Identity, Pragmatism and the Future of Europe. An Exploration in Hungarian Media Discourses

Abstract

In this paper we summarize the experiences of Hungarian media discourse analysis related to different symbolic and pragmatic aspects of Europeanization. First, we review the discourses concerning national identity and different understandings of Europe. Secondly, we present the lessons learned from the Hungarian debates on the future of Europe shading more light on how the European Union should develop and the representation of these debates in the media. In our analysis we rely on the corpus of articles selected within the MEDIATIZED EU project between July 2021 and March 2022. In a highly polarized discursive field our results identified opposing media discourses depending on the media outlets: the government’s discourse about national sovereignty with constituting elements of a cultural/ primordial identity based on Christianity, the importance of the nation and family, placing member-states at the heart of the European construct with different degrees of rejection of the EU; and one, less prominent discourse presents in the independent media about European values and a rather integrationist stance.