Pictorial stereotypes and images in the Euro debt crisis

ABSTRACT

In the Euro debt crisis, it is hardly surprising that reciprocal stereotyping is carrying the day in the national media reviving old images of the respective ‘other’. The study asks how covers of German news magazines are shaped by the use of national stereotypes and images when reporting about this crisis. The paper seeks to build a bridge between the seemingly distanced disciplines arts and political science by offering a lean framework for analysis. It uses some cover images taken from two German weeklies and modifies Panofsky's semiotic model revealing traditional stereotypes and images of Greece.

KEYWORDS:

• Stereotypes on Greece
• pictorial analysis
• Euro debt crisis
• German media
• national identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Horst-Alfred Heinrich is a Professor of Methods in Empirical Social Research at the University of Passau. His research areas include national identity, collective memory, and visual analysis. His selected publications are 2015: (Politik-)Wissenschaft als erinnerungspolitischer Akteur [(Political) Science as protagonist in memory politics]. (Co-authored with S. Ehrlich et al.) In S. Ehrlich et al. (Eds.). Schwierige Erinnerung: Politikwissenschaft und Nationalsozialismus [Difficult commemoration: Political Science and National Socialism] (pp. 7–14). Baden-Baden: Nomos. 2012: Uroš Predić' Kosovo Mädchen – Sterben und Töten für das Gute [Uroš Predić' Kosovo Girl – Dying and Killing for the Good] (Co-authored with B. Stahl). In Jahrbuch für Politik und Geschichte, 3, 221–238. Stuttgart: Steiner. Retrieved from http://www.steiner-verlag.de/reihe/view/titel/59789.html. Emotions toward the nation. In S. Salzborn et al. (Eds.). Methods, theories, and empirical applications in the social sciences. Festschrift for Peter Schmidt (pp. 227–234). Wiesbaden: VS.

Bernhard Stahl is a Professor of International Politics at the University of Passau. His research areas include Comparative European and EU foreign policy, and identity theory. His selected publications are 2014: The Foreign Policies of Post-Yugoslav States. From Yugoslavia to Europe. (Co-edited and introduction co-authored by S. Keil), Series New Perspectives on South-East Europe, Houndmills and New York: Palgrave MacMillan. 2013: Another ‘strategic accession'? The EU and Serbia (2000–2010). Nationalities Papers. The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, 41(3), 447–468. doi: 10.1080/00905992.2012.743517. 2012: Taumeln im Mehr der Möglichkeiten – die deutsche Außenpolitik und Libyen [Faltering in the Plethora of Possibilities – Germany's Foreign Policy and Libya]. Zeitschrift für Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik, 5, 575–602. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12399-012-0293-0/fulltext.html.

Notes

1 Acropolis now (2010, May 1). The Economist.

2 Some scholars define nation membership by using essentialist criteria while others prefer attributed ones. Furthermore, it is contested whether nation building is rather a primordial or a modernist phenomenon (Ichijo & Uzelac, 2005).

3 See for example Petersen and Schwender (2009). Here, stereotypes are partly associated with categorisations, and partly with negatively loaded prejudices. For a comprehensive literature review see Fiske (1998) and Quinn, Macrae, and Bodenhausen (2010).

4 Change of this sort may not fully transform the stereotype at once. It can also occur, if some exceptions from the rule constituted by the simplified perception are accepted (Hahn & Hahn, 2002, p. 22).

5 For an overview see Schweinitz (2006).

6 For further studies see Fiske (1998, p. 375).

7 Goldstein explains in his chapter how we perceive art and how a work of art may exploit the given circumstances in order to deceive the observer. Our perceptions are vulnerable and can easily be led astray. Perceptions, therefore, are highly susceptible.

8 The scheme concept is explained by Smith and Queller (2001).

9 We are mindful of the fact that scholars do not share a common definition of the term symbol (see Berndt & Drügh, 2009; Warnke, 2005; Zerbst & Waldmann, 2006). Yet, our definition enables to draw a relationship between Boulding's image concept and the world of pictures – regardless of the fact that Boulding constrains his idea to conversation – the spoken word.

10 According to Boulding (1956), symbols are similar to stories about issues or (hi-)stories.

11 For a broad overview concerning the different approaches of discourse analysis see Keller (2007).

12 Panofsky speaks of ‘pre-iconographic description' (1978, p. 50).

13 For an overview see Panagiotarea (2013).

14 This summery is based on the review of a context analysis of newspapers published between 1997 and 2004 and encyclopaedias edited in the last 150 years (Busch, 2005), of the hermeneutic analysis of German twentieth-century travel stories (Meid, 2012), of the description of journal articles printed between 1918 and 1944 (Thanopulos, 1987), and of the analysis of survey data collected under German tourists in 1992 (Papadimitriou, 1995).

15 This conflict (clash among fault line) has also been made popular by Huntington (1993, pp. 30–32).

16 The white roses as symbol are important insofar as they play a role in the pictorial analysis.

17 In our denotative descriptions we do not mention the magazine logo, number and date of edition, price quotation, or small info boxes with textual hints concerning other topics within the magazine. Rather, we are only interested in the visual articulation of the Greek case.

18 In Focus and Spiegel, four further covers were published between 2009 and 2012 referring to Greece and the debt crisis. One is very similar to that in Figure 1 (Focus no. 38, September 19, 2011) showing Aphrodite as beggar. The Spiegel (no. 25, June 20, 2011) presented an obituary at the Euro showing Greece as a coffin shaped with the national flag. In these examples, too, the Euro crisis is depicted as a simple nation-state affair using explicit (beggar) or implicit (cannot economise) national stereotypes. In two other Spiegel covers (no. 10, March 8, 2010; no. 49, December 6, 2010) the Euro coin is depicted showing the front side with the map of all Euro countries. In both cases, Greece disappeared from the map.