The Framing of Serbia’s EU Accession by the British Foreign Office on Twitter
The Framing of Serbia’s EU Accession by the British Foreign Office on Twitter

Summary/Abstract: This article involves a qualitative study of how the British Foreign Office frames its Twitter discourse pertaining to Serbia’s EU accession. The corpus of the study consists of the British Foreign Office’s tweets associated with Serbia within the period of time from 1 January 2015 until 1 May 2016. The tweets have been compiled and analysed qualitatively following the frame analysis methodology described by Entman (1993, 2010). Results of the qualitative analysis of tweets associated with Serbia’s EU accession on the Twitter accounts of the British Foreign Secretary, Minister for Europe and the British Ambassador to Serbia reveal the following conceptual constructs which structure and organise the discursive space of the tweets: ‘Path’, ‘Positive Mood’, ‘UK Support’, ‘Regional Cooperation’, ‘Disappointment’ (only in the Minister for Europe’s tweet) and ‘European Family’ (only in the British Ambassador’s tweet). Data analysis indicates that the corpus of the examined tweets associated with Serbia’s EU accession involves neither instances of Euroscepticism on the part of the Foreign Office, nor conceptual constructs associated with the UK’s possible exit from the European Union. These findings are further presented and discussed in the article.

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