FortressEurope integrating through division: an actantial narrative analysis

ABSTRACT We examine how the EU integration is narrated in news about asylum seekers. While extant research has examined representations of refugees in media, little attention has been paid to how the EU integration is imagined in such representations. Narration is of key importance to the ongoing EU integration and its contestation. The area of migration and asylum-seeking, in particular, generates terse conflicts between integration measures and individual member states over authority and power. As the EU attempted to coordinate a response to asylum seeking in 2015, ’media became the locus for institutional and intergovernmental clashes’ (Maricut-Akbik, 2020, p.1). We demonstrate the differences and entanglements between ideological ideas in the representation of governments’ and the EU’s debate about the refugee distribution schema by newspapers in Germany, Italy, Poland and the UK, each differently positioned in respect to the EU and the asylum seekers. Further, we demonstrate the utility of Greimas’ (1983) actantial schema to explicating ideological motivators in news narratives shaped by different state interests. We compare and tease out finer ideational points in representation of relations between governments and the EU as well as among the governments themselves and the ideological views informing these representations.