Framing the Next Generation EU Negotiations: Comparisons of Eastern and Southern Member States’ Narratives

During economic crises, fiscally dependent states of multi-level polities aim to secure more funding but are disempowered by their evident dependency and subsequent lack of bargaining chips. Previous scholarship has established that the epistemic dimension of crises give way to discursive processes that can become constitutive of the political outcome, as we have seen with the 'Southern sinners' arguments put forth after 2008. However, little is known about the specific discursive strategies that fiscally dependent states can employ. This comparative article thus draws on a series of negotiations that have taken place between the Canadian federal government and its provinces to advance a model of discursive framing whereby sub-units in relative need can reach successful agreements by pursuing either a solidaristic-communitarian or a coercive framing style. Country-level comparative case studies from the Next Generation EU negotiations aim to shed light on the hitherto unexplored differences between southern and eastern EU states’ framing strategies. Italy and Spain employed communitarian framing strategies that represented a departure from the Eurozone crisis narrative, tapping into a shared European identity and were seemingly successful in achieving their intended conditionalities and funding objectives. Hungary and Poland, in contrast, employed coercive strategies that did not break with past practices, shaming and blaming proponents of the 'rule of law' mechanism, and failed to remove this conditionality from the agreement—although managed to ‘water it down’. What were the specific narratives put forth by each framing strategy, and which one was more conducive to achieving the intended outcomes? By employing a qualitative text analysis, the database of hand-coded articles between March 1st, 2020 and December 31st, 2020 reveals that ‘more aggression was not better’: coercive, highly publicized frames achieved opposite effects. A consistently communicated communitarian approach, however, yielded positive outcomes insofar as these messages fit within a sensible ‘logic of appropriateness’, meaning they corresponded to the hardships faced by the presently existing status quo of budget redistribution. These findings enrich our understanding of how ‘actors in need’ can exercise agency in manipulating the discursive environment of crises to their benefit, as well help examine the decline of coercive strategies’ effectiveness in the EU for the first time since 2010.