Narratives of the EU in Israel/Palestine: narrative “stickiness” and the formation of expectations

ABSTRACT

Analysis of narrative can help identify the expectations actors hold about each other in international relations. This article triangulates a mix of elite interviews, media content analysis and an original Q-sort public opinion methodology to map the presence of narratives about EU relations among young Israelis and Palestinians. Our aim is not to explain the effects of EU public diplomacy in these countries. Instead we aim to identify the narrative “terrain” or conditions that the EU communicates to and with and, drawing on feminist and everyday narrative studies, to examine the role of affect and identity to explain why some narratives are more “sticky” than others in those societies. We find, first, a broad recognition that the EU’s capacity to act in international relations is necessary but limited in the face of greater challenges in the international system, and indeed, within the EU itself. We find, second, little evidence that young people radically reshape the narratives they encounter in their public spheres, but nevertheless some important divisions emerge that pose problems for how EU policymakers can communicate consistently without dismaying some citizens in third countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Strategic narrative
• diplomacy
• European neighbourhood policy
• Israel
• Palestine
• European Union

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Jamie Pow and Iana Sabatoyvch for their excellent research assistance on this article. We are also grateful to Laura Roselle for introducing us to the Q-sort methodology and to Vincent della Sala for feedback on an early version of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Alister Miskimmon is Professor of International Relations and Head of the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen's University Belfast. He has published two books with Ben O’Loughlin and Laura Roselle: Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order, New York: Routledge, 2013 and Forging the World: Strategic Narratives in International Relations, which was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2017.

Ben O’Loughlin is Professor of International Relations and Director of the New Political Communication Unit at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is co-editor of the journal Media, War & Conflict. In 2019 he is Thinker In Residence on 'Disinformation and Democracy' at the Belgian Royal Academy.

Notes

1 Data presented is from a three-year research project called “Crisis, Conflict and Critical Diplomacy: EU Perceptions in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine” (C³EU), supported by the Jean Monnet Programme of the Erasmus+.

2 http://schmolck.userweb.mwn.de/qmethod/downpqwin.htm

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Union Jean Monnet Network: [Grant Number 565374-EPP-1-2015-1-NZ- EPPJMO-NETWORK].