Under construction: images of the enlarging EU in the Australasian news media

Abstract

Institutionalised metaphors are an everyday feature of the EU’s internal discursive constructions. The relevant literature argues that one of the most well-established and frequently employed metaphors describing the EU in EU discourses is that of the ‘Common European House’. This paper suggests that this metaphor is also prolific in external discourses depicting the EU. Easily comprehensible and intimately familiar to the international public, the ‘common house’ metaphor is argued to serve as an efficient means of organising thoughts and observations about unfamiliar and complex global phenomena such as European integration. Exploring a case study of Australasian (Australian and New Zealand) daily news coverage of the 2004 EU enlargement, we found that the popular ‘house’ metaphor delivered imagery dominated by negativity and contradiction, portraying the enlarging EU as an unstable, divided and overcrowded entity. Taking into account the power of metaphors to raise the awareness of key EU concepts, policy issues and events, the imagery resulting from the media’s use of the ‘house’ metaphor is problematic. The continued employment of negative and contradictory portrayals of an important economic and political counterpart may have concerning effects on the perceptions that the publics and decision-makers of Australasia hold of the EU as a global actor, still ‘un objet politique non-identifié’ on the world stage.