DOI: 10.17903/fk2/dpjyeq
title: Europolity - The politicization of European integration in the Greek public discourse, 1974-2019

description: The project analyzes the public discourse regarding the European integration process in Greece from 1974 until 2019. Using a political claims approach that combines political discourse with an analysis of attribution of responsibility and by using media data as the main source, the project will trace the politicization of European integration in Greece. The politicization of European integration that until some years ago was seen as absent is now widely accepted. Thus, EU politicization is mainly used in the relevant literature to describe more recent phenomena that indicate a change in patterns of support and opposition for European integration. Aiming to distinguish and compare the several styles of political debates on European integration in a national case study, we analyze these patterns of support and opposition from a long-term perspective. The analysis focuses and evolves around key events and critical thresholds (Treaties and agreements, European elections etc.) in the evolution of Greece’s accession to the European Economic Community (EEC) and later the country’s embedding in the European Union (EU). The claims-making approach brings to surface the actors (politicians, opinion-makers, civil society actors etc.) who appear in media reports and thoroughly analyzes their views. It also highlights the degree of Europeanization/transnationalization of the Greek public discourse since it shows to whom and at which spatial level the relevant claims are addressed each time. The overarching research question of the project is: What political claims are made and by whom in the Greek public sphere regarding the European integration process? However, the project does not limit itself to description but also explains the patterns of political claims-making in general and the attribution of responsibility in particular. Accordingly, the second set of research questions are: How and to what extent has public claim-making changed over the 1974-2019 period? How can we explain the different political claims-making by different actors? Our explanations refer to the structural position of the actors, the strategic interaction among them, and the political dynamic in Greece and Europe. Our findings relate to the ongoing debates on EU politicization, the debates on the Europeanization of the public sphere, and the Europeanization of contention, in light especially of the recent economic and refugee crises, the rise of negative critiques for the EU project, and the possible secession of member states. The project: combines the quantitative research method of political claim analysis in its special form of discursive attribution of responsibility analysis on media data with the qualitative research method of conducting semi-structured interviews with important actors in the public debate, complements the discursive approach with content analysis of selected parliamentary minutes over the 1975-2017 period, offers a policy analysis report of key EU related issues for Greece to enrich our understanding of the positioning of actors in the debate, the structure of available each time political opportunities and threats, and of the broader political and economic context. The project was initially hosted in the Department of Sociology and the Center for Research and Studies (KEME) at the University of Crete and then at the National Centre for Social Research – EKKE in Athens. Research conducted in close collaboration with the Center of Modern European Studies (CEMES) at the University of Copenhagen. The Principal Investigator was Dr. Kostas Kanellopoulos, and members of the research team were Dr. Angelos Loukakis, Dr. Stavros Protopapas, Mr. Konstantinos Kostopoulos (PhD candidate), Ms. Argyro Psychi-Fili (postgraduate student), and as non-salaried research associates: Prof. Maria Kousis (director of KEME), Dr. Giorgos Tsiolis and Mr. Nikos Kapelonis (all at the University of Crete) and Prof. Hans-Jӧrg Trenz (co-chair of CEMES at the University of Copenhagen and later Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy). The project received funding from the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I Research Grant: 408).