New Article by Karolína Garančovská and Monika Brusenbauch Meislová in European Security on EU War Communication
In their article in the prestigious European Security journal, Karolína Garančovská and Monika Brusenbauch Meislová examine how EU institutions discursively construct the "EU agency" in communication on the X network about the war in Ukraine, i.e., who is portrayed in the text as the one who acts, decides, and bears responsibility, and how communication performatively shapes the EU as a security actor. The authors developed a new analytical model of EU agency attribution and applied it to a dataset of more than 9,300 posts on the X network published by the European Commission, the European Parliament, the European Council, and the Council of the EU between February 2022 and July 2024.
The findings show significant institutional differences in who is attributed agency. The Commission attributes agency multilaterally (across a spectrum of actors) and fulfils the role of a geopolitical "orchestrator," the Parliament emphasises the legitimisation of itself and its members as key actors in the response, and the Council prefers to attribute agency abstractly to the "EU" as a single actor. These patterns are stable over time and thus potentially reflect a certain routine in institutional communication practices. In contrast, citizens and member states are surprisingly absent from this war communication as actors, raising questions of legitimacy, symbolic authority, and attribution of credit and responsibility.
You can read the article here .
