DIE EUROPÄISCHE IDENTITÄT IN DEUTSCHEN BUNDESTAGSDEBATTEN: EINE POLITOLINGUISTISCHE ANALYSE

Die europäische Identität in deutschen Bundestagsdebatten: Eine politolinguistische Analyse (European identity in German parliamentary debates: a politolinguistic analysis) The question of European Identity is controversial and its topicality in the public debate has not disappeared within the last years, consider for example the results of the last European elections (2019), which saw the emergence of (at least at the beginning) Euro-critical actors, such as the Italian Lega or the German Alternative für Deutschland, or the recent Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Its complexity derives from the very definitions of Europe and identity, both polysemous words; this complexity also explains why there has been many attempts to study this concept from different perspectives (sociology, political sciences etc., cf. Prutsch 2017). Considering the close relationship between language and identity (cf. for ex. Pistolesi/Schwarze 2007), the main objective of my PhD thesis is to contribute to this debate by investigating European identity from a linguistic perspective, i.e. looking at how it is thematised or discussed about in the political field. The main research questions are therefore: (1) How and which texts can a corpus for the linguistic analysis of European Identity be constituted of? (2) How can this phenomenon be analysed from a linguistic perspective? (3) Which (lexical, metaphorical, argumentative) patterns emerge from the study of the thematization of European identity? In order to answer question (1), for the purpose of this study I took into consideration the German parliament and the political parties represented in it: in particular, I considered parliamentary debates that took place between 1991 and 2021, trying to sort out the most relevant for the present analysis, first automatically on the Discourse Lab platform, then manually through the software MAXQDA. For the corpus selection as well as for the analysis I decided to focus on one expression of European identity, i.e. the thematization through the explicit use of the name identity (together with its word forms and compounds) in relation to Europe (and its word forms and compounds). In order to answer question (2), European identity has already been studied in linguistics, especially from a sociolinguistic and (critical) discourse analytical standpoint (cf. for ex. Krzyżanowski 2010, Heinemann/Helfrich/Visser 2022). Less investigated seem however the studies which focus specifically on this phenomenon in the political language, using a mainly descriptive approach: in my thesis I therefore claim that a politolinguistic analysis, which makes use of methods derived from the discourse analysis, that is a politolinguistische Diskursanalyse (politolinguistic discourse analysis, cf. Niehr 2014), could prove particularly fruitful to provide new and valuable insights into this question. Such an approach focuses on three levels of analysis: lexis, metaphors and argumentation (ibid.). Seeing identity as the main part of the nominal phrase European identity, I focused for the lexical part on word forms, compounds and collocators of this term. I then annotated the corpus in MAXQDA, focusing firstly on the “higher-level concepts” (übergeordnete Konzepte in Wichmann 2018) and the source domains for the metaphorical part and then on the “prototypical arguments” (prototypische Argumente in Niehr 2004) for the argumentation part. The integration of these three levels made it possible to answer research question (3), thus conducting a quantitative-qualitative synchronic-diachronic investigation. The results were manifold and underlined general as well as party specific tendencies. In general, the frequency of use of the concept of European identity seems to decline over the years and to change its focus: if, for ex., in the first considered legislative periods the concept of Sicherheits-/Verteidigungsidentität (“security and defence identity”) plays a central role, since the sixth considered legislative period it disappears. It was also possible to show that European identity in parliamentary debates is conceptualised not so much through the concept of “process”, as through those of “conflict” (according to the scheme “Europe is in a conflict situation”) or of a “space”, composed of different parts. The lexical analysis brought out some for the discourse relevant thematic complexes (which I called diskursrelevante Themenkomplexe), which allowed to further specify these general tendences: particular attention in the corpus is drawn to the relation between local identities and the European identity, as well as to cultural aspects, which are described as factors which are able to create a sense of belonging; other factors, such as educational initiatives or religion or political factors, seem less important. Political factors seem however to increase their importance within the last few legislative periods. The overlap between Europe and the European Union remains unsolved. Finally, it was also possible to detect some party specificities, such as the fact that the CDU/CSU focuses its attention on the conceptualisation of European identity as a space with clear boundaries, which can generate dynamics of inclusion/exclusion with regard to those who (do not) belong to this space, or the fact the B90/Die Grünen is the only party, which puts culture and common values above the preservation of local identities in European perspective. The hope is that this analysis can contribute to the scientific debate on the considered issue and can constitute a starting point for further (also contrastive) research; furthermore, this work could contribute to increase awareness in the general public when listening to or watching parliamentary debates. Cited references: Discourse Lab (o. J.). Online: http://130.83.47.167/cqpweb/ (zuletzt abgerufen: 23.02.2022). Krzyżanowski, Michał (2010): The Discursive Construction of European Identities. A Multi-Level Approach to Discourse and Identity in the Transforming European Union. Frankfurt am Main. Heinemann, Sabine / Helfrich, Uta / Visser, Judith (eds.) (2022): On the Discursive Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Europe. Berlin. MAXQDA (o. J.). Online: https://www.maxqda.de/ (zuletzt abgerufen: 01.07.2022). Niehr, Thomas (2004): Der Streit um Migration in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, der Schweiz und Österreich: eine vergleichende diskursgeschichtliche Untersuchung. Heidelberg. Niehr, Thomas (2014), Einführung in die linguistische Diskursanalyse. Darmstadt. Pistolesi, Elena / Schwarze, Sabine (a cura di) (2007): Vicini/Lontani: Identità e alterità nella/della lingua. Frankfurt a. M., S. VII-XIV. Prutsch, Markus J. (2017): Im Auftrag des CULT-Ausschusses durchgeführte Studie – Europäische Identität. Brüssel. Wichmann, Martin (2018): Metaphern im Zuwanderungsdiskurs. Linguistische Analysen zur Metaphorik in der politischen Kommunikation. Berlin.