The long-journeying poor cousin before the shut EU door: How the Western Balkans are metaphorically conceptualised in the context of the EU integrations

Summary In this paper we critically analyse how the identity of the Western Balkans (WB) has been metaphorically conceptualised in the latest stages of the EU integration processes in a corpus of internet news articles recently posted in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Hercegovina. Unlike the accession processes of the former membership candidates from Europe, the WB’s integration has proven to be a very long one, hindered by many, perhaps insurmountable obstacles and subject to a great deal of uncertainty regarding its final outcome. Although this process is predominantly conceptualised through the already established metaphors employed to depict such processes of the former member candidates (journey, house, circles/rings, family, etc.), their evaluative content is different, given that the roles and the positions of the EU and the WB are starkly asymmetrical, i. e. that the WB is deeply marginalised. We identified some new metaphors that this specific political situation has engendered, also reflecting the said asymmetry – the WB is perceived as a colony, self-imprisoned state, Trojan horse, victim of blackmail, immature person, experimenting ground and waste-collector for immigrants. These metaphors construct an image of the WB as that of the very inferior Other.