This volume of essays employs discourse theory to analyze mainstream topics in contemporary European politics. Inspired by developments in post-structuralist, psychoanalytic and post-Marxist theory, each contributor problematizes a central issue in European governance, including European security, Third Way politics, constitutional and administrative reform, new forms of nationalism and populism, the shift from welfare to workfare, environmental politics and local government. Alongside these substantive issues, the book tackles questions raised by the difficulties of applying discourse theory to empirical cases.

This volume of essays employs discourse theory to analyses mainstream topics in contemporary European politics. Inspired by developments in post-structuralist, psychoanalytic and post-Marxist theory, each contributor problematizes a central issue in European governance, including European security, Third Way politics, constitutional and administrative reform, new forms of nationalism and populism, the shift from welfare to workfare, environmental politics and local government. Alongside these substantive issues, the book tackles questions raised by the difficulties of applying discourse theory to empirical cases.

How can recent developments in post-structuralist, post-Marxist, and psychoanalytical theory actually inform ongoing empirical research? What are the appropriate methods and research strategies for conducting research in discourse theory and analysis? How can concepts such as hegemony, identity, the imaginary, dislocation, and empty signifiers illuminate key aspects of contemporary society and politics? This pathbreaking and multi-focal book contains a clear introductory statement of the theoretical approach used, and concludes with an assessment of the future directions of discourse theory in the social sciences.

Recent years have witnessed the European Union struggling to keep Europe together in increasingly difficult economic and political circumstances. Communication within and about European institutions has become more challenging in this perplexing political environment, demonstrating the complex nature of EU political discourse. In order to highlight these complexities, the contributors to this volume present different theoretical and methodological approaches to the analysis of diverse facets of EU discourse, realized through a variety of linguistic and discursive phenomena. The approaches represent rhetorical theory, metaphor and conceptual theory, cognitive and corpus linguistics, lexical statistics, polyphony, logical semantics, pragmatic and philosophical perspectives. Through this multitude of perspectives the book complements existing approaches and suggests new approaches in the study of political discourse.

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.

This volume offers a comparative survey of Far Right parties across Europe, examining in particular their changing political rhetoric. The contributors look at the development of two distinct forms of party development and discourse: The Haiderization and The Berlusconization model.

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

Analyzing changes in the role and place of NATO, European integration, and Franco-American relations in foreign policy discourse under Presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, this book provides an original perspective on French foreign policy and its identity construction. The book employs a novel research design for the analysis of foreign policies, which can be used beyond the case of France, by combining the discourse theory of the Essex School with Interpretive Policy Analysis to examine political ideas and how they are organized into a foreign policy identity. On these grounds, the volume undertakes a comparative analysis of parliamentary and executive discourse of President Chirac’s failed attempt at NATO reintegration in the 1990s, Sarkozy’s successful attempt in the 2000s, and the Libyan War. Ostermann depicts French foreign policy and identity as turning away from the European Union, atlanticizing, and losing its American nemesis. As a result, France uses a much more pragmatic, de-unionized, and pro-American strategy to implement foreign policy objectives than before. Offering a new and innovative explanation for a major change in French foreign policy and grand strategy, this book will be of great interest to scholars of NATO, European defense cooperation, and foreign policy.

This book develops a discourse theory of crisis and change in global politics. Crisis is conceptualized as structural dislocation, resting on difference and incompleteness. Change is seen as the continuous but ultimately futile effort to gain a full identity. The incompleteness and contingent character of the social represents the most important condition for democratic politics to become possible and for a theory of crisis and change to become conceivable. In this new understanding, crisis loses its everyday meaning of a periodically occurring event. Instead, crisis becomes an omnipresent feature of the social fabric. It represents the absence of ground, of social foundation, and it rests within the subject as well as within the social whole.

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.