The hybrid discourse of the ‘European Green Deal’: road-mapping economic transition to environmental sustainability (almost) seamlessly

ABSTRACT

The ‘European Green Deal’ (EGD) is a set of communications from the European Commission that outlines EU roadmap to climate neutrality by 2050. The policy envisions that, with the facilitation of speedy and just ‘green transition’, the goals of environmental protection and economic development can be reconciled. This article offers a language-focused critical study of the EGD. After giving an overview of neoliberal ‘discourses of sustainability’ and explaining the notion of ‘interdiscursivity’ in CDS, it presents the results of a close thematic analysis supported by keyword and concordance analysis of representations of ‘environment’ and ‘climate’ on the one hand, and ‘economy’ and ‘transition’ on the other. This study attends to salient language patterns and reveals how interdiscursive crossovers are established to normalise ‘sustainability’ as the contingency between environmental and economic orders of discourse. Also, it identifies the discursive strategies of nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivisation and mitigation or intensification and shows how tensions between discourses are smoothened. This analysis of EGD’s ideological hybridity also sheds light onto how EU institutions are (self)authorised to lead actions on environmental challenges on behalf of European citizens.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• sustainability
• interdiscursivity
• policy
• European Green Deal

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

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Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska

Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska, Ph.D. (Habil.), is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English, Institute of Linguistics, University of Opole, Poland and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Creative Communication, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuania. With a background in English studies, she specialises in (critical) discourse analysis of policy papers, climate change communication and journalism studies, particularly discursive construction of news values. She co-edits the international open access journal Res Rhetorica.