ABSTRACTThis article asks how the EU is imagined and deployed in different justifications for national restrictions on the free movement of European citizens. It does this by analysing press coverage in the UK, where concerns about the issues of immigration and European integration contributed to a victory for ‘Brexit’ in the 2016 referendum. It develops a novel technique for analysing the political dimension of media debates offering a conceptual map to navigate the confusing fusion of Euroscepticism and anti-immigrationism. Through reference (...) to political theories on immigration controls, and ideas about European integration from EU studies a series of hypothetical roles and functions for the EU are developed. These are then used as a framework to analyse coverage in the UK national media in two crucial time-periods: 2006 and 2013. The article’s findings challenge conventional wisdom that Euroscepticism and anti-immigrationism are closely correlated and map neatly onto existing left-right political preferences. The results show that the left-right dimension was less salient in 2013 than in 2006, the space within which discussions of the EU take place narrowed, and the economic and political aspects of regional integration were increasingly overshadowed by the image of the EU as supranational entity. (shrink)

ABSTRACTScholars in transnationalism studies, a diverse and dynamic research field, emphasise the need for transdisciplinarity and diversification of empirical areas and issues, in order to cast light on the particularities of transnational practices, agency and emerging power relations. Starting from the premise that discourse is constitutive of transnational social fields, the articles in this special issue propose the integration of discourse analysis into the study of transnational processes and the exploration of public and semi-public discourses in a variety of specific (...) contexts. They identify multiple symbolic positionings and discursive strategies, such as instrumentalisation, legitimation, reification, bringing to attention the complexity of practices and power relations through which transnational social fields are produced. (shrink)

The Eurozone crisis has brought the imperative of democratic autonomy within the EU to the forefront, a concern at the core of demoicratic theory. The article seeks to move the scholarship on demoicratic theory a step further by exploring what we call the social construction of demoicratic reality. While the EU’s legal-institutional infrastructure may imperfectly approximate a demoicratic structure, we need ask to what extent the ‘bare bones’ demoicratic character of a polity can actually be grounded in a full-flesh social (...) construct that is or could be acted out in the democratic experience and the self-awareness of its peoples. Ultimately, such an enquiry should help us understand whether a polity like the EU is actually and potentially a stable or unstable political form. We develop a consistent theory of popular sovereignty drawing on John Searle and HLA Hart to conceive the constitutionalised people as a social fact and the sovereignty of the people as a status ascribed to the people. We use this construction of demoicratic reality as a conceptual framework to understand the possibility of popular sovereignty being exercised concurrently by several rather than just one dêmos. (shrink)