Discourse & Society

The German media presentation of the so-called Greek financial crisis caused an unexpected uproar in Germany. An anti-Greek sentiment evolved and spread among German citizens and solidarity for crisis-hit Greece was mostly rejected. Public surveys revealed that many Germans even wanted Greece to exit the Eurozone immediately. This article highlights the crucial role of the media in shaping the negative public opinion. In 2010, a period which has lately been referred to as Greek bashing, the German press had discussed the Greek financial crisis heatedly and controversially. Europe’s largest daily newspaper, BILD, published numerous reports that implicitly and explicitly constituted the myth of the corrupt and lazy Greeks in comparison to the hard-working Germans. In 2012, the crisis had spread much further, and not only Greece but other countries too were suffering from high debt, economic stagnation and unemployment. The news coverage became more moderate and conciliating and presented the dramatic social consequences for the respective population. This study highlights not only the development of the German media’s tenor on the Greek crisis through time, but adds an international perspective and widens the view by comparing the media treatment of the different countries involved. Based on 122 online articles, the study methodologically focuses on the analysis of metaphorical language in the news coverage of three comparable international news magazines: SPIEGEL (Germany), The Economist (the UK) and TIME (the USA), and contrasts the representation of Greece with the depiction of larger indebted European countries like Spain and Italy. The analysis shows remarkable differences in the evaluation and presentation of the crisis, which can be linked to the degree of involvement of Germany, the UK and the USA in European policies.

The Greek crisis has attracted more public-political attention than any other sovereign debt crisis within the European Union. This article investigates the argument that this is due to the symbolic-catalytic role that the Greek crisis played in forging a specific approach to state rescue and the reform of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Drawing on assumptions of interpretive-narrative political studies about the discursive construction of crisis and a Critical Discourse Analysis of editorials from the financial press, the study shows how this approach was ‘catalyzed’ by a specific construction of the ‘Greek case’. Reference to the ‘Greek case’, in particular the high level of government debt, rendered austerity a plausible option of crisis management. Reference to the contagion potential of the Greek crisis justified the application of austerity across the Eurozone. The Greek crisis was also seen to reveal the systemic flaws of the EMU and suggest deepened economic integration.

This article explores the representation of the Greek national elections in a British broadsheet newspaper and their recontextualisation through the prism of crisis. I focus on speech representation as a recontextualisation device that serves as a bridge between speech production and text consumption. Specifically, the paper addresses the discursive framing of the crisis by focusing on the ‘speakers’, namely the social actors who are represented as speaking, the actions in which they are involved and the power role relationships established between them. I argue that a polarised image of crisis is constructed and that the framing of the Greek elections in this particular broadsheet results in double-voicing that positions Greece as either dependent on or independent of Europe. This double-voicing seems to contribute to the maintenance of domination and social control and helps sustain dominant discourses circulating in the broader socio-cultural context.

This article seeks to identify the polarising rhetoric adopted by Greek mainstream political parties during the era of ‘Grecovery’. The article focuses on the war of words between New Democracy, the leading party of the coalition government, and Syriza, the main opposition party on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the murder of a 15-year-old schoolboy, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, by a police officer and the subsequent riots of December 2008 and the authorities’ closure of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT). It draws on the political statements of two political parties – New Democracy and Syriza – and emphasises direct reference to the Greek civil war (1946–1949) and parallelisms of the current political climate with the colonels’ dictatorship (1967–1974). In focusing on those obscure pages of Greek modern history, this article analyses the discursive construction of collective memories of two different political poles and examines how the Greek left and right wings legitimise and redefine their political identities through the prism of their divided past. Using the discursive strategies of the discourse historical approach (DHA), the article illustrates how the DHA can reveal silencing strategies that lead to the discursive construction of the distinction between ‘Us’ – ‘democratic patriots’ and ‘Them’ – ‘enemies of the Greek nation’. Finally, recontextualisation in political rhetoric is highlighted as one of the ways of (re)constructing the tension and dichotomy between leftists and rightists. A systematic and explicit discourse analytic methodology of political rhetoric, that is based on history and (re)shapes collective memories, leads to an interdisciplinary approach that brings together and connects political rhetoric, argumentation and critical discourse analysis.

This article focuses on the discursive underpinnings of the legitimacy crisis that the Eurozone as a transnational institution is facing. By adopting a critical discourse analysis (CDA) perspective, the empirical analysis focuses on the media discussion in Finland. The analysis shows how discourses of financial capitalism, humanism, nationalism and Europeanism played a central role in legitimation, delegitimation and relegitimation. Furthermore, the analysis elaborates on the legitimation strategies that were often used in the media texts: position-based authorizations involving institutionalized authorities and ‘voices of the common man’, knowledge-based authorizations focusing on economic expertise, rationalizations concentrating on economic arguments, moral evaluations based on unfairness used especially for delegitimation, mythopoiesis involving alternative future scenarios and cosmology used to construct inevitability. By so doing, this study adds to our understanding of the discursive and ideological underpinnings of the social, political and financial crisis in Greece and other European countries and contributes to research on discursive legitimation more generally.

In this article, I employ small stories research as a micro-perspective for the scrutiny of any crisis-related positionings of ‘Greece’ and ‘the Greeks’ that accompany the circulation of news stories from Greece in social media. My claim is that such positionings cannot be fully understood without reference to what stories get circulated, where, by whom, for/with whom and how. To substantiate this, I draw on a particular incident involving the assault of two female MPs by a male MP on a Greek TV breakfast show (June 2012). My analysis will show that the ways in which the Greek crisis is invoked or disregarded and erased in the social media transpositions of the incident are intimately linked with two key-narrative processes, which I call narrative stancetaking and resemiotizations (i.e. video-based or text-based) that involve a rescripting of the initial incident. In both cases, I will show how processes of story making are important for what is signalled as relevant and for how the context of the Greek crisis is made sense of, critiqued and ultimately backgrounded or erased in favour of more personalized and localized interpretations, grounded in the original and the transposed tales and tellings.

Greece has been in ‘crisis’ for six consecutive years now and during this time living standards have dropped considerably for the majority of the population, strict austerity measures have been implemented and unemployment has reached a record figure of 27.8% (with a Eurozone average of 12%). At the same time, a ‘success story’ is prominent in dominant discourses where Greece is portrayed to have achieved a primary budget surplus and according to which the ‘worst has passed’. The dire consequences of austerity, the political polarisation of Greek society and the rise of the far-right party Golden Dawn (GD), however, indicate a much less positive picture. In this context, the article aims to problematise the complex nexus of relationships between the financial crisis and the re-emergence of the extreme right-wing party, GD. The discussion draws on an analysis of 1497 postings from the online website of the British newspaper, The Guardian. We focus on discourse strategies for attributing/resisting blame emerging from the analysis of the postings, but also as negotiated in two popular threads on the online discussion board. The article takes a critical stance and combines the discourse-historical approach with a micro analysis of the interaction. This allows us to pay special attention to the multiple layers of context and to combine the macro and the micro in the constructions of blame and sense making of the crisis. Analysis of the data shows that a range of actors is held responsible for the current situation, while the rise of GD is constructed both as a ‘product of’ and ‘movement against’ the crisis. We close the article with the implications of our study and areas for further research.