Executive gladiators in the European arena: discursive intergovernmentalism in the politicization of the Covid-19 EU recovery plan

ABSTRACT

As the politicization of European integration is channeled through the media, it fundamentally implies a discursive power distribution between actors and institutions based on who and what type of argument is promoted. Scholars have started to hypothesize who will benefit from this expansion of debates to wider publics, predominantly using media logics to conclude with the notion of ‘discursive intergovernmentalism’: where media spotlights enter, executives benefit. In this paper, we contribute to these nascent studies into the discursive empowerment of actors and institutions, by adding a critical notion. Taking our cue from Critical Discourse Analysis, we argue that media output should not only be theorized based on news values, but equally by accounting for existing institutional power (im)balances. To evaluate this argument, we draw on new intergovernmentalist theory, and empirically delve into the Spanish and Dutch media coverage of the (run-up to the) July 2020 NextGenerationEU recovery package.

KEYWORDS:

• Discursive intergovernmentalism
• new intergovernmentalism
• critical discourse analysis
• media
• politicization
• European Union

Acknowledgement

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their pointed and very helpful comments. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Political Science Workshops of the Low Countries (3-4 June 2021), and the UACES Annual Conference 2021 (6-8 September 2021). We thank the participants for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. As labels for actor categories, we use the institution represented. For example, when Merkel and Macron are visualized individually, they are labelled as representing their own country (domestic and foreign executives). When they are visualized together with other leaders in the European Council, it is coded as ‘Council’.