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 
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creation of feelings of belonging and identity to the EU, but as a constitutive element 
of its own nature.  
However, despite its well-attested positive connotation, the unity in diversity 
rhetoric is still strongly contested in academic literature as far as its meanings and 
outcomes, not to mention its pervasive influence on the process of identity 
construction among people, are concerned. In this respect, the greatest academic 
contribution to this field comes from political scientists and sociologists that 
periodically provide us with several analyses of statistical data from Eurobarometer 
surveys and national opinion polls as well as with in-depth studies of various projects 
and cultural initiatives developed by the EU-run centres. However, as suggested by 
Sassatelli, “interpretations still vary with regard to the real impact of current cultural 
action, and more varied still are the interpretations of how good or desirable that 
impact is” (Sassatelli, 2009: 53). A third contribution to this topic comes from 
sociolinguistic studies that focus on the effect that language usage in both official 
and unofficial discourse has on the emergence of a European identity. Among these, 
one of the most important empirical researches has been recently carried out within 
the IntUne project, whose “media group had the task of building and analysing large 
digital news media corpora to see how Europe is construed in the print and electronic 
media” (Bayley and Williams, 2012: 1). The advantage of such approach is that “the 
corpus approach provides the means to carry out an analysis of these media, building 
models bottom up from data rather than starting from an hypothesis”, thereby 
increasing the reliability of findings both in terms of consistency and congruence. In 
contrast, there is a lack of publications about how the EU discursively constructs a 
European identity in official speeches. 
 The point is that a correct consideration of how EU rhetoric works to create a 
common feeling of belonging to Europe among people implies analysing EU 
discourses and practices from within, not only from a socio-political perspective, but 
also from a discursive one with a view to exploring meanings behind symbols and 
myths. 
Bearing in mind this premise, this paper examines how European identity is 
constructed in official discourse, by focussing particularly on audiovisual 
commercials carried out by the EP-run agencies for the 2014 EP election campaign.  
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We have particularly focussed on the 2014 EP audiovisual election campaign 
for two main reasons. First, European Parliament elections represent a „symbolic 
matrix‟ that connects both levels of people‟s feeling of belonging to Europe – the 
civic and the cultural – to the extent that elections measure citizens‟ attitudes in an 
electoral context, but they affect more deeply people‟s European identity as a result 
of the political communication carried out during the election campaign. Secondly, 
given that political communication is grounded in the power of language – both 
verbal and nonverbal – to produce and communicate significant symbols that have a 
predominant effect on cultural identity, we have assumed that investigating symbols 
and values of the 2014 EP audiovisual election campaign would substantially 
contribute to explaining how European institutions discursively construct European 
identity in official discourse.  
In this perspective, audiovisual fictions stand as a significant factor in the 
discursive construction of European identity. Indeed, the creation of dynamic images 
forces the audience to “to look, to question and to reassess the reality of the world 
around them […] to create a visible form of something that doesn‟t exist yet that is 
for European identity” (Chayka, 2010: 1). Given that audiovisual texts are 
characterised by the multimodal synergism between verbal and non-verbal signs, the 
empirical investigation presented in this paper is based on Multimodal Discourse 
Analysis (henceforth MDA), “which extends the study of language per se to the 
study of language in combination with other resources” (O‟Halloran, 2011: 121), 
such as text, image, music and sound. More specifically, in our analysis we follow 
the practice adopted by Baldry and Thibault (2009) in their systemic functional 
approach to MDA (SF-MDA) which combines multimodal text analysis and 
multimodal transcription. Indeed, like dealing with TV advertisements, their 
analytical methodological framework has proved to be consistent with our analysis of 
dynamic texts from a multimodal perspective. 
Furthermore, we believe that integrating lexico-grammatical analysis into 
SF-MDA might be an effective research method for the analysis of audiovisual 
advertising. Indeed, in persuasive advertising, emotional strategies enhance the 
psychological attraction of the product to the target audience mainly stimulating two 
senses – sound and sight. This in turn implies that feelings, values and beliefs 
conveyed by images and sounds have the most influence on the target audience‟s 
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purchasing decisions. Therefore, an in-depth analysis of the verbal content as well as 
of the combination of the full set of semiotic features co-occurring within a text may 
help the analyst to identify meanings behind symbols and myths.  
