Debating Migration as a Public Problem: National Publics and Transnational Fields [24] 9781433155345

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Camelia Beciu / Malina Ciocea / Irina Diana Madroane / Alexandru I. Carlan: Introduction: Intra-EU Labor Migration and Transnationalism in Media Discourses: A Public Problem Approach
Part 1. Intra-EU Labor Migration in the Media of the Sending Country: Between Instrumentalization and Empowerment
Camelia Beciu / Mirela Lazar: Migration and Country Status: The Rearticulation of Identities Through Media Counter-Discourses
Malina Ciocea / Alexandru I. Carlan: Debating Migration: Diasporic Stances in Media Discourse
Alina Dolea: The Impact of Migration on the Construction of Romania's Country Image: Two Intersecting Public Problems
Part 2. Intra-EU Labor Migration and Deliberative Practices in the Public Sphere
Alexandru I. Carlan / Malina Ciocea: Media Deliberation on Intra-EU Migration: A Qualitative Approach to Framing Based on Rhetorical Analysis
Irina Diana Madroane: Romanian Immigration in the British Newspapers: Engaging Audiences During the Brexit Referendum Campaign
Part 3. Identity Negotiation in the Transnational Field: Agency and Discourse
Irina Diana Madroane: Migrant Identities and Practices in Media Advocacy Campaigns: The Construction of Claims and Audiences
Nicolae Perpelea: Media Hospitality to Diasporactivism and Diasporapathy in the News Community
Camelia Beciu: "Here" and "There": Identity-Building Strategies in Debates with Non-Migrants
Camelia Beciu / Malina Ciocea / Irina Diana Madroane / Alexandru I. Carlan: Final Remarks: Media, Migration, and Transnational Practices
About the Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Debating Migration as a Public Problem

Simon Cottle General Editor Vol. 24

The Global Crises and the Media series is part of the Peter Lang Media and Communication list. Every volume is peer reviewed and meets the highest quality standards for content and production.

PETER LANG

New York  Bern  Berlin Brussels  Vienna  Oxford  Warsaw

Debating Migration as a Public Problem National Publics and Transnational Fields Camelia Beciu, Mălina Ciocea, Irina Diana Mădroane, and Alexandru I. Cârlan, Editors

PETER LANG

New York  Bern  Berlin Brussels  Vienna  Oxford  Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Beciu, Camelia, editor. Title: Debating migration as a public problem: national publics and transnational fields / edited by Camelia Beciu [and three others]. Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2018. Series: Global crises and the media; v. 24 | ISSN 1947-2587 Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018002350 | ISBN 978-1-4331-5534-5 (hardback: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4331-5548-2 (paperback: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4331-5554-3 (ebook pdf) ISBN 978-1-4331-5555-0 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4331-5556-7 (mobi) Subjects: LCSH: Foreign workers—Government policy—European Union countries. | Foreign workers—Government policy—Romania—Case studies. | European Union countries—Emigration and immigration—Government policy. | Romania—Emigration and immigration—Government policy—Case studies. Classification: LCC HD8378.5.A2 D395 2018 | DDC 331.6/2094—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002350 DOI 10.3726/b14216

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council of Library Resources.

© 2018 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006 www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited. Printed in the United States of America

table of contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Intra-EU Labor Migration and Transnationalism in Media Discourses: A Public Problem Approach  Camelia Beciu, Mălina Ciocea, Irina Diana Mădroane, and Alexandru I. Cârlan

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Part 1. Intra-EU Labor Migration in the Media of the Sending Country: Between Instrumentalization and Empowerment Chapter 1. Migration and Country Status: The Rearticulation of Identities Through Media Counter-Discourses Camelia Beciu and Mirela Lazăr Chapter 2. Debating Migration: Diasporic Stances in Media Discourse Mălina Ciocea and Alexandru I. Cârlan

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Chapter 3. The Impact of Migration on the Construction of Romania’s Country Image: Two Intersecting Public Problems Alina Dolea

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Part 2. Intra-EU Labor Migration and Deliberative Practices in the Public Sphere Chapter 4. Media Deliberation on Intra-EU Migration: A Qualitative Approach to Framing Based on Rhetorical Analysis Alexandru I. Cârlan and Mălina Ciocea

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Chapter 5. Romanian Immigration in the British Newspapers: Engaging Audiences During the Brexit Referendum Campaign 139 Irina Diana Mădroane Part 3. Identity Negotiation in the Transnational Field: Agency and Discourse Chapter 6. Migrant Identities and Practices in Media Advocacy Campaigns: The Construction of Claims and Audiences Irina Diana Mădroane

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Chapter 7. Media Hospitality to Diasporactivism and Diasporapathy in the News Community Nicolae Perpelea

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Chapter 8. “Here” and “There”: Identity-Building Strategies in Debates with Non-Migrants Camelia Beciu

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Final Remarks: Media, Migration, and Transnational Practices Camelia Beciu, Mălina Ciocea, Irina Diana Mădroane, and Alexandru I. Cârlan

About the Contributors

Index

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acknowledgments

The studies in this volume are the result of several years of intense research on the topics of intra-EU migration, media and public discourse, and of collaboration with specialists in Romania and abroad, for which we are immensely grateful. Our ideas have taken shape and grown in the course of two projects, funded by the Executive Unit for Financing Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation (UEFISCDI): The phenomenon of workforce migration and the formation of the diasporic public: impact on the public space and institutional practices (2008-2009) and Diaspora in the Romanian political-media sphere. From event to the media construction of public problems (2012-2016). We have had the privilege to exchange views with national and international experts, with colleagues, many of whom are also good friends, and with (now former) PhD students. The exploratory workshop we organized in 2013, Diasporic Identities and Transnational Experiences: From Social Actors to Public Discourses, brought some of them together: Alex Balch, Ekaterina Balabanova, Elena Negrea Busuioc, Irina Culic, Alina Dolea, Nadia Kaneva, Mirela Lazăr, Luciana Răduț-Gaghi, Nicolas Pélissier, John E. Richardson, and Ruth Wodak. We thank them for an inspiring academic event that has furthered the scope of our research and for the collaborations that followed, including a special issue, “Discourse in Transnational Social Fields,” in the Critical

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Discourse Studies Journal. We are deeply grateful to Dana Diminescu, Isabela Fairclough, and Norman Fairclough, for insightful feedback and continued support. We would also like to give special thanks to our contributors, Alina Dolea, Mirela Lazăr, and Nicolae Perpelea. We thank the journals that have given us permission to republish, in a revised form, four of the studies included in the volume: the Romanian Journal of Sociology and the Romanian Journal of Communication and Public Relations. We have also benefitted from the support of the institutes of higher education where we are affiliated: The National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, University of Bucharest, West University of Timișoara, and the Institute of Sociology of the Romanian Academy. We thank our families for all their patience over the past few months, when most of our time has been taken up by work on this volume, and for their confidence.

Funding This work was financed by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS–UEFISCDI [project number PN-II-IDPCE-2011-3-0968] Diaspora in the Romanian Media and Political Sphere. From Event to the Social Construction of Public Problems.

introduction Intra-EU Labor Migration and Transnationalism in Media Discourses: A Public Problem Approach Camelia Beciu, Mălina Ciocea, Irina Diana Mădroane, and Alexandru I. Cârlan

The President1 expressed well and succinctly the desire of the majority of the population when he urged those dissatisfied with the conditions in the country2 to abandon Romania and go to other countries, which could offer them what they wanted. He first wished “safe journey” and “fair wind” to doctors. He then implied that teachers should feel free to follow them, if they were unable to find a second “job” in Romania.3 (“Traian Băsescu, Criticized by the British Press: He Supports the Migration of His Own Citizens”)4

In 2010, in a controversial statement on what was perceived as a problem in Romanian society—rising high-skilled emigration—Traian Băsescu, Romania’s president at the time, asserted that the decision to work abroad, in other European Union member states, made by the youth (and specialists in various fields, in general), was absolutely legitimate, given that the country of origin could not offer them the opportunities they might have in the host countries.5 The president underlined that the absence of economic policies that would encourage professionals to build a career in the country of origin should be acknowledged and assumed by the entire political class. However, in Romania, the president’s statement generated fierce criticism from politicians, NGOs, and opinion leaders, who interpreted it as legitimizing economic migration, an unacceptable stance for a decision-maker. At the same time, the press mediatized negative reactions from migration actors and presented in

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detail the comments on this topic in the international press, for example in receiving states like the UK, where the Romanian president’s statements were linked with the internal public agenda and positions on intra-EU migration. We take this episode to be illustrative of the main aspects and tendencies that concern us in the present volume. First, it is one in a series of contexts and situations, after the fall of communism in Romania (in 1989), that have triggered major public debates on migration. Romania is a state with a growing number of economic migrants, unofficially estimated at 3.5 million in 2017, a trend that has accelerated following the country’s EU accession6 in 2007. Second, in Romania, as a sending country, a range of positionings towards the migrants and ways of identification have been construed in the media and political spheres. They integrate moral, legal, and civic norms, while at the same time being correlated with voices that reveal the public opinion in receiving countries. We look at the Romanian migrants’ intra-EU mobility patterns as processes of transnational migration, “by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement.” (Basch, Glick Schiller, & Szanton Blanc, 2005 [1994], p. 8) These processes and the identities and practices associated with them have often been instrumentalized in the public space, for the purpose of raising other public issues, upholding ideological positions, or (re)producing power hierarchies (Beciu, Mădroane, Ciocea, & Cârlan, 2017). Not only have the media, among other public institutions, construed the actors and dynamics of intra-EU economic migration, but, in this way, they have also symbolically built transnational social fields (Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004), a strategy through which they have renegotiated the position of the sending country as well as their own position, derived from the role of engaged media actors. The point of departure for all the studies included here is the fact that, within the public debates on intra-EU migration in Romania, institutional and non-institutional actors position themselves as actors in the sending country and, simultaneously, in a transnational, European field of relations. A distinctive feature of our work is our interest in such discourses, against the background of what we consider to be emergent transnational(ized) public spaces. We study the Romanian media’s approach to migration in specific European contexts, with implications for both the sending and host countries, and we approach public debates on circular migration that involve the media in Romania and the media in the host countries simultaneously. While our empirical work focuses on Romanian postcommunist society, we believe

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that the theoretical framework, the methodological instruments, and, to an extent, the findings presented here, could contribute to an analysis of other EU member states from the former communist space, with similar patterns of intra-EU migration (Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia, etc.). The volume brings these topics to attention, introducing a perspective that has been less frequently considered: the correlation between the construction of migration as a public problem and the engagement of the sending country as a transnational actor. In this regard, it is interesting to notice that the current studies on media, migration, and diaspora have privileged, methodologically, the perspective of the host country, despite the fact that the literature on international relations, political geography, or political science has generated, over the past fifteen years, numerous conceptualizations of the role of the sending state, but also of non-state actors, in engaging or mobilizing diasporas, as a consequence of what Weinar (2017) calls a rediscovery of emigration (for recent reviews see Cohen, 2017; Dickinson, 2017). Due either to the centrality of the western media in the global media landscape and the visibility thus confered to the topic of migration, or to the position of the researcher in an apparatus of scientific knowledge production, or for other reasons, the object of analysis has been, predominantly, the media in the host country: representations of migration with inclusionary or exclusionary effects, the framing of migration, reconfigurations of practices of media production and consumption due to (new) migrant audiences, etc. As we have pointed out elsewhere (Beciu et al., 2017), a shift in perspective starts from the recognition that, to a certain extent, the media of the sending country cannot be separated from diasporic media consumption, which has been the focus of systematic studies in the media and diaspora field in the last fifteen years. But even this research agenda is typically concerned with the migrants’ engagement with the media as part of their daily routines in the host country (for an overview, see Beciu et al., 2017). A direction challenging the primacy of the host country perspective relies on comparative approaches between sending countries and host countries, investigating, for instance, media framings of migration (Balabanova & Balch, 2010; Balch & Balabanova, 2016). Nonetheless, these complementary approaches remain less influential and disconected from the topic of emigration, which reshaped migration studies in the early 2000s: “The re-introduction of the country-of-origin perspective in the 2000s was an important step in the further development of the migration studies field: migrants, after all, are people who come from somewhere.” (Weinar, 2017)

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Our own research focuses on how media debates on emigration institute a transnational field in which a public problem is articulated, identities are constituted, symbolic missions are attributed to emigrants claimed as “diaspora”, and symbolic exclusions and hierarchies are produced.

