Harmony and Melody in Discourse on European Cohesion

Abstract

From a corpus constituted by the five Cohesion Reports written by the European Commission, the article, using the methods of textual analysis, highlights the production of a European discourse on the territories participating to a process of institutionalization. Thus, starting from various authors analyses who validate the idea of institutionalization, the authors propose here to further explore this idea, using a method based on a lexical analysis software. The aim is then, on the one hand, to assess the extent to which the discourse of the Commission has elements of stability to justify the idea of institutionalization or, in the other hand, the elements of change over time that could compromise the very idea of institutionalization. The authors present the following results: the Commission discourse has important features of stability. Nevertheless, beyond this finding, there are changes at work. Their expression is rendered possible by the polysemy of the notions mobilized, and they are driven partly by a “rational” representation, but above all by the interplay of the succession of tensions and mind-shaping contexts in the construction of Europe.

Notes

1. See the presentation of the work by Andreas Faludi, Bas Waterhout, Ole B. Jensen and Tim Richardson.

2. Briefly, three main approaches can be distinguished here: (i) that of rational choice, which explores the way in which institutions constrain the choices made by the different players, who for their part tend to pursue their own interests according to a logic that is viewed as rational; (ii) that of historical institutionalism, based on the idea that the history of institutions enables their present characteristics to be explained; (iii) that of sociological institutionalism, which, adopting a cultural viewpoint, explores the way in which the organization and practices of institutions can be explained.

3. Referred to as institutional design, institutional building, institutional change or institutional engineering.

4. These reports comprise 150–300 pages each and are organized along two main lines of approach: an overview of economic, social and territorial evolutions and trends in the Union, and a presentation of recommendations for future action in the Union in the area of regional policy.

5. For further detail refer to the website: http://www.image-zafar.com/index_alceste.htm.

6. Please note that statistical analysis has been made out from the documents in their French version. This does not affect the general analysis made as far as the Alceste programme is dealing with forms and not with meanings. Consequently, the English words that appear in this text are translation from French. That could mean that in some cases the exact wording is not the same in the English versions of the documents and in the French ones. But this situation is still marginal as far as a test we realized on some samples of the English versions of the documents show nearly the same results in terms of wording.

7. Similar calculations have been performed on the English-language versions of the Cohesion Reports. They yield results that are globally the same for the different occurrences.

8. This debate began in 2003 with a report entrusted by the Commission to Jacques Sapir, entitled An Agenda for a Growing Europe.

9. Until 2006, regional policy identified at the regional level, areas of intervention based on specific socio-economic criteria.