Research Papers

The current crisis is impacting on European integration beyond economics, sparking debates about the future of Europe and posing challenges to European democracy and identity (Schmidt, 2009). This paper will present new qualitative data on political discourse in the UK and Germany, and consider the importance of the Eurozone crisis for European identities in light of the literature on the EU’s perceived ‘democratic deficit’. Rather than damaging European identities, the Eurozone crisis could even help to strengthen them in the long-term. Post-national approaches argue that European identities will develop through political contestation and participation in the public sphere (Habermas, 2001; Follesdal and Hix, 2006). But politicised debates about EU politics have been traditionally absent across member states. Can the Eurozone crisis improve the scope for increased debate, having succeeded in making European issues much more salient in public discourse? We need to look more closely at the language used by political leaders in different countries. The effect of the crisis to some extent depends on the discursive framework employed by elites - how they construct national and European identities, and the EU itself. This paper will compare British and German political discourse in press releases and major speeches during the Eurozone crisis and unpick the discursive strategies used to legitimise policy ideas to the public. In so doing it will consider the potential for increased debate and interaction on EU issues within a European public sphere.