Europe in Crisis: Discourses on Crisis Events in the European Press 1956-2006

This article proposes a diachronic, empirically founded and qualitative approach to the examination of constructions of a European Public Sphere in Europe's national news media. By focusing on transnational press-reporting of a set of selected Crisis Events in post-war European history (in the period 1956–2006), different discursive representations of “Europe” (and Europe-related normative notions such as, e.g., “European values”) are studied to show the diversity and heterogeneity of their nationally specific perceptions. Similar discursive patterns and commonalities in discourses across Europe are highlighted, as are the evolving ways of (re-)constructing the tension between the transnational and the national, in the specifically European context. Within the latter, Europe changes its role in news-media discourse over time—from being an adversary or source of problems for the nation, to becoming the “bearer” of common values for all (or at least several) European nation-states.