Turn the Other Greek. How the Eurozone Crisis Changes the Media Image of Greeks and What do the Visual Representations of Greeks Tell Us About European Identity?

  • Abstract:

    This paper analyzes discursive practices of political cartoons in construction of Greek and European identity in light of the European sovereign debt crisis. The goal of this paper is to assess the emergence of Greeks as significant Others in relation to Europe and its impact on European identity. To this end, the paper develops a theoretico-methodological framework that brings together identity as a process and a project, and multimodal discourse analysis tailored to political cartoon research. The paper first tests for existence of a Europe-wide discourse of the crisis and Greeks, using qualitative methodology. After existence of such discourse is confirmed, the paper examines the contents of the discourse concluding that a Greek Other has emerged from the discourse and continues to search for common interpretive frames and shared meanings that would point towards a common European identity. The political cartoon data sample comes from these examined countries: Austria, France, United Kingdom and Slovakia.