Intra-EU Labor Migration: What Is Distinct? Political and Public Contexts Recent literature discusses intra-EU migration7 as a distinct socio-economic phenomenon, which started with the post-1989 dismantling of the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe (Weinar, 2017; see also studies in Anghel & Horváth, 2009). Democratization processes in the CEE countries, correlated with a series of transformations in European policies, have created the premises for emerging forms of labor migration. The precarious economies of countries experiencing the so-called postcommunist transition of the 1990s (a global term for a long period of structural transformations) are among the factors that have influenced the decisions of numerous social groups to look for work in more developed European countries. At the core of this phenomenon were countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Poland, the Czech Republic, or the Baltic states, which became sending countries after decades of restrictive laws on the individuals’ freedom of movement under communism (Anghel & Horváth, 2009). This ongoing type of migration has had its own dynamics, depending on political macro-contexts, such as accession to the European Union, with the forms it took in different countries. After a 10-year long candidacy, Romania became a member state in 2007; all the while, the so-called “European argument”, regarding the desirability and legitimacy of EU membership—developed in the national public sphere or at official European level—strategically structured the public discourse, including the discourse on economic migration, and continues to do so. Seen from this angle, the processes of economic migration and the formation of transnational practices, both bottom up (related to migrants) and top down (related to institutional actors), have been shaped by public regulations and policies on the European labor market. The economic crisis that started in 2008 and the complete lifting of restrictions on the European labor market for Romanians and Bulgarians in 2014 are key moments in the dynamics of labor migration. Last, but not least, the trends and practices of this new migration have been influenced by the constant

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“dialogue” between EU and local actors’ statements, with their distinct stakes, as well as by the evolution of public opinion in the sending and host countries. The social-economic phenomenon of intra-EU migration rests upon cross-border relations, practices, and policies, involving actors from both the European community and the national states concerned. In broad terms, we identify three stages of circular migration in the EU: 1990–2000 (2000 is the year Romania officially begins accession negotiations with the EU), 2000– 2007 (Romania becomes a member state in 2007), and after 2007, taking into consideration the actors and practices of migration, Romania’s accession to the EU, and the evolution of the public/ media discourse on migration.8

Labor Migration after 1990: Emerging Practices of Mobility and Policies While the early 1990s witnessed various forms of migration practices (with migrants seeking individualized ways out of the instability of social and political life in a former communist country, clandestine work practices, migratory networks, and flows of the Roma community), migration after 1994 has been characterized by a rise in economically motivated migration. In this respect, Diminescu discusses Romanian migration by making a distinction between the “temporary and exploratory migrations” in the early 1990s, when, in some cases, migrants “expressed the wish to travel rather than migrate” (2009, p. 49, our translation), as a result of decades of privations in terms of freedom and movement, and the migration for work that developed after 1994, first towards countries in Central and Northern Europe (Germany and France), and, after 1998, mainly towards Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, as well as other destinations, such as Israel, Canada, the U.S., Ireland, and the UK (Diminescu, 2009, p. 50). Economic migration was most often associated with social actors without educational capital and with a low living standard, even below poverty line, who practised “temporary circular and transnational mobility governed by the ebb and flow of economic demand” (Favell, 2008, p. 703), working in the host country for a while and returning to the sending country. The social imaginary fixed the image of seasonal farm workers (“the strawberry pickers”), construction workers, or domestic workers, while cases of illegal emigration were frequent before the year 2000 (Diminescu, 2009). The ethos of circular mobility (“here and there”), as a “pre-condition for transnational social

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practices” (Boccagni, 2012), structured and still structures the migrants’ daily lives and their interactions with non-migrants within a frame of distance-proximity action relative to the sending and host countries. From this point of view, mobility can be understood as a site of identity construction (Easthope, 2009), in connection with multiple temporal and social scales of action and belonging. To this process of identity construction contributes the fact that public positionings on migration also integrate specific meanings of circular mobility (Beciu & Lazăr, 2016). In the public spheres of the sending countries, circular mobility is incorporated into media representations of migrants as social actors, subjects of power relations. However, as the chapters in the present volume demonstrate, the media build homogenized representations of migrants’ mobility patterns, which does not necessarily bring to light the “structural factors and human agency” (Easthope, 2009, p. 62) underlying the processes of migration. The wave of economic migrants after 1994 seems to have been triggered by very diverse factors; among them, hope for professional improvement, disappointment with public policies and political life in general, and the failure of the state to provide appropriate working environments for specialists. Diminescu also delineates as a distinctive feature of the period before 2000 the support for migrants by the civil society in the receiving countries: Each migrant found “her employer,” “her French person,” “her Italian,” “her German friend” who protected her, introduced her to their network, taught her their language, and who possibly paid a visit to her village etc. […] This form of “grassroots” or “underground” social integration remains confined to the European space. (Diminescu, 2009, p. 55, our translation)

Migration is likewise a socially significant form of social integration centered around the village: from the village (the media frequently signals the so-called “depopulation of villages”), as many migrants settle in the receiving countries and “call” friends and relatives who remained in the villages at home to join them, via migratory networks, and towards the village.9 Labor migration received considerable impetus following the introduction of visa waivers for Romanian citizens (starting with January 1, 2002), the right to freedom of movement in the Schengen Area, and, later, Romania’s accession to the EU (January 1, 2007). These significant changes in the Romanian citizens’ free movement in the EU (similar changes were taking place in other former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe) led to the emergence of forms of migration management by the state, through the initiation of a normative framework for protecting the Romanian workers

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abroad (Diminescu, 2009).10 There was growing interest in migrants as providers of money for families left behind and in migration as an option for those in search of higher living standards (for these factors, see Culic, 2008; Diminescu, 2009; Sandu, 2010). After 2007, the state’s actions and policies regarding the status of Romanian citizens working in EU countries have become one of the recurrent themes of public debate, frequently invoked by Romanian journalists, who have usually held the authorities accountable for the whole situation. The decision-makers were interpellated by journalists for their lack of reaction when migrants, Romanian citizens in the host countries, were victims of abuse (violence, exploitation, discrimination, etc.) or were faced with constraints; similarly, the journalists denounced the decision-makers’ reaction towards what they perceived to be general public statements in the host countries, affecting Romanians (for instance, when the collocation “Romanian migrants” was used to refer to illegalities involving Romanian citizens). A shift was noticeable in media discourse, from the denunciation of the Romanian politicians in office for not fulfilling EU requirements, in the pre-accession period, to the denunciation of political elites and media in the host states for discrimination against Romanian migration and of the Romanian authorities for failure to take an official stance in defense of the Romanian citizens’ rights. It is relevant that in a highly sensitive political context, in 2010, during the so-called “Roma crisis in France”, politicians and the government criticized the measures on Roma expulsions taken by the French Government at the time, while also declining responsibility and stressing that “the Roma problem” was, after all, a “European problem” (Europa Liberă, 2010; “Pentru Bucureşti problema romilor din Franța este problema Europei” [“For Bucharest the problem of the Roma in France is Europe’s Problem”]).11 Actually, the Roma’s migratory practices have been constantly debated in the Romanian public space ever since the 90s. The media have given intense visibility to illegal contexts involving representatives of the Roma community in the receiving countries, one of the most sensitive themes of debate being the interchangeable use of the terms Roma/ Romanian.12 In this respect, radical voices have signaled that the media in the receiving countries sometimes fail to show that some illegal actions can be attributed to “Romanian citizens of Roma ethnicity”, and thus discriminate against all the migrants from Romania. This perceived discrimination of Romanian migrants in the public spheres of the countries of destination has often led to a discrimination of the Roma in the Romanian public space. For example, in 2009, a newspaper launched a petition to replace the

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term “Roma” with the derogatory term “țigan” [Gypsy] in official documents, so that “Romanians” would no longer be confused with the “Roma” in the EU countries of destination; the campaign failed because of insufficient public support (Mădroane, 2012).13 On the other hand, self-reflexive positions, critical of such derailments, have also taken shape in the Romanian public discourse, but are still marginal (see Beciu et al., 2017). In 2008, at the onset of the economic crisis, the preoccupation for the situation and status of Romanian migrants in European host countries, noticeable in policies and public discourses, started being integrated into the construction of other arguments, which became stronger over the following years, as the recession worsened. In the political and media discourse, migrants were represented as actors of “negative trends” that concerned the flows of migration, the rate of unemployment in the host countries and, generally, the economic decline in these countries, to which anti-migration policies were added. Moreover, in the Romanian public discourse, the economic impact of the crisis on workforce migration was viewed as a perturbing factor for the status of the sending country within the European economic space (see Beciu and Lazăr in this volume). The decrease in the sums remitted by migrants during the economic crisis, visible in the span 2009–2012,14 was reflected in the media on a note of concern, accompanied by a recognition of the migrants’ efforts, bestowed with a heroic status, and by a critical positioning towards the Romanian state, accused of “lack of economic vision” in lifting the country out of recession (Mădroane, 2016, p. 235). The migrants’ financial remittances have always been an important resource not only for the Romanian economy, but also for education, healthcare, and other categories of social assistance that, according to Cingolani (2009, p. 183), the Romanian state in transition transferred to families, without even officially recognizing the migrants’ contribution, for a long time. In the years of negotiations for Romania’s EU accession, 3 percent of the GDP came from remittance money (Diminescu, 2009, p. 56). The year 2005 can be considered evidence of the Romanian migrants’ insertion in the EU labor market, notes Dumitru Sandu (2010, p. 15), due to a spectacular increase in remittances, by 35 times in comparison with the previous years. Remittances are not, however, only financial; they include the social capital, values, and practices that migrants circulate across borders (Levitt, 2001). Romanian migrants are agents of social change in their communities of origin, who have the capacity to bring about a transformation of mentalities and a sense of civic participation, still at an early stage in these communities (Anghel, 2009; Bădescu, Stoian, & Tănase, 2009).

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After 2010, the migration of professionals such as doctors and engineers became more visible—the press even coined the term “the doctors’ exodus” (for doctors’ migration, see Popa & Lucheș, 2014; Saghin, Lucheș, & Marici, 2016). This trend was consolidated following the full liberalization of the labor market in the EU, in 2014, for Romanians and Bulgarians. The contrast between high-skilled and low-skilled migration policies (Triandafyllidou & Isaakyan, 2016) is manifest in the vastly different experiences of migration of these two broad categories. At the same time, discourses on migrants vary widely along the skilled/ unskilled dichotomy. For instance, in the context of the lifting of restrictions for Bulgarian and Romanian migrants in the UK, in 2014, the British tabloids announced a so-called “invasion” of Romanians. Romanian journalists reacted by positioning themselves against these “frames”, invoking the large number of Romanian specialists who contributed to the British economy, even before liberalization. With these socio-political developments, circular mobility takes much more individualized forms, indicating different professional-contractual and familial practices (see studies in Anghel & Horváth, 2009; Sandu, 2010). Return to the sending country becomes a ritual on special occasions, such as celebrations, holidays, events. At present, labor migration continues to be a goal for all kinds of social categories, especially for young people, which brings to the attention of policy-makers the need for specific policies to encourage the return of Romanian migrants or reduce the intensity of the phenomenon. This objective gives even more salience to the institutionalization of the relationship between the state and migrants (Levitt & de la Dehesa, 2003), expressed in various forms of engaging the diaspora, a process that started even before Romania’s accession to the EU. From governmental agencies to political and legislative structures (such as The Department of Policies for Relations with Romanians Abroad, the Minister Delegate for Relations with Romanians Abroad), several types of political mechanisms and practices have been developed in order to “govern diasporas” and reproduce a “diasporic discourse” (Ragazzi, 2009, p. 379), as part of a “new, reconstituted, and distinctive arena of political practice” (Laguerre, 2013, p. 98). As a transnational practice by definition, remittances have sparked complex debates in the Romanian media, around moral duty to families and country, family sacrifice, and the price paid by the children and the elderly “left behind,” solidarity with non-migrants (and, hence, the possibility of building transnational civic communities), and instrumentalization of the migrants by the Romanian state, in its attempts to engage with the diaspora as an agent of development (Mădroane, 2016). Importantly,

