Attitudes Towards Europe: Language in the Unification Process
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Drawing on interdisciplinary analyses this volume investigates the public debate about the future structure of the European Union (EU) in Germany and Great Britain, ultimately seeking to raise awareness of discourse stereotypes in international public debate. The editors of this book present the results of the first phase of a joint research project ‘Attitudes Towards Europe’ undertaken by research teams from Durham University and the Institut fu¨r Deutsche Sprache at Mannheim University. The authors combine the methods of political science, lexicography, critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. These, however, are only satisfactorily explained in Chapters 3 and 5, making the first two volume’s contributions less enjoyable to those not versed in linguistics and the basics of computeraided research. The authors’ aim is to look at what hides behind the international public debate. Their particular focus on Germany and Great Britain — countries often finding themselves at the opposite ends of the ‘Euro-scale’ — reveals the volume’s ambition to document different ‘national baggages’ determining the discourse(s) on European integration. The volume opens with two forewords: one by the German Ambassador to Britain and one by the editors. Referring to Joschka Fischer’s seminal speech in May 2000, the editors state the general importance and their specific goal of highlighting the ‘semantic and pragmatic contrasts between linguistic expressions used in the different discourse communities, notably the British and German public’ (p. xiv), that is, the contrasts between the meanings and situational use of words and phrases in German and British languages and cultures. And they do justice to this aim. Still, true to their ‘disclaimer’ in the foreword, they illuminate promising perspectives for further research into the sensitivities raised by the different perceptions of ‘European’ concepts rather than present a comprehensive, compact analytical work. The volume’s nine contributions come in three parts: British Discourse on Europe (I), German Discourse on Europe (II), and Comparative Studies (III). Journal of International Relations and Development, 2004, 7, (337–340) r 2004 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1408-6980/04 $30.00
www.palgrave-journals.com/jird
Journal of International Relations and Development Volume 7, Number 3, 2004
338
In the opening chapter of Part I, Gerlinde Mautner looks into the role of symbolisms — especially language — in the construction of national identity, which she perceives as the main stumbling block on the way to uniting Europe. She puts emphasis on the motifs, argumentative patterns and linguistic detail of the British discourse on both Europe and the country’s national identity. Her research is part of a larger project on the British Euro-discourse based on a corpus (a body of spoken and written material forming a basis of a linguistic analysis) consisting of parliamentary speeches and newspaper articles on Europe collected between the early 1970s and mid-1990s. Her introduction to the (pri
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