European debates during the Libya crisis of 2011: shared identity, divergent action

Abstract

The war in Libya of 2011 is generally portrayed as yet more evidence of the European Union (EU)'s inability to formulate a coordinated foreign policy. While the crisis took place in the EU's backyard, joint foreign policy action was hindered by member states' disagreements on whether or not to establish a no-fly zone in Libya. While this is true of political decision-makers, this paper investigates whether governmental decisions were reflected in similar divisions in national news media or whether references to European identity and criticism of European disunity transcended national media boundaries. Comparing a total of 6746 newspaper articles from Germany, France, the UK, Austria and the USA, the findings show that intergovernmental differences did not lead to similarly divided public spheres. Public debates in France, Germany and Austria constantly referred to a European foreign policy identity, though EU identity references were largely absent from UK newspapers.

Keywords:

• European identity
• Libya
• humanitarian interventions
• CSDP
• European public sphere

Acknowledgements

This study is a result of the interdisciplinary research project “Multiple Collective Identities in International Debates on War and Peace since the End of the Cold War. Language Technological Tools and Methods for the Analysis of Multilingual Text Corpora in the Social Sciences (EIdentity)” led by Prof. Dr Cathleen Kantner, Prof. Dr Jonas Kuhn, Prof. Dr Manfred Stede and Prof. Dr Ulrich Heid. I owe a special debt of gratitude to colleagues in my department, above all Dr Eric Sangar, for valuable comments and remarks. My thanks also to the anonymous reviewer.

Funding

I am grateful to the Bundesministerium fuer Bildung und Forschung for its generous funding within the framework of the eHumanities initiative for the 2012--2015 period (support code: 01UG1234A).

Notes on the contributor

Maximilian Overbeck is a PhD student, research associate and lecturer at Stuttgart University. In 2012, he graduated in political science from Sciences Po Bordeaux and Stuttgart University. He is currently working on religion in European and US public debates on wars and armed conflicts.

Notes

1. Needless to say, news media – including newspapers – are only one part of the public sphere. Within modern nation states, however, they constitute a central space in which political issues are discussed and arguments exchanged.

2. This empirical “rule of thumb” has already been applied in several empirical studies (Kantner 2006, Renfordt 2007, Kantner et al. 2008, Risse and Grabowsky 2008, Kantner 2011a, 2011b).

3. The most important national newspapers were not always available on Lexis Nexis, one of the most important databases of newspaper articles. This was the case for Germany, where I had to select two relatively small newspapers, the conservative Die Welt and the liberal Frankfurter Rundschau. The same applied in the case of the UK, for which I selected the Daily Mail rather than The Times of London. This may of course have an impact on the empirical findings of the study.

4. These country selection criteria are similar to those used in the study by Dimitrova and Strömbäck (2005), who sought to illuminate how media reflected the positions of the political elite on the Iraq War of 2003 (Dimitrova and Strömbäck 2005, p. 401).

5. Tabloid newspapers were not selected as I consider newspapers of the quality press to be both “agenda-setters” (Dimitrova and Strömbäck 2005, p. 408) and “frame-setters” for the entire national press.

6. Thus, if a newspaper article contained both commercium and communio types of identity, then these were counted as only one expression of European identity for the whole article.

7. The number of articles is in some cases slightly higher than that in Figure 2 as several newspaper articles both contained interest- and value-based identity expressions that were counted separately for this figure.

8. “‘Kadhafi et sa clique doivent partir’, ont répété les deux dirigeants dans un courrier commun au président du Conseil européen Herman Van Rompuy, jugeant que l'Europe doit envoyer un ‘signal politique clair’”.

9. “Europa müsse sich vielmehr fragen, was es militärisch können will. Bei der Intervention in Libyen hätte sich die Überlegenheit der Amerikaner bei Aufklärungs- und Führungsmitteln gezeigt, gleichzeitig seien die Kollateralschäden minimiert worden. Damit seien Standards gesetzt worden, hinter die man nicht mehr zurückgehen sollte”.

10. “Die EU verfügt aber nicht über das vollständige Instrumentarium in der Außenpolitik. Wenn sich eine Situation einstellt wie jene, als Gaddafis Truppen vor Benghazi standen und ein Massaker drohte, sind die Gemeinschaftsinstitutionen überfordert. Beim nächsten Massaker wird die EU wieder überfordert sein. Es ist schwer vorstellbar, dass die Europäer ihre Söhne und Väter unter der EU-Fahne in ein Schlachtfeld ziehen lassen”.

Additional information

Funding

Funding: I am grateful to the Bundesministerium fuer Bildung und Forschung for its generous funding within the framework of the eHumanities initiative for the 2012—2015 period (support code: 01UG1234A).