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political remittances turn the diaspora into an agent of civic change, as the debates around the vote, discussed here, demonstrate. As Chikanda, Crush, and Walton-Roberts’ recent study (2016) shows, “the diasporic discourse” of governments sees diasporic communities as homogeneous, ignoring their socio-cultural diversity and the fact that not all migrants acknowledge their belonging to those communities or to other categories of practice. Meanwhile, authors with a critical approach to the strategies initiated by the sending state in order to engage the diaspora, which is seen as instrumental in dealing with the challenges of the migration-development nexus, emphasize that the neoliberal mindset informing these strategies necessarily requires a differentiated targeting of the diaspora. This produces a discriminatory separation between the “courted diaspora”, which, due to its various forms of capital, can constitute an agent of development, and the “neglected emigrants”, disenfranchised on account of their gender, class, race, ethno-religious heritage, or time of emigration (Dickinson, 2017; Ho, 2011; Koh, 2015). As Nir Cohen puts it: …forced to maintain a competitive edge in the global economy, both developing and developed countries are drawn into a global race for talent […], which by and large entails the claiming and mobilization of skills harbored only by some of their nationals abroad. […] Additionally, because states and aid organizations value certain forms of development more than others, it is particular types of skilled diasporic members that are identified and drawn upon. […] By now, it is well established that strategies are discriminatory structures, which reinforce existing—and produce new—forms of inequality among diaspora members (and those who are not) with respect to ethnic, race, class, and gender relations. (Cohen, 2017, p. 5)

In fact, the discrepancy might be explained by the difference between particular actions and strategies of diaspora engagement originating with sending state or non-state actors, on the one hand, and discourses legitimizing such actions for the citizens at home, which render the diaspora homogeneous. This way of representing the diaspora in governmental discourses can be consolidated and legitimized, or, on the contrary, dislocated, when the topic of “engaging the diaspora” is reproduced in specific forms in media discourse and other types of public discourse. In this context, political and media actors have also (re)produced negative stereotypes and clichés about migrants from marginal social areas or with different ethnic backgrounds, in particular the Romanian Roma, who have often been blamed for damaging Romania’s image abroad; gradually, discourses deconstructing these claims have emerged, but are less well-established (Beciu et al., 2017). In Romania, this constant interplay between the

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political/ governmental discourses and other public stances regarding the role and status of the diaspora in the context of labor migration has created a certain public perception of the diaspora as “a category of mobilization” (Sinatti & Horst, 2015, p. 137), that is, as an actor-resource for the national “we”.

Labor Migration—From Social Imaginary to Public Problem What we are trying to demonstrate in this book is that “the new diaspora”, the go-to term in public discourse for the actors of intra-EU migration, indicates a category of practice, namely, a new social and political actor involved in the current development of society. The regular contact between migrants and their communities of belonging, as well as the intense public visibility of migration-related aspects, have contributed to the public perception of labor migration as an everyday reality, and of migration actors as referential for the identity construction of non-migrants. The “us” versus “them” or “us” and “them” relationships in the non-migrants’ positionings reveal the coexistence of forms of solidarity, inclusion, and exclusion. In Romania, this type of migration has become at the same time (1) a society theme incorporated in the imaginary of everyday life, (2) a theme on the permanent media (and political) agenda, and (3) a public problem, producing modes of engagement and policies. The naturalization of this new social situation relies, among other things, on categories of language by means of which public discourse has pinpointed problems created by migration: “the orphans of migration” (referring to the children of migrant families left behind in the host country, who see their parents several times a year, upon the ritualistic return of parents)15; “the doctors’ exodus” (pointing to the massive migration of Romanian doctors to other European countries and the deepening crisis in the health system),16 “the engineers’ exodus”17; “the young people’s exodus” (signaling the massive migration of various categories of young people)18; “the brain exodus” (the specialists’ migration); “the Romanian slaves” (referring to the dramatic situation of Romanian women aggressed at work in host countries)19; “the new migration” (a term initially used quite frequently by the Romanian press to label the actors of circular economic migration, which, over time, saw other layers of meaning attached to new or atypical migration phenomena)20; “the return of the diaspora” (after 2014, the Romanian media and politicians have often tackled the problem of public policies that are necessary to make the

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return appealing to Romanian migrants)21; “the social and economic bombs” (with reference to the demographic decline caused by economic migration).22 The magnitude of economic migration is revealed by the press through a specific discursive practice, when it calls inhabitants of various regions in Romania “the Spaniards”, “the Italians”, “the Germans”, thus emphasizing the massive migration from those regions.23 These newly coined phrases are reproduced in both media discourse and the discourse of other public actors, and in specific debates around political and social events in the sending and host countries. What results is a repertoire of recurring discursive themes and practices of attracting public attention that define, categorize, and interpret the processes of economic migration. We will refer here to three significant examples for the Romanian public space. The first example is about the way the media and other public discourses discuss and emphasize a specific trait of Romanian labor migration, the feminization of migration, meaning that in certain periods—for instance, in the late 90s, the women were the first to migrate, followed (or not) by the men in the family, a fact that marks a redefinition of the woman’s status and role in the family. The media constantly provide news about the difficult working conditions or the abuse faced by women in unqualified jobs (especially agriculture and farming), often in illegal conditions, or by women who do not even get to work, becoming victims of delinquents or traffickers. Many of these news stories are based on articles and reports presented by the media in the receiving countries.24 The symbolic construction of feminine migration in the media is articulated around categories such as care workers for the elderly (badanti in Italian, considered a derogatory word),25 farm workers, domestic workers, women in sales, “transnational grandmothers”, who look after their daughters’ children in the receiving countries, so that the mothers can work (Cingolani, 2009, p. 185), or marginal categories, such as prostitutes. Starting from images/ representations of Romanian women as social actors of migration, the media legitimize at the same time a representation of migration as a sphere of inequality and social discrimination (affective-compassionate rhetoric is used, and words such as “exploitation”, “slavery”, “drama” are current in the media discourse). The dramatic circumstances of women in the receiving countries are appropriated by the media from the perspective of a transnational field of power relations that includes not only the migrant women, but also “us”, as a national community.26 On the other hand, the fact that in the context of migration many women are forced to leave their families for a longer or shorter period of time has generated a series of social problems, extensively

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signaled by the media in reports, news, documentaries, or even campaigns. Social problems such as the break-up of families, the children left at home, psychologically affected by the absence of the mother, or the ageing parents are the object of media campaigns and social campaigns (see Mădroane’s chapter “Migrant Identities and Practices in Media Advocacy Campaigns” in this volume), being thus acknowledged as public problems. The second example is the debate on the so-called “diaspora vote”, whether it makes sense to introduce the vote by postal ballot for Romanians working abroad. In Romania, a bill proposal regulating the diaspora vote was first mentioned after the presidential elections in 2009, when this vote was considered to play a decisive role in Traian Băsescu’s victory (Lafleur, 2013; see also Beciu’s chapter “‘Here’ and ‘There’ Identity-Building Strategies in Debates with Non-Migrants” in this volume). Afterwards, in electoral or referendum contexts, the stakes of the debate were reinforced and expanded to address the way governments create conditions for the diaspora vote, even touching on the political options of the diaspora and its capacity to influence the voting results and the political game in general (the “diaspora vote” meaning how the diaspora votes in terms of political options).27 The above-average turnout of citizens from the diaspora in the 2014 elections, the consistent option for certain candidates, which overturned the score back home, and the solidarity demonstrations to support the diaspora vote (in the case of insufficient polling stations, which the media and the opposition presented as the authorities’ deliberate attempt to hinder the diaspora from exercising their right to vote) have transformed the diaspora into a category associated publicly with the electoral context. Therefore, the debate and related controversies concerned the “diaspora” as a collective actor that is the object of power relations in electoral circumstances.28 The third example points to another dominant debate in the Romanian public space, focused on the role of migrants in building a positive international image of the sending country. The media have constantly offered visibility to the migrants’ actions in the host countries, interpreting them as resources for the nation’s symbolic capital (Beciu, 2012; Beciu & Lazăr, 2014), which can also be seen as a type of remittance (Mădroane, 2016). They have built categories of migrants (those who became integrated into the host countries and managed to perform professionally or be known in local communities vs. the vulnerable ones, who fell victim to abuse, or those involved in criminal acts) and have defined migration as a public problem from the perspective of the impact these categories have on the country’s image. In the

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context of these debates, the concept of “nation branding” was developed, with media, politicians, and opinion leaders underlining the necessity to identify a brand capable of situating the country in an advantageous position in an international field of competing relations. Moreover, a series of governmental projects were initiated, which were controversial from the perspective of the cultural relevance of the campaigns selected to promote the country (see Alina Dolea’s chapter “The Impact of Migration on the Construction of Romania’s Country Image” in this volume). On the other hand, the debate on the Romanian migrants’ actions in the host countries has fostered another debate on collective identities. The migrants’ success or failure has been associated with the incapacity of the political class and the national community alike to ascribe value to high-flying Romanians (migrants and non-migrants) in the sending country. In this way, the media have reproduced a discourse critical of policy-makers, but also of the national community (self-critical), which instituted a collective responsibility towards the migrants and, in general, towards those who contribute (or not) to the country image, one way or another. Thus, the problem of migration has been appropriated from the perspective of identity logics, related to a marketization of identity or to an essentialization of identity even in a context where the goal is to create collective solidarity. These are a few examples of how practices of instrumentalization of migration actors have been used in public discourse. These debates are equally relevant for the way migration has been constructed as a public problem, through reframing, to reflect the current agenda and the recurrent themes in the public space. As Cefaï (1996) notes, public problems are not a given, “they become a problem through selection and focalization, argumentation and dramatization, which raises them to a certain ‘degree of generality’, gives them the weight of reality or legitimacy.” (Cefaï, 1996, p. 54, our translation) Firstly, starting from the dynamics of migration, the media have initiated debates on problems that have gone beyond the socio-economic area of migration, such as the country’s reputation and status in a transnational political field, the efficiency of political systems and the policy-makers’ responsibility, the state of society, or the relationship between citizens and institutions, between voters and politicians. Generally, in the context of these debates, the press and TV channels specialized in news and political debates, with an engaged media discourse, based on the journalist’s interpretive and adversarial role, have reproduced the power relationship of “us” (the society, the citizen) versus “them” (politicians).

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Secondly, the reframing of migration as a public problem has highlighted the positionings of participants in the debates, as actors in a transnational field (“us” relative to the media and political leaders in the host countries, “us” relative to migrants, the declarations of the European leaders, etc.). This positioning (an identitarian “us” in a transnational field), as an “ideological habit” (Billig, 1995, p. 6), has contributed to the reproduction of migration as a daily reality and a society problem, but also to the production of normative stances concerning the public interest in terms of policies, political action, and public engagement.

