Perceptions of dominance, othering and the European integration.

Abstract

The process of European integration is currently facing significant reconsiderations. From an ever-closer EU to completely disintegrated European nation-states, diverse scenarios are being developed and debated on what the future of European integration could be. This is nothing new in the history of integration that is yet to achieve its finalité politique. However, it is important that currently the debate is driven beside member states also by the EU institutions and citizens themselves (Fabbrini, Fossum, Góra, Wolff 2021). The Future of Europe debate ensued in 2015 in Europe and as framed by the White Paper on the Future of the EU (2017) was meant to be an exercise of searching for the best future construction of the EU after the multiple crises that toppled the bloc. However, the debate also revealed that the differentiation offered as one of the solutions triggered debates on (perceived) dominance as a structural feature of the integration as well as on the position of the (sovereign) nation states within the future models of integration. These themes also became visible in European public sphere and in social media. The multiple crises that the EU endured in recent years – but specifically financial, migration and Covid-19 pandemic – revealed the perceived unequal status of different states and various actors within states and on European level. In the proposed panel we will analyse how reactions to the crises in social media discourses can serve as the building blocks of European public sphere, and by extension a European identity. Moreover, we focus on showing and discussing the relationship between perceptions of dominance within European integration expressed by different actors such as Eurosceptic and sovereignist parties, civil society organisations, members of parliaments, citizens in social media and the current state of European integration. By focusing on perceptions of dominance within the EU, we would like to capture the dynamics of "othering" understood as a process of “differentiation and demarcation by which the line is drawn between ‘us’ and ‘them’ [...] and through which social distance is established and maintained” (Lister, 2004: 101). We will investigate in a selection of papers how the othering within the EU is used by political actors to pursue specific visions of integration especially by sovereignist actors. This in turn allows for the analysis of reconstructions of European and national identifications resulting from a reaction to crises and transformed within the broader frames of the debate on the future of Europe.

Title	Details
United, we tweet: Belonging, solidarity and othering in German and Greek Twitter-spheres	View Paper Details
Sovereignism and the Future of Europe	View Paper Details
Popular versus populist perceptions of the EU: Thought communities and pre-conditions for polity formation in a differentiated Union	View Paper Details
Differentiation of Migrants and the Future of Europe. Parliamentary Discourse on the Migration Crises in Poland	View Paper Details
Who’s dominating whom? Narratives on dominance in the debate on the Future of Europe.	View Paper Details