Dialectics of European solidarity and crisis in Croatian and Serbian broadsheet press (2007–2017)

The presentation will explore representations of European solidarity in the aftermath of crisis-like events between 2007 and 2017 in Croatian and Serbian broadsheet press, as well as their resonance with discursive construction of Europe and Europeanisation. In order to achieve this goal, corpus-based discourse analysis was performed over a large collection of ca. 20,000 articles, originating in four newspapers. The results demonstrated that discourses on European solidarity rose to particular prominence in 2008-2009, 2011-2013, and 2015. This constitutes a dialectical relation with discourses on crises: the global financial crisis, European debt crisis, and migration crisis – especially the latter redefined the notion of European solidarity reflected in Croatian and Serbian discourses. In Serbia, the solidarity discourses were of particular local importance during the first phase of the global financial crisis, coinciding with the application for the EU candidacy. Using the ‘downloading’, ’uploading’, ’crossloading’ perspective on Europeanisation processes, this finding can be interpreted as an attempt to ‘upload’ Western discourses on solidarity with an agenda of financial aid for the candidate countries. Later on, they lost on significance, giving way to more ‘Euro-opportunist’ attitudes. In Croatia, the notion of European solidarity seemed to become more relevant for domestic actors after the 2013 EU accession with progressive ‘downloading’ of the discourses employed by non-Croatian European leaders.