Migration and the Discursive Construction of Public Problems. Main Research Goals Our chief goal is to identify empirical sites and methodological tools for approaching (1) how migration has been constructed in the Romanian public space as a public problem (in other words, how social actors have highlighted some aspects of migration that require governmental/ collective action and mobilized values and modes of engagement); (2) how the media, migrants, non-migrants, and political leaders have positioned themselves as actors in a transnational field, in the construction of the public problem. What types of problems directly or indirectly related to migration are brought to the fore in host and sending countries? How do deliberation practices coexist with strategies of instrumentalization of migration? How do the media use the theme of inclusion/ exclusion of the diaspora in their engagement with matters of public concern? We believe that the investigation of changes and developments in public debates could contribute to the understanding of “the importance of temporality in transnational dynamics” (Lacroix, 2016, p. 183). In this sense, the identification of discursive patterns on migration in the public sphere has to be correlated with an analysis of the conditions in which these patterns come into being: within debates and controversies, through narratives and reoccurring frames, strategies and arenas of captivating and mobilizing publics, depending on macro-contexts, local contexts, and agendas. We approach transnationalism as a “potential attribute of social relations,” following Boccagni (2012, p. 41), according to whom migrant cross-border practices “emerge as selective and dynamic attributes,” having “mutable degrees of intensity, prevalence, frequency, persistency” (p. 43), likely to be activated in space, through “the resources being circulated in-between,” and

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in time, through “fluid and mutable” ties (p. 41). Levitt and Glick Schiller (2004) stress that the relations that migrants develop and reproduce via networks and structures take shape through the migrants’ repositionings in the transnational social field: Most migrants move from a place where the state has relatively little power within the global interstate system to a more powerful state. At the same time, many migrants gain more social power, in terms of leverage over people, property, and locality, with respect to their homeland than they did before migrating. It is this complex intersection between personal losses and gains that any analysis of power within transnational social fields must grapple with. (Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004, p. 1014)

Therefore, the analysis of how power relations are formed in the transnational field should turn its attention to the symbolic struggles that inform social relations, such as “constant adjustment and negotiation of their [the migrants’] status in their different social spheres, both in the sending and receiving countries” (Lacroix, 2014, p. 187). In this volume, we look into an aspect that has not yet been widely researched: the reconfiguration of the ways that both the migrants’ status and “the image of a transnational social field of power relations” (Beciu et al., 2017, p. 260) are negotiated in the media sphere. As a consequence, the most salient premise that we adopt in this work is that transnationalism becomes, to a certain extent, structural in setting the public agenda (and the issue of labor migration in the EU is a good example) and in public debates. In this respect, the analyses in the volume focus on the media discourse on migration as a public problem through (1) the dynamics of media representations on migrants, (2) positionings, and (3) forms of engagement towards migrants and migration as a problem of public interest.

Media and Migration: Research Trends The field of media and migration has generated a notable literature, including seminal works that study transnational media (Bailey, Georgiou, & Harindranath, 2007; Brüggemann & Schulz-Forberg, 2009; Chalaby, 2005; Shumow, 2012), diasporic media/ diasporic television (Ogunyemi, 2015), or the “globalization and media flows” (Christensen, 2013, p. 2400), so as to illustrate how these kinds of media produce an agenda of and for the diaspora, by relying on specific journalistic practices and audience consumption practices. Many of these studies demonstrate the role of the transnational media in the production of alternative media spaces of representation, connection, and

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engagement of diasporic audiences. Some authors, like Budarick (2014), consider, however, that current analyses should not dissociate the transnational/ diasporic media from the non-diasporic media, precisely in order to avoid reproducing a schematic understanding of the diaspora, as “determined by ethnicity, dispersal and nostalgia” (p. 143), and an equally schematic understanding of the role of the media in relation to diasporic communities: Examining different forms of media highlights the diversity and unpredictability of the relationship between media and diasporic community and the way in which forms of media engagement that correspond to a diasporic frame of experience are contextualised by media use that is non-diasporic. Just as media can play an active role in forging transnational solidarities, so too can they offer resources for imaginings of different identities and alternative communities. (Budarick, 2014, p. 149)

In this volume, we develop this assumption, by highlighting the role of the Romanian media not only in producing agendas on intra-EU migration, but also in incorporating the transnational into the everyday space of communication and debate through the mediation of migrants’ transnationalism. Thus, the media have taken on an active role, engaging in the deconstruction of stereotypical interpretations of Romanian migrants in EU member-states, while constructing other simplified images to take their place. Another category of studies in media and migration deals with the transnational actors’ self-reflexive positioning, identity, and agency, built through practices of media consumption (Aksoy & Robins, 2000; Bonini, 2011). Starting from the media practices of ethnic communities, refugees, families, and individuals, these studies situate transnational actors within spaces of “diasporic life” in order to highlight the “complex relations between identity, community and the media” (Bailey et al., 2007, p. 28), through which transnational actors appropriate their everyday life and “diasporic status.” The main focus is on the ways migrants use the media both as “home-making tools” (Bonini, 2011) and as part of their agency. One of the most significant research directions is concerned with media practices and discourses on migration. Two chief research areas can be distinguished: the first has to do with journalistic practices regarding “the news-making production on immigration issues” (Gemi, Ulasiuk, & Triandafyllidou, 2012), especially on television (Santa Ana, 2016). The second area is interested in media as discourse, namely, media as a site of representation, debate, and “space for the participation of migrants and minorities in a public sphere where they can advance their interests and identities” (Bleich,

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Bloemraad, & de Graauw, 2015, p. 859). Applying content analysis, frame analysis, or discourse analysis, numerous studies examine critically the role of the media in: the misrepresentation of migrant “voices” (Alonso Belmonte, McCabe, & Chornet-Roses, 2010; Wodak, 2010); the production of dominant frames on migration (Balch & Balabanova, 2011, 2016; Vliegenthart & Roggeband, 2007); the persistence of white racism in the media discourse on ethnic minorities and in media production practices, adapted as they are to the “changing” realities of postmodern societies (Cottle, 2000); the negotiation of cultural identities in ethnic and transnational media reception (Cottle, 2000; Georgiou, 2012). As noted earlier, these studies take as research object especially the media in the host countries, identifying particularities of media discourse over significant time spans, but without correlating them with the dynamics of transnational and local contexts in the sending or receiving states, or discussing them in depth. Likewise, there are fewer studies on the media as a platform for debating migration and for the production of public space. On this last subject, Bleich et al. (2015) note the potential of “claims making research,” focusing “on how groups are able to participate as actors in the mediatised public sphere, and the factors that affect their claims, extending a longstanding interest in migrants’ and minorities’ political participation to a new arena of the public sphere” (p. 864). Balch and Balabanova (2016) follow this emergent trend in research, which analyzes intra-EU migration from the perspective of “the quality of the debate” (p. 33), looking at the arguments in the media debates in the UK in 2006 (when the controversy regarding the Labour Government’s policy on migration intensifies) and in 2013, the year prior to the lifting of restrictions on the British labor market for Romanians and Bulgarians. Relying on an analysis of ethical frames in the British press, their research shows the salience of certain types of arguments and narratives about the negative consequences of immigration, in a context in which the debates had become increasingly narrower. This finding confirms the importance of studying the role of the media in constructing the debate on migration, through a pluralist understanding of contexts and actors’ positionings: A public sphere that features a broader range of arguments based upon a wider spectrum of values, not simply a cost/ benefit understanding of immigration, has the potential to mitigate monopolization by a particular perspective or narrative. The evolution of press coverage over Romanian and Bulgarian migration should warn us of the political difficulties for tomorrow when the more difficult arguments are overlooked today. (Balch & Balabanova, 2016, p. 33)

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We expand this line of research, taking as a point of departure the ways in which the sending country media construct migration as a public problem. Investigating the media both as actors and arenas of visibility and debate, the studies in this volume highlight how the topic of migration has been incorporated into the definition of problems that “concern us”. This contextualized and historicist approach of media practices (Christensen, 2013) could be a valuable framework for the media and public space scholarship: it provides ways of understanding how participation, engagement, claimsmaking, advocacy stances, and accountability are enacted in and by the media. We favor the concept of public problem, starting from the sociology of public problems (Boltanski, 2004; Cefaï, 1996, 2013; Gusfield, 1981; Thévenot, 2007)29 and the discursive analysis of the public space (Chouliaraki, 2008; Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012). Public problems reveal a process of symbolic negotiation of the definitions and interpretations of socially problematic situations and phenomena, which are considered to necessitate collective action and public policies. According to Cefaï (1996), in this symbolic process the interpretations of social actors need to answer a series of fundamental questions, such as “who”, “what”, “what for”, “with whom”, “against whom”, “how”, “when”, “where”, “with what right”, “for what interests”, “with what consequences” (Cefaï, 1996, p. 55, our translation). Therefore, the intervention of decision-makers and, hence, institutions, is only the final stage in a long process of publicization (Cefaï, 2013) of public problems, in which various “entrepreneurs of a cause” compete in “definitional struggles” (Gilbert & Henry, 2012, our translation) to impose a specific understanding of a problem and attribute responsibility. As Gusfield states (1981), “public problems have a shape which is understood in a larger context of a social structure in which some versions of ‘reality’ have greater power and authority to define and describe that ‘reality’ than do others” (p. 13). The appropriation of public problems relies, thus, on a dynamic of definitions and arguments and, accordingly, on a dynamic of contending actors (the media included), and of arenas of conflict and negotiation. This line of research highlights the formation of arenas of visibility and debate constituted around a public problem and their transformation, triggered by competing interpretations/ positionings. Within the media and public space scholarship, a research trend has developed, by the integration of fundamental concepts into the sociology of public problems, such as “suffering at a distance” (Boltanski, 2004). Seminal works (Chouliaraki, 2006, 2008; Höijer, 2004; Joye, 2010; Scott, 2014) examine

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how the media produce the “emotional engagement” (Höijer, 2004, p. 513) of audiences, by reporting on human suffering. Chouliaraki (2008) is preoccupied with the “symbolic power of transnational media” in the formation of “cosmopolitan communities of emotion and action” (p. 346), and explores “the capacity of the media to selectively combine resources of language and image in order to present distant suffering as a cause of emotion, reflection and action for Western media audiences” (p. 329). Other researchers (Scott, 2014) examine, “within a broader understanding of the moral role of the media” (Scott, 2014, p. 18), how audiences respond to the mediation of distant suffering. In essence, the mediation of human suffering creates the potential conditions for the (emotional, ethical, civic) engagement of audiences, in other words, for the formation of a public around a problem of public concern that is not reduced to the national community. In this book, we take further the integration of the concept of public problem into media and migration studies, by investigating the discursive negotiation in media (and political) discourses of forms of responsibility and engagement with what at one point might be considered a matter of public interest (what normative positions are deemed relevant in the debate, who carries responsibility, and how public action can be initiated). The empirical analyses in this volume delineate “definitions” and discursive patterns on migration from the perspective of modes of engagement produced by the media (including critical media stances); at the same time, we show how these practices of problematization of migration are transformed in relation to the positioning of the media in a transnational social field. In some public spheres, for example in Romania, the media appropriate the role of actors in the transnational field both explicitly, by assuming an interpretive role, and indirectly, by reproducing some of the migrants’ contexts of visibility. In this way, the analyses avoid the separation between studies about sending and host countries that some authors, like Waterbury (2010), take as an analytical and methodological obstacle to understanding the “transnational engagement” of the sending countries towards migrants and their integration “into the homeland state political community” (p. 132). This perspective highlights the dynamics of media discourse in various contexts, both of maximum debate intensity and “regular” ones. It is an essential aspect, given that the theme of intra-EU migration is on the permanent agenda in home and destination states confronted with massive migratory flows, and is likely to capture the public attention in the long term.

