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British press attitudes towards the EU’s global presence: From the Russian-Georgian War to the 2009 Copenhagen Summit

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Comparative European Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

This article surveys the way in which British print media have presented the European Union (EU)’s global presence in the international arena by analysing two case studies which reflect two very distinctive areas of EU foreign policy: global climate change policy and the policy towards Russia. It employs frame analysis, allowing for the identification of the way in which the discourse of the press was categorized around a series of central opinions and ideas. Frames underscore the connections made by journalists between different events, policies or phenomena and their possible interpretations. The analysis highlights that acting through the common framework of the EU rather than unilaterally was a strategy preferred by the British press. These findings are in stark contrast with the deep Euroscepticism which characterizes press attitudes towards most policy areas, and is often considered to be rooted in the British political culture, media system, public opinion or the longstanding tradition of viewing the European continent as the other.

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Notes

  1. Smith and Allen have famously applied a more complex understanding of global or international presence, which is ‘defined by a combination of factors: credentials and legitimacy, the capacity to act and mobilize resources, the place it occupies in the perceptions and expectations of policy makers’ (Allen and Smith, 1990, p. 21).

  2. According to the 2011 Eurobarometer survey (European Commission, 2011), British public support for a common European foreign policy (55 per cent) is below the average of the 27 member states, in contrast to other policy areas where support is much lower: economic and the monetary union and the euro (11 per cent), or the future enlargement of the EU (37 per cent).

  3. At the same time, articles that focused on the probability of war in the South Caucasus – before August 2008 – the war itself, its aftermath (the ceasefire) and the post-conflict management by international actors were also included in the analysis after the first reading.

  4. Coverage by the media is widely considered to provide citizens with the necessary information that allows them to construct reflexive opinions regarding European issues. As individuals in the EU have few chances to get in contact with decision-makers at the European (supranational) level, news reports and articles supplied by the media fill this knowledge gap, mediating the interactions between society and politics.

  5. Moreover, The Guardian in the build-up to the Copenhagen Summit increased its staff working on environmental issues to eight (Boykoff, 2012, p. 253).

  6. This finding is surprising, as previous research has uncovered that the Daily Express has one of the most Eurosceptic discourse found in British newspapers (Werder, 2002; Carey and Burton, 2004; Carvalho, 2007).

  7. Tables 2 and 3 show that British newspapers tended to report on climate change policy and on the policy towards Russia through similar frames. Low levels of converge in newspapers such as The Sun, The Mirror or Daily Mail translated in the absence of a series of frames. On the other hand, the whole spectrum of frames was found within the quality and middle-range newspaper analyzed regardless of their political orientation and readership, all of which presented rates of occurrence regarding most frames close to the total averages.

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Nitoiu, C. British press attitudes towards the EU’s global presence: From the Russian-Georgian War to the 2009 Copenhagen Summit. Comp Eur Polit 13, 615–635 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2014.15

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