At the students’ conference on ‘European peripheries’, hosted by Amelie Kutter at European University Viadrina on 18 July, 2023, students presented their collaborative work on trends of peripheralisation in EU border regions.
The paper, presented at the 28th Council for European Studies conference in Lisbon/ISCE on 29 July, 2022, introduces a ‘discursive political sociology perspective’ that combines the theory of meaning-constitution developed in linguistically informed discourse studies with Bour-dieusian political sociology and the political theory of polity-building. It shifts attention from outcome (legitimacy) to process (legitimation) and from identification with existing EU institutions to discourse practices that only establish the means of communicating and cognizing EU politics in its potential and postnational character.
In the past decade, societies in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain have gone through mutiple crisis. The recent pandemic further aggravates calamities that were already visible during the financial and Eurozone crisis: social inequalities, dysfunctions in national systems of social security and health provision, political instability and non-sustainable economies. At the same time, the Covid-19 pandemic markes a shift in policies of crisis management: on both national and European levels, policy-makers have departed from austerity and agreed on stimulus programmes, instead. This workshop explores reasons for this policy shift and the role, crisis narratives play in making that shift more or less possible.
At this panel, Amelie Kutter (IFES / Euroean University Viadrina) will present her book and Vivien Schmidt (Boston University) and Nicolas Hubé (University of Lorraine), who both worked and published extensively on the EU’s legitmation, will then review it, facilitated by Timm Beichelt (IFES / European University Viadrina).
(Deutsch) The Eurozone crisis is among recent developments that upset the European Union (EU) most profoundly and sparked unprecedented contestation. This article adopts a discursive notion of politicisation and the frame of Discursive Political Studies to investigate whether that moment of contestation re-politicised EU economic governance in substantive terms. It argues that, while emerging counter-narratives of crisis projected alternative scenarios of economic integration and established a practice of constructive EU critique, they were co-opted by the dominant mass-mediated story of a public debt crisis.
This book investigates how political authority and legitimacy is constructed in the postnational setting of the European Union. Drawing on the example of the EU constitutional debate, and the use of ‘EU constitutional speak’ in Polish and French broadsheets, more particularly, the book shows how claims for legitimacy transform while being transposed from the discourse field of multilateral negotiation to that of national media.
Contributions in this panel consider how field analysis can be advanced as a research programme in European integration studies. Panellists include Didier Bigo (Sciences Po Paris), Niilo Kauppi (University of Helsinki), discussant), Amelie Kutter (European University Viadrina, chair), Tomas Martilla (Vienna University of Economics and Business), Christian Schmidt-Wellenburg (University of Potsdam, co-chair).
The contributions to the symposium seek to highlight peripherisation and peripherality as a backgrounded disposition of current struggles over sovereignty.
Talk given by Amelie Kutter and Gesine Lenkewitz at the 7th CADAAD conference
The Eurozone crisis brought about a new form of party political opposition in Europe that is deeply critical of the current institutional setting of the EU and the EU’s approach to crisis management while, at the same time, generally supporting the European project. This paper investigates discourse practices employed by such ‘euroalternativist opposition’ (Fitzgibbon 2013), drawing on the example of statements (press releases, speeches and interviews) on EU crisis management addressed to international audiences by SYRIZA between the years 2009-2014.
Lecture given by Amelie Kutter on June 13th, 2017, in the frames of the MA Class ‘European integration in times of crisis’ and the ‘Borderland Studies’ Track of the Viadrina Summer School.