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Discourse, Public Problems, Transnational Fields The approach we take to the study of transnational migration as a public problem and, in general, transnationalism, gives a central role to discourse/ semiosis. We regard discourse as an integral part of social structures, practices and identities, and as a site where social change is co-constituted in the dialectical relationship between the social and the semiotic (Fairclough, 1992, 2003, 2006; Wodak & Meyer, 2009; Wodak & Fairclough, 2010). From this perspective, discourse is constitutive of transnational processes and social fields. Transferring Norman Fairclough’s reflections on the interconnection between discourse and globalization (Fairclough, 2006, p. 26), discourse can be taken to construct transnationalism (as a category of practice), in its multifaceted aspects, at different intersecting scales (global, regional, national, local), to (mis)represent transnational actors and relations, to (de)legitimize political decisions, and to (re)produce worldviews and ideologies (see Fairclough, 2006, p. 26, on discourse and globalization). At the same time, discursive interactions, the strategies employed by social actors to justify courses of action (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012) or to reposition themselves, and their enactment of identities expand and transform social imaginaries and public cultures to incorporate transnational realities (Beciu, 2011). Discourse is thus directly involved in fostering social change that can reinforce or challenge existing power relations and social hierarchies in transnational social fields (Bauböck & Faist, 2010; Guarnizo & Smith, 1998; Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004, among others). Scholars in transnational studies have opened up this area of research by engaging, among other topics, with the intersection between structural “discursive spaces” and “narratives of belonging, resistance or escape,” where transnational identities are forged (Guarnizo & Smith, 1998, pp. 21–23). Likewise, discourse comes to the fore in research on public policies, development and citizenship, linked with transnational phenomena (Bauböck, 2010; Faist, 2008; Nieswand, 2008; Weinar, 2010). These studies underscore the importance of discourse in the analysis of terminological overlaps between “transnational communities” and “diasporas” (Weinar, 2010), the articulation of migration with development discourse in public policy (Faist, 2008), and various instances of reification and contestation of the “diaspora” (Nieswand, 2008; see also Beciu et al., 2017). Boris Nieswand’s conclusion, building upon Roger Brubaker’s distinction between the diaspora as “a category of practice”

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and “a category of analysis” (2005, p. 12), is also relevant for our position and the goals of this volume: Although an ideological reduction of the empirical complexities of the relationship between migrants and their country of origin, diaspora discourses stimulate transnational activities. They motivate people to act, which, then, becomes evidence for the adequacy of the representation of migrants as diasporas. […] Thereby a transnational social field is created that provides Ghanaian migrants and non-migrants a forum for the negotiation and renegotiation of social status, citizenship, power and identity. (Nieswand, 2008, p. 49)

In previous work, we have pointed to the necessity of developing this line of research and taking a systematic approach to the analysis of public and semi-public discourses “as constitutive of transnational social fields, starting from the (inter)actions and power struggles of agents who usually have ‘the consciousness of being embedded’ (Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004, p. 1006) in transnational networks” (Beciu et al., 2017, pp. 230–231). In a broad sense, public discourse is a dimension of the transnational social field at multiple levels: policies and strategic documents, for example European Union directives, which generally have a structuring effect on institutional and social actors; an array of discursive practices in the media and political spheres, mobilized within symbolic struggles for visibility; the performance of identities by transnational actors, who enact “ways of belonging” in the field, from different power positions. Establishing the role of discourse in understanding migration in relation with public problems and transnational fields of power requires a comparative approach among various claims and projects, actors and transnational situations, ways of constructing distance and belonging to communities. In the discourses they produce and circulate, the media appropriate actions “at a distance”, mediating positionings and identities, legitimizing courses of action, and engaging the publics in the transnational social field. The media can also take on an active role in the symbolic struggles for repositioning in the field, by reframing and recontextualizing transnational discursive practices (see Beciu et al., 2017). Media agency is performed in the symbolic negotiation of meanings, representations, responsibilities, and “definitions”, which brings to light power relations and interactions among the media, public and non-public actors (politicians, organizations, intellectuals, public figures, groups, etc.), migrants and non-migrants, opening national public spheres to transnational issues and dynamics.

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In view of the premises outlined above, we argue that media constructions and positionings play a part in the (self-)identification of social actors (migrants and non-migrants) with particular values, claims, and actions. The modalities of linguistic and discursive realization used by the media as transnationally-oriented actors can be very diverse, from framing, rhetorical devices, representation, argumentation, to the production of new genres, practices, and identities related to migration and, in general, to transnational actors. As the studies in this volume aim to illustrate, a discursive approach to the research of transnational migration, taking public discourse as an object of empirical analysis, has the capacity to unravel the multiplicity of stakes, categories, and types of interaction among transnational actors, across scales and in different contexts. Our central claim is that a good point of entry into studying the formation of transnational social fields and the ensuing social transformations (practices, relationships, identities, power configurations) are the emergent public discourses, arguments, narratives, genres, and symbolic performances that are integral to their constitution.

The Structure of the Book Situated at the intersection of fields such as media and discourse studies, transnational migration and diaspora, the sociology of mobility, and cultural identities, the volume reflects the heterogeneity of existing approaches in the field and offers an interdisciplinary perspective relevant for each of the fields mentioned above. Our focus is on the analysis of media discourses, starting from the premise that the media participate in the construction of public problems both as an actor, namely a “categorization dispositif” (Cefaï, 2013 with reference to Widmer, 1999), and a debate arena. An essential aspect in this book is the analysis of debates on migration as a public problem from the perspective of the ways the media and other actors position themselves in a transnational social field. The studies mainly discuss how migration is problematized in the media as deliberative actors, situated in certain macro-contexts (the economic crisis, the liberalization of the European labor market for Romanians and Bulgarians, the elections in the UK, the EU referendum campaign, the refugee crisis) and local micro-contexts (political actions and declarations) in sending and receiving countries. These interrelations between transnational macro-contexts and national ones are analyzed at (1) the level of specific debates and (2) the level of positionings that they generate.

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In addition, the book includes studies that take into consideration how migrants and non-migrants, as well as diasporic communities, recontextualize public discourses in the process of making sense of migration as a matter of public concern and action. The first section discusses the mediation of diasporic experience and the construal of moral distance towards migrants in the media of the sending state. We identify several strategies of instrumentalizing migration in the public discourse in order to legitimize collective identities and public issues, especially those related to political behaviors and country status. How do these strategies contribute to diaspora reification, including cases of “strategic essentialism” (Spivak, 1987)? Starting from emblematic cases for the media debate on migration, Camelia Beciu and Mirela Lazăr (“Migration and Country Status. The Rearticulation of Identities through Media Counter-Discourses”) demonstrate how labor migration has become, in the postcommunist sending country, a symbolic resource in negotiating Romania’s country image and political status within the European space of political action. The debate on country image in relation to migration actors has generated a broader debate on the types of responsibilities involved; in this respect, along with the delimitation of the politicians’ responsibility, a collective responsibility pertaining to “us”, as a national community, has been constantly emphasized (the necessity of stronger forms of social and civic solidarity, and social engagement). As a consequence, this type of identity discourse, centered on self-collective reflexivity, recurring in debates on migration, has highlighted another problem, signaled in previous research by Kaneva (2012), for instance, namely the ongoing negotiation of “the conflicting discourses of national self-identification and of European integration.” (p. 9) The preoccupation for country image and status reveals “a discourse of identity construction that could, at least superficially, accommodate the conflicting pressures of differentiation and integration.” (Kaneva, 2012, p. 9) In their study, Beciu and Lazăr analyze the modalities in which the redefinition of migration as a public problem takes place through particular types of identity counter-discourses used to deconstruct dominant discourses against migrants, and to revalorize the Romanians working in the EU, as an extension of the (national) collective identity: “Through these types of counter-discourses, the press in Romania assumes the role of a ‘public voice’ that interacts within a polemical space, explicitly delineating interlocutors and stereotypical hegemonic discourses that need to be contested” (Beciu & Lazăr, chapter “Migration and Country Status,” this volume).

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Alina Dolea (“The Impact of Migration on the Construction of Romania’s Country Image: Two Intersecting Public Problems”) also investigates the promotion of Romania’s country image “by various social actors in Romania after 1990 and its gradual linkage with migration within a macro context (the adoption of promotional practices by the Romanian government) and a local context (the recurrent debates on migration in Romanian society).” The author places this objective within “the global preoccupation of countries to gain visibility as competing actors in a glocalized economy and culture,” which has led to the adoption of “various promotional practices (Wernick, 1991) from the business sector (e.g. nation branding, public relations) in a gradual process of habitualization and even institutionalization.” Starting from these contexts, Alina Dolea makes a longitudinal analysis of the gradual interconnected construction of Romania’s country image and migration as public problems: it identifies several stages (between 1990 and 2010), when the government played a key role, and more recent developments (between 2010 and 2015), when various non-state actors seized the opportunity for increased visibility and instrumentalized the two public problems in brand communication campaigns. Thus, the chapter shows how the different stages in the construction of these public problems have been reconfigured over time, and focuses especially on the impact of migration on the construction of Romania’s country image. Another logic of instrumentalizing migration refers to the strategic use of the theme of Romanian migrants in EU countries in political and electoral contexts, triggering positionings and competing agendas. Mălina Ciocea and Alexandru I. Cârlan (“Debating Migration: Diasporic Stances in Media Discourse”) discuss the role of the media discourse in defining migration as a public problem and the potential effect of diasporic stances adopted by journalists, highlighting how journalists strategically use the theme of diaspora in line with the logic of the media field. The paper starts from the premise that journalists, when discussing migration, adopt diasporic stances, expressing loyalties and moral commitments, and articulating them in the debate through practical arguments. Analytically, the authors discuss the stances favored by journalists in attributing a role to the migrants, the media’s position in relation to the governmentality of diaspora, and the subsequent visibility of certain types of citizenship produced. Three types of media discourse are identified: the policy approach discourse, the professional accomplishment discourse, and the citizen-as-victim discourse. These types of discourse are related with the arguments invoked for or against migration, and their

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subjacent loyalties. “In accounting for various positions and events of both the internal and external agenda, journalists make strategic use of the theme of diaspora in relation to the articulation of the media field and its relationship with the political field. By denouncing politicians and the consequences of their actions, journalists foster forms of citizenship that contest or reinforce allegiances along a communitarian—cosmopolitan continuum. The citizen as a victim of politics and the prospects of emigration become discursive devices of representation by means of which journalists substitute the political roles and construct the diasporic option as an alternative which falls under a traditional representation of diaspora.” The second section reunites two articles that treat the specific deliberative mechanisms through which definitions and frames of migration as a public problem are negotiated, starting from a corpus that includes media outlets from host countries (UK, France), in addition to opinion articles in the Romanian press. The purpose of this section is to highlight, conceptually and methodologically, the importance of values and practical arguments by means of which the media inform a deliberative arena about migration. Irina Diana Mădroane (“Romanian Immigration in the British Newspapers: Engaging Audiences during the Brexit Referendum Campaign”) examines how arguments on Romanian immigration, within the broader category of intra-EU labor migration, are enacted in a corpus of conservative and liberal British newspapers during the Brexit referendum campaign. The study also aims to shed light on the ways British publics were engaged in the referendum debate (discursive strategies, positionings). The findings indicate that the conservative newspapers continued to use the same construals and claims on Romanian immigration they had employed in the past, grounded in nationalist values, “but in a more intense and totalizing manner”: they pooled all their discursive resources towards mobilizing British citizens to vote “out”, especially by presenting a British society in crisis because of EU immigration. “They positioned themselves as champions of the people, in opposition to the political elites, made claims grounded primarily in nationalist values, and projected a British citizenry that had the power to change the fate of Britain.” The liberal newspapers responded by formulating a number of critical objections, and set out to deconstruct negative stereotypes on Romanian (and CEE) immigration, expose exaggerations in the Leave argument on the issue, and explain the goals and advantages of EU membership (a more complex argument, where values related to universal human rights, including free movement, and a pragmatic orientation to economic benefits co-existed).

