European Identity: a Multimodal Perspective

In a recent publication, the European Commission has defined European cultural identity as “a sense of identification with Europe and fellow Europeans” (European Commission, 2012: 36) which is mainly fostered “through the exposure to influential discourses and symbols [i.e. through] persuasion and indoctrination” (ibidem). In this respect, a growing body of scholarly literature has increasingly focused on the official EU rhetoric and practice of identity-building, and there is general agreement in identifying the common rhetoric of unity in diversity as the key to European identity. The European narrative of unity in diversity is an evolving notion, whose significance has changed in the course of time. Today, the unity in diversity rhetoric has generally gained positive connotations, no longer representing diversity – intended as the plurality of historical and cultural traditions which make up the EU – as an obstacle to any further development towards the creation of feelings of belonging and identity to the EU, but as a constitutive element of its own nature. In this regard, academic and official accounts – which largely rely on the quantitative analysis of data from Eurobarometer surveys and national opinion polls – generally converge on the idea that, for an increasing number of Europeans, “the constructed character of European narratives” (Sassatelli, 2009: 193) appears self-evident. However, as it would seem from the case study presented in this paper, when analysing the EU rhetoric at a deeper level of meaning, other more complex and controversial issues appear. To address these issues, this study carries out a synchronic intralinguistic multimodal analysis of selected audiovisual advertisements from the 2014 European Parliament (EP) election campaign that employs lexico-grammatical analysis and Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) as research tools. It focuses on the 2014 EP audiovisual election campaign for two main reasons. First, EP elections measure citizens’ attitudes in an electoral context, but they affect people’s European identity more deeply as a result of the political communication carried out during the election campaign. Secondly, given that political communication is grounded in the power of language – both verbal and nonverbal – to produce and communicate significant symbols that have a crucial effect on cultural identity, it follows that investigating symbols and values of the 2014 EP audiovisual election campaign can substantially contribute to explaining how European institutions discursively construct European identity in official discourse. As dealing with audiovisual political advertising, the research model of this study is based on the integration of Baldry and Thibault’s Systemic Functional-Multimodal Discourse 178 179 Analysis (2009) and Sinclair’s lexico-grammatical approach (1991). Indeed, in audiovisual advertising, emotional strategies enhance the psychological attraction of the product for the target audience mainly by stimulating two senses – sound and sight (Lindstrom, 2005). This in turn implies that feelings, values and beliefs conveyed by images and sounds have the most influence on the target audience’s purchasing decisions. An in-depth analysis of the verbal content, as well as of the combination of the full set of semiotic features co-occurring within a text, therefore, allowed us to better identify meanings behind symbols and myths.