The European Union plays an increasingly central role in global relations from migration to trade to institutional financial solvency. The formation and continuation of these relations – their narratives and discourses - are rooted in social, political, and economic historical relations emerging at the founding of European states and then substantially augmented in the Post-WWII era. Any rethinking of our European narratives requires a contextualized analysis of the formation of hegemonic discourses. The book contributes to the ongoing process of "rethinking" the European project, identity, and institutions, brought about by the end of the Cold war and the current economic and political crisis. Starting from the principle that the present European crisis goes hand in hand with the crisis of its hegemonic discourse, the aim of the volume is to rescue the complexity, the richness, the ambiguity of the discourses on Europe as opposed to the present simplification. The multidisciplinary approach and the long-term perspective permits illuminating scope over multiple discourses, historical periods, and different "languages", including that of the European institutions. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of European Union politics, European integration, European History, and more broadly international relations.

The European Union plays an increasingly central role in global relations from migration to trade to institutional financial solvency. The formation and continuation of these relations – their narratives and discourses - are rooted in social, political, and economic historical relations emerging at the founding of European states and then substantially augmented in the Post-WWII era. Any rethinking of our European narratives requires a contextualized analysis of the formation of hegemonic discourses. The book contributes to the ongoing process of "rethinking" the European project, identity, and institutions, brought about by the end of the Cold war and the current economic and political crisis. Starting from the principle that the present European crisis goes hand in hand with the crisis of its hegemonic discourse, the aim of the volume is to rescue the complexity, the richness, the ambiguity of the discourses on Europe as opposed to the present simplification. The multidisciplinary approach and the long-term perspective permits illuminating scope over multiple discourses, historical periods, and different "languages", including that of the European institutions. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of European Union politics, European integration, European History, and more broadly international relations.

Discourse/Counter-Discourse is situated on the border between cultural history and literary criticism: combining the insights of Marxism and semiotics, it attempts to delineate the cultural function of texts. Focusing on France during a period of remarkable cultural, social, and political transformation, Richard Terdiman examines both the dominant bourgeois discourse—novels, newspapers, and other mass forms of expression—and the effort of intellectuals to devise counter-discourses to combat it.

The political landscape in Europe is currently going through a phase of rapid change. New actors and movements that claim to represent 'the will of the people' are attracting considerable public attention, with dramatic consequences for election outcomes. This volume explores the new political order with a particular focus on discursive constructions of 'the people' and the category of populism across the spectrum. It shows how a unitary representation of 'the people' is a central element in a vast range of very diverse political discourses today, acting to anchor identities and project antagonisms in a multitude of settings. The chapters in this book explore commonality and contrast in representations of ‘the people’ in both radical and mainstream political movements, looking in depth at recent political discourses in the European sphere. The authors draw on approaches ranging from Essex-style discourse theory over critical discourse studies, corpus analysis and linguistic pragmatics, to investigate how historically situated categories such as the people and populism become fixed through local linguistic, textual and narrative practices as well as through wider ideological and discursive patterns. As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

How to be a democrat and a Muslim at the same time is the subject of ongoing controversy. This book maps out the variety of voices contesting Islam and democracy in the Arab world, insisting that neither category can be taken as unitary or fixed. In the Arab Middle East, the contestover which democracy, whose democracy, and how much democracy takes place within an existing contest over the degree of preeminence that which slam, whose Islam, and how much Islam should be given in the political and cultural sphere. There is a Democracy and there are democracies. There is an Islam and there are Islams. Larbi Sadiki deploys the conceptual tools of contemporary Western political philosophy and theory to articulate and defend some provocative theses.

This book uses post-structuralist theories of power and discourse to study European integration and the associated forms of governance.

Henrik Larsen presents discourse analysis as an alternative approach to foreign policy analysis. Through an extensive empirical study of British and French policies towards Europe in the 1980s, he demonstrates the importance of political discourse in shaping foreign policy. The author discusses key theoretical problems within traditional belief system approaches and proposes an alternative one: political discourse analysis. The theory is illustrated through detailed analyses of British and French discourses on Europe, nation/state security and the nature of international relations.