, such as the construction of a representative claim using the argument pro bono publico Europae or the interpellation of multiple audiences through variable deixis (see Table 4.1, row ‘Genre’). However, these conventions of language use were possibly now employed in line with the regulative discourse that is specific to EU multilateral negotiation, that is, in line with classifications of appropriate and effective opportunities for mobilising collective action across the arenas, phases and factions of EU decision-making. Moreover, knowledge of these opportunities is likely to have been processed in habitualised ways, for example by politicising oppositional or depoliticising governmental campaigns and by keeping to the doxa of a teleological interpretation of EU treaties (see Table 4.1, row ‘Code’). These specificities of the discourse field of multilateral negotiation, I assumed, are likely to have shaped the debate and negotiation outcome during the Constitution process, together with participants’ relational positioning along the binary poles of EU political competition. The discourse field of Europeanised national news is a space of structured interaction which has been institutionalised within the national journalistic field. While gathering and constructing ‘news’, journalists compete about consecration power, that is, about sanctifying what is the news of the day and about effectively interpellating and appropriating target audiences. Their interaction maintains, above all, journalistic practice, and, in the case of the investigated Polish and French broadsheets, the practice of institutional news journalism, more particularly. It is constituted through conventions of language use that are geared towards constructing news salience and audience-specific consonance, for example by condensing an account of an occurrence into a dense and prominently placed news story or by alluding to associations in the headline that presumably resonate with the audience. These patterns correspond to the pragmatics typical of journalism, that is, to the exigency to effectively distribute news and reinforce the complicity with the imagined audience. But they are employed with reference to the regulative discourse of news journalism, in particular the habitualised classifications of news value and

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newsworthiness and the processing norm or doxa of ‘objectivity’ and quasi-scientific news gathering (see Table 4.1, rows ‘Genre’, ‘Code’). The specificity of Europeanised national news media is that their interaction is partially oriented towards the transnational, Brussels-based field of EU news production, which is manifest in a reoriented editorial process, salience attribution and specific patterns of text composition. The Europeanisation of professional practice allows journalists to secure a share in the EU news of the day and, in the case of the broadsheets investigated, to distinguish themselves as EU-informed national reference papers that are quoted by colleagues in other member states. But the prime target of their activities remains the national audience, to be interpellated by the use of national interdiscourse, and the national journalistic field as a  primary site of competitive positioning. In it, journalists draw on field-specific discursive capital in the form in which it evolved with the national trajectory of journalism, aligning more either with the autonomous or with the heteronomous mode of professional ­legitimation, that is, adhering to the regulative discourse of news journalism (or other conceptions of disinterested journalism) either more restrictively or employing field-specific discursive capital in line with logics of other professional fields, for example to boost revenue from advertising. Thereby, journalists and news organisations inscribe themselves in the constellation of heteronomy that prevails at a certain moment in time. Moreover, segment-specific distinction, which draws on divisions and classifications set by field-specific regulative discourse, matters in relational positioning. For instance, the newspapers investigated distinguish themselves through strong and opposing partisan alignment inherited from foundational, politically polarised moments of professional history, unlike regional newspapers and tabloids or public broadcasters, the latter being legally obliged to observe internal pluralism. But the selected newspapers also distinguish themselves from other ‘high-quality’ papers by their proclaimed broadsheet profile, dedicating considerable space to debate and comment on issues of assumed relevance to the national audience, in a variety of text genres that range from editorial to invited commentary to moderated debate (see Table  4.1, row ‘Field’). Such ‘media debate’, arranged in accordance with the relational positioning of the respective news organisation, is the setting in which the EU constitutional agenda

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was recontextualised: a practice context quite different from the originating discourse field of multilateral negotiation. The following chapters will examine how the two discourse fields and the recontextualisation between them channelled the EU constitutional debate and EU polity construction.

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5 The Constitution Process in the Discourse Field of Multilateral Negotiation

The very fact that EU political actors managed to arrive at an agreement on treaty revision that echoed many of the principles of constitutional engineering is astonishing. Previous efforts to codify the EU’s legal and political order in a foundational document had failed repeatedly.1 And the events following the adoption of the Constitutional Treaty highlighted again the difficulty of obtaining intergovernmental agreement and popular consent on a document that claimed to finalise the EU’s political rationale and institutional set-up. After the Constitutional Treaty had been rejected in the French and Dutch referendums in 2005, member state governments hastily gave up on the constitutional pathos and certain parts of the text, such as the preamble. They returned to negotiations behind closed doors and to a depoliticised treaty language when negotiating the follow-up Lisbon Treaty (Puntscher-Riekmann, 2008). Hence, the constitutional episode of EU treaty revision was and remains  The Draft Treaty Establishing the European Union deserves particular mention in this regard. It was adopted by the majority of MEPs in 1984, on Altiero Spinelli’s initiative, but never came into force due to opposition of the heads of government. After a series of earlier efforts since the 1970s, the European Charter of Fundamental Rights was adopted in 2000. But it was of purely declarative character until inclusion into the Lisbon Treaty, the follow-up of the Constitutional Treaty, which came into force in December 2009. It does not apply fully in Poland and the Czech Republic. 1

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an extraordinary occurrence. In the literature, it is usually explained with reference to external pressures, in particular the exigency to adapt EU institutions to the EU entry of 13 new members between 2004 and 2007 (de Witte, 2003), to social learning among member state representatives after subsequent Intergovernmental Conferences on EU treaty revisions had failed to deliver (Craig, 2004), and to the public salience of the problems negotiated, which forced member state representatives to adopt a mode of integration in public, instead of by stealth (Genschel & Jachtenfuchs, 2013). From the perspective adopted in this book, the EU’s constitutional episode appears, instead, to be an outcome of the mutual reinforcement of ‘constitution speak’, on the one hand, that is, patterns of official language use that framed treaty revision in constitutional terms, and dynamics of the ‘discourse field of multilateral negotiation’, on the other. The latter was established with the extended treaty revision procedure adopted at the Laeken summit in 2001 and complemented, for the duration of the Constitution process, the customary intergovernmental politics of treaty revision and the customary domestic politics of treaty ratification with the supranational politics of publicly staged constitution-drafting using the so-called Convention method. This chapter will review the dynamics and contents of the Constitution process, which were likely to become a subject of debate in national news media. In a first step, the emergence of EU’s constitution speak will be reconstructed and situated in the intertextual context of EU politics of the early 2000s. The construction and legitimation of the EU as a polity suis generis will be demonstrated in a rough discourse analysis of two core speech acts of the Constitution process that framed treaty revision in constitutional terms: the Laeken Declaration and the speech  given by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing on the occasion of the inauguration of the Convention on the future of Europe which drafted the EU constitution (Sect. 5.1). The following sections will examine the intersecting developments in the EU supranational and intergovernmental arenas (Sect. 5.2) and in Polish and French domestic politics (Sect. 5.3) that influenced negotiations on the EU constitution while drawing on EU constitution

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speak. The final section takes up the concept of the ‘discourse field of multilateral negotiation’, considering how these developments can be understood and explained through its lens (Sect. 5.4).

5.1 Constitution Speak and Polity Construction in Intertextual Context Compared to the four preceding periods of treaty revision, the Constitution process stood out with its rich reference to constitutionalism: EU institutional reform was measured against principles of legal, moral and procedural self-constraint of political power; and designed with a view to eventual formalisation in an integrated legal document (Birkinshaw, 2003). Suggestions for treaty revision were discussed with their potential to render EU governance “more democratic, more transparent and more efficient”, following the wording of the Laeken Declaration, which suggested more of a constitutional agenda than a classic treaty reform (Magnette & Nicolaïdis, 2004, p. 388). Moreover, the disputes over adequate adjustments echoed legal scholars’ debates on the EU’s institutional architecture and drew on constitutional doctrines for argumentation. Up to the adoption of the Constitutional Treaty in 2004, EU legal scholars had pondered EU institutional design in line with classic questions of constitutional law, such as: whether EU treaties should have the status of a constitution or of an international treaty; whether one should move towards a codified formal constitution or stick to the accustomed méthode Monnet of incremental legalisation, drawing on various, often inconsistent, legal sources; whether the EU foundational documents were to be formulated along the lines of legal positivism or should also  enforce natural law traditions and communitarian values; and whether the powers of the EU should be separated or remain meshed with regard to both their constituent-constituted and legislative-­executive character (Peters, 2006). These controversies were spelt out in  either a formalist-deductive or an inductive-pragmatist tradition of constitutional

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thought. The formalist-deductive approach, which is said to be rooted in continental European traditions of constitutional law, aims to bring law and institutional architecture into logical accordance with legal doctrine and to codify the result in a formal document. It motivated pleas for a ‘simplification’ of EU treaties that rendered them comprehensible as a foundational document to the legal subjects and citizens of the European Union. The pragmatist-inductive approach, which is most articulated in the US and the UK, confers case-by-case solutions from hypothetical experiment or historical experience. It has driven most of the EU’s de facto constitutionalisation which emerged with the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) (Magnette, 2005, pp. 441–447). The legal language informed the proposals discussed in the Convention (see Sect. 5.2) and survived later intergovernmental polarisation, where opposing views on competence division, vote weighting, policy objectives, the inclusion of the Charter and reference to God/Christianity in the preamble were justified with reference to constitutional doctrines. The constitutional framing may appear to be an overdue acknowledgement and natural consequence of the EU’s actual constitutionalisation, which has been observed by EU legal scholars over the last two decades (Peters, 2006; Shaw, 2003). The constitutional framing forced “political actors at the national and European levels to confront more directly than ever before key questions about what European constitutionalism already is, especially in legal terms” (Shaw, 2003, p.  4). Being composed of a range of proto-constitutional documents, such as declarations or preambles to EU treaties and the (then not yet binding) European Charter of Fundamental Rights, and the case law of the CJEU, EU law has long since  attained a  constitutional character: it regulates relations between the constitutive political bodies of the European Union and between the European Union and its citizens based on its distinct constitutional principles (Longo, 2006; Stone Sweet, 2005; Weiler, 1999). Nevertheless, legal scholars were divided over the question of whether modern constitutionalism is an adequate template for the EU setting. Critics point to the interlegality of the EU legal system, showing that the EU legal order relies upon the contested  intersection  of EU law with national (constitutional) law and jurisprudence (Neil, 2002). Moreover, as modern constitutional integration historically implied the suppression of

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autochthon constitutional cultures (Tully, 1995, 2002), it is considered ill-suited to accommodate the multiplicity of constitutional traditions within multinational and multicultural settings, such as that of the EU (Wiener, Dunoff, Havercroft, & Kumm, 2019). Scholars studying ‘new constitutionalisms’ further suspect that constitutional framing is instrumental for enforcing and legitimising international legal regimes, which are, in fact, market-driven and hollow out constitutional entitlements and achievements established in the modern era. The legal arrangements of European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) are considered a prominent example, given their emphasis on the removal of barriers to transnational cooperation and on fiscal discipline as a means to enhance the confidence of investors (Bieling, 2015; Gill, 1998). In contrast to academics, politicians refrained from framing European integration in constitutional terms, because it challenged national constitutions as the epitome of national sovereignty and threatened to trigger allusions to and conflict with conventional conceptions of modern constitutionalism handed down in national history and law. In addition, it recalled earlier initiatives for a foundational document, such as the federalist initiative for a Draft Treaty Establishing the European Union agreed upon by Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in 1984. Thus the fact that modern constitutionalism, with all its symbolic and legal implications, still became the prime reference of EU institutional reform between 2001 and 2005 remains astonishing. In retrospect, it can be pinned down to the dynamics of multilateral negotiation (see Sects. 5.2 and 5.3), triggered by a chain of constitutionalising speech acts. Against the broader intertextual context of that time, which reaches beyond the de facto constitutional status of already-existing EU legal documents, they unfolded performativity and locked in explicit constitutionalisation. The most prominent constitutionalising discourse events are the following: • The series of prospective speeches by representatives of EU member states, starting with Joschka Fischer’s federalism speech at Humboldt University in Berlin in May 2000. The speeches pleaded for renewed effort in EU polity-building and promoted different national constitutionalisms as a point of reference.

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• The Laeken Declaration adopted by the heads of EU member states in December 2001. It opened a window of opportunity for an explicitly constitutionalist reimagination of the EU by mentioning the ‘C’-word, by setting a constitutional agenda which extended the mandate of the Nice Treaty and by convening the Convention on the Future of Europe as a more inclusive forum of consensus building. • The speech by the Convention president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing delivered on the occasion of the inauguration of the Convention on 28 February 2002, and his subsequent interventions. They portrayed the drafting process as the EU’s constitutional moment, the Convention as a quasi-constitutional assembly, and a foundational document as the natural outcome. These interventions mobilised a contractualist-­ communitarian imaginary and reinforced “the sense that the Convention really was going to produce a constitutional document, and allowed the key national players to absorb the idea” (Craig, 2004, p. 668). • The Draft Constitution presented by the Convention on 13  June 2003. It presented major constitutional principles as consensual to avoid reassessment during the subsequent intergovernmental negotiations. Thereby, the document locked in an understanding of the EU as a constitutional and (restrictedly) sovereign regime: it turned the fragmented legal bodies of the EU into one and lent sovereign international action capacity to the EU.  The (later modified) decision to assign legally binding status to the European Charter of Fundamental Rights endowed the EU with its own source of extra-positive law. The hybrid character of the European Union, that is, the alternation between intergovernmental and supranational logics, and the mixing of functional powers and of centripetal and centrifugal conceptions of the federal order, was streamlined by introducing co-decisions, Qualified Majority Voting, and joint administration of the two presidents as default mechanisms. Although these amendments corresponded to a functional understanding of polity-building and focused on (improved) power regulation, they were justified with reference to the legitimate relationship between governors and governed. The Draft Constitution, thus, pushed the EU towards a modern constitutional order, drawing on constitutional-lawyers’ terminology and contractualist imagination.

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In the debates surrounding these events, the constitutional imaginary was condensed into ‘constitution speak’, formulae of official language use, which borrowed from these speech acts and were hitherto used as shortcuts to signal the constitutional agenda. Among the most frequently used was the wording of the Laeken Declaration, according to which the EU was to be rendered “more democratic, more transparent and more efficient” and brought “closer to the citizens”, a reference to historic constitutional moments such as the constitutional assembly of Philadelphia which had founded the US, and to values of modern constitutionalism, but also talk of ‘simplification’ as an imperative of legal-institutional reform that ought to ensure both a clear legal systematic and comprehensibility for and identification by the layperson. However, the constitutionalising speech acts and EU  constitution speak were only possible and meaningful in the broader context of self-­ representations which EU bodies had developed in the 1990s in reaction to debates on the EU’s international role and its proverbial democracy and legitimacy deficit. With changing geopolitical and geoeconomic constellations and the increase in popular discomfort with the EU, European integration and the activity of EU institutions turned into a matter to be justified more clearly (Nonhoff & Schneider, 2010). EU institutions, above all the European Commission, redefined their tasks in terms of human rights, constitutional government and responsiveness. This development can be pinned down, first of all, to the political conditionality established with EU developmental aid and the procedures of accession preparation in the 1990s. Political conditionality constructed the EU as a community of liberal values and endowed it with the role of a stabilising and democratising power of international scale, with the Commission as a safeguard (Sedelmeier, 2003); it also triggered a number of documents that stipulated constitutional principles, such as the Copenhagen Criteria (1993) or the Stability Pact for South-Eastern Europe (1999). One could add the 1995 White Book, which spelt out the norms that govern the Internal Market or efforts to substantiate minority protection on the basis of the acquis communautaire and the European Convention on Human Rights (Schwellnus, 2005). Hence, enlargement and development aid pushed the EU to address its future in openly constitutional terms (de Witte, 2003).

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This development was paralleled by political-academic discussions about the legal basis upon which the EU was to become (more) involved in international conflict management or which could substantiate ongoing joint actions, for example in the Balkans. The discussions resulted in documents such as the ‘Petersberg tasks’, later to be integrated into the Amsterdam Treaty, which posited that EU defence policy should include humanitarian and rescue tasks, peacekeeping, and combat forces for crisis management. These documents testify to how EU institutions, pushed by third parties’ expectations, have constructed the European Union as a (militarily equipped) conflict-resolving force with a civil mission based on fundamental values (Bengtsson & Elgström, 2009). A redefinition of roles in terms of constitutional governance also resulted from the corruption scandal of the Santer Commission in 1999. Since then, the EU Commission has reframed its work, which initially was justified by accurate execution of conferred tasks, now using the markers of ‘transparency’ (Bellier, 2001) and ‘good governance’ (e.g. in its 2001 White Book on Good Governance). The objective to foster greater ‘closeness to the citizens’, laid down in the Maastricht Treaty, was increasingly propagated by EU representatives in an attempt to dissipate Eurosceptic fears and critique of an alienated expert government (Vogel, 2008). These texts and institutional discourses served as an intertextual background to the argumentative struggles going on in the Convention and during the Intergovernmental Conferences (IGCs) on the EU constitution. In the course of the Constitution process, they became promotional discourses that served the self-empowerment of EU institutions as constituent powers of the EU. The following subsections will trace the development of EU constitution speak and polity constructions in two core constitutionalising speech acts, which turned out to be major references during multilateral negotiation: the Laeken Declaration and Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory speech.

The Laeken Declaration The Laeken Declaration is a testimony to the aforementioned intertextual background. It opened a window of opportunity for an explicitly constitutionalist reimagination of the EU by mentioning the ‘C’-word, by setting a constitutionalist agenda, and by convening the Convention.

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But it also provided springboards for argumentation as to why such an endeavour is justified, drawing on the above intertexts, often even taking up their wording (e.g. of the Copenhagen Declaration, see Appendix D, line 57f ). The Laeken Declaration is both a diplomatic note, which confirms shared convictions, and an international agreement establishing the Convention on the Future of Europe. However, it is structured in the manner of a policy paper. It identifies problems to be tackled and ponders reasons (Part I “Europe at a crossroads”), outlines issues and guidelines for problem-solving (Part II “Challenges and reforms in a renewed Union”) and stipulates the procedure (Part III “Convening a convention on the future of Europe”). The introductory paragraphs lead to the problem to be solved: they recall the previous achievements and rationales of European integration—peace, prosperity, equalisation of rising living standards—and construct a turning point that calls for reformist action—the enlargement towards the East as both the accomplishment of previous dynamics and a new horizon: “At long last, Europe is on its way to becoming one big family, without bloodshed, a real transformation clearly calling for a different approach from fifty years ago, when six countries first took the lead” (Appendix D, line 29–31). While enlargement provokes a new approach, the challenges to be tackled are of more general kind. An objective pressure for reform is, first, the disconnection problem, that is, popular unease with European integration (reference is made to EU bureaucracy critique, fear of loss of identity, and the democratic deficit). Secondly, international developments such as 9/11 suggest that the EU should promote its success story abroad in order to help banish the foes of open societies: “Opposing forces have not gone away: religious fanaticism, ethnic nationalism, racism and terrorism are on the increase, and regional conflicts, poverty and underdevelopment still provide a constant seedbed for them” (Appendix D, line 60; 48–50). Thirdly, citizens’ wishes for a stabilising international role for the EU and for more responsive and effective EU-internal governance are cited both as confirmation of the above problem of identification and as ultimate exigency for reform.2 The  The basis for the analysis of citizens’ supposed demands is not spelt out in the Laeken Declaration; however, the account is largely identical with Eurobarometer data polled during the period of investigation. 2

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resulting imperative of reform, which will become a most-quoted intertext in national media debates, is thus: The Union needs to become more democratic, more transparent and more efficient. It also has to resolve three basic challenges: how to bring citizens, and primarily the young, closer to the European design and the European institutions, how to organise politics and the European political area in an enlarged Union and how to develop the Union into a stabilising factor and a model in the new, multipolar world. (Appendix D, line 91–96)

There are two interesting moves of EU polity  construction in the substantiation of the so-defined reform agenda, one portraying the EU as an expansive civil-constitutional power, the other portraying the EU as a responsive political system. The first construction relies on the suggestion that the enlarged European Union is an internally settled liberal community that is called upon to spread its success story globally. The founding motives of European integration—peace, prosperity, solidarity—are portrayed as being still valid, though in altered form. They urge the EU to internationally engage in a “battle against all violence, all terror, and all fanaticism”, now localised outside the European Union (Appendix D, line 64f ). This problem definition evokes both strategic- and moral-contractualist rationales of polity-building: it suggests establishing powerful institutions to protect one’s achievements from external threats; and it does so with reference to moral values—the community of liberal values—that need institutional embodiment by the European Union. The call for the EU to become “a power seeking to set globalisation in a moral framework”, which now has “to point the way ahead for many countries and peoples”, is based on suppositions that the EU already embraces and has accomplished the above objectives (Appendix D, line 61f; 64f; 53f ). These suppositions are produced by narrative mythopoesis. The image of the European Union as a peaceful, liberal and solidarity-minded community is enhanced not only by the success story of Western European integration, but also by reference to the velvet revolutions (here ‘co-opted’ as an episode of European unification) and the liberal constitutional traditions of the member states: “Europe as the continent of human values, the Magna Carta, the Bill of

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Rights, the French Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall; the continent of liberty, solidarity and above all diversity, meaning respect for others’ languages, cultures and traditions” (Appendix D, line 53–56). The construction of the EU as an expansive constitutional power is possible through flexible and concentric geographical denomination: when referring to concrete achievements of integration or the EU institutions, “European Union” or “Union” is used; when referring to the European idea and pointing towards the Union of 27 members, the political space is named “unified Europe”; and when the history of the Enlightenment is recalled, the entire “continent” comes into perspective. At the same time, boundaries are explicitly fixed in terms of modern constitutionalism, invoking the Copenhagen Criteria: “The European Union’s one boundary is democracy and human rights. The Union is open only to countries which uphold basic values such as free elections, respect for minorities and respect for the rule of law” (Laeken Declaration, Appendix D, line 56–58). Hence, the plea to transform the European Union into a ‘civil(ising) power’ is rationalised by pointing to external threats and the necessity for proactive struggle; and it is authorised with reference to record, tradition and standards qualifying the EU for such an endeavour. Along with the projection of the EU as an internally settled civil power, the Laeken Declaration introduces the image of the Union as a responsive political system that reacts to demands addressed to it by the citizens. Various issues that earlier might have been constructed as objective pressures for further integration—cross-border crime, asylum seekers and refugees, pollution, food safety, international conflict management—are presented as “expectations of Europe’s citizens”. The repeated stress on the wishes of the citizens (“they want, they feel, they expect”) suggests that it is their demands that “require Europe to undergo renewal and reform” (Appendix D, line 66, 90). And the repetitive references to Eurosceptic objections signal awareness of the disconnection problem and determination to balance future EU institutional development with popular concerns. It invokes the rhetoric of ‘closeness to the citizens’, which has been part of positive self-representation of EU institutions since the Maastricht Treaty (Krzyżanowski & Oberhuber, 2007, p. 111f; Vogel, 2008).

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While the notion of ‘closeness’ also connotes inclusion and participation (and is often used in this respect during the Constitution process), the Laeken Declaration makes sure that it is understood in terms of responsiveness, that is, as a reaction of EU political institutions, who take citizens’ concerns as guidelines for action: “How can citizens’ expectations be taken as a guide here” (Appendix D, line 117). Importantly, the projection of the EU as a responsive political system allows perpetuating the output-focused approach of EU governance, even in the light of public contestation and treaty revision. EU institutions are now not only required to effectively satisfy the  objective needs of citizens, but also urged to respond to citizens’ quest for self-determination through corresponding institutional design. Hence, the disconnection problem is defined here in terms of utilitarian polity rationales, as a functional exigency to be tackled by improving the activities of existing institutions. This projection constructs a (symbolically violent) representative claim: it monopolises the power over the definition of the desirable future of European integration in the hands of enlightened institutional actors and justifies their decisions as supposedly made in the name of the people. The Laeken Declaration provides various examples of how certain decisions on treaty revision are authorised by a particular interpretation of citizens’ wishes. For instance, the notice that “citizens undoubtedly support the Union’s broad aims, but […] do not always see a connection between those aims and the Union’s everyday action” suggests that the above imperative is a call for (only) improving the performance of existing institutions in a way which renders their action more tangible and transparent (Appendix D, line 35f, 158f ). This is underlined by more concrete suggestions: (a) clarification of the vertical division of competences, which balances effectiveness and subsidiarity; (b) simplification of procedures according to the principle of proportionality; (c) strengthening participatory rights as well as electoral constituencies and representative institutions in the EU decision-making process; (d) reorganisation of the horizontal separation and sharing of powers to ensure action capacity and authority; (e) consideration of these issues in a broader forum involving all veto players in the EU decision-making process and hearings with the ‘public’ (as provided by the Convention); (f ) possible codification of these changes in a constitutional text. The focus on the “increase [of ] the

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legitimacy and transparency of the present institutions” (Appendix D, line 158f ) excludes the option of more fundamental constitutional revision which starts from the ends of integration, rather than from the existing institutional set-up. Another instance is the stress on the idea that citizens wish for more concerted action even in realms traditionally assigned to the sovereignty of nation-states (foreign and defence policy, justice and home affairs, healthcare). But the Laeken Declaration hastens to make clear that simultaneous fears of superstate bureaucracy suggest that the primary focus should nevertheless continue to be on (negative) economic integration and on “opening fresh opportunities, not imposing further red tape” (Appendix D, line 82f ). As Magnette notes, this paradoxical wording signals a diplomatic compromise between the federalist-minded Belgian presidency and a strong group of sovereigntist member states (Magnette, 2005).3 However, the repeated stress on the critique of bureaucracy as citizens’ primary objection and on “less unwieldy and rigid and, above all, more efficient and open” institutions as the chief lesson to be drawn also underlines a neoliberal tenor. It suggests that further integration is fine as long as it does not involve interventionist-redistributive policies (Appendix D, line 36f; 82–85; 86). More importantly, it reframes in terms of efficient output performance what initially had been introduced as a democratic challenge, that is, citizens’ feeling “that deals are too often cut out of their sight and […] democratic scrutiny” (Appendix D, line 41f ). Accordingly, citizens will appreciate those activities as good governance that open up opportunities and provide “more results, better responses to practical issues and not a European superstate or European institutions inveigling their way into every nook and cranny of life” (Appendix D, line 83–85). Hence, the suggested reform agenda is also justified through moral evaluation, evoking the values of democracy and popular consent. To sum up, while taking up the topoi of the debate on the EU’s democratic deficit (e.g. lack of accountability of EU governance and self-­ determination) the problem is formulated solely in terms of a critique of bureaucracy, to be remedied by smart institutional engineering, and  This compromise is also ensured through the method adopted in the Laeken Declaration of posing questions and of giving to each two alternative answers. 3

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projected onto the world outside the EU that does not (yet) dispose of European democratic and human rights experiences. The critique of the democratic deficit of the EU, and the discourse of self-determination and participation it is related to, is here turned into a self-marketing discourse It promotes responsive government as a remedy, and institutional solutions taken over from previous EU treaties as democratic and consistent with the public will.

The Introductory Speech by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing The speech delivered by Giscard d’Estaing on the day of the inauguration of the Convention, on 28 February 2002, reads in many respects as an affirmation and rhetorically refined elaboration of the Laeken Declaration (for a more detailed analysis of specific aspects of polity construction, see Sects. 3.1–3.3). Like the Declaration, Giscard d’Estaing evokes the discourse of rational, transparent government, according to which the major task of the Constitution process lies in providing “a system to manage our continent (sic!) which is both effective and clear to the public” (Appendix E, line 29f ). He also identifies Eastern enlargement (“our continental dimensions”) and the exigencies of joint international action as major reasons for institutional reform and also recalls the history and icons of European integration (overcome confrontations of the past, area of freedom, unity in diversity) as the basis from which to start this endeavour (Appendix E, line 32–34; 69–84). Just as the Laeken Declaration does, he constructs the EU as a power with a global civilising mission which supposedly is wished for by “everyone on our planet” and which suggests itself due to the European contributions to “reason, humanism and freedom” that stem from Ancient Greece, Rome and the Enlightenment (Appendix E, line 96–111). However, in decisive points, Giscard d’Estaing deviates from the example of the Laeken Declaration. First, he draws a far more dramatic picture of current insufficiencies of the (institutional) design of the European project and conjures up the threat of “dislocation” should the Convention not manage to produce a proposal that remedies the major problems. In the palpable image of the crossroads, at which Conventioneers decide to

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either advance or give up European integration, he conjures up a decisive moment for constitutional engineering (see Sect. 3.1). The current approach to European integration, according to his interpretation, has “reached its limits” and “shows signs of flagging”. He identifies the following problems (Appendix E, line 87–111): • the increasing degree of complexity of the EU “decision-making machinery (…) to the point of being unintelligible to the general public”; • the disappointing outcome of reforms initiated from within the EU institutions with regard to the original aims of a “common European good”; • the incapacity of the European Union to jointly and reliably act at international level; • the disenchantment with EU politics among the general public in the member states. Secondly, when pondering the reasons for disenchantment, Giscard d’Estaing does not point to EU bureaucracy or a lack of responsiveness on the part of EU institutions towards citizens’ wishes and needs.4 Different from the Laeken Declaration, he regards disenchantment as primarily the result of a lack of identification with the European project, more precisely, “the difficulty of combining a strong feeling of belonging to the European Union with a continuing sense of national identity” (Appendix E, 14f, repeated several times up to line 126). By characterising the EU constituency as missing and necessitating dual c­ ommunitarian bonds and by suggesting that the Convention is of similar character and will account for this need, this is shown in more detail in Sect. 3.2, Giscard d’Estaing projects the Convention as a multinational constitutional assembly that represents and shares a common cause with EU citizens, rather than a unit composed from EU representatives, who are answerable to the delegating institutions.  In fact, he sees the general acceptance of the common currency as indicator for EU citizens’ capacity to appreciate rational EU government: “302 million Europeans have just cast off the reproach of euro-sclerosis and shown that they are able to approve what is proposed to them when they judge it to be simple and useful” (Introductory Speech, Appendix E, line 80f ). 4

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Starting from this depiction, Giscard d’Estaing arrives at quite different conclusions as to what the agenda of reform should be. The major task assigned to the Convention by the Laeken Declaration, in his view, is to “ensure that governments and citizens develop a strong, recognised, European ‘affectio societatis’, while retaining their natural attachment to their national identity” (5, 125f ). The measures he proposes to achieve this goal convert the functional-federal understanding and utilitarian polity rationale of the Laeken Declaration into a contractualist understanding of treaty revision and a communitarian polity rationale (Appendix E, line 130, 199–205; 133f; 135–155; 40, 240): • A Constitution (or constitutional treaty), rather than a number of more detailed suggestions, should be the outcome. • Reflection upon necessary reform should not start from “preconceived ideas”, but from consideration of “our sources” and the “ultimate goal of the European project”. • Constitution-drafting should be a collective deliberative project which is open to all the possible voices (including outsiders and newcomers to EU institutional politics like civil society, ‘youth’, candidate states etc.). • Conventioneers should be carried along by the enthusiasm of a “movement bringing together countries and peoples” and by a collective “Convention spirit” which helps them to work out a common approach. Hence, Giscard d’Estaing evokes the imagery of a constitutional moment and a constitutional movement in the very sense of early federalist conceptions. This view is rationalised with reference to a lack of identification or European consciousness, but it is also narratively constructed, through mythopoesis. In the course of his speech, Giscard d’Estaing constructs a timeline, locating the Convention at a crossroads between the old and the new epoch of European integration. The “old times” of Western European integration he characterises as defined by the “cruel confrontations of the past” (therein including also the Cold War), the relative homogeneity of member states, and the steady work of European institutions towards the establishment of an economic power when the “only

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concern was to further European integration” (Appendix E, line 121). The new times are owned by “the youngest, who dream of a wide area of freedom and opportunity”, characterised by heterogeneity and cultural diversity (supposedly) dramatically increased with Eastern enlargement, by the exigency to establish “a political power which will talk on equal terms to the greatest powers on our planet”, and by the requirement to make the established EU system compatible with nationally diverse political, social and cultural life (Appendix E, line 118–124). The before-after scenario is underlined by pairs of (approximate) opposites like “past” versus “youth”, Europe versus the world, economic versus political power and so on. The narrative suggests that, on the cusp of new times, EU-Europeans have to reach a principal agreement that will allow them to speak to third parties (“the world”) with a single voice, and to develop a proper feeling of association. Thus, in his speech, Giscard d’Estaing raised a set of expectations linked to modern constitutionalism, in particular to the idea that a constitution symbolises the idée directrice of the constituent political community and expresses its collective will in a kind of explicit social contract (Krzyżanowski & Oberhuber, 2007, p. 103). Such constitutional framing and references to contractualism and communitarianism paved the way for an explicit constitutionalisation of EU governance (see Sect. 5.2). It also suggested that the Convention was a constitutional assembly that, following the ethos of deliberative democracy and representing the European pouvoir constituant, would work out a foundational document and thereby contribute “modestly, but effectively, to writing a new chapter in the history of Europe” (Appendix E, line 36f ). Hence, while the Laeken Declaration provided a functionalist-­federalist imagination of polity-building—following the exigencies of effective power consolidation for the sake of better performance according to predefined measures and demands—the introductory speech by Giscard d’Estaing provided additional contractualist-communitarian pathos. Both lines seem to have inspired the Conventioneers’ discussions. The following sections will show how the constitution speak and polity  constructions contained in the two documents were involved in the dynamics of EU constitution-drafting.

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5.2 Supranational and Intergovernmental Dynamics Commentators agree that Joschka Fischer’s speech at Humboldt University in Berlin, on May 12, 2000, set off the dynamics of the Constitution process (Bayrak, 2002; Laffan, 2006). His plea for federalisation on the German model and for a foundational document in the form of a ‘constitution’ or ‘constitutional treaty’ triggered reactions from other European heads of government: Jacques Chirac and the French socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, foregrounded the importance of political integration and of the integrity of the member states within the EU setting; Tony Blair suggested a monopoly of central political authority in the hands of the European Council and the drafting of a ‘statement of principles’ which, following the British example, would be crafted from a variety of sources and should be overseen by a secondary chamber made up of the national parliaments; the Benelux countries advocated the strengthening of community institutions and joint EU action and demanded a constitution for the sake of clarification of competences; and the Polish president, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, emphasised the Polish ambition to contribute to the debate prior to accession, highlighted scepticism towards supranational centralisation and underlined the importance of upgrading the Community Method—to mention just a few statements according to the frequency they were referred to and only insofar as they varied in content (Laffan, 2006, p. 72; Parzymies, 2003; Stolarczyk, 2003; Weiss, 2002). Hence, already in this early phase, competing, nationally inspired, projections were promoted which pushed certain programmes of institution building. The noble speeches on the future of European integration sharply contrasted with the actual experience of this mode of treaty revision at the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) in Nice in December 2000. The resulting Treaty of Nice formally prepared the European Union for the 2004 round of enlargement. Therefore, it carried some positive symbolic in the accession countries. At the same time, it was remembered as a flawed compromise because it failed to accommodate controversial issues of institutional reform left over from the Amsterdam Treaty, notably the

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composition of and voting within EU bodies, and the integration of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. The IGC in Nice has also been associated with an unprecedented polarisation between the French and the German governments on the weighting of votes in the European Council in those policy issues where Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) applied instead of unanimity. The French government had insisted upon the conventional agreement, according to which France and Germany were given the same voting power in the European Council in spite of their differently sized populations. On the initiative of the German government, which claimed to be acting also in favour of Polish demands, governments agreed upon balancing the preponderance of big countries (29 votes each for Germany, France, Italy and the UK) by upgrading the weight of votes of the middle-sized countries (27 votes each for Spain and Poland), a controversial arrangement, which became referred to as the ‘directorate of the six’ bigger countries.

Laeken and the Instalment of a Quasi-Constitutional Assembly Against the background of perceived failure and the looming ‘big bang’ enlargement, the Belgian prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, who held the presidency of the European Council in the second half of 2001, convinced the other heads of government to extend the mandate of the Nice Treaty. The Nice Treaty had commissioned governments to find ways of incorporating the Charter into the EU Treaties; of simplifying the legal documents and instruments of the EU; and of improving the delineation of EU and national competences and the participation of national parliaments in the process of EU policymaking (Laffan, 2006, p. 73f ). At the IGC in Laeken in December 2001, the EU heads further committed themselves to enhance the EU’s democratic legitimacy and ‘closeness to the citizens’. The questions listed for discussion read “more like a constitutional agenda than the basis for a classic treaty reform” (Magnette & Nicolaïdis, 2004, p. 388), and the four slogans heading particular instructions—division of competences; simplification; more democracy, transparency and efficiency; towards a constitution for European citizens—would become widespread shortcuts for that agenda (see Sect. 5.1).

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Next to this constitutional framing, the Laeken Declaration provided for the set-up of the Convention on the Future of Europe in February 2002.5 It would adopt the convention method that had proved successful for the elaboration of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights in the years 1999 and 2000. Like its predecessor, the Convention on the Future of Europe was composed of delegates from all EU political institutions (supranational bodies, national governments and parliaments), led by a powerful Presidium and assisted by an influential Secretariat.6 Agreement was to be reached through a complex series of publicly accessible debate and administrative steering (Maurer, 2006, p.  130). Differently from its predecessor, the Convention on the Future of Europe also included delegates from the governments and legislative chambers of the accession states, though coupled with the proviso that they must not block decisions of the established EU members and that one of them— the Slovenian parliamentarian Alojz Peterle—could participate only as observer in the meetings of the Presidium. For the first time, the Committee of the Regions and the Economic and Social Committee, the European Ombudsman, and social partners were also conceded speaking rights. Moreover, contributions from hearings with civil society actors, the ‘Youth Convention’ as well as from the Internet forum ‘futurum’ were  Proceedings of the Convention as well as proposals and reports are still accessible via the Convention website http://european-convention.europa.eu/EN/bienvenue/bienvenue2352. html?lang=EN and the digital European studies platform of the Luxembourg university https:// www.cvce.eu/en/home. 6  The Convention on the Future of Europe included delegates from: the member state governments (15) and the accession state governments (13); member state parliaments (30) and accession state parliaments (26); the European Parliament (EP) (16); European Commission (2); on top of that: the chairman Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (France) and his vice chairmen Giuliano Amato (Italy) and Jean-Luc Dehaene (Belgium). They formed the Presidium together with the two Commission representatives (Michel Barnier and António Vitorino), two Members of European Parliament (MEPs; Méndez de Vigo and Klausch Hänsch), two national parliament representatives (Gisela Stuart, John Bruton) and the respective presidents of the European Council (Ana Palacio for the Spanish; Henning Christophersen for the Danish; and George Katiforis for the Greek government). At the insistence of delegates from the accession countries, Alojz Peterle, a Slovenian parliamentarian, was belatedly admitted as an observer. The Secretariat was chaired by Sir John Kerr, representative of the British government during the negotiations on the Maastricht Treaty, and four functionaries from the General Secretary of the European Council of Italian, German and Austrian background, while the team of ‘editors’ comprised (in equal representation) functionaries of the Commission, the General Secretary of Council, and the EP, as well as national diplomats, among them the French Etienne de Poncins and the Pole Agnieszka Bartol (Deloche-Gaudez, 2004, pp. 4–6). All in all, 7 participants were of Polish and 13 of French origin, including alternates and secretaries. 5

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to be taken into account.7 To prevent intergovernmental and other forms of alliance building and bargaining typical of IGCs or parliamentary sessions, voting was not allowed, the seating in the Plenum followed alphabetical order, and each sub-body (Plenum, Working Groups, Presidium, Secretariat) was made up of equal representation of the various national, party and institutional backgrounds. The work was processed in a sequence, which started with a period of prior listening in the Plenum where emphasis was put on general statements regarding the mission of the European Union (‘listening phase’, March to July 2002). The listening phase was followed by synchronic discussion in the smaller working groups that dealt in depth with particular issues (‘study phase’, September 2002 to January 2003), and by a debate on proposals in the Plenum (‘proposal phase’, February to June 2003). The discussions followed the catalogue of questions given in the Laeken Declaration. Accordingly, the working groups of the Convention dealt with further integration in certain policy fields (external action and defence, justice and home affairs, economic policy); the status of substantial and formal constitutional provisions such as the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and the EU’s accession to the European Convention of Human Rights overseen by the Council of Europe; subsidiarity and the empowerment of national parliaments; the legal personality of the European Union and the merging and simplification of the EU’s legal orders; and voting rules and the general principles for balancing competences between EU bodies and levels of government. Against considerable resistance from the Presidium, the Conventioneers set up an additional working group on questions of European social policy (Norman, 2005, pp. 63–125).8  For an evaluation of the limited significance and promotional function of these hearings, see Norman (2005, p. 41f ). 8  The working groups had the following titles and chairs, and legal training is indicated by an asterisk: subsidiarity (Íñigo Méndez de Vigo ∗, European Parliament), Charter/accession to the ECHR (António Vitorino∗, Commission), legal personality (Guiliano Amato∗, vice president), national parliaments (Gisela Stuart∗, member of UK Parliament), complementary competences (Henning Christophersen, Danish government), economic governance (Klaus Hänsch, European Parliament), external action (Jean-Luc Dehaene∗, vice president), defence (Michel Barnier, Commission), simplification of legislative procedures (Guiliano Amato∗, vice president), security and justice (John Bruton, Irish parliament), social policy (George Katiforis, Greek government, Presidium). 7

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However, the entire ‘deliberative enterprise’ remained under the auspices of the ‘masters of the treaties’, the member state governments, whose heads eventually were to decide upon which suggestions to integrate into the new treaty. Moreover, Conventioneers were obliged to keep to (the deficiencies of ) existing treaties and suggestions already made by EU bodies and think tanks, rather than starting anew from scratch. While the anticipation of the national governments’ prerogative endowed the latter de facto with an extra communicative power, the second requirement imposed a preselection of topics and suggested a rather functional understanding of constitutional order, that is, a primary focus on coordination and consolidation of power. Yet despite these constraints, the Convention quickly acquired the aura of a constitutional assembly, and comparisons with the convention in Philadelphia which had founded the US constitution in 1787 suggested themselves both to those involved and to those observing (Deloche-Gaudez, 2003). This was also due to the proactive framing of the Convention’s mandate by its president and other key players. Already in his opening speech on February 28, 2002, Valery Giscard d’Estaing had called for a single document in the form of a ‘constitutional treaty’. And on October 28, 2002, even before the ‘study phase’ was concluded, he presented the draft structure of an integrated document, the so-called Skeleton, just in time to forestall the competing proposal by the Commission.9 These interventions quickly dispelled the initial impression that the Convention was a mere “talking shop that would rapidly sink from view” (Norman, 2005, p. 35). They underlined the ambitions of prominent Conventioneers to make a difference to the legal-political status quo of the European Union and to construct a veritable esprit de corps. The Skeleton reinforced “the sense that the Convention really was going to produce a constitutional document, and allowed the key national players to absorb the idea” (Craig, 2004, p. 668).  The Commission’s proposal announced for December 4, 2002, failed to have the expected agenda-­ setting function because another version, which was authored by the Commission president, Roman Prodi, and codenamed ‘Penelope’, was leaked to national newspapers. Still, the official Commission proposal proved a welcome source of reference later on (Norman, 2005, pp. 135–138). Decisive input for the Skeleton, in particular on simplification, came from the Lamassoure Report published in April 2002; and from the draft worked out by Hervé Bribosia, a member of the Secretariat. 9

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The Emergence of a Convention Consensus Despite the heterogeneity of the assembly and the multiplicity of opposing views, the Convention managed to present an integrated document, the Draft Constitution, on June 13, 2003, in time for the start of the next IGC. This success is largely attributed to Giscard d’Estaing’s strict regime, but also to the working methods and social dynamics unfolding in the Convention. Giscard d’ Estaing used his formal powers, his position at the relay of communicative flows between the Presidium, the Secretariat, and the Working Groups, his informal contacts to the alpha Conventioneers10 as well as bilateral diplomacy with the EU capitals for extensive gatekeeping and benchmarking (Norman, 2005, p.  48f ). Complexity was further reduced by the logic of expertise induced by the Secretariat whose members possessed high-profile EU expertise. They not only were in charge of documenting and editing consultations, but also prepared proposals for consultation behind the scenes, in close cooperation with the bodies of the Convention as well as with legal advisors of EU institutions and the national administrations. Their collective working method helped to establish shared assumptions about what was likely to become part of an acceptable ‘Convention acquis’ (e.g. when fitting the imperative of ‘simplification’) and what was rather to be ignored as unfeasible (e.g. when strongly ‘nationally’ connoted) and what terminology provided enough vagueness, but also normative impetus to be endorsed by opposing camps (Deloche-Gaudez, 2004, pp. 4–8; Oberhuber, 2006, p. 101f ). As a result, the proposals of the Secretariat gained support by  Among those Conventioneers who stood out thanks to particular activity, Norman mentions Méndez de Vigo, a constitutional lawyer, Spanish member of the European Peoples Party (EPP) and chair of the EP delegation, who organised one of the most important informal forums, the ‘Hilton dinners’; Elmar Brok, German EEP member, who welded conservative MEPs and national parliamentarians into a cohesive body; Alain Lamassoure, French EEP member and former speech-writer of Giscard d’Estaing; Andrew Duff, British member of the liberal faction (ELDR) in the EP and participant in the previous convention, a convinced federalist handing in a first personal proposal for a draft constitutional treaty; Johannes Voggenhuber, Austrian Green MEP, federalist and outspoken critic of Giscard d’Estaing’s methods; Anne van Lancker, Belgian MEP and Flemish socialist, promoted the Working Group on ‘social Europe’; Danuta Hübner, representative of the Polish government; endowed accession countries with a sense of ownership in the Convention; Peter Hain, British European affairs minister, who promoted the UK’s ‘red lines’; Jens-Peter Bonde, Danish Eurosceptic MEP, leading the ‘Group for Europe of Democracy and Diversity’ (Norman, 2005, p. 33f ). 10

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the Plenum more easily than suggestions made by the Presidium or the president Giscard d’Estaing himself (Deloche-Gaudez, 2004, pp. 14–26). Norman points to the related effect of the reporting practice of the chairs of the Working Groups, who mainly belonged to the Presidium and had, in majority, merits in EU institutions and a legal training. They glossed over divisions in their groups by stressing the considerable degree of agreement one or the other issue supposedly had reached. These written acclamations of majority opinion tended to outweigh protests in the plenary and to influence later discussions (Norman, 2005, p. 92). Consensus was also facilitated through extensive informal communication launched by delegates from the European Parliament and by the political families (Norman, 2005, p. 42f ). In particular, the MEPs’ cross-­ faction activities paved the way for a progressive approach adopted by the entire Convention and for far-reaching amendments towards supranationalisation and constitutionalisation (Oberhuber, 2006, p. 103f ). These processes enhanced the internal cohesion of the Convention and turned it into a distinct epistemic community. At the same time, informal hierarchies emerged which ranked Conventioneers according to EU expertise, informational resources, contacts to members of the Presidium, and pragmatic networking abilities. Together, these social dynamics exerted a strong mainstreaming effect on less equipped Conventioneers such as the newcomers from the accession countries or national parliamentarians. They started rallying around proclamations and discourses of the ‘centre’ in order to be heard (Krzyżanowski, 2005; Oberhuber, 2006, pp. 107–111). On this basis, the Working Groups achieved substantive solutions, some of them outliving the subsequent negotiations. Among them were: the suggestion to merge the different legal bodies of the European Union and its three-pillar structure into one and to endow the Union (instead of its different legal entities) with legal personality so as to enhance its international action capacity; the integration of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and fundamental values and objectives; a ­rearrangement of legislative procedures which privileged co-decision of the European Parliament, coupled with QMV in the European Council; simplification and merging of legal instruments and budgeting principles; the monitoring of subsidiarity, including national parliaments’ stronger involvement in EU decision-making; strengthening of institutional relays for the common foreign and security policies.

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Intergovernmental Polarisation Major events that laid the seed of contention in the works of the Convention and the subsequent IGCs were interventions, mainly by groups of government representatives, who launched proposals via the mass media in the member states, paralleling the Convention consultations. The ‘ABC proposal’, launched by Aznar, Blair and Chirac early on, pleaded for extensive re-pooling of power in the hands of the European Council by assigning to it a permanent EU president with guideline competence. In November 2002, the Franco-German team published suggestions for the strengthening of the common foreign and defence policies, which was taken up by an initiative for enhanced military cooperation and an EU headquarters by Belgium, Germany, France and Luxemburg in April 2004. In the beginning of December 2002, the Benelux memorandum took a counter-position to the ABC proposal by pleading for strong Community institutions and a rotating presidency. A major reference for various issues of balance of power became the FrancoGerman proposal published on January 15, 2003, which reintroduced leverage for the Commission (e.g. regarding the election of the Commission president by the European Parliament and the Commission’s involvement in an EU foreign ministry), but privileged large countries in many respects (e.g. in the recruitment method for a permanent Council president and for a smaller Commission). The counterposition was soon to follow in a proposal by the ‘Friends of the Community Method’ on March 16, 2003, which gave voice to the majority of smaller states’ representatives and was underlined by a ‘Benelux breakfast’ of 18 smaller states on April, 16, 2003. Most controversial, however, was Giscard d’Estaing’s authoritative version of a constitutional treaty presented to the Convention on April 22, 2003. In this version, drafted with the help of the general secretary, Sir John Kerr, and published without giving prior notice to fellow Presidium members, Giscard d’Estaing aligned himself with most of the claims of the larger member states. On top of that, he proposed to substitute the system of QMV agreed upon in the Treaty of Nice with the double majority principle. Therewith, Giscard d’Estaing’s draft not only fuelled the argument between representatives of smaller and larger EU countries or advocates of the Community Method and those of intergovernmental EU politics, but in addition affronted Spain

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and Poland. They reacted with a joint paper, published on September 23, 2003, condemning the double majority principle. These thorny issues were smoothed over in subsequent versions and altogether made up only 15% of the provisions suggested in the Convention’s final draft presented on June 13, 2003. However, they were hard to settle in the dense series of consultations that the Italian Council presidency coordinated after the European Council had accepted the Draft Constitution as a starting point in Thessaloniki on June 19, 2003. The first constitutional IGC in Rome during December 12–13, 2003, failed above all because the French and the German governments, on the one hand, and the Spanish and the Polish governments, on the other, were not ready to work out a compromise on the weighting of the votes in the European Council. It was agreed upon only in spring 2004 thanks to a sophisticated multitrack method of consultation adopted by the Irish Council presidency (Laffan, 2006, pp. 79–84). Agreement was difficult not only because of the virulence of classic interest and ideological conflicts among member state governments. In addition, events external to the constitution process repeatedly interfered. The looming large-scale enlargement (realised in 2004 and 2007), which served as an argument for far-reaching institution reform, made up a second platform of intergovernmental negotiation where EU members and accession states were facing each other on unequal terms. As in previous enlargement rounds, the fights about the concrete financial conditions of accession and shares in the EU’s redistributive policies—up to the conclusion of the accession negotiations in December 2002—ended to the detriment of the accession states and placed on them the costs of delayed EU-internal reform (Kutter, 2008). The hierarchy resulting from different membership status was mirrored in the relationship between full members and (observing) newcomers in the Convention, and the parallelism of accession and negotiations on the Constitutional Treaty that put considerable constraint on the representatives from the accession countries (see Sect. 5.3). Events on the international stage were of no lesser importance. Whereas the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York in September 2001 (9/11) proved a permanent backdrop of discussion, in particular on the joint action capacity of the European Union towards ‘external threats’,

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the conflict on the Iraq War exposed strong dissent on joint defence acticities within the EU. In winter 2002–2003, the preparation for the US-led war on Iraq split EU governments into supporters and opponents of intervention. The former group was represented in particular by the ‘Eight’, which had signed a supportive letter on January 30, 2003 (the UK, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic), after the French president and the German chancellor—symbolic heads of the latter group—had declared their disapproval on January 22, 2003, in unilateral fashion. Soon after, the ‘Vilnius group’ issued an even more outspoken support for the position of the Bush administration on February 6th, 2003.11 These events caused major EU-internal diplomatic irritation and follow-up affronts. Famously, Jacques Chirac told the accession states among the ‘Eight’ they had better hold their peace (February 7th, 2003), while the secretary of defence of the US, Donald Rumsfeld, praised the ‘new Europe’ for being more up to date than the ‘old’ Franco-German Europe (January 23rd, 2003), a juxtaposition heavily exploited both by politicians and by national media. The divisions on the Iraq War brought the consultations in the Convention to a temporary standstill. They put initiatives for a common security and defence policy in question (pushed first by UK and France, then by Belgium, France and Germany) and revealed the divisions over the status of the transatlantic alliance as an institutional pillar of European integration. The sudden visibility of suspicion between the ‘old’ and the ‘new Europe’, which had previously been masked by the unification rhetoric, shed a different light on these initiatives. In particular, Franco-German interventions for a powerful EU president and foreign minister and ‘enhanced cooperation’ in matters of defence had the air of preserving a model of EU leadership and vision of society and international politics that was not only against the interests of other members, but was virtually outdated. Against this background, the positions advocated by the French and the Polish government representatives at the IGCs appeared as principally antipodal. French secularism and legal positivism clashed with the Polish preference for transcendental anchorage of constitutional order; the  The ‘Vilnius group’ comprised Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Albania, Republic of Macedonia, Romania and Bulgaria. 11

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French support for the double majority principle in the voting of the Council (a German preference) appeared to the Poles as a plot against the voting power Poland would have had according to the Nice Treaty; and the opposition of the Polish government appeared to the French as an obstruction of a delicate compromise achieved by means of far-reaching French concessions. At the time of polarisation on the Iraq War, the confrontation at EU level was fuelled by bilateral quarrels about armament policy and by divergent conceptions of transatlantic cooperation (see also Sect. 5.3). Again, these constellations imploded when Madrid was hit by a terrorist attack on April 11, 2004, and when Spanish parliamentary elections on April 14 turned into a negative vote on Aznar’s security and military policies. They brought the socialist Manuel Zapatero to office, who immediately renounced Aznar’s previous policies, regarding both the support for the US administration in the war on Iraq and the rejection of a double majority principle for the vote weighting in the European Council. Hence, when considering the course of events surrounding the consultations of the Conventions and the subsequent negotiations on the Constitutional Treaty, it becomes clear that the outcomes, while set in motion by a proactive Convention collective and its ‘constitutional framing’, were highly contingent and dependent on geopolitical events. The next sub-chapter will go into more detail in describing the dynamics of domestic political competition in Poland and France that influenced the Constitution process and that are likely to have also shaped the media debate.

5.3 T  he Constitution Process in Poland and France In Poland and France, the drafting of the EU constitution did not trigger major political controversy in the beginning. Most political forces welcomed the plan to address the tricky questions of EU institutional reform in a more fundamental manner as envisaged by the Convention, and so did the majority of the population in EU member and accession states.12  In the years 2003–2004, the idea of a European Constitution was welcomed by 70–80% of the respondents from the member states and 50–70% of respondents from the accession states; cf. 12

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Soon after the IGC in Laeken, suggestions regarding reform were discussed in policy-advisory circles and linked to some public awareness raising campaigns (Bayrak, 2002; Parzymies, 2003). In both countries, expectations addressed to the national representatives involved in an EU event of such historic-symbolic significance were high.13 However, the EU constitutional issue was absent from the campaign for the presidential and parliamentary elections in France (April–June 2002) and from the campaign for regional elections and the accession referendum in Poland (Oct–Nov 2002; May 2002–June 2003). The extent of the controversy which would surround the topic, and which would unfold rapidly in Poland and steadily in France once the Draft Constitution of the Convention was unpacked in the intergovernmental negotiations, took governments, and, notably, commentators, by surprise. In part, the dynamics of politicisation can be plausibly pinned down to strategic positioning and political communication in EU multilevel politics, in particular to the governments’ (failing) two-level games and oppositional groups’ successful counter-mobilisation.14 Below, I will try to illuminate these dynamics as far as they have been analysed in the literature.

Eurobarometer on http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/eb/eb62/eb_62_en.pdf. 13  This is apparent in several articles, in both the French and the Polish broadsheets, that stress the significance of the Constitution process and lament the lack of initiative by national governments and, more generally, on the lack of debate. 14  EU scholars have observed that parties in government refrain from addressing controversial EU issues both in parliament and vis-à-vis national media, anticipating costly confrontation with EU partners in ongoing negotiations. This is especially the case when they lack a comfortable parliamentary majority and risk the mobilisation of EU issues by opposition parties. In turn, attacking the government’s EU policies has proved a successful strategy for radical and marginal parties to increase their share of votes, in particular during elections to the European Parliament or EU-related referenda, when posts in government are not at stake (Hooghe, Marks, & Wilson, 2002). However, also centrist oppositional parties may politicise national EU policy by dismantling the government’s ‘containment’, rather than by attacking the political-ideological policy choice. Moreover, as Beichelt notes (Beichelt, 2004), in Central Eastern European Countries, where party politics are fluctuating, with politicians flexibly shifting factions or parties and voters frequently changing their preferences, the agenda of radical parties may well travel from the margins to the centre of policymaking. Finally, the model of ‘two-level games’ (Putnam, 1988), which underlies the above assumptions, may prove of too low complexity, when IGCs are but one forum of multilevel politics and when additional stakeholders (e.g. national parliamentarians) involved at EU level start playing their own two-level games, as was the case during the Convention (Gaisbauer, 2005, p. 307). The following analysis attempts to consider these modifications.

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Poland: Nice or Death Until the successful conclusion of accession negotiations on December 13, 2002, and the approval of EU accession in the referendum of June, 2003, Polish delegates to the Convention, most of them associated with the ruling post-communist Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej (SLD; Democratic Left Alliance), refrained from publicly voicing any concern in the domestic arena that was likely to complicate accession negotiations, help the campaign of the opponents of accession, or provide critics of the SLD government with new arguments. Critics became numerous after the government had been suspected of involvement into a major corruption scandal—the so-called Rywin affair—in late 2002 and after coalition partners, the agrarian Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe (PSL; Polish Peoples’ Party) and Unia Pracy (UP; Labour Union), had left government in April 2003.15 These incidents played into the hands of the right-wing opposition represented by the liberal conservative party Platforma Obywatelska (PO; Civic Platform), the national conservative party Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS; Law and Justice), the populist-agrarian Samoobrona (Self-Defence), and the nationalist-catholic Liga Polskich Rodziń (LPR; League of Polish Families), the latter two agitating against EU accession. These parties had emerged as successors of the former Solidarity movement from the parliamentary elections in 2001, after the heavy defeat of the conservative coalition Akcja Wyborcza Solidarność (AWS; Solidarity Electoral Action)  The key incident of the ‘Rywin affair’ took place on July 22, 2003, when the film producer Lew Rywin offered Adam Michnik, editor of Poland’s largest daily Gazeta Wyborcza, to arrange for a change in a draft law that was supposed to limit the print media’s rights to own radio and television channels and would have prevented the newspaper’s publishing house, Agora S.A., from buying the private TV channel Polsat and the second channel of the public broadcaster, TVP. In exchange, Rywin demanded a $16 million bribe. The fact that the newspaper published the secretly recorded conversation only in December 2002 cast doubt on Michnik himself. Moreover, as Rywin had indicated that he acted on behalf of a ‘group in power’, the government was suspected of involvement. A special committee was set up in the Polish parliament (Sejm) in January 2003; however, it revealed the extent of manipulation by the opposing parties rather than the exact circumstances. Both a separate penal prosecution and the majority report of the special committee (approved by SLD and Samoobrona) identified Rywin as sole person responsible. The minority report, instead, which was initiated by a member of the SLD splinter SdPl and unexpectedly adopted by the Sejm in September 2004, named Prime Minister Leszek Miller, members of his cabinet, and the head of TVP as the brains behind the attempted bribe. 15

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and the liberal Unia Wolności (UW; Freedom Union), who, together with the SLD, were held responsible for the transition policies implemented in the 1990s. The Rywin affair, on top of other corruption scandals, was to overshadow Polish politics for the following two years. It was used by the new right-wing parties to mobilise for moral renewal in a ‘Fourth Republic’ and to establish themselves as the true inheritors of Solidarity (Brier, 2009, pp. 78–82).16 The corruption affairs contributed to the loss of popularity of the SLD and to the resignation of the SLD prime minister Leszek Miller in May 2004. He failed to settle internal party fights about social and economic policies, in particular on the ‘Hausner plan’ that cut social spending. These struggles split the SLD, with a splinter group forming the new party Socjaldemokracja Polska (SdPl; Social Democracy of Poland) in April 2004. Against the backdrop of lessening support at home and simultaneous involvement in two EU processes requiring different approaches— accession and constitutional deepening—the SLD government and its parliamentary club adopted a contradictory strategy. At Convention level, Polish delegates basically subscribed to the Convention mainstream (University of Lòdź, 2003). The three Polish delegates were of different backgrounds within the Polish political scene: Danuta Hübner represented the Polish government, but as a cross-bench member, not a member of the SLD; Jósef Oleksy, member of the parliamentary club of the SLD and the parliamentary European Committee, represented the Polish parliament Sejm (lower chamber); while Edmund Wittbrodt, member of the liberal conservative AWS (which survived in the alliance “Blok Senat 2001”), represented the Senat (upper chamber). With the exception of a suggestion for a compromise on the preamble, which included both reference to Enlightenment and to Christian heritage, Polish delegates did not expose themselves as national group, and rarely as an accession state.17 As a rule, they joined broader initiatives, for example demanding  The ‘Fourth Republic’ was a concept adopted by PiS in particular. PiS claimed that the structural deficiencies of the ‘Third Republic’ founded in 1989 were only to be overcome by a rebirth of religious and patriotic values, an uncompromising decommunisation, and the strengthening of collective memory (Brier, 2009, p. 65). 17  The group of Central and Eastern European accession states launched one joint proposal, which objected to the speeding-up of the initial plan for the Constitution project (not considered by the 16

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the preservation of the principle of one commissioner per country and of unanimity in economic policy (in particular regarding taxation), or the strengthening of the Community Method.18 On the issue of vote weighting, they were extremely cautious, with Danuta Hübner criticising the deviation from the vote weighting system of the Nice Treaty only once when Giscard d’Estaing presented his draft to the Plenum in April 2003. Not until the presentation of the Draft Constitution at the IGC in Thessaloniki in July 2003, did Miller voice his objection, and not until September 23rd did the Polish government join the Spanish protests. Reticence on the issue of the voting system at EU level, however, contradicted the communication strategy adopted by the SLD at national level. Here, government representatives tried to appease fears of loss of national independence by referring to the considerable bargaining power Poland would gain in EU intergovernmental politics after accession thanks to the arrangements of the Treaty of Nice. As Gaisbauer notes (Gaisbauer, 2005, p. 302f ), the number of votes attributed by the Nice Treaty to Poland in the European Council had become important already during the accession preparations: it was portrayed as appropriate appreciation of Poland’s seize and ambitions as future member of the European Union—both by Polish and EU politicians; as compensation for painful compromises during the accession negotiations; as collateral for future competition for EU resources; and as contractual basis of EU accession laid down in the accession treaties and ratified in the accession referendum in June 2003. Furthermore, it was presented as an agreement that, unlike other issues of institutional reform, was eventually settled in Nice and, therefore, not to be resumed in the Convention and the subsequent IGC. This had also been the official position of the EU commission and of the enlargement commissioner, Günter Verheugen, until Giscard d’Estaing presented his draft in April 2003 which brought the issue of the double majority to the fore. Plenum). The proposal would have allowed the accession states to start negotiations on the Draft Constitution in full possession of membership. The decision to do without an ‘accession lobby’ resulted from consultations with representatives from other accession states which had revealed the divergence of preferences (Krzyżanowski, 2005). 18  For the contributions of Polish Convention delegates, cf. http://european-convention.eu.int/ doc_register.asp?lang=EN&Content=CONTRIB (June 6, 2010).

