When the margins impact on the centre: YouTube videos on displacement as conflicting constructions of the European identity
Abstract
Europe has many meanings, and there are many approaches to understanding Europe. Even when common sense often points to its material characteristics, such as a land mass or the people living in this territory, the many contingencies and ambiguities - even at this material level - raise questions about how Europe is discursively constructed.
This chapter foregrounds a discourse-theoretical perspective, inspired by Laclau and Mouffe's (1985) discourse theory, which is then used in a documentary case study. Two episodes of the documentary series Along the Borders of Turkey, produced and broadcast by the Dutch public broadcaster VPRO, are studied, focussing on Cyprus and Greece, two countries that demarcate European borders and their complexities in specific ways and invite a reflection on European identity and its contingencies.
The chapter is interested to see how these episodes contribute to particular constructions of Europeanity, via a dual problematization of Europe's margins and Europe's constitutive outsides - in this case, enacted by Turkey. These episodes reveal, in particular, the tensions and contradictions caused by different migration flows - with bodies considered 'strange to Europe' and coming from/through Europe's 'margins', crossing its permeable borders and entering European territory.
Migration flows thus provide ample opportunity to better understand how particular articulations of the Europeanity discourse are made visible and get validated and/or discredited.