Contingent Europeanism in EU candidate states: effects from immigration news framing on European civic and cultural identity in North Macedonia

ABSTRACT

How does European identity manifest itself outside the European Union? How does it come to being, and what is the role of the immigration phenomenon capturing the continent in this dynamic? To examine the different meanings of Europeanism held by citizens of EU candidate states, and the routes through which they are acquired in the context of the ‘European migrant crisis,’ I draw from media effects theory, conducting a survey experiment whose factorial design combines the most common frames in immigration coverage (valence and episodic/thematic frames). Using the Republic of North Macedonia as a case study, this analysis finds evidence that the feeling of belonging to Europe among non-EU nationals are contingent on media exposure, and that emotions are the mechanism which mediates the relationship between news frames and identification adjustments.

KEYWORDS:

• Framing
• media effects
• immigration
• European identity
• EU enlargement

Notes

1 The argument made by Bruter (2003) is that European cultural identity is too entrenched to be affected by news; as research states that negative news have greater impact than positive ones (Soroka, 2006), I posit that only the ‘risk’ frame could impact cultural identity and not the ‘opportunity.’ This, coupled with Knobloch-Westerwick and Meng’s (2011) findings that the political self-concept (including that of ethnic identity) is reinforced only by congruent messages, is considered to be sufficient hint that a cultural identity which makes a sharp distinction between Europeans and non-Europeans will likely not be affected by an ‘opportunity’ frame.

2 While conceptually it makes little sense to view European identity as ethnic, the emergence of such a factor can be considered the strongest evidence that the classic dichotomy can be applicable in the given context of Europe and migration. Reijerse et al. (2013) emphasize that cultural representations emerge in large part due to the shift from blatant to more symbolic types of racism, as a result of social disapproval toward expressing negative outgroup attitudes based on race and ethnicity. However, as the cultural identification is strongly related to the ethnic one, the result of the factor analysis highlights the need to better understand these distinctions on the European level. Unfortunately, this is beyond the scope of the present study which seeks to test how news content affects apriori conceptualizations of identity, empirically validated by other studies.

3 The location for the fictional event was chosen because of both its proximity to North Macedonia and Croatia’s EU membership, thus priming ‘Europe.’

4 66.3 percent of the participants were female, with mean age 21.61 years, and average mean of 3.77 (SD = 1.19) on the ideology scale (1-far left, 7-far right).

5 Both direct and effects were absent in the case of the European ‘ethnic’ identity.