National and supranational stereotypes in geopolitical representations of the European Union

Abstract

This paper analyses the humoristic use of stereotypes in geopolitical representations of the European Union. Building upon the literature about stereotypes and geopolitical representations and that about humour and popular geopolitics, the paper aims at shedding light on the specificities of the case of the geopolitical imagination of the European Union. The paper examines the production and reproduction of national stereotypes and the creation of supranational ones in three cultural artefacts commissioned by EU institutions. The first is Entropa, an art installation commissioned by the Czech presidency of the Council at the occasion of the first Czech presidency in 2009, and the other two are videos commissioned by the European Commission for EUtube, its channel on YouTube. They all attempted to use stereotypes tongue-in-cheek to promote European identification, but with variegated effects. Through the analysis of the deployment of stereotypes of Member States, Candidate Member States, the EU and external partners such as China, I hope to contribute to a better understanding of the ambiguous and dynamic character of stereotypes in geopolitical representations regarding both self-identification and others’ identities. The humorous use of stereotypes proves to be a difficult art – especially for authorities – and generates uncertain returns. Only unambiguously positive stereotypes can be used for this type of communication without generating strong opposition. Ambiguous or negative ones tend to re-actualize uneven power relations and to feed antagonisms instead.