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Article published In: Discourses on Racism and Resilience: Between power and resistance
Edited by Marjo Lindroth, Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen and Claes Tängh Wrangel
[Journal of Language and Politics 25:2] 2026
► pp. 194–214

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‘A resilient Europe’?

The representation of European society in the national recovery and resilience plans

ORCiD logo with link | University of Milano-Bicocca
Published online: 5 January 2026
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.25092.col
Abstract
In recent years, the concept of resilience has rapidly proliferated across the social sciences and policy domains, with evolving and often ambiguous meanings. Drawing on critical discourse analysis as a theoretical and methodological framework, this paper investigates how resilience is conceptualised in the European Union’s National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs), introduced following the COVID-19 pandemic. I demonstrate how the representation of a ‘resilient Europe’ functions ideologically, naturalising economic priorities while marginalising social diversity. The concept is deployed strategically to frame crises as opportunities for growth, thus obscuring systemic inequalities. I argue that NRRPs discursively construct an ethnocentric vision of Europe around a colour-blind logic that excludes racial and ethnic minorities. The analysis reveals that the resilience discourse aligns with neoliberal and exclusionary governance structures that reinforce existing power relations.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Resilience as strategic discourse
  • 3.Background: The pandemic crisis and the national recovery and resilience plans
  • 4.Theoretical and methodological approach
  • 5.The use of the term ‘resilience’ in the corpus: An overview
  • 6.The (non)definition of resilience
  • 7.The emerging representation of a ‘resilient Europe’
  • 8.Conclusion
  • References
References (81)
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