Using the example of the European Union’s foundational myth that post-war cooperation led to peace, in this paper I attempt to develop both a theory of mythopoetic legitimation and an analytical framework for its analysis. I start from the position that mythopoesis is a form of legitimation through history or, more specifically, through selective narratives of history. I utilise Berger and Luckmann’s social constructivism to show that myths are deeply sedimented narratives that integrate existing (objectivated) phenomena into a cohesive story. I then propose a framework for critically analysing myths as legitimation strategies. After detailing the EU’s origins story, the remainder of the paper operationalises the framework by analysing how the EU’s foundational myth is used in three, very different contexts: Brexit, the coronavirus pandemic, and a State of the Union address. In doing so, I argue that the EU has become a prisoner of the past it has mythologised.
Bennett, Samuel. 2019b. ‘Values as Tools of Legitimation in EU and UK Brexit Discourses’. In Discourses of Brexit, edited by Veronika Koller, Susanne Kopf, and Marlene Miglbauer, 17–32. London: Routledge.
Bennett, Samuel. 2021. ‘“Britain Has Always Been a Safe Haven”: Mythopoetic Legitimation in UK Immigration Policy’. Plenary Lecture presented at the Approaches to Migration, Language & Identity, University of Sussex, June 9.
Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Penguin.
Bernstein, Basil. 1990. The Social Construction of Pedagogic Discourse: Class, Codes, and Control. Vol. IV1. London: Routledge.
Chouliaraki, Lilie, and Norman Fairclough. 1999. Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Cohen, Anthony. 1985. The Symbolic Construction of Community. London: Routledge.
Della Sala, Vincent. 2010. ‘Political Myth, Mythology and the European Union’. Journal of Common Market Studies 48 (1): 1–19.
Della Sala, Vincent. 2016. ‘Europe’s Odyssey?: Political Myth and the European Union’. Nations and Nationalism 22 (3): 524–41.
Di Nonno, Maria. 2019. ‘The Founding Mothers of Europe: The Role of Simone Veil and Sofia Corradi in Defence of the European’. In Peace and European Values as a Potential Model for Integration and Progress in a Global World, edited by Jesus Baigorri and Elvert Jurgen. Vienna: Peter Lang.
Eder, Klaus. 2006. ‘Europe’s Borders: The Narrative Construction of the Boundaries of Europe’. European Journal of Social Theory 9 (2): 255–71.
Filardo-Llamas, Laura. Forthcoming. ‘From the War on Covid-19 to Political Wars: Metaphor and Polarization in the Early Stages of the 2020 Pandemic’. In Discursive Approaches to Socio-Political Polarization and Conflict, edited by Laura Filardo-Llamas, Esperanza Morales-Lopez, and Alan Floyd. London: Routledge.
Gardner Feldman, Lily. 1999. ‘Reconciliation and Legitimacy: Foreign Relations and Enlargement of the European Union’. In Legitimacy and the European Union, edited by Thomas Banchoff and Mitchell Smith, 67–85. London: Routledge.
Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Johnson, Cathryn, Timothy J. Dowd, and Cecilia L. Ridgeway. 2006. ‘Legitimacy as a Social Process’. Annual Review of Sociology 32 (1): 53–78.
Kelsey, Darren. 2020. ‘Psycho-Discursive Constructions of Narrative in Archetypal Storytelling: A Discourse-Mythological Approach’. Critical Discourse Studies, November, 1–17.
Kølvraa, Christoffer. 2016. ‘European Fantasies: On the EU’s Political Myths and the Affective Potential of Utopian Imaginaries for European Identity’. Journal of Common Market Studies 54 (1): 169–84.
Kristeva, Julia. 1986. The Kristeva Reader. Edited by Toril Moi. Columbia University Press.
Krzyżanowski, Michal. 2010. The Discursive Construction of European Identities: A Multi-Level Approach to Discourse and Identity in the Transforming European Union. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Krzyżanowski, Michał. 2014. ‘Values, Imaginaries and Templates of Journalistic Practice: A Critical Discourse Analysis’. Social Semiotics 24 (3): 345–65.
Musu, Costanza. 2020. ‘War Metaphors Used for COVID-19 Are Compelling but Also Dangerous’. The Conversation (blog). 8April 2020. [URL]
Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak. 2001. Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism. London: Routledge.
Schröter, Melani, and Charlotte Taylor. 2018. Exploring Silence and Absence in Discourse : Empirical Approaches. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan.
Smith, Anthony D.1986. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Reprinted. Blackwell Publishers.
Van Eemeren, Frans, Peter Houtlosser, and A. Francisca Snoeck Henkemans. 2007. Argumentative Indicators in Discourse : A Pragma-Dialectical Study. Argumentation Library: Vol. 12. Springer.
Van Leeuwen, Theo. 2008. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van Leeuwen, Theo, and Ruth Wodak. 1999. ‘Legitimizing Immigration Control: A Discourse-Historical Analysis’. Discourse Studies 1 (1): 83–118.
Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California
Wodak, Ruth, and Norman Fairclough. 2010. ‘Recontextualizing European Higher Education Policies: The Cases of Austria and Romania’. Critical Discourse Studies 7 (1): 19–40.
Wodak, Ruth, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl, Ruth Rodger, and Karin Liebhart. 1999. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
White, Hayden. 1980. ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’. Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 5–27.
Wright, Will. 1975. Sixguns and Society A Structural Study of the Western. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2023. In Quest for Discursive Legitimation of Ongoing Policy Processes: Constructing Brexit as a Success Story. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 61:3 ► pp. 815 ff.
2023. Ontological security, crisis and political myth: the Ukraine war and the European Union. Journal of European Integration 45:3 ► pp. 361 ff.
Kosman, Marcin
2023. New Polish Right – politeness and radicalism. A corpus analysis of Krzysztof Bosak’s (de)legitimation strategies on twitter. New Perspectives 31:3 ► pp. 200 ff.
Loucas, Emily
2023. Depoliticising the people: post-normative power Europe in the women-led protests in Belarus. Journal of Contemporary European Studies 31:4 ► pp. 1489 ff.
Salamurović, Aleksandra
2023. The Metonymy EUrope as a Means of Legitimizing Nations in the Western Balkans. In Konzepte der NATION im europäischen Kontext im 21. Jahrhundert [Linguistik in Empirie und Theorie/Empirical and Theoretical Linguistics, ], ► pp. 219 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 november 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.