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“This approach put them in a position of educators of their readers, who were confronted with their own prejudices about EU immigration and ignorance of the EU benefits for the UK,” a completely different stance by comparison with the right-wing newspapers. Of relevance is the fact that the claims and representations in the conservative press already enjoyed, at the time of the Brexit referendum debate, more visibility than those in the liberal press, due to certain developments in the British public sphere that can be taken as evidence that the right-wing media had “ownership” (Gusfield, 1981) of the public problem of immigration from the CEE member-states, as part of the wider problem of Britain’s EU membership. With respect to the way media build public problems, in particular migration, Alexandru I. Cârlan and Mălina Ciocea (“Media Deliberation on Intra-EU Migration. A Qualitative Approach to Framing Based on Rhetorical Analysis”) discuss the methodological implications of an approach to framing based on the deliberation model proposed by Isabela and Norman Fairclough. Focusing specifically on opinion articles, the study emphasizes how a qualitative approach to framing, based on rhetorical analysis, can complement the typical quantitative approaches employed in the literature. “Such an approach can prove insightful for the analysis of media deliberation on migration, because it can not only reveal how various ethical framings structure the media debate, but also allow for a clearer articulation of the role of values in the definition of the frames, an identification of media engagement with the audiences, and a broadening of the scope of framing theories.” Appealing to argumentative reconstruction and textual analysis of the selected media texts, they demonstrate how various arguments for or against migration are constructed through the strategic convergence of a particular presentation of circumstances, values, and goals employed in deliberation. The third section presents the ways that public discourses on intra-EU labor migration, routinely employed in the political and media spheres of the sending and host countries, are recontextualized bottom up by migrants and non-migrants. Irina Diana Mădroane’s chapter (“Migrant Identities and Practices in Media Advocacy Campaigns: The Construction of Claims and Audiences”) looks at the construction of the Romanian migrants’ identities and transnational practices in a national media advocacy campaign targeted at improving policy in the area of aged care provision in Romania. The point of departure is the situation of the migrants’ parents, subsequently extended to all Romanian elders in need of social assistance. Run by a commercial television

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channel that had also tackled the issue of the migrants’ children left in the country of origin (ProTV), the campaign converges with and builds upon representations and claims already established in the Romanian public culture, concerning, for example, the vulnerable social categories created by migration. Irina Diana Mădroane develops a framework for the analysis of advocacy campaigns that “helps to bring out” the “complex configuration” of the migrants’ identities in the campaign, in relation to the journalists’ claims for action and representation: “(objective) cause of the phenomenon of abandoned elders; victims and sufferers because of misguided policies (alongside non-migrants); audiences with a potential to become mobilized (alongside non-migrants); and, not least, symbolic partners in bringing about change in Romanian society.” Importantly, the advocacy campaign instills among the migrant and non-migrant publics a sense of moral and civic solidarity, resulting into a shared responsibility, “‘our responsibility’ for the type of society we want to live in,” as the analysis of comments posted by the campaign petition signers demonstrates. The advocacy campaign can be considered to facilitate grassroots transnational interaction, at an early stage, which could contribute, eventually, to the formation of civic transnational communities. Nicolae Perpelea (“Media Hospitality to Diasporactivism and Diasporapathy in the News Community”) approaches positionings of migrants via Facebook (designated as “news community”) towards the thematization of the new Romanian diaspora’s experiences in the compassionate and moral media discourses/ stances. The author situates these positionings, on the one hand, in the broader framework of online publics formation, as “the continued growth of Facebook will create a new mass audience for particular types of news”; on the other hand, in the media practices of mediating suffering and other emotional stances, by producing news stories that “accelerate the dissemination of ethical interpellations” and that may activate a “cosmopolitan solidarity inherent in convergent journalism.” In other words, the public will not be researched through generalizations of certain reception situations, predefined by Eco’s model of “ideal reader” inscribed in the “text.” By “diasporic public”, Nicolae Perpelea means “a type of self-definition behavior: that of explicitly seeking to ‘be among the public’, of risking to publicly expose (a private conversation, an Internet forum, etc.) the personal way of morally and emotionally interpreting the diasporic experience from the news repertoire, be it adventure, emergency, ecstatic, or neglected news.” Taking into consideration the online speech interactions, the author identifies a series of discursive mechanisms by means of which migrants appropriate the diasporic experience mediated

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by news on distant suffering. One such mechanism consists in reframing the diasporic experience as a category of practice in the form of normative-pedagogical discourses, emerging forms of “diasporactivism”—in order to articulate new claims and projects. Camelia Beciu (“‘Here’ and ‘There.’ Identity-Building Strategies in Debates with Non-Migrants”) stresses in her study that “the analysis of the modalities in which public and semi-public discourses are incorporated into social practices of action at a distance provides a new point of entry into the study of transnational social fields.” Starting from positions expressed in focus groups by Romanian non-migrants, Camelia Beciu highlights discursive mechanisms used by these actors to construct ways of engagement towards migrants and migration as a public problem, expressed through normative assertions or generality principles. This research illustrates how “the expectations and strategies of non-migrants” (Boccagni, 2012, p. 118) are articulated as one of the multiple migrants’ ties with the homeland. Based on critical discourse analysis, the chapter develops the interpretation hypothesis that, in debating public problems (such as intra-EU labor migration), social actors redefine power relations and “establish meanings of collective and national identity.” Thus, proximity-distance relationships and the engagements towards migrants rely on identity discourses, some of them being currently reiterated in the media public sphere in the context of the problematization of migration. The chapter discusses three types of strategies of including migrants as a collective “we” in the non-migrants’ discourse and, correspondingly, delineates specific meanings of collective identity within debates on migration. Overall, this volume analyzes migration from the perspective of the sending country, bringing to attention specific concerns and articulations in the transnational social field. Beyond the diversity of approaches, disciplinary fields, and methodological options, current literature favors the angle of the receiving country, even when the focus is a transnational one. This means that both in terms of empirical sites of investigation (be it ethnographic research—even multi-sited, media discourse, or policy), and of core concepts (identity, media consumption and everyday life, social problems), it is the migrants already settled in the western world (United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Spain) or the western media that are investigated. Our book aims to achieve balance in the field of research, currently dominated by a view that tends to replicate concerns and reflections on the situation in host countries, generally belonging to the space of the affluent North and West or, in the case of the European Union, to western EU member states.

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Notes 1. Traian Băsescu, Romania’s president between 2004 and 2014. 2. In 2010, Romania was experiencing the effects of the economic recession. 3. Opinion: Abandoning Romania, Attempt on National Security (“Opinii: Fugitul din țară, atentat la siguranța națională”, Leca, December 10, 2010, ziare.com). 4. Traian Băsescu, Criticized by the British Press: He Supports the Migration of His Own Citizens (“Traian Băsescu, criticat de presa britanică: Încurajează migrația propriilor cetățeni”, Antena 3, headline, August 6, 2010). 5. Let Us Not Make a Drama out of the Fact that Romanians Are Going to Work Abroad (“Să nu mai facem o dramă din faptul că românii pleacă să muncească în afara țării”, Adevărul, August 5, 2010, quoting Traian Băsescu’s statements on the TV show Special Edition [Ediție Specială], TVR1). 6. In 2011, the percentage of Romanians living in other European Union states was 13.7, the second largest after Polish migrants, recorded at 22 percent (People in EU. Statistics on Origin of Residents, Eurostat, 2015). 7. While intra-EU migration can also refer to the mobility of citizens between Western European member states, currently it is widely used about economic migration from the CEE member states. 8. Dana Diminescu (2009) identifies several stages of migration, taking into consideration forms of mobility correlated with transformations of European legislation: 1990–1994 (“the individual explorations,” including the migration of the Roma through family networks); 1994–2002 (“the transborder commercial migration,” the often illicit migration caused by the economic crisis in Romania); after 2002, the year of visa waivers for Romanians traveling in Europe, which marked the free circulation of Romanians in the Schengen Area (pp. 45–62); Cingolani (2009) defines the stages of Romanian migration in Italy as an analytical tool that facilitates the understanding of the formation and consolidation of transnational practices: “the discovery, from the early 90s to 1995 (with many undocumented young people who stayed in Italy for longer periods of time); the consolidation, from 1996 to 2001 (through an increase in the number of women, who joined their husbands or traveled alone, and, equally, through ethnically mixed population); the circulation, from 2002 to 2007 (through an increase in the number of persons who remained in Italy for shorter periods of time); the opening of borders (since January 2007)” (p. 190, original emphases, our translation). 9. This was preceded by a wave of internal migration from cities to villages, which also laid the ground for the formation of networks of Romanian migration within the EU (Diminescu, 2009; Sandu, 2010). 10. For example, Law no. 156/26.07.2000, amended through Law no. 232/29.11.2017, on the protection of Romanian citizens working abroad. Among other things, these laws regulate the activity of labor force placement agencies and fall within the legal framework in which bilateral agreements were signed on the protection of Romanian citizens working in the EU (see Diminescu, 2009, p. 58). 11. https://www.europalibera.org/a/2123154.html

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12. “The term ‘Roma’ was introduced in official Romanian documents in the year 2000, through a memorandum (D2/1094/29.02.2000). This was done under pressure from the Council of Europe, the OSCE, and various international NGOs, in light of the conditions for Romania’s EU membership candidacy” (Mădroane, 2012, p. 105). 13. According to Mădroane (2012), in the discursive construction of the campaign, “an in-group (‘us’), identifiable through a number of shared features (origin, language, history, tradition), is straightforwardly pitched against an out-group (‘them’), also constituted around similarities, but distinct from the in-group and often subjected to ‘othering’” (p. 103). 14. See “Migration and Remittances: Recent Developments and Outlook” (2017), World Bank Data on remittance inflows. In this report, Romania is listed as one of the ECA countries dependent on remittances (p. 23). 15. Half of Europe’s “migration orphans” come from Romania (Comsa, “Jumătate din ‘orfanii migrației’ europeni…”, June 6, 2010, Ziare.com); Italy, a land of sorrow: the parents’ migration, the children’s suffering (Garbo, “Italia, un pământ al durerii…”, March 24, 2014). 16. How the state plans to stop the exodus of doctors abroad. Iohannis accuses authorities of ‘irresponsibility’ (“Cum vrea statul să stopeze exodul…”, October 5, 2015, Știrile ProTV). 17. Romanian engineers go abroad for 8.700 Euro wages. See to what countries (“Inginerii români pleacă în străinătate pe salarii de…”, gazetaromaneasca.com). 18. The exodus of young people out of Romania amplifies. ‘I will return when I have enough money in the bank account’ (“Exodul tinerilor din România ia amploare…”, gazetaromaneasca.com). 19. The Observer Report. Romanian ‘slaves’ on farms in Sicily: raped, beaten, and exploited (“Reportaj The Observer. ‘Sclavele’ românce…”, March 12, 2017, Mediafax). 20. The new migration: Romanian grandparents go to Spain to their grandchildren (“Noua migrație: bunicii români pleacă…”, January 29, 2008, Ziare.com). 21. Brain drain and return: How do we attract young people who studied abroad to the Romanian private and public system? (“Exodul și reîntoarcerea creierelor…”, December 17, 2010, Hotnews). 22. Romania’s great demographic dramas that will become social and economic bombs (Mihai, “Marile drame demografice ale României…”, July 14, 2014, Ziarul Financiar). 23. “Suceava grows because of the ‘Italians’. Hundreds of young people go abroad, mostly to Italy. Even though this town in Bukovina, renowned for its pottery, was not poor before the 90s, an unprecedented economic growth has taken place because of numerous young people going abroad, a phenomenon that has remained constant over the years (…). ‘The Spaniards’ from Copșa Mică (…) For years many of those who went abroad have settled in towns in Spain and even managed to create communities by means of which they are trying to help the families at home” (“Suceava crește datorită ‘italienilor’…”, December 13, 2017, România Liberă). 24. “Up to 7,500 women, the majority of whom are Romanian, are living as slaves on farms in south Italy, according to estimations by the police, who underline that Ragusa is the center of the exploitation taking place in the area, reports the weekly The Observer, which talked to the victims” (“Româncele care lucrează la fermele din Italia…”, March 12, 2017 Ziare.com); “The Italians call them ‘badanti,’ they have hired thousands of Romanian women for the job and pay them handsomely. 100,000 carers are needed now in Romania!

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26.

27.

28. 29.

debating migration as a public problem Unfortunately, here wages are up to five times lower than ‘abroad,’ and the working conditions are much poorer” (“Până la 7,500 de femei, majoritatea românce …”, May 29, 2015, Evenimentul Zilei). “badanti or Romanian women who migrated to Italy” (“Romania, I love you !” Report, 2014, Știrile ProTV); Badanti, slaves at their workplace (“Badantele, sclave la locul de muncă”, June 1, 2014, Agerpres) “Many Romanian women leave in the origin country their children and families, whom they support, and feel forced to make desperate choices” (“Multe dintre românce lasă în țara de origine copiii…”, March 12, 2017, Ziare.com); “Rareş Năstase, special correspondent Ştirile Pro TV, made a series of reports presenting the hidden world of the Sicilian mafia and reveals the problems faced by the Romanians working abroad (…) Rareş Nastase speaks about the modern slaves, about exploitation, about the drama of Romanians abroad, and about fear” (“Rareş Năstase, corespondent special Ştirile Pro TV, a realizat o serie de reportaje…”, February 6, 2015, Adevărul). A growing literature focuses on what motivates diasporas to engage politically in the sending state as “potential agents of democratization” (Koinova, 2009, p. 42). Studies on postcommunist diaspora laws show that definitions of migrants, although pervasively ethno-cultural, are “much more nuanced than the civic/ ethnic nationalism dichotomy posits” (Shevel, 2010, p. 161). This type of vote was regulated in 2015. The law introducing the vote by postal ballot was promoted as a solution to the recurring crisis generated during the presidential elections. In the sociology of public problems we can distinguish approaches that are interrelated to some extent, such as the symbolic analysis of public problems (starting with Gusfield’s seminal work, 1981) and the pragmatic analysis of public problems of the French school (Boltanski, 2004; Thévenot, 2007; Cefaï, 1996).

