A Rhetorical Perspective on Media and Societal Europeanization: Framing of European Integration in Montenegro and Serbia

Sharing a common geohistorical background and having both held EU candidate status for over a decade, Serbia and Montenegro nevertheless display strikingly divergent discourses on European integration, resulting in varying levels of societal uptake of EU norms and values. While Montenegro, despite dynamic domestic political conditions, has maintained strong and stable public support for EU accession, Serbia - by contrast - has reached historically low levels, despite being the region’s largest recipient of EU financial assistance. This divergence challenges dominant political, economic, and identity-based explanations in the literature on European integration and public opinion, suggesting that existing accounts remain insufficient to capture the contemporary realities of the two Western Balkan neighbors. This paper argues that in EU candidate states - where access to EU ideas remains more limited - domestic media play a central role in impression management. While research on European integration has extensively examined framing, the rhetorical dimension of frames remains comparatively underexplored. Building on the premise that specific linguistic and symbolic choices matter for internalizing EU norms and values, this study investigates how rhetorical strategies embedded in media frames produce contrasting patterns of public consensus and polarization. The paper is based on a qualitative analysis of over 2,500 media texts from Serbia and Montenegro covering major EU-related events since the signing of the Stabilisation and Association Agreements and the granting of candidate status. It focuses on three rhetorical strategies - rationalization, moralization, and mythopoesis - and examines how they support diagnostic (identifying the EU as a problem or highlighting deficiencies in the integration process), prognostic (proposing solutions), and motivational (guiding action) framing tasks. By showing how these strategies facilitate the framing tasks, the study reveals a spectrum of interpretations of reality, producing distinctly different perceptions of what the EU represents and how integration should proceed. The study descriptively elaborates the rhetorical construction of meta-frames and shows that, although both countries initially drew on a shared repertoire of affect-laden frames, their framing trajectories evolved in opposing directions over time. Montenegro’s media discourse consolidated into a stable, consensus-oriented, and predominantly rational framing of EU membership benefits. Serbia’s media landscape, by contrast, remains highly fragmented, with competing outlets either promoting integration through pragmatic reasoning or framing the EU through moral contestation and emotionally condensed, myth-based frames. In addition, Montenegrin media frame the EU primarily in economic terms, emphasizing “standards,” whereas Serbian media focus predominantly on political and identity-related dimensions, highlighting “rules,” “conditions,” and “pressure.” The two countries also differ in temporal anchoring: Montenegrin frames emphasize anticipated future outcomes, while Serbian outlets frequently anchor frames in the past, referencing historical grievances and conflicts. To explain why some meta-frames stabilized while others faded, the paper extends classic framing theory through a rhetoric-centered analysis of frame resonance. By showing how rhetorical strategies are tailored to specific media audiences and aligned with their prior beliefs, experiences, and discursive frameworks, the study demonstrates how identical events generated contrasting interpretations, transforming the EU from a referential political object into a media-constructed arena of meaning.