'Us' and 'Them': Redefining Communities in Populist Times

Abstract

This panel’s focus is on identity and community redefinition in relation to populist politics in the European Union (EU). The first paper in the panel looks at how descriptions of the EU in the media could contribute to the advancement of populism. By contrasting the attributes attached to the EU in the public media prior to national and European elections of the past decade, the study aims to answer three questions: (a) Does the definition of European as ‘them’ differ between national and European elections? (b) How does it differ between countries? (c) Does this definition become more similar as populist parties start to coordinate their message? The second paper in the panel explores perceptions of EU citizenship rights among British citizens after Brexit and seeks to explain individual level support of and opposition to the different rights, as well as the consistency of such support. The third paper focuses on the relationship between Italian governmental activities and international commitments deriving from membership of the European Union, related to rule of law, financial stability, and freedom of movement. In particular, it tests the proposition that the equilibrium point between the populist narratives of the two government partners is a new discourse of national assertiveness vis-à-vis the European institutions and partners. The authors propose that the legitimacy of government action comes to rely on a redefinition of Italian national identity in a more assertive and less conciliatory posture. The fourth paper analyzes Russian-speaking minorities in Estonia as objects of various projects and discourses aimed at constructing groupness and belonging. The paper traces discursive representations of Russian-speakers in the Estonian-language media over a period of thirty years, from 1988 to 2018. The paper seeks to ascertain the relative prevalence of these constructions across the media space, the discursive contexts in which they are used, as well as changes in the discursive representations of the country’s Russian-speakers over time.