Much research on the discursive construction of Europe in national news media has quantitatively focused on the presence of ‘EU topics’. The more frequently EU topics appear, the better the breeding-ground for a sense of European community, it is argued. This article tackles the question of a European identity from a different angle. Guided by theories on collective identity and power, and utilizing qualitative discourse analysis of the reporting on climate change in a tabloid newspaper and public service television news in Sweden, this article discerns a budding European political identity, discursively embedded and ‘hidden’ in the reporting as the natural order of things. When turned into common-sense knowledge, the European realm as a representative of ‘Us’ is accorded spontaneous legitimacy as a relevant political power in the making of meaning on climate change.
Abrams D., Hogg MA ( 2003) Collective identity: Group membership and self-conception . In: Brewer MB, Hewstone M (eds) Self and Social Identity . Oxford: Blackwell, 147-81.
2.
Anderson B. ( 1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
3.
Augoustinos M., Walker I. ( 1995) Social Cognition: An Integrated Introduction. London: Sage.
4.
Berglez P., Höijer B., and Olausson U. ( 2009) Individualisation and nationalisation of the climate issue: Two ideological horizons in Swedish news media. In: Boyce T, Lewis J (eds) Climate Change and the media. New York: Peter Lang.
5.
Billig M. ( 1995) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.
6.
Boykoff MT ( 2008) Lost in translation? United States television news coverage of anthropogenic climate change, 1995-2004. Climatic Change86: 1-11.
7.
Brossard D., Shanahan J., and McComas K. ( 2004) Are issue-cycles culturally constructed? A comparison of French and American coverage of global climate change. Mass Communication and Society7(3): 359-77.
8.
Carvalho A. ( 2007) Ideological cultures and media discourses on scientific knowledge: Re-reading news on climate change. Public Understanding of Science16: 223-43.
9.
Carvalho A., Burgess J. ( 2005) Cultural circuits of climate change in UK broadsheet newspapers, 1985-2003. Risk Analysis25(6): 1457-69.
10.
Delanty G. ( 2000) Citizenship in a Global Age. Buckingham : Open University Press.
11.
Delanty G., Rumford C. ( 2005) Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization. New York: Routledge .
12.
De Vreese CH ( 2007) The EU as a public sphere. Living Rev. Euro. Gov2(3). Available at: www. livingreviews.org/lreg-2007-3.
13.
D’Haenens L. ( 2005) Euro-vision: The portrayal of Europe in the quality press . Gazette67(5): 419-40.
14.
Eriksen EO ( 2005) An emerging European public sphere. European Journal of Social Theory8(3): 341-63.
15.
European Commission. (2008) You Control Climate Change. Available at: ec.europa.eu/environment/climat/campaign/index.htm.
16.
Gripsrud J. ( 2007) Television and the European public sphere. European Journal of Communication22(4): 479-92.
17.
Habermas J. ( 2001) Why Europe needs a constitution. New Left Review11: 5-26.
18.
Habermas J., Derrida J. ( 2003) February 15, or what binds Europeans together: A plea for a common foreign policy, beginning in the core of Europe. Constellations10(3): 291-7.
19.
Hall S. ( 1996) Introduction: Who needs identity? In: Hall S, Du Gay P (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage, 1-17.
20.
Höijer B. ( 2004) The discourse of global compassion: The audience and media reporting on human suffering. Media, Culture and Society26(4): 513-31.
21.
Höijer B. ( 2007) A socio-cognitive perspective on ideological horizons in meaning-making. In: Höijer B (ed.) Ideological Horizons in Media and Citizen Discourses: Theoretical and Methodological Approaches. Gothenburg: Nordicom , 33-50.
22.
Höijer B. ( 2008) Sociala representationer i medietexter [Social representations in media texts]. In: Ekström M (ed.) Mediernas språk. Stockholm: Liber, 139-64.
23.
Höijer B., Olausson U. (in press) The role of the media in the transformation of citizens’ social representations of suffering. In: Chaib M, Danermark B, and Selander S (eds) Education, Professionalization and Social Representations: On the Transformation of Social Knowledge. London: Routledge.
24.
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). ( 2007) Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
25.
Jameson F. ( 1995) On cultural studies. In: Rajchman J (ed.) The Identity in Question. New York: Routledge, 251-83.
26.
Koopmans R., Erbe J. ( 2004) Towards a European public sphere? Vertical and horizontal dimensions of Europeanized political communication. Innovation17(2): 97-118.
27.
Laclau E., Mouffe C. ( 1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso.
28.
Lauristin M. ( 2007) The European public sphere and the social imaginary of the ‘new Europe’. European Journal of Communication22(4): 397-412.
29.
Machill M., Beiler M., and Fisher C. ( 2006) Europe-topics in Europe’s media: The debate about the European public sphere: A meta analysis of media content analyses. European Journal of Communication21(1): 57-88.
30.
Moscovici S. ( 1988) Notes towards a description of social representations . European Journal of Social Psychology18(3): 211-50.
31.
Moscovici S. ( 2000) Social Representations: Explorations in Social Psychology . Cambridge: Polity Press.
32.
Mouffe C. ( 1995) Democratic politics and the question of identity. In: Rajchman J (ed.) The Identity in Question. New York: Routledge , 33-46.
33.
Mouffe C. ( 2005) On the Political. New York: Routledge.
34.
Nohrstedt SA ( 2005) Media reflexivity in the war on terror: Three Swedish dailies and the Iraq war. In: Nohrstedt SA , Ottosen R (eds) Global War-Local Views: Media Images of the Iraq War. Gothenburg : Nordicom, 223-44.
35.
Olausson U. ( 2005) Medborgarskap och globalisering: Den diskursiva konstruktionen av politisk identitet [Citizenship and globalization: The discursive construction of political identity]. PhD dissertation, Örebro Studies in Media and Communication3, Örebro University.
36.
Olausson U. ( 2007) The ideological horizons of citizenship: National media as discursive bridge. In: Höijer B (ed.) Ideological Horizons in Media and Citizen Discourses: Theoretical and Methodological Approaches. Gothenburg: Nordicom , 51-73.
37.
Olausson U. ( 2009a) Identitet [Identity]. In: Berglez P, Olausson U (eds) Mediesamhället: Centrala begrepp. Lund: Studentlitteratur.
38.
Olausson U.(2009b) Global warming - global responsibility? Media frames of collective action and scientific certainty. Public Understanding of Science18(4): 421-36.
39.
Schlesinger P. ( 2003) The Babel of Europe? An essay on networks and communicative spaces. ARENA, Working Paper 22/03. Available at: www.arena.uio.no/publications/workingpapers2003/papers/03_22.xml.
40.
Thompson JB ( 1995) The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media . Cambridge: Polity Press.
41.
Weingart P., Engels A., and Pansegrau P. ( 2000) Risks of communication: Discourses on climate change in science, politics, and the mass media. Public Understanding of Science9(3): 261-83.
42.
Zehr SC ( 2000) Public representations of scientific uncertainty about global climate change. Public Understanding of Science9(2): 85-103.
