The people and its enemies : a discourse theoretical approach to populism and the European Union

Abstract

This study investigates how the European Union (EU) discursively constructs its institutional rationality and manages dissent during moments of political crisis. Anchored in the post-2008 financial and sovereign debt context, it analyses how the EU responded to two major challenges: the election of the left-populist Syriza government in Greece (2015) and the Brexit referendum in the UK (2016). The study aims to understand not only how the EU reacted to populist dissent, but how it constructs its own hegemonic self-image, rationalities, and regimes of truth in the face of political rupture. Bringing together Foucauldian framework of governmentality, Poststructuralist Discourse Theory (PDT), and psychosocial analysis, the study offers an original theoretical framework for studying EU institutional discourse. It conceptualises EU discourse as a site where technocratic rationality is not merely deployed but affectively invested in, sustained through fantasy, and disrupted by symptoms of ambiguity, contradiction and dislocation. The methodology combines a retroductive research strategy with lexicometric analysis and multimodal NVivo coding, applied to a corpus of 316 documents spanning six years. The findings show that the EU constructs itself as a morally superior, expert-led, post-national polity, projecting dissent as irrational, irresponsible or populist. In doing so, it masks the political contingency of its governance model. While Syriza was punished for challenging austerity, the EU internalised many of the grievances central to Brexit, a move that may reflect a broader hesitation in how the union engages with political dissent. Ultimately, the study exposes the limits of technocratic governance and argues for a renewed, critical engagement with EU politics that foregrounds contingency, conflict, and democratic openness.