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The news of the change of mind in the Convention hit the Polish parliamentary and public debate late and unprepared. At the instigation of the president of the Sejm, SLD member Marek Borowski, and to the annoyance of the Polish parliamentary Conventioneers, but apparently tolerated by the opposition, plenary discussions on the works of the Convention had been suppressed in the Sejm (Gaisbauer, 2005, p. 300).19 As a result, the EU constitutional issue and details on the Draft Constitution did not enter the public-political agenda until the European Committee presented its estimations to the plenary in September 2003. In his speech on September 9, Jan Rokita, chairman of the parliamentary club of the PO party, who had gained popularity as a tough investigator in the special committee on the Rywin affair, famously launched the slogan ‘Nicea o muerte, Nicea albo śmierć (Nice or death). He sought to thereby mobilise support for a resolution that urged the Polish government to fiercely “defend” the arrangements of the Nice Treaty. For PO, this was the first opportunity to enhance the party’s profile on EU policymaking, the sole unquestioned competence of SLD, without running the risk of being identified with the radical Euroscepticism of LPR (Gaisbauer, 2005, p. 300). While PO cried scandal on the inconsistencies in the government’s stance towards the voting system in the Council, PiS and LPR appropriated the slogan to accuse the government of treason of national interests and wilful subservience to the big EU countries’ preferences when consenting to the Draft Constitution. To them, non-consideration of central Polish demands in the Draft Constitution—the vote weighting arranged in the Nice Treaty and the mentioning of Christianity as source of belief or cultural heritage in the preamble—was another proof of the instrumental character the constitutional project had for the perpetuation of German and French predominance in the enlarged European Union. Against the backdrop of this massive campaign, which conjured up the threat of Poland again falling victim to European power politics, the opposition pushed through two resolutions in October and December  The European Committee of the Sejm discussed the works of the Convention regularly, but non-­ publicly, assisted by the Conventioneer Danuta Hübner, representative of the Polish government and MEP Jósef Oleksy. Yet, the entire Sejm and the (publicly convening) general committee discussed the issue only once, in July 2002. After the president of the parliament had decided that no further plenary session would take place, LPR also refrained from demanding further discussion. 19

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2003. They obliged the government to stick to the vote-weighting system of the Nice Treaty, to press for the mentioning of Christianity in the preamble, for the preservation of the principle of ‘one country, one commissioner’ and the rotating EU presidency, as well as for the restriction of ‘reinforced cooperation’ and for the formal acknowledgement of NATO’s primary role in European defence issues.20 The fact that also the majority of the members of SLD consented to the resolutions and that Leszek Miller promoted exactly these claims during the IGC can be viewed as a strategic choice meant to enhance bargaining power at EU level by limiting options of concession, a strategy which had partially proved successful during accession negotiations (Gaisbauer, 2005, p. 300). However, it also revealed the lack of alternative arguments which could have persuaded sceptics of the prospects of the Draft Constitution or provided some estimates for the actual cost of non-agreement. Commentators point out that the Polish government (and the Polish politicians in general) had not developed any idea of what the future of European integration, and Poland’s role therein, should look like once accession was accomplished (Stolarczyk, 2003, p. 23; University of Lòdź, 2003). Instead, it adopted a pragmatic approach (let’s first be in, then co-decide) and went on with executive-centred EU policymaking as practised during the accession preparations. The major line of argument for one or the other suggestion of EU institutional reform drew on the strategy adopted for accession in the early 1990s: accordingly, EU membership was both instrumental to Polish economic development and to the geostrategically desirable integration with Western institutions; but it was also crucial to reassert Poland’s status as internationally acknowledged state, independent from foreign (Soviet) influence, forming part of the international community and the political culture of the West on an equal footing with the established members (Adamczyk & Gostmann, 2007; Krzyżanowski, 2008; Paszkiewicz, 1996). In accordance with these assumptions, the Polish president and member of SLD, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, had early on adopted a ‘yes, but’ argument towards EU institutional reform: he supported the strengthening of  See the resolutions No. 1985 and No. 1989 on http://www.sejm.gov.pl/archiwum/2003r/pos58r. htm (June 6, 2010). 20

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existing EU institutions through democratisation, a charter of shared values and enhanced common foreign and security policies, but rejected federalisation which would affect Polish decision-making autonomy in policies crucial for economic catch-up as well as in its cultural particularity.21 Sticking to this line, Polish Conventioneers supported integrationist stances which highlighted intra-EU solidarity and financial transfer, and the strengthening of supranational institutions, notably the Commission and the Community Method; they also supported initiatives enhancing the European ‘community of values’ (Charter, preamble) and the EU’s international action capacity. At the same time, they insisted on the principle of equal representation in EU intergovernmental politics, advocated unanimity in economic policy (taxes, in particular), and warned of ‘enhanced cooperation’ in defence issues that would drive less equipped member states and atlanticists from the scene (Parzymies, 2003). Moreover, they tried to upload the Polish constitutional compromise of 1997, the formula in the preamble, which named ‘other beliefs’ next to Christian belief as source of civic values and had gained the support of both atheist post-communists and Catholic conservatives. Yet, it remained unclear how potentially contradictory formulations of national preferences went into a conception of a European Union capable of legitimised action after enlargement and whether it suggested a proactive or rejecting stance towards constitutionalisation. The sudden politicisation of the Draft Constitution in Polish domestic politics in autumn 2003 put all these issues on the table. It triggered intense debate on the reasons for joining, fostering or rearranging the European integration project, polity visions of the European Union, and the desirable national EU strategy. In short, discussions on the EU Constitution served as a late substitute for the debate about the accession decision which had not taken place in the preceding years (Kucharczyk, 1999). Moreover, decisively fuelled by the radical right-wing parties’  At the IGC in Laeken, he pointed to the need to include Poland into consultations on foreign and security policies (in particular regarding Ukraine and Belarus) prior to accession; at the kick-off meeting of the advisory forum on Polish EU strategy in February 2002, he stressed a centrifugal conception of federal order referring to cultural diversity: “The prospects of Europe are not grounded in federalism, but in the respect for the particularity of every single member state, for the cultural mosaic, the unity in diversity, which is the unique cultural heritage and achievement of the Europeans” (cited in Parzymies, 2003, p. 97f ). 21

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warning of foreign rule and moral decay, the idea became popular that EU membership was no longer a safeguard of national independence, but that the latter was to be protected by means of an influential position within the EU, so as to enable the Polish government to talk on equal terms with the large member states (Normann, 2008, p. 81). While equal representation in EU intergovernmental politics was a common demand of all political groups, controversy arose over: the desirability and the model of sharing sovereignty with the EU; the preservation of national peculiarities that could be either ‘morality’ as prescribed in national conservative traditions of Solidarity, conservative family law and the concordat with the Catholic Church (PiS and LPR), or supposed closeness to the Anglo-Saxon (economic) model and special relationships with the US (PO; PiS, UW), or backwardness in political culture to be overcome by means of Europeanisation (UW, SLD); and whether isolationism or concessive cooperation was the order of the day.22 In the run-up to the IGC in October and December 2003, the last of the aforementioned issues became the subject of bitter debate between national conservative intellectuals and politicians on the one hand, and liberal intellectuals and politicians on the other. The former advocated tough bargaining and categorical defence of the Polish interest understood in narrow terms of power politics, and the latter called for commitment to European integration and institutional politics. While Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of PiS, labelled the latter group partia białej flagi (the party flying the white flag) that supposedly misconceived the power ­politics in EU policymaking and acted to the detriment of Polish preferences, the liberals castigated national conservatives for a populist frazeologia nacjonalnego interesu (national interest rhetoric). They held that proactive cooperation was what actually ensured Polish co-determination in EU decision-making. However, the rhetoric of national interest dominated and became the ‘Polish’ opinion to be defended by the government against the pretensions of Germany and France during the IGCs.  The issue of market regulation played a minor role in the political polarisation related to the Draft Constitution/Constitutional Treaty, although it was a hot topic in the internal debates of SLD and liberal conservatives criticised the inclusion of social-democrat policy objectives in the Draft Constitution. 22

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Partners at EU level could not be persuaded of the urgency of the Polish priorities and did not let themselves be convinced by moral arguments (e.g. justifying the Polish position as a prerequisite for a just consideration of smaller and poorer states). They preferred to declare the failure of the first IGC on December 13, 2003. This experience induced another shift in Polish domestic political dynamics. In the debate following the failed summit, which critically reviewed the implications of this failure for Poland’s standing in the European Union and the opposition’s contribution to that ‘shame’, the bloc of the right-wing opposition dispersed, with the PO party becoming increasingly ambivalent about rejection or approval (Crum, 2007, p.  72). Voices from that party claimed that proactive coalition-building at EU level was more important than defence of formal votes. Along with the collapse of the partnership with Spain after the change in government in Madrid, this shift seems to have enabled Polish agreement on a modified double majority principle at a bilateral Polish-German summit in April 2004 and at the final IGC in June 2004. Nonetheless, in the course of the debate, popular support for the EU constitution had decreased dramatically. Had the Polish government not decided to drop ratification after rejection in the French and the Dutch referenda, the Polish vote would probably have yielded similar results.23

F rance: Enlargement as a Threat to Deepened Integration In France, the politicisation of the EU constitutional issue followed a similar pattern, regardless of different position this founding EU member had in multilateral negotiation. Until the parliamentary elections in June 2002, won by the centre-right alliance Union pour la Majorité Présidentielle (UMP),24 France was governed in cohabitation, with Jacques Chirac, head of UMP, acting as president and Lionel Jospin, leader of Parti Socialiste (PS; Socialist Party), as prime minister. Until the elections, the two heads  In forecasts of the ratification process, Poland, not France, was considered a ‘critical case’ (Kurpas, Incerti, & Schönlau, 2005). 24  Since 2002: Union pour un Movement Populaire (UMP; Union for a Popular Movement). 23

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of government proved particularly reluctant to take clear-cut positions on the Laeken agenda. In fact, temporary delegation to the ‘talking shop’ of the Convention seemed a welcome option helping keep out from election campaigns the thorny issues of and divisions on the national EU policy (Lequesne, 2003). However, contrary to what was the case in the Polish situation, a large number of delegates to the Convention were French and were important figures both in French domestic politics and in European politics. Along with the former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (member of Union pour la démocratie française, UDF; Union for French democracy), Michel Barnier (UMP), then EU Commissioner for Regional Policy, held a prominent position: he represented the Commission as a body. Acting on behalf of the European Parliament was Alain Lamassoure (UMP, and president of the French European Movement) and Olivier Duhamel (PS), substituted by the sovereigntist William Abitbol (formerly member of the right-wing party Rassemblement pour la République, RPR) and Pervenche Beres (PS). Pierre Moscovici (PS), later replaced by the foreign minister Dominique de Villepin (UMP), represented the French government; while Alain Barrau (PS) acted for the French parliament Assemblée Nationale (the lower house) and Hubert Haenel (RPR) for the Sénat (the upper house); the last two were deputised by Robert Badinter (PS) and Anne-Marie Idrac (UDF). The numerous statements of these delegates at the Assemblée Nationale and the Sénat, the congresses of the respective parties, and in the media bypassed this two-level game and facilitated a rather ­differentiated discussion on the EU constitution in the informed public prior to its popularisation in the referendum campaign. The first round of the presidential elections on April 21, 2002, added an additional concern to French EU policy. For the first time and to the shock of most of the French, the chairman of the nationalist and radically Eurosceptic Front National (FN; National Front), Jean-Marie Le Pen, won second place for the first time, behind Jacques Chirac, but ahead of his socialist challenger, Lionel Jospin. In autumn 2002, in reaction to this incident and related to criticisms that the nationalist parties had benefited from the UMP’s EU policy vacuum, Chirac’s government adopted a proactive strategy at the Convention, which was backed by the comfortable parliamentary majority of pro-­

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European conservative UPM and UDF.  In close cooperation with the governing German coalition of Social-Democrats and Greens, which likewise had the following wind of recent electoral victory, it took on the role of intergovernmental agenda-setter at the Convention. The first statements given by the French government reaffirmed the proverbial French emphasis on intergovernmental conceptions of European political integration. At various occasions, Chirac stressed the conception of a confederation (fédération des États-nations); the ABC proposal called for the pooling of EU executive power in the hands of a permanent EU president elected by the European Council; and the discussions on EU economic policy were used to push the institutionalisation of the Eurogroup as an intergovernmental counterweight to Ecofin for a more interventionist intergovernmental gouvernance économique at EU level.25 Nonetheless, once French government representatives had joined Germany, common positions gained a partially ‘supranational’ character, for example the suggestion of abandoning unanimity and pooling the Commission’s and the Council’s competences in foreign policy and defence issues; the preservation of the double head in the EU executive (the president of the Commission and of the Council being strengthened through electoral procedures); abolition of the pillar structure (separating supranational and intergovernmental policy realms); and the empowerment of the European Parliament (Ratka, 2009, p. 30f ). Commentators, when applying assumptions of ‘realism’ in International Relations, see this as proof of efforts to restore French leadership within the EU, by meeting the German positions half-way. France’s central role in EU intergovernmental politics had been diminishing by both step-bystep supranationalisation and successive enlargements. These developments had reduced France’s relative voting power and increased the number of stakeholders in the usually French-dominated field of EU foreign and security policies. Moreover, relationships with Germany, the  Since the introduction of the Single European Act, the French government had endorsed the restriction of supranationalisation to economic-monetary integration, whereas political integration, that is, the strengthening of the EU’s capacity for action in international politics, economic and social governance, and Justice and Home Affairs, was to be realised through intergovernmental cooperation which reserved decision-making autonomy to the French state (Ratka, 2009, p. 935, 27). 25

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habitual partner for proactive European policymaking, had been strained by disagreement over an increasing number of policy issues throughout the 1990s, in particular over agricultural policy, which had called into question the Franco-German ‘motor’ (Grossman, 2007, pp. 984–986). As a lesson drawn from the IGC in Nice in 2000, where the Franco-­ German polarisation over the issue of the parity of voting power in the European Council had deadlocked negotiations, French officials early on chose to cooperate closely with the German government in the Constitution process. The duo of Fischer and de Villepin, several bilateral summits, and the 40th anniversary of the Elysée Treaty on January 21, 2003, symbolically underlined this commitment. While this strategy ensured more leverage vis-à-vis other partners, it required substantive concessions on issues which had previously been essential to the French leadership concept, such as the French-German parity in voting power in the European Council. In addition, it set France (and Germany) on collision course with both the smaller members and the accession countries. The above strategy seems to be also based on a shift in emphasis from intergovernmental rigour to conceptions of ‘shared sovereignty’, justified by the necessity of a globally active Europe puissance.26 This shift showed in the speeches of the governing UMP and in oppositional parties’ stances on the Draft Constitution, in which the preservation of national ­sovereignty was less pronounced compared to in previous statements (Ratka, 2009, p. 87; Wagner, 2008, p. 270). This ‘federalisation’ rested upon a compromise between fédéralistes and souverainistes arranged within the UMP during the years 2000 and 2001 (Bayrak, 2002, p. 54) and built a bridge for the majority of the French Socialists and the more federalist-­minded French Conventioneers. Moreover, it was consistent with the consensus achieved between centre-right and centre-left (the partis de gouvernement) in the past 20 years. Accordingly, European integration was to be critically supported (also in its liberal approach to economic policy and in its moves towards supranationalisation) because it helped to maintain achievements of the French nation-state in a

 The French conception of Europe puissance relates to the objective of endowing the European Union with an international (economic and military) mission and power. 26

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globalising world (Höhne, 2003, p. 27; Marcussen, Risse, EngelmannMartin, Knopf, & Roscher, 2001, pp. 104–108). However, and this is what observers usually castigate as a misconception of reality (Grossman, 2007, p.  984; Lieb, 2008, p.  72; Schmidt, 2007), the above umbrella projection disregarded more recent developments that questioned this very consensus and that had led to a proliferation of EU criticism on the left and the right of the French political spectrum. The first strand of criticism related to the disappointing economic performance and high unemployment in France in spite of involvement in the European economic and monetary union. Along with Germany, France violated the Maastricht budget deficit criterion for another time in autumn 2003, which would have brought painful budgetary adjustments had not the Ecofin decided to suspend the recommendation of the Commission in November 2003.27 More importantly, achievements of French social policy, in particular the French model of public service provision (services publiques), had come under pressure with the implementation of deregulation associated with EU negative economic integration. The plea for a more ‘social Europe’ (in terms of harmonisation of taxation and social standards at EU level) had become a common denominator of leftist factions of PS and Les Verts (the Greens), the Parti Communiste Français (PCF; French Communist Party), the Ligue Revolutionaire Communiste (LRC; Revolutionary Communist League) and anti-globalist movements that assembled at the European Social Forum in Paris in November 2003. The second strand of debate related to fears of religious fundamentalism, which entered French public debate after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 (9/11) had shed an alarming light on Islamist tendencies in the French Muslim community, and which were unashamedly exploited by (radical) right-wing politicians in xenophobic campaigning against immigration.

 The explicit acceptance of that violation by the French minister of finance in August 2003, the downplaying comments of the Commission president, Romano Prodi (he called the deficit criterion ‘stupid’), and the suspension of the deficit procedure for Germany and France by Ecofin de facto overruled the Growth and Stability Pact and annoyed the smaller members of the European Monetary Union (EMU). 27

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Both issues were directly linked to European integration, more precisely: to EU enlargement. The accession of Central Eastern European Countries was expected to additionally weaken the competitiveness and social standards of the French national economy by way of price and wage dumping (Franck, 2005, pp.  1073–1075; Rupnik, 2004). The Islamist threat seemed to increase with the prospects of Turkey being admitted soon as accession candidate (approved by the European Council on December 12, 2002), in spite of the fact that, since October 2002, it was governed by the Islamist AKP party that had agitated against Turkish secularism. The issue became heatedly debated in public after Giscard d’Estaing, during an interview on the work of the Convention in Le Monde on November 9, 2002, dramatically called for a rejection of Turkey’s EU entry. As justification for his position he referred to the different cultural traditions that supposedly qualified Turkey as ‘non-­ European’ (Tekin, 2008, p. 728f ). This plea ran counter to the official policy of Chirac’s government, and it went right to the core of unresolved concerns with enlargement in French political society. Compared to the deepening of political integration, enlargement used to be regarded as secondary by French public opinion and was only reluctantly supported by French governments at EU level (Grunberg & Lequesne, 2004). In conjunction with undesired enlargement, the loss of control and popular self-determination in European politics became a hot issue and spurred recurring demands to subject both enlargement and the EU constitution to a national referendum. These problems only partially fed back into the discussions at the Convention and the IGCs. For instance, French Conventioneers pushed for the anchorage of public services as a policy objective of the European Union and demanded a strictly secular constitution. But, more importantly and similar to the situation in Poland, these issues exposed blind spots of official French EU policy and retroactively spurred contention on the ‘new Europe’ of post-enlargement. The EU constitutional project became the “focal point of French narratives about Europe and of [divergent] expectations linked to the European project” (Lieb, 2008, p. 55, author’s translation). Even before Chirac decided to subject the Constitutional Treaty to a national referendum on July 14, 2004, and before the Bolkestein directive unleashed protests in January 2005, parties

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and social groups had started discussing the pros and cons of the Draft Constitution and the Constitutional Treaty. The official rhetoric in these discussions resembled the rhetoric of the campaign on the Maastricht Treaty: advocates of the EU Constitution warned of a disaster in the case of rejection, labelling the adversaries ‘demagogues’ and ‘populists’, while opponents conjured up a ‘liberal plot’ and accused advocates of national treason (Dacheux, 2006, p. 87). But across the habitual lines, which separated centrists and radical or populist Eurosceptics, new coalitions formed: parts of UMP and PS denounced the consensus of the 1990s, while radical left and radical right pushed for a restoration of national decision-making autonomy. This polarisation resulted from arguments about the extent of desirable market regulation to be realised qua European integration, on the one hand, and the adequate protection of national decision-making autonomy, self-determination, and French cultural achievements, on the other. The first controversy divided the partis de gouvernement UMP and PS, who officially welcomed the Constitution project: the liberal minority in the UMP disapproved of concessions to ‘social Europe’ made in the EU Constitution, and leftist minority factions of the PS blamed the document for perpetuating ill-­ balanced EU economic policy, not progressing far enough towards ‘social Europe’ (Taggart, 2006; Wagner, 2008).28 Concerns about further ­competence delegation to the EU and concessions towards German proposals made souverainistes in the UMP sympathetic towards the claims promoted by Eurosceptic right-wing groupings like FN, Mouvement National Républicain (MNR; National Republican Movement) and de Villiers’ Mouvement pour la France (MPF; Movement for France).29  At the congress of the PS in May 2003, only the party leader and representative of the majority faction, François Hollande, clearly argued in favour of the current model of European integration and stressed the prospects for EU social policy linked to federalisation. The other motions projected the envisaged reform as perpetuating the European Union as ‘Trojan horse of capitalism’ or as mere free trade area without a social project. The ongoing controversy split the party in three camps: the supportive majority faction that employed non-economic arguments like the Charter of Fundamental Rights or foreign policy; the opposing Eurosceptic minority factions; and six dissidents from the majority faction, among them Laurent Fabius, who launched the alternative programme Ambition socialiste pour l’Europe and did not subscribe to the positive vote of the internal PS referendum in December 2004 (Wagner, 2008, p. 261f ). 29  For instance, Philippe de Villiers accused the government of having given the keys to European integration into the hands of German federalism (Bayrak, 2002, p. 56). 28

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Concerns about popular self-determination and insufficient provisions for the EU’s democratisation in terms of a federal parliamentary democracy were shared by leftist factions of PS, the Greens and the Eurosceptic radical left. These ambivalences among  pro-European parties seem to have contributed to the large-scale mobilisation of voters during the national referendum in May 2005 (Crum, 2007; Jérôme & Vaillant, 2005). To sum up, the politicisation in Poland and France of the EU constitutional project was highly dependent on constellations and ideological cleavages specific to the domestic politics of the two countries. French parties were polarised on the left versus right and the federalist versus sovereigntist continuum, while  Polish  party politics was dominated by fights between post-communists and successors of Solidarity, on the one hand, and between the different factions within the latter camp, on the other. Disputes arose mainly  over democratic-internationalist or isolationist-­realist conceptions of collaboration within the EU and open versus closed conceptions of society. Nonetheless, there are many parallels. In both countries, the vacuum in EU policy left by the governments was filled by (radical) oppositional groups. They pushed conceptions of European integration that had been driven from the scene by the liberal consensus, which governments in both countries had endorsed throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Consequently, established national EU policies were put into question not only due to institutional reform and changing constellations at the  EU level, but also because of contestation in the domestic arena.

5.4 R  evisiting the Constitution Process Through the Lens of the Discourse Field: Summary The drafting period of the Constitution process, in which most of the EU’s current arrangements were hammered out, certainly did not revolutionise the EU’s legal set-up, nor did it turn the EU into an accepted and justified polity. Nevertheless, the changes it brought about were all but trivial in terms of polity-building and discursive (de-)legitimation. This concluding section will show why. It will first summarise the agenda and

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negotiation outcome that each phase of the drafting period brought about and how they channelled and narrowed the imagining of future European integration. In a second step, the developments will be reviewed through the lens of the ‘discourse field of multilateral negotiation’ developed earlier (see Sect. 4.5). I will assess what aspects of the agenda of the EU constitutional debate can be plausibly related to agents’ detailing of position and disposition in the discourse field of multilateral negotiation. The Constitution process—starting with the inauguration of the Convention in 2002, ending with the failure of the ratification of the Constitutional Treaty in 2005—marks a particular episode in the history of EU treaty revision. As with many previous treaty amendments, it was launched in anticipation of an upcoming enlargement and based on a number of controversial ‘leftovers’ from the previous treaty revision process. The peculiarity of the Constitution process was its explicit framing and staging as a constitutional project that was meant to settle the EU’s finalité. That project was instituted by an extended treaty revision procedure, agreed at the European Council summit in Laeken. It complemented the usual intergovernmental negotiations by prior public consultations among all political bodies of the EU in a convention. The Laeken Declaration also framed the leftovers of the Nice Treaty, such as the legal status of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, the delineation of EU and national competences or the strengthening of national parliaments, in terms of a constitutional agenda: it mandated the Convention to recalibrate the division of powers for the sake of more efficient, transparent and democratically accountable decision-making, to simplify and merge the EU’s constitutive legal structures, including the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, into a foundational document. This unusual move may have been tactical, to unblock intergovernmental negotiation deadlock (Genschel & Jachtenfuchs, 2013) and to launch an (arguably self-defeating) communication strategy that was meant to enhance the EU’s public appeal amidst criticism of the EU’s democratic deficit and disconnection problem (Krzyżanowski & Oberhuber, 2007, p.  111f ). It was certainly facilitated by a proactive Belgian Council presidency and the contemporary intertextual context, in which the EU appeared as a regional player and model successfully ‘diffusing’ its legal norms and liberal values (see Sect. 5.1). However, the

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previous sections have shown that the constitutional framing revealed its own, contradictory, dynamics and contributed to the mainstreaming of a particular conception of EU institutional reform, thus reaching beyond initial motivations and conditioning contexts. Already, in the first ‘listening phase’ of constitution-drafting, the Convention established itself as a serious player. Despite increased multilaterality and heterogeneity, it mobilised consensus on a couple of reforms that were far-reaching in terms of both the integration of further policy realms and further supranationalisation of EU decision-making. And despite being confined to adjusting the EU’s existing political architecture by the mandate of the Laeken Declaration, the Convention attained the aura of a constitutional assembly that was going to deliver a foundational document. The Draft Constitution, which was presented to the EU heads of government and state in June 2003, highlighted the EU as a constitutional and (restrictedly) sovereign political order: it provided the EU with a quasi-constitutional document which turned the fragmented legal bodies of the EU (the supranational European Community, intergovernmental agreements and declarations of cooperation) into one. The diffuse character of EU legal acts, their alternating between intergovernmental agreements and supranational law, was aligned with the legal systematic of laws and provisions. Moreover, the decision to assign legally binding status to the Charter endowed the EU with its own source of extra-positive law, thereby echoing the constitutional principles of most EU member states. The (later slimmed down) preamble enshrined not only the EU’s constitutive liberal values, but also social policy objectives, while references to religion and Christianity were made in terms of cultural heritage only, putting aside the model of several national constitutions’ references to religious-spiritual guidance. The Draft Constitution also lent sovereign international action capacity to the EU by assigning a legal personality to the EU as a whole (instead of only to the European Community and common trade policy) and by pooling competences and capacities in conceded foreign policy realms. Supranationalisation of decision-making was decisively enhanced by establishing ‘co-decision’, that is the joint decision making by the  Council and  the European Parliament, and QMV in the Council (instead of unanimity) as default decision-making mechanisms. At the same time, the Convention reaf-

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firmed and constitutionalised the hybrid character of the EU’s political system: its alternating between intergovernmental and supranational modes of consensus building and between direct EU-wide and indirect national representation; the mixing of functional powers (legislative, executive); and the mixing of centripetal and centrifugal conceptions of the federal order. This was done by adding checks such as the enhanced co-decision  powers of the European  Parliament and early warnings by national parliaments; by introducing the ‘citizens’ petition’ as a soft, non-­ binding, form of direct participation; and by copying the EU’s double-­ headed structure onto the field of external representation. The discourse analysis of the core constitutionalising document, the Laeken Declaration and Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory speech, showed that these institutional adjustments were embedded in a rich intertextual context. They were also bolstered by specific polity constructions, which projected the EU as a civilising power, whose external action was instructed by constitutional values, and as a responsive democratic system that took up citizens’ demands for more democratic participation (see Sect. 5.1). The final so-called proposal phase of the Convention and ensuing IGCs were dominated by intergovernmental positioning and likewise left their marks on the institutional architecture of the European Union. Member state representatives affirmed the merging of legal structures, the integration of foreign and security policies and internal affairs, as well as the codification of co-decisions and QMV as default decision-making mechanisms. At the same time, they reinforced intergovernmental checks. They made sure that the Council’s legislative prerogative was sustained, as well as the member states’ leverage on the nomination of EU posts, including that of the  Commissioners the Higher Representative for Foreign Policy and the presidents of the Commission and the Council. By introducing a double majority (a majority of member states coupled with a majority of the EU population) to the QMV of the Council, member state representatives formalised the preponderance of densely populated countries and rendered the formation of blocking minorities more difficult. They thus shifted the balance of intergovernmental power in a way which foregrounded countries that had a larger population. They also reinforced the possibilities of integration à la carte, allowing member states, who had the capacity, to shape further integration in some policy realms without the consent of the remaining parties, thus pushing the EU further towards differentiated integration.

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In the two domestic arenas at stake in this study, Poland and France, the issue was to renegotiate existing national EU policies in the face of changing EU institutions in a way which took account of divisions in national political competition. In Poland, controversy arose over how to share sovereignty within the EU: whether isolationism or concessive cooperation was the order of the day and what national peculiarities ought to be protected from  EU rule. The Polish debate was linked to fights between rising national conservatives, on the one hand, and the post-communist government and liberal successors of Solidarność, on the other. In France, a  dispute arose about the extent of desirable market regulation and social protection to be realised qua European integration, which marked internal struggles within left-wing parties, and the adequate means of ensuring national decision-making autonomy, which polarised the opponents and advocates of a ‘federalisation’ or ‘Germanification’ of French EU strategies within right-wing parties. These aspects of domestic competition influenced intergovernmental negotiations in the run-up to IGCs in 2003 and 2004, insofar as they enhanced polarisation over a very few issues that concerned the recognition of the respective national polity or national EU policy in the EU’s new institutional design. They also led to agreements on transition periods, for example in the coming into force of the double majority principle in the QMV of the Council, and to a couple of opt-outs of some member states from parts of the agreed-upon Constitutional Treaty, for example from the rights of the Charter concerning family policy in Poland. Thereby, they enhanced the EU’s legal fragmentation and enabled changes to national constitutional guarantees, too, for example concerning reproductive rights in Poland. The puzzle of why the Convention successfully pushed the EU’s constitutionalisation and set the frames for ensuing negotiation and contestation resolves more fully when we apply the lens of the discourse field of multilateral negotiation developed earlier (see Chap. 4 and Sect. 4.5). The lens suggests that the constitutional framing became performative because it formed part of and mapped onto existing generic practice of the discourse field of multilateral negotiation. EU constitution speak became an additional source of distinction employed in the relational positioning among involved agents. In order to make this argument clear,

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I will briefly recall what I established as the characteristics of the discourse field of multilateral negotiation (see Sect. 4.5 for more details). The discourse field of EU multilateral negotiation is a space for structured symbolic interaction, in which participants seek to influence negotiations that concern the EU’s polity-building, that is, EU legislation and treaty-making that sets the coordinates for EU policymaking and regulates relations between constituent bodies and collectives. They do so in a setting that involves multiple stakeholders and veto players. They all raise claims for political authority and (cultural) recognition within the EU, address scaled audiences (EU, national, subnational and partisan constituencies and publics); and participate in at least one of three tiers of political competition and decision-making: the supranational, where the  primary focus is on Eurocratic statecraft, the intergovernmental, where the focus is on interstate diplomacy, and the domestic, where the emphasis is on partisan struggle. Different as the stakes might be in these three arenas of EU policymaking, the involved agents operate according to a European modus operandi: they inculcate possible implications of policymaking in other arenas and seek to broker or hinder collective action and compromise across these arenas. Moreover, the three arenas share a social topology that emerges from the participants’ relational positioning, that is, from their effort to gain, in relation to other participants, prestige and office which grant them influence on negotiation outcomes. Such relational positioning draws, first, on competing sources of political authority that historically emerged in the EU power field, including electoral delegation and popular-parliamentarian rule situated in majoritarian institutions (direct-EU: European Parliament; indirect-national: Council; direct-national: national parliaments), regulatory delegation and technocratic government (Commission, European Central Bank, EU agencies), or corporative and advocacy delegation (consultation bodies). Secondly, relational positioning draws on binary oppositions that either associate with clusters of ‘national interest’ among member states (big vs small, nett payer vs nett receiver etc.) or with policy conflicts that have been settled in the “postwar compact” on European integration (Rosamond, 2017) and structure partisan struggle over European integration in binary oppositions between supranational rule versus democratic authorisation, market-making versus social protection, open versus closed society and so on.

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The point the concept of discourse field makes is that outcomes of EU multilateral negotiation do not directly flow from these positions, but from the way agents detail them with dispositions, that is, with their (varying) proficiencies in professional knowledge, habitus and conventionalised discourse practice that are specific to and constitutive of EU multilateral negotiation. Agents’ capacity to influence EU polity-­building is derived from the acknowledgement they receive from competitors, peers and audience constituencies for mastering this field-specific expertise, while drawing, at the same time, on their primary source of political authority, such as office or mandate. As I have described in more detail in Sect. 4.5, the constitutive part of the symbolic-discursive practice of EU multilateral negotiation is the classification of options and opportunities for mobilising and preventing collective action across scales of territorial government, arenas of decision-making and audiences of EU politics. It is processed in a repertoire of strategic-tactical intervention, which inculcates implications that interventions might have in another arena of EU policymaking. Such processing of options of multilevel and multilateral political agency is, at the same time, informed by what EU scholars found is the doxa of the EU political field. The doxa regulates acceptable voice as well as the admitted defiant (or: heterodox) voices during multilateral negotiation. It includes a teleological reading of EU treaty-making, according to which EU polity-building is programmed towards a closer union among member states and societies, and the assumption that multilateral consensus is an objective worth achieving in itself, a means to the end of the common European good. In the period of investigation, heterodoxy was limited to envisaging the teleology in different ways, alongside the binary ideological oppositions of the EU political field and the post-war compact, without yet questioning it as such. The knowledge of multilevel and multilateral political action is also enacted in a sophisticated ‘switching practice’, that is, discourse practice that allows addressing the EU’s different arenas and audiences. It is constituted by certain patterns of language use they include appeals to both the culture and myths of national pasts and the future-oriented political culture of the European Union, with its rich metaphoric language of progress and change; or interpellations of the politically represented in their quality as the  electorate of a territorial unit or as political beings emotionally invested in both nations and the European project.

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The first revelation produced by the lens of the discourse field is that the constitutional imaginary neatly mapped onto that switching practice. It allowed drawing in the memory of national constitutional struggles, the EU’s proto-constitutional declarations, assumptions about ‘good (constitutional) governance’, international human rights liberalism and the new constitutionalisms of international economic regimes, thus facilitating switching between different scales of constitutional government. Moreover, reference to grand moments of modern constitutionalism underlined the historical task and achievement of European integration, the pathos of its political mission and the projection of the EU as a regionally attractive and influential civilising power. The constitutional framing also aligned with the doxa of European integration. The teleological reading of EU treaty-making translated into the story of incremental constitutionalisation of EU political rule, while the to-be-agreed treaty appeared as a social contract that was struck between old and new members of the European Union, between founding and succeeding generations, and actualised the EU’s political mission after the end of the Cold War. The Laeken Declaration confined such constitutional reimagination to existing political institutions and set as given the existing economic-­regulatory polity of the European Union. At the same time, it forced negotiators to view institutional reform as concerning power relations within the EU and as a matter to be aligned with public consent, participation and identification (‘closeness  to the citizens’). It thus highlighted popular-political sources of EU political authority and ­ invited negotiators to think beyond the accustomed design. The second revelation produced by the lens of the discourse field is that, once integrated into the generic discourse practice of multilateral negotiation, EU  constitution speak became instrumental in internal coordination and public-political communication. In the Convention, legal-constitutional terminologies, such as the imperative of simplification and the formalist-deductive tradition of constitutional thought, instructed proposals and forged consensus. Endowing the EU with international legal personality, integrating further policy realms and supranationalising decision-making appeared plausible and acceptable, because these measures simplified and systematised the EU’s legal order and decision-­making system. Together with the integration of the European

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Charter of Fundamental Rights, these reforms also promised to improve relations between EU institutions and citizens and ‘bring citizens closer to the EU’, following the assumption borrowed from the formalist-­ deductive tradition that greater comprehensibility of foundational documents will foster identification and involvement. Hence, where a connection could be made to the enhancement of legal concision and coherence, this increased the acceptability of a proposal and the likelihood of it being included in the documents drafted by the Secretariat. Correspondingly, he binary ideological oppositions of EU politics, too, translated into competing claims for recognition in constitutional design and were formulated in legal-constitutional terms, whether they related to market-driven policies versus protection from market, supranationalisation versus democratic authorisation, open versus closed society. While the ensuing IGCs and domestic controversies added discourses of ‘real-­ political’ power struggles and ideological division, they also clung to EU constitution speak. They mobilised adversarial idées-forces of European integration, drawing on conflicting models of national constitutionalism, as the Polish-French dispute about laicism and the model character of the respective national tradition showed. Hence, participants of multilateral negotiation aligned with the constitutional framing to enhance their negotiating positions. Thereby, they contributed to the narrowing of debate on institutional reform to issues of legal-constitutional adjustment. At the same time, they charged EU institutional reform with the symbolic of a constitutional moment and modern constitutional struggles, which appealed to participants of constitution-drafting as being involved in a great task of historical importance. The strong mainstreaming effect of constitutional framing resulted not only from its performativity, though. The third revelation produced by the lens of the discourse field is that EU constitution speak, mapped onto generic discourse practice, became a resource in field-internal relational positioning that empowered some agents rather than others. Both the streamlining of EU institutional reform into a coherent constitutional document and polarisation over power-sharing and national constitutional models can be plausibly attributed to the dynamics within the discourse field of multilateral negotiation and the way constitution speak was employed as resource of distinction. During the period of investigation,

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we can observe how agents position themselves  alongside the binary oppositions and competing sources of political authority, which EU scholars have found structure the EU political field. Early on, member state representatives formed ‘national interest clusters’, with the ‘big’ members habitually favouring intergovernmental solutions, the ‘small’ members advocating community institutions and supranational decision-­ making, and the net payers seeking to limit the EU’s redistributive policies and budget, as opposed to net receivers who pleaded for budget extensions. As Convention consultations formed cross-body coalitions similar to consultations in the European Parliament, member state representatives started spinning national news media with competing proposals, distinguishing themselves along these habitual lines. Polarisation over power-sharing and national constitutional models allowed them to present themselves as proficient players in intergovernmental politics, true promoters of the common constitutional project, and credible advocates of some national interests at the same time. MEPs, in contrast, highlighted their proposals as flowing from a greater commitment to common European interests and from more genuine democratic authorisation than those of member state representatives, as they usually do while drafting EU legislation. During the Constitution process, their claim to (superior) political authority was additionally derived from the Convention method that was deemed to be more inclusive and more democratic than the usual, intergovernmental, method of treaty revision (e.g. in Lipietz’ and Cohn-Bendits self-representation in Sect. 7.3). The Commission also  sought to position itself in its habitual role and prepared for agenda-­setting with an authoritative draft, in the habit of its monopoly on legislative initiative and coordinative leadership that derives from member states’ regulatory delegation. As Bevir and Philipps show, the competing legitimations of the EU bodies left their traces and can also be found in the successor Lisbon Treaty, revealing the bodies’ conflicting interpretations of democracy and their contradictory implementation in institutional reform (Bevir & Philipps, 2017). The oppositional parties or factions in the Polish and French domestic arenas, in turn, capitalised on the fact that the governing parties initially refrained from campaigning on the EU constitution, whether due to cohabitation in France or the pending accession referendum in Poland. Vis-à-vis national and

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partisan audiences, they brought themselves into play as alternative political choices regarding European integration and national EU policies. Hence, lines of confrontation and distinction largely followed practices of classifying opportunities for collective political action that have become established in EU political competition. But the procedure introduced with the Constitution process, especially the Convention phase, altered the coordinates of that competition. It introduced new institutional players, such as the Presidium, the President and the Secretariat of the Convention, and merged the logics of Eurocratic polity-building, interstate diplomacy and partisan struggle that are usually associated primarily with either the EU bureaucratic field, the diplomatic field or the political field. The Constitution process also increased multilaterality and the necessity to publicly justify proposals and combat over idée-forces of European integration. As a result, all involved agents had to engage in switching practices, Eurocratic statecraft and public-political competition (see also Sect. 4.5). EU constitution speak provided patterned language use that endowed these interactions with meaning. In that setting, not only those agents, who drew on legal-­institutional prerogatives, such as the president of the Convention or the heads of government and state,  acquired particular symbolic capital, and, thus, acknowledged capacities to influence negotiations. Several MEPs, whom Norman calls “alpha Conventioneers” (Norman, 2005), were also able to exert influence on policy formulation because of a c­ ombination of experience in brokering compromises across factions and audiences, extensive informal networking, and proficiency in the switching practice and doxa of European integration. Their activities paved the way for a progressive approach adopted by the Convention and for far-­reaching amendments towards supranationalisation and constitutionalisation (Oberhuber, 2006, p. 103f ). The fact that the working groups on subsidiarity, the Charter, the EU’s legal personality and the simplification of EU legislative procedures proved particularly successful in pushing through proposals can be attributed, on the other hand, to the prestige that MEPs and members of the Presidium involved in these working groups derived from their legal training, combined with longstanding expertise in EU coordination. This expertise made them acknowledged contributors to early template drafts,

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such as the Lamassoure report drafted in the European Parliament, and to the consultations with legal advisors of the Commission and national governments that the Secretariat held behind the scenes. Hence, informal hierarchies emerged which ranked Conventioneers according to EU- and legal expertise, informational resources, contact with  members of the Presidium, and pragmatic networking abilities. Together, these social dynamics exerted a strong mainstreaming effect on less equipped Conventioneers, such as the newcomers from the accession countries or national parliamentarians. They started rallying around proclamations and discourses of the ‘centre’ in order to be heard (Krzyżanowski, 2005; Oberhuber, 2006, pp. 107–111). Among intergovernmental players, proposals were pushed through, which might have been rejected in other contexts, once they plausibly drew on constitution speak and justified adjusted power-pondering with reference to increased efficiency and improved democratic representation. For instance, the double majority voting in QMV, which privileged countries with a larger population, was advocated as enhancing efficient decision-making in the Council after enlargement because it incentivised proactive majorities, rather than blocking minorities. German and French politicians also promoted it as a measure fostering democracy because it saved big countries, which hosted the majority of EU citizens, from being overruled. But it was thanks to Giscard d’Estaing’s intervention that this argumentation travelled to the Draft Constitution at the last minute. Given his outstanding institutional role as head of the Convention, his celebrity as an elder statesman, his contacts with high-profile EU politicians and bureaucrats and his eloquent use of constitution speak, he was able to assume an authoritative role and style. Whether during the inaugural session, when he persuaded Conventioneers to stretch their mandate, or when he pre-empted the Commissions’ proposal by unilaterally launching his own, or when he aligned with the big countries’ positions to prevent them from unpacking the Draft Constitution later on, Giscard d’Estaing acted as a game changer and overruled both the accustomed and the Convention-specific structures of relational positioning. Hence, the perspective of the discourse field allows the capture of emergent dynamics

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and processes of classification, which emanate from field-­internal and context-specific symbolic-linguistic interaction and the specific conceptions and routines of professionalism that participants employ in competitive-relational positioning. It reveals how the material-­ institutional sources of power that are stressed in conventional explanations of EU politics are mediated in field-internal logics of symbolic recognition. While EU  constitution speak, as a component of generic discourse practice and a resource of distinction in multilateral negotiation, facilitated collective action and consensus building, it also narrowed the debate on institutional reform in specific ways. It was symbolically violent, not only because it drove important issues and voices from the scene, which did not link up to constitutional imagination. It also helped to entrench classifications of legitimate power relations and power execution that left a problematic legacy not only for the ratification of the Constitutional Treaty, but also for the years of European integration to come. In general terms, EU  constitution speak suggested that EU polity-­ building, which habitually draws on experiences of state  formation, should be conceived in terms of modern constitutional government and focus on measures of constitutional rule, such as a neat delineation of vertical (competences) and horizontal (functional) powers, that tend to be failed by the daily routine of hybrid EU governance with its stress on shared competences between territorial levels, mixed legislative-executive powers and compound modes of decision-making. Relying upon formalist-­ deductive traditions of constitutional law, EU  constitution speak crowded out other traditions of constitutional law that used to form part of EU jurisdiction, thereby misrecognising a substantial part of the EU’s and its members’ constitutional multiplicity. Moreover, by stressing, above all, human rights liberalism as a  fundamental value, it blanked out the constitutive market liberalism of the European Union and the ongoing political struggle over its due reform. In short, the Constitution process introduced evaluative criteria for EU governance that were easily unravelled as at least partially mismatching daily political-­ juridical constitutional practice (see Sect. 8.3 for a discussion). The more specific and obvious instances of symbolic violence were revealed in the discourse analysis of the core constitutionalising documents. They showed, for example, in the Laeken Declaration,  when heads of government and state, in an extensive argument ad populum,

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implied that their paradigmatic choice for a lean state was the preference of EU citizens, which they would serve disinterestedly in institutional reform, or when they co-opted the memory of diverse national freedom fights in the mythopoetical success story of European integration as a continuation of modern constitutional struggles. In Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory speech, we can see how the Convention president presupposes the titular nations of the EU as natural-essential communities from which the Convention draws its authorisation as a multinational assembly, thus blanking out the many EU-related identities not confined to a titular nation or culture. He highlights the newly arriving Central European members with their cultural peculiarity and merits, while at the same ranking them second, using the multinationality theme for both selfauthorisation and the construction of difference. The obvious discrepancy between contractualist-constitutional rhetoric, on the one hand, and the actual focus on institutional reform initiated from within the institutions themselves, on the other, between the stress on inclusion and democracy (whether understood as responsiveness or deliberative practice) and the very set-up and functioning of the consultations, shed a dubious light on the constitutional episode and unmasked the PR character of constitution speak. The perspective of the discourse field and the insights into constitution speak as a resource of field-internal distinction helps to elucidate the (more or less obvious) symbolic violence that classifications of political rule imply and why they are not necessarily entangled by the participants involved. The next chapter will explore how the dynamics of constitution-­ drafting, the controversies and intertexts of  constitution-drafting were appropriated to the two national media debates in Poland and France.

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6 Recontextualising the Constitutional Agenda in Media Debates in Poland and France

Given the absence of pan-European media and the linguistic heterogeneity of the European Union (EU), national mass media are considered crucial for the distribution of EU news to broader audiences in EU member states in their respective languages and for building EU-informed publics (Eder & Kantner, 2000; Schlesinger, 1999). The field perspective, introduced earlier, further suggests that national news media are important for EU-related political communication because they are specialised in the mediation of domestic public-political debate and enlist those who seek public approbation of their vision of European integration in national publics. In the age of news platforms and social media, the agenda-setting potential of traditional mass media might be reduced, but they remain recognised and valued as representatives of institutionalised journalism employing acknowledged professional standards. Being ascribed visibility in national broadsheets, the type of national mass media analysed in this book promises to generate special prestige as broadsheets embody highquality journalism and are valued for particular merits in past struggles over freedom of speech during decisive moments of nation-building. In turn, giving visibility and voice to some claims on European integration rather than others allows national news media to maintain consecration © The Author(s) 2020 A. Kutter, Legitimation in the European Union, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33031-6_6

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power over EU news, while simultaneously distinguishing themselves from competitors in the national journalistic field and aligning with what the assumed preferences of the targeted national audience are. For this reason, that is, because of their specialisation in and competition over facilitating national debate, including European integration, I selected national broadsheets as sites where discursive Europeanisation can be studied. This chapter seeks to establish how political controversies over the EU constitution which were waged in the context of multilateral negotiation were recontextualised in that ‘discourse field of Europeanised national news media’ and what ground for EU polity construction was, thereby, prepared. The subject of analysis is the debate on the EU constitution arranged by two Polish and two French dailies, respectively: Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita, and Le Monde and Le Figaro. They are known for their adherence to high standards of news journalism, prestigious as national reference papers with an impressive history and regarded as aligning with opposite political-intellectual camps in a mostly capital-­ based educated readership (see Sect. 4.4). While covering EU politics is part of such a broadsheet profile, the four newspapers stood out with their explicit commitment to the European idea and for stimulating debate on European integration. During the period of investigation (2002–2004), in which a draft of the Constitutional Treaty was prepared, domestic political and bilateral French-Polish polarisation was particularly strong, so that lively discussion and mutually referential debate on the EU constitution can be expected to have taken place in the selected newspapers. How did they recontextualise the EU constitutional agenda and constitution speak, selecting, weighting, rearranging and complementing it with connotation? Was the issue of the EU constitution “dropped into the mess of [national] interdiscourse” (Link, 2003, p.  14, author’s translation)? What transformation did its meaning undergo in the course of that recontextualisation, and did it involve some sort of ‘nationalisation’? The chapter investigates the argument, theoretically developed earlier (see Sect. 4.1–4.4), about  what becomes recontextualised in national news media and how it corresponds to the specialised and self-referential practice of news journalism, which is here conditioned by both involvement in EU news production and relational positioning in a national

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journalistic field. The specific practices enacted in this ‘discourse field of Europeanised national news media’, it is argued, illuminate why a debate on European integration is waged among a national media public in specific ways. This argument opens up a new horizon of interpretation, complementing existing research on Europeanised mass communication and European media publics. In this research, national news media are conceived of as transmitters of content generated elsewhere. The question usually posed is whether national mass media fill their ‘information function’ by adequately covering EU politics, accounting for its multilevel character (Koopmans & Pfetsch, 2007), and whether they generate conditions for the emergence of a transnational communication community that may speak in different languages but that addresses EU politics alongside shared problem definitions (for an overview, see Eder & Kantner, 2002; Risse, 2015). If the media visibility of agents from the EU’s different territorial levels and political arenas corresponds to the actual extent of integration in policymaking, and if relevance to shared concerns is attributed in synchronous and convergent ways, this is read as evidencing good EU journalism and conducive conditions for transnational communication communities (Koopmans & Pfetsch, 2007). In reverse, the lack of such indicators or ‘domesticisation’ in terms of a predominant focus on domestic politics and (own) national representatives is read as proving the persistence and determining force of national systems of political communication and domestic political competition in Europeanised political communication (Adam, 2007). The perspective of the discourse field of Europeanised national news media alternatively suggests that news media are more than gatekeepers and primers of content generated elsewhere. They form a microcosmos of their own, constituted through the generic language use and regulative discourse of news journalism, which is varyingly employed for relational positioning vis-à-vis competitors and representatives of other fields of specialised social practice. The language use of news media generates salience and consonance with the imagined audience, following the pragmatic exigency to persuasively construct news, a subject of public curiosity, and effectively distribute it to target audiences. But it also corresponds, more or less, to the regulative discourse of institutionalised news journalism, that is, established classifications of newsworthiness

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and habitual assumptions of how to process it, for example by following the norm of ‘objective’ coverage and quasi-scientific gathering of sources. What is made a subject of media debate, I argue, and with what similarities and differences, corresponds to the detailing of the disposition (the specialised discourse practice) and position of an agent in the field, be that a news organisation or an individual journalist, and channels ‘discursive Europeanisation’ to some degree. When subordinated and appropriated to the discourse field of Europeanised national news media, discourse fragments relocated from the context of multilateral negotiation no longer express an external political reality, but turn into the media’s own construction of EU politics. In line with this reading, both the shift of media  attention to the many arenas of EU politics  or, conversely, the ‘domesticisation’ of EU news  do not necessarily  indicate  an essential Europeanisation of genuinely national views  or their persistence. Rather,  these features of EU coverage are established  strategies of constructing EU news, by which national news media seek to maintain consecration power. The lens of the discourse field—and this is important to stress—does not relativise the normative question derived from democracy theory that motivates existing research on Europeanised media publics, that is, the question as to how EU politics ought to be communicated and mediatised to enable constructive-critical engagement with EU policymaking in all EU member states. Rather, the perspective of discourse fields points out blind spots in existing research which stand in the way of answering this question in a subject-adequate and reflexive way. This argument will be investigated in this chapter, drawing on the primary analysis of the EU constitutional debate in the four selected newspapers between the years 2002 and 2004. The primary analysis is special, not only because it is instructed by the perspective of discourse fields and accordingly re-accentuates existing knowledge about Europeanised journalistic practice. Unlike existing research on Europeanised media content, which primarily deals with news coverage or selected aspects of journalistic evaluation, the primary analysis conducted in this book mainly deals with ‘media debate’, that is, with evaluative text genres, such as invited and journalistic commentary and analysis, moderated debates, editorials and lampoons, that accumulate in ‘clusters of debate’, that is, in series of commentaries on a topic arranged by the individual newspapers at a certain point in time. The study thus focuses on those aspects of

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mediatised political communication that come closest to an argumentative exchange, here on the future of European integration and the EU’s institutional reform, and that are more likely to be the site of appropriation and discursive (de-)legitimation. The novelty of the analysis lies further in the triangulation method  chosen and in the joined and comprehensive assessment of metadata, media content and generic discourse practice. These different materials were generated, on the one hand, by a qualitative and quantifying content analysis, which was aided by the annotation (or ‘coding’), query and co-occurrence functions of the software atlas.ti. The content analysis focused on metadata, such as date of publication and text genre, or authors and their provenance (national, partisan, type of EU arena, field of social practice). It also considered specific media content, such as proposals for EU reform (‘constitution topics’) and associated problems of polity-building (‘polity topics’) or repeatedly referred-to events. The content analysis was applied to the set of 4,526 articles published on the EU constitution in the four newspapers and, separately, to a subset of 1,863 argumentative-evaluative articles that covered the EU constitution in some detail. It was triangulated with the linguistically informed apparatus of Critical Discourse Analysis, and the Discourse-Historical Approach more specifically, which focused primarily on discourse strategies of representation and plausibilisation. The discourse analysis was applied to the editorials and adjacent journalistic news stories or commentaries that the four newspapers published on the inauguration of the Convention on 1 March 2002. They were filtered on the basis of information generated with the help of the content analysis and were selected because they established the editorial lines which the four newspapers hitherto applied whenever the EU constitutional issue was taken up (for the funnel method, see Sect. 2.4, and Appendix A for samples and subsamples). The insights generated by these methods are presented in three steps. The first section establishes what thematic aspects of the Constitution process were recontextualised in the four broadsheets. Drawing on a frequency and co-occurrence analysis of reform proposals (or ‘constitution topics’) in evaluative-argumentative text genres, it investigates what topics where rendered the subject of debate and whether similar or different patterns of selection and weighting were apparent in the four newspapers (Sect. 6.1). In the second section, practices of generating news salience are

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scrutinised so as to establish the classifications of news value the convergence and divergence in thematic narrowing in the four newspapers corresponds to (Sect. 6.2). The third section explores, for each newspaper individually, how that narrowing relates to practices of generating consonance with imagined audiences, drawing on the discourse analysis of strategies of plausibilisation in news reports on the inauguration of the Convention (Sect. 6.3). In summary, these insights will be read in light of the concept of the discourse field, venturing an overall interpretation as to why recontextualisation occurred in the way it did.

6.1 R  econtextualising Topics of EU Institutional Reform The EU constitutional issue and related struggles in the Convention and the subsequent intergovernmental conferences did, indeed, become the subject of extended evaluation in the four broadsheets. Various topics coming up at EU level were selected for evaluation and connected with events and topics of some domestic relevance. In this section, I will assess what thematic aspects of EU constitution-drafting were taken up, contrasting patterns of selection and weighting in the four newspapers. The investigation is based on the inductive content and co-occurrence analysis conducted of evaluative genres, that is, text genres that made a particular judgement explicit, such as in-depth analyses, commentaries, interviews, statements or lampoons, and were published on the EU constitution in the newspapers investigated during the drafting period, in the years 2002–2004. They were scrutinised with regard to the frequency and distribution of ‘constitution topics’, that is, suggestions for EU institutional reform. A co-occurrence analysis in atlas.ti further revealed what constitution topics were ‘dense’, frequently associating with  other thematic aspects, such as more abstract problems of polity-building (polity topics), issues in relation to which the EU Constitution is mentioned (embedding topics, e.g. enlargement), and certain events that became ritualised points of references (‘repeatedly referred-to events’, e.g. 9/11 or the intraEuropean Iraq conflict).

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The four newspapers considered similar suggestions for reform to be worthy of debate.1 They shared a set of frequent constitution topics, most of them reflecting issues that became controversial during intergovernmental negotiations on the Draft Constitution.2 Among these topics were the following: • The substitution of unanimity by qualified majority voting (QMV) in the European Council in further policy realms conventionally considered ‘core competences’ of member states such as foreign policy. This reform was expected to enhance the efficiency of decision-making in the Council, but reduce the veto power of individual member states and challenge confederal, sovereigntist conceptions of European integration [QMV]. • The principle of vote weighting during QMV in the Council, which touched upon the power balance between member states. It concerned the question as to whether vote weighting should follow a simple ‘double majority’ principle, considering the majority of votes in the Council in combination with the majority of EU population, or whether the quotas set by the Nice Treaty should be maintained. While the first option strengthened the votes of big member states such as Germany and France and rendered the formation of blocking minorities more difficult, the second strengthened the votes of middle-sized countries such as Spain and Poland and allowed groups of smaller member states to build a blocking minority, too [Vote Weighting].  Exclusively French concerns were, for instance, the question of the Mediterranean partnership and the guarantee of EU funds for French overseas territories. Exclusive Polish concerns related to the EU’s Eastern dimension and a stipulation taken from the Nice Treaty that guaranteed subsidies for Eastern German regions, which was criticised given the more urgent needs of Polish regions. 2  Topics that occurred in at least ten Polish and twenty French articles were considered to be ‘frequent’. The difference was decided on in order to balance the fact that individual French articles as a rule covered various topics, whereas the Polish tended to be mono-thematic (in particular in Gazeta Wyborcza). The list presented concentrates on constitution-related topics and does not include issues of the Constitution process such as the composition of the Convention, upcoming meetings or the negotiation strategy pursued by the national representatives. It also does not include topics related to the promotion of the document, for example the necessary PR to be done, the Youngsters’ Convention and so on. Note that only the suggestion on Vote Weighting was retained without amendments in the eventual Lisbon Treaty, with long transitional arrangements ceding only in 2018. Other suggestions were realised in the form of a watered-down compromise, and the preamble was removed. 1

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• The replacement of the six-month EU presidency, which used to be held by the head of a member state’s government, by an EU president elected for five years. This measure was thought to enhance the EU’s action capacity in the realm of common foreign and security policies and to push its visibility and democratic accountability. The question was whether it should be double-headed by the Commission and the Council, whether it should be the responsibility of the Council alone and elected by the European Parliament (EP) or the European electorates [Presidency]. • The replacement of the High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy by an EU Foreign Secretary to become head of a common diplomatic service, formed from the existing services of the Council and the Commission. This also meant enhancing international action capacity and abolishing parallel structures. At the same time, it pooled more state capacities under the EU heading and urged a rebalancing of the established competence division between Commission and Council in this realm [Foreign Secretary]. • A decrease in the number of Commissioners; here the question was whether the principle of ‘one commissioner per country’ should be adhered to, which assured the same formal leverage to all member states in the Commission, or whether a two-tier system should be adopted which would give the Commission a smaller, more efficient shape, but would also temporarily lessen the leverage of individual member states [Commissioners]. • The concession of more veto power to the EP during the nomination of the Commission president or the EU president and during EU legislation, by extending the co-decision method to further policy realms. This was meant to enhance democratic accountability and control of EU decision-making, but, like QMV, also touched upon prerogatives of member states [EP]. • Institutional reforms in the realm of common foreign, security and defence policies (e.g. solidarity clause, armament agency, EU headquarters) [CFSP/ESDP]. • Institutional reforms in the realm of economy (e.g. taxes, status of the European Central Bank, economic governance, strengthening of the Eurogroup, reform of the Stability and Growth Pact) [Economy].

