Introduction: a narrative turn in European studies

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a tendency to explain the successes or failures in formulating and justifying policy or polity-building proposals for the European Union (EU) in terms of the difficulty in articulating narratives appealing to the contemporary European public. However, narrative analyses are an emerging approach and the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of these debates are sometimes not made explicit. This special issue contributes to debating the potential of narrative analyses for understanding the EU, their methodological and thematic approaches as well as their limits. The articles that follow address three issues. Firstly, they consider how narratives have become prominent in academic interest and political practice in recent years. Secondly, they consider how the EU institutions have embarked in explicit or implicit attempts to build narratives of European political and cultural union through debates on the state of the Union, through cultural committees seeking to give the European project a cultural or artistic ‘soul’ or through designing euro banknotes. Finally, they analyse societal narratives of ‘Europeanness’ in relation to history, memory or cultural diversity.

Keywords:

• Narratives
• argumentative turn
• permissive consensus
• identity

Introduction

This special issue reflects the growing interest for the ways in which EU integration is narrated and the political uses and potential for identity-building conveyed by narratives of the European Union.¹ This introductory paper highlights the growing interest in narratives about European integration, discusses how these approaches build on previous debates on the role of political communication in polity-building in the EU, albeit often from different epistemological and theoretical points of view, and introduces the subjects discussed in the six articles.

Jacques Delors is often quoted as saying that nobody falls in love with a common market in order to point out that the EU needs ‘something else’ to gain the hearts and minds of Europeans for the project. The EU’s difficulty in articulating narratives addressing its contemporary challenges – understood as an inability to select, articulate and communicate EU policies via convincing public discourse regarding its positive effect on the lives of Europeans – has been identified in political and intellectual debates (Battista and Setari 2014; Chenal and Snelders 2012) as negative evidence that this ‘something else’ is still missing.

The recent interest for narration in EU studies faces an issue well-known in the scholarly debate: that the key structures of a European polity and common identity – the public sphere (Eriksen 2007), parties (Hix 2013) and historical memories (Todorov 2007) – remain strongly national and only exist at the pan-national level amongst elite or diasporic communities. It is only from the moment that the EU started to be conceived as a polity needing to be in touch with its citizens – roughly in the early 90s with the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty and the creation of European citizenship – that scholars of the EU started to reflect on whether and how the EU can justify its existence directly to the peoples of Europe. In the turn from the Community to the Union a number of intellectuals suggested then that European integration needs to complement economic integration by fostering cultural and political bonds among Europeans (Ferry 1990; Koslowski 1992; Morin 1990). Consider the attempts of some European intellectuals to bring debates on EU integration to the attention of the public in the contexts of the Iraq war debates, the enlargement to Turkey or an EU constitution. Most of these debates saw the involvement of salient intellectuals (Lacroix and Nicolaidis 2011) reflecting on how these moments or crises reflected upon EU identity, its position in the world or its historical roots, the locus of democracy, the ultimate goal of EU integration. However, European intellectuals have been more successful at starting pan-European debates on the future of Europe in high quality media than at introducing a European dimension in national political debates (Koopmans and Statham 2010).

Narratives in the European public sphere

The growing interest in narratives in the EU can be seen as a result of the decay of the grand narrative of an ever deeper integration amongst the peoples of Europe (Gilbert 2008) and the emergence of competing explanations and projects resulting from the politicisation of the EU in recent years. In the wake of the financial crisis the EU is now becoming an issue in member states’ internal politics and has never been so present in the public sphere (Beck 2013). Eventually the old ‘permissive consensus’ on EU issues may be replaced by a ‘constraining dissensus’ (Hooghe and Marks 2009). The ‘narrative turn’ encompasses previous reflections on the EU’s democratic deficit, identity issues and the lack of a European public sphere.

