Construction of European identity by the Pro-European Parties/Avrupa Yanlisi Siyasi Partiler Tarafindan Avrupa Kimligi insasi.

• Author: Ozoflu, Melek Aylin

Introduction

The 2019 European Parliament (EP) elections took place within political turbulence that challenged the European Unions (EU) cohesion and solidarity as the core elements of European integration. (1) Repercussions from consecutive crises, namely the 2009 Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, the 2015 European refugee crisis and Brexit, resulted in the rise of Eurosceptic parties utilizing the rhetoric of exclusion and intergroup differentiation. Moreover, they provided suitable ground for the competition of discursive constructions of European and national identities, thereby aggravating old national stereotypes based on the traditional core/periphery divide. (2) In this context, the 2019 EP elections marked a turning point both for the European democracy and its new vision for the future steps of the Union (3) that would be shaped directly by European citizens under the shadow of the Eurosceptic surge. (4)

The rise of Euroscepticism has drawn significant scholarly attention. The literature on the nexus between the formation of European identity and the EU s crises often deals with addressing Eurosceptic discursive strategies that rely on a discursive socio-political exclusion. Yet less attention has been paid to the discursive strategies of Europhiles (5) endeavoring to promote the collective European identity formation and how they aspire to mobilize European identity construction rhetorically and politically to form pro-European sentiments in times of political turmoil. This article argues that the discursive strategies of the Europhiles and European identity construction as a tool of rhetorical and political mobilization also need to be considered when analyzing the different articulations of European identity. To fill the above-mentioned gap, this research addresses pro-European discursive strategies to increase the sense of belonging to the in-group within the 2019 European parliament elections context. Since the EP is the only directly elected institution within the Union, the election campaigns present political actors' influence through discursive power.

The research qualitatively analyzes party manifestos, press releases, public speeches, and interviews with party leaders obtained as secondary sources. Party groups are chosen based on their affiliation with pro-Europeanism and their representation in the EP. Therefore, the research focuses on the largest political party groups: the Group of the European People's Party (EPP), Party of European Socialists (PES), Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), and the European Green Party (EGP). While the views expressed by these party groups do not represent the views of the EP as a whole, the analysis sheds light on the vision of the largest political groups' agenda in terms of identity politics.

The study utilizes Wodak's Discourse Historical Approach (DHA). DHA is valuable to grasp the construction of European identity and to reveal the linguistic manifestations of identity embedded in the social and political context, since its primary focus is on the systematic analysis of context along with its dialectic relation with meaning-making. (7) In addition, thanks to its triangulation principle, DHA compiles intertextual and interdiscursive relations together while offering a solid ground on which to study numerous theories and empirical observations.

The paper first briefly elaborates different theoretical approaches to European identity to provide a background for the analysis of European identity construction. Then, it discusses the main features of DHA and its concept of topos (8), which will be utilized as a discourse-analytical tool. Lastly research findings are discussed by illustrating the pro-European discursive constructions of European identity within two themes, namely the positive representation of the European self and the construction of a common history and vision for the future. By doing so, this article empirically contributes to the existing body of knowledge regarding the Europeanist ways of European identity construction.

Theoretical Framework of European Identity

Social scientists have proposed different explanations of the concept of European identity in the literature. Some scholars examining the patterns of national identity and European identity formation argue that the construction of European identity is similar to national identity construction because it has both objective (territory, legal rights within EU, Schengen passport, Euro) and subjective dimensions (European flag, European day anthem) in creating the sense of belongingness to an in-group. (9 )In the same way as national identity is exposed, supranational institution-building and the continuous exposition of European values are aimed to reinforce the development of a sense of European identity. (10) Brussels elites employ myths, norms, and values that have symbolic importance to the European community. (11) These dimensions are believed to decrease the level of the abstractness of European identity. Castano explains these initiatives with 'entitativity', which foresees psychological existence in the minds of the European public as the prior condition of the formation of European identity. (12 )Verhaegen and Hooghe explain such a correlation between the knowledge and identification levels with the cognitive mechanism proposed by Inglehart s theory of cognitive mobilization regarding the support levels for European integration. (13)

Similarly, fundamental aspirations of Tajfel's social identity theory also come from the cognitive aspect of the individual correlating social identity of the individual with his/her levels of awareness of group membership. (14) Social identity refers to when the self-concept of individuals is defined through their group memberships. (15) Within the ever-evolving nature of the identity context, people categorize the world around them according to in-groups and out-groups. Group memberships then result in people carrying emotional attachment to the members of the in-group at the expense of the others. (1) Social identity theory defines this process as the construction of its positive self-identity and self-image of the in-group, which forms in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination. In this respect, the formation of European identity is regarded as the process in which the EU models itself on this utopia. (17)

The description is aligned with constructivist approaches to European identity. Constructivists regard European identity as a discursive construct that is closely embedded in the discursive elements based on the positive self-images of the EU. (18) These elements imply the distinctive features of the ingroup, triggering in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination. As a discursive construct, common European identity is promoted strongly by the EU elites. (19) Yet European identity construction reaches even beyond the top-down elite-level political and rhetorical mobilization. As a transnational referent, it emerges discursively from the interplay between individual, social, agentive, and structural dimensions of society (20) Zappettini argues that construction of Europeanness occurs at multiple sites out of the multiple intersections of social processes at different levels, including supranational, national, and regional both in EU institutions and in daily practice, which cover both top-down and bottom-up conceptualizations. (21) Thus, the elite-driven project of European identity offers a viable laboratory to test the possibility of supranational identity formation.

Against this background, it is of critical importance to mention post-functionalist theory which provides a certain room for identity politics in its explanation of the European integration process. Hooghe and Marks argue that there has been a concrete shift from 'permissive consensus' to constraining dissensus' within the European public. (22) The shift symbolizes the limitation of the EU's decision-making authority, which was traditionally reinforced by Brussels elites. (23) Hence, European elites are no longer able to push for further integration without domestic resistance.

Moreover, as Borzel and Risse highlight that the crises changed identity politics within the EU, since each crisis incrementally brought up the so-called identity cleavage debates to the surface. (24) Now, the EU faces Eurosceptic parties driving exclusive nationalist politics. As Krzyzanowski argues that the discursive articulation of European identity construction as a means of political and rhetorical mobilization gained critical relevance in the wake of populism, the rebirth of nationalism, and economic setbacks. (25)

Because of the recent rise of exclusive nationalism, the Habermasian universalistic approach of a cosmopolitan European identity (2) based on constitutional patriotism, which envisages solidarity among strangers through European constitutionalization, (27) became obsolete if not completely invalid. While Habermas' emphasis on the necessity of democratization remains salient as an answer to the EU s democracy and legitimacy deficits in countering the rise of Euroscepticism, the application of his doctrine to the EU is far from an achievement.

Discourse Historical Approach and Method

The theoretical framework briefly elaborated above to investigate the discursive construction of European identity is operationalized through the critical perspective of DHA. DHA is widely applied in various research topics including populism, discrimination, and identity politics. (28) Wodak's triangulation approach integrates knowledge about four levels of analysis, namely text level, intertext level, extralinguistic level, and socio-political and historical context, in which discursive practices are embedded. (29) This is because DHA maintains that language does not hold any power on its own, it is rather a means to gain and maintain power through...