A European public sphere based on a common identity in the coverage of the euro crisis? The Cyprus bailout in 2013 and the Greek referendum in 2015 in the Austrian, German, Spanish, French and British press.

This research builds on the extensive research on the Europeanisation of national public spheres. It explores how far newspapers contribute to discursively building a European Public Sphere and a common European identity by spreading shared agendas, values and frames. The research relies on agenda-setting, claims-making and framing theory, as well as on narrative semiotics and two linguistic theories —Government and Binding Theory, and Functional Grammar— that allow for valid, reliable and intersubjective analysis of journalistic texts written in different languages and cultural contexts. Based on a most-different research design, this project studies how fifteen leading British, French, Spanish, German, and Austrian newspapers reported the euro crisis during the Cyprus bailout week in March 2013 and the Greek referendum week between the 1st and the 7th of July 2015. The selected newspapers are tabloids (Kronen Zeitung, Bild, Le Parisien, The Sun), as well as left-liberal (Der Standard, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Le Monde, El País, The Guardian) and liberal-conservative (Die Presse, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Le Figaro, El Mundo, ABC, The Times) quality newspapers from each country. The research universe consists of 4,464 articles: the results rely on the agenda-analysis of the population and the claims-making and semionarrative frame analysis of purposeful samples. The results indicate that the surveyed newspapers contribute to a common European Public Sphere when reporting the critical events but, at the same time, discursively construct national and isolated public spheres when reporting the other issues related to the euro crisis. The results also suggest that the discursive contribution to a shared public sphere and a joint identity varies across countries and across newspapers. Nonetheless, the three analysed British newspapers contribute, in general, less to discursively constructing a shared European Public Sphere and identity than their Austrian, German, Spanish and French counterparts.