Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article offers a poststructuralist analysis of the role of the European Union (EU) in the dialogue between Kosovo and Serbia by employing the works of Jean Baudrillard. Drawing from the content and discourse analysis of texts – policy documents, speeches, statements – as well as 14 interviews conducted in Kosovo, Serbia and the EU, the article is framed to explore how the EU assert power in this dialogue. It suggests that the EU simulates its power, firstly by denying its own role in the process and secondly by exaggerating the European future for Kosovo and Serbia. Observing how the dialogue produced ambiguities in which meanings are relativized, the article suggests that Baudrillard's framework can be useful in understanding and problematizing certain aspects of the nature of EU's power and its effects.

The EU-facilitated dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina has been hailed as a major achievement for the European Union's (EU) foreign policy as well as for the 'European future' of Kosovo and Serbia, since it started in 2011. Looking at EU discourse – speeches, statements and press releases – this article problematizes the logic of the dialogue, its aims in the process and its outcomes. Using the framework of 'recontextualization', developed by Van Leeuwen and Wodak, we explore how the EU is substituting elements of the dialogue and adding elements that are not intrinsic to the process, which then create ambiguities which we problematize. We argue that ambiguities are not limited merely to the outputs of the dialogue, such as agreements, but they also obscure the very meaning of the dialogue for the EU, for Kosovo and Serbia, as well as for EU's relations with both countries.