PEACE AND ITS CHANGING NATURE DURING WWII. ROMANIAN DISCURSIVE INSIGHTS ON A NEW PROJECT FOR EUROPE
PEACE AND ITS CHANGING NATURE DURING WWII. ROMANIAN DISCURSIVE INSIGHTS ON A NEW PROJECT FOR EUROPE

Summary/Abstract: Public discourse both in Western European countries and in the emergent states of Central and Eastern Europe is built around the repertoire of peace. This paper aims at investigating the changing vs. unchanging nature of the discursive repertoire of peace as central point of a new project for Europe, starting from Romanian corpora confronting two opposite discursive conjunctures: Operation Barbarossa (22 June 1941), when Germany (seconded by Romania and the other Axis powers) attacked the Soviet Union and the moment when Romania switched sides to join the Allies (23 August 1944). Methodologically, the paper uses both content and discourse analysis applied to the total number of opinion pieces published by two newspapers in the periods between June and July 1941 and respectively, August and September 1944: Timpul and Universul. The main conclusion is that while the discourse about peace remains fundamental for the European construction until today, its changing evolution is grounded on the repertoire born during WWII. Moreover, the two selected newspapers, which were forbidden by the communist regime soon after the Peace Conference in Paris, mirror the Romanian vision of the era on the place and role of Eastern Europe within the post-war new project for Europe.

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