The EU on the Web: Self-representations of an Emerging Security Actor

(Anna Maria Johansson, University of Bristol)

In the last decade the profile of the European Union has changed, and the Union has gone from being a primarily civilian power, achieving security and stability through cooperation in non-security issues, such as economic integration, to putting more and more emphasis on developing security structures, practices and discourses. This development can appear puzzling within traditional frameworks, and this paper suggests that on possible fruitful way of understanding the change and the emerging security interests and practices of the Union, is as an identity policy. Seen as such, the development of the security aspect of the Union has importance not only in a strict security sense but also for the future of the Union at large.

This paper will be looking at representations of the EU as a security actor on the internet. It will be investigating how the EU articulates itself as a security actor in cyber space, i.e. on its websites, in order to try to understand what kind of self-image, values and role conceptions the EU wants to convey to the citizens of the Union and the world at large. The paper holds that discursive practices, both linguistic and non-linguistic practices, such as images, construct meaning and identity. One important scene for the EU to convey and construct a common meaning of an emerging security identity, is in communication with its citizens through new, popular, venues such as the internet. Both texts and images on the web-pages will be analysed in order to try to capture the nascent security identity of the union.