1. Hermeneutic Encounterns and the EU’s Communication Strategy: Citizenship and the European Narrative
Hannes Hansen-Magnusson

2. Problem: Multiple deficits
Deficient “citizenship practice”:
Entitlement to rights
Access to rights
Legal identity
Belonging
Euroscepticism:
Loss of identity
Loss of status
Effect:
Declining order?
Long-term viability threatened?
Citizenship practice: a problem of understanding

3. Constructivism Critical Constructivism
Meaning intersubjectively generated
Communication as process
Subject positions
legal & cultural validity (dual quality)
Different types of norms
Contestation

4. Hermeneutics
Hans-Georg Gadamer: Normative order as a continuous process of understanding
“fusion of horizons” – unsurpassable resource of “Being”, subject position
Prejudice: resource for understanding, facilitates rhetoric
Subjective meaning A1
understanding B1
Meaning-in-use: transposition into speech or writing A2 (symbolic coding)
Meaning-in-use: transposition into speech/writing/ meaningful action B2 (symbolic coding)
message
Ill. 1: Normative order as emerging from an interactive process of understanding

5. Understanding-in-use
Central Motif
Rules of Framing
Concise terminology that encompasses repeatedly occurring argumentative structures, positionings, models, etc.
Contain rules of discourse: what can be expressed and how, which alternatives are foreclosed?
Attentional plain
Focus
Interaction
Positioning of roles represented in the text/speech; constellation of roles towards each other; characteristic features
Syntax
Grammatical features that present the object via recourse of selected linguistic rules, thereby creating mental representations of the object while excluding alternatives
Semantics
Lexic of text/speech: vocabulary and type of language that structures mental representations
Narrative gestalt
Reoccurring patterns of the text; rhetorical strategy or plot

6. Some preliminary findings
Interaction
Triangular relation between Commission, Member States & Citizens
Commission: knowledgeable, need for “immediate experience”
Citizens hindered by insufficient capacity
Syntax
Simplicity & clarity
Address “all walks of life”
Semantics
Citizens as humanized entity: ontologizing citizenship
Empathic Commission, saviour
Managerial rhetoric
Narrative gestalt
‘immediate experience’ needed – “closing the gap”
Citizenship deficit manageable (curable)
Central Motif
Rules of Framing
Spectre of Enlightenment
Functionality & rationality