Construction of the Eurozone crisis: re- and depoliticising European economic integration

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Eurozone crisis is among recent developments that upset the European Union (EU) most profoundly. It deprived large parts of the population of their previous standard of living, put the rationality of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) into doubt and sparked unprecedented contestation. This article adopts a discursive notion of politicisation and the frame of Discursive Political Studies to investigate whether that moment of contestation re-politicised EU economic governance in substantive terms. It argues that, while emerging counter-narratives of crisis projected alternative scenarios of economic integration and established a practice of constructive EU critique, they were co-opted by the dominant mass-mediated story of a public debt crisis. This is shown in a combined content, network and discourse analysis of crisis narratives, which were issued by leading EU representatives, anti-austerity parties and European media between 2010 and 2013.