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part 1 intra - eu labor migration in the media of the sending country : between instrumentalization and empowerment

·1· migration and country status The Rearticulation of Identities Through Media Counter-Discourses Camelia Beciu and Mirela Lazăr

Introduction The intra-EU migration of the Romanian workforce has been at the core of various debates in the national political and media spheres, being strategically used to legitimize other public issues, identities, and power relations. Romania’s European status, perceived in terms of a non-stereotypical profile of the country, has increased the stakes of these debates especially after the country’s accession to the EU in 2007. The emergent discourses cannot be dissociated from the circulatory character of this type of migration (the so-called “new migration”) and from the action at a distance of social actors living in-between the countries of origin and destination. Intra-EU migration is, ultimately, a socio-economic phenomenon that takes place in a specific (trans) national situation—the European one—involving Community policies on cross-border mobility, migration, and citizenship. Therefore, migration is seen both as a European and national problem, being subject to policies and various stances adopted by EU institutions, but also to political and economic developments in the countries concerned, including their positioning towards EU policies. The Europeanization literature outlines the “deficit of participatory forms” of debate and the fact that a European public sphere cannot arise

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in the absence of social practices, a social imaginary, and a community public culture, as there should also be a certain convergence of setting agendas, practices of mediatization, and public communication (Abélès, 2000; Kleinen-von Königslöw, 2012; Lauristin, 2007; Triandafyllidou, Wodak, & Krzyzanowski, 2009). According to Conrad (2014, p. 39), “a European communicative space that could function as a public sphere would therefore have to be Europeanized both in terms of meaning structures and in terms of interactive structures (Trenz, 2007): the same issues have to be discussed throughout Europe, but also crossborder patterns of communicative interaction have to become more prominent.” From this point of view, labor migration is a concrete problem that fosters debates with some degree of simultaneity, indicating emergent practices of interaction and symbolic negotiation from national perspectives on this issue (Fossum, Schlesinger, & Kvaerk, 2007), which involve both European countries and European institutional actors. Thus, some of the political and media positions on the migration issue will be reshaped within the discursive interactions between European media actors, the media in the destination countries, and those in the countries of origin, respectively. This type of interdiscursivity becomes relevant in light of the research that explores the possibility of a European public sphere (Cornia, 2010; Lochard, 2006; Statham, 2008). Based on these premises, we approach the ways the Romanian media address the migration issue in two European contexts that generated debates in both the sending and host countries. We refer to contexts involving contradictory consequences for the dynamics of labor migration: a) the economic crisis that began in 2008 and brought about disruptive effects on the workforce market and the migrants’ economic status, and had wider implications for the migration policies in some European states; b) the lifting of restrictions on Romanian and Bulgarian workers on January 1, 2014, which created favorable conditions for economic mobility. However, due to the economic crisis, acquiring full access to the labor market posed an obstacle—at least symbolic—for migrants. A possible explanation may be found in the public debates on immigration in the destination countries, such as the UK, that fed “moral panic and fear-mongering regardless of politics or policy context” (Balch & Balabanova, 2016, p. 21). Several research questions are to be addressed. How do such disturbing contexts for labor migration (the crisis, the reactions in some European countries to the lifting of restrictions to labor market access) influence the ways the media in Romania redefine migration as a public issue? How do the Romanian



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media use the counter-discourse as a positioning strategy towards public discourses on migration in the countries of destination? How do the media legitimize the meanings of a European field of action in terms of symbolic power and subject positions, in the context of competing discourses on migration? This research mainly shows that the Romanian media use types of identity counter-discourses in order to deconstruct stereotypical dominant discourses about migrants and Romanians and to cast a more positive light on the Romanians working in the EU, resulting in an extension of the (national) collective identity. Journalists shape migration in terms of symbolic power relations between the sending and destination countries.

A Theoretical Framework for the Media Construction of Intra-UE Migration As a trend, research on the media construction of migration refers to the political-media space in the destination countries, considering that migration in these countries bears multiple consequences for the economic and political spheres, and for the formation of a certain climate of opinion. Thus we identify a wide range of studies from those focusing on the media framing of various immigration aspects such as policy issues (Balabanova & Balch, 2010; Cottle, 2000; Vliegenhart & Roggeband, 2006), to those employing CDA approaches, questioning the stereotyped and communitarian media discourses used in portraying the immigrants’ image (Belmonte Alonso, McCabe, & Chornet-Roses, 2012; Mădroane, 2012; Wodak, 2010). In contrast, there are fewer studies that address the perspective of the sending countries and the way public discourses in these countries construct migration as a transnational situation and the visibility of the migrants as acting within coexisting scales of cultural and territorial distance. Such studies have emerged due to specific contexts, one of which being circular migration within the EU. Following Boccagni (2012, p. 35), who places great emphasis on the understanding of migrant transnationalism “as a potential attribute, along a continuum with different degrees of intensity, frequency, extensity, and durability”, we embrace the perspective of a constant reconfiguration of the field of transnational practices and interactions among actors, encompassing the sending country standpoint. In other words, transnationalism should not be opposed to methodological nationalism since we are considering the dialectics between transnationalism and the setting of national agendas. Labor

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migration in the EU and the European construction in general are operational examples in this respect. As such, our main premise is that the “national angle” is not a mere preset extension of the imagined community but is (re)defined in the process of formation of (trans)national public arenas. It is constantly reconfigured within the dynamics of both top-down and bottom-up “representational strategies” (Frello, 2008, p. 30) about multiple contexts of belonging and action at a distance. Therefore, discourse is a fundamental dimension of the transnational social field, showing the ways in which social actors appropriate “simultaneity or living lives that incorporate daily activities, routines, and institutions located both in a destination country and transnationally.” (Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004, p. 1003) Our position in this article is that discourse, viewed as socially constitutive and socially constituted (Fairclough, 2003; Wodak & Meyer, 2009), is a set of practices of resistance, public commitment, problematization/ mediation and, not least, instrumentalization. The discursive struggles among institutional and non-institutional actors (migrants and non-migrants, politicians, journalists) at national and European levels are constitutive of various practices of identity construction in contexts of migration, mobilities, citizenship (see Ciocea & Cârlan, “Debating Migration: Diasporic Stances in Media Discourse”; Beciu, “‘Here’ and ‘There’. Identity Building Strategies in Debates with Non-Migrants”; Mădroane, “Migrant Identities and Practices in Media Advocacy Campaigns: The Construction of Claims and Audiences”, this volume). Thus, studies grounded in critical approaches to media discourse discuss in a specific way whether and how this discourse establishes practices of visibility and reification of transnationalism and its manifestations. From this point of view, the public sphere is shaped in the discursive negotiation of interpretations and forms of engagement in relation to the public interest (the discursive construction of accountability). Taking into account these theoretical elements, we consider the case of the media in the countries of origin to be of particular interest in terms of “permeability of national public spheres” (Conrad, 2014, p. 40), given the strategic attempts of these states to reposition themselves in response to transnational processes. We analyze here the ways in which the press in Romania problematizes labor migration by positioning itself towards the public reactions and viewpoints on this issue in the destination countries. We therefore start from the hypothesis that the Romanian media discourse is in a direct and indirect polemicity (Amossy & Burger, 2011) with the media discourse and the positions of politicians in the destination countries and of European policy-makers, which are appropriated through various types of counter-discourses.



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Methodological Design The first objective of the present research is to analyze the meanings of migration produced by the media in Romania under the disturbing circumstances presented above, namely the economic crisis and the reactions with respect to the EU regulations regarding the labor market, as compared with discourses already established in the national public sphere. Second, we examine how the Romanian press constructs meanings of migration as a public problem, by taking a stand against the (negative) viewpoints in the destination countries. We consider counter-discourses in light of “the intimate mechanisms of conflict” (Terdiman, 1989, p. 50) through which the contestation of dominant discourses is substantiated. As such, counter-discourses prove their validity in the framework of power relations and the “struggle for visibility” (Voirol, 2005, pp. 107–108) in which the social actors are involved. On the other hand, counter-discourses do not only reproduce, but also set up a field of power through the very act of confrontation. Put into a Foucauldian perspective, counter-discourse strategies enact power. This position of “resistance and counterinvestments” (Foucault, 1978, p. 97) creates the very tension that supports hegemonic discourses. Counter-discourses can thus be analyzed as macro-performative strategies employed by social actors to reposition themselves in relation to the dominant discourse (or what they claim to be the dominant discourse), through reframing it. The performativity of this strategy lies in the fact that counter-discourses also address a third party (Nicolas, 2012) and this condition of production becomes salient in public discourses. Thus, in the media sphere, the counter-discourse is used in polemical interactions to inform and capture the audience, and also to engage the public, in one form or another, in the confrontation between contrary standpoints, so as to legitimize symbolic “alliances” and “borders”. Moreover, orchestrating polemical interactions and counter-discourses is a crucial mechanism of media culture spectacularization and of the transition to an increasingly personalized, interpellative, and hyper-adversarial political journalism. Staging the discourse of contestation in the media sphere requires a specific temporality and logic of visibility (more sophisticated when taking into account media convergence). Based on these features, we consider the counter-discourse in the media sphere as a set of recurring (verbal and visual) communication practices that establish a space of interaction within which power relations are negotiated. In other words, the counter-discourse is viewed as a dispositive of (re)positioning

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within an antagonistic field of communication, which is discursively constituted. As such, from the point of view of their “tactical productivity” and their “strategical integration” (Foucault, 1978, p. 102), counter-discourses can be “a starting point for an opposing strategy”, based on “reutilizations of identical formulas for contrary objectives.” (Foucault, 1978, p. 100) Our methodological framework draws on critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003; Van Leeuwen, 2008; Wodak, 2010) in order to emphasize the ways the Romanian media use the counter-discourse as a strategy of (de)legitimizing dominant discourses. The analytical instrument we applied allowed us to identify the following conditions of production of a media counter-discourse: a. discursive representations: prevailing ways of acting and being of migrants, and the circumstances and types of power relations they are situated in (modes of designation and categorization through the use of certain pronouns, metaphors, nominal and adjectival phrases, activation/ passivation of roles—affected actor, beneficiary, etc.); b. the discursive management of voices—as a mechanism deployed by the press to produce authoritative positions (various quotation forms, polyphony, the diversity of voices or the backgrounding of voices); c. modes of engagement —definitions of the problem in terms of obligation, necessity, and public action (normative statements, recommendations, moral assessments, categorical utterances, generalizations). The discursive representation establishes “ways of (inter)acting and ways of being” (Fairclough, 2003, p. 208) of social actors and dimensions of events (“the main parts of the world”, cf. Fairclough, 2003, p. 129). First, representations introduce what Fairclough (2003, p. 124) calls “a scale” of discourses through which they are differentiated from one another, “i.e. in how much of the world they include, and therefore in the range of representations they can generate.” Second, representations legitimize discourses of power. For instance, inclusion and exclusion strategies can be built according to the representations of actors and, consequently, categories (of belonging, moral, evaluative, etc.) and power relations are established. Triggering forms of engagement is a crucial mechanism in legitimizing public problems by symbolically negotiating responsibilities, obligations, and modes of action in relation to the public interest, to what is desirable or undesirable in society at a certain time.



