Description
The paper will unpack the relationship between the issue-specific narratives of ‘foreign interference’ and the broader autobiographical narratives, through which the EU tries to anchor its identity and seek some sense of ontological security. The paper will first engage with the debates about the EU’s identity and role in the world. Since the late 1990s, the EU has been conceptualised as a particular type of actor; a distinctly liberal ‘normative power’, which attempted to influence the world by exporting and institutionalizing normative agendas. However, more recently, both political discourse and academic scholarship shifted towards much more traditional conceptualisations of EU’s identity, speaking about a ‘geopolitical turn’. Increasingly, the EU reconstructed its sense of self in terms of a ‘Fortress Europe’, trying to defend and detach itself from a dangerous world behind its borders. In parallel, the notion that EU was threatened by ‘foreign interference’ became prominent in its discourses. This paper will provide a mixed-methods examination of the narratives of foreign interference, EU identity, and their linkages in official EU texts and European Parliament speeches in 1999-2024. We probe the hypothesis that the rise of foreign interference in the discourse could be seen as a compensatory byproduct of the gradual discursive ‘closing off’ of EUrope. In that sense, the discourse of foreign interference is not only descriptive, but also plays an ontological role.
