Weaponizing narrative: Russia contesting EUrope’s liberal identity, power and hegemony

ABSTRACT

Europe has always occupied a special place in Russia’s storytelling of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ – from Russia being portrayed as ‘part of Europe’ to it being cast as a ‘better Europe’ or an alternative to Europe that stands for conservative values or a different model of regional cooperation, including such as the Eurasian Economic Union. This article explores the recent shift from discursive contestation to subversion – all around the conflict in Ukraine and in a broader framework of a Russian matryoshka-style struggle against Western liberal-democratic hegemony and the EU’s liberal identity, power and influence in what Russia regards as its’ ‘near abroad’. It demonstrates the growing weaponization of the narrative replacing the pursuit of conventional narrative-contestation practices. In doing so, the article develops an original methodology combining qualitative (content-analytical) and quantitative (digital corpus-analytical) narrative enquiry, including the use of the GDELT-powered ‘big data’ analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Narrative weaponization
• contestation
• Russia
• liberal Europe
• counter-narratives
• discursive subversion
• European integration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Supported by Google Ideas and based on Google Cloud Platform, the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) is an open-source database that in real-time inventories the world’s events, emotions, and narratives every 15 minutes. The GDELT Project, launched in 2012, monitors the world’s broadcast, print, and web news from nearly every corner of every country in over 100 languages and identifies the people, locations, organizations, counts, themes, sources, emotions, quotes and events driving global society every second of every day. It covers over 250 million events in over 300 categories, recorded in full-text newspaper articles published since 1979, cf.: http://gdeltproject.org.

2. The growing body of literature, including that which features as a secondary source of analysis in this article, deals, in a dedicated and systematic manner, with classical content analysis of the Russian official discourse, main narrational frames or individual narratives (cf.: Ambrosio and Vandrovec 2013; Leichtova 2014; Gaufman 2017; Kushnir 2019; Foxall 2019).

3. Among many other salient dimensions of material struggle, political subversion (also known from the Soviet era as ‘active measures’) plays a central role; the recently uncovered top-secret Unit 29,155 within the Russian military intelligence agency (GRU) appears to be specifically tasked with sowing discord within European governments and societies as well as destabilizing Europe in other possible ways, cf.: Schwirtz (2019); Cohen and Radin (2019); Rid (2020).

4. Event ‘tone’ is measured the average ‘tone’ of all documents containing one or more mentions of a specific ‘event’ (= attitude). The score ranges from −100 (extremely negative) to +100 (extremely positive). Common values range between −10 and +10, with 0 indicating neutral.