What It Means to Be European: Alexis Tsipras’s Victory in Blogs and Online Newspapers

Abstract

Starting from the assumption that new media play a crucial role in circulating discourses about Europe, this paper sets out to compare the representations of the Union circulated by the online press of two member states, Italy and the UK, which have been participating in the European political project to a significantly different extent. Two comparable corpora consisting of texts posted by online newspapers and blogs in Britain and in Italy in the period January 24-26, 2015 on occasion of Greece’s general election have been collected and analyzed. The data obtained thanks to the utilization of a methodological toolkit combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics reveal the presence of common discourses about the possible causes of the electoral outcome in Greece, i.e. the victory of a mildly eurosceptic party, and about the ways in which the Greek political scene can affect that of other member states. Conversely, remarkable differences as to what it means to be part of the European Union emerge in the study: whereas British media discourse considers the EU mainly as an economic reality, their Italian counterparts construct it as a geocultural and political entity.