Knocking at the House with Closed Doors: European Integration in the Ukrainian Public Discourse
Knocking at the House with Closed Doors: European Integration in the Ukrainian Public Discourse

Summary/Abstract: The idea of European integration plays an important role in Ukrainian political discourse. This idea is crucial for a definition of Ukrainian foreign policy preferences and for the construction of Ukrainian national identity. In the Ukrainian context, this idea was found to be primarily constructed in regard to the question of the historical and geopolitical place of Ukraine. Public opinion in general largely reflects the instability in Ukraine-EU relations, as well as the inconsistent European integration policy of the Ukrainian government and the lack of a coherent policy from the side of European Union. This paper focuses on a study of how the European integration was conceptualized and metaphorically presented in the Ukrainian press in the period of 2005 – 2010. Based on the Critical Metaphor Analysis and Conceptual Metaphors approach, we investigate in this paper the main frames and metaphorical representations of Europe and the European integration in Ukrainian media. It can be noticed that the European integration is described in Ukraine with a tension between the two discourses – the discourses of closeness and of openness. The European Neighborhood Policy was created for an opening of the door for Ukraine to Europe and as a ‘road map’ for the Ukrainian way towards the EU. Despite that, for the majority of Ukrainians the EU is still an unrealistic ‘dream’ where doors ‘rather closed’ then opened.

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