European society in a pandemic. Media monitoring and the Copenhagen Security School
Authors:   Dostoevsky Omsk State University, Mironov Victor V. 
Published: February 2023

The article aims to identify trends in the study of modern European society in the context of a pandemic. The foundation of the source base for the analysis was European media reports. The information array was processed using quantitative assessment methods and interpreted from the standpoint of the approach of the Copenhagen School of security studies. The school attracted attention at the turn of the 21st century by adapting a number of constructivist ideas to the subject field of the study of international relations. The school became famous thanks to the developments carried out at the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute (Denmark) from 1988 to 2002 by a group of researchers led by Barry Buzan. Other participants of the school are Ole Waever, Jaap De Wilde, Richard Little. The central publication of this project was the monograph Security. A New Framework for Analysis (1998). The basis of this analysis was the ideas of societal security, securitization of the most problematic issues in the media and of regional security complexes. The main disadvantages of the school's approach are the specific understanding of society in constructivism, which is considered as a phenomenon relatively autonomous from the state, the limited validity of the concept, the analysis of security through a set of changeable states and contexts. Despite a number of comments made to the school, the school's approach allows us to speak about the specifics of European society as a whole. The focus of the European media in the context of a pandemic is on socio-political problems, it gradually shifted towards the topic of the pandemic in 2021. Nevertheless, political issues still occupy a central place in the focus of international security perception. Quantitative analysis shows the prime importance of traditional issues at the pan-European level. The pandemic did not displace, but rather caught up with it in the total amount of information. The European media show the “subsidence” of the panEuropean level of security before the national one in the conditions of a pandemic as a regional security complex. Not only COVID-19 played a role here, but also Brexit and other internal processes of the region's development: difficulties with flights, the introduction of immunity passports, restrictions on movement, lockdown in some countries (Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and France). As a result, in 2021, national measures to overcome the development of the pandemic led to a decrease in the number of reports on general regional issues. There is a certain shift in emphasis towards the problems of societal security, which objectively reflects the reaction of the European communities. Within the social field, which is the specificity of the European region, the sphere of restriction of personal and political rights of people plays a critical role. At the same time, in the context of the development of regional protest sentiments, this aspect is an important factor in the formation of a pan-European societal agenda. The situation with the reaction to COVID-19 affected the fundamental values of society, not individual countries, but European identity as a whole. This allows us to speak about the formation of a general level of social self-identification.