Europe and the Nation: Austrian EU-Scepticism and Its Contestation

Abstract

This discussion of EU-scepticism and its contestation in contemporary Austria is based on a qualitative, discourse analytical reading of the country's diverse media over recent years. Focusing in particular on news coverage and readers' letters pertaining to various (perceived) European crises, the analysis draws on the concepts of topoi (or ‘structures of argument’) and deixis (or ‘rhetorical pointing’) to examine the following four thematic foci, around which different positions of EU-scepticism, pragmatism and pro-European counter-discourses are variously formulated and argued over: the role and effects of (global) markets; a spectrum of competing identifications; frameworks of memory and prediction; debates about the EU's institutional structures and different political visions. The internally heterogeneous and strongly contested discursive field thus revealed also demonstrates the uneasy coexistence of various, more or less rigid discourses of national identity with emerging forms of ‘banal Europeanism’. While focused on Austrian data throughout, this analysis also points towards discursive parallels in other parts of the EU and argues for the value of qualitative analyses of EU-scepticism and its counter-discourses to complement existing quantitative studies.