Conclusion: The Media, Politics and European Identity Building

Abstract

The rise of Euro-journalism helped to create the European Union as the sui generis supranational polity and incarnation of Europe that we know today. Euro-journalism contributed to elevating the “European integration process” into the central position that it occupies within European public discourse today. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the European Communities went through a remarkable transformation within the Western European media, morphing from a technocratic international organisation into a democratic European polity. During the 1950s, Western European journalists overwhelmingly treated the European Communities as just one among many international organisations that were working for Western European cooperation. The ECSC, the EEC and supranationalism did not stand out among a multitude of other European integration projects, ranging from neoliberal to Gaullist to communist. By the 1970s, however, the media had begun to frame the Communities as a sui generis European polity, incarnating European integration and Europe. Moreover, they also promoted the Communities and supranationalism to the publics of Western Europe. The purpose of this study has been to explain this astonishing transformation.