This paper is organized into five chapters. Chapter 1 provides us with a brief 
overview of the most important scientific contributions to the main topic of European 
cultural identity, in order to understand to what extent the scope of the current debate 
should be extended. This chapter prepares the ground for chapter 2, in which we will 
briefly survey how the recent EP electoral campaign was conceived, developed and 
carried out by the EP services in order to relate our corpus to its wider “context of 
culture” (Halliday, 1977: 37). Furthermore, chapter 2 provides us with an in-depth 
description of the corpus of evidence and methodology used to investigate 
discursively the three case studies presented in this research. Therefore, chapters 3-5 
present our three case studies fully. As stated above, our corpus consists of eight out 
of the thirty-nine audiovisual official texts broadcast during the electoral campaign, 
which have been selected according to their congruency to several internal and 
external criteria. To explain this in greater detail, external criteria refer to the 
predominant conative-exhortative function of texts under investigation, whereas 
internal criteria concern the recurrence of on/off-screen verbatim transcription. In 
this respect, indeed, it has to be stressed that audiovisual texts were translated and 
subtitled in all 24 official languages of the EU; however, for practical reasons, we 
will refer to the English subtitling that has been, nonetheless, classified as an 
„international‟ language by the EP itself. Finally, our main findings and theoretical 
reflections will be drawn together in a brief conclusion. On this basis, we shall argue 
that although the constructed nature of European identity is increasingly manifest, it 
becomes necessary to understand how the process of identity construction is 
discursively represented. Indeed, since identification predisposes the audience to the 
performative reception of the message, identifying meanings behind symbols and 
myths could prompt critical thinking and independent decision-making among 
viewers. 
  
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1. A Soul for Europe: 
on the Search for a European Identity 
1.1 Introduction 
As a point of departure for this work, a brief overview of the most important 
scientific contributions to the main topic of European cultural identity is provided in 
order to understand to what extent the scope of the current debate should be 
extended.  
As is shown below, contributions come from a wide range of academic 
fields – history, sociology, psychology, economics, political sciences and 
linguistics – besides from the media and the official surveys carried out by EU-run 
centres. On the whole, these empirical studies have contributed to examining the 
feeling of belonging to Europe from various perspectives, even coining new terms – 
e.g. „Europeanization‟, „Euroscepticism‟, „Europhobia‟, „Europhilia‟ – and reshaping 
discourse practices. Since the rationale of this whole study is primarily 
sociolinguistic – focussing on the discursive strategies the European Union employs 
in its self-representation – findings from different academic fields will be assessed 
according to their relevancy to this domain. The first goal is, therefore, to review data 
in order to identify common patterns and recurring themes in the academic and 
official discourse on European cultural identity. It should be borne in mind, however, 
that results are sometimes conflicting, partly because of the significant political and 
symbolic value attributed to the European cultural identity by the elite, scholars and 
the general public.  
Without entering into the core of the socio-political debate on the emergence 
of a European identity, this chapter aims to focus on the key issues around which the 
main topic is debated both officially and academically. This, in turn, will provide the 
framework within which the case studies to follow in chapter 3, 4 and 5 of this work 
will be analysed and understood.   
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1.2 Narratives of European cultural identity 
 “We now have to give a soul to Europe”. Several years have passed since 
Jacques Delors, then President of the European Commission, pronounced his famous 
appeal. Over and above the spiritualistic undertones of the soul metaphor, defining 
European identity is today still the subject of lively political and scientific debates.  
According to the historian Hartmut Kaelble (1998, cited in Sassatelli, 
2009: 20) there are two phases in the wider contemporary debate on Europe in the 
social and human sciences: the first, the „classic‟ one, from the end of the Second 
World War to the early 1960s; the second, the period of renewed interest, dating 
from the end of the 1980s until the present day. Studies from the first phase 
accompanied the founding and the evolution of the first Communities, legitimising 
them. Not only politicians and political scientists, but also philosophers, poets and, 
more generally, intellectuals over a long time-span, have all contributed to creating a 
genre setting the several meanings attributed to „Europe‟ in a progressive, unilinear 
narrative. These reconstructions typically juxtapose the different meanings of the 
term „Europe‟ in literature, across centuries, territories and disciplines, in order to 
create an historical and somewhat teleological continuity that leads from Antiquity in 
Greece (the „cradle of European civilization‟) to the first European Communities 
(Sassatelli, 2009: 21, 22). One of the first and most stimulating essays in this sense 
was produced by the Italian historian and sixteenth-century specialist Federico 
Chabod (1961), defined by many as one of the inventors of the genre of the European 
historical narrative. According to Chabod, the key question is how and when the idea 
of Europe was born, in a word “how and when our ancestors have come to acquire 
consciousness of being Europeans” (1961: 13, translated by Sassatelli, 2009: 22). In 
analysing and classifying these classical studies the sociologist Richard Swedberg 
has traced 14 key themes which create today‟s sanctioned history of the idea of 
Europe:  
[…] etymologies of Europe, Europe as a geographical concept, the myth of Europa and the 
bull, Europe and medieval Christianity, Charlemagne as father of Europe, Europe in 
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century peace plans, the Enlightenment‟s cosmopolitan Europe, 
Napoleon‟s Europe, the European Concert, literary Europeanism, attempted unification in 
the interwar periods, Hitler‟s New Europe, federal ideas of Europe in Second World War 
resistance movements, and the creation and development of European contemporary 
institutions (Swedberg, 1994: 382, cited in Sassatelli, 2009: 22).  
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