Debate In European Parliament Research Articles

Narrating Solidarity With Ukraine: European Parliament Debates on Energy Policy

The article aims to improve our understanding of the politics of energy policy in the EU in the context of the war in Ukraine. It shows how the energy policy debate is contextualised by the suffering of Ukraine and the country’s efforts to resist Russian aggression and full-scale war. An abductive qualitative content analysis of 10 European Parliament debates on economic sanctions against Russia between March 2014 and October 2022 is used to reconstruct four narratives of the EU’s transnational solidarity with Ukraine. The following solidarity narratives are compared in terms of underlying notions of solidarity, proposed policy solutions, and their temporal aspects: “solidarity based on the common enemy,” “solidarity as mutual sacrifice,” “solidarity based on shared independence,” and “solidarity based on our resilience.” We find that despite the prominence of the solidarity frame in all four narratives, there were latent relevant differences in the urgency of the proposed solutions. Moreover, the references to suffering in these narratives tend to contrast “their” and “our” suffering, rather than calling for help for Ukraine.

A Passion for Virtue? Appeals to Morality and Emotions in European Parliament Climate Change Debates

Although it is well acknowledged that moral foundations have an emotional component, little is known about the relation between moral foundations and emotions in current political and public debates. The analysis of this relation is crucial to better understand causal pathways from affect and emotion to climate change action and behavior. Employing Emotion Discourse Analysis, this study analyzes appeals to moral foundations in European Parliament (EP) plenary debates on the topic of climate change, and their relation to emotions between 1994 and 2022. We show that the relation between moral foundations and emotions depends on the narratives put forward by policymakers from different political groups. After linking narratives, moral foundations and emotions, we hypothesize how the identified combinations affect political action. We show that narratives promoting action-oriented and effective appeals to emotions, which are key in advancing environmental protection, are not the most prominent in EP debates.

Reframing the language of human rights? Political group contestations on women’s and LGBTQI rights in European Parliament debates

ABSTRACT European integration is challenged on numerous grounds today with democracy and fundamental values at the center of the debates. The article analyses the role of the European Parliament’s political groups in shaping human rights as a core democratic value and the ways in which religion and gender equality are utilized. The research material consists of plenary debates and 130 MEP and staff interviews in the 8th and 9th legislatures. We discern three clusters in the ways in which the political groups frame human rights and gender equality: (i) ‘the defenders’, (ii) ‘the reframers’, and those (iii) ‘sitting on the fence’. Our analysis illustrates that core EU values such as human rights and equality are defended, challenged, and reframed by the political groups to an extent that they constitute key lines of division not only in between but also within the political groups.

Debating responsibility‐sharing: An analysis of the European Parliament's debates on the Common European Asylum System

AbstractThe Common European Asylum System (CEAS) has failed to ensure effective protection in times of high numbers of asylum seekers. CEAS reforms have not successfully introduced responsibility‐sharing mechanisms that can balance the effects of the Dublin Regulation's allocation rules. This paper analyzed the absence of substantial CEAS reforms by examining the discursive strategies used by Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in asylum reform debates during the European Parliament's (EP) seventh legislative term (2009–2014). The mixed‐methods analysis revealed that: (a) MEPs across the political spectrum argued in favor of responsibility‐sharing, (b) MEPs from south‐eastern border European Union Member States were prone to use solidarity discursive strategies to speak in favor of responsibility‐sharing, (c) and that MEPs aligned their discursive strategies to the actual responsibility‐sharing mechanisms under discussion. These findings point to substantive and problem‐oriented debates in the EP. Yet, these debates did not translate into essential CEAS reforms.

Could Have, Should Have, Would Have. The Speaker’s Attitude in Expressing Hypothetical Past Alternatives in English and Italian by Means of Pragmatic Markers and Modality in EU Parliamentary Debates.

Legislation and important decisions affecting the lives of over 400 million European citizens are discussed on a regular basis in the European Parliament debates. This research paper analyzes the MEPs’ speeches in terms of the co-occurrence of past conditionals and pragmatic markers signalling the speaker’s attitude to the propositional meaning being expressed by past conditionals. The pragmatic markers of interest have been divided into two categories – one denoting certainty, and the other uncertainty or tentativeness – and compared accordingly. Since it is a corpus-based study, it was also possible to compare the English and Italian versions in order to verify whether the use of pragmatic markers within a set context horizon is consistent in the two languages. Results suggest that the use of hedging pragmatic markers is negligible as compared with intensifying markers, with the exception of ‘perhaps’/‘ forse ’. Translations, on the other hand, are not always consistent; however, this lack of consistency does not affect the general trends observed in the general use of pragmatic markers from both corpora. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.32.0.19445

Strategic maneuvering in European Parliamentary Debate

This paper focuses on argumentation the institutional context of debate in the European Parliament. A parliamentary debate is a distinct argumentative activity type. In the pragma-dialectical approach, argumentative activity types are defined as conventionalized argumentative practices in which the possibilities for strategic maneuvering are predetermined. What are the characteristics of the activity type of a debate in European Parliament that predetermine the possibilities for strategic maneuvering?

No representation without justification? Appraising standards of justification in European Parliament debates

Much is known about the voting behaviour of representatives in the European Parliament. However, less has been done to investigate the role of the European Parliament in ‘speaking up’ for different points of view. This contribution uses a philosophical analysis of the role of justification in representation to propose standards that can be used to evaluate the quality of justification in legislative bodies. It then applies those standards to a study of debates in the 2004–9 European Parliament.