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• Further institutionalisation of common social policies at the EU level [Social Policy]. • The content of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, in particular the social rights contained thererin, and its legal status (binding or declarative) [Charter]. • Reference to God or Christianity in the preamble, which raised the issue of the cultural heritage to be invoked in the preamble and touched upon existing national conceptions of laicism [Reference to God/ Christianity]. • The institutionalisation of ‘reinforced cooperation’ as a mechanism entitling smaller groups of member states to go ahead with further integration, for example in defence policies, which institutionalised a controversial ‘differentiated’ or ‘two-speed’ mode of European integration [Reinforced Cooperation]. Two further topics were pondered in the four newspapers, which went beyond the agenda set by the Convention and the constitutional IGCs: the mode of ratification—whether to submit the EU Constitutional Treaty to a national or EU-wide referendum or not—[Ratification]; and the future of the EU’s redistributive policies (structural funds and agricultural subsidies), a topic which caused major diplomatic conflict when the financing of the upcoming EU expansion and the EU budget for the next planning period were negotiated [Cohesion]. Less attention was paid to topics such as whether a treaty or a constitution would be the appropriate form, whether the EU should possess an integrated legal personality and how national parliaments could be assigned more power in EU decision-­ making. Some topics that were prominent in the news such as provisions for later treaty revision or exemptions from EU rule (regarding French cultural policy or Polish family law) were not reflected in evaluative articles.3 Hence, all four newspapers made those topics a subject of commentary that had provoked conflict in multilateral negotiations and touched upon  Apart from these differences, however, the selection of topics in news articles was largely the same as in evaluative articles. As a scrutiny of topics in news articles in Gazeta Wyborcza and Le Monde showed, evaluative articles simply narrowed the selection made in the news articles. 3

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CFSP/ESDP* 35

Charter*

30 25

QMV

Cohesion*

20 15 10

Social Policy*

Commissioners

5 0 Reinforced Cooperation

Economy*

Reference to God/ Christianity

European Parliament* Ratification Presidency*

Le Monde

Le Figaro

Foreign Minister

Gazeta Wyborcza

Rzeczpospolita

Fig. 6.1  Constitution topics (in % of N). (Source: Own elaboration) Topics marked by an asterisk were built from several subordinate or related topics (clockwise, starting from Social Policy). Social Policy includes Public Services, Social and Employment Policy, Social Rights, Social Europe General; CFSP/ESDP includes Solidarity Clause, European Armament Agency, EU Headquarters, CFSP General; Charter includes Antidiscrimination, Status of the Church in the Charter, Charter General; Cohesion includes Cohesion Transfers, Eastern Dimension; Economy includes EC Control, ECB Status, EU Budget, Economic Governance, Eurogroup, Taxes, Economy General; European Parliament includes EP Composition, EP General; Presidency includes Commission President, Council President, EU President. N: 474 (Le Monde), 483 (Le Figaro), 395 (Gazeta Wyborcza), 511 (Rzeczpospolita)

the division of powers within the EU and a few substantive issues related to the foundations of political association. At the same time, they put varying emphasis on these topics. Figure  6.1 shows the percentage of evaluative articles dealing with specific constitution topics. It reveals that

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the Polish newspapers, Rzeczpospolita in particular, essentially narrowed down the debate to two topics: vote weighting in the European Council and the reference to God or Christianity in the preamble. These two topics are referred to in 24% to 32% of the evaluative articles in the Polish newspapers (see Fig. 6.1 and Appendix B). The two French newspapers, on the other hand, highlighted the institutional anchorage of the EU’s external policies. This is evident from the high percentage of evaluative articles which address CFSP/ESDP (Le Monde: 17.09; Le Figaro: 27.54), Presidency, Foreign Secretary and Reinforced Cooperation. A large proportion of evaluative articles also raise the questions of running or not running a referendum on the Constitutional Treaty (Le Monde: 16.88; Le Figaro: 15.32), the extension of QMV in the European Council (Le Monde: 11.18; Le Figaro: 17.18) and the further integration of economic and social policy (Le Monde: 11.18, 14.35; Le Figaro: 7.09, 13.35). Gazeta Wyborcza takes a somewhat middle position between Rzeczpospolita and the French newspapers, discussing, for instance, the institutionalisation of CFSP/ESDP, the Presidency and the Foreign Secretary with similar intensity compared to Le Monde. But a marked difference between the two national contexts is seen in the strong emphasis the French commentators place on EU social policy, while simultaneously neglecting the EU’s cohesion policies, whereas Polish commentators seem to be more concerned about cohesion policies (in particular in Gazeta Wyborcza), but show a markedly lower level of interest in EU social policy (in particular in Rzeczpospolita). In addition, Reference to God/Christianity is markedly less relevant in the French newspapers than in the Polish ones. Moreover, while we can see an overlap between topics covered by Gazeta Wyborcza and both French newspapers, we can barely discern any similarities between liberal newspapers, on the one hand, and conservative papers, on the other, that cross the two national contexts. Hence, the overall picture of the weighting of topics, as displayed in Fig. 6.1, suggests that the four newspapers selected constitution topics primarily according to an assumed national horizon: variance between newspapers is overshadowed by stronger variance between national contexts.4  This is, at least, suggested by the descriptive data. A more elaborated statistical analysis would show whether Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita do in fact show patterns of convergence or rather divergence. 4

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The differences between newspapers in one national context suggest, on the other hand, that each newspaper, nevertheless, developed a distinct thematic strand. Thus, Le Monde highlighted CFSP/CSDP followed by Social Policy and Economy, while Le Figaro foregrounded CFSP/ CSDP and QMV, considering Social Policy to a lesser extent and backgrounding Economy. Gazeta Wyborcza focused on Vote Weighting followed by Reference to God/Christianity and gave voice to debates on Cohesion, while Rzeczpospolita overwhelmingly focused on Reference to God/Christianity followed by Vote Weighting.5 These newspaper-specific recontextualisations can be revealed in clearer fashion when considering the contents that were frequently associated with salient constitution topics, drawing on what the co-occurrence analysis in atlas.ti had revealed. The co-occurrence analysis considered the mention of ‘repeatedly referred-to events’, such as 9/11 or Rokita’s ‘Nice or Death’ speech in the Sejm; ‘embedding topics’, such as EU expansion, to which the Constitution process was connected only by a brief mention; and ‘polity topics’, which dealt with more abstract problems of polity-­building. Among them were problems of checks and balances, such as the competence division between the EU’s levels and entities of territorial government (e.g. between member states, Balance MS-MS, and intergovernmental or supranational bodies, Balance MS-EU), between EU bodies (e.g. Balance EU-EU) and the EU and other international actors (Balance EU-NATO, Balance EU-US). Problems of politybuilding were also raised when problematising EU political culture (e.g. Spirit of Community, Unity, EU identity) or fundamental values to be observed in the EU’s political association (e.g. Religion, Sovereignty, Democracy). The co-occurrence analysis revealed, on the one hand, which constitution topics were not only frequent, but also ‘dense’, that is, they were mentioned together with many other themes, thus symbolising a certain significance. On the other hand, it brought to light the recurring contextual meanings of that topic.

 See, however, the stronger stress of Le Figaro (as compared to Le Monde) on QMV and CFSP/ ESDP—two classic issues of conservative confederalists in France. 5

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„Nice or death“ Failed summit

Balance MS-MS Commissioners

Vote Weighting

Spirit of Community

Balance EU-USA

Charter Democracy Reference to God/ Christianity Religion

CFSP/ ESDP

QMV

Economy

Foreign Minister

Balance EU-EU

Presidency

Fig. 6.2  Dense constitution topics in Gazeta Wyborcza. (Source: Own elaboration)

These contextual meanings are visualised in Figs. 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 and 6.5. They show the densest constitution topics in big bubbles, the co-­occurring constitution and polity topics in medium-sized bubbles and embedding topics and repeatedly referred-to events in small bubbles. The bold lines between content categories indicate that the two categories co-occur at least twenty times, while the fine lines represent a co-occurrence of at least ten times. Figures 6.2 and 6.3 reveal that the two constitution topics most frequently occurring in Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita—Vote Weighting and Reference to God or Christianity—are also the densest. They co-occur with almost all the other topics. In both newspapers, Vote Weighting is regularly connected with the failed summit in December 2003 and Jan Rokita’s intervention in the Sejm, the Polish parliament, in September 2003, when he pleaded for a  stubborn defence of the vote weighting laid down in the Nice Treaty, putting out the slogan “Nice or

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Balance EU-MS Failed summit

Democracy

Balance MS-MS

„Nice or death“

Charter

EUidentity

Reference to God/ Christianity

Religion Diversity

Vote Weighting

Spirit of Community

QMV

Foreign Minister

Commissioners

CFSP/ ESDP Balance EUNATO

Fig. 6.3  Dense constitution topics in Rzeczpospolita. (Source: Own elaboration)

death”. Moreover, it is frequently associated with the problem of the balance of power between EU member states and the call for a Spirit of Community, which values  the common European Good, rather than only individual national benefit. Unlike in Rzeczpospolita, discussants in Gazeta Wyborcza also associate Vote Weighting with Democracy, either assertively or by referring to the EU’s democratic deficit (see Fig. 6.2). Evaluative articles in Rzeczpospolita are, for their part, much richer in contextual meanings when the issue of Reference to God or Christianity in the preamble is at stake. They not only discuss this issue as a problem of anchoring religion in the EU, as touching upon contents of the Charter and as linking up to the example of the Polish constitution; unlike commentators in Gazeta Wyborcza, commentators in Rzeczpospolita also associate Reference to God or Christianity with the guarantee of cultural diversity and the separation of competences between the national and the

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EU levels (see Fig. 6.3). In addition, they frequently and explicitly associate Reference to God/Christianity with an EU-specific identity—which is not the case in Gazeta Wyborcza (see Fig.  6.2). A third topical node shared, but differently framed, by the two Polish newspapers is CFSP/ ESDP. In Rzeczpospolita, CFSP/ESDP links almost exclusively to questions of institutional balance between the EU and NATO. In Gazeta Wyborcza, discussants additionally stress the Iraq conflict as a circumstantial context of debate and the institutional anchorage of external policies as implied by the topics of Foreign Minister, QMV, Presidency (with the last linking up to questions of power balance between EU bodies— Balance EU-EU) (see Figs. 6.3 and 6.2 respectively). The French newspapers reveal an  almost opposite thematic emphasis. While they do associate Vote Weighting and the Commissioners with intergovernmental power balance and Reference to God/Christianity with the status of religion within the EU, these topics remain marginal and isolated. The most prominent node is, instead, CFSP/ESDP (see Figs. 6.4 and 6.5).

Democracy

Charter

EP elections Enlarge ment

Ratification

Iraq crisis

Social policy

Vote Weighting

Balance EU-USA Borders

QMV Presidency

EMU stability pact

St Malo

CFSP/ ESDP

Domestic politics Economy

Defence Initiative

Unity

Balance MS-MS

Foreign Minister

Balance EU-EU

EP

Fig. 6.4  Dense constitution topics in Le Monde. (Source: Own elaboration)

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Democracy

Iraq crisis

Reinforced cooperation

EP elections

Defence Initiative Unity

Domestic politcs

Social policy

Ratification

St Malo

EU leadership

CFSP/ ESDP

Economy

QMV Presidency

Exemptions from EU rule Spirit of Community

Vote Weighting

Commiss ioners

Balance EU-USA

Foreign Minister Balance EU-EU

Fig. 6.5  Dense constitution topics in Le Figaro. (Source: Own elaboration)

In Le Monde and Le Figaro, it is regularly associated with the Iraq conflict (both as a repeatedly referred-to event and as an embedded topic) and Unity (as opposed to dissent and divisions) as necessary for external action. It also links to Reinforced Cooperation and various events that mark (French) initiatives for a European defence, such as the British-French summit in Saint Malo in 1998 and the quadrilateral meeting of Belgium, Luxemburg, France and Germany in April 2003. As in Gazeta Wyborcza, CFSP/ESDP frequently co-occurs with institutional issues—the Presidency, Foreign Secretary and QMV.  But instead of the balances between the  EU and NATO, the relationship that is highlighted in connection to CFSP/ESDP is that between the EU and the US and that between EU institutions (see Figs. 6.4 and 6.5). Ratification, which proved so frequent in the distribution analysis, is a rather isolated topic. It is mentioned predominantly in relation to the elections to the EP, domestic politics and enlargement. It also clusters

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prominently with Democracy (in terms of both a positive value and a deficit of the EU’s  polity) and Social Policy (see again both Figs.  6.4 and 6.5). This overlap in focus notwithstanding, the two French newspapers also disclose marked differences in associated meaning. For instance, in Le Monde, Social Policy is not only linked to economic policies and QMV (as in Le Figaro), but frequently also to the Charter, thus highlighting social policy entitlements as an issue of fundamental rights (see Fig. 6.4). Discussants in Le Figaro, by contrast, are less voluble on Social Policy, and develop QMV as an additional integrative node, instead. Abandoning unanimity seems to be a key concern in Le Figaro. It co-occurs with the problem of exemption from EU rule, more precisely, the French exception culturelle, that exempts French cultural policy from EU market (de)regulation. But, surprisingly, it does not connect with polity topics that would expound the problem of balanced competences between the EU and member states or Sovereignty. Instead, the Spirit of Community is a frequent associate of QMV, so that the question of whether or not to further supranationalise EU decision-making is pondered against the backdrop of some European good (see Fig.  6.5). Evaluative articles in Le Figaro also associate CSFP/ESDP with EU leadership, while in Le Monde, EU leadership remains a minor issue only related to French-German bilateral relations. Hence, as with the Polish newspapers, the two French news media reveal a similar overall thematic focus, but differ in the emphasis and contextual meaning associated with shared topics. In a nutshell, the assessment of the distribution of constitution topics and co-occurring contents reveals a triple narrowing of the EU constitutional debate in the four broadsheets investigated: from the overall range of topics debated in the course of the Constitution process, all four newspapers only selected for discussion in evaluative articles those that had been subjects of dispute in multilateral negotiations, in particular between member state representatives during intergovernmental conferences. Recurrently taken up and pondered in depth was again, however, only a selection of topics were from that shared agenda, and that selection differed significantly between country settings: the choice of the two French papers was similar, as was that of the two Polish papers, while there was considerably less overlap between the papers aligning with a more liberal

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(and left-leaning) readership in both countries (Gazeta Wyborcza and Le Monde) and papers aligning with a more conservative readership in both countries (Rzeczpospolita and Le Figaro). Moreover, the co-occurrence analysis revealed, that, within the frames of a transnationally shared news agenda and of a nationally convergent emphasis, each newspaper developed a distinct thematic profile: each placed the constitution topics that it shared with the other broadsheets in a different thematic context. The next sections will explore how this triple narrowing as well as similarities and differences in the selection and weighting of topics can be explained, considering the generic discourse practice of institutionalised news journalism as it is endorsed by the four broadsheets.

6.2 G  enerating Salience: Converging Coverage, Diverging Debate The starting assumption about the specific discourse practice of news journalism was that it centres on constructing ‘news’, an imaginary account of what has happened in the past, while seeking to establish consecration power over the most revelatory or intriguing news in a way that helps to reach out to the target audience and outperform competitors. Generating visibility, or salience, for specific news items is one of the methods applied to this end. It is, it was argued, applied in line with a specific canonical-regulative discourse and habitualised assumptions about what can be classified as ‘newsworthy’ and how news thus classified is to be processed (see Sect. 4.3). This section seeks to establish why recontextualisation in the four newspapers differed and how they tended to construct EU news, taking into account these practices of generating news salience. Drawing on existing studies of media content, I will study salience generation and relevance attribution in the number and placement of articles published on the EU constitution. Adding to that and drawing on insights from news discourse studies, I assume that newspapers also highlight the significance of a topic when they assess it in depth, rather than only mentioning it, and by processing it in a specific text genre: as news, in descriptive-narrative text genres or as a debate, presenting the topic in evaluative-argumentative text genres such as editorials,

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commentaries, interviews, moderated talks, in-depth analysis or lampoons. Moreover, information about the distribution of voice, that is, about who is allowed to author an evaluative article and be visible in a specific debate, will reveal what group of social actors is considered worthy of attention by a newspaper and gives another hint as to what the enacted classifications of newsworthiness are. The analysis is based on the content analysis of the entire corpus of evaluative and news articles published over the period of investigation in 2002–2004, that is, overall 4,526 articles. It focuses on metadata assigned to the overall set of articles, including publication date, section, text genre, author and her or his social role (or field of specialised practice), partisan alignment and multilevel provenance (own member state, fellow member state, supranational, subnational).6 Those articles that touched upon concrete suggestions for institutional reform (constitution topics) and/or broader issues of future EU polity (polity topics) in at least one paragraph were considered to cover the EU constitution in depth. To the analysis of the quantified abstractions of these content categories, I added a manual scrutiny of the topics pondered in individual ‘clusters of debate’, that is, a series of commentaries arranged by a newspaper on a specific topic.

Converging Coverage The four newspapers display striking similarities in the way they attributed salience and visibility to the EU constitutional agenda. During the period under investigation from January 2002 to August 2004, the four newspapers each published roughly 1,000 articles on the EU constitution (Gazeta Wyborcza: 862; Rzeczpospolita: 1152; Le Monde: 1296; Le Figaro: 1216).7  Note that, additionally but limited to Le Monde and Gazeta Wyborcza, it was assessed how news-­ giving or quoted sources were distributed in news articles. 7  The markedly lower scores of the overall coverage of Gazeta Wyborcza are due, in part at least, to the smaller volume of the newspaper. They also relate to the fact that both Polish newspapers increased the amount of coverage on the EU constitution only in late 2002 so that their overall coverage is somewhat slimmer. However, the comparison of the share of articles covering the EU constitution in more detail revealed that Gazeta Wyborcza, while publishing a smaller number of articles entailing the keyword ‘EU constitution’ (and its alternates), dealt in these articles with the EU constitutional issue as a major topic. The high score of Le Monde in the amount of overall coverage is due to a large share of articles only mentioning the EU constitution. 6

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140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 Jan 02 Apr 02 Le Monde

Jul 02 Nov 02 Feb 03 May 03 Sep 03 Dec 03 Mar 04 Jun 04 Le Figaro

Gazeta Wyborcza

Rzeczpospolita

Fig. 6.6  Coverage on the EU constitution over time (absolute numbers). (Source: Own elaboration) N: 1296 (Le Monde); 1216 (Le Figaro); 862 (Gazeta Wyborcza); 1152 (Rzeczpospolita)

This amounts to, on average, six to nine articles per week (Gazeta Wyborcza: 6.20; Rzeczpospolita: 8.29; Le Monde: 9.32; Le Figaro: 8.75). Thus, in terms of the quantity of published articles, all four newspapers assigned the EU constitutional issue considerable newsworthiness. Moreover, they attributed salience more or less synchronously, in relation to key events of the Constitution process. The peaks of overall coverage that are displayed in Fig. 6.6 coincide with the dates of these key events, which include the inauguration of the Convention on 28 February, 2002; the presentation of the Skeleton on October 28, 2002; the presentation of the Draft constitution on 13  June, 2003; and the subsequent IGCs and preparatory meetings on 3–4  October, 2003; December 12–13  December, 2003; 25–26 March; and 24 June, 2004. The climax of media attention in late 2003 is connected with the IGCs in October and December 2003 when intergovernmental polarisation escalated so that heads of state and government temporarily suspended negotiations (see Fig.  6.6). Hence, at first sight, all four newspapers appear to have given news salience to the EU constitution when key institutional events of the Constitution process and the prominence of institutional actors were at stake. They seem to have

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presupposed that institutional leverage and the symbolic capital of institutional representatives have news value.8 This guess is underscored by the placement of the articles. As a rule, the EU constitution was placed as news on the first page only when a key event in the Constitution process was to be announced. With the exception of Le Monde, which placed 127 articles on the EU constitution on the first page, 21 of them dealing in depth with the EU constitutional issue, the other papers only occasionally put the EU constitutional issue in this prominent place and usually only together with another topic. Only 11 out of 53 articles placed on the first page of Gazeta Wyborcza presented the EU constitution as a major topic, and six articles out of 68 in Le Figaro.9 These differences are partially due to the idiosyncratic editorial practices of the newspapers: Le Monde published both short announcements and long essays on the first page; Gazeta Wyborcza and Le Figaro, in contrast, used first-page placements primarily for short announcements which referred the reader to the opinion or politics section for further elaboration. Still, compared to the overall publication output, first-page placement of the EU constitution was rare in the period under investigation. The modest visibility of the EU constitutional issue on first pages is paralleled, however, by what communication scholars have  coined the ‘invisible importance’ of EU news items: they rarely enter the top news agenda in highly visible programmes or newspaper sections, but are attributed considerable space in lower-ranked places (Peter, Semetko, & De Vreese, 2003, p. 308). Indeed, when separately scrutinising the share of evaluative articles in overall coverage, that is, of text genres that made a particular judgement explicit, it appears that the EU constitution gained salience as an issue of debate in the opinion sections, rather than as hot news. Large proportions of overall coverage in the four newspapers  There was also an ‘investigative’ classification of newsworthiness, focused on the revelation of scandals. However, it rather reinforced preoccupation with official institutional events as it was limited to the revelation of petty scandals of EU personnel, such as the tricks and unfair play during the nomination of the Praesidium of the Convention or Giscard d’Estaing’s exaggerated salary demands. 9  In the archive of Rzeczpospolita, information on first-page placement was not given. 8

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Table 6.1  News and evaluation (in % of the overall coverage) News Evaluation

Gazeta Wyborcza

Rzeczpospolita

Le Monde

Le Figaro

54.18 45.82

56.64 44.36

63.43 36.57

60.28 39.72

N: 862 (Gazeta Wyborcza); 1152 (Rzeczpospolita); 1296 (Le Monde); 1216 (Le Figaro)

were evaluative text genres such as in-depth analysis, commentary, interview, statement or lampoon. This is particularly true of the Polish newspapers, where news items, that is, descriptive-narrative text genres, had only a slightly bigger share of overall coverage compared to evaluation (see Table 6.1). Moreover, the majority of evaluative articles went beyond merely mentioning the EU Constitution and touched upon concrete suggestions for institutional reform (constitution topics) and/or broader issues of the future EU polity (polity topics) in at least one paragraph. The share of evaluative articles covering the EU constitution in depth amounted to 87.09% in Gazeta Wyborcza, 89.43% in Rzeczpospolita, 86.71% in Le Monde and 91.72% in Le Figaro. This suggests that issues of EU institutional reform and polity-building were seen, above all, as ‘debate-worthy’. Along with the prominence of institutional events and actors, controversy seems to have been an item of news value attributed to the EU constitution: it was primarily featured as an issue needing explanation and argument, somewhat echoing the official staging of the Constitution process as an experiment in public deliberation. Hence, at first glance, the shared set of the most frequent constitution topics depicted in the previous chapter clearly relates to shared practices of generating salience and visibility: the constitution topics that entered the opinion sections and in-depth analyses were prominently featured in the news sections during the ‘hot times’ of constitution-drafting. These shared practices of constructing news salience explain the shared set of most frequent topics and prove the emergence of a shared news agenda: all newspapers recruited those topics to the news agenda that related to the official Constitution process and involved controversy. They do not explain, however, why the emphasis on constitution topics and associated meanings differed so strongly both between country settings and between individual newspapers within the same country setting.

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Diverging Debate The separate scrutiny of the distribution and thematic focus of evaluative articles reveals how ‘debate-worthiness’ was constructed. The overall synchronicity of news coverage notwithstanding, the share of evaluative articles in the general publication output increases at different temporal points in the four newspapers. The timing of ‘clusters of debate’, that is, of a series of accumulated commentaries on a specific topic, varies strongly between the country settings, but also between the newspapers in the same country. Moreover, these clusters of debate are either asynchronous, but thematically overlapping, or synchronous, but thematically divergent, or they are solitary peaks of debate specific to an individual newspaper. Debate seems to be arranged according to newspaper-specific concerns that vary in timing and focus. They also remain highly introverted, including above all compatriots; evaluative articles were mostly authored by nationals: only 10% of all authors of opinion articles in Le Monde and Le Figaro were non-French, whereas 32.60% in Gazeta Wyborcza and 18.78% in Rzeczpospolita were non-Polish (members of the Polish diaspora not included). A closer scrutiny of these clusters of debate shows that there were basically three classifications of ‘debate-worthiness’ suggesting which event or topic was worthy of debate and was to be kept on the agenda by inviting or admitting a range of discussants. The first has already been investigated in communication studies on Europeanised national news (Adam, 2007) and could be coined ‘domestic politics proximity’ or ‘domestic polarisation’. Accordingly, the EU constitution was rendered a subject of debate when it could be linked to political conflicts waged in the national political scene of the newspaper’s host country and when the newspaper could, through this ‘domesticisation’, secure consecration power over these conflicts. Such arrangement of debate typically draws on a divisive statement, which has been issued earlier by a prominent public figure of the national political scene and is now scandalised by the newspapers as challenging government policy or displaying political conflict between major political actors in the domestic scene.

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The peak of coverage and debate shown in the French newspapers between September and November 2002, for instance, includes commentary on the Skeleton, that is, the grid for a constitutional document suggested by Giscard d’Estaing and a series of principled commentaries on CFSP/ESDP. But, above all, it reflects the controversy over whether or not enlargement should be subject to a referendum, which arose on the occasion of the second Irish referendum on the enlargement-facilitating Nice Treaty (September and October 2002) and whether or not Turkey should enter the EU, a problem which related to the upcoming decision on Turkey’s candidature and the recent victory of the Islamist AKP Party in the Turkish parliamentary elections (November and December 2002). Le Monde had raised a furore over Giscard d’Estaing’s dramatic rejection of Turkey’s EU entry (“ça sera la fin de l’Europe”), which he issued while giving an interview on the progress of the Convention on 9 November, 2002, thereby openly opposing the official policy of the French government. This incident was made a repeatedly referred-to event in Le Monde, taken up by Le Figaro, among others. It served as a springboard for discussing the cultural boundaries of EU-Europe, which reconnected to the status that would be given to religion and Christianity in the Constitution. The major peak of debate in the Polish newspapers in October 2003 relates to a similar constellation. It includes a discussion of the reform proposals that were brought to the fore in the Draft Constitution. But above all, it reflects the quarrel about whether or not sticking to the vote weighting of the Nice Treaty was a necessary and meaningful negotiation strategy to be pursued at the upcoming intergovernmental conference. The quarrel was launched by Jan Rokita, chairman of the parliamentary club of the oppositional liberal-conservative party Citizens’ platform in a debate in the Sejm on September 9, 2003. Coining the slogan ‘Nicea o muerte, Nicea albo śmierć (‘Nice or death’), he sought to mobilise support for a resolution that urged the Polish government to fiercely ‘defend’ the arrangements of the Nice Treaty on the vote-weighting system during the upcoming intergovernmental conference. It heralded a massive campaign by the Polish oppositional parties against the Draft Constitution and polarised Polish intellectual-political camps over the fundamentals that should guide Polish EU policies (see also Sect. 5.3). Especially, Gazeta Wyborcza used this slogan to initiate subsequent clusters of debate,

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triggering a series of intermedia agenda-setting  articles, with Rzeczpospolita following suit. The two newspapers also published open letters by opposing groups of intellectuals: Gazeta Wyborcza gave voice to a group that castigated Rokita’s “national interest rhetoric”, calling for a cooperative approach towards EU partners; Rzeczspospolita, meanwhile, issued an open letter that castigated the “party of the white flag” and called for hard bargaining following the model of established EU members. The other classification of debate-worthiness that arguably instructed the arrangement of debate in the investigated newspapers is that of ‘intergovernmental polarisation’ combined with ‘moral indignation’. The EU constitution was rendered a subject of a series of commentaries if that displayed a  conflict between member state governments or a clash of ‘national interests’. The newspapers thus actualised a pattern of international news coverage, according to which curiosity and drama are instigated by stereotyping supposedly ‘national’ views as fundamentally adversarial. Further, the blame games typical of EU intergovernmental negotiations, that is, the quarrels over who spoilt the EU’s negotiation performance and pursued egotistic national interests instead of the common European good, were exaggerated in moral panics over the supposed wrongdoings of fellow Europeans and in an outrage over implications for one’s own nation or the collective.10 In the case investigated, this template of debate-worthiness was applied when diplomatic irritations arose between the French and Polish governments in 2003, over the US-led intervention in Iraq and the provisions of the Draft Constitution, such as the reference to God or Christianity in the preamble, qualified majority voting in the Council or the role of NATO in joint defence initiatives. They were fuelled by calculated provocations. For instance, Jacques Chirac told off the EU newcomers for supporting the Iraq intervention (“they had better kept their mouths shut”), while a Polish government official was responsible for the hoax that French missiles had been found in Iraq (see also Sect. 5.3). These events fed into moral panics, which  The concept of moral panic was first introduced by Stanley Cohen in the 1970s to designate the rousing of moral concern and indignation over an issue in a society, stirred by ‘moral entrepreneurs’ and mass media scandalisation, a process by which deviant behaviour is defined and social control restored (Thompson, 1998, pp. 7–15). 10

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constructed reversal threats, for example of ‘the French’ allegedly imposing their militant laicism and marginalising Poland in the Council and of ‘the Poles’ allegedly spoiling the achievements of political integration that ‘old Europe’ had struggled for (later complemented by panics about the ‘the Poles’ supposedly flooding the French economy with cheap labour). Among the investigated newspapers, only Rzeczpospolita used this template consistently to initiate controversy. However, the stereotyping of opposing governmental positions as adversarial national views and reproach for national egotisms ran through all the commentaries, while scepticism and paternalism towards the newcomers was particularly pronounced in Le Monde (see also Sect. 6.3). This pattern of controversy culminates in the publication, in both Le Monde and Gazeta Wyborcza, of an argument between Daniel Cohn-­ Bendit and Olivier Duhamel, two Conventioneers and Members of the EP of the French Green party, on the one hand, and the editors of Gazeta Wyborcza Marek Beylin and Adam Michnik, on the other. On October 9, Cohn-Bendit and Duhamel issued the letter “To our Polish friends”; on October 15, Beylin and Michnik published the retort “Poland: motives of a struggle”. After some diplomatic cordiality, which highlights the mutual acknowledgement of the fellow country’s constitutional struggles and democratic achievements, the discussants perform as defenders of national interests and constitutional models. Duhamel and Cohn-Bendit plead against the reference to Christianity in the preamble, referring to the Catholic Church’s problematic history of interference and reproaching “our Polish friends” for forcing their model of friendly laicism onto diverse EU populations (“the Church has … why would you want to impose your Christian zeal on muslims and agnostics?”), while Beylin and Michnik advocate it, referring to Judeo-Christian heritage, and reproach their interlocutors for misrecognising an important reference point of identification (“the reference to Europe’s Christian heritage is not an acknowledgement of the Catholic Church’s role, but of historical truth”). Eventually, each party claims for itself the exclusive authority, derived from national experience, to judge what is adequate for all Europeans, leaving no scope for a deliberated position in-between. The marked difference in emphasis on specific constitution topics that showed in the comparison of the French and Polish newspapers (see Sect.

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6.1) derives from this use of domestic political and intergovernmental polarisation to enhance controversy. The strong differences that showed in the emphasis on constitution topics and associated meanings between the individual newspapers, on the other hand, relate to solitary peaks of evaluation specific to an individual newspaper. For instance, the isolated peak of evaluation that shows in Rzeczpospolita in June 2002 relates to discussions about the necessity of including an Invocacio Dei in the EU constitution, triggered either by consultations in the  EU arena or by interventions of Church representatives. It is continued on various occasions, but hits another climax in May and June 2003, when Jolanta Brach-Czaina, an outspoken critic of the influence of the Polish Catholic Church on Polish society and policymaking, criticised the strong lobbying of Church followers in Brussels and EU capitals for the reference to God or Christianity in the EU preamble. She provoked the collective outrage of the newspaper’s editorialist and readers, a discussion which largely repeated the controversy that had taken place during the drafting of the current Polish constitution between 1992 and 1997. The debate was taken up again in June 2004, when final agreement on a Constitutional Treaty not including a reference to Christianity became very likely. Rzeczpospolita’s extreme narrowing of the constitutional debate apparently derives from the repetitive arrangement of clusters of debate on that topic. Le Figaro’s steadily high volume of evaluative articles between December 2002 and March 2003 connects to a series of debates on the future of French-German relations and EU leadership launched on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the Elysée Treaty and on the prospects of a French-German ‘pioneer group’ in defence matters. The evaluative articles that accumulate in Le Monde in June 2004 deal primarily with the divergent positioning of members of the Parti Socialiste on the Constitutional Treaty and their recommendations to vote for or against such a treaty in a possible referendum. Hence, much of the variance in the emphasis and contextual references of constitution topics, which the co-occurrence revealed for the individual newspapers (see Sect. 6.1), can be pinned down to the initiation of newspaper-specific debates on matters of constitutional design and national EU policy that were constitutive of the intellectual-political community that the respective newspapers claimed to target.

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In sum, the divergence in emphasis on specific constitution topics and associated meanings, which showed between Polish and French newspapers, can be pinned down to intergovernmental and domestic political polarisation, applied as a classification of ‘debate- worthiness’ in the newspapers’ arrangement of debates. The divergence between newspapers in the same national setting, on the other hand, relates to solitary clusters of debate that the individual newspapers arranged at different temporal  points on topics that highlight the respective newspaper’s partisan profile. Such a classification of debate-worthiness also shows in the distribution of voice, that is, in the visibility attributed to news givers and sources in news articles and in the choice of authors whom the newspapers invited: visibility was given, above all, to news givers from the national political scene, while voice was mainly attributed to those compatriots that stood for the partisan alignment of the respective newspaper. The next section will assess how this newspaper-specific narrowing was brought about in journalists’ representation of the EU constitutional issue, focusing on how they rearranged and added meaning when appropriating fragments of constitution speak from multilateral negotiations.

6.3 G  enerating Consonance: Intertextuality and Plausibilisation Generating visibility, or salience, by selecting and weighting recontextualised contents in line with assumptions about news- and debate worthiness is one method of constructing ‘news’. But acting as complexity-reducing gatekeepers is just one facet of national news media’s involvement in Europeanised political communication. They also bridge and selectively integrate strands of discourse from different fields of specialised social practice, rearranging appropriated discourse fragments and complementing them with connotation that resonates with the targeted epistemic community (see Sect. 4.3). Following this argument, this section examines the rearrangement and addition that fragments of discourse witnessed when being relocated from the discourse field of multilateral negotiation on the EU constitution to the four newspapers investigated. More specifically, I will focus on discourse practices that

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govern intertextuality and add connotation: on syntactic-grammatical means that generate cohesion and logical coherence among formerly unrelated texts and on allusions, mythopoesis and illustrative means that suggest linkage (strategies of plausibilisation) as well as on the modification and referencing of social actors (strategies of representation). Insofar as these practices conventionally generate consonance with the target audience, interpellating the imagined reader, they can be considered part of the regulative discourse of news journalism, too, even if they potentially undermine clear-cut definitions of newsworthiness and professional ethos. They suggest how to cultivate and reproduce, by generic language use, the interdiscourse of an audience and epistemic community. The objective of this section is to establish what transformation, beyond being narrowed down, relocated fragments of discourse underwent when subordinated to this ‘integrative’ aspect of the regulative discourse of news media. How is EU constitutional speak translated into audience-specific interdiscourse and what construction of ‘the national’ is thereby involved? These questions are assessed drawing on a detailed discourse analysis of first-page reports and adjacent analyses or commentaries that the four newspapers published on March 1, 2002, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Convention on February 28, 2002. The focus is on how the four newspapers rearranged and added meaning to EU constitutional speak which Valéry Giscard d’Estaing uttered in his introductory speech and what portrayal of the involved actors and the Constitution process that involved. These articles were selected for three reasons. Firstly, the inauguration of the Convention turned out to be the first event when all the four newspapers placed the Constitution process on the first pages and attributed additional prominence and importance in the opinion or international politics sections; it can be regarded as an initialising moment, in which the newspapers first adopted a specific perspective on the Constitution process. Secondly, the editorial lines on the EU constitution-­drafting and the generation of consonance developed in these articles proved to be salient throughout the entire period under investigation. Slightly adjusted with the changing course of events (e.g. the settling of accession, the Iraq conflict), these lines persisted as shortcuts when the Constitution process was put on the agenda anew. Thirdly,

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as all four newspapers included fragments from Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory speech in their reports, these selected articles showed vividly how EU constitutional speak (analysed earlier in Sects. 3.1–3.3 and 4.1) was adapted to media discourse and where this adaptation converged or varied between countries and newspapers. The four newspapers refer either to Giscard d’Estaing’s warnings of failure and the prospects of success, which he repeated at various points of his speech, or to his appeal to the European spirit of the Conventioneers. I will later show for each newspaper separately how these fragments from Giscard d’Estaing’s speech were translated into quote stories and how adjacent analyses and editorials enhanced the reading of these quotes. The findings will be resumed at the end of the section before they are integrated in the synoptic analysis of the four newspapers’ recontextualisation in the conclusions to the chapter.

‘Big Words, Small Reforms’: Plausibilisation in Rzeczpospolita In Rzeczpospolita, the Brussels correspondent Jędrzej Bielecki delivers two accounts of the inauguration of the Convention on March 1, 2002: a news article entitled “What Union, What Europe?”, which is arranged as a quote story that combines parts from Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory speech with comments by other politicians, above all by the Polish Conventioneers (Bielecki, 2002a); and an in-depth analysis of the prospects for far-reaching reform, entitled “Big words, small reforms” (Bielecki, 2002b). In the lead to the quote story, Bielecki draws on the following paragraphs from Giscard d’Estaing’s speech. They are taken from the official version of the EU translation services, complemented by me, in square brackets, with the literal translation where the English translation deviates from the French original: If we succeed, in 25 years or 50 years—the distance separating us from the Treaty of Rome—Europe’s role in the world will have changed. It will be respected and listened to, not only as the economic power it already is, but as a political power which will talk on equal terms to the

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greatest powers on our planet, either existing or future, and will have the means to act to affirm its values, ensure its security and play an active role in international peacekeeping. (Appendix E, line 104–109)11 If we were to fail, each country would return to the free trade system [to the logic of free trade]. None of us—not even the largest of us—would have the power to take on the giants of this world [would have enough weight to take on …]. We would then remain locked in on ourselves, grimly analysing the causes of our decline and fall [Each of us would remain alone with himself, grimly analysing the causes of our decline and of the situation of being dominated]. (Appendix E, line 294–296)12

Bielecki paraphrases these quotes, marking his version as direct speech.13 The lead says: The decision which Europe makes now will determine whether, in fifty years, Europe will be a power, which forms the destinies of the world, or just a free trade zone that submits itself to the will of others—said Valéry Giscard d’Estaing yesterday in his new function as president of the Convention, which was launched to tackle the Union’s reform. Meanwhile, Polish delegates fear that decisions will be made without the participation of our country. (Bielecki, 2002a, paragraph 9)14  The French original: “Si nous réussissons, dans 25 ans ou 50 ans (…) Elle [l’Europe] sera respectée et écoutée, non seulement comme la puissance économique qu’elle est déjà, mais comme une puissance politique qui parlera à l’égal avec les plus grandes puissance de la planète, existants ou à venir, et qui disposera des moyens d’agir pour affirmer ses valeurs, assurer sa sécurité, et jouer un rôle actif dans le maintien de la paix international.” 12  The original reads thus: “Si nous échouions, chaque pays retournerait à une logique de libre échange. Aucun de nous, même les plus grands, n’aurait un poids suffisant vis-à-vis des géants du monde. Nous resterions alors chacun face à nous-mêmes, dans une interrogation morose sur les causes de notre déclin, et de notre situation de dominés.” 13  Quoting techniques turned out to be opaque in Polish newspapers. A hyphen is used to mark the passing from a (supposed) quote to the naming of the author, but the start of the original quote is often obscured. 14  The original in Polish language runs thus: “Od decyzji, które teraz podejmie Europa, zależy, czy za 50 lat będzie potęgą kształtującą losy świata, czy tylko strefą wolnego handlu, poddającą się woli innych—powiedział wczoraj przed Konwentem powołanym do spraw reformy Unii Europejskiej jej przewodniczący, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Polscy delegaci obawiają się tymczasem, że rozstrzygnięcia zapadną bez udziału naszego kraju.” 11

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This paraphrase reflects, on the one hand, the heading and the subheading “Convention kicked-off, Polish delegates voice concern”. On the other, it provides a pointed translation that reduces Giscard d’Estaing’s quotes to the problem of dominance and subjection and places this translation in the context of unequal representation at the Convention. Giscard d’Estaing’s proposition that “each of us would remain alone with himself, grimly analysing the causes of our decline and of the situation of being dominated” is transformed into a stronger proposition according to which the EU, not its constituent components, will either shape global destinies or submit itself to the will of others. The focus is on the gaining of power, as opposed to marginalisation and subjection. The aspect of disintegration and singularisation that also appears in the referred-to quote gets lost in Bielecki’s translation as does the differentiation of EU members. In Bielecki’s encapsulation, the EU is already a monolith (either a dominant power or a dominated free-trade zone), juxtaposed with the sceptical Polish delegates. The appellative “nous” in Giscard d’Estaing’s speech, which references the collective of the Conventioneers and simultaneously alludes to them as representing the European political elite originating from different states, is replaced by the national collective “we”. The collective is also enunciated in the term “our country” for Poland, described as threatened with exclusion from the EU’s institutional engineering despite its presence in the Convention. The juxtaposition between the EU collective and the national collective is achieved by means of the contrastive adjunct “meanwhile” (tymczasem). It generates syntactic cohesion between claims made by different people in different contexts—Giscard d’Estaing at the Plenum; the Polish delegates at the press conference for Polish journalists. At the same time, the adjunct constructs logical coherence, suggesting that the two different news sources are in a relationship of contradiction. This suggestion is elaborated in the body of the news article. It gives more details on the set-up of the Convention to then quote José Aznar, Spanish prime minister and Council president at that time, with a remark that reminds the Convention of the masters of the reform—the state representatives. Subsequently, the Polish delegates are introduced as being likewise sceptical about the Convention’s work. Józef Oleksy, representative of the Sejm, and Danuta Hübner, representative of the Polish government, warn of a

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speed-up of the procedure of treaty revision, which would predate accession of the candidate countries and exclude them from full participation in the subsequent IGC.  The apprehension that Poland might become marginalised because of conflicting procedures of accession and constitution-­drafting is most pronounced in the report about the press conference. It can be heard in phrases like “decisions will be made without the participation of our country”, “will be agreed upon without Poland’s participation”, “not disposing of the right to block the Convention”, “dangerous for Poland”, “ensure Poland a place”. It appears again at the end of the news article, as will be quoted shortly, albeit in a surprising reversal. Bielecki stresses the preference of influential EU leaders for an intergovernmental, rather than a supranational, power centre, and suggests that if this were to come about, Poland would become a big player, causing anxiety of marginalisation among its smaller neighbours. While the linkage between the strengthening of the intergovernmental method and a stronger intergovernmental position of Poland is by no means a given, it is tacitly suggested by use of the adverbial participle godziąc (agreeing upon) which is used as an adjunct to link up to the content of the previous sentence. It is further reinforced by the subsequent paragraph in which the emergence of a “directorate of the six” is presented as likely. The leaders of the most important countries of the Fifteen clearly argued for the intergovernmental (the cooperation of independent states), not the Community method (strong leverage by the Commission and the European Parliament) of European integration. Agreeing upon setting up power in this way, the Polish delegates want to ensure Poland a place among the six big players. (…) The perspective of the emergence of a directorate of France, Germany, United Kingdom, Spain and Poland already raises concern among the smaller member and candidate states. (Bielecki, 2002a, paragraph 11, emphasis added)15  The Polish version reads thus: “Za metodą międzyrządową (współpraca niezależnych państw), a nie wspólnotową (duże uprawnienia Komisji Europejskiej i Parlamentu Europejskiego) integracji europejskiej w ostatnich tygodniach jasno opowiedzieli się przywódcy najważniejszych krajów ‘15’. Godząc się z takim rozkładem sił, nasi delegaci chcą zapewnić Polsce miejsce wśród ‘sześciu 15

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Hence, by means of adjuncts, Bielecki weaves together various quotes and parts of indirectly reported speech in a way which enhances the theme of power politics, subjection and dominance. Tacitly, the threat of marginalisation, a threat faced by the EU in Giscard d’Estaing’s speech, is shifted to Poland, and then to smaller countries. However, the most concerned collective actor remains Poland. This is due to repetitive referencing of Poland as one, coherent, national collective: the national ‘we’ recurs in the personal pronoun we, substituting Poland as a political-economic entity, for example in the same paragraph as quoted earlier, in “a strong government in Brussels would help us achieve the Western level of development”; and in the recurrent possessive construction “our delegates”, “our country”. Moreover, the country is personified as a subject and object of political action, a practice salient in international news coverage more generally. Here it is used as a substitute for the Polish delegates (toto pro pars), for example in “Poland will not present its full concept of reform”; “Poland withdraws from specifying its visions of the future design not only because (…)” (Bielecki, 2002a, paragraph 11). The national collective is further enhanced by depicting the (supposed) intergovernmentalist stance of the Polish delegates as resonating with Polish public opinion, thereby constructing a consensual definition of ‘national interest’.16 Along with this referencing, the portrayal of Poland as a collective possibly denied co-decision is enhanced by allusion to the shared memory of a collective struggle for co-determination, which is likely to be recognised by the readers of Rzeczpospolita. The memory is evoked in the text where fear is voiced that decisions might be made which affect Poland and its European futures “without its participation”. These instances potentially evoke the different episodes of Polish history associated with struggles for democratic freedom and national independence. They recall the popular slogan nic o nas bez nas (nothing upon us without us). It originates in a founding moment of Polish constitutionalism, more precisely, in the act rozgrywających’. Perspektywa powstania ‘dyrektoriatu’ Francji, Niemiec, Wielkiej Brytanii, Włoch, Hiszpanii i Polski już wywołuje niepokój mniejszych państw Unii i pozostałych kandydatów.” 16  In fact, the Polish delegates joined the “Friends of the Community method” later on. Individually, they promoted different views, with Edmund Wittbrodt, conservative representative of the Senat, and Józef Oleksy, representative of the Sejm and member of the governing SLD, occasionally supporting integrationist approaches.

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Nihil novi nisi commune consensu, frequently used and reformulated in popular culture (see Sect. 3.5). By means of allusion to this slogan, the issue of the EU constitution is linked to intertexts about Polish constitutionalism and the Polish struggles for democratic freedom and international recognition. In the in-depth analysis “Big words, small reforms”, the theme of (denied) co-determination is not the obviously dominant one. Instead, Bielecki elaborates the opposition between proactive integrationists (the Convention, Giscard d’Estaing, his vice presidents) and increasingly EU-sceptic populations or heads of government (referenced: Berlusconi, Schröder, Straw, Blair, Aznar, the Irish and the Germans) to prepare his conclusion that “it would come close to a miracle if consensus on a far-­reaching reform of the Union was reached” (Bielecki, 2002b, paragraph 15). The perspective is shifted from the outsider’s view on implications of the Constitution process for Poland to the view of an insider knowledgeably commenting on the distribution of preferences among EU players and the likelihood of consensus or deepening of integration. This type of political commentary proved common among Brussels correspondents in all the newspapers I analysed. By using this professional template, Bielecki waters down the alarming account of the news report. He suggests that the Convention, regardless of unfair procedures and the determination of its federalist majority, will not introduce any threatening change, but will remain a talking shop whose “wings were clipped” by the early initiatives launched by Schröder and Blair.17 The theme of (denied) co-determination, however, re-enters through the back door. It is used to reinforce the contrast between the high-flying ambitions of the Convention (“big words”) and the actual poor outcome (“small reforms”). In the introductory paragraph of his evaluation, where Bielecki depicts the set-up of the Convention and the ambitions of its leaders, he refers to the candidates’ inclusion as a possible indicator of a nascent new order in the history of European integration:  It is not fully clear to what “initiatives” Bielecki is referring. Earlier in the article, he said that “the Federal Republic no longer wants to be the cash cow of the Union and is pressing for a restriction of the Common Agricultural Policy and the structural funds”. Later, he points to Schröder and Blair as having signed a letter addressed to Aznar (then holding the EU presidency) in which they support the plans of the British minister of European affairs and member of the Convention, Jack Straw, to strengthen the European Council as central power in the EU. 17

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Moreover, they [the heads of EU-15] invited delegates of the candidate countries as observers, who up to now had no say in the matter of the future EU order. The first day of the Convention’s work proved that promises have been kept. (Bielecki, 2002b, paragraph 6, emphasis added)18

A few paragraphs further on in the text, when recalling the poor start of the Convention, Bielecki states: Contrary to the promise that the representatives of the candidate countries would be “treated as equals” [on the grounds of equal rights] beyond the mere participation in voting, they were not invited when the Praesidium was nominated. (Bielecki, 2002b, paragraph 10, emphasis added)19

The seeming contradiction dissolves in the composition of the entire story, which starts with promising beginnings to then shift to the extensive discussion of likely shortfalls in outcome. The line where the image is reversed is marked by prophetical style: Those who think that the Union broke with its established working methods and that a European state is about to rise will be sorely disappointed. (Bielecki, 2002b, paragraph 8)20

Hence, the theme of conceded, then denied co-determination supports Bielecki’s sceptical overall appraisal about prospects for reform. But, in addition, the image of the “invited”, who were not or only partially given what was promised to them, connotes betrayal and deception as well as arbitrariness. These connotations easily link to ritualised Polish collective  Note that the delegates from the candidate countries were actually given voting rights, but they were not allowed vetoing decisions made by the Convention. In addition, they were assigned only observatory status in the Praesidium. This differentiation is often not made in the Polish newspapers, and it is equally not made in Bielecki’s analysis. In Polish the quote reads thus: “Więcej, zaprosili jako obserwatorów wysłanników krajów kandydackich, którzy dotychczas nie mieli nic do powiedzenia w sprawie przyszłego kształtu Unii. Pierwszy dzień prac Konwentu udowodnił, że obietnica została dotrzymana.” 19  The Polish original reads thus: “Wbrew zapowiedziom, że będą traktowani “na równych prawach” poza możliwością udziału w głosowaniach, przedstawiciele krajów kandydackich nie zostali zaproszeni do wybrania prezydium Konwentu.” 20  The Polish original reads thus: “Ci, którzy uwierzą, że Unia zerwała z dotychczasowymi metodami pracy, a powstanie europejskiego państwa jest tuż-tuż, mogą się jednak srodze zawieść.” 18

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memory of having been at the mercy of the manipulation by the great powers, if the reader is at all aware of this larger historic-intertextual context. More importantly, the connotations are highly plausible against the context of enlargement, when conditions of entry and time schedules shifted frequently, mostly to the detriment of the accession states. By evoking these connotations, Bielecki opens arrays for appropriation to national interdiscourse and lends plausibility to the portrayal of European politics as being calculable only in so far as it is driven by the struggle for dominance and veto power.

‘Watchmen of Solidarity’: Plausibilisation in Gazeta Wyborcza The Gazeta Wyborcza published a two-liner on the first page and a news article on the very day of the inauguration on February 28, 2002. It drew heavily on Constitution speak to depict the Convention’s tasks, referring to the threat of paralysis and the necessity of renewal in the face of enlargement. On March 1, 2002, the Brussels correspondent Jacek Pawlicki published a short report on the inauguration of the Convention, entitled “The Convention has started” (Pawlicki, 2002b), which was made up only of quotes from Giscard d’Estaing’s speech and some additional commentary, and a separate account of the press conference given by the Polish Conventioneers, which is entitled “Watchmen of solidarity? What Poland’s role will be in the Convention which started yesterday” (Pawlicki, 2002a). These two articles will be used as examples here. In the report on the inauguration, Pawlicki draws on quotes from the end of the introductory speech where Giscard d’Estaing appeals to the European spirit of the Conventioneers and calls for a joint European dream, given here in the official version of the EU translation service: Let me conclude by calling on your enthusiasm. (…) We are often upbraided for neglecting the European dream, for contenting ourselves with building a complicated and opaque structure which is the preserve of economic and financial cognoscenti. So let us dream of Europe!

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Let us imagine a continent at peace, freed of its barriers and obstacles, where history and geography are finally reconciled, allowing all the states of Europe to build their future together after following their separate ways to West and East. (Appendix E, line 270; 273–279)21

Hence, Pawlicki chooses one of those fragments of Giscard d’Estaing’s speech where the unification rhetoric is heard. At that time, such rhetoric used to be attached to almost any mention of the 2004 enlargement. But interestingly, Pawlicki does not pick up on Giscard d’Estaing’s recalling of the divided and soon to be united continent, but highlights the joint effort. He replaces Giscard d’Estaing’s reference to “all the European states” as subjects of reform by a more general human collective. His paraphrase reads thus: Allow me to appeal to your enthusiasm—said Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to the Convention which counts more than hundred members.—The younger generation often criticises us for a lack of imagination. So let us dream of a peaceful continent (…) where all jointly build their future—called the 76 year old former president of France when opening the works of the Convention which has to prepare the reform of the EU. In the near future, the Union will be extended from 15 to 25 members and fall into inertness unless courageous reform and a better connection with the people is established. (Pawlicki, 2002b, paragraph 012)22

In the paragraph following the quote, Pawlicki puts the reform project into the context of enlargement, highlighting it as a challenge, rather  The French original reads thus: “Permettez-moi, en conclusion, de faire appel à l’enthousiasme. (…) On nous reproche souvent de ne pas faire rêver de l’Europe, de nous contenter de bâtir une structure compliquée, opaque, réservée aux seuls initiés de l’économie, et de la finance. Et bien, rêvons d’Europe! Imaginons un continent pacifié, liberé de ses cloisons et de ses entraves, et où l’histoire et la géographie seront enfin réconciliées, permettant à tous les États d’Europe de batîr ensemble leur avenir, après avoir suivi des chemins séparés à l’Ouest et à l’Est.” 22  The Polish version reads thus: “Pozwólcie w sobie wzbudzić entuzjazm—mówił do ponad setki członków europejskiego Konwentu jego przewodniczący Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.—Młodzi często krytykują nas za brak marzeń. Pomarzmy więc o pokojowym kontynencie (…), gdzie wszyscy wspólnie budują swoją przyszłość—zaapelował 76-letni b. prezydent Francji, otwierając prace konwentu, który ma przygotować projekt reformy UE. W najbliższych latach Unia powiększy się z 15 do 25 członków i bez odważnych reform i odzyskania kontaktu z obywatelami pogrąży się w “bezruchu”.” 21

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than as an achievement as suggested in Giscard d’Estaing’s speech, and recalls the threat of paralysis which he had already introduced in the article published the previous day. Thus, contrary to Bielecki in Rzeczpospolita, Pawlicki is careful not to introduce some kind of contradiction or opposition between EU, on the one hand, and Poland, on the other.23 Instead, he highlights inclusive moments, for example Giscard d’Estaing’s amusing (because wrongly pronounced) welcome in Polish, and points out what is at stake for the EU as a whole, drawing on EU constitutional speak. Although the adjacent report on the Polish delegates’ plans does depict opposition between the EU and Poland, it is moderated by stress on the EU-conform contribution the Polish delegates are willing to make—their concern for the EU’s principle of solidarity. The report on the Polish delegates’ press conference, entitled “Watchmen of solidarity? What Poland’s role will be in the Convention which started yesterday”, differs in various aspects from the representation given in Bielecki’s report in Rzeczpospolita. Firstly, the article does not suggest that the Polish delegates would have one opinion that, in addition, corresponds to Polish public opinion and that of many like-­ minded Eurosceptics. Instead, the representative of the Polish Upper Chamber (Senat), Edmund Wittbrodt—absent from Bielecki’s report— is foregrounded and qualified as a “federalist” because he pleads for a strengthening of Community institutions. His quote is then juxtaposed with the intergovernmentalist stance of the “president and other Polish politicians” (Pawlicki, 2002a, paragraph 009). Hence, the possibility of having a “federalist mind” is foregrounded. Secondly, Pawlicki makes sure that the concerns voiced, in particular, by Józef Oleksy, are mitigated by a ‘package’ story introduced by the heading, the lead and a paragraph further down in the article. In accord with the point made in the rearranged quotes from Giscard d’Estaing’s speech, this package story stresses the positive contribution of the Polish delegates to the joint reform project. What is more, the contribution of the Polish delegates is represented as enhancing EU principles, notably the principle of intra-European  Note that Pawlicki substitutes “on nous reproche” by “the younger generation often criticises us for”. This is taken from another part of Giscard d’Estaing’s speech, but is used here to contrast and further underline the advanced age of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing that is mentioned later.

23

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solidarity. The lead gives a pointed summary of the approach and objectives that the Polish delegates intend to pursue in the Convention. Quiet, pragmatic, but caring about Poland’s interests, in particular about the Union’s principle of solidarity and our country’s place among the six biggest countries of the enlarged EU—this is how the line of Polish activity in the Convention can be sketched. (Pawlicki, 2002a, paragraph 005)24

This strand is taken up again further down in the article, reporting in indirect speech the statement given by the representative of the Polish government, Danuta Hübner: She suggested that we should make sure that the notion of solidarity does not fall off the principles of the European Union, that is the sharing of wealth by the richer countries with the poorer ones, supporting them in their catch-up to the EU average [of living standards/productivity]. She labelled this ‘the Eastern dimension of the Union’. (Pawlicki, 2002a, paragraph 008)25

The term solidarity is here used to name EU cohesion policies and its transfer to the neighbouring countries to the East of Poland (later to become institutionalised as the European Neighbourhood Policy). By representing EU cohesion policies as a means for successful catch-up development, now to be preserved for other Eastern European countries queuing up for EU membership, Hübner both recalls the major justification of Polish governments for EU accession and suggests that Poland is already in the state of an insider that is able to shape EU policymaking or even portfolios. At the same time, the triple emphasis on the word ‘solidarity’ enhances connotations with the project of transformation from socialist rule and integration with the West, which Gazeta Wyborcza and associated  The Polish original: “Cisi, pragmatyczni, ale pilnujący interesów Polski, w tym zwłaszcza zasady unijnej solidarności i miejsca naszego kraju wśród szóstki największych państw rozszerzonej UE— tak rysuje się linia polskich działań w Konwencie.” 25  The Polish version reads thus: “Zapowiada, że przypilnujemy, by z unijnych zasad nie zniknęło pojęcie solidarności, czyli dzielenia się bogactwem przez zamożniejsze kraje z biedniejszymi i pomagania im w doszlusowaniu do średniej UE. Określiła to mianem “wschodniego wymiaru Unii”.” 24

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intellectual liberal circles stand for. The word ‘solidarity’ evokes memories of the social movement Solidarność, which eroded communist rule in Poland, achieved a moderated turnover of government and paved the way for the democratic revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe as well as the rapprochement of the former Soviet satellites with NATO and the European Community. ‘Solidarity’ has also been used as a trademark for a reconciling, deliberative and integrative approach to society (including former perpetrators of crime under Communist regimes) promoted by the liberal reformers. By stressing this trigger word in the context of EU reform, compatibility with and ownership of such reform is claimed for Poland. Conformity of Polish demands with EU standards, their ‘Europeanness’, is also underlined by repeated mention of solidarity being an ‘EU principle’. Hence, in quoting Hübner in that way and in pushing this interpretation in the heading and the lead, Pawlicki offers various hooks for appropriation to established strands of national debate. However, this is not the only allusion to connect with Polish interdiscourse. Within the package story about the EU-conform Polish contribution is, in mitigated form, the potentially outrageous news about the possible exclusion of candidate countries from decisions on the EU’s future institutional set-up, which recounts the Polish delegates’ positioning in the face of the most recent German suggestions to conclude the Convention’s consultations prior to enlargement. The mitigating effect is also achieved by reporting (only) the rather cautious statements given by Oleksy. Oleksy is reported to have said the following: [W]e heard about an informal German proposition according to which the Intergovernmental Conference (the representatives of the governments of the EU states—ed.) should be launched right after the conclusion of the Convention’s work, which would, within the circle of the old members, swiftly adopt the reform project. (…) It is in our interest to make sure that this will not happen. (Pawlicki, 2002a, paragraph 006)26

 The Polish original: “—Słyszeliśmy o nieoficjalnej niemieckiej propozycji, by tuż po skończeniu prac Konwentu zwołać Konferencję Międzyrządową [przedstawicieli rządów państw UE—red.], która rączo i w starym gronie przyjęłaby projekt reform. (…)—W naszym interesie jest, aby tak nie było.” 26

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In the subsequent explication of the Convention’s set-up, however, Pawlicki suggests how to read Oleksy’s diplomatically encrypted statement. In his paraphrase, it connotes a similar set of issues as Bielecki’s report in Rzeczpospolita. What Oleksy referred to as an “informal German suggestion” has become the wish of “some (…) EU members” and is potentially directed at mischievously depriving the newcomers of their co-determination rights: In the Convention, only EU members have a right to vote. Some of the existing EU members wish to make key decisions before the entry of the new countries, somewhat behind their backs. (Pawlicki, 2002a, paragraph 007)27

Through a characteristic set of trigger words (“(not) having the right”, “not having a say”, “behind backs”), Pawlicki’s report alludes to the well-­ established collective memory of being betrayed and deprived of better, co-determined, futures. But, having touched upon this potential scheme of interpretation, Pawlicki switches again to the package story about the Polish delegates’ general strategy. While the threat of exclusion can be read between the lines, Pawlicki refrains from constructing the EU as a hostile ‘Other’ (as in Rzeczpospolita). Instead, the EU is presented as an in-group to which Poland belongs due to the heritage of Solidarność and the EU-conform objectives pursued by the Polish Convention delegates.

