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Article published In: Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 21:4 (2022) ► pp.521–543

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Right-wing populist media events in Schengen Europe

The negotiated border discourse in-between nation states

ORCiD logo with link | Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 22 September 2021
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.20066.lam
Abstract
Leaders of European right-wing populism (RWP) have developed speeches about the state border control required to protect the “people” electing them. Nevertheless, are these RWP narratives necessarily circulated during populist media events that take place in the symbolic locations of European integration? It is argued that border control discourse in these EU places can be mitigated by RWP actors, but also emphasized by the media depending on the separated predispositions of politicians and reporters to address the border issue in a given context. Bourdieusian “field theory” is used in this article to grasp the potential differentiated discursive positioning. Based on a comparative analysis of RWP media events organized in the town of Schengen in Luxembourg, the investigation allows us to shed new light on the specificities of populism in the media.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Media events, fields of power, and the border from a right-wing populist perspective
  • 3.Argument, methodology, and case studies
  • 4.Populist media events in Schengen Europe: Approaching the border discourse with Bourdieu and DHA
    • 4.1Philippot in Schengen: Claiming protective borders for the French people?
    • 4.2The mass media unwittingly serve the populist “anti-establishment”: The border as a closed and nationalized line of tension
    • 4.3A son of the French state nobility in partially revolutionized political fields and the sealed social world of journalists
  • 5.Concluding discussion: From the leopard to the chameleon… under the spotlights of somewhere
  • Notes
  • References
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