Euroacademia Conferences
Europe Inside-Out: Europe and Europeanness Exposed to Plural Observers (9th Edition)April 24 - 25, 2020
Identities and Identifications: Politicized Uses of Collective Identities (9th Edition)June 12 - 13, 2020
8th Forum of Critical Studies: Asking Big Questions AgainJanuary 24 - 25, 2020
Re-Inventing Eastern Europe (7th Edition)December 13 - 14, 2019
The European Union and the Politicization of Europe (8th Edition)October 25 - 26, 2019
Identities and Identifications: Politicized Uses of Collective Identities (8th Edition)June 28 - 29, 2019
The European Union and the Politicization of Europe (7th Edition)January 25 - 26, 2019- 7th Forum of Critical Studies: Asking Big Questions AgainNovember 23 - 24, 2018
Europe Inside-Out: Europe and Europeanness Exposed to Plural Observers (8th Edition)September 28 - 30, 2018- Identities and Identifications: Politicized Uses of Collective Identities (7th Edition)June 14 - 15, 2018
Contesting the European Union in Times Of Crisis
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Presentation speakers
- Milica Pejovic, University of Trento, Italy
Abstract:
The European Union (EU) has been struggling with a series of crises which have often been framed as existential. The Eurozone crisis has brought into question the viability and utility of the common currency and the solidarity with crisis-ridden countries, whereas the refugee crisis has tested the sustainability of the Schengen system under massive migratory pressures and the willingness of EU states to share the burden of increased migration. Moreover, citizens’ fading trust in the EU, evidenced by Eurobarometer surveys, has been often interpreted as a result of the lack of both ‘input’ and ‘output’ legitimacy of EU decision-making when tackling these crises. Due to its role in the crises management, the EU has become a matter of political conflicts and a very salient theme in the media. Thus, the aim of the proposed paper is to analyse how the EU is contested in social media during the Greek bail-out crisis, as an episode of the Eurozone crisis, and during the peak period of the refugee crisis. Using the content analysis of Facebook pages of the European Parliament and the European Commission, the proposed paper seeks to extrapolate different evaluations of the EU polity and underlying reasons for different assessments of the Union. Moreover, it will investigate how the role of the EU in the crises resolution has been interpreted by citizens, who they attribute the responsibility for the crises to and what the most salient concepts are. The content of debates in these transnational virtual arenas will provide me with a rich set of data on popular attitudes towards the EU, complementing the existing statistical data.
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