‘A Civilisational Project’: Plausibilisation in Le Monde In Le Monde, the inauguration of the Convention is celebrated with an extra package of news and commentary, including a longer news report on the background and agenda of the Convention, analyses of the positions taken by the Commission president, Romano Prodi, by the two heads of government at that time, president Jacques Chirac and prime minister Lionel Jospin, and by the Parti Socialiste, as well as short  The Polish original: “Prawo głosu w niej mają tylko członkowie Unii. Część obecnych członków UE chce, by kluczowe decyzje podjąć jeszcze przed wejściem nowych krajów, niejako za ich plecami.” 27

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portraits of a number of Conventioneers.28 The subject of analysis here, however, will be the first-page report, entitled “Towards a European constitution” (Le Monde, 2002b), and the adjuratory editorial, entitled “The Conventioneers” (Le Monde, 2002a). In a short introduction, the report specifies the set-up and mission of the Convention and quotes from Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory speech, to then return to the descriptive narrative, explicating the planned schedule of treaty revision and pointing to the little attention the issue has found so far in the French presidential election campaign.29 Le Monde chooses to quote from exactly the same parts of the introductory speech as Rzeczpospolita, but arrives at a very different rearrangement. The parts of Giscard d’Estaing’s speech, which the author draws on in the article quoted further down, are taken from the official version of the EU translation services, complemented by me, in square brackets, with the literal translation where the official English translation deviated from the French original: If we succeed, in 25 years or 50 years—the distance separating us from the Treaty of Rome—Europe’s role in the world will have changed. It will be respected and listened to, not only as the economic power it already is, but as a political power which will talk on equal terms to the greatest powers on our planet, either existing or future, and will have the means to act to affirm its values, ensure its security and play an active role in international peace-keeping. (Appendix E, line 104–109)30 If we were to fail, each country would return to the free trade system [to the logic of free trade]. None of us—not even the largest of us—would have the power to take on the giants of this world [would have enough weight to take on…]. We would then remain locked in on ourselves, grimly analysing the causes of our decline and fall [Each of us would remain alone with himself, grimly analysing the causes of our decline and of the situation of being dominated]. (Appendix E, line 294–296)31  Note that authors of editorials are not mentioned in Le Monde.  Note that Le Monde suggests that the final decision will be made prior to enlargement, by the EU-15 alone. Hence, what the Polish newspapers warn of as a possibility, Le Monde takes as a matter of fact. 30  See footnote 12 for the French original. 31  See footnote 13 for the French original. 28 29

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For incorporation of this fragment in its news report, Le Monde uses indirect speech to link Giscard d’Estaing’s warnings to the planned outcome— the constitutional treaty. The focus on the output—the foundational document—is already made clear in the heading “towards a European constitution”; it is underlined in the short lead and attached to the quote by means of the demonstrative ‘this’ (ce), here used as an adjunct. For the former head of state, this [the agreement on a constitutional treaty modernising Europe’s institutions] would be a success that, in fifty years, would render Europe a political power capable of speaking to the other global powers [les autres grands de la planète] at equal footing, capable of acting in a way which reaffirms its values and ensures its security. In the contrary case [of failure], Mr Giscard d’Estaing holds that the European Union will be reduced to a free trade zone, and the Europeans will remain alone with themselves [here starts the exact quotation of Giscard d’Estaing’s text] grimly analysing the causes of their decline and their situation of being dominated. (Le Monde, 2002b, paragraph 1068–1069)32

Out of the many possible options, Le Monde paraphrases those parts that highlight the EU as a political power with a global civilising and strategic mission. Le Monde skips Giscard d’Estaing’s stress on the existing economic power as a good basis to acquire political strength. Instead, and similar to Rzeczpospolita, it links to another part several pages later in Giscard d’Estaing’s speech which conjures up the threat of regression to the logic of free trade, while omitting Giscard d’Estaing’s association with the more general threat of the powerlessness of singularised European states. The “economic power that already exists” is substituted by the term “free trade zone”, which enhances the negative connotation that Giscard d’Estaing attributed to the “logic of free trade”. It sharpens the  The French original: “Pour l’ancien chef de l’Etat, ce serait alors un succès qui ferait de l’Europe, dans cinquante ans, une puissance politique capable de parler d’égal à égal avec les autres grands de la planète, capable d’agir pour affirmer ses valeurs et assurer sa sécurité. Dans le cas contraire, estime M.  Giscard d’Estaing, l’Union européenne serait réduite à une zone de libre-échange, et les Européens resteraient alors face à eux-mêmes dans une interrogation morose sur les causes de leurù déclin et leurù situation de dominés.” 32

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contrast between the promising futures of enhanced political integration, on the one hand, and a simple free-trade area which is here suggested to be a looming disaster. This powerful contrastive scheme, created simply by a rearrangement of quotes, is further elaborated in an editorial. In the editorial “The Conventioneers”, the haunting spectre of the free-trade area is conjured up again in order to sketch the salving alternative of a political Europe and to push the final conclusion on the necessary contents the constitutional treaty should include: Finally, this text should be ambitious: it should make sure that those who cling to a Europe espace (a vast successful free-trade zone) don’t hinder the progress of those who want to build a Europe puissance whose political personality would equal the economic weight of the Union. (Le Monde, 2002a, paragraph 0859, emphasis added)33

This plea for a constitutional treaty—as a means to safeguard European integration against ‘regressionists’—is prepared by means of plausibilisation in the preceding paragraphs. In an interesting move of mitigation, the first paragraph introduces the upcoming enlargement as reason for concern even though it points out that problems existed earlier and that taking the candidates on board is inevitable. The editorialist remarks in accustomed unification rhetoric that the candidates are “nations who should never have been cut off from the European project”. Thereby, he or she tacitly implies, however, that it is in fact the post-communist candidates who are the troublemakers, a suggestion which is reified by the subsequent but: The European Union with fifteen members already functions badly. In 2004, it will have between 25 and 27 members, opening its doors to nations who should never have been cut off the European project. But if  The mention of the personality of the EU somewhat recalls the debate about the legal personality which would allow the EU to fully act on behalf of its members in terms of international law. Focused on ‘Europe puissance’, however, the required personality, in the editorialist’s eyes, is political. The original French version of this passage reads thus: “Ce texte devra être ambitieux, enfin: faire que les tenants d’une Europe-espace (vaste zone réussie de libre-échange) n’empêchent pas d’aller de l’avant ceux qui, parmi eux, ont aussi le projet de faire une Europe-puissance dont la personnalité politique soit à la mesure du poids économique de l’Union.” 33

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the institutions of the Union are not reformed, Europe will be paralysed. (Le Monde, 2002a, paragraph 0854–0855)34

The connection between the regressionists in the final paragraph and the candidates in the first paragraph is never made explicit, but repeated reference to enlargement as a looming threat facilitates this association. The Constitution is portrayed as a bulwark against the possibility that the EU will lose power on the global stage due to enlargement. This linkage is enhanced both by narration and by modification. The editorialist suggests that the EU has reached a tipping point. “Europe” is set on a similar timeline as in the Laeken Declaration: the achievements of the post-war period, with “Europeans” benefiting from peace and welfare, appear as a glorious past; the present, however, is full of unsettled challenges such as the upcoming enlargement, the related anxiety of institutional malfunction, and “Europeans” demanding more transparency. Yet, the conclusion is not, as in the Laeken Declaration, that existing institutions need improvement to ensure further functioning. Le Monde employs Giscard d’Estaing’s picture of the crossroads—success and progress, on the one hand, failure and regression, on the other—to sketch two alternative futures: political integration endowing the EU with political power on the international level or decay in the form of regression to a free-trade zone. The urgency of a flight forward is underlined by extensive modification, if not exaggerated illustration of the pitiful fate the latter option would imply. The following quote is a good example of the chaining of words from the same semantic field (quarrelling, cacophonic; custom tariffs, accountants) as a means to enhance the portrayal: It [one of the most rewarding political and economic achievements of the post-war period] will be inevitably drawn toward the unappealing fate of a cacophonic and quarrelling community, which is essentially occupied with

 The French version reads thus: “L’Union européenne à quinze membres fonctionne déjà très mal. En 2004, elle en comptera de 25 à 27, ouvrant ses portes à des nations qui n’auraient jamais dû être coupées du projet européen. Mais si les institutions de l’Union ne sont pas renouvelées, l’Europe sera alors paralysée.” 34

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the reduction of its customs tariffs. An issue for accountants, rather than a civilisational project. (Le Monde, 2002a, paragraph 0855)35

But potentially more persuasive than the dramatising narrative and the elaboration on supposedly embarrassing commercial activities are allusions triggered by the words “cacophony”, “free trade zone”, and “civilisational project”. They aim at the centre of a couple of well-established strands of debate on French EU strategy that have been developed since the 1950s and that have their root, in part, in national polity-building. Through the warning of cacophony and quarrel shines the counterfactual positive value of unity, which remotely connotes the symbolic ‘unity’ that has been gained as part of French unitary statehood, embodying the desirable coherence among the diverse parts of metropolitan France and its former colonies (see Sect. 3.5).36 More prominent and enhanced by drastic modification is the warning of the free-trade zone. It links to well-­ established criticism of the economism of European integration and to the recurrent plea for more political control which would balance the EU’s independent regulatory policies and resemble the instruments of the French administrative state. Hence, by using the phrase ‘free trade zone’ and marking its deficiencies (of which there is no mention in Giscard d’Estaing’s speech), the editorialist of Le Monde also evokes the reverse images of more advanced social-economic integration—that of “gouvernance économique” and “Europe sociale”. Thereby, he or she reintroduces an issue that has been constitutive for self-conceptions of the political left in France since the failure of Keynesian policies in the 1980s and the emergence of the fragile liberal consensus on a market-led mode of regional integration. However, when Le Monde explicitly names the desirable political face of European integration, it is the vision of the EU as an international power (Europe puissance) that “affirms its values in the world”. Mention of European  The French original: “Elle se verra inexorablement aspirée vers le destin peu réjouissant d’une communauté cacophonique et querelleuse, essentiellement occupée à gérer la baisse de ses tarifs douaniers. Une affaire de comptables, au lieu et place d’un projet de civilisation.” 36  This might appear far-fetched; however, the topic of unity is particularly salient in the two French newspapers (see section “The Genre of News Journalism” in Chap. 4) and is always set against the threat of division. This points to the integral function of the symbolic unity for this particular national interdiscourse. 35

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integration as a project establishing a particular civilisation, also beyond the confines of the member states’ borders, in turn actualises the sense of proactive universalism as a necessary ingredient of political community and institution-building which is said to be part and parcel of French polity-building (Ratka, 2009). The trigger words and the common sense they allude to easily bridge the absurd assumption that a halt in integration would necessarily lead to a free-trade zone. By the means of the plausibilisation depicted earlier, the free-trade zone becomes simply, and without much logical foundation, the epitome of what is to be prevented through institutional reform. The Convention, the Conventioneers and Giscard d’Estaing in person are represented as those who, with their method and skills, might ensure such reform.

‘To Really Exist’, Federalisation Is Inevitable: Plausibilisation in Le Figaro Le Figaro gives yet another recomposition of Giscard d’Estaing’s speech. A short introduction is provided which reflects the heading “Europe is seeking a new future for itself—start of the works of the Convention chaired by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing”. This introduction underlines the historical significance of the Constitution process by mentioning ambitious words attached to the Convention (“constitution”, “United States of Europe”, “beginning of a grand future”) and by invoking the Philadelphia Convention as an example which laid down the “hardly ever changed” constitution of the US. In line with this pathos of the historical moment, Le Figaro picks up the following passages from Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory speech. They are taken from the official version of the EU translation services, complemented by me in square brackets, with the literal translation where the official English translation deviated from the French original: On one side, the yawning abyss of failure. On the other, strait is the gate to success. If we fail, we will add to the current confusion in the European project, which we know will not be able, following the current round of enlargement,

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to provide a system to manage our continent which is both effective and clear to the public. What has been created over fifty years will reach its limit, and be threatened with dislocation. (Appendix E, line 27–31) We can indeed dream of Europe, and persuade others to share that dream! [Yes, we can dream of Europe and make others dream of it]. (Appendix E, line 293)37 We must have a passionate interest in the success of our task if we are to engage and persuade others. It is a task modest in form but immense in content, for if it succeeds in accordance with our mandate, it will light up [illuminate] the future of Europe. (Appendix E, line 298–300)38

Rousselin rearranges the quotes in the following way and adds the image of the regression to the logic of free trade, which Giscard d’Estaing underlines in another variation of the crossroads metaphor. The rearrangement of the quotes enhances the impression of a grand project: “Yes, we can dream of and make others dream of Europe” exclaimed the president of the Convention Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in a speech given to his ‘Conventioneers’ which began with a “Ladies and Gentlemen” in the eleven languages of the Union as well as in Polish. The former president of the Republic holds that this exercise is not free from risks: “On one side, the yawning abyss of failure. On the other, strait is the gate to success”. In the case of failure, “what has been built in the past fifty years will find its limits and will be threatened with dislocation”, each country would return to a “logic of free trade”. But if the Convention succeeds, it will “illuminate the future of Europe”. (Le Figaro, 2002a, paragraph 008–009)39  The French original reads thus: “Oui, nous pouvons rêver, et faire rêver de l’Europe!”  The French original reads thus: “Pour entraîner et convaincre les autres, nous devons ressentir un intérêt passionné pour le succès de notre tâche, une tâche modeste dans sa forme, mais immense dans son contenu, car si elle réussit, selon le mandate qui nous est confié, elle illuminera l’avenir de l’Europe.” 39  The French version reads thus: ““Oui, nous pouvons rêver et faire rêver de l’Europe”, a lancé le président de la Convention, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, dans un discours à ses “conventionnels” commencé d’un “Mesdames, Messieurs” dans les 11 langues de l’Union ainsi qu’en polonaise. L’ancien président de la République a estimé que l’exercice n’était pas dénué de risques: “D’un côté, le gouffre béant de l’échec. De l’autre, la porte étroite du succès.” En cas d’échec, “ce qui a été construit 37 38

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By quoting the speech in that way, Le Figaro stresses the common project and proactive approach in a similar way to Gazeta Wyborcza. And similar to his colleague of Le Monde, Rousselin juxtaposes contrasts regress to a free-trade logic with progress towards political integration in order  to underline that the latter option is the one to be proactively pushed. But his rearrangement supports, again, a very different interpretation. It highlights the EU’s international role and the supranationalisation of foreign and defence policies and portrays the Convention and representatives of supranational bodies, instead of the member states, as guarantors of a bright future of political integration. The proactive approach is underlined by the choice of the quote “oui nous pouvons rêver et faire rêver de l’Europe” from Giscard d’Estaing’s speech. This enhances activity, suggesting that action will follow from dream. More importantly, “faire l’Europe” (make (that) Europe) is a core slogan in French EU strategy, linking back to interviews given by Charles de Gaulle on the second Fouchet plan in 1962. Then, for the first time and unsuccessfully, the effort was made to establish a European defence union (see Sect. 3.5). Hence, the foregrounding of this quote from Giscard d’Estaing’s speech has the potential to actualise familiar slogans, but also a particular historical parallel—the French initiative for political-­ military integration as once launched by the founder of the Fifth Republic and the idol of French Gaullist conservatives. The proactive approach towards political integration is further emphasised by introducing Romano Prodi, president of the Commission at that time, as a secondary, but similarly authoritative voice. While Giscard d’Estaing casts the negative scenario of “dislocation”, Prodi provides the positive scenario of “a constitution marking the birth of a political Europe”. Moreover, his plea for a referendum on the constitutional treaty is quoted (Le Figaro, 2002a, paragraph 011). The mention of the referendum, in addition, must invoke memories about the referendum campaign on the Maastricht Treaty in the early 1990s, when giving consent on competence delegation and ‘federalisation’ was highly contested. depuis cinquante ans trouverait sa limite et serait menacé de dislocation”, chaque pays retournant “à une logique de libre-échange”. Mais, si la Convention réussit, elle “illuminera l’avenir de l’Europe”.”

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‘Federalisation’, here primarily understood as integration and co-­ decision in foreign and defence policies, is the major strand taken up in the editorial. The main concern of the editorial “What place for Europe”, authored by Pierre Rousselin, is spelt out at the beginning: [H]ow to ensure the functioning of a European Union with 25 members so that it can make itself heard and respected in the world? (Le Figaro, 2002b, paragraph 105)40

The editorialist argues that a proactive approach towards the federalisation of ESDP/CFSP is crucial for the existence of the EU, “pour exister vraiment”, because competition for global influence is toughening (he points to the US and Asia); because the citizens wish it so (“que cela marche”); but most importantly, because its rationale is to enhance France’s (and others’) position in the world (Le Figaro, 2002b, paragraph 107). He suggests abandoning the intergovernmentalist approach (and to him the Convention is proof of a related learning process among the heads of the EU-15), parting with national sovereignty in matters of diplomacy, persuading European partners of Europe puissance, and ensuring French impact within the enlarged EU, possibly as a member of a “directorate of the big” rather than only of the German-French couple. To support his argument, Rousselin draws heavily on personal authorisation (the citizens wish it so) and on impersonal authorisation (“il faut”, “ce serait absurde si”, “chacun voit”, “pour que”) as argumentative strategies. More importantly, at this point, he bridges various logical gaps by means of plausibilisation. As in the editorial of Le Monde, enlargement is constructed as a pretext for fostering political integration, which is here unambiguously understood as international action capacity. The two reasons for reform given in the Laeken Declaration and in Giscard d’Estaing’s speech—institutional reform because of enlargement and citizens’ demands; enhanced international capacity to effectively tackle international conflicts—are collapsed into one single reason: enlargement. This is achieved by the conjunction “so that” (“afin que”) in the  The French version reads thus: “comment l’Union européenne peut-elle fonctionner à vingt-cinq États membres afin de se faire entendre et de se faire respecter dans le monde?” 40

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earlier quote, which suggests a derivative relationship between proper function of the enlarged EU and its enhanced international action capacity. Another instance of tacitly bridged contradiction is the following: in the beginning of the editorial, the Convention and federalisation are portrayed as a method to overcome the ineffectiveness of the intergovernmental method and as a means to integrate the new members, whereas further down in the editorial, the directorate of the big is seen as (another) means to defend French interests. This seeming contradiction is resolved by differentiating EU logics and national logics. The French national collective is represented as essentially distinct from the EU-15: it is referenced as “us, the French”, “we”, “France”. While the EU-15 needs to learn from the ineffectiveness of the intergovernmental method, the national collective, qua its being, needs to enhance its bargaining power in intergovernmental politics. The latter exigency is additionally rendered plausible by the representation of the candidate countries. It is claimed that the candidate countries, “who are often still learning how to use their own wings to fly, don’t agree with our point of view” (Le Figaro, 2002b, paragraph 110).41 This portrayal downplays the significance of the newcomers and, at the same time, conjures up their possibly harmful ignorance. By suggesting both—federalisation and intergovernmental ‘containment’ politics—Rousselin elegantly mediates between the two possible ways of European integration contested by the implied conservative audience. While arguing for federalisation, he makes sure that the national collective is invoked as a driver and owner of reform. The plea for a pace-setting role for France in establishing a Europe puissance is also rendered plausible by utilising several keywords that crystallise certain strands of contemporary political thought on the French polity and on French EU strategy. For instance, the repeated stress on the objective to “be heard abroad”, “to affirm ourselves in the world” and to “impose itself in the world”—interchangeably used for the EU and for France—connotes the proactive universalism as in Le Monde. It seems to also fill the ellipses in the heading, suggesting that it is the “place of  The French version reads thus: “les candidats, qui souvent apprennent encore à voler de leurs propres ailes, ne sont pas acquis à nos thèses.” 41

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Europe” in the world that is at stake. As in Le Monde, there is also repeated stress on the impossibility of “the economy as single point of reference” and of a “simple free trade area”, wearing out the topical dichotomy between economic and political integration. Finally, the many references to the “F” word (“it’s clear to everybody that the federation is about to come”) and explicit mention of giving up sovereignty in the field of diplomacy lead directly to the habitual struggles of French conservatives to get to grips with shared sovereignty. To sum up, the analysis of rearrangement and addition in selected articles on the inauguration of the Convention shows how fragments of discourse generated in the Convention were translated to audience-­ specific interdiscourses. In the first place, this intersection was enabled by syntactic-grammatical means. Adverbs, propositions and demonstratives were used to rearrange the matter into a cohesive story text from different contexts, such as quotes from Giscard d’Estaing’s speech, the press conference of Polish delegates and Prodi’s comments. In doing so, the journalists generated a particular reading of the event and the prospects for the work of the Convention, designed to ‘speak’ to the implied audience. Those parts of Giscard d’Estaing’s speech were foregrounded in quotes or confabulated in paraphrases that allowed stress on power politics and problems of (foreign) dominance (Rzeczpospolita); belonging to the EU in-group (Gazeta Wyborcza); urgency of a social Europe and globally radiating civilisation project (Le Monde); and the necessity of a globally politically influential EU (Le Figaro). The syntactic means also helped to bridge logical gaps between that reading and integrated quotes. For instance, the conjunction ‘so that’ plausibilised the selective quoting from Giscard d’Estaing’s speech and the less logical conclusion of Le Monde, according to which EU enlargement was the reason for enhancing the EU’s international action capacity, and intermingled the habitualised plea for a Europe puissance with an alarming account of enlargement, both likely to arouse the readership. Apart from generating logical consistence, these syntactic-grammatical linkages proved to have an intertextual function: they allowed for hooking onto or shifting between different quotes and alternative interpretations within the text. Contrary to what I initially expected, symbols of national polity- or nation-building were not particularly salient and barely used to

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plausibilise such a rearranged reading of the inauguration of the Convention. Instead, slogans of established national EU policies were consistently used, such as the opposition of  Europe espace and Europe puissance in the French newspapers, or the reference to solidarity in relation with EU funds in Gazeta Wyborcza. Symbols of national polity-building are perceptible only in particular trigger words, such as the repetitive use of “not having a say” or “not having the right” in the Polish newspapers, or Le Monde’s stress on (the threat of ) cacophony and division. In the Polish reader, this potentially recalls the national struggle for codetermination; in the case of Le Monde the positive value of “unity”, associated with the building of the French state, is evoked. However, these allusions to foundational myths of nation-state-building are barely noticeable and employed highly flexibly. This is particularly evident in the contrary use of allusions to the overruled nation in the Polish newspapers: in Rzeczpospolita, Bieleciki uses it to underline the scenario of (once again) threatening domination, while Pawlicki in Gazeta Wyborcza enhances, through it, the scenario of future resolution in a proactive integrationist stance. The national horizon is rather implied by the consistent use of the usurpatory national ‘we’, the synechdoches that take the government or a delegate for the nation and vice versa, and the personification of Poland and France. Such delimitation of a national in-group is particularly strong in Rzeczpospolita and Le Figaro and marks the only parallel of the two right-wing papers, which together sets them apart from the two liberal-­ leftist papers. But, in all four newspapers, allusions to the constitutive symbols and to accustomed controversies over European integration that habitually trigger controversy in the associated partisan camp were more pronounced: solidarity and cohesion policy (extended to the East) in Gazeta Wyborcza, federalisation (understood as supranationalisation of decision-making) in Le Figaro or social Europe in Le Monde. This reaffirmation of a specific epistemic community is strongly marked, as the comparison between the newspapers shows. The differences in emphasis on particular constitution topics that was revealed in Sect. 6.1 directly relate to this ‘community’ focus revealed in the detailed analysis: commentators in Gazeta Wyborcza stress cohesion policies more than any other newspaper; in Le Figaro unanimity and

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CFSP/ESDP are most prominent and dense; Le Monde highlights discussion on issues of further integration of social and economic policy (see Sect. 6.1). Only Rzeczpospolita deviates from that pattern as the constitution topic that later gains major importance—the reference to God or Christianity in the preamble—is not mentioned during the inauguration of the Convention. However, the stark delimitation of the national ‘we’ from the EU, which showed in the analysis of Bielecki’s report on inauguration of the Convention, also informs the discussion on the preamble and the status of religion in EU politics later on.

6.4 T  he Discourse Field of Europeanised National News Revisited: Summary The EU constitutional agenda took on rather different meanings once recontextualised to the Polish and French newspapers investigated. The analysis presented in the previous sections reveals a strong narrowing, but also enrichment, of meaning. The four newspapers selected only those topics of EU institutional reform for in-depth coverage that had attracted some controversy, primarily during intergovernmental negotiations. But from this set of topics only those which had polarised the respective national political scene  were repeatedly addressed. And for even fewer topics, which promised to arouse the targeted political-intellectual community, they repeatedly arranged a series of commentaries. As a result, the concerns pondered in discussions in the four newspapers differed strongly, regardless of the fact that, overall, they had attributed similar salience and visibility to the EU constitutional issue. In Gazeta Wyborcza, debate primarily focused on equal representation and intergovernmental power balance within the EU, relating to broader problems of polity-building, such as democratic representation and a spirit of community, while the context most often referred to was the domestic dispute about the appropriate Polish negotiation strategy (Nice or death). Evaluation in Rzeczpospolita, while also concerned about vote weighting and equal representation between member states, dealt above all with the status of (the Christian-Catholic) religion within the enlarged

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EU as a matter of shared European identity and cultural rights to be guaranteed by the EU Constitution. The major concern of debate in the French newspapers was coherence in EU foreign policy and the establishment of an institutionally balanced EU defence policy that was on an equal footing with the US. However, discussants in Le Monde also took a strong interest in EU social policy and seemed to relate it to human rights to be granted in the Charter and democratic self-determination. Discussants in Le Figaro, instead, pondered the loss of control over policymaking implied by extended, qualified majority voting and the prospects of regaining that control through joint EU leadership with Germany. Hence, what was a common agenda—EU institutional reform—turned into thematically strictly narrowed debates. As the assessment of the speakers’ provenance revealed, these debates were also largely introverted, featuring voices above all from the national scene and the associated intellectual-political camp. Moreover, even though there was considerable attention devoted to events in the respective other country and occasional mutual reference or explicit exchange of arguments between Polish and French public figures, discussants remained strongly implicated in the respective introverted debate, unable to acknowledge the validity of the interlocutor’s view. This was evident, for instance, in the argument published in Gazeta Wyborcza and Le Monde featuring Olivier Duhamel and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, on the one hand, and Marek Beylin and Adam Michnik, on the other. Such selective, diversifying and divisive recontextualisation—according to the argument introduced at the beginning of the chapter—was due to the self-referential practices of the discourse field of Europeanised national news media, their conventionalised language use, regulative discourse and competitive-relational positioning. The previous sections studied the discourse practices constituting this field, in the selection, weighting, rearrangement and complementing of discourse fragments adopted from multilateral negotiation. The content-analytical study of the selection and weighting and of metadata regarding publication date, placement and authorship revealed how the newspapers generated news salience and media visibility. The discourse-analytical study of rearrangement and addition showed how the newspapers generated consonance with the target audience. In this summary, I will consider how the insights

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gained  can qualify and advance existing knowledge on Europeanised national news media and what they reveal about the role ‘the national’ plays in Europeanised political communication.

Shared Practices, Divergent Outcomes In a nutshell, the analysis showed that the narrowing and selective enrichment described earlier was due to the routinised practices of generating news salience and consonance for EU politics, which were shared by the European affairs editors and correspondents of the four newspapers. The fact that they convergently selected the same overall set of constitution topics for coverage, attributing to them similar relevance in terms of publication output, in-depth coverage and placement, could be related to their primary focus on institutional events of constitution-drafting at the EU level. While they only rarely reserved a prominent place for the constitutional issue, they all consistently staged it as a matter deserving principled commentary and debate, thus attributing significance primarily in terms of controversy or ‘debate worthiness’. Ironically, not only convergence in salience attribution, but also the divergence in the emphasis and associated meanings of selected constitution topics was produced by shared professional practices, and practices of generating debate worthiness, more specifically. It was strongest between the two country settings and less pronounced between newspapers in the same country setting. The EU constitutional issue was attributed particular relevance when an EU institutional event could be related to disputes between individual governments (intergovernmental polarisation), to a controversial statement on the national government’s negotiation position (domestic polarisation) or to opposing views from associated politicalintellectual camps (partisan polarisation). For instance, debate on the EU constitution intensified in the two Polish newspapers in October 2003, when intergovernmental quarrels over the Constitutional Treaty could be related to bilateral diplomatic irritations between the French and Polish governments and resonated with  the oppositional parties’ mobilisation against the Constitutional Treaty and the overall moral indignation over the damage the other political-­intellectual camp supposedly did to national

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interests. These moments of mediatised political polarisation largely explain the national variance in emphasis on selected topics of EU institutional reform: they highlight the domestic political struggle over ongoing intergovernmental negotiations. The variance in thematic emphasis between newspapers in the same country setting, on the other hand, occurred because all four newspapers, individually and asynchronously, arranged debates that brought the EU constitutional issue down to controversies over national EU policy that are constituent for the associated partisan-epistemic community. Le Monde arranged debates on Europe sociale, which are crucial in the French left, Le Figaro arranged debates on French-German leadership, which are pondered in the French centrist right, while Rzeczpospolita highlighted  self-determined moral politics, which Polish national conservatives identify with, and Gazeta Wyborcza on  democratic-internationalist co-determination and catch-up development, which are habitually debated in the Polish liberal scene. The additional discourse analysis of news reports and journalistic commentary on the launch of the Convention showed that the translation into partisan debate was bolstered by various discourse strategies of plausibilisation, which constructed syntactical and logical coherence between fragments from politicians’ statements and added trigger words actualising audience-specific connotations. These strategies of plausibilisation, adopted early in the Constitution process, established a template for interpretation which was hitherto consistently applied whenever a debate on the EU constitution was arranged. The EU constitutional agenda was, hence, not only narrowed and ‘domesticated’, but also channelled into what editors assumed were recognisable concerns of national EU policy that habitually attracted controversy in the associated partisan community.

 uropeanised Communication Revisited Through E the Lens of Discourse Field The described insights confirm, but also re-accentuate, existing knowledge on Europeanised news media and European media publics. They underline earlier observations that national broadsheets cover EU politics relatively intensely and steadily, compared to other media segments (Wyrozumska, 2007) or compared to  broadsheets in distant non-EU

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countries such as the US (Kantner, Kutter, & Renfordt, 2008), and they account for the EU’s dual power base, attributing visibility to developments and agents both at EU level and in fellow member states (Koopmans & Erbe, 2004). The study showed that EU-related news coverage in this segment converges in relevance attribution across different national media publics, not only in terms of overall publication output, which previous studies detected (Kantner et  al., 2008), but also in terms of placement and the extent of in-depth coverage and evaluation. It confirmed that EU journalists predominantly focus on EU institutional events, occasionally complemented by revelations of scandals within EU institutions, which earlier studies have shown (AIM-Research-­ Consortium, 2007). But it also highlighted that, along with institutional leverage, controversy is another news value regularly associated with EU politics, so that news salience is attributed according to the ‘debate worthiness’ of the events accounted for. The present study also underscores the assertion that there is mutual reference, if not exchange of arguments, between discussants in news media from different member states, here observed rarely for Le Monde and Le Figaro, occasionally for Rzeczpospolita and more frequently for Gazeta Wyborcza. These features of Europeanisation—this being another outcome of the study—are not only typical of broadsheets in long-standing EU member states, but may be even more pronounced in national news media in accession states. But the insights generated in this chapter also stress the reverse trends that previous studies spotted, such as the consistent foregrounding of member state representatives and ‘domesticisation’ in terms of highlighting aspects of EU politics that resonate with the contemporary domestic political agenda (Adam, 2007; Koopmans, 2007). The analysis of ‘clusters of debate’ and of plausibilisation strategies further revealed that, mutual reference notwithstanding, discussants remained implicated in the introverted national-partisan debates, which the individual newspapers initiated, and that problem conceptions remained unmediated. I am cautious to read these revelations as proving either the emergence of EU-related communication communities or the persistence of national views, and thus as reflecting developments outside the media field in linear ways. The study revealed that, contrary to what is sometimes

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suggested in research on European media publics (Eder & Kantner, 2000), convergent patterns of news coverage do not imply a synchronous transnational debate that ponders the same problems or even develops similar problem conceptions; instead, debates remain asynchronous and divergent in focus and associated meaning. In turn, the newspapers’ stress on intergovernmental and domestic controversies and their fuelling of national moral indignation does not imply that the broadsheets unduly downplayed the supranational dimension of EU politics or that the national communication system and the national political scene determine what is at stake in EU journalism; this is disconfirmed by the many parallel features of Europeanisation disclosed. A further interpretation is refuted by the insights generated in the chapter, namely the assertion that the observed patterns correspond to diverging professional self-­ conceptions and modes of scandalisation or politicisation endorsed by different national and generational cohorts of EU correspondents (Baisnée, 2003): all four newspapers politicised events by fuelling intergovernmental and domestic political polarisation and simultaneously followed the template of institutional journalism, which trusts official sources as an authoritative political voice and adopts institutionalised journalistic expertise as a legitimate approach to EU political events. These scattered and contradictory patterns of EU journalism join to reveal a clearer picture when approached from the perspective of the discourse field of Europeanised national news media. This perspective suggests that we are dealing with the effects of a shared repertoire and routine combination of specialised professional practice of Europeanised national news media, instead of with effects of external (news) factors or their national variation. Coverage converges and debates diverge between the four newspapers, because the newspapers apply the same practices of classifying and processing EU news for a national audience  and use these practices flexibly for relational positioning in the national journalistic field. Thereby, the four newspapers govern what is at stake in the field; they maintain consecration power (the ability to generate visibility and relevance) over what happens in the various scenes of EU policymaking, in a way that secures them a share in the news of the day and allows for social distinction among competitors.

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Thus, by focusing on institutional events and official sources, the four broadsheets, above all, qualified as belonging to the institutionalised professional tribes among journalists, but not to community media or social media that operate on unofficial sources, or tabloid journalism which focuses on (intrusive-investigative) revelations. The fact that they applied standard routines of processing news, attributing salience in convergent ways, allowed them to maintain an equal share in the EU news of the day and consecrate newsworthy events in the supranational and intergovernmental arenas. At the same time, they were thus able to signal adherence to professional standards and present themselves as high-quality news organisations with a pro-European orientation. This broadsheet profile can also be discerned in the strong emphasis on continued debate. Additionally, the cultivation of principled debate on European integration can be seen as a tribute to the essayistic-evaluative tradition of Polish and French journalism, highlighting the four newspapers’ significance as national reference papers that embody the national history of the profession. The strong ‘domesticisation’ of EU news can be read as an effort to maintain consecration power over domestic political events. It shows in fact that the four newspapers weighed topics according to their assumed relevance for the domestic political agenda. They foregrounded politicians from their own country and scandalised divisive statements voiced by an oppositional politician or an EU representative who challenged the national government’s negotiation strategy. While the two pairs of newspapers stuck to a shared national horizon in their choice of and emphasis on specific constitution topics, they also sought distinction by launching their own debates (and thus setting the ‘debate agenda’) on a latent conflict in domestic politics. This is the case with Le Monde’s scoop on Giscard d’Estaing’s opposition to French governmental enlargement policy or Gazeta Wyborcza’s continuous ramification of the debate on ‘Nice or death’. The repetitive references to these self-generated discursive events, which were revealed by the co-occurrence analysis (see ‘repeatedly referred-to events’ in Sect. 6.1), demonstrates that the thematic variation between the newspapers goes back to relational positioning among news organisations within the national journalistic field. This conclusion is further supported by the revelation that the four newspapers instigated,

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again and again and at self-chosen points in time, habitual debates on European integration and constitutional struggles, which promised to enhance exclusive alignment with the target audience. In the present case study, it can be shown that each newspaper established its own template of interpretation or editorial line on EU constitution-drafting, slightly different from that of the competitor, according to which these exclusive debates were arranged and the series of invited commentaries introduced and commented upon. For instance, Gazeta Wyborcza set itself apart not only by putting less emphasis on Rzeczpospolita’s preferred constitution topic of Reference to God/Christianity, but also by plausibilising its alternative choice of topics in a distinct way. In the editorial by Pawlicki, the question of whether or not to give up on the vote-weighting system of the Nice Treaty and meet Germany and France in their preference for a double-­qualified majority voting was framed not as a problem of fighting foreign domination (again), as in Rzeczpospolita, but as urging a solidarity- and open-minded approach to negotiation partners. Thereby, Pawlicki invoked a reconciliatory approach, which representatives of the associated political camp had adopted towards communists during the political transition. In short, relational positioning among competitors within the national journalistic field and broadsheet segment drew heavily on domestic partisan battles, here over adequate approaches towards (ex-communist) adversaries, which have divided splinter groups of the former Solidarity movement since 1989 and with whom Rzeczpospolita and Gazeta Wyborcza have sided in opposing ways. In the EU constitutional debate, the four broadsheets, hence, actualised the partisan alignment which we found marks their particular competitive profile (see Sect. 4.4).

 he ‘National’ During Recontextualisation in National T News Media The perspective of the discourse field also opens up a different angle from which to assess the significance of ‘the national’ in the process of recontextualisation. Existing studies in Europeanised mass communication often assume that ‘domesticisation’ is determined by external national

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factors, such as adaptability to a specific national policy tradition or political actor constellation (Adam, 2007, Boomgaarden et  al., 2013). The discourse field perspective invites us, instead, to denaturalise the national and to view it as engendered and pinpointed in the course of EU news construction, as an ingredient of Europeanised political communication that results from media agents’ relational positioning. The insights gathered in this chapter support this reading in several ways. First, the national is  revealed as a horizon of interpretation shared by two broadsheets from the same national setting. It shows in similar topic choice and relevance attribution. It was revealed in the researcher’s content-analytical abstraction when contrasted with the topic choice and relevance attribution of the two newspapers in the other country setting. Substantively, these similarities constitute a national variation only insofar as they foreground a domestic political agenda and highlight topics struggled over primarily in one national context, but less so in the other. Secondly, ‘the national’ is constructed as the desirable negotiation preference of one’s own government (or ‘national interest’), over which the journalist claims superior (to competitors) interpretive authority. It crystallises only once juxtaposed to other national interests as being comparatively more European. The national preference forms when authorised with reference to voices of national politicians, when delimitated against others by the usurping national ‘we’, possessive constructions (‘our country’) and personifications, and when scandalised in moral panics as being harmed by fellow Europeans or opposed political camps. In short, ‘the national’, understood as a  desirable diplomatic stance in EU negotiations, forms only in juxtaposition with the ‘European interest’ and other ‘national interests’ or partisan preferences. It is realised mainly in referencing discourse strategies of representation which enact a positive association or negative dissociation with an in- or out-group. Thirdly, ‘the national’ is constructed more implicitly in plausibilisation strategies that seek to establish complicity and consonance with the target audience. For instance, the repetitive use of the expression “not having a say” or “not having the right” in the Polish newspapers potentially recalled Polish collective memory of the overruled nation and the struggle for freedom and co-determination, actualising a strong collective symbol of national interdiscourse. However, such allusions to foundational myths

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of national polity-building were employed highly flexibly to enhance competing visions of what national EU policy should address. In Rzeczpospolita, the allusion to the betrayed and overruled nation was used to underline the scenario of (renewed) foreign domination and the plea for hard-nosed power politics, while Gazeta Wyborcza enhanced, through it, the scenario of resolving that problematic condition in a proactive integrationist stance. Much more pronounced were trigger words and slogans that recalled established national EU policies, such as the juxtaposition between Europe espace and Europe puissance or Europe sociale in the French newspapers, which invoked the stress on political integration in French EU policy, or the reference to solidarity in relation to EU funds in Gazeta Wyborcza, which reinforced the stress on redistributional justice in Polish EU policy. These trigger words were preferred for plausibilising a specific portrayal of EU politics and for enhancing a particular plea or future scenario. In short, journalists did presuppose a national horizon (the domestic political agenda), a national diplomatic preference and a national collective and referred to them in intra-European blame games. But their effort at generating consonance and complicity with the target audience was geared towards interpellating a partisan-epistemic community that identified with a specific project of national EU membership. The following chapter will show what polity constructions emerged in the context of such recontextualisation.

References Adam, S. (2007). Domestic Adaptations of Europe: A Comparative Study of the Debates on EU Enlargement and a Common Constitution in the German and French Quality Press. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 19(4), 409–433. AIM-Research-Consortium (Ed.) (2007). Comparing the Logic of EU Reporting: Transnational Analysis of EU Correspondence from Brussels. Adequate Information Management in Europe (AIM). Bochum and Freiburg: Projekt Verlag. Baisnée, O. (2003). Can Political Journalism Exist at the EU Level? In R. Kuhn & E.  Neveu (Eds.), Political Journalism: New Challenges, New Practices (pp. 108–128). London and New York: Routledge.

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Bielecki, J. (2002a, March 1). Jaka Unia, jaka Europa? Konwent wystartował— obawy polskich delegat [What Union, what Europe? The Convention Started—Polish Delegates’ Concerns]. Rzeczpospolita, p. 1. Bielecki, J. (2002b, March 1). Wielkie słowa, małe reformy. Rozpoczyna prace Konwent Unii, który opracuje projekt ‘konstytucji europejkiej’. [Big Words, Small Reforms. The Convention has Started to Work on the Project of a ‘European Constitution’]. Rzeczpospolita. Boomgaarden, H. G., de Vreese, C. H., Schuck, A. R. T., Azrout, R., Elenbaas, M., van Spanje, J. H. P., & Vliegenthart, R. (2013). Across Time and Space: Explaining Variation in News Coverage of the European Union. European Journal of Political Research, 52, 608–629. Eder, K., & Kantner, C. (2000). Transnationale Resonanzstrukturen in Europa. In M.  Bach (Ed.), Europäisierung nationaler Gesellschaften (pp.  306–331). Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Eder, K., & Kantner, C. (2002). Interdiskursivität in der europäischen Öffentlichkeit. Berliner Debatte Initial, 13(5/6), 79–88. Kantner, C., Kutter, A., & Renfordt, S. (2008). The Perception of the EU as an Emerging Security Actor in Media Debates on Humanitarian and Military Interventions (1990–2006). RECON Online Working Paper, 2008(19), Arena Oslo, Oslo. Koopmans, R. (2007). Who Inhabits the European Public Sphere? Winners and Losers, Supporters and Opponents in Europeanised Political Debates. European Journal of Political Research, 46, 183–210. Koopmans, R., & Erbe, J. (2004). Towards a European Public Sphere? Vertical and Horizontal Dimensions of Europeanized Political Communication. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Sciences, 17(2), 97–118. Koopmans, R., & Pfetsch, B. (2007). Towards a Europeanised Public Sphere? Comparing Political Actors and the Media in Germany. In J.  E. Fossum, P.  Schlesinger, & G.  O. Kvaerk (Eds.), Public Sphere and Civil Society? Transformations of the European Union (pp. 57–87). Oslo: ARENA. Le Figaro. (2002a, March 1). L’Europe se cherche un nouvel avenir [Europe is Searching Itself a New Future]. Le Figaro, pp. 1, 4. Le Figaro. (2002b, March 1). Quelle place pour l’Europe? [What Place for Europe?]. Le Figaro, p. 13. Le Monde. (2002a, March 1). Les conventionels [The Conventioneers]. Le Monde. Le Monde. (2002b, March 1). Vers une Constitution pour l’Europe [Towards a European Constitution]. Le Monde, p. 1. Link, J. (2003). Kulturwissenschaft, Interdiskurs, Kulturrevolution. kultuRRevolution (45/46), 10–23.

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Pawlicki, J. (2002a, March 1). Jaka będzie rola Polski w rozpoczętym wczoraj Konwencie. Stróże solidarności? [What Will be Poland’s Role in the Convention? Watchmen of Solidarity?]. Gazeta Wyborcza, p. 12. Pawlicki, J. (2002b). Konwent wystartował [The Convention has Started]. Gazeta Wyborcza, p. 1. Peter, J., Semetko, H. A., & De Vreese, C. H. (2003). EU Politics on Television News: A Cross-National Comparative Study. European Union Politics, 4(3), 305–327. Ratka, E. (2009). Frankreichs Identität und die politische Integration Europas: der späte Abschied vom Nationalstaat. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Risse, T. (Ed.). (2015). European Public Spheres: Politics is Back. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schlesinger, P. (1999). Changing Spaces of Political Communication: The Case of the European Union. Political Communication, 16, 263–279. Thompson, K. (1998). Moral Panics. London and New York: Routledge. Wyrozumska, A. (2007). Who is Willing to Die for the Constitution? The National Debate on the Constitutional Treaty in Poland. Perspectives on European Politics and Society, 8(3), 314–341.

7 Constructing the Polity Nexus: Legitimation in Media Debates in Poland and France

The debate on the EU constitution not only proved divisive among those negotiating treaty revision, but also revealed strong “pluri-­ decontextualisation” (Fossum & Trenz, 2006, p. 12), that is, strong variation in the meanings attached to the EU constitution among the member states’ publics. The previous chapter revealed that such differentiation results from recontextualisation, the way in which national news media appropriate EU issues from the discourse field of multilateral negotiation, transforming it into salient and consonant news for a national and partisan audience. While the four investigated dailies, Gazeta Wyborcza, Rzeczpospolita, Le Monde and Le Figaro, enabled extended discussion on EU institutional reform, they did so according to the discourse formation and generic practice of news journalism, within the confines of editorial lines and formatted media debates, which allowed for relational positioning in the discourse field of national media. As a result, thematic emphasis and added connotations differed strongly between countries and newspapers (see Chap. 6). This chapter investigates the polity construction that took place within the frames of the media debate arranged by the newspapers in this way. It presents and discusses empirical findings for two research questions

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investigated in the book: the question of how, by what discourse p ­ ractices, the EU is legitimised and delegitimised, and the question of what role the national imaginary plays in accommodating constructions of EU polity and how the European and the national are thereby combined. The questions are motivated by conceptualisation of discursive political legitimation in the EU setting developed earlier from a combination of linguistic-­pragmatic conceptions of discourse as social practice, Bourdieu’s consideration of symbolic violence in political representation in liberal democracies and the political philosophy of state-building (see Chap. 3). Accordingly, the adequacy and justifiability of political rule beyond the state, its legitimate institution and execution, are not only matters of legitimacy belief and consciously voiced evaluation, as usually suggested in the political sociology and political science literature. The book claims that the EU’s legitimation and delegitimation is also implied in ‘discourse practices of legitimation’, that is, in conventionalised language use that is ritually actualised in specific pragmatic contexts (discourse as practice), while drawing on existing polity discourses, especially on acknowledged rationales of polity-building (discourse as historically specific knowledge formation). Moreover, endorsing the premise that intersubjective meaning about legitimate political rule is always constituted through the correspondence between an utterance (text) and the circumstances of its expression (context), I expect that some meaning-transforming recontextualisation will go on between the context of multilateral negotiation, in which definitions of EU rule are first established, and the context of mediatised national debate in member states, in which they are justified or contested vis-à-vis a more general audience (see Chap. 3). This chapter investigates these expectations, assessing insights generated by the combined content and discourse analysis of discursive legitimation that I designed earlier (see Sect. 3.6). The assessment draws on the content analysis of 1,863 evaluative articles published on the EU constitution in Gazeta Wyborcza, Rzeczpospolita, Le Monde and Le Figaro in the years 2002–2004, on the one hand. On the other, it is based on the discourse analysis of clusters of debate arranged by the Gazeta Wyborcza and Le Monde on the  most controversial issues of the Draft Constitution in autumn 2003. They were selected in a funnel method of grounded downsizing, on the basis of content-analytical findings (see Sect. 2.4, for the funnel method). The first section provides an overview of issues of EU

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polity-building that were raised by discussants. It presents findings on the distribution and co-occurrence of polity topics, that is, of issues that are regularly pondered in relation to political association and political authority, including attributes of the constituent political community (boundaries of belonging, political culture) and principles of institutionalisation and power execution (power sharing, foundational principles). Moreover, similarities and differences in associated meaning are assessed, scrutinising the co-occurrence with constitution topics, that is, proposals for EU institutional reform, embedding topics and repeatedly referred-to events (Sect. 7.1). The second section assesses those polity topics in more detail, in a qualitative scan of coded text passages, that proved to be dense in all four newspapers, that is, that were interlinked with many other topics: democracy and boundaries of the EU. This look into systematically gathered text passages will give an overview of how EU polity constructions generated in the context of multilateral negotiation were appropriated to media debates on democracy and belonging (Sect. 7.2). In the third section, EU polity constructions will be assessed in depth, scrutinising argumenative interaction in each cluster of debate arranged by Gazeta Wyborcza and Le Monde on the Draft Constitution in autumn 2003. As the two clusters contain EU constitution speak and the topics of debate that proved most controversial in the two countries and the four newspapers, their analysis gives a fair impression of discursive legitimation of the European Union in the Polish and French media debate on EU institutional reform (Sect. 7.3). Together, the three steps of analysis offer a synoptic view on EU polity construction in national media debates (Sect. 7.4).

7.1 P  olity Topics: From Functioning Institutions to Legitimate Political Association This section presents findings yielded by the comparative content analysis of polity topics and associated contents (constitution topics, embedding topics, repeatedly referred-to events). The objective is to work out an overview of what issues of polity-building were pondered in evaluative

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articles in the four newspapers, whether this selection reflected issues pondered during multilateral negotiation and what distinct profiles of polity discourse the four newspapers developed, with what national and/ or partisan similarities and differences. Indeed, the debate on concrete suggestions for institutional reform (constitution topics) analysed earlier (see Sect. 6.1) coincided with a discussion of classic themes of polity-building—principles of good institutional architecture and attributes of legitimate political association (polity topics). These abstract implications of institutional reform were commented on either on the occasion of particular ‘constitution topics’, for instance, when the suggestion was made that the Enlightenment, but not religious heritage, be mentioned in the preamble, or in a more fundamental manner, for example in a commentary pondering the attributes of European identity or the future of sovereignty. Hence, against the backdrop of concrete constitution-drafting, polity discourse came to the fore. The content analysis also revealed that core formulae of EU constitution speak, for example about rendering institutions, procedures and so on “more efficient, transparent, and democratic”, were part of the debate and were not only voiced by politicians marketing the progress of the Convention or the IGCs, but were also taken up by discussants of different provenance.1 The discussion of good institutional architecture touched upon the various checks and balances characteristic of the EU system—the balance between EU bodies [Balance EU-EU]; the balance between member states within the Council, the Commission or the EP [Balance MS-MS]; the balance between the shared and exclusive legislative-executive or judicial competences of EU-level and domestic institutions [Balance EU-MS]; and the balance between various levels of territorial government [Balance multilevel]. As we can see from Fig. 7.1, discussants in all four newspapers were quite concerned about the delimitation of competences between the national and EU levels: this polity topic occurred in 8.1% (Gazeta Wyborcza), 9.0% (Rzeczpospolita), 8.44% (Le Monde) and  ‘EU constitution speak’ was tracked in a semi-automated manner in atlas. ti: a search for the most characteristic phrases such as ‘transparen∗’, ‘more democratic’ and so on, identified articles in the text collection containing these phrases so that I could decide which of them were used in the sense of the Laeken Declaration and Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory address. Constitution speak was particularly salient during the Convention period. 1

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Political Will

Democracy* 25

Balance EUEU

20

Unity

Balance EUMS

15 Spirit of Community

Balance EUNATO

10 5

Manners

Balance MS-MS

0

Balance Multilevel

Religion

Sovereignty

Identity Diversity

Leadership Borders*

Le Monde

Le Figaro

Gazeta Wyborcza

Rzeczpospolita

Fig. 7.1  Polity topics (in % of N). (Source: Own elaboration) Topics marked by an asterisk were built from several subordinate or related topics. ‘Democracy’ includes positive references to democracy as a value (‘Democracy’) and reference to problems of democratic legitimacy (‘Alienation and Contestedness’); ‘Borders’ include all instances of delimitation towards out-groups, mostly Turkey, other accession and neighbouring countries and/or competitors, mostly the US (‘Borders and Frontiers’, ‘EU-US’)

14.08% (Le Figaro) of evaluative articles. The balance between EU bodies was an additional concern in French evaluative articles, but not so much in  Polish  ones (Le Monde: 7.8%; Le Figaro: 8.7% vs Gazeta Wyborcza: 4.25% and Rzeczpospolita: 2.15%). Discussants in the Polish newspapers, in contrast, primarily focused on the balance between member states (Gazeta Wyborcza: 11.39%; Rzeczpospolita: 13.11% vs Le Monde: 5.7% and Le Figaro: 8.49%).

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This difference in emphasis reflects the predominant stress in the Polish discussion on the vote weighting in the Council and in the French debate on the institutional anchorage of CFSP/ESDP, which was identified in Sect. 6.1. The polity topics that  turned out to be particularly salient related semantically to these frequent constitution topics. Figure 7.1 also demonstrates that the EU’s multilevel character, despite the work on subsidiarity in the Convention, was only a marginal concern (Gazeta Wyborcza: 1.25%; Rzeczpospolita: 1.17%; Le Monde: 1.05%; and Le Figaro: 2.28%). Of similar importance in all four newspapers was, instead, and obviously linked to suggestions on a strengthened defence component in the EU’s foreign and security policies, the balance between the EU as a military force and defence alliance, on the one hand, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) [Balance EU-NATO] or the US [Balance EU-US], on the other. Hence, the debate took account of additional institutional checks and balances that are imposed by the set of other international organisations in which the EU or European countries take part. The EU constitutional debate pushed the idea of a formalised-­constitutionalised relationship between defence organisations and their (exclusive or shared) competences; it was subject of debate in about 4% of the evaluative articles (Gazeta Wyborcza: 4.05%; Rzeczpospolita: 4.13% vs Le Monde: 3.16% and Le Figaro: 4.55%) (see Fig. 7.1). The most striking finding is, however, that the debate in the four newspapers was not limited to a focus on improving institutional balances and institutional performance, which was predominant during multilateral negotiations. Contrary to the debate in the Convention, which was driven by legal-constitutional concerns, and the intergovernmental negotiations, which raised problems of power division, the media debates foregrounded struggles over the definition of legitimate political association and authority beyond the state: attributes of constituent community and criteria of legitimate power execution. In all four newspapers, the institutional architecture of the EU figures in ‘only’ 26.16% (Le Monde), 29.5% (Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita) and 38.1% (Le Figaro) of evaluative articles. Attributes of political community and criteria of legitimate power execution, instead, are referred to in 74% (Gazeta Wyborcza), in 80% (Le Monde and Rzeczpospolita) and 90% (Le Figaro) of

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evaluative articles.2 Discussing the EU constitution in national media, hence, seems to necessarily involve discussion about legitimate political authority and association. Figure 7.1 reveals that democracy, sovereignty, respect for religion, diversity and leadership were the most frequently mentioned criteria of legitimate power execution within the EU’s setting. They arose when the lack or presence of democratic control or popular support within the EU was an issue [Democracy], when the respect for (Judeo-Christian) religion as an extra-positive reference or the important cultural heritage of EU politics was mentioned [Religion] and when discussion dealt with the desirability of (cultural, regional) multiplicity [Diversity], national sovereignty [Sovereignty] or claims for EU leadership [Leadership]. Attributes of community were pondered, for example, in positive projections of an EU-specific identity [Identity] or when drawing boundaries between European Selves and American, Turkish, Muslim or Eastern and Western European or Asian Others [Borders]. They were also raised in terms of a political culture specific to the European Union, such as a European consciousness, often opposed to ‘national egotisms’ and employed as argument pro bono publico [Spirit of Community]; unity and coherence as opposed to divisions [Unity]; the appeal to a  conscious and energetic commitment to joint problem-solving and integration [Political Will]; or compliance with EU norms and conformity with standardised practices such as budget discipline or multilateralism, often portrayed as appropriate behaviour qualifying ‘good Europeans’ [Manners]. In the case of the French newspaper debates, the prominence of Democracy is striking. Figure 7.1 shows that it is referenced in more than 20% of all evaluative articles, unlike other polity topics that generally remain below 15%. Moreover, strong emphasis is put on delimiting an EU identity from outsiders by defining Borders (Le Monde: 12.53%; Le Figaro: 15.33%), as well as on the problem of EU-internal coherence, referred to as a need for Unity (Le Monde: 8.02%; Le Figaro: 11.18%). In the Polish case, discussants in Gazeta Wyborcza again seem to mediate  Note that for Le Figaro, semi-automatic coding was used more extensively, based on prior text-by-­ text coding and insights gained during the analysis of Le Monde. This produced more matches for Le Figaro for all topics, but does not distort relative values, that is, the relative importance of institution-related polity topics as compared to community-related topics and so on. 2

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between the patterns of the French newspapers and those of Rzeczpospolita. They mention Democracy in about 10.4% (Rzeczpospolita: 8.4%) and Borders in 11.4% of evaluative articles (Rzeczpospolita: 8.2%). At the same time, they also stress Religion (7.3%) and Sovereignty (7%)—two topics that are particularly important to discussants in Rzeczpospolita (Religion: 12.3%; Sovereignty: 7.8%). Interestingly, Gazeta Wyborcza is the only one to refer to Manners with some regularity, in 6.58% of evaluative articles; while Le Figaro stands out by frequently dealing with Leadership (9.7%). When focusing on commonalities rather than differences, Fig. 7.1 reveals that reference and appeal to a Spirit of Community is strong in all four newspapers (in about 10% of evaluative articles, with the exception of Le Monde), while Diversity as an integral value of EU integration remains a marginal reference of discussion. We can also discern commonalities between the two conservative newspapers: their invitees deal more often with implications for national sovereignty, diversity and competence division between the national and EU levels than do their liberal counterparts. That said, the figure also clearly shows that these issues, so unsurprisingly related to sovereigntist conceptions of European integration, are not the major and foremost concerns in conservatives’ discussions on the EU constitution. In fact, in all four newspapers the polity topics of  Democracy and Borders were the densest: they were regularly mentioned with many other topics and often linked to principled commentary on the EU’s distinct identity (Identity) or mention of Unity or Spirit of Community. This was revealed by the co-occurrence analysis of polity topics and co-occurring contents. Hence, discussants in the four newspapers saw issues of political community and legitimacy primarily through the lens of democracy and belonging, that is, of the question who ought to or must not be part of the European project and on what grounds. Obviously, connotations of these topics varied. In the French newspapers, Borders clustered primarily with issues related to the 2004 EU expansion and Turkey’s candidacy for EU entry, both approved in December 2002. When the EU’s foreign and defence policies were discussed, boundary-drawing also related to transatlantic relations, in particular the competitive positioning between the EU and the US, and frequently co-occurred with references to the Iraq War. In Le Monde, CFSP/ESDP and the delimitation against

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the US were brought into connection with issues of the political culture of the European Union (Unity, Political Will, Spirit of Community), while it linked up to the promise of (French) EU leadership in Le Figaro. In the Polish newspaper, the borders of the European Union were not particularly controversial and were only mentioned, as a rule, when transatlantic relations were at stake.3 Discussants in Gazeta Wyborcza problematised the relationship between the EU and the US in conjunction with the Iraq crisis and the institutionalisation of CFSP/ESDP, as did the French newspapers. In Rzeczpospolita, in  contrast, transatlantic relations were pondered only in connection to the Iraq War and the controversy about the EU as a civil power compared to the US as a military power, which had been raised in widely received essay by Kagan, countered by Habermas and Derrida, Albright and Kissinger. When discussing Democracy, French commentators were particularly ramified on topics of institutional reform that connected to the problem of the strengthening of EU majoritarian institutions (e.g. extended co-­ decision for the EP, veto powers for national parliaments, direct or indirect election for the EU presidency) and procedures of involvement (citizens’ petitions). But they also reviewed the question of whether or not there should be a referendum on the EU constitution and the checks and balances between EU bodies (Balance EU-EU) through the lens of democratic legitimacy. In the Polish newspapers, instead, Democracy more frequently co-occurred with checks and balances between member states (Balance MS-MS). Interesting differences also show in the clustering of the polity topic of Identity with Borders and Democracy. In Le Monde, this link is most pronounced and complemented by references to a Spirit of Community, Diversity, Sovereignty and Religion. In contrast, in Le Figaro, Identity remains a rather unrelated topic. And while commentators in Gazeta Wyborcza also link Identity to Democracy, they additionally highlight Religion as an important thematic aspect, which is the  In Gazeta Wyborcza, Borders occasionally also relate to a welcoming mentioning of further expansions, but to such low degree that it does not show in Fig. 7.1. The argument made in this context is that EU entry would bring about socio-economic stability and the fostering of liberal values (pluralism, human rights). It was used to justify Poland’s EU accession and is now extended to Turkey. 3

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exclusive and strongest associate of Identity in Rzeczpospolita. The ­following two sections assess what polity construction was facilitated by such differentiated thematic narrowing.

