Who Speaks for Europe? Moving the Centre from Brussels to the Borders

Who can credibly “speak for Europe” — and why are some claims recognised while others fall flat? In an era of overlapping crises (security, migration, the rule of law), the familiar centre–periphery map keeps shifting: at times the “centre” seems to relocate towards the EU’s borders and then swing back. I explain this mobility through a prototype–recognition mechanism. The argument is that EU political discourse has sedimented a prototype of “Europe” — a repertoire combining values and rights, rule-setting capacity, and guardianship of a European “way of life.” Actors whose self-presentation more closely matches this prototype are more likely to receive public recognition as speaking for Europe. Crises operate as windows of opportunity that temporarily reallocate attention and legitimacy; they amplify borderland voices especially when those voices perform the prototype convincingly. Empirically, I draw on an original hand-coded corpus of 75 primary documents (2014–2024) covering five actor types: EU institutions, the “historic core” (France/Germany), “New Europe,” illiberal innovators, and neighbours/candidates. I operationalise prototype proximity and recognition at the document level with a transparent coding protocol (codebook, inter-coder stability checks). The design is mixed-method: I report descriptive frequencies and compact quantitative tests (document-level cross-tabulations and group contrasts), paired with short qualitative vignettes that illustrate the mechanism without replacing systematic evidence. Findings show a positive association between prototype proximity and recognition, and a crisis uplift in recognition rates. Actor-type contrasts indicate that “New Europe” and selected neighbours gain a “recentering effect” in crisis windows when their narratives align with the canonical repertoire; EU-level documents codify the prototype, while France/Germany re-centre through extensions of rule-setting capacity. Vignettes on, for example, invocations of the “European way of life,” Sorbonne-style leadership rhetoric, and enlargement/surroundings debates illustrate how prototype-conforming claims travel. The contribution is threefold. Theoretically, it recasts “the centre” as a discursive–institutional outcome rather than a geography. Methodologically, it integrates discourse analysis with succinct quantitative tests, with open replication materials. Substantively, it clarifies how crises reassign centrality via prototype-based recognition, explaining why some claims to speak “for Europe” are amplified while others remain unheard. The account yields testable implications for enlargement, the neighbourhood policy, and the distribution of legitimacy within the EU polity.