In Search of a European Identity: a Multimodal Discourse Analysis of the 2014 European Parliament Election Campaign

Introduction This paper examines how European institutions construct European identity in official discourse through the analysis of a sample of institutional data – eight out of thirty-nine audiovisual commercials developed by the EP for the 2014 EP electoral campaign. The analysis uses theoretical and methodological frameworks of Baldry and Thibault‟s Systemic Functional-Multimodal Discourse Analysis (2009) and those of Sinclair‟s lexico-grammatical approach (1994). Since the 1980s, in particular, the subject of European identity has enjoyed a growing interest in academic, institutional, and media circles worldwide. Indeed, the collapse of the Berlin wall marked a milestone in the process of European integration, thereby causing a shift in the academic debate on European identity from the political, which was the main concern of the first period, to the cultural, in the attempt to focus on what holds Europe together in a broader sense. It is no coincidence, in fact, that the term „identity‟ officially entered the field in the second half of the 1980s with the Resolution on European Cultural Identity (COE, Res. 85/6), which focussed on cultural cooperation as an indispensable tool for the construction of a pan-European awareness. In this respect, a growing body of scholarly literature has increasingly focused on official EU rhetoric and the practice of identity-building, and there is general agreement in identifying the common rhetoric of unity in diversity as the key to European identity. The European narrative of unity in diversity is an evolving notion, whose significance has changed in the course of time, particularly when responding to the challenges of globalisation and the enormous spread of new technologies and Internet. Indeed, the globalisation of exchanges and the progress of new technologies have provided new means of self-representation for cultural groups, thereby promoting cultural diversity as well as causing a shift from corporate-dominated monoculture to multiculturalism. This general focus on multiculturalism has significantly affected the EU rhetoric of unity in diversity, no longer representing diversity – intended as the plurality of historical and cultural traditions which make up the EU – that is to say, as an obstacle to any further development towards the 1