7.2 Polity Duplicatis: Communitarian Rationales in Ritualised EU Commentary Along with the shift of focus from functional-federalist considerations of the appropriate institutional architecture to issues of legitimate political association, conceptions of the EU as polity sui generis changed, too; these had been carved out during multilateral negotiations, such as the construction of the EU as a civilising power or responsive democratic system (for these see Sect. 5.1). This was revealed by a closer scrutiny of text passages annotated with polity topics that had proved to be dense in all four newspapers: Democracy and Borders. The debate on the state of democracy within the EU (Democracy) showed diversifying appropriation of the construction of the EU as a responsive democratic system, while discussion of the EU’s boundaries (Borders) involved a modifying appropriation of the construction of the EU as civilising power, as will be shown in this section.

From Responsiveness to Self- and Co-determination The strong emphasis on Democracy in all four newspapers is related to an elaborate discussion of the EU’s democracy deficit—more precisely, of the disenchantment with EU politics and rising Euroscepticism, the future of democratic politics in a postnational setting and the functional deficits of EU institutional structures in ensuring democratic accountability and participation (what is known as deficient input legitimacy in scholarly debate, see Sect. 1.2). Hence, discussants joined in and signalled familiarity with a major tenet of political and scholarly debate. However, EU constitution speak related to deficiencies in the democratic performance of EU institutions is turned into a much more fundamental

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evaluation of democratic politics in the postnational setting.4 The utilitarian construction of the EU as a responsive democratic system, which is frequent in core documents of the Constitution process and suggests that EU representatives duly account for citizens’ demands for greater democratic control, is replaced by a stress on national co-determination and popular self-determination. This can be derived from the text passages containing references to democracy. Polish discussants are primarily concerned with the (continuous, diminishing) role of the nation-state as framework for democratic politics. The backdrop to this discussion is not so much the democratic deficit of the European Union as the perceived crisis of the Polish state, notably the little trust Polish citizens have in Polish democratic institutions. The nation-state’s performance in terms of accountability and participation is at stake, rather than only its lessening steering power— contrary to established patterns of debate in Western EU member states and France, in particular, where globalisation and the EU’s network governance are the major reference points for concerns about accountability. The radical questioning of the state as an adequate framework of democratic politics yields polarised answers: commentators in Gazeta Wyborcza tend towards supranational conceptions; they sympathise with the dissolution of national into European politics with the aim of a better democratic and economic development dividend for the Poles (sic!) and endorse further democratisation of supranational institutions. Commentators in Rzeczpospolita in general take the opposite position; that is, they see the nation-state as safeguard of national self-­determination and plead for stronger control over self-perpetuating EU institutions by national governments. The Polish discussion on democracy thus directly links to issues of competence division, sovereignty and the protection of national peculiarity against EU legal impositions (particularly in Rzeczpospolita) and to questions of multilevel subsidiarity and the development of a postnational EU identity (in Gazeta Wyborcza).  Reference to the EU’s proverbial democracy deficit was also regularly used to deconstruct the claims for political authority made by political representatives involved in EU constitution-­ drafting, whether these are related to a proclaimed advocacy for EU democratisation or to the Convention as a representative constitutional assembly. 4

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But, in addition, democracy is discussed when the balance of power between member states and, prominently, the weighting of votes in the Council or the composition of the Convention is at stake. This is particularly the case in Gazeta Wyborcza, where the constitution topic of Vote Weighting has nodal importance. The suggestion that the proposed double-­majority principle is more democratic is called into question, objecting to the arguments of defenders of the Draft Constitution and German and French government representatives, in particular. Two major counterarguments are stressed: the double-majority principle for vote weighting in the Council violates the principle of equal representation; the principle that votes in the EP, rather than in the Council, should reflect population size. Importantly, the ‘Spirit of Community’ is also referenced within that thematic context—taking up and refuting reproaches by European partners that the Polish government was acting “egoistically” and not considering the common European good when vetoing the Constitutional Treaty. These reproaches are turned upside down, pointing to the reverse effects for unity and cohesion that a violation of equal representation would have. The quote below from an open letter from conservative intellectuals, who backed the pro-Nice campaign of the right-wing opposition (and later also of the SLD government), may illustrate the reformulation of EU constitution speak on enhanced democratic performance in terms of equal representation. It was published as a retort to another open letter, published by liberal intellectuals in October 2010, who pleaded for an appreciative and constructive attitude towards the Draft Constitution and castigated the “phraseology of national interest” that depicted major achievements of the Constitution process as a threat to Poland (GazetaWyborcza, 2003). The extract from the retort by conservative intellectuals reads thus: The current project [the Draft Constitution, AK] essentially disturbs the equilibrium between small, medium-sized, and big member states to the benefit of the last. This may well deepen the EU’s democratic deficit in future. Democracy does not imply, as we know, automatically following the voice of the strongest; it also involves a process of jointly establishing principles, which ensure that the weakest will not be relegated to the role of supernumeraries. (…) the Polish defence of the provisions of the Nice Treaty does not flow from a narrow understanding of national interest, but

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from the conviction that these provisions will help to counter internal sectionalism to a greater extent than will the provisions of the Draft Constitution (…). (GazetaWyborcza & Rzeczpospolita, 2003)5

In Le Monde and Le Figaro, the debate on democracy as a problem of EU constitution-drafting is especially ramified with regard to functional deficits in the EU’s democratic performance and methods of remedy. Particular emphasis is put on the disempowerment of majoritarian institutions through structural effects of EU governance, as the quote below of a former member of the Parti Socialiste (later associated with Attac) in Le Figaro demonstrates: The European Union is the model field of a full-scale application of this type of governance, where the elected are out of the loop, where ministers defend their half-acre as best they can, where the Commission consults who it wants when it wants. The European institutions, zealous promoters of governance, move, in effect, from a ritual and derisory sermonising on democracy, to replacing the political choices of those elected by the people by decisions responded for just as much by private actors as by political representatives. (Bellon, 2002)6

Consequently, ‘Democracy’ co-occurs with many constitution topics that raise the problem of strengthening the democratic legitimacy of EU institutions through improved checks and balances (e.g. extended co-decision for the EP, veto powers for national parliament, direct or indirect election  The Polish original is: “Obecny projekt w istocie narusza równowagę między małymi, średnimi i dużymi państwami Unii na rzecz tych ostatnich. Może to pogłębić w przyszłości deficyt demokracji w Unii. Demokracja nie oznacza bowiem automatycznego podążania za głosem najsilniejszych, lecz także proces współtworzenia zasad gwarantujących słabszym, iż nie zostaną zredukowani do roli statystów. (…) Uważamy zatem, że polska obrona postanowień traktatu z Nicei nie wynika z ciasno pojmowanego interesu narodowego, iż postanowienia te w większym stopniu niż obecny projekt konstytucji pozwalają przeciwdzialać wewnętrznym partykularismom (…)”. 6  The French original is: “L’Union Européenne est le principal champ d’application grandeur nature de cette gouvernance où les élus sont court-circuités, où les ministres défendent plus ou moins bien leur pré carré, où la Commission consulte n’importe qui, n’importe quand. Les institutions européennes, promoteurs zélés de la gouvernance, tendent, en effet, au- delà du prêche rituel et dérisoire sur la démocratie, à remplacer les choix politiques effectués par les élus du peuple par des décisions dont les principaux responsables sont tout autant des acteurs privés que des représentants démocratiques” (André Bellon, Le Figaro, March 2, 2002). 5

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for the EU presidency) and procedures of involvement (citizens’ petitions). To a considerably greater extent than in the Polish newspapers, the checks and balances between EU bodies (‘Balance EU-EU’) are also reviewed in terms of democratic legitimacy. Along with the (more) democratic performance of the EU institutions, the decline in popular support for European integration is discussed. On the occasion of Le Pen’s success in the first round of the presidential elections (April 2002), the second Irish referendum on the Nice Treaty (October 2002) and the European Parliament elections (June 2004), commentators address the growing disenchantment of French (and EU) citizens with EU politics and the room for manoeuvre this creates for populist tendencies. This strand of debate almost ritually links to the call for more persuasive political communication and European civic education as mentioned. When the ‘Spirit of Community’ is evoked in relation to ‘Democracy’ (predominantly in Le Figaro), it is mostly with regard to the “national egoism” that it is feared will dismantle the Convention’s compromise and further undermine social acceptance of European integration. In the course of the debate, a third strand becomes predominant: the question of whether grand EU decisions such as those on EU expansion and the Constitution process should rely on a popular vote and how to accommodate the legitimate quest for (national) self-determination, if not in a referendum. Whereas in the Polish debate issues of national sovereignty are pondered in connection with competence division between national and EU levels (Balance EU-MS) and ‘Diversity’ or ‘EU Identity’, French discussants seem to perceive sovereignty, above all, as a matter of democratic will formation; ‘Sovereignty’ frequently co-occurs with ‘Democracy’ and the constitution topic of ‘Ratification’. The referendum becomes the reference point on which various divergent projections of popular sovereignty can hook: it appears as the means to (re-)write popular sovereignty (whether of the national or EU-wide constituency) into an elitist project; to re-establish political choice in an a-politicised legal and administrative governance; to reallocate decision-making power in the hands of national electorates; to create room for counter-articulation against the “arrogance of power” more generally or to provide a symbolic moment for the self-constitution of an EU-related political community.

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In short, the topic of the referendum helped to rearticulate the imagination of popular sovereignty as a seed of politics, as opposed to legal governance and market-based reallocation. The aspect of reinventing the political against the market is especially pronounced in Le Monde and can be illustrated by the quotation below, from a reprinted extract from Jean-­ Paul Fitoussi’s book Extraits de La Règle et le Choix: When carrying out practical and progressive reforms we urgently need to return to a form of government in which political choices determine the rules. Europe is our future if it relies on democracy. But, between the market and democracy, the present architecture of European institutions favours the market. The resulting democratic deficit which shows just as much at EU level as at the level of nations that make up Europe, is supposed to enhance efficiency. (Fitoussi, 2002)7

To sum up, the examination of thematic associations of the polity topic ‘Democracy’ reinforces the initial observation that, in the context of national mediatised debate, EU constitution speak took on different meanings. The talk about rendering EU institutions “more transparent, efficient, and democratic”, that is, about improving their performance from within the institutions, turned into a debate about re-establishing popular self-determination in France and, in Poland, about freedom from legal impositions by the EU (Rzeczpospolita) or equal representation and co-determination (Gazeta Wyborcza).

F rom Civilisational Frontier to Civic and Cultural Commonality A similar observation could be made with regard to the construction of the European Union as a civilising power and civilisational frontier, whose boundaries are but defined by human rights, constitutional rule  The French original is: “Il est urgent, en procédant à des réformes pragmatiques et progressives, de revenir à un gouvernement où les choix dominent les règles. C’est dans la démocratie que l’Europe est notre avenir. Or, entre marché et démocratie, l’architecture présente des institutions européennes privilégie le marché. Le déficit démocratique qui en résulte, tant à l’échelle de l’Europe qu’à l’échelle des nations qui la composent, est supposé servir l’efficacité.” 7

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and the free market system, which was prominent in core documents of the Constitution process. It was only echoed in Gazeta Wyborcza, when commentators argued for Ukraine’s EU entry, commented on Poland’s democracy to be consolidated by EU membership or invoked standards of compliance or appropriate behaviour to be met as an EU member (polity topic ‘Manners’). In the main, however, commentators in the four newspapers did not take up that vision. Nor did they follow the idea promoted in the Laeken Declaration (see Sect. 5.1) that the containment of Islamist terrorism or ethnic-nationalist conflict in neighbouring regions and, hence, of external reincarnations of the evils that had once necessitated European integration urged further integration and a strengthened role for the European Union in common foreign and defence policies. While commentators took up the strategic-­ communitarian rationale, according to which the pooling of foreign policy and defence capacities would help to more effectively and more cohesively address new external threats, this was not done to promote the EU as an international peacekeeper in the first place. In Le Monde and Le Figaro, in particular, the strategic-contractualist rationale warranted pleas for deepened political integration that enhanced the EU’s leverage and prestige in international security and trade, whether by means of QMV in foreign and defence policy (Le Figaro), strengthened economic governance (Le Monde) or by strengthening coherence in CFSP/ESDP (captured in the polity topic ‘Unity’). However, much more prominent in all four newspapers was the construction of the EU as a political association based on commonalities of (civic) culture, attributed to entities located primarily within the EU. This was revealed by a closer look at text passages that contained the polity topic of Borders. Surprisingly, perhaps, from today’s perspective, commentaries containing the polity topic of Borders did not include any geopolitical imagination that would cast a common ‘Other’ to be addressed by joint foreign and defence policies. If external Others were conjured up, and this was primarily the case in the French newspapers, they were ‘recruited’ from different groups of EU aspirants. This is suggested by the strong co-­ occurrence of Borders with the embedding topics of the upcoming 2004 EU expansion (primarily in Le Monde), Turkey’s EU candidature, ­discussions on the prohibition of the Islamic veil in French public institu-

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tions (primarily in Le Figaro) and Ukraine’s possible EU association (in Gazeta Wyborcza). The delineation from or the embracing of newcomers and outsiders is informed by communitarian rationales of political association and serves the projection of the EU in terms of a civic-cultural community, often modelled on the example of national polity. For instance, in the French newspapers and especially in Le Monde, the prospects of Turkey entering the European Union after the Islamist party AKP had won elections raised the issue of secular political culture and France’s tradition of laïcité and whether it might be threatened by Muslim immigration. In this context, Turkey under AKP was feared to not endorse the secularism that French commentators considered to be constitutive of both the French and the EU political community. Accession states, on the other hand, were often suspected of not yet being accustomed to the political culture of the European Union, its stress on a spirit of community, unity and political will, and prone to spoil EU compromise and further integration. A particular case of a positive embracement, on the other hand, showed when new and old members were likewise urged to develop a European spirit, through European civic education and “pedagogic effort”.8 The quote below from a commentary by Boris Waldbaum published in Le Monde is representative of a number of contributions, showing how this civic-communitarian project is constructed with reference to the example of French nation-building and the educational institutions of the unitary state: We are thus thrown back to our incoherent vision of Europe, torn between a desire for a political voice, indeed for power, on the one hand, and timidity in democratic matters, on the other, which holds back the legitimate development of such power. How do we get out of this impasse? Our country’s history provides some clues. The French Republic did not straightforwardly arise from a series of constitutions that each brought about a new sharing of power between individuals and political institutions.

 The constitution topic of ‘PR’, which was assigned to text passages that called for a communicative and pedagogic effort, has not been considered due to its limited overall frequency. However, it is mentioned regularly in Le Monde and Le Figaro. But it is only Le Monde which gives space to voices promoting social engineering for a civic-communitarian European project. 8

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Based on a shared past, but primarily on a political ambition, our Republic was formed above all thanks to public education. It’s the schools that, over the decades, have imposed themselves, in particular in opposition to the Church, to create and form the French citizen. There will be no citizen without an educational project. (…) If the EU is to answer the challenge of democracy, the university must be for Europe what the school was for the Republic. The university is the institution best adapted to the formation of the European spirit. (Waldbaum, 2004)9

Only with escalating bilateral conflict over the Iraq intervention and the controversy over the Atlantic component of EU defence did geopolitical imagination gain relevance. The US and the security policy of the US administration became the major reference point for defining principles of military alliance and joint external action. However, reference to the US, again, primarily served intra-EU ‘othering’ between ‘new’ and ‘old’ Europeans: national collectives took the blame for supposedly undermining the EU constitutional consensus, effective military alliance or the general policy objectives of European integration. Commentators in French newspapers, partially taking over EU constitution speak, pondered whether joint defence capacities would allow the EU to assert liberal values internationally in different ways compared to the US. Delimitation against the US was related to reflection on the feasibility of Europe puissance. The Iraq conflict was seen as revealing the limits of French ambition to establish a competitive relationship with the US  The French original is “Nous voici donc renvoyés à l’incohérence de notre vision européenne, à la fois marquée par un désir d’expression politique, voire de puissance, et une pusillanimité démocratique qui en entrave le développement légitime. ∗Comment sortir de cette impasse? Notre histoire nationale nous donne des pistes. L’avènement de la République française n’a pas simplement consisté en une série de Constitutions marquant une nouvelle répartition du pouvoir entre les individus et les institutions. ∗Sur la base d’un passé partagé, mais surtout d’une ambition politique, notre République s’est constituée comme telle d’abord grâce à l’instruction publique. C’est bien l’Ecole qui, au fil des décennies, s’est imposée, notamment face à l’Eglise, pour instituer et former le citoyen français. Il n’y a donc pas de citoyen sans un volontarisme éducatif de proximité. ∗Celui-ci est d’autant plus nécessaire que l’Europe, loin d’être une évidence sur laquelle nous nous sommes assoupis, est une aventure unique qui défie les lois de l’Histoire. Pour que l’Union relève le défi de la démocratie, il faut donc que l’Université soit à l’Europe ce que l’Ecole a été à la République. Elle est en effet l’institution la mieux adaptée à la formation de l’esprit européen” (Boris Waldbaum, “Le cœur de la démocratie européenne”, Le Monde, June 17, 2004). 9

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(or with NATO) within the frame of the EU.  Conclusions ranged between radical sovereigntists’ demand to withdraw from CFSP/CSDP (in Philippe de Villiers’ words: to avoid becoming hostage of America’s vassals) and concessions in federalisation to secure the Germans’ support for a common defence (in Le Figaro) to reflections on what kind of alliance Europeans should subscribe to (Le Monde). Many Polish commentators, on the other hand, insisted that enhanced EU defence capacities should remain subordinate to NATO, which they saw as assuring the defence of liberal values in conjunction with the US.  Commentators in Rzeczpospolita aligned themselves with the US embodiment of liberalism, which they defined as characterised by market liberalism, heroism and religiosity and from which they detached French and Western Europeans, if not the EU as a whole. In Gazeta Wyborcza, commentators subscribed to a similar civic-communitarian universalism compared to their French fellows, but stressed that such a project was larger than the EU (also comprising democratic movements in Ukraine and in Belarus), evolutionary, pluralist and drawing on Christianity as its historical-spiritual source. They thus shared with commentators in Rzeczpospolita a cultural-communitarian polity rationale. In both newspapers, commentators delimitated European identity on the grounds of cultural-religious belonging, in terms of either a fundamental constitutional principle (voiced in Rzeczpospolita) or tradition (voiced predominantly in Gazeta Wyborcza). The quote  below highlights the said connection between civic values and Christianity: To be a European, thus, means above all: I know, recognize and accept the European system of values, convictions, cultural and civil standards. As Vaclav Havel said: ‘Europe is the fatherland of our common thoughts, values and ideals.’ This aspect of European identity is the most important and the most complicated. (…) An intermediate, historical, definition [of these thoughts, values, and ideals, AK] is the easiest, pointing to their origins. (…) there is no doubt that one of the roots of the ideational space ‘Europe’ is Christianity, while the other two are ancient Greek and Roman civilisation. (Sztompka, 2003)10  From a discourse-analytical point of view, the formulation “one of the roots…while the other two” is very telling as it back-grounds the latter two roots. The Polish original is: “‘Być Europejczykiem’ znaczy bowiem także i przede wszystkiem: znam, uznaję i akceptuję europejski 10

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Hence, even when geopolitical positioning was debated, it primarily served symbolic struggles over the recognition of (divergent projections of ) national polity models and foreign policy orientation: while French newspapers tended to invoke or explicitly drew on the French model of the unitary state, laicism and strong international engagement striving to balance the US, Polish discussants proposed the Polish constitutional compromise on friendly laicism and stressed Christian belief as a spiritual source and special relations with the US within a transatlantic security architecture. Moreover, the boundary-drawing, in which either Poland or France was stigmatised as falling short of the principles of the EU’s political association or as violating the spirit of community, shows struggles between established members and newcomers about the EU polity construction to be endorsed: while French discussants reveal discourse practices of constructing the EU polity from within the centre, with a certain paternalist attitude towards newcomers, Polish discussants employ discourse practices of constructing the EU polity from the periphery that are characterised by either embracing official EU discourse or disassociating oneself by deconstructing it as propaganda. To sum up, in the course of debate, here revealed through the prism of text passages annotated with the polity topics of  ‘Democracy’ and ‘Borders’, the negotiators’ reflections on more responsive-inclusive EU governance were turned, in mediatised national debate, into principled claims regarding popular and national self-determination within the EU (from responsiveness to self- and co-determination). Considerations of the mission and identity of the yet-to-be established civilising macroregional power EU turned into a principled debate about EU belonging (from civilisational frontier to civic and cultural commonality). In the context of a debate thus transformed, the mode of polity construction changed, too. Reflections on EU belonging, in particular when paired with intra-EU othering, mobilised a vision of the EU as following the national polity model, in explicit delimitation from visions of national system wartości, przekonań, standardów kulturowych i cywilizacyjnych. Jak powiada Vaclav Havel: ‘Europa to ojczyzna naszych wspólnych myśli, wartości i ideałów.’ (…) Najłatwiej określić je pośrednio, historycznie, wskazując, skąd się wywodzą. (…) nie ulega wątpliwości, że jednym z korzeni Europy jako ‘przestreni aksjologicznej i ideowej’ jest chrześciaństwo, a dwa pozostałe to cywilizacja grecka i rzymska.”

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polity assumed to be relevant in other member states, envisaging the EU as a polity duplicatis. Accordingly, EU polity-building is legitimate if it mirrors the national polity at the EU level, while duplications of other member states’ polity models appear as illegitimate imposition. What is important to note, however, is that this proved to be a highly ritualised discourse practice with limited application in a specific text genre. It was usually only employed in single-standing commentaries on future prospects of European integration, which evaluated in an abstract manner and a prescriptive style what the EU as a polity sui generis should be, assuming that it is characterised by its distinct identity, boundaries, values or political culture (see also the quotes in Sect. 7.2). The primary and highly ritualised communicative plan of these commentaries is to reaffirm and perpetuate known claims for cultural recognition of national constitutional cultures within the EU setting and have them acknowledged as part of larger political struggles, for example, the struggle over centres and peripheries within the EU.

7.3 Polity Instrumentalis: Polity Construction in Struggles About the Draft Constitution This section shows that new ways of accommodating EU constitution speak and national interdiscourse in EU polity construction emerge, instead, from argumentative appropriation that takes place in more dialogical forms of debate on concrete provisions of EU institutional reform. This is revealed in a Critical Discourse Analysis of two ‘clusters of debate’, that is, accumulations of interrelated invited commentary on an issue. Though being strictly formatted by the newspapers, this text genre comes closest to the idea of debate as an exchange of rational arguments. One cluster of debate is taken from Gazeta Wyborcza, the other from Le Monde.11 Both were published in autumn 2003, when position-taking on the Draft Constitution was at stake.  Note that, for copyright reasons, the full version of the analysed texts is not given in this book. The referenced paragraphs correspond to the paragraphs given in the respective web platform, that is, Lexisnexis for Le Monde and the newspapers’ web archive for Gazeta Wyborcza. 11

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They were selected because they give a fair impression of the overall tendencies of debate in the two newspapers: they contain EU constitution speak and the most controversial topics of newspaper-specific debate identified earlier in the content analysis (see Sects. 6.1, 7.1, 7.2). They are also characteristic in the way voice is attributed and staged in controversy: Le Monde gives voice primarily to French leftwing professionals from the political field whose contributions are presented in a stand-alone fashion, with argumentative-­intertextual linkages rarely rendered visible. Gazeta Wyborcza provides for more dialogical formats, such as the selected moderated debate, and explicit argumentative-intertextual reference between contributions, inviting voices from a heterogeneous field including known public intellectuals, experts, politicians from the Polish political arena, the Polish diaspora and international experts. Each contribution will be first situated in the respective cluster of debate. It will be then assessed using the set of discourse-analytical categories that was developed earlier to capture polity construction in discourse analysis (see Sect. 3.6). More precisely, I will scrutinise how, through what discourse strategies of representation, argumentation and plausibilisation, speakers promote a specific claim concerning the Draft Constitution and what analytical narratives of European integration and symbols of national polity-building they invoke. This will help to establish upon which rationale of polity-building the claim is premised and what construction of legitimate political association beyond the state is enhanced. Moreover, I will assess what construction of political authority is implicated in the analysed argumentation, looking into discourse strategies of representation and fallacious argumentation (e.g. the argument pro bono) that generate a specific depiction of the constituent community, its common cause and the disinterested service to be done in its name. On that basis, I will be able to establish how, by what discourse practices, the speakers legitimise or delegitimise the EU and how the national is implicated therein (for more details, see Sect. 3.6).

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‘Czy umierać za Niceę?’ Is Nice Worth Dying for? From Gazeta Wyborcza, the moderated debate “Is Nice worth dying for?” is chosen, facilitated by the journalist Jarosław Kurski (2003). Published on October 10, 2003, it formed part of a cross-newspaper argument on the appropriate negotiation strategy to be adopted by the Polish government at the upcoming intergovernmental conferences. The controversy centred on the question whether or not the Polish government should insist upon the vote weighting laid down in the Treaty of Nice (2000), which overrepresented middle-sized countries such as Poland and Spain, or compromise on the double-majority principle (the majority of votes combined with a threshold of 60% of the EU population) suggested in the Draft Constitution, which gave most weight to the demographically strong countries, above all Germany and France, and rendered the formation of blocking minorities more difficult for small countries. This controversy had been triggered by the plea of the Polish conservative opposition to stick to the vote weighting of the Treaty of Nice at all costs, which Jan Rokita, head of the liberal-conservative party Platforma Obywatelska, had coined in the slogan ‘Nice or death’ in the Sejm in September 2003 (see Sect. 5.3). The controversy culminated in the publication of two opposing open letters published in October 2003 that were signed by two large camps of intellectuals in Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita, respectively. The first one (“We are striving for another Europe”) castigated the rhetoric of national interest and the type of speech the slogan ‘Nice or death’ supported, while the latter letter (‘The Europe we want’) pointed to the necessity of a realistic interest politics and suggested to get rid of the anticipatory obedience of the ‘party with the white flag’. The selected moderated debate gives voice to each one representative of the two camps. The heading ‘Is Nice worth dying for?’ plays upon and ironically subverts the slogan ‘Nice or death’. By alluding to the battle cry of the Cubian revolution ‘Patria ou muerte’, Jan Rokita had not only suggested (by way of a black and white fallacy) that the vote weighting in the Council was a

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matter of life or death of Polish co-determination within the EU, but also invoked the nation-founding myths of Poland’s untiring fight for self-­determination in face of the big European powers’ imperialist politics. The heading thus guides the reader to the heart of a major, and emotionally charged, controversy on the Draft Constitution in Poland. It brings the moderated debate in line with the way the newspapers had recontextualised the constitutional issue from the beginning, that is, as determining EU solidarity and full or only second-class EU membership of a firmly integrated national we that requires its piece of the cake and co-­determination in EU politics from an outsider’s position (see Sect. 6.3). The discussion involves the journalist Jarosław Kurski, at that time working for the opinion section in Gazeta Wyborcza; the political science scholar Aleksander Smolar, then director of the liberal Stefan Bartory Foundation; and Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, former Polish minister of European affairs and co-founder of the Warsaw campus of the College of Europe in Bruges. At the time of the moderated discussion, he taught European studies at different academic institutions in Poland and had joined the liberal-conservative party Platforma Obywatelska. Smolar and Saryusz-Wolski had both been active in the Solidarity movement (Smolar living for 20 years in exile, mostly in France) and members of Solidarity-­ led governments in the years 1989–1992 (Smolar) and 1991–1996 and 2000–2001 (Saryusz-Wolski). Both are frequently interviewed in Gazeta Wyborcza on European matters, as experts and practitioners. In the present discussion, they perform as observers and public intellectuals who feel urged to fight for a specific way how Poland’s role in the EU should be understood. Winning the audience, rather than the interlocutor, for the respective vision of the two camps in the ‘Nice or death’ controversy, seems to be the pragmatic-communicative plan pursued by both speakers. While Saryusz-Wolski poses as experienced in EU politics (he frequently refers to his personal lessons and knowledge of “how things are in the EU”), Smolar poses as a scientist, who uses scientific definitions and drops the names of scientific authorities. The journalist, on the other hand, sticks to the leitmotif of the heading. He raises criticisms that had been repeated over and over again during the preceding weeks, including the criticism that Polish negotiators, if vetoing the new voting system will risk isolation or that the new system, through its consideration of

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EU-wide population majorities, will be more democratic. These points, however, are easily refuted and thus normalise, instead of challenge, the concerns of the ‘Nice or death’ camp. The debate is, hence, strictly controlled—a ready-made set of rather predictable pro- and contra positions. Nonetheless, the two discussants engage in a more general argument about the adequate negotiation strategies in the EU setting, assumptions about what drives EU politics and the art and morals of negotiation. The below analysis will first introduce the two interlocutors’ overarching proposition and then look in more detail into the polity construction and appropriation developed in two threads of debate: a thread in which the discussants quarrel about the adequacy of the slogan ‘Nice or death’ and a thread in which they argue about the art and morals of EU negotiation to be endorsed by Polish negotiators. The position taken by Saryusz-Wolski is clear-cut and echoes the line promoted by the conservative opposition: sticking to the vote weighting of the Nice Treaty is reasonable because a strong Polish position in the European Council will be necessary to preserve the EU’s redistributive policies and the principle of showing solidarity with poorer regions and countries. This proposition crystallises in the following quote: Defending the Nice system means defending a Europe showing solidarity, both in political and economic terms. It is not an egotistic fight for Poland’s position, but a struggle over the vision of Europe. Should it be a solidarity-­ minded Europe, with members helping and supporting each other, or a free trade zone without any obligations? Nowadays the big net-payers tend towards the egotistic Europe of free trade. (Kurski, 2003, paragraph 17, see also paragraphs 16 and 23)12

The quote is rich in language use conventionalised in the context of (intergovernmental) EU politics: the blame game between allegedly egotistic and allegedly solidarity-minded negotiators or member states; the dividing line of net receivers versus net payers or long term versus new,  The Polish original is: “Obrona systemu nicejskiego to obrona Europy solidarnej w sensie politycznym i ekonomicznym. Obrona Nicei to nie jest egoistyczna walka o pozycję Polski, to jest walka o wizję Europy. Czy ma to być Europa solidarna, nawzajem sobie pomagająca i wspierająca, czy to ma być strefa wolnego handlu bez zobowiązań? Dziś wielcy, płatnicy netto, zmierzają do egoistycznej Europy wolnego handlu.” 12

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big versus small members; the flexible and slippery notion of solidarity used to shame adversaries for having failed a common European good; and the familiar opposition between ‘only’ economic integration and enhanced political integration. However, Saryusz-Wolski appropriates these patterns in an original way which allows for a specific construction of political association and authority. First, he varies the dichotomy of economic versus political integration by juxtaposing “free trade zone without obligations” and “egotistic Europe of free trade” with “solidarity-­ minded Europe”, here understood as commitment to EU cohesion and the positive discrimination of small and poor member states. He thus introduces a notion of political integration different from that stressed in French commentaries on Europe puissance and Europe sociale and different from Giscard d’Estaing’s vision of an internationally powerful political association with strong internal communitarian bonds. Second, by associating the vision of a Europe of free trade with net payers and evaluating it negatively as egotistic, while associating the vision of a solidarity-­minded Europe with the vote weighting in the Nice Treaty and Polish negotiators’ defence of it, he draws a clear line between different groups of EU veto players. Any of this association could be challenged on logical and factual grounds, however, through a range of means they are endowed with persuasiveness, for example, through rationalisation qua definition (“means”, “is not, but …”), rich modification (“solidarityminded, helping, supporting vs. egotistic, without obligations”) and the black and white fallacy implied in the suggestion that there is either Nice and solidarity or Draft Constitution and free trade, which links up to the crossroad metaphor of the EU’s future. Saryusz-Wolski’s overall argument, which is implied in this quote and stretches across the moderated debate, is structured as follows: considering that the EU 15 proved particularly stingy during accession negotiations and that net payers are more and more eager to reduce their contributions to the EU budget (grounds, see paragraph 17 and 23), the appreciation of Poland’s voting weight in the Council as arranged by the Nice Treaty will be vital to achieve fairness in the enlarged EU’s cohesion policies (claim): “Without a solid political position, we will never attain (…) equal treatment as far the funds are concerned” (see paragraph 23 below). The claim is warranted on the presupposition that solidarity in

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the EU means positive discrimination of small and poor countries, both in financial and political terms (warrant A); that a strong voting position in the Council will guarantee influence on these matters (warrant B); and that Poland is similar to and speaks on behalf of smaller members (warrant C). As I will show below in more detail, this argument produces a specific polity construction. The first warrant implies a utilitarian polity rationale, according to which the primary end of the EU is to provide for a just allocation of resources that allows poorer regions to catch up, endowing net receivers with co-determined entitlements while placing a duty on the rich. The second warrant carries along a realist-­ intergovernmentalist conception of EU politics as based on hard-nosed bargaining among member state representatives, eventually decided upon by voting weights in the European Council. The third warrant constructs representative relations between Polish negotiators, the Polish nation and poor accession states and endows Polish negotiators with the authority to veto changes, suggesting, at the same time, what legitimate power execution means in the context of the EU. Smolar takes the posture of differentiating and questioning the interlocutor’s statements, signalling his doubts by introductory formula like: “I am afraid that …”, “I doubt that …”, “What troubles me …”. He pushes for an alternative interpretation, which is allegedly more accurate than that of the Polish “political class”. By appealing to Saryusz-Wolski’s EU expertise (“You perfectly know that …”) and by invoking international scientific authorities in a namedropping manner, he seeks to decompose Saryusz-Wolski’s presuppositions. He suggests that Saryusz-­Wolski’s call for solidarity, given that it relates to regional transfers only, will find little resonance among EU partners, who’d rather conceive of solidarity as common approach to a shared problem. He argues that the European Commission, not Poland’s vote in the Council, will assure that cohesion policies are set up justly (paragraph 15); and that retaining the 27 votes from the Nice Treaty will not solve the challenges of transition Poland faces. Most elaborate is, however, his effort to dispute Saryusz-­Wolski’s depiction of EU politics as power politics and the representation of Poland as natural ally and representative of small members or poor accession states. In the following, I will trace the alternative polity

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c­ onstructions that emerge from this explicit questioning, in the dispute about the adequacy of the slogan ‘Nice or death’ and dispute about the art and morals of negotiation. In the below fragment, Saryusz-Wolski defends the slogan ‘Nice or death’ as an adequate instrument of political struggle that corresponds to what he regards as a law-like feature of the European Union: power politics. He authorises his depiction drawing on examples of ‘big bargains’ that usually serve the illustration of intergovernmentalist theories of European integration: In order to be effective, a message has to be clear, and thanks to that metaphor the message has become clear. Our position—non possumus—is nothing special. On the contrary, it is the rule during negotiations within the EU. In that way, the UK won its rebate, Spain the structural funds, Germany the perpetuation of its immigration and asylum legislation etc. (Kurski, 2003, paragraph 4)13

Throughout the debate, Saryusz-Wolski applies various argumentative strategies to substantiate his proposition. He authorises the ‘defence of Nice’ referring to the experience of negotiations on the financing of the accession of the Central and Eastern European members and the new budgeting period of the EU, which turned out little beneficial for the newcomers. He uses moral evaluation when positing that the value of equal treatment and distributional justice should be reflected in the vote weighting in the Council. This evaluation is further enhanced by personal authorisation, pointing to the founding fathers who established the idea of structural overrepresentation of the small members in the Council. Most prominent, however, is impersonal authorisation, the reference to the EU’s principles and rules as ‘entitling’ Poland to defend Nice, if necessary, by veto. To Smolar’s retort that the position of the Polish government does not enjoy support, not even among accession states, Saryusz-Wolski replies:  The Polish original is: “Żeby osiągnąć cel, komunikat musi być wyraźny, a dzięki tej metaforze stał się wyraźny. Nasze stanowisko—non possumus—nie jest niczym wyjątkowym. Jest wręcz kanonem w negocjacjach wewnątrz Unii. W taki sam sposób Wielka Brytania walczyła o rabat w składce, Hiszpania o fundusze strukturalne, Niemcy o zachowanie swojego prawa dotyczącego emigracji i azylu.” 13

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The objection of one single country is enough for the [constitutional, AK] project to be rejected. These are the rules. We are doing nothing which is against the rules. We are using our rights. (Kurski, 2003, paragraph 7, see also paragraph 23 below)14

Smolar takes issue with the slogan of ‘Nice or death’ because, in his view, it creates a rhetoric of war and ultimate choice which discredits and disables any form of compromise: “But formulations like ‘Nice or death’ never remain unpunished in politics. (…) Vis-à-vis international partners, it [the slogan, AK] indicates the determination to reject whatever the alternative (…)” (Kurski, 2003, paragraph 3).15 He argues that it springs from a misconception of EU politics and authorises this judgement by reference to an unlikely supporter, Robert Kagan, the US scholar known in Poland for having scientifically rationalised the transatlantic and EU split over the war on Iraq: For the way the Union is functioning is not confrontation, even though confrontations happen to occur. What troubles me about the Polish discourse is the interpretation of intra-European political mechanisms in the 19th century categories of power balance (próba sił, A.K.). In Gazeta [on Oct 3rd, 2003], Jan Rokita and Donald Tusk argued explicitly that the lesson to be learned from the work of the Convention is ‘that power continues to rule in politics’. But even tough opponents of Europe and the Union—such as Robert Kagan—detect the unique novelty of the Union’s political being. It consists precisely in overcoming traditional politics of power conflicts—which caused the wars—seeking compromise, consensus, and the enforcement of the principle of solidarity. (Kurski, 2003, paragraph 28)16  The Polish original is: “Żeby projekt odrzucić, wystarczy sprzeciw tylko jednego kraju. Takie są reguły Unii. Nie robimy nic, co jest sprzeczne z tymi regułami. Korzystamy z naszych praw.” 15  The Polish original is: “Ależ takie sformułowania jak “Nicea albo śmierć” w polityce nie pozostają bezkarne. (…) To silny przekaz dla partnerów zagranicznych ukazujący wolę odrzucenia jakiejkolwiek alternatywy.” 16  The Polish original is: “Zasadą działania Unii nie jest bowiem konfrontacja, chociaż takowe się zdarzają. To, co mnie niepokoi w polskim dyskursie, to interpretacja wewnątrzeuropejskich mechanizmów politycznych w XIX-wiecznych kategoriach próby sił. Jan Rokita i Donald Tusk piszą explicite w “Gazecie” [3 października 2003 r.], że z prac Konwentu płynie lekcja, że “w polityce nadal liczy się siła”. Przecież nawet twardzi przeciwnicy Europy i Unii—tacy jak Robert Kagan— dostrzegają niezwykłą nowość UE jako bytu politycznego. Polega ona właśnie na przezwyciężeniu 14

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Thus, against Saryusz-Wolski’s depiction of EU politics as hard-nosed bargaining and veto play, Smolar sketches deliberative supranationalism as horizon of interpretation, whether explicitly (Kurski, 2003, paragraph 28) or implicitly, by moral abstraction, stressing the deliberative ethos of taking the other’s arguments into account (Kurski, 2003, paragraph 20, see below). Solidarity, in this view, relates to a consensus-seeking approach in EU politics. This depiction is rationalised qua definition (thus challenging Saryusz-Wolski’s definition) and authorised with reference to an unlikely supporter. It is also enhanced by referencing and mythopoesis: Smolar delineates EU politics from the concert of powers of the nineteenth century and recalls the EU’s foundational myth, according to which national power politics caused the wars, while European integration secured peace. Through these discourse strategies, Smolar links the analytical narrative of supranationalism (politics is driven by new supranational practices of consensus building) to assumptions of early federalist or functionalist integration theories (supranationalism will neutralise national conflicts) and to an intersubjective polity rationale, according to which the EU institutions are set up to facilitate the emergence of bonds among European nations through deliberated consensus. On this provision, that is, that EU politics is consensus-driven and relies upon a rationality of understanding (warrant), Smolar promotes his opposing claim. Accordingly, compromising on the double-majority principle and maintaining friendly, instead of hostile, relations to Germany and France, is a more rational negotiation position, which will ensure Poland’s inclusion in EU decision-making in the long term and raise her profile beyond that of a net receiver (claim). As a support for his claim, he refers to the many diplomatic irritations that the Polish government allegedly already produced by not following this line and to the isolation already revealing in the lack of support for the Polish negotiators’ position (grounds). Hence, in this thread of the debate, the interlocutors negotiate presuppositions of politics along the lines of realist and anti-realist thought, in intergovernmentalist and supranationalist variants, thereby promoting a utilitarian (Saryusz-Wolski) and intersubjective (Smolar) polity rationale and a specific vision of how EU politics works. tradycyjnej polityki konfliktów i siły—która prowadziła do wojen—na rzecz szukania kompromisów, konsensu i obwiązywania zasady solidarności…”

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Their principled opposition also runs through the construction of political authority, as the second strand of debate on the art and morals of negotiation shows. This dispute, which is highlighted in italics in the extracts below, was marked by particular agitation (Kurski, 2003, paragraph 20–23). The greater emotional involvement is indicated by the exclamation. The below paragraphs highlight Smolar’s plea for an empathic approach oriented towards building partnership in the future: What is the state of the official relations with Germany and France today? Answering this question is the most important aspect if we were to clear-up the incident of the Roland rockets.17 There is no doubt that those who decided to stage the affair in public treated an allied state like a foe. When accusing others of lacking solidarity, we should at least try to understand them. The logic of war, of course, does not require something like that. My reproach to the attitude of the political class towards the EU is that it consists of nothing but demanding: more, more, more! [Elaborates in the following paragraphs on the anti-German/-French coalitionbuilding with the US and the small states, which he portrays as irrational because it undermines Poland’s longer-term prospects to be pursued in partnership with Germany and France]. (Kurski, 2003, paragraph 20–21, emphasis added)18

On the first glance, the dispute on the morals of negotiation is a quarrel about who owes something to whom and who should be qualified as irrational, egoistic, disloyal, stingy or embarrassing. Smolar accuses the Polish government of having committed a disloyal act when closing ranks with the US administration during the Iraq crisis and when engaging in calculated provocations such as the rocket affair. In contrast,  Just before the IGC negotiations in October 2003, sources close to the Polish Ministry of Defence claimed that Polish soldiers in Iraq found French rockets produced in 2003—which turned out to be false. 18  The Polish original is: “Jaki jest dziś oficjalny stosunek do Niemiec i Francji? Odpowiedź na to pytanie jest najważniejszym aspektem wyjaśnienia incydentu z rakietą Roland. Bo nie ulega wątpliwości, że ci, którzy postanowili nadać sprawie rozgłos, traktowali państwo sojusznicze jak wroga. Otóż jeżeli winimy innych o brak solidarności, to przynajmniej postarajmy się ich zrozumieć. Logika wojenna oczywiście tego nie wymaga. Moja pretensja do postawy klasy politycznej wobec UE to pretensja o ten czysto rewindykacyjny stosunek: dajcie, dajcie, dajcie! (…).” Note that in the Polish language the word ‘give’ is used instead of ‘more’; thereby putting the emphasis on the very fact of delivering/providing rather than on increase. 17

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S­ aryusz-­Wolski reproaches net payers for having violated EU norms and loyalty when forcing accession states to accept financial and transitional arrangements unfavourable to them during enlargement negotiations. He also accuses France and Germany of departing from the agreed-upon vote weighting system of the Treaty of Nice. But up until now we are still a small country, the only one with the potential to become big. If we map Europe according to the gross domestic product, then it becomes clear that we are relatively small. So there is nothing contradictory about having common interests with the small states. Respect for the principle of solidarity will not be achieved by persuasion and appeals. The structural funds were attained by persistent and untiring diplomacy. Let us not count on getting something for nothing. Thus, I draw a different balance of our accession to the Union than you. We entered on conditions that were worse than realistic expectations and promises suggested! The enlargement process is indeed underfinanced. We entered the Union on conditions that were unfavourable in economic terms, but, in political terms they were quite good. And now suddenly it turns out that the political starting conditions change for the worse. I wish to stress that Poland owes nothing to the European Union. Poland’s contribution to the EU is not to be understated. Thanks to her, the continent is being peacefully reunited. It is the other side that is stingy. Today we get only 30–40 percent of what we ought to get as a full and equal member. Without a solid political position, we will not attain—neither in seven, nor even in 14 years—equal treatment as far as the funds are concerned. We should not temper our requests, because they are legally valid. There is nothing to be ashamed about. (Kurski, 2003, paragraph 22–23, emphasis added)19  The Polish original is: “Bo my jesteśmy poniekąd krajem małym, a jedynie potencjalnie dużym. Gdyby sporządzić mapę Europy wedle produktu krajowego brutto, wówczas okaże się, że jesteśmy relatywnie mali. Nic w tym przewrotnego, że mamy z małymi wspólne interesy. Respektowania zasady solidarności nie osiągnie się ani perswazją, ani apelami. Fundusze strukturalne zostały osiągnięte upartą, wytrwałą dyplomacją. Nie liczmy na to, że ktoś nam coś da za darmo. Otóż ja oceniam bilans naszego przystąpienia do Unii inaczej niż pan. Weszliśmy na warunkach poniżej realistycznych oczekiwań i przyrzeczeń! Proces rozszerzenia jest poważnie niedofinansowany. Do Unii weszliśmy na niezbyt korzystnych warunkach ekonomicznych, ale za to na dobrych warunkach politycznych. I oto nagle okazuje się, że polityczne warunki przystąpienia zmieniają się na niekorzyść. Chcę powiedzieć—nie jesteśmy żadnym dłużnikiem Unii Europejskiej. Polska wniosła do UE wartość nie do przecenienia. Jest nią pokojowa reunifikacja kontynentu. To druga strona jest skąpa. Dziś dostajemy 30–40 proc. tego, co by się nam należało jako pełnoprawnemu członkowi. 19

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But beyond this blame game, the strand of dispute produces two propositions that reinforce the discussants’ principled divide in constructions of political authority, that is, constructions of representative relations and disinterested service. Both discussants appellate the national collective by personalising and agentialising the noun Poland and by using the usurpatory national we, which collapses Polish negotiators, government, populace and participants of debate into one. But while Smolar holds that this collective will be best served by listening to the concerns of German and French partners, building a constructive partnership with them regardless of divergent problem perceptions (“we should at least try to understand them”) and compromising on the vote weighting, Saryusz-Wolski advocates an untiring struggle for one’s (alleged) entitlements, sticking to the vote weighting of the Nice Treaty (“we should not temper our requests”). The morals of diplomacy, in Smolar’s view, should consist of meeting allies with understanding, not war-like tactics, which he plausibilises in the palpable portrayal of intergovernmental relations in terms of interpersonal enmity and friendship. Saryusz-Wolski, on the other hand, considers as adequate any tactic that proves effective in enforcing a morally and legally appropriate entitlement (Kurski, 2003; see sentences highlighted in the paragraphs 20 and 22). This drawing of lines is supported by discourse strategies of representation which associate the national we with different allies. Smolar groups Poland, due to her ambition to leave her mark on European integration and international politics, with the big countries, who cannot draw on the heart strings, but need to come to terms with conflicting interests. He sees Poland, Germany and France as united in an ambitious and proactive approach to European integration, which supposedly sets them apart from other member states, and the small Central European accession states, in particular. At the same time, he portrays Poland to be at risk of underperforming as an EU member due to internal problems, risking self-inflicted decay and marginalisation, referring again to expert knowledge for authorisation:

Bez solidnej pozycji politycznej nie uzyskamy—ani po siedmiu, ani nawet po 14 latach— pełnoprawnego traktowania, jeśli chodzi o fundusze. Nie powinniśmy temperować naszych oczekiwań, bo one są prawomocne. Nie mamy się czego wstydzić.”

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Heather Grabbe, outstanding British specialist on European matters, put her worries about the tendencies in Polish politics thus (…): ‘Poland could become a nightmare if she had the accuracy of Greek administration, a government that functions as well as the Italian one, Spain’s open-minded attitude towards structural funds, France’s position towards the common agricultural policy and Britain’s level of attachment to the European idea.’ (Kurski, 2003, paragraph 28)20

Saryusz-Wolski, in turn, associates Poland, due to similar levels of GDP, with the poor and small EU countries, who ought to enjoy net payers’ solidarity and be overrepresented in the vote weighting (Kurski, 2003, paragraph 20, see above). By this means, he is able to promote the defence of Nice as serving not only the national collective (pro bono nobis), the European interest in social cohesion (pro bono publico), but as also advancing others’ concerns (pro bono eorum). This is achieved in a complicated representation of Poland as the avant-garde of smaller, poorer countries. Saryusz-Wolski refers to his own experience when stressing that small member states tended to refrain from voicing their interest (what he presupposes is also the defence of Nice) because “they did not believe in their own power”, while at the same time welcoming others’ initiative from which they benefited (Kurski, 2003, paragraph 12). His portrayal of Poland as occupying a middle position, small in terms of GDP, but big in terms of (past) merits and future potentials (population size and weight in Council voting), motivates the conclusion that Poland has the mandate to speak up for the timid small. This construction of a supposed representative relation authorising Polish negotiators to defend Nice in the name of others is rejected by Smolar as an imperial phantasy likely to be badly received by the neighbouring accession states. But, as the extended mythopoesis in paragraph 23 shows, the pragmatic plan of Saryusz-Wolski’s depiction pertains to invoking Poland as fighting (again) on behalf of others for co-determination and fairness,  The Polish original is: “Heather Grabbe, wybitna brytyjska specjalistka do spraw europejskich, ujęła swój lęk o ewolucję polityki polskiej w formułę (…): ‘Polska może stać się koszmarem Europy, jeżeli będzie miała grecką czystość administracji, włoską sprawność urzędów, hiszpański wielkoduszny stosunek do funduszy strukturalnych, francuskie stanowisko wobec polityki rolnej i brytyjskie przywiązanie do idei europejskiej’.” 20

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rather than to accuracy, as a plausibilising means to counter the anticipated reproach of Polish egotism. He alludes to the complex of myths related to post-communist Poland in Europe—the myth of Solidarność having triggered not only the breakdown of Polish communist rule, but also the reunification of the continent, and myths of the wounded nation that has repeatedly been betrayed by the neighbours (Polish separations, World War II, Yalta decisions) and never got adequate compensation. They are here intermingled with the experience of the accession negotiations and the stab-in-the-back myth about the double-majority principle, according to which it was a surprising departure from agreed principles upon which Polish citizens had based their decision for accession (Kurski, 2003, paragraph 23, see also Sect. 5.3). Such linking to the history of Polish freedom struggle and constitutionalism is used by both speakers throughout the moderated debate. An example is the proposition “our position—non possumus—is nothing special” (Kurski, 2003, paragraph 7; see above). Here, Saryusz-Wolski evokes both a common phrase for a tough negotiation line and a specific Polish intertext known to the reader who is aware of Polish history, more particularly: of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński’s non possumus towards the interference of the Polish Communist party into the nomination of clerical posts in the Church’s hierarchy in 1953.21 Smolar, on the other hand, evokes the memory of the Polish liberum veto (a reference made explicit in various contributions to the Polish newspapers at the time), by repeatedly voicing his fear that the Polish government might not be able to agree a compromise and might jeopardise EU consensus building through a veto and speed up the EU’s break-up into a multi-tiered regime of differentiated integration (Kurski, 2003, paragraphs 33–34, 41). Hence, the collective memory of national constitutional struggles is indeed employed in constructions of the EU’s political authority and association (for these see Sect. 3.5). Yet, just as in the editorials analysed in Sect. 6.3, it proves a flexibly employed means of aligning with a nationally  In the aftermath, Wyszyński was jailed for years and large-scale arrests of clerics, closure of monasteries and Catholic publications were launched. Wyszyński’s non possumus is remembered as a decisive moment of resistance against Stalinism and became an important reference point of anti-­ communist struggle (Lukowski & Zawadzki, 2006, p. 292). 21

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imagined target audience and does not instruct a specific vision of political authority and association beyond the state. The two visions of political association and political representation rather correspond to the repertoire of symbolic struggles fought between the successors of the Solidarity movement: between the cosmopolitan liberals, on the one hand, who emphasised the rhetoric of democratic debate and reconciliation between anti-communists and communists (also justifying the ‘negotiated turnover’ and the ‘thick line’ drawn under issues of ‘reckoning with the communist past’), and liberal and national conservatives, on the other, who emphasised issues of moral rightness and developed a rhetoric of ‘moral aggression’ (Śpiewak, 2005). The two opposing visions also draw on the dichotomy of ‘shame’ of behaviour, which is supposedly ridiculous and immature in comparison to EU partners, and ‘fear’ or pride as a means of symbolic balancing towards the powerful neighbours (Horolets, 2006). In other words, they actualise the ambivalent positioning between self-inferiorisation and resentment that, following Bourdieu, comes with the classification of Poland as subordinated or peripheral within the EU collective. In the analysed moderated debate, the allusion to the symbolic struggle over the heritage of Solidarność and Poland’s European belonging shows in opposing conceptions of solidarity, the stress on understanding derived from empathy versus demands derived from moral rightness, and in the blame game that scapegoats either Polish inferior politics or stingy EU partners for perceived difficulties to become a full and equal EU member. In the analysed fragment of debate, these strands of plausibilisation are less articulate compared to commentaries in Rzeczpospolita (Kutter, 2006, 2007). However, they are functional in accommodating a vision of cooperation within the enlarged European Union. Moreover, linked with scientific rationalisations of European integration, the plausibilising use of the rhetoric and intertexts of the successor struggle helps to adjust the established national EU policy to both the new setting of EU membership and EU institutional reform and to the competing political-intellectual projects pursued in the context of domestic politics. Both speakers seem to endorse the national EU policy adopted by Polish governments in preceding years, according to which attaining full EU membership will help and is necessary to advance Poland’s ­transition

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to democracy and prosperity. However, they pursue different projects with regard to what full membership means and how it can be realised after accession and during treaty revision. Saryusz-Wolski envisages full or positively discriminated access to EU resources and decision-making as such desirable state and pairs realist intergovernmentalism with myths of the betrayed nation to promote an approach of morally substantiated hard-nosed bargaining. Smolar, in turn, projects a special partnership with France and Germany as a means to attain equal status and combines supranationalism with the reconciliatory approach of the liberal Solidarność successors. It is against the backdrop of these projects that the EU, as a polity instrumentalis, appears as a legitimate political association enabling a legitimately executed political authority beyond the state. Saryusz-Wolski suggests that polity-building and EU institutional reform are legitimate if they provide for just resource allocation across the enlarged EU and give expression to the value of (inter-regional) solidarity and the political will of small and poor countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), drawing on combined utilitarian and moral-contractualist reasoning. His argument that only a strong voting position for Poland in the Council can ensure such polity-building is enhanced by a representation of Poland as a natural leader and representative of CEE, based on her disposition of being (temporarily) small in material assets, but geographically-­ demographically middle-sized, and a portrayal of the EU as ruthless power game. Both is derived from the rationalising presupposition (known from classic realism in International Relations) that material assets, geographic extension and demography decide about a country’s international influence. Additional enhancement comes from authorising reference to the experience of accession negotiations and the custom (‘these are the rules’) of EU intergovernmental negotiation, but also from plausibilisation that invokes the collective memory of Polish anti-­ communist resistance and freedom fight. Smolar, on the other hand, extensively draws on assumptions of supranationalism and democratic internationalism as a narrative of European integration to rationalise his intersubjective rationale of polity-building. Accordingly, the EU’s political association and institutional reform is legitimate if brought about in dialogue and mutual understanding, whereas those members will gain sig-

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nificance and co-determination that strive for understanding and reliability in relations with big member states and the collective of member states. Additional enhancement is achieved by a portrayal of Poland as ‘big’ in terms of ambition to proactively co-develop European integration, but weak in terms of bargaining power and achievements, and the portrayal of EU intergovernmental relations in terms of interpersonal enmity and friendship.

‘Une autre Europe pour une autre mondialisation’: Argumentation in Le Monde From Le Monde, the contribution ‘Another Europe for another globalisation’ was chosen, authored by Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Alain Lipietz, both representatives of the Greens (Les Verts) in the European Parliament (Cohn-Bendit & Lipietz, 2003). It was published on September 20, 2003, and followed by subsequent position-takings by representatives of other left-wing groupings. Together, they pondered the question whether or not the social policy objectives of the Draft Constitution and the social rights included in the Charter will suffice to enhance the desired Social Europe and balance out the given constitutional asymmetry of the European Union which favours neoliberal, market-driven integration. Based on the recontextualising plausibilisation described in Sect. 6.3, which heavily employed the dichotomy of Europe social and Europe espace, Le Monde thus situates the EU constitutional debate in the argument that French left-wing groupings have been carrying on since the Maastricht referendum. The series of commentaries anticipates the upcoming consultations of the Parti Socialiste on the party’s positioning vis-à-vis the Draft Constitution. The consultations resulted in a rejection of the Draft Constitution and were decisive in forming the ‘No’ campaign during the referendum on the Constitutional Treaty in 2005 (see also Sect. 5.3). Repeating the major line of justification of the Maastricht Treaty by the Parti Socialiste and Les Verts, Cohn-Bendit and Lipietz argue that the Draft Constitution, in spite of its many faults, opens opportunities for more democratic and socially just policies because it integrates social policy objectives and strengthens democratic majorities in measures such

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as the extended co-decision of the European Parliament, the (planned) election of the Commission president by the EP, the double-majority voting of the Council, while also allowing for direct participation with the citizens’ petition. In a retort to this article, entitled “Constitution: an inacceptable project”, published on September 27, 2003, Yves Salesse, a self-declared member of the “anti-liberal left”, union activist and scholar of constitutional law, rejects these expectations and suggests that the Draft Constitution pays only lip service to demands for democratisation and social justice while perpetuating the existing set-up. He argues that the Council of Ministers remains a forum of opaque intergovernmental decision-making and that the citizens’ petition is a highly restricted means, whose impact on EU legislation is entirely dependent on the Commission. Referring to the example of the EU-induced shrinking of French public services, he also argues that social policy objectives in previous EU treaties did not yield the hoped-for containment of neoliberalism. He pleads for a rejection of the document (Salesse, 2003). This contribution is countered, again, by the article “The sweet-sour leftism that says no to the European Constitution”, published on October 21, 2003, by Pervenche Berès, member of Parti Socialiste and delegate of the Assemblée Nationale to the Convention. The author points to the planned public convening of the Council, doubts Salesse’s suggestion that a popular legislative initiative could ever be more than a proposal as envisaged in the Draft Constitution and stresses that the policy objective laid down in the Maastricht Treaty of “an open market economy based on free competition” has been changed into a “social market economy pertaining to sustainable development, full employment (…)”. She accuses Salesse of consciously misreading the Draft Constitution in order to enhance his radical leftist project outside the established party system. According to her, this project draws on a populism similar to that of Jean-Marie Le Pen, instead of proactively fighting neoliberalism at the European scale, using the given (legal) frames (Berès, 2003). The dispute, hence, centres not only on what can be seen as an achievement in terms of EU-wide democracy and social policy in the Draft Constitution, but also involves a struggle over the legitimate leftist and Euro-federalist voice. It is in this context of heated argument that Lipietz and Cohn-Bendit seek to persuade both the national party base and the partisan audience of the

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a­dequacy of the Draft Constitution and of their successfully filled representative mandate as Green MEPs and Conventioneers. Let me show how Cohn-Bendit and Lipietz argumentatively bolster their view against possible contention and what construction of legitimate political association and authority they thereby embark on. In the beginning of their article, the authors give tribute to the success of non-­ governmental organisations, farmers’ associations gathered in Via Campesina, and the Global Progressive Network of European parliamentarians, who managed to agree a vision of just global trade in Cancun in 2003, while the simultaneous gathering of the World Trade Organisation failed to so. In an extended narration of this event, the authors suggest that the Convention was a similar move beyond the intergovernmental deadlock and was similarly successful in advancing an alterglobalist vision. This argument is substantiated by an enumeration of provisions of the Draft Constitution, which allegedly constitutionalise democratisation and social policy objectives, and by attributing this success to the untiring work of the coalition of progressive parliamentarians and NGOs in the Convention. The following quote pinpoints the central argument: In its first part and by integrating the Charter, the [new] treaty establishes a legal basis for future legislators and the Court at Luxembourg. Of course, the Conventioneers (who were not given the mandate to go any further) contended themselves to put all those rules in the third part [of the Draft Constitution, A.K.], which, from the Treaties of Rome to the Treaty of Nice, have continuously enhanced neoliberalism. But the coming ‘spirit of the law’, laid down in the ‘objectives of the European Union’ [in the first part of the treaty, A.K.] contradicts the spirit of the old EU directives. (Cohn-Bendit & Lipietz, 2003, paragraph 1394)22

 The French original is thus: Le traité fixe, dans sa première partie et en intégrant la Charte des droits fondamentaux, une base jurisprudentielle pour les futurs législateurs et la Cour de Luxembourg. Certes, les conventionnels (qui n’étaient pas mandatés pour aller plus loin) se sont contentés de compiler dans la partie III les règles européennes telles qu’elles sont issues des traités antérieurs, de Rome à Nice, de plus en plus marqués par le néolibéralisme. Mais “l’esprit des lois” à venir, fixé par les “objectifs de l’Union”, contredit l’esprit des directives anciennes. A “l’économie de marché où la concurrence est libre” se juxtapose une tout autre définition: “L’Union oeuvre pour le développement durable de l’Europe, fondé sur une croissance économique équilibrée, une économie sociale de marché hautement compétitive, qui tend au plein emploi et au progrès social, et un 22

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In this quote, the authors anticipate and relativise the contention that the Draft Constitution perpetuates the market liberalism of the preceding treaties in the phrase “Of course, (…). But (…)”. In a mythopoetical narration that projects a continuity of market-liberal EU treaty revision (“from the Treaties of Rome to the Treaty of Nice”) as a matter of the past, they insinuate that the Draft Constitution, nevertheless, marks a rupture from market liberalism. This rupture is underlined by a richly modified dichotomy between old and new: the “spirit of the old EU directives”, now banned into the third part of the Draft Constitution, is juxtaposed with the “coming spirit of law”, embodied by the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and the policy objectives defined in the first part of the Draft Constitution. The contradiction between the two, they insinuate, will open room for legal interpretation that favours the new spirit. The structure of the authors’ main argument could be summarised as follows: considering that social rights and social policy objectives have been laid down in the Charter and in the first part of the Draft Constitution (grounds A), it is safe to say that the new treaty will strengthen Social Europe and balance out neoliberalism (claim), given that, once injected in the legal acquis of the EU, EU legislation and jurisprudence will enforce these objectives (warrant A). The argument of legal self-­ reinforcement is backed later by a further scenario: once constitutionalised, social policy objectives will give alterglobalist movements more leverage (warrant B), in particular when considering the new means for democratic participation and control: the citizens’ petition and the strengthened European Parliament (grounds B). The warrants remind of the constitutionalisation narrative of EU legal studies, according to which CJEU case law has gradually produced a de facto EU constitution, and of the polity-constructing plot of neofunctionalism, a theory of European integration developed in political science. The latter assumes that supranational legal regimes, supported by rational actors’ activities (e.g. the judges, the social movements), establish themselves and cause spillover effects (here into social-democratic legislation) (see also Sect. 3.4). Indeed, the authors view the citizens’ petition as an opportunity for social movements to push for a Social Europe: niveau élevé de protection et d’amélioration de la qualité de l’environnement. (…) Elle contribue (…) à la solidarité et au respect mutuel entre les peuples, au commerce libre et équitable.”

