Degrees of European Belonging

Book excerpt: While we tend to divide the world into Us and Them, a number of grey nuances exist beyond this white and black distinction. The purpose of this book is to address the fuzzy areas between Us and Them through the study of European belonging as it is represented in the French elite daily, Le Monde. Corpora collected from 2014 to 2017 are used for case studies in the framework of Discourse Analysis to look at the use of “Europe” in headlines, and the representation of the United Kingdom, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Turkey. The combination of these case studies allows to present a conceptual framework for the representation of Europe by Le Monde. However, beyond the study of what belonging to Europe means for Le Monde, this book is about the legitimacy of being “in-between”, i.e. belonging neither totally to Us nor to Them.