Tropes in institutional discourse. An introduction

This paper introduces Antonio Piga’s monographic volume “Towards a New Communication Policy. Sottotitolo: The Evolution of Communicative Strategies in the EU”. In his book Antonio Piga explores the evolution of communication strategies implemented by the European Union in response to the legitimacy crisis and to the 2005 ‘referendum fiasco’ and focuses on the privileged role played by discourse in the construction of a sense of European identity. Discursive practices are, as maintained by critical discourse analysts, “socially constitutive” (Fairclough 1992, 2003; Wodak et al. 1999; Wodak 2007; Chouliaraky/ Fairclough 2001; Fairclough/Wodak 1997), in the sense that they contribute to processes of social change in which the social identities or ‘selves’ associated with specific institutions are redefined and reconstituted (Fairclough 1992: 137). Changes in the way the EU represents itself discursively are analyzed in relation to the potential of new information and communication technologies, with particular reference to the Europa website, the EU’s main communication channel as well as the leading communicative tool for the promotion of aggregation between citizens of Europe (Balirano/Caliendo 2008). Recent studies on participatory democracy (Weber et al. 2003; Chadwick/May 2003; Dahlberg 2001) have concentrated on the potential of new modes of information and communication to enhance public endorsement (Caporaso/Wittenbrinck 2006; Chadwick 2006). According to Howard (2006), the so-called ‘new media’ have engendered a global communication revolution that is leading to the construction of new political, cultural and identity-related domains. The discourse analysis conducted by Antonio Piga takes on a longitudinal slant as it is based on a corpus of informative and popularizing texts made available by the EU to the general public between 2001 and 2009 via the EUROPA website. The analysis mainly aims to track down significant changes in the “interactional routine” (Fairclough 1989: 98) between citizens and institutions during the time span under investigation. For the purpose of his analysis, the author identifies the new discursive patterns that are being adopted by the institutions in more recent informative publications (especially after the 2005 clamorous referendum failure) in order to fuel democratic participation and confer upon the EU the legitimacy and the acceptability required for citizens to identify with it.