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“Imagine the benefit that social movements will take from that!” (Cohn-­ Bendit & Lipietz, 2003, paragraph 1393).23 The expected effect is rationalised by adverbial constructions suggesting causal linkage: “en proclamant (…) le traité place”; “le traité fixe, (…) en intégrant la Charte des droit fondamentaux, une base jurisprudentielle pour le futurs législateurs et la Court de Luxembourg”. However, the authors combine this neo-­functionalist reasoning with moral-contractualist imagination. The following quote underlines the authors’ expectation that constitutionalisation, while relying on the constitution as a productive instrument (“machine”), results from political struggle and popular will, instead of from legal function or groups’ self-interest, an assumption they rationalise through definition: (…) in making its ‘constitutional’ character explicit, the treaty places, at last, European integration in the orbit of democracy. A constitution is a machine that allows citizens to participate in the elaboration of the laws. (Cohn-Bendit & Lipietz, 2003, paragraph 1390)24

Under the provision that the EU constitution will likely be appropriated by citizens according to their Social Europe preferences, various provisions of the Draft Constitution appear as enhancing federal democracy and social policy objectives, including the double-majority principle, the election of the Commission president by the European Parliament and the extension of co-decision. The suggestion that an imperfect and reactionary constitution can develop towards a progressive one through political struggle thus potentially dissolves the criticism voiced, for example, by Yves Salesse that these measures pay only lip service to demands of democratisation. It is authorised with reference to French constitutionalism and plausibilised in a temporal narrative. It reads past national experience with constitutional revision as a promise for the EU’s future, drawing a parallel between the incremental overcoming of slavery,

 The French original is: “On imagine le parti que sauront en tirer les mouvement sociaux!”.  The French original is: “(…) en proclamant son caractère « constitutionnel », le traité place enfin la construction européenne dans l’orbite de la démocratie. Une Constitution c’est une machine offrant aux citoyens de participer l’élaboration des lois.” 23 24

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­ atriarchy and monarchy by the French republican constitutions and the p taming of the market by the Draft Constitution: Two centuries ago, the French constituencies adopted a likewise imperfect constitution; it perpetuated slavery, excluded women from the vote, and offered a king the right to veto. But it opened immense space for democracy (…). Today, Europe is offered a similarly significant responsibility: the first transnational constitution, offering to the citizens of a vast continent the means to tame, through the vote and the law, an economy which has gone crazy while globalising. (Cohn-Bendit & Lipietz, 2003, paragraph 1398)25

In other words, the authors portray the treaty amendments agreed upon by the Convention as potentially bringing about a new EU-wide social contract that gives expression to an alterglobalist vision. This scenario of EU polity-building is achieved by combining a neo-functionalist causal story with moral-contractualist imagination and by endowing EU constitution speak with connotations of French constitutionalism. The scenario of incremental progressive constitutionalisation overlaps with the authors’ representative claim and a specific construction of political authority, which is coupled with a further polity rationale. At several points in the article, Lipietz and Cohn-Bendit present the work of the Convention, in particular the strengthening of the European Parliament, the citizens’ petition and the social policy objectives, as being instructed by and congruent with demands of leftist and alterglobalist communities gathering, for instance, in Cancun in September 2003 or at the first European Social Forum in November 2003. Moreover, the authors turn the argument pro bono nobis (for the sake of the alterglobalist common interest) into an argument pro bono publico when including EU citizens into the represented collective: “our co-citizens who know already that, faced with globalisation, they need a strong political Europe”  The French version is: “Il y a deux siècles, les constituants français adoptaient une Constitution elle aussi imparfaite: elle entérinait l’esclavage, excluait les femmes du vote, offrait au roi un droit de veto. Mais elle ouvrait un immense espace à la démocratie… Aujourd’hui, à l’Europe est proposée une responsabilité du même ordre: la première Constitution transnationale, offrant aux citoyens d’un vaste continent les moyens de domestiquer par le vote et le droit une économie devenue folle en se globalisant. L’Union européenne, première réponse à la faillite de l’OMC…” 25

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­(Cohn-­Bendit & Lipietz, 2003, paragraph 13). With reference to these assumed preferences, the authors see themselves as being  obliged to defend the achievements of the Draft Constitution against the “terrible enemies of a federal Europe”, the “sovereigntists of all colours” and the “worst threat” emanating from the “government representatives with their national preoccupations” (Cohn-Bendit & Lipietz, 2003, paragraph 13, 14). The common cause, which confronts friends to foes, whether in Cancun or in the European Union, is to adopt rules and laws that “harmonise the social and cultural needs of 146 [WTO] countries” and protect these needs from the “jungle of the market” (Cohn-Bendit & Lipietz, 2003, paragraph 5). This construction of representative relations recalls a utilitarian polity rationale, which projects European-global distributive justice in resource allocation as an end of polity-building. Hence, in Lipietz’ and Cohn-Bendit’s pamphlet, alterglobalist accounts of European economic integration (as privileging market-driven globalisation) are combined with neo-functionalist theorising about legal-functional spillovers, narratives of (national) constitutional struggle and utilitarian conceptions of polity-building in a way which suggest the Draft Constitution (and provisions progressive MEPs fought for) embodies that common cause. The union of the represented and representatives is not only constructed with reference to the common cause in whose interest the two parliamentarians act. The most persuasive means is the parallel that is consistently drawn between non-governmental meetings in Cancun, on the one hand, and the Convention, on the other. It is drawn with regard to the common cause and the progress made towards it in the adopted agreements and with regard to the composition of the two gatherings. The authors group themselves, as progressive parliamentarians, into one with union representatives, farmers’ associations, social movements and NGOs, and suggest this composition applied to and was decisive not only for the meeting in Cancun, but also the Convention. They blank out the crucial role government representatives played in the Convention and overemphasise the, actually very limited, involvement of organised civil society. In so doing, the authors align the established leftist Euro-­ federalist project with the terminology of alterglobalism (note the title alluding to the slogan “une autre Europe/monde est possible” promoted

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by the European Social Forum). In that way, European integration (as it is, not as it is projected by those groups) can be reinvented as consistent with their demands. But even more pronouncedly, the parallel between Cancun and the Convention is drawn with regard to the allegedly more inclusive, dynamic, politics-driven, democratic and transparent method of consensus building applied in the two assemblies. It is contrasted with the intergovernmental method, which is associated with unfair global trade and neoliberalism, institutionally embodied in the Treaty of Nice, or “the Europe of Nice”, “a miniature WTO” and the WTO, and characterised by the “trading of egoisms”, being exclusive, opaque, paralysing, market-­ driven and captured by the vested interests of national export industries: If it was possible that such a compromise come about when the governments did not manage to arrive at one [in Cancun, AK], it is precisely because the intergovernmental method proved completely inappropriate for harmonising the social and cultural needs of 146 countries. Yes, in face of the jungle of the global market, rules and law are necessary (“il faut…”), and for establishing law, we need to engage in politics (“il faut faire la politique”)! However, during intergovernmental negotiations, societies are only represented by the governments, who follow above all the interests of export industries. A trading of egoisms, which produces nothing but political logjams and a triumph of the market. It is this intergovernmental logic that let Europe crater at the IGC in Nice three years ago. The Europe of Nice, enlarged to 25 members, is a paralysis of democracy and the omnipotence of the market: neoliberal Europe, a miniature WTO. (Cohn-Bendit & Lipietz, 2003, paragraph 1387–1388)26

 The French original reads: “Si un tel compromis a pu se dessiner alors que les négociateurs gouvernementaux n’y sont pas parvenus, c’est que justement la « méthode intergouvernementale » est totalement inappropriée pour harmoniser les exigences sociales et culturelles de 146 pays. Face à la jungle du marché mondial, oui, il faut des règles, du droit, et pour fixer le droit il faut faire de la politique! Mais, dans les négociations intergouvernementales, les sociétés ne sont représentées que par les gouvernements, qui portent avant tout les intérêts des groupes exportateurs. Un marchandage des égoïsmes ne peut produire rien d’autre qu’un blocage du politique et le triomphe du marché. C’est cette logique intergouvernementale qui a « planté » l’Europe au sommet de Nice, il y a trois ans. L’Europe du traité de Nice élargie à 25 membres, c’est la paralysie de la démocratie et donc la toute-puissance du marché: l’Europe néolibérale, une miniature de l’OMC.” 26

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The dichotomy between the intergovernmental method and the Convention method is underlined by rich modification and draws on the known opposition of politics versus market. The phrase “faire la politique!” potentially alludes to the phrase “faire l’Europe”, which, since de Gaulle, has encaptured the French ambition to deepen political integration towards a Europe puissance and/or a Europe sociale. Moreover, the suggestion that intergovernmental politics thwarts the just allocation of goods and serves but the interests of export industries recalls early Euro-­Marxist accounts of European integration, according to which (intergovernmental) EU structures primarily serve a neo-mercantilist power bloc (for these analytical narratives, see Sect. 3.4). In light of this portrayal of intergovernmental politics, a second representative claim is constructed, which relates to EU citizens as a whole. This collective is supposedly united in being disregarded by intergovernmental politics and in the common knowledge that political integration needs to be fostered to contain globalisation; while progressive MEPs, not member state representatives, and supranational methods of will formation, including the Convention method, prove accountable to their demands. By thus constructing a broader representative claim, the authors actualise distinctions along the lines of competing claims for political authority in the EU power field: supranational-parliamentarian versus intergovernmental and EU-wide versus nationwide. They engage in the blame game widespread among MEPs, according to which member state representatives, during intergovernmental negotiations, fail EU citizens and the common European interest, here understood as fair and democratically accountable regulation of globalised markets. The authors also position themselves in the struggle over the legitimate Euro-federal voice, delimitating their “functional federalist” vision of a rebalanced and democratised, legally self-reinforcing political regime from those of “centripetal federalists” such as Yves Salesse, who measure good reform against the vision of a full federal representative democracy. Moreover, the authors seek distinction in the domestic partisan camp, posing as those who successfully translate both demands of the established French Left for a Social Europe and alternative leftist demands for participatory democracy and global justice into Euro-federalist vision and parliamentary practice. They actualise the traditional EU membership project of

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the Parti Socialiste, which justified European integration as a means that, paired with EU social policies, buffers globalisation, and distance themselves from the Eurosceptic Left. At the same time, they signal complicity with the alterglobalist alternative Left, invoking Cacun and intertexts from the European Social Forum and the movement Attac. In this elaborate shifting practice between Europarliamentarian, Euro-­ federalist and leftist representative claims, the authors establish a nexus between EU polity and national polity, between EU-related intertexts and those relevant in the domestic partisan audience. Similar to the discussants in Gazeta Wyborcza, Lipietz and Cohn-Bendit ground their construction of political authority and legitimation in national interdiscourse not only by adding national connotation to EU constitution speak, invoking past French constitutional struggles, the opposition between market and politics as conventionalised in French EU-related debates and the formula of proactive engagement (“faire la politique”), but by argumentatively appropriating it to the political-ideological project pursued in domestic and European context, for which the EU becomes an instrument for realisation. In Lipietz’ and Cohn-Bendit’s article, further EU polity-building is legitimate provided it allows for incremental legal-political change towards more inclusive-participatory decision-­ making and socially-globally just market regulation, while those enjoy political authority who give voice to related demands. The summary below will situate the insights into the two clusters of debate in Le Monde and Gazeta Wyborcza with the larger-scaled findings on polity topics so as to arrive at an overall conclusion how the EU is (de-)legitimised in national media debates.

7.4 ( De-)legitimising the EU in National Media Debates: Summary The insights produced in this chapter  suggest that, in the course of national media debates on EU institutional reform, the practice of EU polity construction is further transformed. In the discourse field of multilateral negotiation and the core documents of the Constitution process,

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more particularly, polity construction was about enhancing a vision of the EU as a polity sui generis, which allowed for endowing European integration with a new mission after the end of the Cold War and for mobilising collective action within the discourse field of multilateral negotiation, across levels of territorial government and institutional bodies (see Sect. 5.1). In the discourse field of Europeanised national news, this practice transformed into mediatised controversy about EU institutional reform, a practice that remotely (imaginarily) resembled the political struggle over options of political action and the exchange of arguments, but was forged according to the news media’s competitive-relational positioning in the national media field, vis-à-vis an audience imagined along national and domestic partisan lines (see Chap. 6). EU polity construction, in this context, became something else: a struggle over the definition of the nation’s and the partisan community’s role and membership project within the European Union, against which the EU has to prove legitimate and instrumental. This was revealed in the three steps of analysis conducted in this chapter. Drawing on them, this concluding section develops a synoptic view of EU polity construction in national media debates and reviews the initial theses raised about the EU’s discursive legitimation.

Shifting the Emphasis of EU Polity Discourse The analysis of the distribution and co-occurrence of polity topics in the investigated evaluative articles brought to light that, in the context of national media debates, the focus of attention shifted from considerations of institutional architecture to desirable attributes of the EU’s constituent political community and criteria of legitimate power execution. Contrary to the debate in the Convention, which was driven by legal-­ constitutional concerns, and the intergovernmental negotiations, which raised problems of power division, the media debates foregrounded struggles over attributes of the EU’s constituent community and criteria of legitimate power execution. They featured in three quarters of evaluative articles, while issues of power balance were covered in only one third of the evaluative articles. Discussing the EU constitution in national

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media apparently necessarily implied reflecting upon the foundations of political authority and association (see Sect. 7.1). Hence, the constitutional framing of treaty revision, its many allusions to principles of modern constitutionalism, national constitutional struggles and federalists aiming for a pan-European social contract, were indeed taken up in both national media debates. If constitution speak was used as a mobilising and streamlining imaginary during the Convention consultations, for example in Giscard d’Estaing’s appeal to communitarian-contractualist rationales or in the imperative of simplification, and backgrounded in the justifications during intergovernmental negotiations, it triggered much more principled reflection on the polity character of the EU in national media debates than the actual reform agenda suggested. Those polity topics were frequent in the evaluative articles that related to the most controversial constitution topics, for example, Balance MS-MS relating to Vote Weighting in Gazeta Wyborcza, Balance EU-MS relating to Unanimity in Le Figaro or Religion relating to the mention of Christianity in the preamble in Rzeczpospolita. However, in all newspapers the polity topics of Democracy and Borders were particularly dense; that is, they linked up to many other topics, suggesting that discussants saw EU institutional reform mainly through the lens of a problematic state of democracy and belonging. Along with this shift of focus from functional-federalist considerations of the appropriate institutional architecture to issues of legitimate political authority and association, conceptions of the EU as polity sui generis changed, too, having been carved out during multilateral negotiations. This was revealed by a closer scrutiny of text passages annotated with the polity topics of  Democracy and Borders. The debate on the state of democracy as a criterion of legitimate political authority within the EU (Democracy) showed a diversifying appropriation of the construction of the EU as a responsive democratic system. While the core documents of the Constitution process had suggested that  EU representatives would account for citizens’ increased demands for democratic control and participation by rendering EU institutions more inclusive and accountable, commentators in the four newspapers engaged in a more fundamental evaluation of democratic politics in the postnational setting. In Le Monde and Le Figaro, considerations of democracy centred on re-establishing

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popular self-determination, at national and European levels; in Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita on national co-determination and equal representation or, in Rzeczpospolita, on political choices freed from legal impositions by the EU.  The discussion of the boundaries of the EU’s constituent community (Borders) involved a modifying appropriation of the construction of the EU as a civilising power and frontier. The vision of the EU as a macroregional power, whose boundaries are defined by human rights, constitutional rule and the free market system were barely taken up (with some exceptions in Gazeta Wyborcza). Nor did commentators follow the idea promoted in the Laeken Declaration that further integration and a strengthened international role for the EU was necessary to counter reincarnated evils (fundamentalism, terrorist, ethnic-­ nationalist conflicts), now at a  global scale. Instead, they primarily projected EU polity-building as following communitarian rationales and saw the EU as a political association based on internal commonalities of (civic) culture. If external Others were conjured up, and this was primarily the case in the French newspapers, they were recruited from different groups of EU aspirants, who were urged to adopt the political culture of the European Union. Even when geopolitical positioning was debated, for example during the dispute on the war on Iraq and the transatlantic split over the desirability of civil or military power, it primarily served symbolic struggles between groups within the EU, over the recognition of diverging foreign policy orientations and polity models of the different member states (see Sect. 7.2).

 wo Types of EU Polity Construction: Polity Duplicatis, T Polity Instrumentalis In the context of debate thus transformed, two types of EU polity construction emerged, which corresponded to specific pragmatic-­communicative settings and text genres. The first type suggested that political association and power execution within the EU is legitimate as long as they mimic modes and rationales of polity-building known from the respective history of state- and nation-building, thus envisaging the EU as a polity duplicatis. In the French case, such duplication showed, for instance,

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when commentators suggested the civic-communitarian community of the European Union ought to be built through unified models of (civic) education, following the example of the unitary French state. In the Polish case, the national constitutional compromise between agnostics and followers of the Catholic Church, or a form of friendly laicism, was proposed as a cultural-communitarian model for settling conflicts over the suprapositive references of EU law, and so on. This type of polity construction had, however, a highly ritualised and restricted application in two settings. First, it occurred in stand-alone commentary that canvassed the EU’s desirable-prospective polity-building hypothetically. These texts assessed in prescriptive style how the EU ought to be built as a polity of its own type characterised by distinct values and identity, thus taking up the gesture of the prospective speeches that EU heads of government and state had delivered in the early period of the Constitution process. Here, commentary on the EU primarily reaffirmed and perpetuated known claims for cultural recognition of national constitutional cultures within the EU setting. Secondly, the polity duplicatis found application in the context of bilateral blame games and media panics on the wrongdoings of fellow Europeans, such as during the conflict over the US-led war on Iraq, in which either Poland or France was stigmatised as falling short of the principles of the EU’s political association or as violating the spirit of community. Here, the construction of the EU as a polity duplicatis served the distinction between EU countries: while French discussants constructed French EU polity from within the centre of established members, with a certain paternalist attitude towards newcomers and by endorsing and plausibilising EU constitution speak, Polish discussants constructed Polish EU polity from the periphery or an outsider’s perspective, either embracing EU constitution speak or deconstructing it as self-interested propaganda (see Sects. 7.2 and 7.3). The other type of EU polity construction salient in the evaluative articles suggested that political association and power execution within the EU is legitimate as long as it facilitates a specific political project promoted as a desirable national or partisan EU policy, thus envisaging the EU as a polity instrumentalis. It occurred in dialogical-argumentative text genres, in ‘clusters of debate’, that is, series of interrelated invited commentaries, in which discussants struggled over the definition of national

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and partisan EU policy and the legitimate representative voice, in imagined interaction with a national and partisan audience. For instance, in the moderated debate on the Draft Constitution in Gazeta Wyborcza, the EU and institutional reforms were deemed legitimate insofar as they allowed Poland to enjoy her rights as a full member and institutionalised the positive discrimination of poor and small states, thus invoking a utilitarian polity rationale (Saryusz-Wolski), or as long as they enhanced Poland’s prospects as an EU member by including her in supranational initiatives with the proactive league of big members (Smolar). In Le Monde, the Draft Constitution was evaluated on the grounds that it did or did not balance out the EU’s constitutional asymmetry by enhancing democratic participation and the French left’s project of Europe Sociale, which served the struggle over the legitimate Euro-federalist-leftist voice in the domestic scene, establishing two different readings (a functional vs a federal) of utilitarian-contractualist rationales of polity-building (see Sect. 7.3). Hence, different from the discourse field of EU multilateral negotiation, where polity construction is linked to mobilising consensus on specific reforms and pushing through a specific design of Eurocratic statecraft, in debates arranged in the discourse field of Europeanised national media, the construction of EU polity, its legitimation or delegitimation, is linked to the struggle over the recognition of national polity (as providing a model for the EU) or the partisan-political project to be realised at national and European levels.

 iscourse Practices (De-)legitimising the EU in National D Media Debates The insights generated in the detailed Critical Discourse Analysis of clusters of debate (see Sect. 7.3) also allow for conclusions regarding regular patterns of discursive legitimation in the EU setting. Indeed, the analysis revealed many examples of polity construction as an overarching discourse agency through which the EU was legitimised or delegitimised. The following discourse practices of constructing a political association and authority recurred in the investigated evaluative articles.

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First, a specific proposal for EU institutional reform, when scrutinised in its argumentative structure following Toulmin (distinguishing claim, grounds and warrant), usually proved to be premised upon some polity rationale: the claim promoted was based on a specific assumption about why political rule and order are required in the first place, thereby also suggesting how and for whom that political power was to be executed (polity rationales as a warrant for  proposals on EU institutional reform). Thus, when pressing for the positive discrimination of small and poor member states in political terms (voting weights) and financial terms (regional transfers), the commentator and former Polish foreign minister Saryusz-Wolski did not raise an explicit claim about the EU’s legitimacy and constituent community. Rather, he presupposed a utilitarian polity rationale, combined with a moral-contractualist one: he suggested that EU polity-building is legitimate insofar as it provides for a just allocation of resources and considers the will of the marginal. The presupposed utilitarian polity rationale also carries with it an assumption about legitimate political authority, suggesting that those who provide or struggle for equal access to regional funds and decision-making act for a legitimate cause and are authorised to speak and decide for the poor and marginal. This reading of implicit warrants of polity construction is, obviously, an abstraction produced by the informed reader or discourse analyst. But it is supported by a range of legitimising discourse strategies that were part of explicit textual-linguistic structure and proved salient in other reform proposals, too: • rationalisation (usually qua definition) that draws on established analytical narratives of European integration and produces a specific portrayal of EU politics; • authorisation that borrows from national examples or EU-attuned personal authorities; • representation that constructs a larger-than-national constituency; • formulae of fallacious argumentation that suggest the proposal does disinterested service to the common cause and shared good (pro bono publico Europae) of this group;

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• plausibilisation that employs the symbolic-figurative register of the targeted audience and intellectual-political camp, using established myths of national polity-building or signal words that allude to the camp’s struggle for a specific vision of society and EU membership. In Saryusz-Wolski’s intervention, the presupposition that EU political association is required for the sake of a just allocation of resources (and is illegitimate if not following this rationale) is implicated in the way he constructs the EU’s constituent community. In the speaker’s view, that community is defined by different levels of GDP and material-­institutional assets, with a group of small and poor member states, including Poland, and the EU as a whole striving for cohesion, while big net payers show increasing reluctance to contribute their part (strategies of representation, e.g. modification in attributions such as small and poor vs big and net payer, or referencing in pars pro toto constructions). Saryusz-Wolski’s depiction of EU politics as power politics in which those prevail who dispose of material assets and bargain hard is rationalised using definitions and examples of intergovernmentalist theorising and authorised with reference to EU rules and his personal negotiation experience. Importantly, the depiction reinforces the suggestion that a redistributive mechanism is necessary as well as a proper intergovernmental representation of poor member states, which Poland, itself middle-sized and poor, would allegedly fill in the name of the small and poor (pro bono eorum), using its voting weight in the Council granted by the Nice Treaty (see Sect. 7.3).

 onstructing the Polity Nexus, or the Paradoxical Role C of the National The analysis of discourse practices of legitimation listed above also revealed how ‘the national’ is implicated in EU polity constructions in national media debates. Thus, when national EU policy and intergovernmental negotiation strategies are struggled over, the national collective is often interpellated, for example in the usurping national we that subsumes the speakers together with fellow citizens and the government, or

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by agentialising and personifying the country’s name and the associated nationals, or by pushing an argument pro bono nobis, which justifies political action in light of the benefit of the national or partisan collective. For plausibilisation, authors also employed the known figurative-­symbolic register of the two nations, such as the phrases ‘non possumus’ or ‘liberum veto’, which allude to Polish anti-communist and republican-­ constitutional struggles, or the nation-founding myths of Poland as a repeatedly betrayed nation and of Solidarność as having torn down the Berlin Wall. For authorising a specific proposal, examples of national constitutionalism were recalled, such as the alleged incremental constitutionalisation of progressive values in successive French constitutions, the model of the unitary state as being built in France’s educational institutions or the Polish constitutional compromise adopted in 1997. Moreover, the national variation that showed in the emphasis on specific polity topics (see Sect. 7.1) corresponds to polity topics that are habitually raised in relation to the (foundational myths about) national polity. Thus, while both French and Polish commentators refer to the Spirit of Community as a necessary ingredient of the EU’s political culture, the French commentators additionally highlight Unity, Political Will and Leadership, as if reading EU polity in light of the French republican synthesis. The shared emphasis on the polity topics of  Religion and Sovereignty in the two Polish newspapers, in turn, seems to resonate with the stress on friendly laicism, which forms part of the Polish constitution, and the memory of the Polish fight for national independence. Hence, commentators in all four newspapers employed polity-related national interdiscourse to render their depictions and reform proposals palpable. However, references and allusions to national polity discourse did not narrow down the debate to purely domestic perspectives, national interest rhetoric or an extrapolation of national polity models onto the EU. Strikingly, all texts subjected to a Critical Discourse Analysis showed that fragments of national polity discourse systematically intersect with EU polity discourse, such as EU constitution speak, the metaphor of a crossroads used for problematising the EU’s future or the analytical narratives of European integration. For instance, when arguing that the mention of social policy objectives in the Draft Constitution would boost more just EU redistribution policies, Lipietz and Cohn-Bendit refer to

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the French experience of incremental constitutional struggle, but also draw on neo-functionalist theories of European integration, according to which integration by law, once taken up in EU judicial review and political struggle, will reveal its spillover effects. Saryusz-Wolski substantiates his plea for maintaining Poland’s strong voting position in the Council, drawing both on the crossroads metaphor (either keep Poland’s position and gain a just EU cohesion policy or abolish it and risk the EU’s decline to a mere free trade zone), intergovernmentalist theories of European integration and the Polish collective memory of the betrayed nation (see Sect. 7.3). Moreover, references and allusions to national polity discourse seem to plausibilise broaden societal-political projects pursued at domestic and European levels. They are linked to, if not a function of, the struggle over the definition of political projects and the legitimate representative voice pursued in the domestic and European contexts. In the case of Gazeta Wyborcza, the discussants enhance two opposing political projects of EU membership, one democratic-internationalist, one realist, that draw on different morals of negotiation inherited from the anti-communist struggle. In their quarrel over the approach to be adopted by Polish negotiators, whether it should focus on unyielding bargaining or consensus seeking, the discussants actualise the symbolic struggle between conservative and liberal successors of Solidarność over a revenging-renewing versus a reconciliatory-accommodating approach to transitional justice after 1989, inscribing these approaches into supranationalist versus intergovernmentalist conceptions of EU politics. In the case of Le Monde, fractions of the left-wing camp seek approbation of their EU strategies. They compete for the legitimate EU-federal, but also leftist voice in domestic politics, trying to establish two different readings (a functional vs a federal) of moral-contractualist rationales of polity-building. When referring to the example of French constitutional struggles, Cohn-Bendit and Lipietz underscore their claim to represent a pro-European leftist grouping that is different from radical leftist federalists (by stressing a functional-­federalist stance) and the Socialists (by stressing the representative relationship vis-à-vis alterglobalists and NGOs).

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Hence, EU polity construction in national media debates seems to be a recombination that employs certain configurations of discourse from the two discourse fields of Europeanised political communication, including analytical narratives of European integration and national (polity-­related) interdiscourse. Fragments of discourse generated during the Constitution process at the EU level intermingle with symbols and intertexts of national constitutionalism or nation-building (see also Sect. 8.2, for a discussion). However, while the analysis in this chapter clearly provided rich evidence for such bricolage, the major finding is that this recombination is part of struggles over visions of society more generally. The detailed discourse analysis has revealed what Bourdieu states to be a common characteristic of the journalistic, the political and the social science fields. Within the frames of media-specific practices, they all lay claim to the imposition of a legitimate vision of the social world, they have in common the fact that they are the site of internal struggles for the imposition of the dominant principle of vision and division. (Bourdieu, 2005, p. 36)

Crucially, the struggle over legitimate visions of the social world, and the legitimate EU polity, more specifically, is is a matter of broader relational positioning that involves  various representatives of opposing camps, rather than the matter of a single statesman or institution drafting a plausible social technique and persuasive communication strategy as is often suggested in political scientists’ analyses. Such relational positioning in media debates further modifies the recontextualised discourse fragments and translates them into discourses of domestic political projects and struggles over the hegemony of definition. Mediation is difficult when the discourses thus appropriated feed back into transnational dialogue or intergovernmental negotiation: while the common reference—the EU constitution—remains, the meanwhile associated meanings need, again, translation. The following concluding chapter will discuss in more detail what lessons are to be drawn from the empirical exploration conducted in this book.

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References Bellon, A. (2002, March 2). La gouvernance contre la souveraineté du peuple [Governance vs. Popular Sovereignty]. Le Figaro. Berès, P. (2003, October 21). Ce gauchisme aigre-doux qui dit non à la Constitution européenne. Le Monde. Bourdieu, P. (2005). The Political Field, the Social Science Field, and the Journalistic Field. In R.  Benson & E.  Neveu (Eds.), Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field (pp. 29–47). Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. Cohn-Bendit, D., & Lipietz, A. (2003, September 20). Une notre Europe pour une autre mondialisation [Another Europe for Another Globalisation]. Le Monde, p. 18. Fitoussi, J.-P. (2002, October 15). The Rule and the Choice [La règle et la choix, de la souveraineté en Europe]. Le Monde, p. 19. Fossum, J. E., & Trenz, H.-J. (2006). When the People Come In: Constitution-­ Making and the Belated Politicisation of the European Union. European Governance Papers (EUROGOV) No. C-06-03. GazetaWyborcza. (2003, October 10). Chcemy innej Europy. List otwarty do europejskiej opinii publicznej. [We Want Another Europe. Open Letter to the European Public Opinion]. GazetaWyborcza. GazetaWyborcza, & Rzeczpospolita. (2003, November 17). W obronie postanowień Nicei. List otwarty [We Defend the Provisions of the Nice Treaty. Open Letter]. GazetaWyborcza. Horolets, A. (2006). Pulling Europe Closer: The Strategy of Shame in Polish Press Discourse on Europe. In A. Kutter & V. Trappmann (Eds.), Das Erbe des Beitritts: Europäisierung in Mittel- und Osteuropa (pp. 155–169). Baden-­ Baden: Nomos. Kurski, J. (2003, October 10). Czy umierać za Niceę? [Is Nice Worth Dying For?]. Gazeta Wyborcza, p. 23. Kutter, A. (2006). Unia Europejska jako antagonizm. Strategie dyskursywne w polskiej debacie o przyszłości integracji europejskiej [Constructing the EU as an Antagonism: Discursive Strategies in the Polish Debate on the Future of European Integration]. In A.  Horolets (Ed.), Europa w polskich dyskursach [Europe in Polish Discourse] (pp. 101–116). Toruń: Adam Marszałek. Kutter, A. (2007, August). Re-drawing the Boundaries of Belonging: The Construction of Political Projects in Polish Public Discourse. Conference Paper. Paper presented at the DGO Summer School, Warsaw.

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Lukowski, J., & Zawadzki, H. (2006). A Concise History of Poland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salesse, Y. (2003, September 27). Constitution: Un Projet Inacceptable. Le Monde. Śpiewak, P. (2005). Pamięć po komunizme. Gdańsk: słowo/obraz terrytorium. Sztompka, P. (2003, August 20). My, Europejczycy [We, the Europeans]. Gazeta Wyborcza, p. 12. Waldbaum, B. (2004, June 17). The Heart of European Democracy [Le cœur de la démocratie européenne]. Le Monde.

8 Towards a Discursive Political Sociology of European Integration: Conclusions

The concern that gave rise to this book was the question of how a polity is being legitimised or delegitimised in a setting where multiple actors claim authority and competence; where constituencies relate, above all, to their national polities, but extend their political aspirations and claims of representation to the EU’s entity as well; and where the objectives and values underlying political association are not finalised, but subject to reinforcing contestation. How, in such a setting, is the understanding of political rule and association formed? How are its appropriate institutional arrangement, constituent community and power execution imagined? And what role does the national, often suspected of undermining the European project, play in this imagination of political association beyond the state? The book set out to explore the innovative insights that can be gained when addressing these questions from a discourse- and field-theoretical angle that is attentive to the specificities of the European Union. In particular, the fact was considered that the EU is a polity in the making, unsettled in its finalité, modelled on modern liberal government, but unfamiliar in the postdemocratic and postnational forms of governance that it developed. Its justifiability is subject to contestation and political struggle. In addition, the book sought to account for the fact © The Author(s) 2020 A. Kutter, Legitimation in the European Union, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33031-6_8

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that communication about the EU’s legitimacy is primarily triggered in multilateral negotiation on EU institution-building, which draws on EU-specific discourses of institutional engineering, while being mediatised by news media that are Europeanised, but primarily target national audiences and cultivate the interdiscourse of a national society. The Constitution process investigated in this book exposed this condition as clearly as perhaps no other EU treaty revision before. It revealed the asynchrony and heterogeneity of the different contexts of EU-related political communication and illustrated the differential interpretations that a political consensus, which was achieved in multilateral negotiation, attains in the various member societies or national contexts. In addition, the Constitution process exposed the EU as a would-be polity with constitutional aspirations. It triggered contestation on fundamental issues of political association, but without bringing about a consensus as to where European integration should head in future: “(…) le débat sur le Traité constitutionnel (…) a permis de sensibiliser les citoyens à la question européenne, mais n’a pas favorisé la formation d’un consensus” (Dacheux, 2006, p. 88f ). Media debates, which are the focus of the primary research presented in the book, are anything but trivial events in that struggle. The broadsheet debates investigated are, naturally, a rather exclusive phenomenon, consumed and produced by the well-educated and politically informed and only occasionally taken up by other media segments. Still, they contributed to later developments in the French and Polish political public. The controversies that were arranged by Gazeta Wyborcza, Rzeczpospolita, Le Monde and Le Figaro anticipated the polarisation of Polish politics and the later large-scale politicisation of the EU constitution in France. The newspapers highlighted issues that split and reorganised political camps later on. In the Polish case, the dispute over the adequacy of a confrontational approach to the proposed system of vote weighting in the Council ended in the dethronement of the Nice or Death camp within the liberal-conservative Platforma Obywatelska and induced a clearer divide between liberal conservatives on the one hand and emergent national conservatives on the other. In France, the question of whether the Constitutional Treaty sufficiently balanced the deregulatory policies of European economic integration split the Parti Socialiste

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and helped the emergence of a cross-camp coalition promoting Non in the run-up to the referendum. This concluding chapter reflects upon the insights generated in the book, both conceptual and empirical. It draws from them more general conclusions on political legitimation and political communication in the European Union and on ways of innovatively investigating them. I will start with challenging, in a pinpoint manner, a couple of diagnoses that are widespread in EU studies, and the research on European political communication, more particularly. Against the backdrop of the insights gathered, they seem to be in need of qualification. This qualification is then provided in more detail, revising the book’s insights in line with the practice of critique developed in Critical Discourse Analysis (see Sect. 2.3). It combines an immanent critique of selective-exclusive tendencies in the analysed artefacts, with a socio-diagnostic critique, which highlights problematic social and political implications, and a critique of conceptual selectivities or knowledge- and research-philosophical simplifications, to eventually point out, in a prospective critique, some alternative ways of researching and communicating the EU.

8.1 B  eyond the ‘Deficits’: Challenging Conventional Wisdoms on Europeanised Political Communication From the perspective developed in the book, there is, first, no evidence of an encompassing ‘communication deficit’. This deficit is often diagnosed in the literature, referring to a perceived difficulty to render EU politics comprehensible and communicable in broader publics. In the literature, it is attributed to either EU institutions’ ineffective communication policies, which are said to reproduce a depolicising system of governance (Martins, Lecheler, & de Vreese, 2012, Meyer, 1999), or pro-European politicians’ failure to develop persuasive communication that engages broader audiences in compelling visions of a common future and goes beyond the habitual formula of national interest and internal coordinative discourse (Schmidt, 2007, 2014). Moreover, the communication deficit is often related to the lack of an adequate level of information

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on  EU affairs in (national) news media that would facilitate public ­engagement with EU politics (Boomgaarden et  al., 2013; van Noije, 2010). The analysis conducted in this book suggests reconsidering these diagnoses. First, it invites the conclusion that skills and means of communication are not necessarily to blame. The analysis reveals that EU representatives, national representatives and commentators have  a rich repertoire of linguistic devices and discourse practices at their disposal to capture, in accessible and persuasive terms, the EU political process.1 As I will show in more detail in the next section, speakers also draw on a set of well-­developed discourse practices to signify the EU in its polity character. They have generated projections of good political rule, in which the EU figures as a reference object: it is viewed as potentially embodying (if not in a desirable form) a political association and political authority that reaches beyond the national state and the national constituency. Even if these projections are contradictory, also with what the EU currently seems to be, they demonstrate that a repertoire of practices is available and cultivated for legitimising or delegitimising the European Union among general publics (see Sect. 8.2 for more details). Second, the study did not provide support for the verdict that EU politics is generally given too little media visibility to allow for informed EU-related publics to emerge. On the contrary, the investigated segment of centrist broadsheets sought to excel, notably by drawing considerable attention to the Constitution process and by regularly arranging debates on the topic. This is also true for the Polish broadsheets investigated, regardless of the fact that Polish journalists, during the period of investigation, were still reporting with an outsider’s view, from the perspective of an accession state. It sets them clearly apart from other media segments in Poland that barely covered the Constitution process (Wyrozumska, 2007). All four newspapers showed patterns of Europeanisation that communication scholars consider provide an adequate level of information on EU politics. Notwithstanding the predominant focus on  This finding resonates with an earlier study on news coverage on war and intervention in eight EU countries, which showed that journalists and commentators in all the countries investigated had developed sophisticated lexical-semantic means to signify the different centres and tiers of EU politics (Brussels-based, capital-based, supranational, inter- and transgovernmental, domestic, transnational, international), with the notable exception of the UK, where the EU-related vocabulary was more limited and denoted intergovernmental dimensions (Kantner, Kutter, & Renfordt, 2008). 1

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o­ fficial-­institutional EU events and speakers from the respective national political scenes that have been observed for national news media before (Adam, 2007; AIM-Research-Consortium, 2007; Koopmans, 2007), their news coverage was ‘vertically’ and ‘horizontally’ Europeanised (Koopmans & Erbe, 2004): they drew attention to incidents in supranational and intergovernmental decision-making forums and in fellow member states in a way that corresponded to the supranationally, intergovernmentally and domestically driven negotiation phases of the Constitution process and to the level of involvement that French and Polish representatives had in constitution-drafting.2 Europeanisation also showed in specific text genres, including European press reviews, news articles that compared approaches to problem-solving adopted in different member states or text genres that evocated transnational debate such as open ‘letters to European public opinion’ that were published in both Le Monde and Gazeta Wyborcza. Moreover, the four broadsheets seemed to attribute news relevance in similar ways, giving attention to a shared set of topics of constitution-­drafting with similar timing and with similar intensity in terms of publication output, placement and in-depth coverage (Sect. 6.1, but see also Sect. 6.2) Scholars of European public spheres hold that these features generate conducive conditions for transnational debate (Eder & Kantner, 2000). Mirroring the official ‘deliberative’ staging of EU constitution-­drafting, they framed the EU constitutional issue as ‘debate-­worthy’, that is, as a matter of controversy to be debated in opinion sections (see Sect. 6.2). The four newspapers thus facilitated, with national- and newspaper-specific variations, a debate on the EU constitution that had some shared traits and was, to very limited extent, mutually referential.3 Hence, with important qualifications that I will introduce further below, means and practices of communicating European integration are not to blame for the ‘disconnection problem’ that pro-European ­politicians or pro-European journalists face when trying to persuade a  Up until the accession referendum in June 2003, Poland only had observer status in the Convention. 3  Only Gazeta Wyborcza provided for a stratified and international set of discussants, while Le Monde and Le Figaro invited commentary mainly from the French political field, with an emphasis on the associated partisan camp, and Rzeczpospolita mainly from the Polish national-­ conservative camp. 2

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general public of the European project. The diagnosis that the investigated phenomena are specific to the broadsheet segment and reflect a European elite journalism might also no longer fully hold as the visibility of EU affairs has increased across media segments with the politicisation of European integration following the Eurozone crisis (Boomgaarden et al., 2013). Rather, we may suspect that political communication on EU affairs is “less unintelligible than pointless to those, who, not being players in the game, ‘can’t see the interest in it’” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 184). It might be pointless to engage with public debate on European integration, because it is forged according to the exigencies of highly professionalised and self-referential political competition, EU coordination and news production, which relate to internal divisions, rather than to EU citizens’ social struggles, and because its aspects of symbolic violence are more easily exposed (see Sects. 8.2 and 8.3 for more details). The study further cannot confirm that persistent national bonds, or, in the terminology of this book: prevalent national polity discourse and the narrowing to domestically salient issues, stand in the way of developing European perspectives. Indeed, the four newspapers did narrow down the EU constitutional issue to domestically controversial aspects. They also used national interdiscourse extensively for plausibilisation, that is, the figurative register of the national-linguistic community that shows in the recurrent use of certain illustrations, allusions, metaphors and so on and helps to situate abstract knowledge in palpable terms. The same held for national polity discourse, that is, the repertoire of intertexts and examples from national constitutional struggles and nation-building. The newspapers streamlined and stereotyped the EU constitutional issue in line with habitual controversies over EU membership that ritually arouse emotions in the respective domestic political-intellectual camps (see Sects. 6.2 and 6.3). But this did not imply that the broadsheets unduly downplayed the supranational, intergovernmental and transnational dimension of EU politics (see above on Europeanisation). Moreover, all these translations to the domestic and the national seemed to help, instead of hinder, the formulation of projections of the EU’s future. As I will demonstrate in more detail in the next section, the  diversifying appropriation of EU issues to national debates and national polity  discourse does not

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­ ndermine, but enables, the construction and legitimation of the polity u of the EU. What is important to stress is that these translations neither indicated ‘nationalisation’, understood as mechanical or constructed resonance with given national constitutional and policy traditions or national journalistic culture, which would necessarily filter coverage and debate in a specific way. Nor did they imply ‘domesticisation’ in terms of a full subordination of news coverage and debate to concerns of domestic political competition. Instead, they showed what I called ‘recontextualisation’, drawing on Basil Bernstein: the selective, diversifying appropriation of fragments of EU-specific discourses of institutional engineering, such as fragments of EU constitution speak or analytical narratives of European integration, to national polity discourse and interdiscourse. This sophisticated bricolage corresponded to the newspapers’ specific way of arranging news coverage and debate and transformed both the appropriated fragments and established formulae of national interest and EU membership (see also Sect. 8.2). Thus, the same references to national polity  discourse and interdiscourse were used very flexibly by different journalists and discussants to plausibilise opposing depictions or proposals for EU institutional reform and national EU membership. The most palpable example is the recontextualisation of a quote from Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory speech by the two Polish newspapers. Both alluded to the nation-founding myth of the overruled nation when highlighting the (initially) missing representation of accession countries in the Convention Presidium as unfair play. But while Rzeczpospolita’s Brussels correspondent Jędrzej Bielecki used the allusion to underline a scenario of renewedly threatening domination, which substantiated his depiction of EU politics as soberly-to-be-­ addressed power politics, Gazeta Wyborcza’s correspondent Jacek Pawlicki, through it, enhanced the scenario of future resolution in a proactive integrationist stance (see Sect. 6.3). The flexible use of national polity discourse and interdiscourse seemed to be part not only of journalistic practice, signalling distinct editorial lines on European integration and interpellating the national or partisan audience. It was also pronounced in the struggle of politicians and political commentators over adversarial political projects and the legitimate

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representative voice to be put forward on both the domestic and European scales. For instance, when pleading to accept the Draft Constitution in Le Monde, the Members of the European Parliament and the Green faction, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Alain Lipietz, invoked the memory of French constitutional struggles. They did so to underline that even the sole mention of progressive rights and policies may pave the way for successful constitutionalisation in the long run, regardless of how reactionary the rest of the current constitutional design and dominant political forces are. They drew a parallel between the progressivism of civil liberties in French historical constitutions, which helped to overcome the monarchy, and the social rights and social policy objectives in the EU’s Draft Constitution, which they expected to transform the neoliberal set-up of the EU in the future. This move of persuasive speech, together with the dropping of activist slogans (“Europe sociale”, “une autre Europe est possible”), interpellated the traditional left, the alternative-green left and the alterglobalists alike, whose causes the authors claimed to have furthered in the Convention. It also underscored their effort to distinguish themselves, as progressive and directly elected, transnationally operating parliamentarians, from member state representatives, whom they reproached for exclusively promoting the interests of selected sectors of the national economy (see Sect. 7.3). In short, references to national polity discourse and interdiscourse and the actualisation of ritualised domestic controversies on European integration proved to be a resource of multiply scaled political-partisan struggle. The study thus hints at a more complicated story of political communication and competition in the EU setting. While domestic political competition and references to the national prevail, they are embedded in a European modus operandi, with participants of debate struggling to inculcate audiences and intertexts at national and European scales. Having thus refuted overly general verdicts about the supposed lack of European perspectives, of EU-related information, or persuasive-­ imaginative speech, I need to likewise qualify evaluations which view the above findings as an indication of a European communication community. Contrary to what is suggested in some studies on European media publics (Boomgaarden et al., 2013, p. 609; Kantner, 2016), convergent patterns of news coverage do not necessarily indicate a transnational

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debate that ponders the same problems or even develops similar problem conceptions. Instead, the debates investigated remain asynchronous and/ or divergent in focus and associated meaning, in particular between national contexts of debate, but also between newspapers in the same country. This is particularly true for clusters of debate, that is, series of invited commentaries on a topic in which the  discussants engaged in argumentative interaction. The debates remained highly introverted and primarily served the self-affirmation of a national-partisan audience. This was revealed by the separate analysis of overall news coverage, on the one hand, and evaluative articles that dealt with the EU constitution in some depth, on the other. While the analysis of news coverage revealed convergent patterns of relevance attribution, the analysis of evaluative articles showed that commentary peaked at different points in time in the four newspapers and diverged in topic and emphasis (see Sect. 6.2).4 The analysis also revealed that divisive dynamics unfolded in parallel with convergent news coverage. Bilateral French-Polish conflicts on models of laicism to be enshrined in the EU constitution, the US-led Iraq War and EU negotiation failure were scandalised by the newspapers as conflicts of fundamentally opposed national interests and cultures, inciting national indignation over the supposed wrongdoing of other EU governments or member societies. It was a practice used by the four newspapers to boost controversy. It seems to have pushed even the likeminded to rally round respective national flags and deny neighbour-interlocutors the competence to judge what was good for the collective of Europeans. This is demonstrated by the example of the open letters that were published in Le Monde and Gazeta Wyborcza and documented a dispute between Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Olivier Duhamel, members of the Greens and European Parliament at that time, Adam Michnik, founder of Gazeta Wyborcza and an important figure in Solidarity, and the paper’s editor, Marek Beylin (see Sect. 6.2). Hence, extensive Europeanisation of political communication and news coverage does not per se imply  When reporting on the Constitution process, the newspapers all selected and highlighted news according to institutional leverage and controversy, with similar timing, volume and placement of publication, and a similar volume of in-depth evaluation. But, in evaluative articles and opinion sections, they put different emphasis on the topics selected and situated them in different thematic contexts (see Sect. 6.2). 4

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t­ ransnationalisation and shared perspectives. Rather, the development of shared perspectives is yet another process of cultural translation between differently Europeanised national debates. It needs explicit elaboration and is usually not facilitated by the way national news media produce news (for suggestions, see Sect. 8.4).

 econsidering the National in Europeanised R Political Communication The revelations of the study call for a re-accentuation of research on EU political communication, identities or public spheres (see Sect. 8.4). But above all, they encourage scholars and practitioners of EU communication to move further beyond methodological nationalism, that is, the presupposition of a natural essence of a global regime of nation-states, in which nation-states appear as the natural containers of society and of a political collective unified by given interests. Instead of taking the national—here understood as claims for political authority and cultural recognition related to a national jurisdiction, its polity and political ­culture—at face value, and instead of unreflectedly perpetuating the ‘national level’ as a subject and unit of analysis, we should better account for the complicated role the national plays in EU politics and political communication. The insights generated in this study invite us to consider the national as a resource and a sedimented discourse structure, on the one hand, and a relationally constructed category, on the other, which is paradoxically both levelled out and reinforced by dynamics of Europeanised political competition and communication. As a resource, the national is employed when speakers further a proposal for EU institutional reform drawing on fragments of national polity  discourse and interdiscourse for persuasive enhancement, or when they reignite formulas of national EU policy and membership aspiration, such as Europe puissance in France or Nice [positively discriminated, equal representation] or death in Poland. In these cases, national polity  discourse and interdiscourse proved important as an intertextual configuration, a repertoire that was flexibly employed by the speakers to further opposing political projects on national and European scales. It also

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showed as a horizon of interpretation shared by compatriots in the comparative analysis of content analytical insights. It revealed, through aggregation at a country level, a common stress on unity and the integrative forces of the unitary state in the French newspapers and a common emphasis on spiritual-religious traditions in the Polish newspapers (see Sect. 7.2). Moreover, in Europeanised national news media, the national occurred as a sedimented discourse structure, showing in specific features of field-specific cultural-discursive capital and in field-internal hierarchies and segmentation that have emerged with the formation of the national journalistic field. As a distinct claim for political authority and cultural recognition, a set of preferences to be realised within the frames of European integration in the name of the constituency, the national crystallises only relationally. It emerges in the course of EU policy formulation and decision-making, when it is being juxtaposed with other claims for political authority and cultural recognition. This relational definition showed in three variants. First, the national interest became tangible while being highlighted as enhancing the common European interest in some ways, in contrast to or in conjunction with other entities’ demands. The study thus underlines earlier findings that the national, when voiced as a specific claim in the EU diplomatic field, is formulated with regard to how it (also) furthers the common European good (Adler-Nissen, 2014). In debates on EU institutional reform, arguments pro bono nobis are always promoted as arguments pro bono publico Europae or pro bono eorum. Individual instances of such argumentation might seem fallacious, such as the claim by the former Polish foreign minister Jacek Saryusz-Wolski that retaining the preponderance of Polish votes in the Council was in the interest of small accession states and of EU intra-regional distributive justice more generally (see Sect. 7.3). However, the very fact that he puts his vision of national interest in European terms and invokes distributive justice as a  common European cause points to regular practices of voicing and retaining national political authority within the frames of EU politics. A second variant of employing, and perpetuating, the national in EU legitimation showed in the two constitutionalising documents, the Laeken Declaration and Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory speech. Here, the European was represented as serving the many national interests,

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­ sually in metonymies or toto pro pars constructions, which suggested, for u example, that the Constitutional Treaty integrated and cherished national constitutional achievements or that the Convention was a multinational assembly that served the dual European-national identities of EU citizens (see Sects. 3.2, 5.1). In a third variant, the national was highlighted as essentially contradicting other entities’ claims for political authority and cultural recognition, often in ways that instigated hostility towards other nations or the EU. This was the case in intergovernmental blame games on negotiation failure, which were exacerbated by unbenign tactics of international diplomacy, or in media panics on the wrongdoings of fellow Europeans or EU authorities (see Sects. 5.3, 6.2). It is important to stress that, during multilateral negotiations, the three relational constructions of the national served political actors’ social distinction in the EU political field. They helped to highlight and delineate competing representative claims and corresponded to the domestic, the supranational, or the intergovernmental tiers of EU decision-making and treaty revision. Thus, when Saryusz-Wolski pleaded for a preponderance of Polish votes in the Council, suggesting that only this voting weight would preserve EU distributive justice and a fair distribution of regional funds, he anticipated reproaches of national egotism on the intergovernmental scene. At the same time, he positioned himself in the domestic struggle between the camp of ‘national interest rhetoric’ and that of the ‘white flag’ over the appropriate national EU policy, distinguishing himself as an advocate of the former line vis-à-vis his interlocutor (see Sect. 7.3). Giscard d’Estaing, while drawing on the multinationality theme, interpellated a multinational assembly, thereby transgressing the representative logics and competing legitimations that Conventioneers brought in as delegates of particular political institutions (see Sect. 3.2). Intergovernmental blame games and their amplification in media panics, finally, helped member state representatives to delineate their claims on EU political authority in a way that was recognisable to their national electorates and to fellow EU negotiators and set them apart from EU bodies that draw on competing sources of legitimation, such as the European Parliament or Commission. In short, the study encourages us to de-essentialise the national. Instead of viewing it as flowing from a given set of preferences, identifications and traditions, it should be

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­ erceived as being produced in EU-related political competition and p communication: as a  resource of persuasive argumentation for an EU-related project and as a means to enhance competing representative claims in the EU political field. It is a source of cultural continuity, mobilised in struggles over European integration. The study also urges us to reflect upon the adequacy of ‘level’ as an analytical category of EU politics. The conception of scaled governance in terms of levels of territorial organisation is borrowed from International Relations and has inspired much of the theorising on EU politics, whether that highlighted supranational or intergovernmental dynamics, two-level games in EU intergovernmental politics or the EU ‘multilevel system’ as such. The analysis clearly reveals that the ‘level imaginary’ is also presupposed in Europeanised political communication and competition. In struggles over the division of competences and the sharing of sovereignty, it allows participants in a debate to reaffirm competing representative claims, relating to national or European electorates. It thus sustains familiar representative politics as if there was, indeed, no such thing as a postnational and postdemocratic condition (for these unfamiliars, see Sect. 1.3). In light of the European modus operandi of political competition and communication that the study revealed, that is, agents’ systematic factoring in of possibilities of collective action and news production across scales, the analytical potential of ‘levels’ seems limited, though. The level imaginary carries with it the, rather misleading, assumption that the national is a self-contained realm and that certain factors like national political-journalistic culture, legitimacy beliefs, policy traditions or actor constellations form independently from the European and impact on political communication in a predictable way, while the European is derived from or transferred to it. A fuller account of EU-related political communication and EU legitimation is  revealed once we open the box of the ‘national level’ and, instead of perpetuating it as a subject and unit of analysis in comparative designs, look into it and contrast it with dynamics at the meso level of social organisation that stretches the EU’s scales of territorial government. The book did this in two ways. On the one hand, it abandoned the focus on individuals’ and electorates’ support for existing EU institutions and policies. It considered, instead, the legitimising discourse agency of

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those who have made a profession of making EU affairs explicit in different realms of social-professional organisation (politics, journalism, academics), who struggle to make their definitions of legitimate political rule accepted by broader publics. On the other hand, the book highlighted the  discourse structures involved in EU legitimation, adopting the lens of field theory, which highlights structures of symbolic interaction at the meso level of social organisation. The following sections will present the insights achieved with the help of these two conceptual moves.

8.2 Recontextualising Polity Construction: How the EU Is (De-)legitimised The book developed a framework for the discourse study of legitimation, applicable beyond the investigated case, which shifts the focus from a state of acknowledged and justified political rule (legitimacy) to a process of constructing legitimate political authority and association (legitimation) (see Chaps. 3 and 7 and Sect. 5.1 for more details). Instead of polling individuals’ support for the supranational entity or identifying, in publicised opinion, what known criteria of legitimacy or transnationally convergent problem perceptions the EU is associated with, the book investigated how, through what conventionalised language use and discourse practice, speakers construct political authority and association across contexts of Europeanised political communication. Implied in this focus was a shift from conceptions of legitimation as a bottom-up investment in legitimacy beliefs and evaluations held by subjects of EU rule, which inform existing approaches in the political sociology of European integration, to a relational-constructionist conception of legitimation following Bourdieu. Accordingly, legitimation is a symbolically violent struggle over the definition of legitimate political rule. It is waged by professional producers of public discourse and is conditioned upon others’ temporary withdrawal from such activity. Rulers and ruled recognise themselves in relations of public power through the classifications (e.g. of represented and representatives, of rationales for political rule) established in that struggle. These are brought about through speakers’ ­structured symbolic interaction, rather than through wilful manipula-

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tion. Once these classifications are questioned and the power relations, which they normalise, exposed in their arbitrariness, relations of political power become delegitimised. The book elaborated a framework for analysing legitimation defined in this way from a discourse point of view that is sensitive to the EU’s specific setting. It started from the notion of legitimation developed in Critical Discourse Analysis, where legitimation signifies persuasive language use that furthers the speaker’s communicative-pragmatic plan in a specific setting. From this perspective, the EU is legitimised in language use that renders the EU intelligible and justifiable as a polity beyond the state; in macropropositions that relate to polity-building (polity topics) and in structures of argumentation (conclusion, grounds, warrant) and discourse strategies (of representation, argumentation and plausibilisation) that render related claims persuasive (Sect. 3.1). To grasp political legitimation, however, such persuasive language use was reread with regard to how it established classifications of legitimate political authority and association. Based on a review of Bourdieu’s analysis of liberal-­ democratic representative politics in the twentieth century, and the imaginary of electoral-representative delegation, I specified persuasive language use that signifies and performs political authority, for example by classifying and interpellating represented and representatives, by signalling disinterested service to mandatories or by summoning a common political cause (Sect. 3.2). A review of conventional arguments for political rule and association, or polity rationales, further set out how political association might be constructed in persuasive language use. Polity rationales suggest that, due to certain characteristics of the constituent community or humanity, a political association has to be built in certain ways and public-political power executed correspondingly. They have been handed down in centuries of political thought and draw on contractualist, utilitarian or communitarian-­intersubjective traditions of justifying the modern state.5 I assumed that these classic arguments for polity-building form part of  Accordingly, a specific form of political rule and authority is appropriate because it will endow constituent-sovereign parts with the capacity to act upon external pressures and threats (strategic-­ contractualist rationale); give expression to the  popular will, natural rights and shared values (moral-contractualist rationale); ensure effective and just resource allocation and demand process5

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the intertextual repertoire of participants of debate and would inform causal narratives about why the EU has to be built and governed in certain ways (Sect. 3.3). Moreover, considering that notions of EU polity are generated in multilateral negotiation and are primarily  mediatised by news media targeting the EU’s different national audiences, I directed analytical attention to moves of translation between specialised EU discourse and national interdiscourse, the figurative repertoire that a collective of a titular nation shares and that national media cultivate. By thus bringing the perspectives of language use (discourse practice) and regulative configurations of discourse practices (discourse formation) together, I was able to establish how the EU was legitimised during the EU constitutional debate and what features might also be relevant beyond the EU’s constitutional episode. In a nutshell, the EU is discursively legitimised through polity construction. It is legitimised when speakers, while arguing for or against a specific measure of institutional reform, establish, perpetuate or adjust classifications of political authority and association in a way which makes EU-wide political association compelling and substantiates claims to EU political authority. Judging from the analysis conducted in the book, such EU polity construction is not limited to evaluations of current performance, but future-oriented. Even if the initial justification of European integration, the peace-building mission, may have fallen victim to its own success (Weiler, 2012, p.  837), the EU’s legitimacy continues to be judged according to its potential to form a specific political association in the future. To envisage the institutions and community yet to be put in place and to argue for the (deepened) institutionalisation of postnational rule, speakers draw on classic strategic- and moral-contractualist, utilitarian and communitarian-intersubjective polity rationales (see Sects. 2.3 and 7.3). Moreover, speakers appeared to be acutely aware of the polity character of the EU and knew how to talk about it. They problematised multifaceted power sharing, that is, power sharing that extends the vertical division between national and supranational levels of territorial ­government and includes horizontal power division between EU bodies ing (utilitarian rationale); or flow from nested or interactively-intersubjectively emerging bonds (communitarian, intersubjective rationales) (see Sect. 3.3).