Different approaches and actors have been considered in seeking to understand how Europe is narrated. Debates on narratives on European integration navigate between the understanding of a shared future in diversity (Delanty 2013, 11) and the accommodating ambiguity of the open finality of a multiplicity of national narratives (Chopin, Jamet, and Lequesne 2012, 37). The question of agency has been discussed by debating whether hegemonic narratives of Europe are constructed by the institutions and national leaders or whether they are shaped by societal and cultural forces (Chenal and Smelders 2012). Authors have also noticed the evolution of public narratives from an uncontroversial perspective of ever closer union to ever more dramatic narration of European crises (Gilbert 2008; Trenz 2016). Attention has also been paid to the role of narrators and narrative genres focusing on mediators as diverse as intellectuals and quality media (Koopmans and Statham 2010; Lacroix and Nicolaidis 2011) or museums and history teaching projects (Calligaro 2013; Charlety 2006; Kaiser 2015) as well as forms of banal Europeanisation narratives conveyed by tourism, mass culture and sports (Trenz 2016).

However, the growing interest for narrative explanations to the legitimacy problems of the EU polity also reveals that the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of the narrative approach are disputed. How can the success or failure of a narrative be judged? Are all stories on European integration to be analysed as narratives or is that limited to stories about the rationale for European integration? Do narratives of European integration focus on the EU history, policies, projects, or do they relate to cultural diversity and commonalities in Europe? And in the latter case, how do narratives of European culture relate to the project of European integration? Does a narrative require a certain degree of spread among the public – and methodologically, what is this extension? Who are the key producers of narratives?

These are some of the questions that the articles in this special issue contribute to addressing at the EU level. We first discuss some of the emerging conceptual and methodological understandings of narratives as forms of analysis of political projects as stories (McBeth, Jones, and Shanahan 2014; Salmon 2007; Schmidt 2010):

As narrative analysis insists, stories are complex artefacts. It is useful to distinguish at least three components: an appropriately selective series of past events and forces, a temporal sequence and, more importantly, an ‘emplotment’ that establishes causal links and communicates, possibly, moral lessons. (Sassatelli 2012, 2)

Czarniawska explains that ‘narratology departs from textual hermeneutics in the moment that the interest is put in the text itself and not the authors’ intentions’ (Czarniawska 2004, 2). As a consequence, narrative analyses focus on action and more precisely on distinguishing action from its subject and objectifying it. From an epistemological point of view narratives posit relations between events and provide explanation, justification and accountability, but unlike scientific accounts narratives leave causes open to competing plots as ‘narratives exhibit explanations rather than demonstrate them’ (Czarniawska 2004, 7). When it comes to analysing political narratives, an obvious epistemological question concerns the relation between political narratives and political reality, if, for a moment, we can assume that we apprehend political realities by other means than narratives. Shaul Shenhav (2006) sees this as a relation between two opposing poles, one where there is no assumption that the narrative can represent reality and one where it is assumed to fully do so. Intermediate positions are those where narratives can have an episodical or chronological ability to represent reality. Furthermore, Shenhav points out that narrative themselves contribute to construct political reality. Although discursive institutionalism (Schmidt 2010) does not use the notion of narrative, it is useful to consider the role of discourse, in a broad sense, in the construction and reproduction of political institutions. There is a certain logic of appropriateness and need for coherence within a given field which establishes limits to the freedom that those players have to change their narratives.

The elements that narrative analysis focuses on are the form of the text (prose or poetry, technical texts, etc.), the genre (a combination of subjects, styles and conventions, such as epic or science fiction), the structure of the text (types of emplotting, the presentation of the theme, causal relations), the construction of the characters and typical roles (main characters, allies and rivals), and the perspective adopted by the narrator (Czarniawska 2004). The ‘Narrative Policy Framework’ (NPF) follows a close literary analysis of stories and focuses on the setting (the agreed-upon physical and temporal context of the action), the characters (victims, villains and heroes), the plot (the set of actions and, in general, causal relationships) and the moral of the story, that is, in which sense the story’s lessons are paradigmatic (McBeth, Jones, and Shanahan 2014).

