United, we tweet: Belonging, solidarity and othering in German and Greek Twitter-spheres

The question of what characterises the European public sphere, and whether one exists in the first place, has been a topic of flourishing academic debate for many years (Nicolaïdis, 2004; Risse, 2015; Zúñiga, 2015). Concomitant with the rise of social media such as Twitter and Facebook, the focus has shifted to exploring how social media can be used to construct a European public sphere that is fully transnational in nature (Bouza et al., 2019; Ruiz-Soler et al., 2019; Tuñón-Navarro and Carral-Vilar, 2021). Our paper contributes to this literature by honing in on the issues of identity formation and ‘othering’ in the context of European integration: We investigate the extent to which two crises that will arguably come to shape the EU in the coming decades (migration crisis and covid-19 crisis) give rise to a shared discourse among English-language social media users in different countries, as well as whether there are large divergences in the frames adopted by English-language Twitter users and those generally addressing themselves to a national public sphere. It thus helps develop our understanding of the extent to which social media discourses can serve as the building blocks of a truly European public sphere, and by extension a European identity. Using a topic modelling approach, we map the topics of German and Greek Twitter-sphere discourse surrounding the refugee crisis of 2015-2016 and the COVID-19 crisis of 2020-2021 (Blei and Lafferty, 2007), exploiting the multilingual nature of Twitter discourses in the two countries to investigate collective identity and othering both in domestic-language and English-language tweets in the two countries. Drawing on the rich literature on the transnationalisation of public spheres (e.g. Fraser, 2007; Habermas, 1999), we contribute timely empirical analysis to the question of whether the EU’s decade of crises (Gänzle et al., 2019) have given rise to a de-differentiated public sphere, whereby Europeans use social media to debate the same topics while applying the same frames of reference, or if social media instead serves as an amplifier of national discourses and debates.