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as well as power sharing with other international organisations. They used a set of ideographs to signify foundational principles of EU political association, including democracy, popular or national sovereignty, diversity, secularism and respect for religion, and (redistributive) solidarity. They also had precise conceptions of what makes up the EU’s distinct political culture, including identification with the European project, a spirit of community and commitment to unity, political determination, proactive leadership and compliance with shared standards (see Sects. 7.1, 7.2). While based on the same conventionalised patterns of persuasive language use (see subsection below), EU polity constructions remain differential. They diverge between contexts of political communication, whether that is multilateral negotiation as compared to national media debates or national media debates compared to each other. This divergence is a consequence of recontextualisation between contexts of Europeanised specialised-professional practice. Their respective pragmatic-­communicative purpose, specialised discourse practice and structure of self-referential relational positioning drive diversification, rather than given factors of national political culture and domestic political competition that are usually highlighted in comparative analyses (see subsection below, and Sect. 8.3 for a summary). In Europeanised national news media, diversification is driven by the efforts of political journalists and news organisations to wield consecration power over EU news in the face of a national-partisan target audience. To this end, they employ the specialised practice and regulative discourse of news journalism while calibrating between Brussels-based transnational news production and the competitive logics of the national journalistic field (see Sect. 4.4). EU polity construction, in this context, relies upon the selective translation of EU-specific discourses of institutional engineering, such as those generated during EU constitution-­ drafting, into terms that habitually trigger debate on national EU policy and membership in the associated intellectual-political camp. Facilitated by strategies of plausibilisation, that is, by tropes, wordplay, allusion, or mythopoesis that generate familiarity and complicity with the target audience, they are appropriated to national and partisan interdiscourse and polity discourse. Through such accommodation, European integra-

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tion becomes receptive to partisan struggles over postnational political rule, and a ‘polity nexus’ between EU polity and (different partisan conceptions of ) national polity is established (see Sects. 6.3, 7.3). Hence, EU polity construction, the establishment of classifications of political association and authority beyond the state, by which subjects of EU rule recognise themselves, needs to be thought of as recontextualising polity construction. The EU is rendered legitimate not by the emergence of convergent conceptions of political authority and association, nor by subsumption to a specific national conception. Neither are EU polity  constructions simply reflecting “narrative diversity” (Lacroix & Nicolaïdis, 2010). Instead, they indicate and provide legitimacy through differential translation, which is conditioned by the receiving discourse field, into the terms of specific political communities, out of which the national community and the partisan community are the ones fostered by national media debates. Let me illustrate this by  drawing on some insights from the analysis (see also Kutter, 2015). When pleading to strengthen joint EU external action and defence, proponents in the Convention not only referred to UN peacekeeping obligations or lessons from the Balkan wars. In addition, they suggested that these measures would provide EU members with greater action capacity on the international scale and allow them to assert shared liberal values internationally. Speakers thus alluded to both strategic-­ contractualist polity rationales, which suggests the pooling of power is an appropriate means to counter threats more effectively, and to moral-­ contractualist rationales, according to which joint institutions are appropriate once they give expression to the shared principles and political will of a political association. The EU and its reform seemed legitimate as long as they followed these rationales, constituting a polity of its own sort and purpose, a polity sui generis. The analysis of core constitutionalising documents of the Constitution process showed that these constructions of political association carried with them specific conceptions of legitimate political authority, too. The pooling of member states’ and the EU’s external action and defence capacities was represented as a common cause endorsed by member states, EU bodies, international partners and EU public opinion alike, while the EU’s value orientation seemed to ­correspond to (most) members’ constitutional cultures. Altogether, this

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entitled advocates of joint external action to press for its institutionalisation and claim to act in the name of constituencies and the common European good. The construction of the EU as a civilising power, which projected its liberal values onto others and bolstered them against new illiberal-­terrorist threats via a pooling of diplomatic and military capacities, could have resonated with similar policy traditions in Poland and France: in both countries, international universalism and international military intervention were endorsed as policy traditions, as were plans to foster joint EU external action. However, when a diplomatic conflict arose over the war on Iraq and over ‘reinforced cooperation’ in matters of defence, the construction of the EU as a civilising power was differently appropriated in national media debates. In France, it triggered discussions about whether a European defence component that was independent from NATO could eventually be realised, despite enlargement, and whether such independence promised to bring the EU closer to (competing conceptions of ) a Europe puissance. In Poland, the construction of a militarily bolstered civilising power was read as encouraging the Polish project of EU and NATO rapprochement of Ukraine in Gazeta Wyborcza. In Rzeczpospolita, it was seen to potentially thwart NATO, the institution that, in the view of some commentators, primarily embodied the values shared among the EU and the US, values which they saw as being defined by a neoconservative consensus emerging between the ‘new Europe’ of accession states and the US, but not among EU members. In short, in the national media debates, the construction of a polity sui generis as a civilising power was transformed into something else. It turned into a polity instrumentalis, which  ought to serve specific partisan projects related to European integration.

Discourse Practices of EU Legitimation EU polity construction is rarely as explicit and coherent as depicted above. The primary analysis revealed that the EU’s discursive political legitimation relies on scattered patterns of persuasive language use. Speakers employed a set of macro- and micro-textual structures that fur-

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thered their pragmatic-communicative plan across a text. These carried with them polity constructions, which could be distilled through comprehensive analysis and several rounds of abstraction. Among these textual structures recurred the following: • Polity topics: semantic macropropositions relating to polity-building issues, such as power division, boundaries of belonging, shared political culture or foundational principles • Polity rationales: arguments, or specific claims and grounds provided for them, which draw on a polity rationale as a warrant, that is, contractualist, utilitarian or communitarian-intersubjective causal narratives of why, due to what characteristics of the constituent community, a political association has to be built and power to be executed in specific ways • Strategies of argumentation that additionally substantiate a claim through rationalisation, authorisation and moral evaluation • Strategies of representation, which construct the constituent community and representatives legitimately carrying out a common cause, and informal argumentation that underlines disinterested service to that community, such as variations of the fallacy pro bono publico or ad populum • Strategies of plausibilisation that construct supposedly necessary linkages and consonance and complicity between the speaker and the (imagined) target audience constituency through mythopoesis, illustration, allusion or evocation Even though these patterns of language use were used in all the contexts of political communication investigated to construct political association and political authority beyond the state, they yielded divergent notions of EU polity and its legitimacy. This divergence showed not only between the two national media debates and, to a  lesser extent, between two broadsheets operating in the same national setting, but between polity constructions carved out in multilateral negotiation and those elaborated in national media debates. In these two different, discursively constituted spaces of specialised symbolic interaction, or discourse fields, EU polity construction serves distinct pragmatic-communicative purposes, enacted by specific text genres.

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The core documents of the Constitution process, the Laeken Declaration and Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory speech, served the documentation and legal enactment (in the Laeken Declaration) and mobilisation (in the introductory speech) of cross-faction, multilateral consensus. They thus performed a specific way of legitimately installing and executing political power beyond the state. The EU is here constructed as a polity sui generis, a polity that is special and worth building for its own sake. Its reform is associated, above all, with polity topics that signify functional-efficient division and pooling of power between constituent political bodies, while democracy, diversity and the political will to cooperate are values underpinning the sharing of power. Two polity constructions stick out. The first projects the EU as a frontier-like civilising power, which promotes human and civil rights and constitutional and democratic government beyond its borders and which potentially absorbs more countries in the neighbourhood once they adhere to these civilisational choices. Arguments for its institutionalisation in more coherent foreign and security policies are warranted on strategic-­ contractualist rationales, for example when power pooling is justified as maintaining each state’s action capacity in adverse global environments, and on moral-contractualist rationales, when the affirmation and spread of the EU’s values is promoted. The second polity construction envisages, evidently presupposing utilitarian rationales, the EU as a responsive political system that is legitimate as long as it anticipates and adequately processes EU citizens’ demands, including demands for more democratic participation. A third, cultural- and civic-communitarian projection is mobilised in Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory speech when he suggests the EU will be legitimate once Europeans start building, from their national-cultural attachments, a dual national-European identification and cherish the will to work together. As a rule, however, and in particular in public statements issued by member state representatives, strategicand moral-contractualist reasoning prevails. It coincides with a consistent emphasis on the  functional exigencies of treaty revision, stressing that adjusting power relations among constituent units is required to ensure the capacity to act jointly in face of enlargement and new geopolitical challenges, as well as forestall any further alienation of EU citizens (see Sects. 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 5.1).

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The constructions of political association are repeatedly rationalised by conjuring up threats of stagnation and decline and external pressures. They are authorised with reference to members’ past constitutional struggles and to the obligation towards achievements of the past and international partners. Moreover, by extensively invoking the EU’s ideographic values, such as peace, prosperity, diversity, democracy and the rule of law, the vision of deepened political integration and effective power pooling is additionally morally enhanced. Plausibilisation, which draws on EU-specific tropes, such as road metaphors, and mythopoesis reincarnating the foundational peacekeeping myth of the European Union, reinforces a future-oriented projection of the EU’s political association. Implied in these polity constructions is a certain conception of representative relations and power conferral. The right to rule seems to largely derive from the EU’s political mission and from an obligation towards achievements in the past, but also from a responsivity to an ‘elastic’ constituency. The constituency is denoted by flexible deixis, which alternatingly refers to the EU, Europe or the continent or a site in the multipolar world. It is also constructed by referencing diverse social groups, not only the EU’s electorates and political bodies, as owning the European project. Its unifying characteristic is a commitment to and experience in modern constitutional government. It embodies all member nations’ freedom fights and constitutional struggles toto pro pars. In Giscard d’Estaing’s communitarian projection, a dual European-national affective identification is additionally highlighted as a shared and desired characteristic. Along with electoral delegation that is invoked in the reference to the demands of some diffuse EU populace in ad populum fallacies, especially in the Laeken Declaration, we find references to international delegation and inclusive-deliberative modes of new governance that are alluded to especially in Giscard d’Estaing’s speech. They intelligibilise forms of representative relations that suit the EU setting and that of the Convention and (self-)attribute to the authors the power to undertake specific reforms. In the context of national media debates, the pragmatic-­communicative purpose is different. It is oriented towards debating national membership aspirations and national EU policies in a way that triggers the curiosity of national and partisan audiences. This purpose is enacted in text genres

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that generate news salience and consonance with targeted audiences. The construction of the EU as a polity sui generis is here adjusted to or replaced by the construction of the EU as a polity duplicatis, which is legitimate as long it copies the example and constitutional model of the national polity, or by the construction of a polity instrumentalis, which is deemed legitimate as long as it facilitates the realisation of a specific political project pursued on national and European scales. In the case of the EU constitutional debate, these projections of EU polity coincided with a shift in emphasis from the functional exigencies of effective institutions to more principled problems of shared sovereignty and power balance.6 Particularly pronounced was the focus on problems of democracy, whether understood as popular or national self-determination, primarily in the French papers, or as international co-determination, in the Polish papers, which highlighted contractualist rationales. Moreover, a stress on boundaries of belonging emerged as a common theme that enhanced civic or cultural communitarian rationales of polity-building. It mobilised, however, divergent conceptions of cultural or civic communitarianism and of inand out-groups in French and Polish debates (see Sect. 7.2, Kutter, 2015). The projection of the EU as a polity duplicatis occurred rarely, in stand-­ alone commentaries that canvassed, in a principled and abstract manner, how the EU and its political community ought to be, underlining known claims for the cultural recognition of the national polity and constitution within the EU. In the French case, such duplication showed, for instance, when commentators suggested the civic-communitarian community of the European Union ought to be built through unified models of (civic) education, following the example of the unitary French state. In the Polish case, the national constitutional compromise between agnostics and followers of the Catholic Church, or a form of friendly laicism, was proposed as a cultural-communitarian model for settling conflicts over the suprapositive references of EU law. Moreover, the polity duplicatis was stressed during bilateral blame games on negotiation failure and media panics over the wrongdoings of fellow Europeans. In them, discus In the conservative papers, power sharing was pondered between the EU and member states; in Polish papers between member states; in French papers between EU institutions; and between NATO or the US and the EU in all four papers. 6

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sants denied to each other the recognition that the interlocutor’s national-­ constitutional experience was a relevant reference of EU polity-building. Constructions of the EU as a polity instrumentalis occurred in dialogical-­argumentative text genres, in clusters of debate, in which discussants quarrelled over the definition of national and partisan EU policy and the legitimate representative voice in that struggle. For instance, in a moderated debate on the Draft Constitution arranged in Gazeta Wyborcza with the two former politicians, social science scholars and followers of competing successor camps of Solidarność, Alexander Smolar and Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, EU political association was deemed legitimate if it allowed Poland to become a full (first class) member in the long run, with equal access to decisions, funds or the proactive league of big member states. The quarrel about how this was to be achieved, whether by hard-­ nosed bargaining or by mutual understanding, revealed that discussants drew on different presuppositions about polity-building. One, Saryusz-­ Wolski, warranted his argument for an untiring fight for a preponderance of Polish votes in the Council on contractualist-utilitarian polity rationales and bolstered it by scientific rationalisations of realist intergovernmentalism and by plausibilising allusion to the memory of Poland as  an  subjugated nation. In the period investigated, this memory was primarily cultivated in the moralising rhetoric of national-conservative successors of Solidarność. The other, Alexander Smolar, drew on an intersubjective polity rationale, bolstered by scientific rationalisations of supranationalism and allusion to cross-faction dialogue as it was once practised by the liberal successors of Solidarność when they negotiated a transition pact with the tumbling Polish communist party. In Le Monde, the Draft Constitution was debated among representatives of the different factions of the Parti Socialiste. It was  evaluated on the grounds of  whether or not it enhanced democratic participation and a Europe Sociale, the core project of the French left. The dispute served the struggle over the legitimate Euro-federalist-leftist voice in the domestic scene. It established two different readings of utilitarian-contractualist rationales of polity-building: a functionalist one, promoted by Alain Lipietz and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, which expected social policy priorities to be strengthened by the new objectives and social rights laid down in the Draft Constitution, and a federalist one, here promoted by Yves Salesse,

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which advocated the codification of a harmonised social policy as the only way to balance the EU’s neoliberal set-up (see Sect. 7.3). The construction of the EU as both  a polity duplicatis and a polity instrumentalis tended to be rationalised by reference to the threat of becoming isolated or losing out to adversaries in EU decision-making and by scientific rationalisations derived from analytical narratives of European integration. Polity constructions were often authorised with reference to national experiences of constitutional struggle and plausibilised by trigger words that invoked, in the informed reader, nation-­founding myths or habitualised formulae of national or partisan EU policy. In the implied struggle over the legitimate representative voice and political authority, the constituency was referenced in either a firmly integrated national ‘we’, which conflated nation, government and the citizenry, for example in the dispute between Smolar and Saryusz-Wolski on the appropriate Polish negotiation strategy, or a partisan ‘we’, which related to a specific political project and stretched scales of EU politics, such as in the pamphlet published by Cohn-Bendit and Lipietz. The disinterested service to be done to the national and partisan constituency was signalled by arguments pro bono nobis that were equated with the preferences of (wished-for) allies (pro bono eorum) and the European interest more generally (pro bono publico Europae). They evoked electoral delegation as a source of political authority. The point stressed in the book is that the above polity constructions are neither a rhetoric decorum of negotiation strategies nor just expressions of pragmatic-­communicative constraints emanating from the necessity to address various audiences, for example by playing “rhetoric double games” (Crespy & Schmidt, 2014). As I will show in the next section, they can be performative in sustaining specific relations of political power and exclusion within the European Union.

 he Legacy of the Constitution Process: Symbolic T Violence and Delegitimation To grasp the power inherence of the above polity constructions, the book moved beyond the reconstruction of pragmatic-communicative purpose and patterned language use. Informed by Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic

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violence, it also considered configurations of conventionalised discourse practice, or discourse formations, that suggest how to classify and process issues of polity-building. The analysis demonstrated that the EU’s legitimation draws overwhelmingly on the imaginary of the modern state: arguments about EU institutional reform were premised on rationales of polity-building (contractualist, utilitarian, communitarian-­ intersubjective), which historically facilitated the emergence of legal-­ political rule, states and liberal government, and upon which narratives of nation- and state-building and European integration are based (for these see Sects. 3.4, 3.5). The study thus underlines earlier findings that imaginations of European integration heavily draw on state formation as discourse formation (Jachtenfuchs, 2002). The particular qualification that the Constitution process brought about, or, if you like: the legacy that appears problematic from the point of view of socio-diagnostic critique, is to have this imaginary specified and narrowed down in terms of modern constitutionalism, constitutional law and contractualist-communitarian conceptions of political association. No doubt, this framing helped involved negotiators to acknowledge the constitutional quality of EU treaties, it facilitated institutional-legal reforms that, indeed, further constitutionalised EU governance and provided constitution drafters with the idea of a constitutional momentum mobilising collective action. But it also streamlined the debate on EU institutional reform in symbolically violent ways. Modern constitutionalism associates with the elaboration of foundational principles of political association and political order (codified or not), which regulate relations between constituent bodies and between governing and governed. These principles have instructed polity-building and liberal political philosophy since the Enlightenment and the constitutional revolutions of the eighteenth century. In the formalist-deductive tradition of constitutional law that became the prime interpretive template during the Constitution process, modern constitutionalism relates to a set of legal and political concepts, including a clear hierarchy between fundamental-constitutional law and derived (policy-)specific law, the (self-)limitation of governmental power through functional-horizontal and territorial-vertical power division, the recognition and protection of certain individual rights and of private property, and (constrained by judicial review) representative-democratic government that is linked to

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the symbolic of the social contract as an expression of popular will. This set of concepts relies upon the modern assumption of rational, rulebased (instead of divine or kin-based) government and intrinsically links political liberties to the protection of private property from government intervention. It is a powerful discursive formation that tends to be presupposed, in contemporary political-legal practice, as a natural way of classifying legitimate legal-political rule and of safeguarding liberal values (Butleritchie, 2004). The framing of EU treaty revision in terms of modern constitutionalism has been criticised, also during the Constitution process. Critics focused, on the one hand, on the promotion of EU treaty revision as a moment of contractualist-communitarian constitution-making that might bring about a transnational constitutional patriotism, which was seen to raise wrong expectations and overstretch the limited task of revising a given set of international agreements. On the other, the ritual criticism of the ‘as if constitutionalism’ of EU law was raised, which uses modern constitutionalism in its state tradition to deny any constitutional effect of EU law. Accordingly, constitutional readings of EU law are delusive, given that EU law, regardless of its proclaimed supremacy and direct effect, depends on the enforcement capacities of member states and lacks a clear-cut hierarchy, deriving its authority, instead, from policy-specific ‘enabling law’ that is based on international agreements about regulatory delegation (e.g. in Lindseth, 2016). But these criticisms point to rather obvious instances of symbolically violent speech. Moreover, they themselves remain implicated in the discourse formation of modern constitutionalism when suggesting that only legal orders, which conform with the early modern and the state tradition of constitutionalism, can be considered constitutional. More importantly, the ‘delusive’ talk of ­constitutions and constitutional moments, just like criticisms thereof, actually helps to intelligibilise postnational rule. It triggers that sort of juxtaposition of knowledges—here of the common knowledge of modern and state constitutionalism with the specialised knowledge of EU law—which I assume helps to raise awareness of the unfamiliarity of postnational political association. What appears to me more relevant is the unexposed exclusions, the symbolic violence that the modern constitutionalist imaginary produced during the Constitution process. First, the constitutional framing spelt

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out power sharing in terms of constitutional checks and balances. Thus, as part of the ‘simplification’ agenda that was meant to increase the transparency and accountability of the EU’s institutional structure, shared sovereignty was explicated and codified as a segregation of competences (exclusively supranational, shared, exclusively national) controlled by additional checks such as the early warning of national parliaments or the strengthened co-decisions of the European Parliament. Thereby, the EU’s initial “constitutional equilibrium” (Moravcsik, 2005) was seemingly restored, that is, the balance between publicly salient and nationally governed state powers (social security, taxation, defence) controlled by national parliaments, on the one hand, and regulatory powers of EU bodies controlled by the European Parliament, on the other. Constituent powers were, thereby, reassured in their share of competence and claim for EU political authority. At the same time, crucial aspects of EU governance were rendered invisible. The systematic meshing of supranational legislative and executive powers, the dispersion of territorial political authority typical of EU governance and the comprehensive transformation of simple polities through the EU’s compound governance and of national welfare states through EU economic integration were blurred and ‘hedged’ in familiar functional-federalist visions of power division. A second consequence of constitutional framing was that relations between governing and governed and the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’ were envisioned in line with contractualism, highlighting consent by constituencies, majoritarian institutions and electoral-representative delegation. Proposals for EU institutional reform were generally justified as being instructed by majority public opinion and electorates’ demands, not only by members of the European Parliament or EU heads of government and state whose mandates rely, indeed, on electoral delegation. Other sources of EU political authority, such as regulatory, international or corporatist delegation, legality or political mission and obligation, were backgrounded. While we can see efforts to extend the electoral constituency into a multinational, transgenerational, deliberating collective, sharing dual national-European attachments and an affectio societatis, for example in Giscard d’Estaing’s speech, these constructions of a postnational or postdemocratic constituency never go without additional reference to familiar representative delegation. In reverse, the EU constitution draft-

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ers’ representative claims were regularly deconstructed as an arbitrary imposition in national media debates, where popular or political-­ legislative sovereignty, both national and supranational, was highlighted as the true source of political authority. Hence, the constitutional framing encouraged a contradictory democratic regrounding: the modernist political subject in its individual (citizen) or collective (demos) dimensions was reinforced by both political representatives, who spelt out institutional reforms in terms of representative and participatory or deliberative democracy, and the critics, who deconstructed these measures as undemocratic window dressing. The speakers thus reinvigorated an imaginary that is seen to omit the increased complexity of social relations and political subjectivities in contemporary societies (Blühdorn, 2009). There are two further narrowings effected by the constitutional framing of treaty revision. The stress on constitutional government, segregated competences and legal-logical simplification was paired with an emphasis on human rights liberalism and progressive-political liberties as foundational principles of the EU. This was, on the one hand, a clear statement against conceptions of bonded citizenship and closed societies. On the other, it backgrounded the EU’s two other traditions of liberalism that are constitutionalised in EU law and form part of justificatory discourse: economic liberalism and the (Kantian) liberalism of international peace (Rosamond, 2014). By backgrounding economic liberalism, the EU constitutional debate disregarded membership projects that were based on the EU’s single market project and used to be pushed especially by the British and several accession states’ governments. Moreover, it disregarded the elaborate economic constitution of the Internal Market and related debates in public and organised civil society on the EU’s “constitutional asymmetry” (Scharpf, 2010) and the question of how market integration was to be rebalanced with social and environmental protection. During the Constitution process, these concerns were communicable only as a problem of power division (e.g. EU vs national taxation, political vs regulatory control of fiscal criteria) or of social rights linked to the Charter or policy objectives mentioned in the preamble. The working groups in the Convention dealing with the EMU and EU social policy remained marginal, they lacked the argumentative anchor that EU constitution speak provided to working groups on legal simplification or competence divi-

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sion. The constitutional framing thus disabled ongoing struggles over European economic integration, only to fuel their mobilisation in campaigns against ratification of the Constitutional Treaty and in heated contestation of the management of the Eurozone crisis later on. Relying upon formalist-deductive traditions of constitutional law, EU constitution speak further crowded out some constitutional-legal traditions that used to form part of EU jurisdiction and/or make up some members’ primary references to national constitutional culture, such as the descriptive-incremental tradition of constitutional law which is characteristic of British constitutional law and CJEU case law, the stress on the popular sovereign and majoritarian institutions in the EU’s simple member polities and diverse traditions of references to extrapositive law. In short, EU constitution speak misrecognised a substantial part of the EU’s constitutional multiplicity. By streamlining the EU’s legal-­ constitutional heterarchy into a certain model of constitutionalism, the “unfreedom of the moderns” (Tully, 2002) was somewhat reinforced. In short, the constitutional framing foregrounded certain conventional classifications of legitimate political rule, including checks and balances of liberal-constitutional government, electoral-representative delegation, human rights liberalism, deductive-formalist traditions of constitutional law. Against the backdrop of the  EU’s constitutional multiplicity and compound system of decision-making, these classifications  appear as simplifying and misrecognition in Bourdieu’s sense, glossing over the exclusions actually induced. When compared to the actual  decision-­ making on the EU constitution and the familiar context of the national state, such misrecognition is more easily exposed and hence potentially undermines the justifiability and legitimacy of the European Union. The symbolic violent aspects of EU constitution speak have proved, in the years after the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty, to be a problematic legacy that has contributed to reinforced alienation and division rather than to the hoped-for consensus. The more specific and obvious instances of symbolic violence of EU constitution speak are revealed in its instrumental use. Such use showed, for instance, when heads of government and state, in an extensive argument ad populum, suggested in the Laeken Declaration that their paradigmatic choice for a lean state was the preference of EU citizens, which EU leaders would serve disinterestedly in institutional reform, or when

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co-opting the memory of diverse national freedom fights in the mythopoetical success story of European integration as a continuation of modern constitutional struggles. In Giscard d’Estaing’s introductory speech, we can see how the Convention president presupposes the titular nations of the EU as natural-essential communities from which the Convention draws its authorisation as a multinational assembly, thus blanking out the many EU-related identities not confined to a titular nation or culture. He highlights the newly arriving Central European members with their merits and cultural peculiarity, while at the same ranking them second, using the multinationality theme for both self-authorisation and the construction of difference. German and French representatives justified a major reshuffle in voting weights in the Council, which benefited large member states, as a measure to enhance democracy. The obvious discrepancy between contractualist-constitutional rhetoric, on the one hand, and the actual focus on institutional reform initiated from within the institutions themselves, on the other, between the stress on inclusion and democracy (whether understood as responsiveness or deliberative practice) and the very asymmetric set-up and outcome of the consultations, shed a dubious light on the constitutional episode and unmasked the PR character of EU constitution speak. The perspective of the discourse field and the insights into constitution speak as a resource of field-internal distinction, which I will summarise in the next section, help to elucidate why such symbolically violent classifications are not necessarily disentangled by involved participants themselves.

8.3 Discourse Fields and Discursive Europeanisation An important argument developed in this book is that the astonishing performative-constitutionalising, yet simultaneously symbolically violent and divergent polity constructions of the Constitution process, can be better understood once we devote our attention to the contexts of specialised social practice in which they were produced, as well as to the transformation of meaning resulting from the transposition of discourse fragments between these contexts. Underlying these were two premises or

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observations on Europeanised political communication and competition. First, it is characterised by the European modus operandi, oriented towards both the EU power centre and (fellow) member states’ capitals and factoring in implications that political action and news production might have in other arenas of decision-making or news coverage. Second, crucial are not only (macro) levels of territorial organisation, at the national and EU levels, but different epistemic communities and practice contexts at the meso level of social-professional organisation that stretches the EU’s territorial scales. In the context of EU treaty revision, relevant practice contexts of political communication are, on the one hand, the context of EU multilateral negotiation, in which classifications of postnational political rule are generated in the first place, and Europeanised national news media, on the other, which appropriate agenda and classifications to public-political debates in member states. The endeavour was to understand how EU polity construction, the discursive legitimation of the European Union, is conditioned and moulded by these practice contexts and the translation between them. The exploration yielded a framework for the study of discursive Europeanisation that is applicable beyond the case investigated. It started from the premise endorsed in CDA that intersubjective meaning, including that of practices of legitimation, is always co-constituted by the context of expression in its various, also discursive, dimensions. I showed that a clearer understanding of the text’s social implications can be gained when drawing in, as an additional heuristic layer at another level of abstraction, the perspective of discourse formation. More particularly, theories that highlight meso-level professional practice, such as that of the ‘code’ (Bernstein, 1990) or the ‘field’ (Bourdieu, 1989), when articulated with the CDA concept of ‘genre’, illuminate why the registered selective and excluding procedures occur in the texts investigated. Combined in a ‘bifocal procedure’, the two analytical perspectives help to explain these excluding procedures as corresponding not only to a typical pragmatic setting and script of action, such as the exigency to distribute concise and resonant news to a specified audience. They can also be seen to enact and vary a professional ‘code’ or regulative discourse, that is, ways of classifying and processing knowledge, or as offering a ‘field-­ specific discursive capital’, a source of distinction employed in the rela-

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tional positioning and political economy of recognition actual in a field at a given moment in time. In that way, insights gained through the micrology of language use can be translated into the study of meso-level professional practice and its Europeanisation. The exploration yielded two conceptual innovations. First, it brought about the notion of discourse fields. The notion captures, from a discourse-­ theoretical perspective, the meso-level contexts of specialised practice that I assumed to be involved in Europeanised political communication and the EU’s discursive legitimation: EU multilateral negotiation on institutional reform, with its intertextual references to EU polity-­building, and related controversies in the member states’ domestic context, mediatised by national news media that, through their professional practice, cultivate national and partisan interdiscourse. I adopted the idea from Bourdieu’s field theory that each of these contexts forms a space of structured symbolic interaction, whose existence and activities rely on peers’ and society’s recognition of specific credentials of professionality, or field-­ specific capital. What is produced in the field is shaped by the way participants use this resource for competitive-relational positioning vis-à-vis peers and representatives of other fields, alongside established cleavages and modes of professional legitimation. I applied a discursive turn to the field concept, however, in order to account for the emergent and dynamic social topologies of the European Union that reveal performativity beyond the confines of nationally grown professional institutions and habitus. I showed that field-specific capital, upon which participants draw to maintain their professional reputations, is more than a set of habitualised assumptions about professionality, which participants internalise when being socialised in the field. In fact, it is discursively constituted by generic patterns of language use that correspond to the pragmatic constraints typical of professional activity in a field (genre) and by the field’s regulative discourse, that is, by conventions of classifying and processing professional knowledge (code).  In short, field-specific capital is constituted by discourse practices that continuously produce, reflexivise and entextualise specific professional expertise, ethos and self-understanding. By drawing on these practices, participants maintain a specific discourse field. Discourse fields, then, are spaces of structured interaction, social topologies, which specialise in  a specific

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type of discourse production, such as the construction of news or the construction of a mobilising political idée-force. What is said and how and who is given voice in what way in this interactional space is conditioned by constitutive discourse practices, the genre and the code of the field. But it also depends on how involved agents make use of these discourse practices in relational positioning, when seeking to distinguish themselves from or outperform competitors. Moreover, it depends on regular interactions with other fields, on the way intertextuality and interdiscursivity are organised with them, sustaining a certain degree of autonomy, heteronomy or meta-capital (see Sect. 4.2). The articulation of genre, code and field also yielded a clearer notion of discursive Europeanisation, that is, of the appropriation of discourse fragments from the context of EU multilateral negotiation to that of national media debates in the different member states. It provided a discourse-­ theoretical explanation of why discursive Europeanisation tends to be differential in different (national) contexts. Following Bernstein, discursive Europeanisation can be understood as recontextualisation: as the  meaning-transforming transposition of discourse fragments between contexts of specialised practice, in the course of which the original practice (e.g. of multilateral negotiation) is transformed into a virtual practice (e.g. of news production drawing on representations of multilateral negotiation). I qualified and specified this theorem, suggesting that this change of meaning takes place because the discourse fragments are appropriated and subdued to the configuration of the receiving discourse field. The selection, weighing, rearrangement and enrichment that discourse fragments experience in the course of recontextualisation likely result from the linguistic conventions, regulative discourse and internal competition of the receiving discourse field.

 he Selectivities of the Discourse Field T of Multilateral Negotiation Drawing on these conceptual clarifications and using existing analyses of EU fields and Europeanised political communication, I specified the contexts of professional practice that I assumed to be chiefly involved in the EU constitutional debate: EU multilateral negotiation and

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Europeanised national news production. The discourse field of EU multilateral negotiation is a space of structured symbolic interaction, in which participants seek to influence negotiations that concern EU legislation and treaty-making and set definitions of the idée-force of European integration and coordinates of EU policymaking. The struggle over the power of definition involves multiple stakeholders and veto players. They all raise claims for political authority and (cultural) recognition within the EU, address scaled audiences (EU, national, subnational and partisan constituencies and publics) and participate in at least one of three tiers of EU policymaking: the supranational, where the  primary focus is on Eurocratic statecraft; the intergovernmental, where the focus is on interstate diplomacy; and the domestic, where the  emphasis is on partisan struggle over European integration and national EU membership. Different as the stakes might be in these three arenas, the agents involved operate according to a European modus operandi: they factor in possible implications of policymaking in other arenas and seek to broker or hinder collective action and strike compromises across these arenas. Moreover, the three arenas share a social topology that emerges from the participants’ relational positioning, that is, from their effort to gain, in relation to other participants, prestige and office which grant them influence over negotiation outcomes. Such relational positioning draws, first, on competing sources of political authority that emerged historically in the EU power field, including direct or indirect electoral delegation and popular-­ parliamentarian rule situated in majoritarian institutions (European Parliament, European Council, national parliaments), regulatory delegation and technocratic government (Commission, European Central Bank, EU agencies) or corporative and advocacy delegation (consultation bodies). Second, relational positioning draws on binary oppositions that either associate with clusters of ‘national interest’ among member states (big vs small, netto payer vs netto receiver etc.) or with policy conflicts that were settled in the “postwar compact” on European integration (Rosamond, 2017) and structure partisan struggle over European integration in binary oppositions between supranational rule versus democratic authorisation, market-making versus social protection, open versus closed society and so on (see Sect. 4.5 for more details).

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The point the concept of discourse field makes is that the outcomes of EU multilateral negotiation do not directly flow from these positions, but from the way agents detail them with dispositions, that is, with their (varying) proficiency in the professional knowledge, habitus and conventionalised discourse practice that is constitutive of EU multilateral negotiation and acknowledged by peers, competitors and audience constituencies. As I have described in more detail in Sect. 4.5, the constitutive part of the symbolic-discursive practice of EU multilateral negotiation is the classification of options and opportunities for mobilising (or disabling) collective action across scales of territorial government, arenas of decision-making and audiences. These classificatory practices form a code in Bernstein’s sense of a regulative discourse. It is processed in a repertoire of strategic-tactical intervention applied by agents to politicise or depoliticise European integration in a particular arena. It is informed by the doxa of European integration that defines acceptable voices as well as the tolerable defiant (or heterodox) voices during multilateral negotiation. The doxa includes a teleological reading of EU treaty-making, according to which EU polity-building is programmed into a closer union among member states and societies, and the assumption that multilateral consensus is an objective worth achieving by itself, a means to foster the common European good. Knowledge of multilevel and multilateral political action is also enacted in a sophisticated ‘switching practice’, that is, discourse practice that allows addressing the EU’s different arenas and audiences. It is constituted by certain patterns of language use, such as appeals to the cultures and myths of the national pasts and the future-oriented political culture of the European Union, with its rich metaphoric language of progress and change; or interpellations of the politically represented in their quality as the electorate and citizenry of a constituent territorial unit, for example in ad populum or pro bono publico arguments, or as political beings emotionally invested in both nations and the European project. The argument developed in the book is that, during the Constitution process, EU constitution speak became part of that field-specific discourse practice, neatly mapping onto the doxa and the switching practice of multilateral negotiation. Proficiency in talking constitution speak, together with expertise in constitutional law, became an additional

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resource used in field-internal relational positioning. This constitution speak enabled certain negotiation outcomes rather than others, not only due to its own performativity, that is, because of the palpability and connotativity of the imaginary of modern constitutionalism. As part of a field-specific discursive practice, it also endowed those, who knew how to employ it, with an additional argumentative anchor and extra resource of prestige. Several of the problematic narrowings of the EU constitutional debate that were mentioned in the previous section can be pinned down to the use of constitutional framing in relational positioning, such as the adherence to the continental formalist-deductive tradition of constitutional law, the reshuffle of intergovernmental power division to the benefit of large countries and the adjustment of intra-EU balances in the name of democracy, or the (symbolic and physical) exclusion of newcomers. They go back to the particular power of definition that a couple of agents, such as the ‘alpha’ MEPs in the Convention, Giscard d’Estaing or German and French government representatives, could exert because they were proficient in EU procedures, constitution speak and constitutional-­legal reasoning, and  because they commanded extensive networks across institutional bodies and factions and had experience in brokering multilateral compromises. In addition, the perspective of the discourse field highlights why constitution drafters invested in constitution speak and identified with the constitutional project but were unable to convince their audiences and constituencies to do the same, if they were not straightforwardly blamed for transparent self-marketing and hubris. The specific ‘communication deficit’ or ‘disconnection problem’ of the Constitution process thus unravels as an effect of the self-referentiality of field-internal competitive positioning. It made perfect sense to participants within the field to enhance their competing claims for political authority and cultural recognition qua reference to constitutionalism. For instance, when Giscard d’Estaing portrayed the Convention as a constitutional assembly deriving its authority from international delegation, rather than from institutional delegation or the mandate of the Laeken Declaration, he enhanced the Convention as an agent which claimed its own political authority in the Constitution process. However, to those not involved in the game, the symbolic violence or arbitrariness of these borrowings from modern con-

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stitutionalism became rather obvious in comparison to the actual procedures of the Constitution process and in juxtaposition to familiar examples of national constitutionalism.

 he Selectivities of the Discourse Field T of Europeanised National News While the perspective of the discourse field, applied to multilateral negotiation, illuminates why certain negotiation outcomes prevailed rather than others, and why their constitutional framing already implied their (partial) delegitimation, the perspective of the discourse field of Europeanised national news media helps to situate the puzzle of Europeanised political communication. It provides an explanation of the puzzling fact that the meaning of discourse fragments appropriated from multilateral negotiation diversifies in different national media debates and that such divergence in EU-related media debates paradoxically coincides with convergence in EU news coverage. These facets of Europeanised political communication are usually read as either evidencing (if converging) or disconfirming (if diverging) an adequate level of information on EU politics and an emerging European media public, or as evidencing the Europeanisation (if converging)  or (persistent) nationalisation and domesticisation (if diverging) of the EU-related media debate. As I will show below, from the perspective of the discourse field, these seeming contradictions resolve and reveal as the  outcome of a shared and Europeanised professional practice. The discourse field of Europeanised national news is a space of structured interaction which has been institutionalised with national journalistic fields. While gathering and constructing ‘news’, journalists compete over consecration power, that is, over sanctifying what is the news of the day and about effectively interpellating target audiences. Their interaction maintains journalistic practice in the first place, and, in the case of the Polish and French broadsheets investigated, the practice of institutional news journalism in the broadsheet print segment, more particularly. It is constituted through conventions of language use that construct news salience, for example by condensing an account of an occurrence in

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a prominently placed news story, and audience-specific consonance, for example by alluding to associations in the headline that presumably resonate with the audience. These patterns correspond to the pragmatics typical of journalism, that is, to the exigency to effectively distribute news and reinforce the complicity with an imagined audience. But they are also employed with reference to the regulative discourse of news journalism. Journalists draw on habitualised classifications of news value and newsworthiness and the doxa or processing norm of ‘objectivity’ and quasi-scientific news gathering. At the same time, they subvert the classifications of this textbook code of news journalism in likewise systematic manner, employing features of rumour, figurative language and strategies of plausibilisation, which allows associating new and abstract content with familiar interdiscourse (see Sect. 4.3). The specificity of Europeanised national news media is that they have partially oriented news journalism towards the transnational, Brussels-­ based field of professional EU communication. They have done so in terms of allocated resources, editorial process and patterns of salience attribution and text composition. Such Europeanisation enables national news organisations to access sources, through their correspondents in Brussels and other member states’ capitals, and to secure a share of the EU news of the day. Moreover, by Europeanising, national news organisations qualify and distinguish themselves as national reference papers in the transnational field of EU communication. In this way, they make sure that both EU political actors and peers in other member states recognise and value them as a source and multiplicator of the publicised opinion specific to the member state in which they are operating. But the prime target of the activities of national news media remains the national audience, to be interpellated by the use of national interdiscourse, and the national journalistic field as primary site of competitive positioning. In it, journalists draw on field-specific discursive capital as it evolved with the national trajectory of journalism, aligning either more with the autonomous or more with the heteronomous mode of professional legitimation. More precisely, they either adhere to the regulative discourse of news journalism (or other conceptions of disinterested journalism) restrictively (autonomy) or employ field-specific discursive capital in line with the logics of other professional fields, for example to boost

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revenue from advertising  (heteronomy). Thereby, journalists and news organisations inscribe themselves in the constellation of heteronomy of the profession that prevails at a certain moment in time. National broadsheets, the type of news media investigated in the book, distinguish themselves, in the national journalistic field, by proclaiming strict adherence to the code of conduct of institutionalised news journalism and a focus on in-depth analysis and debate of problems relevant to the national territory and citizenry, distributed to a narrow well-educated urban audience. In this  way, they explicitly delineate themselves from specialist papers, which address a specialist audience; tabloids, which focus on revelation and large-scale distribution; or local news media, which focus on problems relevant to the regional-local community. Moreover, in Poland and France, they qualify via partisan alignment with major political camps in the national political scene, an alignment which is  inherited from the political parallelism of founding moments of professional history. They distinguish themselves, in this regard, from regional papers or tabloids, which go without strong partisanship, or public broadcasts that are legally required to grant internal pluralism. But, above all, partisan alignment helps them to be distinct from competitors in the same segment of the  national quality press and to maintain their interpretive authority in a specific partisan segment of the narrow educated-urban audience (see Sect. 4.4). The features of news coverage and debate on the EU constitution that were revealed in the investigation of the four newspapers can be pinned down to this distinct practice and relational positioning of national broadsheets. The analysis showed a coincidence of (a) astonishing convergence in relevance attribution and in the intensity of evaluation and debate; (b) stark divergence in the emphasis and associated meaning of topics of debate between newspapers of different, but also of the same, national provenance; (c) occasionally hostile polarisation primarily on national, but also partisan, grounds. Moreover, despite articulate Europeanisation, the four newspapers narrowed the EU constitutional debate in a way that served, above all, the self-affirmation of the associated political-intellectual community and the national political projects habitually debated in relation to European integration (see Sects. 6.1, 6.2, 8.1).

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These features mirror the dual implication of journalists and news organisations in both the transnational, Brussels-based field of EU communication and the national journalistic field, that they seek to calibrate in adherence to professional regulative discourse and language use. Convergence in EU-related news coverage can be related to their effort to have a share in the EU news of the day, maintain access to EU news givers and prove, to their audiences and competitors, that they are informed on and inform about EU institutional events in line with professional conceptions of news value, such as institutional prominence and controversy. The emphasis on controversy and the high volume of evaluative articles pondering the EU constitution qualify them as broadsheets and also reflect the historically grown specificity of Polish and French journalistic capital, the fact that refined political commentary and extended debate is valued as a feature of journalistic proficiency. It showed in what I termed ‘media debate’, a variety of text genres that range from editorial through invited commentary to moderated debate. Ironically, divergence in the emphasis on and contextual meaning of shared constitution topics and the triple narrowing of debate goes back to shared practices of classifying news according to potential controversy, too: all the  newspapers highlighted only those events and issues that could be shown to have triggered intergovernmental conflict, polarise the national political scene or arouse the partisan community associated with the respective newspapers. Variance between national contexts could be traced back to the continuous scandalisation of controversial statements on the EU constitution or European integration, which had been voiced either by critics of the Polish negotiators’ strategy in the intergovernmental arena or by oppositional actors in the domestic scene. These controversial events were, at times, generated by the newspapers themselves, in interviews arranged with a suspected antagonist, and by reproducing such antagonism in a  continuously fed debate. Such constructed and repeatedly referred-to events related, for example, to Rokita’s rejection of the Polish government’s negotiation strategy, Giscard d’Estaing’s rejection of the French government’s approval of Turkey’s EU candidacy, or Chirac’s suggestion that Central European governments supporting the US-led war on Iraq should have kept their mouths shut. In feeding the debates on these events, newspapers in the same domestic context made sure they

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influenced the priming of the domestic news agenda and the definition of what was ‘debate-worthy’ to the national public (see Sect. 6.2). Beyond such obvious (and known) ‘domesticisation’, the analysis revealed that each individual newspaper sought to establish a specific angle on EU constitution-drafting that allowed them to wield consecration power over domestic debate in explicit delineation from competitors in the national journalistic field. The variation between two newspapers in the same national context derived from ‘clusters of debate’ that each newspaper arranged on EU-related issues, which are habitually debated in the associated intellectual-political camp, such as Europe sociale in Le Monde, co-determination in French-German EU leadership in Le Figaro, the recognition of the Polish model of Church-friendly laicity in Rzeczpospolita or of national co-determination and solidary society in Gazeta Wyborcza. The discourse analysis showed that this divergent thematic emphasis went hand in hand with newspaper-specific strategies of plausibilisation that helped to translate abstract matters of European integration into palpable interdiscourse, that is, the figurative register of a national or partisan community. Drawing on such strategies of plausibilisation, newspapers set up divergent editorial lines early on and translated the EU constitutional issue directly into the associated community’s habitual debates about (national) EU policy and the national polity (see Sect. 6.3). In short, the lens of the discourse field reveals that convergence and divergence in EU-related debates are rooted in the use of field-specific dispositions, including conceptions of news value and generic language use, by agents in the field in accordance with field-internal relational positioning. The reinforcement of the national and the domestic in news production appears, above all, as an effect of shared and Europeanised professional practice, instead of as an effect of essential national differences. Moreover, the field perspective reveals that such shared professional practices also explain why, during debates on EU institutional reform, a piece of multilateral consensus becomes subject to ‘pluri-­ decontextualisation’, resulting in nationally divergent debates and differential polity construction.

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8.4 T  owards a Discursive Political Sociology of European Integration The insights generated in this book enrich and re-accentuate existing political-sociological enquiry into European integration. They provide hints as to how such enquiry could be conducted from a discourse angle, in a ‘Discursive Political Sociology of European integration’. And they inspire a prospective critique that speculates about what EU literacy might be required to overcome the divisive legacy of the Constitution process and develop a discourse practice conducive to the EU’s multiplicity. This concluding section will briefly discuss these points.

 e-accentuating the Political Sociology R of European Integration The book, as outlined in previous sections, complements existing political-­sociological research on European integration. It shows how the EU’s (de-)legitimation is constituted in language use and how the discourse dynamics of Europeanisation can be grasped. More generally, the book suggests paying more systematic attention to the symbolic mediation and discursive constitution of EU-related political identities, political competition and political communication. Such an angle reveals, for instance, that EU-related political identities and projects emerge not only from identification with (or distancing from) EU policies, institutions or values, from deliberation of shared concerns, or from delineation against EU-internal and EU-external ‘Others’. The book shows that cognitive-­ discursive means for relating to European integration also transpire when EU-specific discourses of institutional engineering, such as EU constitution speak and analytical narratives of European integration, are appropriated to another context, such as national media debates, and selectively translated into interdiscourses of national or partisan collectives. In the course of that recontextualisation, discourses of the EU’s postnational polity are brought into agreement  with national polity  discourse. This sophisticated bricolage prepares the ground for a ‘polity nexus’: it facilitates the understanding that the familiar national polity and the EU’s

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unfamiliar postnational polity blend into each other, are instrumental to or reflective of each other and provide reference points in the pursuit of different EU membership and partisan projects. In reverse, a distance and alienation from European integration does not only show in opposition to further competence delegation, supranationalisation and the sharing of sovereignty, that is, in variations of Euroscepticism (for these, see e.g. Statham, Koopmans, Tresch, & Firmstone, 2010). The book underscores earlier findings that EU critique is also ideologically specified and relates to political-ideological projects yet to be realised qua European integration. Along with positions on the known left-right and open versus closed society continuum, they include, this was shown especially for the Polish debate, references to democratic internationalism, as opposed to isolationist realism, and to liberalism, as opposed to illiberalism. However, the most crucial qualification that the book provides for the study of EU critique and the EU’s delegitimation  relates to the concept of symbolic violence. Appropriated to EU political communication, the concept of symbolic violence revealed that delegitimation is inherent in efforts to maintain specific classifications of postnational rule and association. Speakers delegitimise the EU when they show that the classifications, which EU representatives use to signify and justify power relations within the European Union, are flawed and serve the self-empowerment of EU representatives or the crowding out of specific interests and claims for cultural recognition. Against the backdrop of the familiar politics of the nation-state and the actual processes of constitution-drafting, the references to modern constitutionalism, representative delegation and (deliberative) democracy that prevailed in EU representatives’ statements on the EU constitution were easily exposed by sceptics in their symbolic violence, as was the paternalism of longstanding EU members towards Central and Eastern European newcomers. EU critique and a delegitimation of the EU may thus specifically relate to the incredibility and the exclusions generated by classifications of postnational rule. From the angle adopted in the book, the binary oppositions of EU-related political competition are revealed as an effect of the professional practice of EU multilateral negotiation, rather than as flowing bottom­up from societal cleavages and interest aggregation. Whether they relate

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to ideological divisions over aspects of the postwar compact, opposing ‘national interest clusters’, or claims for political authority that draw on either electoral or regulatory delegation—these oppositions are maintained because they serve agents’ distinctions in a Europeanised space of interaction, where they struggle over public power by brokering or hindering compromise across factions and scales. In this space, the national, understood as a claim and set of preferences to be realised within the frames of European integration in the name of a national constituency, may have Europeanised. That is, the national manifests itself only while being juxtaposed with  other members’ national interests and the common European interest. However, it is thereby not overcome, but rather  reinforced, as a means of distinction that corresponds to the structurally-­ institutionally entrenched role member states fill in EU decision-­making. To explain such counter-intuitive tendencies, more complex conceptions of political competition are needed, which take the self-referentiality and the  European modus operandi of structured symbolic interaction among EU politicians into account. Among them are field-theoretical conceptions, such as the concept of the discourse field of multilateral negotiation developed in the book. In a similar vein, the revelations on contradictory patterns of Europeanised news coverage and media debate call for abandoning simple sender-receiver models of EU-related political communication and mass mediation. According to these models, political communication is an exchange of information, spun by politicians and transmitted by ­gatekeeping and priming mass media, with some variables intervening, such as national journalistic and political culture or policy tradition. The book suggests accounting for mediatisation, instead, that is, for the fact that political communication is oriented towards the idiosyncratic logics of media, their (Europeanised) professional practice of news production. One possible alternative conceptualisation, elaborated in the book, is a field-theoretical conception of mass media as a discursively-symbolically constituted microcosm. Such informed research on mediatisation requires some sort of thick description. In the book, this was done by contrasting a comprehensive analysis of meta-data, media content and generic language use, which reconstructed the discourse agency of professional producers of public-political debate, with an analysis of the discourse

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structures of Europeanised national news media, their regulative discourse and social topology (see Chap. 6 and Sect. 2.4). Along these lines, the book contributes to what has  recently been established as a ‘sociology of the European Union’ (Favell & Guiraudon, 2009). The formation, institution and legitimation of power relations systematically related to European integration, which used to be addressed primarily from a political science and International Relations perspective, have become a subject of genuinely sociological research. Sociological arguments are employed to shift the focus from EU institutions and official EU politics to practices and spaces of social interaction that evolve with European integration at micro, meso and macro levels of social organisation (Favell & Guiraudon, 2009; Mau, 2015). They are also used as an auxiliary to better ground established political science theories of European integration (Saurugger & Mérand, 2010) or, in contrast, to highlight the distinct contribution that French constructionist sociology can make to the study of EU politics (Zimmermann & Favell, 2011). While the book engages with strands of this thought, in particular Bourdieusian sociology, its major concern has been to unearth potentials of the linguistic turn that have been neglected in both IR Constructivism and EU sociology.

 ontours of a Discursive Political Sociology C of European Integration With the term ‘discursive political sociology of European integration’ I mean to label research that seeks to conceptualise political-sociological enquiry from a discourse angle and takes the advancements into account that interdisciplinary discourse studies have brought about in the past three decades. The subject of a discursive political sociology of European integration remains the enquiry into the formation and transformation of power relations in the EU’s setting, and into EU-related political legitimation, communication and competition, more specifically. However, the focus is on discursive and communicative rationalities that bring EU-related power relations about. If conducted on an advanced level, such discursive political sociology will not satisfy itself with reproducing

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meta-theoretical positions between deliberative and poststructuralist approaches in IR constructivism or between (ideational) discourse and (material) practice in EU sociology. It will consider criticisms of ‘thin interpretation’, which an exclusive or superficial focus on linguistic-­ semiotic artefacts might bring, and conceptually integrate the conditioning contexts and materiality of discourse, for example by including field-theoretical arguments as I did in the book. But, at the same time, an advanced discourse study will not fall back behind the scientific revolution that the linguistic turn brought about in the social sciences and “reaffirm a naive reference to reality as if we never had gone through the linguistic turn, poststructuralism and deconstructivism” (Bachmann-­ Medick, 2019, author’s translation). It will endorse, instead, the linguistic turn also in its epistemological dimension. Endorsing the linguistic turn involves more than extending research beyond  political attitudes  into utterances on political issues (thematic turn). It also does not exhaust itself in the assumption that discourse and communication co-constitute the social and political world (ontological turn), in the use of discourse theories for conceptualising a research problem (macro-theoretical turn) and of more text-sensitive methods for primary analysis (method-related turn). In addition, the postrepresentational and postfoundational philosophy of mind is accounted for, which was introduced by modern linguistics and linguistic philosophy and became the basis of discourse theories in the social sciences (epistemological turn). The epistemological turn implies  acknowledging that cognition and meaning-making are socially and communicatively mediated, instead of flowing from or merely reflecting prior sensation, intention or experience; that language and other semiotic artefacts co-constitute cognition through performative signification, interpretive tradition and conventionalised language use; and that the researcher herself or himself is implicated in these intersubjectivities. Three implications follow: First, language and semiotic artefacts are no longer perceived as instruments transmitting given ideas or experiences, as a utilitarian conception of language suggests. Instead, they are understood to be meaning-making practices that constitute and perform, enable and disable, certain forms of cognition and action. Second, the researcher is aware and knowledgeable of the heterogeneity of discourse

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epistemologies that has formed on that common knowledge-­philosophical ground and accounts for the different disciplinary and national academic trajectories that borrow from reflexive hermeneutics, linguistic pragmatics or (post)structuralism. These discourse epistemologies do not align with, but reach across, the divide between deliberative versus poststructuralist meta-theory that is stressed in IR constructivism nor with the divide between discourse as ideational and practice as a material dimension of human action that is sometimes stressed in EU sociology. As they each provide a distinct notion of discourse, a theory of meaning-­ constitution and a method of critical reading, which  root in different intellectual traditions, these discourse epistemologies are also not necessarily compatible or easily combined. The book has outlined five discourse epistemologies that provide a discursive conception of politics and are instructive to the study of political-­ sociological problems: Interpretive Policy Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, Birmingham cultural studies, Foucauldian governmentality studies and poststructuralist hegemony studies. Closest to conventional understandings of politics is certainly the perspective developed in Interpretive Policy Analysis, which is grounded in reflexive hermeneutics and US interpretive studies. Accordingly, the political is constituted through intersubjective meaning-making in practical reasoning over ­public policy and based on argumentation, framing and narration, that employs social imaginaries and mobilises scenarios of collective action. Critical Discourse Analysis, assumes that meaning is constituted in the interplay of the features of an utterance (text) and the circumstances of its production and reception (context) following linguistic-pragmatic, text-­linguistic or systemic-functional assumptions. Correspondingly, CDA conceives of politics as a specialised realm of social practice that is constituted through generic patterns of language use, such as the meta speech act of ‘legitimation’ or text genres of political campaigning and political oratory. They establish symbolic power by excluding or including certain social groups, voices and visions of society (see Sects. 2.2, 2.3). Birmingham cultural studies, which draw on a reformed Althusserian concept of ideology and Gramsci’s theory of articulation and cultural hegemony, see the political and relations of political power constituted in marginalised subjects’ subcultural contestation of powerful, mass-­mediated,

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social imaginings. Hegemony studies, which draw on poststructuralist semiology and Laclau’s and Mouffe’s Gramscian-Focauldian discourse theory of the political, locate the political in the antagonistic-­agonistic structuring of political space and adversarial political movements. They are expected to form through ‘hegemonic articulations’, that is, semiotic operations of equivalence and difference that pertain to the closure of polyvalent meaning, excluding a potentially subversive alternative interpretation. Foucauldian governmentality studies, finally, which are situated in (post)structuralist discourse theory, assume that political power is sedimented in knowledge-generating practices (e.g. statistical measures of risk and population management) and self-management techniques through which some approaches of governing are enabled rather than others, and through which political authority is produced. What is important to stress is that none of these approaches is limited to the investigation of semiotic artefacts. In fact, they see the meaning of the semiotic artefacts to be co-constituted by either  contexts of utterance, following pragmatic conceptions of language (CDA); conjunctures in socio-economic trajectories (Birmingham cultural studies); phantasmatic, social and economic logics (logics approach in the Essex school); or dispositives (Foucauldian discourse studies). Part of their methods of critical reading is a systematic situating of the investigated artefacts with these dimensions (see Sect. 2.2). A third implication of the epistemological linguistic turn is that the researcher achieves scientificity only by exposing her own involvement in reflexive research design. Bracketing one’s axiological stance and interpretive tradition in quasi-experimental research design, universal method and nomothetic-deductive explanation, as is usually done in the social sciences, appears problematic from that perspective. In its place, the researcher lays out a problem-oriented analytical strategy and critical method of reading, which is exact and replicable, but focuses on giving a complex account of the research problem and extends, instead of confirms, conventional ways of interpretation. An analytical strategy determines from what research-philosophical viewpoint and macro-theoretical assumptions such endeavour starts and how these inform the conceptualisation of the research subject (Andersen Åkerstrøm, 2003). Specific to a discourse-analytical strategy is to additionally point out what theory of

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discourse and meaning-constitution guides the study, how one expects the social reality to be co-constituted through acts of uttering and signification. Based on these general decisions, one will need to adopt middle-­ range theories that specify relevant instances of discursive construction and that are concrete enough to inform categories of textual-multimodal analysis and abstract enough to translate insights back into the macro-­ theoretical framework. The outcome is a critical, instead of a  literal, method of reading: reading procedures are adopted that not only endorse criteria of text criticism and replicability, but also apply an apparatus of terms and categories derived from a specified discourse epistemology, thereby inducing a distance from the literal and the obvious (see Sect. 2.4 and Kutter, 2018). The particular challenge that a political-sociological discourse study faces is the translation of insights achieved through the micrology of semiotic artefacts into a macrology of political-sociological enquiry, and vice versa. If a micrology, a detailed discourse analysis of semiotic artefacts, is neglected, one risks a ‘thin interpretation’ and jumping to conclusions made on internally scarcely valid inferences. If one goes without translation into macro-level research questions and social or political theory, one risks conducting a descriptive discourse analysis with little relevance to  political-sociological enquiry. To tackle this dilemma, the book suggested juxtaposing, in a ‘bifocal procedure’, the analytical perspective of discourse as social practice with the analytical perspective of discourse as formation of knowledge. While the former is situated in the middle range of abstraction and highlights, for instance, patterns of legitimising language use, the latter is situated at a higher level of abstraction and highlights, for instance, the regulative discourse of news journalism. Moreover, at the level of method development, a discursive political sociology will not only triangulate methods of textual-contextual analysis in order to generate a more comprehensive understanding of the problem at stake. It will choose and combine those methods that help the translation between micrology and macrology. For the study conducted in this book, the method of computer-aided qualitative content analysis of large samples of texts was combined with a detailed discourse analysis of selected texts, applying the analytical apparatus of the Discourse-­ Historical Aapproach in CDA. The first method helps to work out pat-

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terns of distribution and co-occurrence of propositional content (what is said) in the investigated text collection. When subsequently aggregated on different levels of abstraction and compared to each other, for instance between news organisations or between country settings, these patterns can be interpreted in a way that is of interest to a political-sociological enquiry. The latter method is attentive to the materiality and contextual conditioning of meaning generated in texts (how it is said) and provides a bridging vocabulary in the middle range of abstraction, such as ‘discourse strategies’ or ‘genre’, that makes selected aspects of such linguistic micrology accessible to social research. Combined in a funnel method and in an abductive procedure, the two methods instruct each other. The funnel method selects a limited number of texts for discourse analysis on the basis of insights generated through content analysis, while an abductive procedure relates empirical insights back to theoretical concepts and vice versa (see Sect. 2.4). An advanced generation of discourse studies of European integration will have to explicate reflected choices in all such dimensions of analytical strategy.

 ow to Speak of Multiplicity: Towards a Reflexive H EU Literacy The insights generated in the book also give some criteria to reflect upon academics’ and practitioners’ habits in communicating EU politics and European integration. They motivate a prospective critique that points to alternative ways of communicating EU affairs. In this book, such critique draws axiological inspiration from the ethics of alterity (for this see Moebius, 2004) and the political theory of (political-moral) recognition of multiplicity, that is, recognition  of multiple cultures, constitutions, constituencies and claims for political authority that are situated in a territory. It has been spelt out for first and second nations in Tully’s work (Tully, 1995) and in assessments of postnational political association, including that of the EU (Fossum, 2005; Wiener, Dunoff, Havercroft, & Kumm, 2019). Recognition of multiplicity and consideration of the ‘alter’ (the necessarily excluded) of one’s self-conception, this is the assumption, may help to resolve social conflicts by restoring respect and

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justice between parties. It may thus be a substantial condition for building a political association in complex societies. Such a conception of recognition  of difference risks reproducing inequality and conflict, in particular if political-cultural recognition is thought of and granted without addressing asymmetries in structural or economic power. But it is useful as a regulative idea, through which to scrutinise arrangements, practices and discourses of recognition with regard to how they reproduce particularistic-exclusive political orders (Bartelson, 2013). In line with this argument, the patterns of discourse and language use observed for EU studies and EU-related professional communication are here reflected upon with regard to how they hinder or foster the recognition of multiplicity. As explicated earlier (see Sect. 8.2), the EU’s constitutional episode left a problematic legacy, because it propagated and enhanced a conception of political association and a design of EU political institutions that followed central premises of modern constitutionalism and the (continental) deductive-formalist tradition of constitutional law (see Sect. 8.2). Thereby, it crowded out or glossed over some aspects of the EU’s grown constitutional multiplicity, including its legal-constitutional heterarchy or interlegality, inductive-pragmatist traditions of constitutional law or the stress of simple member polities on the prevalence of popular parliamentary sovereignty over legal review. Moreover, the concern with vertical and horizontal checks and balances, the constitutionalisation of human rights and electoral-representative delegation that the constitutional imaginary suggested certainly gave expression to claims for political authority and cultural recognition that were  voiced by the  EU’s different political entities. But it also normalised EU governance into a vision of familiar functional-federalist order, omitting the meshed powers, the multi-tier, compound and partially postdemocratic nature as well as the constitutional asymmetry that is characteristic of EU governance. These features of EU governance have become contested and provide the starting point for any reformulation of multiplicity within the EU. Further problematic narrowings of the EU constitutional debate that crowded out multiplicity showed in moral panics over fellow Europeans’ supposed misrecognition, in which participants of the debate started rallying round the national flag and denied to their fellow Europeans that their constitu-

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tional tradition was of any relevance to the common EU polity. Finally, when presupposing the titular-national collective as culturally defined and when normalising it as the natural constituency of EU politics, participants of the debate ignored and excluded the EU’s national or ethnic minorities as well as differences in member societies that transgress the cultural or territorial container. The objective of the prospective critique formulated here is not to morally evaluate these narrowings and project conceptions of EU polity that are less entrenched in modern constitutionalism or more multiplicity-­ aware. Instead, what a discourse study can inform is a practice and competence of critique through which to expose the  limitations of EU discourse in scholarly and media debate. What I have in mind is a ‘reflexive EU literacy’, that is: knowledge of how to problematise accustomed ways of signifying European integration and EU politics, how to expound blind spots and experiment with alternative ways of signification. Standardised in curricula, textbooks and codes of conduct for students in EU studies, journalists and communication professionals, such reflexive practice could become an ingredient of professional education. To be sure, the development of a reflexive EU literacy might not appear to be the most pressing issue to journalists, who deal with the defence of press freedom  and journalistic ethos against the backdrop of rising authoritarian rule and corruption or  the surge of fake news. And EU representatives and established political forces are busy maintaining collective action in a disintegrating Union and in face of a reconfiguring electorate and party base. Moreover, professional producers of EU discourse, be they journalists, communication professionals, politicians or EU scholars, already dispose of EU literacy. They have elaborate knowledge of the EU’s institutional arithmetics and a rich vocabulary and discourse practice for signifying the EU’s polity character and multifaceted power sharing (see Sects. 8.1 and 8.2). They acquire it either as applied knowledge on the job (journalists, communication professionals, politicians) or as consolidated textbook knowledge which scientifically rationalises EU governance (scholars, see Sect. 3.4). The established EU literacy centres, however, on the EU’s formal and informal, primarily political, institutions, procedures of legislation and regulation, motivations that drive political action and market participation, and symbols of unifica-

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tion and peace among nations. And critique of EU literacy focuses on the extent to which these aspects of EU politics are known and accessible to EU citizens and practitioners in all member states. Such literacy enables involvement in EU-related communication, political competition and expertise. But it might not suffice for retaining interpretive authority in an era of rapid social and political change that increases the complexity of social relations. A reflexive EU literacy and practice of critique that enables talk and recognition of multiplicity would centre, instead, on expounding the ways in which EU discourses and established EU literacy exert symbolical violence, blanking out specific groups or visions of political association. The following strands of throught could be subject of such scrutiny: • Modern constitutionalism and  the  related presupposition that legal hierarchy, functional-horizontal and territorial-vertical power division, (negative) individual freedoms and representative democracy as established in state constitutions naturally constitute good political rule and that contractualism and civic and cultural communitarianism are the natural ways of building a political association. • Discourses of representative democracy that portray electoral-­ representative delegation and disinterested service to the electorate constituency as a source of EU political authority, for example in ad populum fallacies or pro bono arguments. • Doxa of European integration, such as the teleological reading of EU treaty-making, according to which EU polity-building must follow the script envisioned in the treaties and is programmed into a closer union, and the assumption that a multilateral consensus is an objective worth achieving in itself. • Methodological nationalism, that is, the naturalisation of a global regime of nation-states, in which nation-states appear as the containers of society and as the natural political collective unified by given interests. It shows in a strong emphasis on: levels of territorial government (with the national being the primary and the others the derived levels), national interest and interstate diplomacy as the mode of EU decision-­ making, or formulae such as ‘red lines’ of national interest or the ‘usurpatory national We’, which conflates society, government, state and

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titular and non-titular nation(s) in a homogenous position. It also shows in practices of mass mediation, such as nationally polarising moral panics, which enhance a nationalist doctrine and have been inherited from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. • Culturalist-essentialising depictions of the EU’s social and institutional heterogeneity, which specify different national political systems, media systems, welfare and growth regimes or schools of thought, usually from the perspective of one or two ‘generic’, if not superior, variants from which the others deviate. They reveal in comparative methods, in foreign correspondents’ reports, mediatised European blame games or ritualised references to the EU’s cultural diversity. A related practice is to dissolve cultural difference in depoliticised depictions of EU citizens as consumers and market participants who are united in their interest to benefit from access to other member states and EU economies of scale. • ‘Flat’ conceptions of political competition that reduce political struggle to bottom-up aggregation and representation of societal demands or a market model, in which the best-sold product of political programme will be rewarded with public opinion’s or voters’ support; and ‘flat’ conceptions of political communication that assume a simple sender-receiver model and ignore the self-referential dynamics of multiscalar news production and mediatisation. A related practice would be to encourage the critical acquisition of non-­ canonised knowledges of European integration and make respective turns in EU scholarly debate accessible to trainees in the different professional realms. Among them are, first, interlegality studies, which stress the mutual conditioning of plural legal orders (be they related to overlapping political communities or to policy-specific legal regimes), as well as the permanent translation between different traditions of constitutional law and jurisprudence. They move from enquiring into the formally granted to the relationally enacted constitution of a political entity, for example by focusing on the interrelation of national and EU citizenship or a dual legal review within the EU (Klabbers & Palombella, 2019). Second, methodological nationalism loses its encompassing persuasiveness, as do simple models of political communication and competition, when con-

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trasted with concepts of (emerging) ‘polity’, ‘field’, ‘space’ or ‘scale’. Instead of using these concepts as elusive metaphors to intellectually access agency and structure that stretch territorial levels, as is often done in EU political science, the task would be to adopt the social and political theory associated with these terms and embark on a polity, field, scalar or spatial “mode of thinking” (Dikeç, 2012, for the spatial mode; MacKinnon, 2010, for scalar politics; Stone, 2012, for the polity mode). The tendency to culturalise and hierarchise social and institutional heterogeneity can, third, be exposed by adopting the practice of postcolonial critique, which relativises a chosen vantage point by explicitly approaching the subject of interest from the (seeming) margins, for example by highlighting those types of the EU’s institutional-social heterogeneity that usually escape attention. This list of possible subjects of reflexive EU literacy is certainly not exhaustive. But it gives a handle to efforts in civic and professional education that seek to counter divisive trends and the ‘re-nationalisation’  mentioned in the introduction to the book. The research conducted suggests that professional producers of EU discourses are so thoroughly implicated in structured symbolic interaction in their professional fields that reflexive EU literacy will not grow organically as soon as participants of public discourse are involved in supranational settings, transnational interaction or convergent news cycles. Instead, the  cognitive and discursive-linguistic capacities that enable them to address and appreciate multiplicity and engage in cultural translations need explicit elaboration. A discursive political sociology of European integration can inform the elaboration of such competence in postnational political association.

