RECON Online Working Paper 2008/19

Next to states and established international organisations, the European Union is emerging as an actor in the realm of international conflict management. Has the media in the EU Member States reflected this change? Our study reveals that the EU, despite its limited institutional capacity in external security affairs, is present in media coverage on international conflict management. Awareness of EU institutions and other EU Member States has increased over time. This pattern is evident in all selected EU Member States, whereas it is considerably less pronounced in the US. The findings point to an appropriate media perception of EU foreign and security policy and to an emerging European problem-solving community. The study is based on a systematic content and corpus-linguistic analysis of a large data set encompassing 16 years of mass media coverage of humanitarian and military interventions in Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, the UK and the US.