Chapter 5. Organising political consensus
The visual management of diplomatic negotiations and community relations in the Finnish accession to the EU
The community relations of the EU are here looked at as a performative political environment where power is exercised by acts of visual display and diplomatic signalling between the Member States, the EU and the candidate state. The main argument is that, during the Finnish accession to the EU, the television news images were used by the politicians and the media to demonstrate one’s power, to affect the political assessments made by others and to commit oneself or the political opponent to the shared community rules in public. Images representing politics are by default spectacular. A critical perspective changes the role and function of visual analysis in the study of images. In the chapter, suggestions are made of what this could mean in practice.