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 Appendix A: Samples and Subsamples

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Kutter, Legitimation in the European Union, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33031-6

509

Overall coverage News Evaluation Constitution major topic (overall coverage) Constitution major topic (evaluation) First page placement News and editorials inauguration (CDA) Nests of debate (CDA)

N

86.71 9.80

411

127 2 3

63.43 36.57 79.71

1296 822 474 1033

68 2

443

1216 733 483 Missing

Absolute numbers

Absolute numbers % of N

Le Figaro

Le Monde

Newspaper

5.59

91.72

60.3 39.7

% of N

1

58 2

344

862 467 395 719

Absolute numbers

6.73

87.09

54.18 45.82 83.41

% of N

Gazeta Wyborcza

Missing 2

457

1152 641 511 Missing

Absolute numbers

89.43

55.64 44.36

% of N

Rzeczpospolita

510  Appendix A: Samples and Subsamples



Appendix B: Constitution Topics in Evaluative Articles

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Kutter, Legitimation in the European Union, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33031-6

511

% of N 17.09 5.91 3.59 4.22 11.18 6.33 7.17 10.55 16.88 6.75 7.59 14.35 11.18 6.75

474 81 28 17 20 53 30

34 50 80 32

36

68 53 32

64 83 33

31

40 57 74 41

483 133 22 12 27 47 31

Absolute numbers

Absolute numbers

13.25 17.18 6.83

6.42

8.28 11.80 15.32 8.49

27.54 4.55 2.48 5.59 9.73 6.42

% of N

16 27 127

11

24 34 30 103

395 65 28 33 33 28 15

Absolute numbers

4.05 6.84 32.15

2.78

6.08 8.61 7.59 26.08

16.46 7.09 8.35 8.35 7.09 3.80

% of N

Gazeta Wyborcza

11 25 125

16

14 22 30 134

511 42 38 24 21 22 21

Absolute numbers

2.15 4.89 24.46

3.13

2.74 4.31 5.87 26.22

8.22 7.44 4.70 4.11 4.31 4.11

% of N

Rzeczpospolita

Topics marked by an asterisk (∗) were built from several subordinate or related topics (clockwise, starting from Social Policy). Social Policy includes Public Services, Social and Employment Policy, Social Rights, Social Europe General; CFSP/ESDP includes Solidarity Clause, European Armament Agency, EU Head Quarters, CFSP General; Charter includes Antidiscrimination, Status of Religious Groups and the Church, Charter General; Cohesion includes Cohesion Transfers, Eastern Dimension; Economy includes EC Control, ECB Status, EU Budget, Economic Governance, Eurogroup, Taxes, Economy General; European Parliament includes EP Composition, EP General; Presidency includes Commission President, Council President, EU President

N CFSP/ESDP∗ Charter∗ Cohesion∗ Commissioners Economy∗ European Parliament∗ Foreign minister Presidency∗ Ratification Reference to God/ Christianity Reinforced cooperation Social Policy∗ QMV Vote weighting

N

Le Figaro

Le Monde

Newspaper

512  Appendix B: Constitution Topics in Evaluative Articles

Appendix C: Polity Topics in Evaluative Articles

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Kutter, Legitimation in the European Union, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33031-6

513

% of N 20.89 7.81 8.44 3.16 5.70 1.05 4.85 5.06 12.03 4.22 5.70 4.43 1.48 6.96 8.02

474 99 37 40 15 27 5 23 24 57 20 27 21 7 33 38

N

N Democracy∗ Balance EU-EU Balance EU-MS Balance EU-NATO Balance MS-MS Balance multilevel Sovereignty Leadership Borders∗ Diversity Identity Religion Manners Spirit of community Unity 23.40 8.70 14.08 4.55 8.49 2.28 7.04 9.73 15.53 5.59 5.38 4.76 1.86 9.94 11.18

% of N

14 17 29 26 36 23

395 41 18 32 16 45 5 28 22 10.38 4.56 8.10 4.05 11.39 1.27 7.09 5.57 11.14 3.54 4.30 7.34 6.58 9.11 5.82

% of N

Gazeta Wyborcza Absolute numbers 511 43 11 46 22 67 6 40 18 42 26 31 63 18 50 23

8.41 2.15 9.00 4.31 13.11 1.17 7.83 3.52 8.22 5.09 6.07 12.33 3.52 9.78 4.50

% of N

Rzeczpospolita Absolute numbers

Topics marked by an asterisk (∗) were built from several subordinate or related topics. ‘Democracy’ includes positive references to democracy as a value (‘Democracy’) and reference to problems of democratic legitimacy (‘Alienation and Contestedness’); ‘Borders’ include all instances of delimitation towards out-groups, mostly Turkey, other accession and neighbouring countries and/or competitors, mostly the USA (‘Borders and Frontiers’, ‘EU-USA’)

27 26 23 9 48 54

483 113 42 68 22 41 11 34 47

Le Figaro Absolute numbers

Le Monde

Absolute numbers

Newspaper



Appendix D: Laeken Declaration

Source: Presidency-of-the-European-Council (2001). Laeken declaration on the future of the European Union. Annex 1 to the Presidency conclusions of the European Council meeting in Laeken on 14 and 15 December 2001 (SN 300/1/01 REV 1). Brussels: European Union Retrieved from https://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/en/ ec/68827.pdf.

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Kutter, Legitimation in the European Union, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33031-6

515

516 

Appendix D: Laeken Declaration

1

LAEKEN DECLARATION ON THE FUTURE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION

2

I. EUROPE AT A CROSSROADS

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

For centuries, peoples and states have taken up arms and waged war to win control of the European continent. The debilitating effects of two bloody wars and the weakening of Europe’s position in the world brought a growing realisation that only peace and concerted action could make the dream of a strong, unified Europe come true. In order to banish once and for all the demons of the past, a start was made with a coal and steel community. Other economic activities, such as agriculture, were subsequently added in. A genuine single market was eventually established for goods, persons, services and capital, and a single currency was added in 1999. On 1 January 2002 the euro is to become a day-to-day reality for 300 million European citizens.

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

The European Union has thus gradually come into being. In the beginning, it was more of an economic and technical collaboration. Twenty years ago, with the first direct elections to the European Parliament, the Community’s democratic legitimacy, which until then had lain with the Council alone, was considerably strengthened. Over the last ten years, construction of a political union has begun and cooperation been established on social policy, employment, asylum, immigration, police, justice, foreign policy and a common security and defence policy.

19 20 21 22 23 24

The European Union is a success story. For over half a century now, Europe has been at peace. Along with North America and Japan, the Union forms one of the three most prosperous parts of the world. As a result of mutual solidarity and fair distribution of the benefits of economic development, moreover, the standard of living in the Union’s weaker regions has increased enormously and they have made good much of the disadvantage they were at.

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Fifty years on, however, the Union stands at a crossroads, a defining moment in its existence. The unification of Europe is near. The Union is about to expand to bring in more than ten new Member States, predominantly Central and Eastern European, thereby finally closing one of the darkest chapters in European history: the Second World War and the ensuing artificial division of Europe. At long last, Europe is on its way to becoming one big family, without bloodshed, a real transformation clearly calling for a different approach from fifty years ago, when six countries first took the lead.

33

The democratic challenge facing Europe

34 35 36

At the same time, the Union faces twin challenges, one within and the other beyond its borders. Within the Union, the European institutions must be brought closer to its citizens. Citizens undoubtedly support the Union’s broad aims, but they do not always

  Appendix D: Laeken Declaration 

517

37 38 39 40 41 42 43

see a connection between those goals and the Union’s everyday action. They want the European institutions to be less unwieldy and rigid and, above all, more efficient and open. Many also feel that the Union should involve itself more with their particular concerns, instead of intervening, in every detail, in matters by their nature better left to Member States’ and regions’ elected representatives. This is even perceived by some as a threat to their identity. More importantly, however, they feel that deals are all too often cut out of their sight and they want better democratic scrutiny.

44

Europe’s new role in a globalised world

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Beyond its borders, in turn, the European Union is confronted with a fast-changing, globalised world. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, it looked briefly as though we would for a long while be living in a stable world order, free from conflict, founded upon human rights. Just a few years later, however, there is no such certainty. The eleventh of September has brought a rude awakening. The opposing forces have not gone away: religious fanaticism, ethnic nationalism, racism and terrorism are on the increase, and regional conflicts, poverty and underdevelopment still provide a constant seedbed for them.

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

What is Europe’s role in this changed world? Does Europe not, now that is finally unified, have a leading role to play in a new world order, that of a power able both to play a stabilising role worldwide and to point the way ahead for many countries and peoples? Europe as the continent of human values, the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the French Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall; the continent of liberty, solidarity and above all diversity, meaning respect for others’ languages, cultures and traditions. The European Union’s one boundary is democracy and human rights. The Union is open only to countries which uphold basic values such as free elections, respect for minorities and respect for the rule of law.

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Now that the Cold War is over and we are living in a globalised, yet also highly fragmented world, Europe needs to shoulder its responsibilities in the governance of globalisation. The role it has to play is that of a power resolutely doing battle against all violence, all terror and all fanaticism, but which also does not turn a blind eye to the world’s heartrending injustices. In short, a power wanting to change the course of world affairs in such a way as to benefit not just the rich countries but also the poorest. A power seeking to set globalisation within a moral framework, in other words to anchor it in solidarity and sustainable development.

70

The expectations of Europe’s citizens

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

The image of a democratic and globally engaged Europe admirably matches citizens’ wishes. There have been frequent public calls for a greater EU role in justice and security, action against cross-border crime, control of migration flows and reception of asylum seekers and refugees from far-flung war zones. Citizens also want results in the fields of employment and combating poverty and social exclusion, as well as in the field of economic and social cohesion. They want a common approach on environmental pollution, climate change and food safety, in short, all transnational issues which they instinctively sense can only be tackled by working together. Just as they also want to see Europe more involved in foreign affairs, security and defence, in other words, greater and better coordinated action to deal with trouble spots in and around Europe and in the rest of the world.

82 83

At the same time, citizens also feel that the Union is behaving too bureaucratically in numerous other areas. In coordinating the economic, financial and fiscal environment,

518 

Appendix D: Laeken Declaration

84 85 86 87 88 89 90

the basic issue should continue to be proper operation of the internal market and the single currency, without this jeopardising Member States’ individuality. National and regional differences frequently stem from history or tradition. They can be enriching. In other words, what citizens understand by “good governance” is opening up fresh opportunities, not imposing further red tape. What they expect is more results, better responses to practical issues and not a European superstate or European institutions inveigling their way into every nook and cranny of life.

91 92 93 94 95

In short, citizens are calling for a clear, open, effective, democratically controlled Community approach, developing a Europe which points the way ahead for the world. An approach that provides concrete results in terms of more jobs, better quality of life, less crime, decent education and better health care. There can be no doubt that this will require Europe to undergo renewal and reform.

96

II. CHALLENGES AND REFORMS IN A RENEWED UNION

97 98 99 100 101 102

The Union needs to become more democratic, more transparent and more efficient. It also has to resolve three basic challenges: how to bring citizens, and primarily the young, closer to the European design and the European institutions, how to organise politics and the European political area in an enlarged Union and how to develop the Union into a stabilising factor and a model in the new, multipolar world. In order to address them a number of specific questions need to be put.

103

A better division and definition of competence in the European Union

104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

Citizens often hold expectations of the European Union that are not always fulfilled. And vice versa – they sometimes have the impression that the Union takes on too much in areas where its involvement is not always essential. Thus the important thing is to clarify, simplify and adjust the division of competence between the Union and the Member States in the light of the new challenges facing the Union. This can lead both to restoring tasks to the Member States and to assigning new missions to the Union, or to the extension of existing powers, while constantly bearing in mind the equality of the Member States and their mutual solidarity.

112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119

A first series of questions that needs to be put concerns how the division of competence can be made more transparent. Can we thus make a clearer distinction between three types of competence: the exclusive competence of the Union, the competence of the Member States and the shared competence of the Union and the Member States? At what level is competence exercised in the most efficient way? How is the principle of subsidiarity to be applied here? And should we not make it clear that any powers not assigned by the Treaties to the Union fall within the exclusive sphere of competence of the Member States? And what would be the consequences of this?

120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131

The next series of questions should aim, within this new framework and while respecting the “acquis communautaire”, to determine whether there needs to be any reorganisation of competence. How can citizens’ expectations be taken as a guide here? What missions would this produce for the Union? And, vice versa, what tasks could better be left to the Member States? What amendments should be made to the Treaty on the various policies? How, for example, should a more coherent common foreign policy and defence policy be developed? Should the Petersberg tasks be updated? Do we want to adopt a more integrated approach to police and criminal law cooperation? How can economic-policy coordination be stepped up? How can we intensify cooperation in the field of social inclusion, the environment, health and food safety? But then, should not the day-to-day administration and implementation of the Union’s policy be left more emphatically to the Member States and, where their constitutions so provide, to the

  Appendix D: Laeken Declaration 

519

132 133

regions? Should they not be provided with guarantees that their spheres of competence will not be affected?

134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141

Lastly, there is the question of how to ensure that a redefined division of competence does not lead to a creeping expansion of the competence of the Union or to encroachment upon the exclusive areas of competence of the Member States and, where there is provision for this, regions. How are we to ensure at the same time that the European dynamic does not come to a halt? In the future as well the Union must continue to be able to react to fresh challenges and developments and must be able to explore new policy areas. Should Articles 95 and 308 of the Treaty be reviewed for this purpose in the light of the “acquis jurisprudential”?

142

Simplification of the Union’s instruments

143 144 145 146 147 148

Who does what is not the only important question; the nature of the Union’s action and what instruments it should use are equally important. Successive amendments to the Treaty have on each occasion resulted in a proliferation of instruments, and directives have gradually evolved towards more and more detailed legislation. The key question is therefore whether the Union’s various instruments should not be better defined and whether their number should not be reduced.

149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156

In other words, should a distinction be introduced between legislative and executive measures? Should the number of legislative instruments be reduced: directly applicable rules, framework legislation and non-enforceable instruments (opinions, recommendations, open coordination)? Is it or is it not desirable to have more frequent recourse to framework legislation, which affords the Member States more room for manoeuvre in achieving policy objectives? For which areas of competence are open coordination and mutual recognition the most appropriate instruments? Is the principle of proportionality to remain the point of departure?

157

More democracy, transparency and efficiency in the European Union

158 159 160 161 162 163 164

The European Union derives its legitimacy from the democratic values it projects, the aims it pursues and the powers and instruments it possesses. However, the European project also derives its legitimacy from democratic, transparent and efficient institutions. The national parliaments also contribute towards the legitimacy of the European project. The declaration on the future of the Union, annexed to the Treaty of Nice, stressed the need to examine their role in European integration. More generally, the question arises as to what initiatives we can take to develop a European public area.

165 166 167

The first question is thus how we can increase the democratic legitimacy and transparency of the present institutions, a question which is valid for the three institutions.

168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177

How can the authority and efficiency of the European Commission be enhanced? How should the President of the Commission be appointed: by the European Council, by the European Parliament or should he be directly elected by the citizens? Should the role of the European Parliament be strengthened? Should we extend the right of co-decision or not? Should the way in which we elect the members of the European Parliament be reviewed? Should a European electoral constituency be created, or should constituencies continue to be determined nationally? Can the two systems be combined? Should the role of the Council be strengthened? Should the Council act in the same manner in its legislative and its executive capacities? With a view to greater transparency, should the meetings of the Council, at least in its legislative capacity, be

520 

Appendix D: Laeken Declaration

178 179

public? Should citizens have more access to Council documents? How, finally, should the balance and reciprocal control between the institutions be ensured?

180 181 182 183 184 185

A second question, which also relates to democratic legitimacy, involves the role of national parliaments. Should they be represented in a new institution, alongside the Council and the European Parliament? Should they have a role in areas of European action in which the European Parliament has no competence? Should they focus on the division of competence between Union and Member States, for example through preliminary checking of compliance with the principle of subsidiarity?

186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196

The third question concerns how we can improve the efficiency of decision-making and the workings of the institutions in a Union of some thirty Member States. How could the Union set its objectives and priorities more effectively and ensure better implementation? Is there a need for more decisions by a qualified majority? How is the co-decision procedure between the Council and the European Parliament to be simplified and speeded up? What of the six-monthly rotation of the Presidency of the Union? What is the future role of the European Parliament? What of the future role and structure of the various Council formations? How should the coherence of European foreign policy be enhanced? How is synergy between the High Representative and the competent Commissioner to be reinforced? Should the external representation of the Union in international fora be extended further?

197

Towards a Constitution for European citizens

198 199 200

The European Union currently has four Treaties. The objectives, powers and policy instruments of the Union are currently spread across those Treaties. If we are to have greater transparency, simplification is essential.

201 202 203

Four sets of questions arise in this connection. The first concerns simplifying the existing Treaties without changing their content. Should the distinction between the Union and the Communities be reviewed? What of the division into three pillars?

204 205 206 207 208

Questions then arise as to the possible reorganisation of the Treaties. Should a distinction be made between a basic treaty and the other treaty provisions? Should this distinction involve separating the texts? Could this lead to a distinction between the amendment and ratification procedures for the basic treaty and for the other treaty provisions?

209 210 211

Thought would also have to be given to whether the Charter of Fundamental Rights should be included in the basic treaty and to whether the European Community should accede to the European Convention on Human Rights.

212 213 214 215 216

The question ultimately arises as to whether this simplification and reorganisation might not lead in the long run to the adoption of a constitutional text in the Union. What might the basic features of such a constitution be? The values which the Union cherishes, the fundamental rights and obligations of its citizens, the relationship between Member States in the Union?

217

III. CONVENING OF A CONVENTION ON THE FUTURE OF EUROPE

218 219 220 221 222 223

In order to pave the way for the next Intergovernmental Conference as broadly and openly as possible, the European Council has decided to convene a Convention composed of the main parties involved in the debate on the future of the Union. In the light of the foregoing, it will be the task of that Convention to consider the key issues arising for the Union’s future development and try to identify the various possible responses.

  Appendix D: Laeken Declaration 

521

224 225

The European Council has appointed Mr V. Giscard d’Estaing as Chairman of the Convention and Mr G. Amato and Mr J.L. Dehaene as Vice-Chairmen.

226

Composition

227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235

In addition to its Chairman and Vice-Chairmen, the Convention will be composed of 15 representatives of the Heads of State or Government of the Member States (one from each Member State), 30 members of national parliaments (two from each Member State), 16 members of the European Parliament and two Commission representatives. The accession candidate countries will be fully involved in the Convention’s proceedings. They will be represented in the same way as the current Member States (one government representative and two national parliament members) and will be able to take part in the proceedings without, however, being able to prevent any consensus which may emerge among the Member States.

236 237

The members of the Convention may only be replaced by alternate members if they are not present. The alternate members will be designated in the same way as full members.

238 239 240 241 242

The Praesidium of the Convention will be composed of the Convention Chairman and Vice-Chairmen and nine members drawn from the Convention (the representatives of all the governments holding the Council Presidency during the Convention, two national parliament representatives, two European Parliament representatives and two Commission representatives).

243 244 245 246 247 248

Three representatives of the Economic and Social Committee with three representatives of the European social partners; from the Committee of the Regions: six representatives (to be appointed by the Committee of the Regions from the regions, cities and regions with legislative powers), and the European Ombudsman will be invited to attend as observers. The Presidents of the Court of Justice and of the Court of Auditors may be invited by the Praesidium to address the Convention.

249

Length of proceedings

250 251 252 253

The Convention will hold its inaugural meeting on 1 March 2002, when it will appoint its Praesidium and adopt its rules of procedure. Proceedings will be completed after a year, that is to say in time for the Chairman of the Convention to present its outcome to the European Council.

254

Working methods

255 256 257

The Chairman will pave the way for the opening of the Convention’s proceedings by drawing conclusions from the public debate. The Praesidium will serve to lend impetus and will provide the Convention with an initial working basis.

258 259

The Praesidium may consult Commission officials and experts of its choice on any technical aspect which it sees fit to look into. It may set up ad hoc working parties.

260 261 262 263

The Council will be kept informed of the progress of the Convention’s proceedings. The Convention Chairman will give an oral progress report at each European Council meeting, thus enabling Heads of State or Government to give their views at the same time.

264 265 266

The Convention will meet in Brussels. The Convention’s discussions and all official documents will be in the public domain. The Convention will work in the Union’s eleven working languages.

267

Final document

522 

Appendix D: Laeken Declaration

268 269 270

The Convention will consider the various issues. It will draw up a final document which may comprise either different options, indicating the degree of support which they received, or recommendations if consensus is achieved.

271 272 273

Together with the outcome of national debates on the future of the Union, the final document will provide a starting point for discussions in the Intergovernmental Conference, which will take the ultimate decisions.

274

Forum

275 276 277 278 279 280 281

In order for the debate to be broadly based and involve all citizens, a Forum will be opened for organisations representing civil society (the social partners, the business world, non-governmental organisations, academia, etc.). It will take the form of a structured network of organisations receiving regular information on the Convention’s proceedings. Their contributions will serve as input into the debate. Such organisations may be heard or consulted on specific topics in accordance with arrangements to be established by the Praesidium.

282

Secretariat

283 284 285

The Praesidium will be assisted by a Convention Secretariat, to be provided by the General Secretariat of the Council, which may incorporate Commission and European Parliament experts.

Appendix E: Introductory Speech by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to the Convention on the Future of Europe

Source: Giscard d’Estaing, V. (2002). Introductory Speech by president V.  Giscard d’Estaing to the Convention on the future of Europe (SN 1565/02 2). Brussels: European Union Retrieved from http://europeanconvention.europa.eu/docs/speeches/1.pdf.

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Kutter, Legitimation in the European Union, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33031-6

523

524  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Appendix E: Introductory Speech by President Valéry Giscard… INTRODUCTORY SPEECH BY PRESIDENT V. GISCARD D'ESTAING TO THE CONVENTION ON THE FUTURE OF EUROPE SN 1565/02 2 -

My thanks to the President of the Council (for creating us) to the President of the European Parliament (for accommodating us, and providing our contact with the electors of the only elected European institution) to the President of the Commission (for inspiring us, and sharing with us the experience of his institution).

12

Mesdames, Messieurs,

13

Ladies and Gentlemen,

14

Meine Damen und Herren,

15

Signore e Signori (IT)

16

Señoras y Señores (ES)

17

Dames en heren (NL)

18

Mine damer og herrer (DK)

19

Κυρίεσ και Κύριοι (GR)

20

Minhas Senhoras e Meus Senhores (PT)

21

Hyvät naiset ja herrat (FI)

22

Mina damer och herrar (SV)

23

Szanowni Państwo (PL)

24

You are the members of the Convention on the future of Europe.

25

You are the "Conventionists" of Europe.

26

You therefore have the power vested in any political body: to succeed, or to fail.

27 28

On one side, the yawning abyss of failure. On the other, strait is the gate to success.

29 30 31 32

If we fail, we will add to the current confusion in the European project, which we know will not be able, following the current round of enlargement, to provide a system to manage our continent which is both effective and clear to the public. What has been created over fifty years will reach its limit, and be threatened with dislocation.

  Appendix E: Introductory Speech by President Valéry Giscard… 

525

33 34 35 36 37 38

If we succeed, that is to say if we agree to propose a concept of the European Union which matches our continental dimension and the requirements of the 21st century, a concept which can bring unity to our continent and respect for its diversity, then you will be able to leave here and return home, whether you are Italo-European, Anglo-European, Polish-European – or any of the others – with the feeling of having contributed, modestly but effectively, to writing a new chapter in the history of Europe.

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

I should like, at the start of this Convention, to tell you how essential our work is for Europe and indeed for the world; to tell you also that our task will be a difficult one, as it will have to combine the dynamism of a movement bringing together countries and peoples, with great rigour of thought and method; I shall conclude with a call for enthusiasm, a call to you, members of the Convention, and to the leaders of the Member States and the candidate countries, and to all the citizens of Europe, to the eldest, who were the victims of the cruel confrontations of the past, and to the youngest, who dream of a wide area of freedom and opportunity opening for them in Europe.

***

*** 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

The European Council could not more forcefully underline the importance of our work than by creating this powerful Convention team, of which you are members. -

-

This team of 105 members is strong enough to meet the challenge facing us: the Convention will rely on two Vice-Chairmen of the first rank, Mr Giuliano Amato and Mr Jean-Luc Dehaene, who have held high office in two of the founding States; the presence amongst the representatives of the European Parliament, the national parliaments and the governments of personalities of great stature, who have studied the facts of the European debate, will ensure the quality of their dialogue with the national bodies from which they come, and towards which they will play an indispensable intermediary role; here, I would like warmly to thank those bodies which have responded positively to my call to appoint women to represent them; as for the two representatives of the Commission, they will help us to benefit from their great expertise, and their practical knowledge of the Europe of the Communities; the strong representation from the candidate countries, with 39 members, will ensure that the Convention has precise knowledge of their aspirations, and of the role they wish to play in Europe; the post of Secretary-General to the Convention will be held by a senior diplomat, with experience of the European institutions. I would like to thank the United Kingdom Government for facilitating his appointment.

Finally, the small team at the General Secretariat, which is young and talented and selected exclusively on its merits will, I am sure, constitute a brilliant "think tank" for the great European adventure, and will help to make our proceedings consistent and methodical. ***

73 74 75

The Convention is part of the rich and fertile continuum of European history. The distance we have travelled since Jean Monnet, Konrad Adenauer, PaulHenri Spaak and Alcide de Gasperi is vast and scarcely credible.

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76 77 78 79

Your very presence together in this room would have appeared unimaginable, would have seemed like a dream to the British, the Germans, the French, and the Dutch less than sixty years ago, and to the Czechs, Hungarians and Romanians less than fifteen years ago.

80 81 82 83

Europe has moved forward step by step, from Treaty to Treaty. The road has been lined with partial agreements and with crises which have quickly been overcome. The most striking feature is that Europe may have appeared at certain periods to be blocked, but it has never taken a step backwards.

84 85 86 87

In changing their currency, showing a remarkable capacity to adapt and a sort of popular joy, 302 million Europeans have just cast off the reproach of euro-sclerosis and shown that they are able to approve what is proposed to them when they judge it to be simple and useful.

88 89 90

All along this road, the European institutions, the Council, the European Parliament, the Commission, and the Court of Justice, have provided sterling service, to which we must pay tribute.

91 92 93

At the same time, we must admit that these measures are reaching their limits. The process of European union is showing signs of flagging, as the Laeken Declaration makes clear.

94 95 96 97 98 99 100

The decision-making machinery has become more complex, to the point of being unintelligible to the general public. Since Maastricht, the latest Treaties have been difficult to negotiate and have not met their original aims: discussions within the Institutions have often given precedence to national interests over consideration of the common European good. Finally, the abstention rate at European elections has reached a worrying level: in 1999 it exceeded the highly symbolic 50% threshold for the first time!

101 102

The shortcomings affect Europe in its present configuration. They will be even more critical in an enlarged Europe.

103 104

world.

105

We must remedy them in the interests of Europe, but also in the interests of the Today’s world lacks a strong, united and peaceful Europe.

106 107 108 109

The world would feel better if it could count on Europe, a Europe which spoke with a single voice to affirm respect for its alliances, but also to proclaim, whenever necessary, a message of tolerance and moderation, of openness towards difference, and of respect for human rights.

110 111 112

Let us not forget that from the ancient world of Greece and Rome until the Age of Enlightenment, our continent has made three fundamental contributions to humanity: reason, humanism and freedom.

113 114

Indeed, everyone on our planet would feel better if the strong voice of Europe could be heard.

115 116

If we succeed, in 25 years or 50 years – the distance separating us from the Treaty of Rome – Europe’s role in the world will have changed.

117 118 119 120

It will be respected and listened to, not only as the economic power it already is, but as a political power which will talk on equal terms to the greatest powers on our planet, either existing or future, and will have the means to act to affirm its values, ensure its security and play an active role in international peace-keeping.

  Appendix E: Introductory Speech by President Valéry Giscard… 

527

121 122

Our work, Honourable Members of the Convention, will be only one phase in the new Europe, but it is a key stage in giving our multinational adventure a fresh start.

123 124 125 126 127

Europe is at present marking time on account of several factors: the tangled skein of powers, the complexity of procedures, and perhaps also the weakening of political resolve; but there is, in my view, one prime reason: the difficulty of combining a strong feeling of belonging to the European Union with a continuing sense of national identity.

128 129

This difficulty already exists today. But it will be accentuated by the number and diversity of States taking part tomorrow in the life of the European Union.

130 131 132 133 134

This requirement is relatively new. During the first decades of the union of Europe, when national identities were still strong – to the point of fuelling bloody confrontations in order to protect or extend them, and when only a small and relatively homogenous Europe was involved – the only concern was to further European integration.

135 136 137

Since the 1990s, we have witnessed the growth of another need: the need for compatibility between the desire to be part of a strong European Union, and to remain solidly rooted in national, political, social and cultural life.

138 139 140

We must ensure that governments and citizens develop a strong, recognised, European "affectio societatis", while retaining their natural attachment to their national identity.

141 142 143 144

It was in the light of all these aspects that the Laeken European Council decided to create the Convention on the Future of Europe, of which you are members, assigning to it the task of preparing for the reform of Europe’s structures and – if we prove equal to the task - setting us on the path towards a Constitution for Europe.

***

*** 145

What will our programme be?

146

And how shall we conduct our proceedings?

147 148 149

The present situation of Europe prompts us to look back, to return to our sources and to ask ourselves what is the ultimate goal of the European project. The first stage of our work will thus be one of open, attentive listening.

150 151 152

As members of the Convention we will have to ask each other, and ask all our interlocutors, this question: "what do Europeans expect of Europe, at the beginning of the 21st century?"

153 154 155 156 157

We must embark on our task without preconceived ideas, and form our vision of the new Europe by listening constantly and closely to all our partners, governors and governees, economic and social partners, representatives of regional authorities – already present here – members of associations and civil society represented in the forum, but also those who have no other identity than that they form part of Europe.

158 159 160 161 162

In listening, we must pay special attention to two groups: young people, for whom I would like us to be able to organise a "Convention for the Young People of Europe", which would meet using our own model as its basis; and the citizens of the candidate countries, who will be both discovering the European Union and learning how it works.

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163 164 165 166

We will make use of contemporary, interactive listening methods, particularly on the Internet. Everyone must have an opportunity to be heard, which of course presupposes effective, decentralised organisation, making possible a dialogue with no ideological or partisan barriers.

167 168

Similarly, there is a desire for interactive surveys, enabling civil society to react to some of our future proposals.

169 170

Vice-Chairman Jean-Luc Dehaene has agreed to coordinate the Convention’s activities in that area.

171

Our first meetings will be devoted to listening to what Europe wants.

172 173 174

Our survey will in particular cover how Europeans imagine Europe 50 years hence. Do they want a Europe tending towards homogeneity – a more uniform Europe – driven forward by a process of harmonisation?

175 176 177

Or do they prefer a Europe which would keep its diversity, while respecting cultural and historical identities? These two objectives will obviously result in different approaches.

178 179 180 181 182

We shall also have to be more attentive to an issue which the Nice Declaration placed at the head of the demands being made on our Convention and of which the Laeken Declaration underlined the importance: defining the respective powers of the European Union and the Member States: the answer to the famous question: who does what in Europe?

183 184 185 186

What should the powers of the Union and the States be? Must the emphasis be placed on exclusive competence or should we adapt to a large area of shared competence? What should be the means of exercising these powers so that they are understandable to the public?

187 188

During this listening phase we shall be able to draw on the very fruitful work conducted in the European Parliament.

189 190 191

Perhaps, to make the process easier for our interlocutors in civil society, we should draw up a kind of "questionnaire on Europe" as has already been done in some Member States. ***

192

After this listening phase, we shall have to conduct two parallel approaches.

193 194 195 196 197 198

First of all, we shall have to seek answers to the questions raised in the Laeken Declaration. Theyfall into six broad groups: fundamental questions on Europe's role; the division of competence in the European Union; simplification of the Union's instruments; how the institutions work, and their democratic legitimacy; a single voice for Europe in international affairs; and, finally, the approach to a Constitution for European citizens.

199 200

At the same time, we shall have to consider carefully the various prescriptions for Europe's Future which others have put forward, and which are now in circulation.

201 202 203 204

At this stage, our role will not be to make value judgments on them, but simply to examine them, together with all their implications, and to check their consistency, particularly in terms of the issues raised at Laeken, so as to gauge their impact on the future of Europe 25 years and 50 years from now.

205

In particular, we shall consider the following formulae:

  Appendix E: Introductory Speech by President Valéry Giscard…  206 207 208 209 210 211 212

-

529

the organisation of the European institutions resulting from the Treaty of Nice; the plan for a Europe organised along federal lines, as put forward by high-level German decision-makers in particular; the document prepared by the European Commission on modernising the Community method; the solutions submitted under the banner of a "federation of nation states", whether or not they involve the creation of a second chamber.

213 214

Once that examination has been completed, the Convention will be able to embark on the third stage of its work: its recommendations, and indeed its proposal.

215 216

We shall have to respond to the request for simplification of the Treaties, with the aim of achieving a single Treaty, readable by all, understandable by all.

217 218

The Laeken Declaration leaves the Convention free to choose between submitting options or making a single recommendation.

219

It would be contrary to the logic of our approach to choose now.

220 221 222

However, there is no doubt that, in the eyes of the public, our recommendation would carry considerable weight and authority if we could manage to achieve broad consensus on a single proposal which we could all present.

223 224

If we were to reach consensus on this point, we would thus open the way towards a Constitution for Europe.

225 226

In order to avoid any disagreement over semantics, let us agree now to call it: a "constitutional treaty for Europe". ***

227 228 229 230

I now come to the conduct of our proceedings. Each of us can perceive the immensity of the task which faces us if we are to carry our discussions through to their conclusion and draft texts reflecting our proposals.

231

The one-year timeframe which we have been given is relatively short.

232

We shall endeavour to comply with it.

233 234 235

However, I must say here and now that I am not prepared to sacrifice either the authenticity of our survey of European public opinion or the quality of work of our Convention and the proposals it draws up.

236 237

The practical working methods of our Convention are not a matter for this inaugural meeting. We shall finalise them at our first working meeting.

238 239

However, I should like to put to you three comments which seem to me important for the direction of our work.

240

1. We are neither an Intergovernmental Conference nor a Parliament.

241

We are a Convention.

242 243

We are not an Intergovernmental Conference because we have not been given a mandate by Governments to negotiate on their behalf the solutions which we propose.

244 245 246

We are not a Parliament because we are not an institution elected by citizens to draft legislative texts. That role belongs to the European Parliament and to national Parliaments.

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247

We are a Convention.

248

What does that mean?

249 250 251

A Convention is a group of men and women meeting for the sole purpose of preparing a joint proposal. The principle underlying our existence is our unity.

252 253 254 255 256

The members of the four components of our Convention must not regard themselves simply as spokespersons for those who appointed them – Governments, the European Parliament, national Parliaments and the Commission – no more than Giuliano Amato will speak on behalf of Italy, Jean-Luc Dehaene on behalf of Belgium or I myself on behalf of France.

257 258

Each person will of course remain loyal to his or her brief, but must make his or her personal contribution to the work of the Convention.

259 260 261

Let us be clear about it. This Convention cannot succeed if it is only a place for expressing divergent opinions. It needs to become the melting-pot in which, month by month, a common approach is worked out.

262 263

In order to be ready to listen, the Convention will have to turn towards the outside world.

264 265 266

However, in order to think about what proposals we can make, the members of the Convention will have to turn towards each other and gradually foster a "Convention spirit".

267

Outwards to listen. Inwards to make proposals. ***

268 269

2. My second remark concerns what will happen within the framework of the Convention itself.

270 271

The Laeken Declaration gave the Convention two structures: a Chairman and two Vice-Chairmen and a Presidium of twelve members.

272 273 274

Some of you have expressed concerns about the role of the Presidium and the Plenary, fearing that the bulk of the work will in practice be carried out by the Presidium.

275 276 277 278

To you I would say that, for me, the Convention is the Convention! It is normal for the proceedings of a Convention to be prepared and organised by a Presidium, as is the case for any assembly or organisation. However, discussions will take place here and will be public.

279 280

Everything else will depend to a large extent on you and on the content of your contributions.

281 282 283 284

If your contributions genuinely seek to prepare a consensus, and if you take account of the proposals and comments made by the other members of the Convention, then the content of the final consensus can be worked out step by step here within the Convention.

285

3. My third remark is simply a thought.

  Appendix E: Introductory Speech by President Valéry Giscard… 

531

286 287 288

Our Convention represents the first occasion since the Messina Conference in 1955 for European leaders to set aside the resources and time to examine in detail the future of the European Union.

289 290 291 292

Although there have been several Intergovernmental Conferences in the intervening years, these provided an arena for diplomatic negotiations between Member States in which each party sought legitimately to maximise its gains without regard for the overall picture.

293 294 295 296

For its part, the European Council has decided on various occasions to hold meetings on the future of the European institutions, but those discussions have seldom lasted for longer than a day because of the pressure of international events and the constraints of the Council's schedule.

297 298

The proceedings of our Convention are therefore by way of an intellectual reassessment of the future of the European Union.

299

Ladies and Gentlemen,

300

Let me conclude by calling on your enthusiasm.

301 302

A word which comes from the Greek "en-thousia", meaning "inspired by a god". In our case, you might say "inspired by a goddess" - the goddess Europa!

303 304 305

We are often upbraided for neglecting the European dream, for contenting ourselves with building a complicated and opaque structure which is the preserve of economic and financial cognoscenti.

306

So let us dream of Europe!

307 308 309

Let us imagine a continent at peace, freed of its barriers and obstacles, where history and geography are finally reconciled, allowing all the states of Europe to build their future together after following their separate ways to West and East.

310 311

A space of freedom and opportunity where individuals can move as they wish to study, work, show enterprise or broaden their cultural horizons.

312 313 314

A space clearly identified by the way in which it successfully distils the dynamism of creation, the need for solidarity and protection of the poorest and the weakest.

315 316

But also a space in which strong cultural identities continue to exist and thrive, both conscious of their origins and keen for the stimulation that exchange can bring.

317 318

Let us also imagine Europe's voice in the world, its unity ensuring its influence and authority.

319 320

The richness of its culture and the ever-renewed strength of its creativity are known to all.

321 322 323 324

Europe has brought the world reason, humanism and freedom. It has the authority to send forth a message of moderation, preaching the quest for mutually acceptable solutions and a passionate attachment to peace. Its tolerance is ensured by its cultural diversity.

325 326

It must also show itself capable of ensuring its own security, whatever the dangers facing it.

327

We can indeed dream of Europe, and persuade others to share that dream!

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Appendix E: Introductory Speech by President Valéry Giscard…

328 329 330 331

If we were to fail, each country would return to the free trade system. None of us – not even the largest of us – would have the power to take on the giants of this world. We would then remain locked in on ourselves, grimly analysing the causes of our decline and fall.

332 333

Our call for enthusiasm goes out to other Europeans, but first and foremost to ourselves.

334 335 336

We must have a passionate interest in the success of our task if we are to engage and persuade others. It is a task modest in form but immense in content, for if it succeeds in accordance with our mandate, it will light up the future of Europe.

337

Long live Europe! Thank you.

Index1

269, 285, 286, 290, 294, 297, 303, 303n28, 308, 315, 316, 324–326, 344, 348, 373, 378, 381, 395, 397n3, 400, 409–411, 413–415, 418, 425–436, 443, 459, 461, 463, 468, 469, 472–474, 478, 479, 484, 495, 496, 502

A

Allusion, 72, 80, 90, 107, 109, 110, 110n4, 116, 124, 129, 141, 142, 164, 188, 208, 209, 248, 265, 351, 356, 357, 363, 369, 376, 385, 386, 424, 437, 443, 444, 454, 455, 465, 468, 472 Analytical strategy, 21, 59–71, 497, 499 Argument, argumentation, 2–7, 12, 37, 38, 48, 49, 68–70, 88–90, 106–108, 107n2, 110, 111, 113, 115, 116, 124, 127, 133, 137n6, 139, 140, 143, 144, 149, 150, 164–167, 181, 183, 212, 250, 263,

B

Bernstein, Basil, 6, 22, 74, 80, 181–183, 182n1, 189–196, 191n5, 191n6, 194n7, 196n8, 204, 210–212, 247, 455, 482, 484

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Kutter, Legitimation in the European Union, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33031-6

533

534 Index

Bourdieu, Pierre, 6, 19, 21, 22, 47, 50, 68, 74, 80, 105, 106, 117–123, 125, 130, 131, 163, 164, 181, 189, 190, 195–200, 196n8, 198n11, 206, 214–216, 232, 232n18, 235, 246, 390, 424, 445, 454, 462, 463, 473, 478, 480, 481 C

Code, 6, 22, 80, 86, 88, 122, 181, 182n1, 183, 189–206, 206n12, 209–214, 217, 218, 223, 245, 247, 250, 480–482, 484, 487, 488, 501 journalistic code, 209–213 pedagogic code, 191 Communication deficit, 3, 14, 121, 451, 485 Communicative rationality, 41, 494 Constitution French, 443 Polish, 155–157, 336, 349, 443 Constitutionalisation, 23, 141, 148, 264, 265, 277, 284, 295, 308, 311, 314, 429–431, 443, 456, 500 Constitutionalism, modern, 84, 134, 136, 264, 265, 267, 271, 277, 311, 437, 474, 475, 485–486, 492, 500–502 Constitutional Treaty, 4n2, 82, 115, 167, 244, 261, 261n1, 263, 276, 278, 282, 283n10, 285, 286, 288, 296n22, 302, 303, 305, 308, 324, 331, 333, 349, 366, 367, 372, 379, 400, 426, 450, 460, 478, 535

Constitution process, 4n2, 5, 13–15, 82–84, 87, 89, 105, 116, 126, 232, 233, 236–238, 240, 249, 250, 261–317, 327, 329n2, 334, 339, 342–344, 351, 357, 370, 380, 399, 400, 402, 404, 435, 437, 439, 445, 450, 452, 453, 457n4, 466, 469, 473–479, 484–486, 491 Constitution speak, 23, 84, 87, 89, 142, 243, 262–277, 308, 311, 312, 314–317, 324, 350, 359, 391, 392, 392n1, 398, 400, 403, 406, 409, 410, 431, 435, 437, 439, 443, 455, 477–479, 484, 485, 491 Constructivism, 35, 36, 41, 495 IR Constructivism, 494, 496 Convention on the future of Europe, 4n2, 105, 111, 262, 266, 269, 280, 280n6, 523–525, 527–538 Council of the European Union, 281, 288, 293, 299, 306–309, 315 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), 6, 20–22, 36, 53, 59–74, 77, 78, 80–82, 85, 87–90, 105, 107, 116, 141, 163, 164, 167, 181, 183, 187–189, 194, 203, 245, 327, 409, 440, 443, 451, 463, 480, 496–498 Cultural studies, Birmingham, 53, 496, 497

 Index  D

Delegation electoral, 130, 132, 309, 470, 473, 476, 483, 493 representative, 106, 118–120, 123, 130, 476, 492 regulatory, 121, 309, 313, 475, 483, 493 Democratic deficit, 9, 146, 273, 274, 305, 336, 399, 400, 403, 476 Discourse epistemologies, 20, 21, 36, 43, 51, 57–59, 61–63, 72, 74, 75, 81, 91, 181, 495–496, 498 Discourse field, 181, 201–205, 247, 311, 315, 317 of EU multilateral negotiation, 22, 182, 309 of Europeanised national news, 6, 23, 182, 219, 248, 250, 436 of Europeanised national news media, 22, 218–232, 324–326, 377–386, 486 of multilateral negotiation, 6, 23, 232–243, 250, 252, 261–317, 350, 389, 436, 482–486, 493 Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), 60, 70, 78, 85, 327, 498 Discourse practice, 3, 5, 19, 21, 22, 65, 73, 74, 81, 82, 104, 116, 117, 124, 132, 133, 138, 164, 165, 180, 181, 204, 209, 218, 241, 243, 247, 248, 310–312, 316, 326, 327, 340, 350, 378, 390, 408–410, 440–442, 452, 462, 464, 465, 474, 481, 482, 484, 491, 501 of EU legitimation, 116, 168, 482–486

535

Discourse strategy argumentation, 90, 410, 463 plausibilisation, 90, 165, 327, 380, 410, 463 of representation, 90, 327, 385, 410, 421, 463 Discursive Political Sociology, 24, 449–504 Discursive rationality, 43, 73 Doxa, 190, 236, 238, 243, 250, 251, 310, 311, 314, 484, 487, 502 Draft Constitution, 4n2, 83, 89, 115, 141, 167, 266, 283, 286, 289, 292–295, 292n17, 296n22, 300, 303, 306, 315, 329, 342, 346, 347, 390, 400, 401, 409–435, 440, 443, 456, 472 E

EU journalism, 6, 20, 219, 325, 382 European Council, 88, 234, 278, 279, 280n6, 284–286, 288, 292, 299, 300, 302, 305, 329, 333, 357n17, 413, 415, 483, 515, 521, 523–525, 529, 537 European identity, 10, 13, 16, 60, 71, 378, 392, 407 Europeanisation, 11, 17, 22, 78, 159, 179–181, 183, 190, 221, 242–252, 296, 326, 381, 382, 452–454, 457, 481, 486–488, 491 discursive, 22, 78, 90, 179–252, 324, 326, 479–490

536 Index

Europeanised political communication, 4, 6, 19, 20, 72, 104, 169, 181, 183, 190, 218, 233, 244, 246, 248, 325, 350, 379, 385, 445, 451–462, 480–482, 486 European media publics, 219, 325, 380, 382, 456, 486 European public spheres (EPS), 11, 12, 38, 146, 453 F

Fallacy, fallacious argumentation, 90, 107, 115, 124, 165, 186, 410, 411, 414, 441, 468, 470, 502 Field, 195–198, 203, 215, 217, 245, 482 of cultural production, 196, 197 journalistic, 6, 20, 199, 214–220, 222, 224, 227, 232, 245, 250, 251, 324, 325, 382–384, 459, 465, 486–489 political, 6, 119–121, 132, 196, 199, 200, 237, 238, 249, 310, 313, 314, 410, 453n3, 460, 461 theory, 4, 6, 19, 21, 22, 80, 181, 190, 200, 246, 462, 481 Field theory, 195

generic language use, 6, 23, 182–189, 201, 219, 233, 238, 240, 248, 325, 351, 490, 493 text genre, 5, 52, 66, 70, 72, 85, 87–89, 207, 209, 210, 213, 217, 221, 240, 251, 328, 409, 438 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, 83, 105, 111–117, 125–132, 138–142, 163, 168, 169, 183, 185–187, 186n4, 201, 240, 243, 244, 247, 262, 266, 268, 274–277, 282–285, 283n10, 292, 298, 302, 307, 315, 317, 343n8, 346, 351–354, 353n14, 356, 357, 359–361, 360n22, 361n23, 365, 366, 366n32, 368–373, 371n39, 375, 383, 392n1, 414, 437, 455, 459, 460, 469, 470, 476, 479, 485, 489, 523, 527–538 Governmentality, 38, 39, 55, 73, 496, 497 H

Hermeneutics, 43, 46–49, 51, 53, 55, 496 I

G

Genre, 6, 22, 65, 70, 72, 78, 80, 82, 88, 168, 181, 182, 184, 187–209, 211–213, 217, 245–247, 250, 326, 327, 340, 341, 343, 344, 409, 439, 453, 468, 470, 472, 480–482, 489, 496, 499

Interdiscourse, 4n1, 78, 80, 89, 180, 213, 219, 240, 244, 351, 359, 363, 369n36, 375, 385, 409, 443, 445, 450, 454–456, 458, 464, 481, 487, 490, 491 Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA), 40, 49, 496

 Index  J

Journalism, 6, 20, 65, 195, 206, 212–215, 217, 219, 222–224, 226, 228–230, 233, 250, 251, 323, 325, 382, 383, 454, 462, 487 political, 214, 216, 465 (see also News journalism) Justifiability, 9–11, 15, 16, 18, 103n1, 105, 169, 390, 449, 478 L

Laeken Declaration, 83, 111, 113–115, 125, 142, 262, 263, 266–277, 280, 281, 305–307, 311, 368, 373, 392n1, 404, 438, 459, 469, 470, 478, 485, 515, 531, 533–536 Language use, 6, 12, 16, 20, 22, 23, 44, 52, 58–61, 63–69, 72, 73, 78, 80, 106–117, 123, 124, 130, 133, 137, 163–167, 169, 180–189, 194, 201, 203, 204, 210, 217, 219, 233, 238, 240, 241, 244–246, 248, 250, 262, 267, 310, 314, 325, 351, 378, 390, 413, 462–465, 467, 468, 473, 481, 484, 486, 489–491, 493, 495, 496, 500 Legitimacy, 3, 5–19, 21, 39, 103–105, 121, 122, 133, 163, 165, 267, 273, 279, 390, 393, 396–398, 401, 402, 441, 450, 461, 462, 464, 466, 468, 478, 514, 516, 521, 522, 534 Legitimation discursive, 5, 22, 78, 83, 90, 103–169, 190, 243, 246, 248, 391, 436, 440, 480, 481

537

political, 6, 22, 80, 81, 105, 117, 118, 122–124, 130, 132, 163, 164, 166, 167, 390, 451, 463, 467, 494 Linguistic turn, 19, 21, 35–91, 494, 495, 497 M

Media debates, 5, 14, 16, 23, 24, 82, 83, 89, 104, 105, 163, 181, 208, 209, 214, 251, 270, 288, 317, 323–386, 389, 391, 394, 435–445, 450, 465–468, 470, 477, 482, 486, 489, 491, 493, 501 Multilateral negotiation, 5, 19, 24, 38, 39, 72, 82, 104, 163, 181, 232, 232n18, 238, 239, 241, 246–248, 250, 265, 268, 297, 310, 312, 316, 324, 326, 331, 339, 350, 378, 390–392, 394, 398, 437, 440, 450, 460, 464, 465, 468, 480–482, 484, 486, 492 N

Narrative analytical, 40, 137, 137n6, 143, 143n8, 148, 166, 410, 418, 434, 441, 443, 445, 455, 473, 491 of European integration, 6, 22, 39, 106, 137, 142–153, 166, 410, 441, 443, 445, 455, 473 mythopoesis, 109, 110, 114, 127, 209, 270

538 Index

National, 3, 17, 20, 146, 151–153, 161n15, 163, 179, 224, 228, 241–243, 278, 289, 290, 298, 336, 345, 350, 351, 354, 356, 374, 376–379, 382, 384, 385, 390, 402, 410, 421, 422, 424, 427, 435, 442–445, 449, 454, 456, 458–462, 466, 471, 490, 493, 521, 529 interdiscourse, 4, 78, 80, 219, 240, 244, 246, 251, 324, 359, 369n36, 385, 409, 435, 443, 445, 450, 454–456, 458, 464, 481, 487, 491 news media, 19, 20, 22, 80, 85, 218–232, 244–246, 251, 313, 323–326, 350, 377–386, 389, 452, 453, 458, 459, 465, 480, 481, 486, 487, 494 polity discourse, 82, 90, 443, 444, 454 News, 199, 205, 210, 217, 218 journalism, 23, 206, 212, 217, 218 media, 205, 206 (see also National, news media) News discourse, 6, 81, 86, 90, 109, 188, 206, 207, 209, 210, 216, 340 Nice Treaty, Treaty of Nice, 113, 116, 266, 278, 279, 285, 288, 292–294, 305, 329, 329n1, 335, 346, 384, 400, 402, 411, 413–415, 420, 421, 428, 429, 433, 442, 521, 534 P

Plausibilisation, 90, 107, 109, 113, 114, 116, 124, 164–167, 184,

327, 328, 350–377, 380, 381, 385, 410, 424–426, 442, 443, 454, 463, 465, 468, 470, 487, 490 Political association, 3, 7, 18, 19, 24, 77, 80, 90, 104–106, 117, 132–144, 163–168, 332, 334, 391–398, 404, 405, 408, 410, 414, 424, 425, 428, 438–440, 442, 449, 450, 452, 463–466, 468, 470, 472, 474, 475, 499, 500, 504 Political authority, 5, 12, 17, 22, 56, 77, 80, 90, 104–106, 116–133, 138, 142, 164–169, 179, 241, 242, 248, 278, 309–311, 313, 391, 395, 399n4, 410, 419, 421, 423, 424, 431, 434, 435, 437, 441, 452, 458–460, 462–464, 466, 468, 473, 476, 477, 483, 485, 493, 497, 499, 500, 502 Political sociology of European integration, 73, 449–504 Politicisation, 3, 5, 9, 13–15, 71, 84, 122, 238, 289, 295, 297, 304, 382, 450, 454 Polity -building narrative, 74, 80, 106, 137, 138, 140, 153–162, 166, 169 construction, 19, 22, 23, 74, 82, 84, 85, 90, 103–169, 243, 252, 263–277, 307, 324, 386, 389, 391, 398, 408–436, 440–442, 445, 464–470, 473, 479, 480, 490 discourse, 4, 109, 142, 165–167, 390, 392, 409–435, 443, 465

 Index 

rationale, 135–138, 142–144, 143n8, 151, 152, 160, 165, 168, 169, 272, 276, 407, 415, 418, 431, 432, 440, 441, 463, 464, 466, 468, 472 Postdemocracy, 18 Postfoundationalism, postfoundational philosophy of mind, 45, 63, 135, 495 Postnational constellation, 17 Poststructuralism, 36, 54, 63, 91, 495 Poststructuralist discourse analysis, 62 Pragmatic turn, 21, 61–63

Recontextualising polity-­construction, 445, 462–479 S

Symbolic power, 196–198, 198n11, 218, 235, 243, 496 Symbolic violence, 316 T

Theories of European integration, 40, 143, 144, 151, 416, 444, 494

R

Recontextualisation, 4, 22, 23, 72, 78, 80, 82, 84, 85, 90, 179–252, 324, 328, 334, 340, 352, 378, 384–386, 389, 390, 455, 465, 482, 491 and discourse field, 201–205

539

W

War on Iraq, Iraq War, 5, 87, 286–288, 396, 397, 417, 438, 439, 457, 467, 489