The Postmodernity of the European Union: A Discourse Analysis of State of the Union Addresses

ABSTRACT

While the debate about further integration is ongoing, the European Union (EU) already shows signs of functioning like a state. The dynamics of the European integration process are defined by the duality of inter-governmentalism and supranationalism. This contradiction encouraged the development of the EU as a new hybrid political organisation. A software-assisted discourse analysis of the European State of the Union Addresses highlights that Presidents of the EU Commission have indeed conceptualised the Union both as a state-like entity and an intergovernmental institution because of its unique process of evolution, as evidenced by parallelism with the US event, the co-occurrence of conventional metaphors of statehood and EU-related metaphors as well as the merging of the concepts of “Europe” and “European Union” in the Addresses. Overall, the Addresses have contributed to creating a context of statehood for the EU on the one hand, and to reinforcing the position of the Presidents of the European Commission of the EU Parliament as leaders of the EU on the other.

KEYWORDS:

• State of the Union Address
• European integration
• statehood
• European identity
• political discourse analysis

Notes

1 See, for example, Christiansen (2005) on the constitutionalisation and territorialisation of the EU.

2 The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, sanctioning Russian authorities for the death of Russian dissident and human rights activist Sergei Magnitsky.

3 The distinction between these two figures of speech is arguable. Hilpert (2007, 127) points out that a metonym differs from a metaphor in the domain of comparison: a metaphor draws a parallel between two things from two different domains of knowledge (for instance, ”governing a state is like helming a ship”). On the contrary, a metonym uses the name of a thing to refer to another thing within the same domain of knowledge (for instance, “Brussels” for the leading institutions of the EU because their seat is in Brussels). In this sense, the only difference between a metaphor and a metonym is that the former is founded on inter-domain comparison, while the latter is founded on intra-domain comparison.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Molnár

Anna Molnár is Professor at the University of Public Service, Budapest, Hungary.

Éva Jakusné Harnos

Éva Jakusné Harnos is Adjunct Professor at the University of Public Service, Budapest, Hungary. Email: [email protected]