In theoretical terms narrative analyses posit a clear difference from post-structuralist understandings of the role of discourse in power struggles (Fairclough 2003), as many authors tend to see narratives as the natural structure of social life and are less interested in the intentions of the authors than in the text itself. In her explanation for the contemporary interest in narratives Czarniawska suggests that ‘[o]ne of the reasons for an eager espousal of a narrative approach in both the humanities and social sciences might be that it is useful to think of an enacted narrative as the most typical form of social life’ (2004, 3). This quote by Roland Barthes – one of the founding fathers of the French structuralist turn towards narratology together with Tzvetan Todorov – is suggestive of how narrative is naturalised:

Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances – as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories (...) Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives (…) Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself. (Barthes, 1977, 79, quoted in Czarniawska 2004, 1)

This view is clear in the NPF conception of the individual as an ‘homo narrans’ that understands the world in narrative terms (McBeth, Jones, and Shanahan 2014). Even though post-structuralists have also developed an interest in narratives, even then this implies that there is a ‘common repertoire of textual strategies, which are recognisable to both the writer and the reader’. (Czarniawska 2004, 87, see Jones and Radaelli 2015 for a discussion of the ontological and epistemological problems associated with the NPF). In more politically oriented definition, Chenal also considers that narratives somehow form naturally out of collective readings of the past and projections for the present and future: ‘Narratives are collective stories and representations, which are made of people’s memories of the past, experience of the present, and above all imagination of the future. Narratives underpin and bind communities; they make them move’. (Chenal 2012, 23, footnote 1).

Scope and structure of the special issue

As academics start to pay more attention to narratives of Europe, a publication highlighting the potential of narrative analyses for understanding the EU, its methodological and thematic approaches as well as its limits is timely.

This special issue is structured around three main dimensions. Firstly it considers how narratives have become prominent in academic interest and political practice in recent years. Narratives are associated with projects of political identity construction, and thus the current debate on which narratives are underpinning the process of EU integration suggests that the EU is undergoing a significant change in its relation to its citizens, as narratives proposing views of a common identity compete with those emphasising diversity. From this point of view, the focus on narratives as a form of understanding the EU relation with the public is an epistemological and methodological evolution from the argumentative turn (McBeth, Jones, and Shanahan 2014). Several articles discuss how different manifestations of the EU polity can be conceived as narratives, and if so, what types of messages on European integration they convey. Perchoc considers how European integration is narrated in the streets of Brussels, Sassatelli discusses the ambiguity of European integration and identity that is conveyed by euro banknotes and Bouza discusses how the speeches by Barroso on the narratives of Europe sought to take a step back from the politicisation of the EU.

Secondly this special issue addresses narratives of Europeanness through the definition of borders and by discussing how the EU narrative on reconciliation is perceived by the rest of the world. Narratives are powerful in mobilising resources for the cohesion and integration of political communities, to the extent that all political communities are defined on the grounds of shared narratives (Anderson 2006; Hobsbawm and Ranger 2012) built via memory, education or media. In doing so, narratives create the conditions under which Europeans identify themselves as such, and what traits, are associated with Europeanness. McMahon argues that in a similar way as national universities and academies contributed to legitimate nation-building, European studies contribute to defining the borders of Europe. His article analyses how normative considerations have structured scholarly debates on the borders of Europe among French, German and Polish scholars. Just as borders are constructed narratively, the content of European identity is also constructed by reference to differences from the rest of the world. Rosoux points out how ‘reconciliation’ has been narratively constructed as the specific distinction of EU integration from other projects of international or regional cooperation and as part of the contemporary ‘lesson’ that Europeans can convey to the rest of the world.

A third group of articles addresses attempts by the EU institutions to embark on explicit or implicit efforts to build narratives of a European political and cultural union through seeking to give the European project a cultural or artistic ‘soul’. It appears however that these projects have shown tensions in relation to culture and identity rather than succeed in showing a clear prospect for a coherent narrative. Both Sassatelli and Perchoc show that cultural and historical taboos seem to re-emerge at attempts to define the contents of a European narrative beyond the idea of ‘unity in diversity’. The very idea that European integration had been characterised by a single narrative of unity that has only been challenged recently can be questioned. As Cloet emphasises, competing narratives appear to have been the norm in most debates on Europe during the twentieth century.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by College of Europe, UACES Small event grants.

Notes

1. The authors are grateful to the College of Europe for hosting the workshop ‘A narrative turn in European studies?’ on 13 October 2015 and for the editorial support for this publication, as well as to Academic Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES) for the partial grant for that event.