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Article published In:
(De)legitimising EUrope in times of crisis
Edited by Franco Zappettini and Samuel Bennett
[Journal of Language and Politics 21:2] 2022
► pp. 300–319

“We” in the EU: (De) legitimizing power relations and status

The case of the 2019 European elections in Romania

 | University of Bucharest
 | University of Bucharest
The article analyzes how the leaders and the candidates of the main parties in Romania built a European field of power and subject positions in the context of the 2019 European elections. We adopt the premise that the (re) positioning of these politicians towards the EU is part of their ongoing strategies of (de) legitimization. In this respect, the study focuses on how they assign themselves a “European authority” in relation to audiences through their positioning as actors in the field. On the basis of a mainly critically discursive methodological framework, we analyze a corpus consisting of electoral messages on Facebook. The research reveals the ways in which the political actors build claims, representations and positionings about the EU through naturalizing (a) symmetric relations, statuses, and symbolic power hierarchies.
Keywords: European elections, political discourse, legitimization, claims-making, representations, positioning, dispositive, field of power
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Discourse on Europe. Contexts of research
  • 3.Methodological design
  • 4.Findings
  • 5.Conclusions
  • References
Published online: 11 January 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.21067.bec
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