The discourse of the European Union on the 2020 Belarusian civic protests: Understanding the contemporary symbolic geography of Belarus

Abstract

Despite numerous European Union policy frameworks aimed at approximating countries of Eastern Europe to the European Union, the latter routinely distances itself from the region, actively (re)constructing Europe’s others. This article analyses the reactions of the European Council and the European Parliament to the 2020 crackdown on civilian protests in Belarus through a close reading of 25 press releases issued between May and November 2020, complemented by a retroactive reading in light of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Belarus’s complicity in the war. The reading is combined with an analysis of Belarus’s position within Europe’s symbolic geography and the consequences this position entails for the European Union’s response. Although the European Council and European Parliament initially differed in their reactions, their discourses ultimately converged and culminated in European Union sanctions. Across both institutional narratives, Belarus is consistently rendered and reified as non-Europe while simultaneously constructed as Europe’s other.