Turn the Other Greek. How the Eurozone Crisis Changes the Image of Greeks and What Visual Representations of Greeks Tell Us about European Identity
Turn the Other Greek. How the Eurozone Crisis Changes the Image of Greeks and What Visual Representations of Greeks Tell Us about European Identity

Summary/Abstract: This article analyses the discursive practices of political cartoons and their contribution to the construction of Greek and European identities in light of the European sovereign debt crisis. The goal of this article is to assess the emergence of Greeks as a significant Other to Europe and its implications for European identity. To this end, the article develops a theoretico-methodological framework that brings together theories of identity as a process and a project, and a discourse analysis/iconology methodology tailored to political cartoon research. The article first tests for the existence of a Europe-wide discourse of the crisis and the Greeks, using qualitative methodology. Once the existence of such a discourse is established, the article goes on to examine the contents of this discourse, concluding that a Greek Other has indeed emerged through a process of differentiation, and continues to search for common interpretive frames and shared meanings that would point towards a common European identity. The political cartoon data sample comes from these countries: Austria, France, Slovakia and the United Kingdom.

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