Patterns in the Discursive Construction of Europe on Czech Social Media

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Vaia Doudaki, who presents a discourse-theoretical analysis of Czech social media content about the construction of Europe. This is a suitable approach for the study of identities, as identity signifiers are objects of political struggle for hegemony. This builds on nineteen dimensions in the construction of the idea of Europe, and the present paper focusses on constructions of the European people and of European institutions.

Institutions are seen as durable, multifaceted social structures that are socially constructed and therefore subject to change; the people are variously constructed by populist or nationalist discourses that pit ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’ or against the populations of other nations.

The present study gathered Facebook and Twitter posts in Czech related to European issues, by media, politicians, organisations, and citizens, and from these selected the posts with the high test engagement or reach; these were examined both quantitatively and qualitatively to identify the key aspects of how they constructed the European institutions and people.

There was a strong emphasis here on European institutions (independent of whether posts were themselves by institutions and elites or by ordinary people); the people figured considerably less. Europe is reduced to the EU, and the EU is expanded to represent the entirety of Europe; this excludes non-EU countries in Europe, and positions them as not European (enough), and especially excludes Russia and Belarus, even though this sample is from before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

At the same time, the European people appeared more as an aggregation of national citizens rather than under an overall European identity; while institutions are attributed agency, the people receive less agency in this discourse. This pits Europe’s powerful organisations against its powerless people. In addition, Europe is challenged as irrelevant or harmful to Czech people, with the EU apparatus portrayed as a dictatorship or dominant apparatus that undermines self-determination and self-sufficiency and represents only the interests of the wealthy and normalises a bureaucratic system of surveillance and control.

Europe is this activated as an other that is outside of the populist or nationalist construction of Czech identity. This builds on the specific socio-historical context of Czech national identity, of course, and is perhaps triggered especially by the elections period during which the data were gathered. The results should not be translated straightforwardly to broader Czech attitudes, of course.