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These conditions of production of the media counter-discourse are embedded in macro-strategies, that is, in “discursive acts that are socially constitutive” and serve to establish identities, status, and power relations (Wodak, 2002, p. 150). Our corpus is comprised of opinion articles published in the national quality newspapers (Jurnalul naţional, Evenimentul zilei, Adevărul, România liberă, Gândul) between 2013 and 2015. The English translation of the examples is ours. We were interested in analyzing media counter-discourses in two particular cases of polemics: one indirect, in which we considered the standpoints towards Romanian migrants taken by the media and various authorities in the destination countries, in the context of the economic crisis and the loss of jobs by Romanians working in the EU countries; one direct, in which the Romanian journalists referred to reports on migrants by the media and the political actors in the destination countries as a dominant discourse (regarding a potential flood of Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants following the full opening of the EU labor market, and the broadcasting of a British documentary on Romanian citizens of Roma ethnicity living in the UK). Besides intense coverage of statements made in the British public sphere, some newspapers in Romania initiated media campaigns in response to a negative advertising campaign reportedly planned by British Government ministers to deter Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants from going to the UK, which also sparked off “tongue-in-cheek” reactions from the Britons in the newspaper The Guardian. So our corpus includes articles of opinion (as part of a permanent media agenda related to the labor migration issue) and strategic opinion articles (as part of media campaigns or Romanian journalists’ reactions triggered by statements/ events considered derogatory for both Romanians in the destination countries and Romania).

Findings Migration, Economic Crisis, and Country Status: The Counter-discourse as a Recontextualization Strategy In previous research (Beciu, 2012, 2013; Beciu & Lazăr, 2015), we have shown that the Romanian media have established certain patterns of migrant visibility in the destination countries and problematization of migration, especially after the country’s accession to the EU, in 2007. Both the press and

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the TV channels built polarized representations, such as the migrants-heroes (the “winners”), who have made themselves known through their outstanding actions in the countries of destination, vs. the vulnerable migrants (the “losers”), victims of unfavorable socio-economic contexts. Through these representations, the media have defined migration from the angle of an identity discourse on Romania’s status in Europe and a collective “we”. The national media have problematized migration not so much as a socio-economic phenomenon, but as a resource for Romania’s positive image in the European context. The migrants’ actions have been interpreted as an extension of the imagined community, their accomplishments or their failures having become “ours” as a society and a collective identity. Moreover, linking migration to the country’s image has generated in the media discourse a certain overlap between the issues of workforce migration and the Romanians’ mobility in the EU countries. The distinction between the Romanian migrants in relocation or professional development contexts and individuals or groups involved in crime in the countries of destination has not always been made obvious, the journalists often using global categories such as the “Romanians abroad” to indicate either the contribution of migrants to improving the country’s image or their negative impact upon it. In the context of the economic crisis, the media produce a new pattern of visibility: the Romanians migrants in relation to economic development on a European scale. The restrictive measures imposed on labor migration are approached by the press as an indirect disturbing situation for migrants, which also bears explicit negative consequences for the home countries. More emphasis is put on Romania’s status as a national player in the European context of the crisis than on migrants as social actors. With regard to the negative impact of European austerity policies on Romanian migrants and, through them, on the sending country, the press in Romania also develops another strategy, an indirect form of counter-discourse, to legitimize Romanian migrants as a category actually useful for the countries of destination. This counter-discourse is built through a strategic mobilization of formal/ institutional or symbolic voices: statements by experts and local officials, opinions of ordinary people in the countries of destination, and, mostly, European officials’ standpoints. The press places the statements by European officials



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within a diplomatic discursive exchange with the authorities in the destination countries, defining thus discursive power relations in decision-making: The European Commissioner [Dacian Cioloş] mentioned that there are two million job vacancies in the European Union that truly justify labor migration. […] External workface in a member state creates wellbeing and does not affect the welfare of the locals. “This is the position of the European Commission, namely that this is a right, and not some favor, so we no longer have to make apologies for Romanians going to work in Italy or Spain”, said Cioloş. (Ionaşcu, 2014; Adevărul)

It is noteworthy that through this type of counter-discourse (built on the polyphony of voices of authority), the press legitimizes the existence of a dominant discourse about the restrictive measures on immigrants in the public spheres in the destination countries and at the European level; moreover, the media establish a symbolic scale of allied authority voices in the national public sphere, and also within European institutions. The coverage of statements made by Romanian politicians, who in turn quote European officials’ standpoints to highlight the migrants’ contribution to the economy of the destination countries, also proves to be relevant: Despite the campaigns of denigration of Romania and Romanian workers, one thing is certain: the GDP of several countries has increased due to Romanians. […] “There are a number of studies showing that Romanians have brought many benefits to the countries where they work” […], said [MEP] Renate Weber. (Scarlat, 2013; Jurnalul național)

The public problem established by the press is Romania’s stand in relation to other European countries’ position in terms of European labor market access. The initial problem of the country’s image and status built via the migrants’ actions in the destination countries is thus recontextualized with a focus on the country status in a European economic and political field. These repositioning strategies were reflected in a much more prominent way in the press and on television throughout the year preceding the opening of the labor market in the European Union and have continued to be used ever since. The press started to quantify political and media reactions on Romanian migrants in the countries of destination as well as the reactions of European officials, focusing more on the British public sphere.

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Counter-discourses as a Strategy of (De)legitimizing Dominant Discourses “Us” and “Them”: Building Asymmetric Symbolic Relations between European Countries The reaction of the media and the political actors in Britain with respect to the risk of an influx of Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants has witnessed steady coverage since 2013. In our corpus, the media in Romania give special visibility to negative reactions, presented as a dominant discourse in the UK public sphere. The newspapers constantly quote a series of metaphors used by some British journalists (“an invasion of Romanians”, “hordes of Romanians and Bulgarians”, “mass exodus of Romanians to the UK”, “Britain ‘under siege’ from Romanian migrants”) to legitimize the existence of an anti-Romanian discourse and even an anti-immigration campaign, and to define an asymmetric relation between “us” (as a state, a national community) and “them” (as a state, the media, the public opinion in the UK). It should be noted that many of the articles that warned of an impending “invasion” of immigrants appeared in the British tabloid press. Although this fact was mentioned by the media in Romania, their dominant framing of the stories induced the idea that this was the generalized viewpoint in the UK. At the same time, as we demonstrate below, the Romanian press quoted articles from the British quality press to strategically integrate them into various forms of counter-discourse to the discourse of the media and the political class in Britain. Through these types of counter-discourses, the press in Romania assumes the role of a “public voice” that interacts within a polemical space, explicitly delineating interlocutors and stereotypical hegemonic discourses which need to be contested. The issue of access to the EU labor market is embedded here in a question of identity: how the Romanians working in Britain are perceived. In other words, the problem of Romania’s image in the EU (which originally was bound to labor migration) has been redefined not so much in terms of social trajectories of the migration actors in the EU, but in connection with the public discourses in the destination countries. Romanian journalists position themselves in relation to two types of discursive practice: (1) daily articles in the British (tabloid and quality) press assessed as part of an “anti-immigration campaign” (the “British media hysteria” about the influx of migrants), and (2) the actual media campaigns. These



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practices result in a serialization of the anti-immigration issue, which has to be linked with the growing marketization of the quality media in Romania. In the articulation of these counter-discourses produced by the press in Romania, we have identified two main macro-strategies (Wodak, 2002) that instantiate identities and power relations between social actors. The first strategy is meant to legitimize the existence of a dominant public discourse in the UK which is discriminatory against Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants and, implicitly, against Romanians in general. The second aims to delegitimize this dominant discourse and redefine the symbolic power relations by revaluing the status of Romanian migrants and, accordingly, the national country status. Both these macro-strategies are based on specific micro-strategies in order to establish identities and power relations of which the most frequently used ones are the discursive representation of identity categories and the management of voices. We consider these macro-strategies in the dialectics of establishing-dismantling a dominant discourse. The various modes of delegitimizing the dominant discourse used by the press in Romania strengthened, for spectacular reasons, the representation of a concerted action in the British public sphere. The interpretive role of journalists was performed mainly through the strategic use of certain types of “voices”, through which forms of engagement and definitions of the public problem were being shaped in that particular context. For legitimizing a dominant discourse in the British media sphere, the Romanian press frequently mobilizes the representation of the national community as a category situated in an unequal power relation. Through the strategic use of pronouns (we, you), journalists “indexicalize” a “victim”—a category that includes “us”, the public, as citizens, as a national community sharing a collective national identity, and, at the same time, as a state actor. Another way to establish the dominance of this discourse consists in representing Romanian migrants as a vulnerable category, through using voices of witnesses, i.e. Romanians working in the UK: We are being again under attack in the British press (Botezatu, 2013; Evenimentul Zilei) What awaits you if you immigrate to Britain, besides hysteria against the Romanians (Chițu, 2014; Evenimentul Zilei) “We work ten times more than other nations only not to be seen as the most abject beggars”, is said in the message [of a Romanian established in the UK]. (Chiujdea, 2015; Evenimentul Zilei)

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The strategy of reversing the argumentative orientation of the dominant discourse also contributes to constructing the “victim” category of migrants: The Migration Advisory Committee chairman David Metcalf hints at a truth that everyone knows, but no one openly admits. “We are not saying British workers are lazy, we are saying British employers made great efforts to recruit British workers.” Neither are we saying that Romanian workers are industrious, we are saying that British employers have used them and now they invoke imaginary dangers only to fuel further restrictions on the labor market. (Iolu, 2013; Adevărul)

The delegitimization of the “dominant” discourse is primarily accomplished through mobilizing the polyphony of the power field in which politicians from the UK and from Romania, MEPs from Romania and from other European countries, representatives of European institutions, and international experts are involved. The Romanian media constantly quote statements by national officials (ambassadors, Ministers, MEPs) meant to stand against the statements of some British politicians, while emphasizing those parts that evaluate the migration issue in terms of a European responsibility and respect for the values of European citizenship. The labor market access and the anti-immigration rhetoric focused on Romanians and Bulgarians are defined as a European public problem, which the Romanian media highlight by invoking the European argument upheld by national politicians. “The statement referring to the need for fingerprinting Romanian and Bulgarian citizens is a deeply unfortunate statement because not only does it introduce an element of discrimination in the treatment of European citizens, but it is contrary to the EU fundamental principles and values. […] I believe that a call for responsibility and restraint in the public rhetoric of European politicians is needed”, said [Romanian Foreign Affairs Minister] Corlăţean at a press conference at the European Commission Representation in Romania. (Mătieş, 2014; Evenimentul Zilei)

In this field of political (counter-)statements on labor migration, Romanian politicians reframed the issue of European responsibility in terms of a pro-European commitment (alluding to the danger posed by anti-Europeanism). For Romanian politicians, speaking of Europe with other European politicians, in an antagonistic context, implies assuming and reiterating the European founding discourse (in terms of values and practices). The reactions of the media and politicians in Britain towards the implications of the European labor market opening for Romanians and Bulgarians were mainly approached by Romanian journalists from the perspective of



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the status of Romania and its citizens in the EU. Using a particular rhetoric (metaphors like “citizens as second-class Europeans”, “third-class citizens” or “periphery”), the press in Romania pointed out that the country’s EU membership proved to be insufficient for acquiring a European status, and that what counted was the status of the country in a field of symbolic power of the EU countries. In general, the journalissts built a series of representations of the European citizenship of Romanians understood as a symbolic resource. On the other hand, it should be noted that the problem of the European status (of the country, of the citizens) has become significant in the context of the “discourse about Europe and the EU” that the Romanian media have practised over the years. Up to 2007 and a few years later, the press reproduced an expert type of consensual discourse about the Union in the context of Romania’s EU accession that mostly echoed procedural and diplomatic aspects. The Romanian Constitutional crisis of 2012 and especially the labor migration theme would mark a recontextualization of the media discourse in that the press started to focus on Romania as a European actor in relation to European institutions, member states’ governments, the media, and the public opinion in these respective countries. What therefore prevails is representing Europe as a field of symbolic power also shaped by the ways states use de facto their EU membership status. Within this field of power, Brussels’ official discourse is instrumentalized by the media and the political class in Romania as a resource of (de)legitimizing voices (in the European countries or in this country) that can strengthen or weaken Romania’s status, respectively. And it is not by chance that the Romanian press puts forth statements coming from European officials who reiterate, under various forms, the European argument as a decisive one. Highlighting and, at the same time, dismantling the dominant discourse of the British press involves, among other things, revaluing the Romanian “immigrants”, wherefrom their portrayal as social categories needed for the British economy: When they passed the magnifying glass over the issue of immigration […], the journalists from The Guardian noted that without labor supply from Bulgaria and Romania the price for fruit and vegetables in shops would go up. (Iolu, 2013; Adevărul) The Romanian and Bulgarian “invaders”, “pickpockets”, who “steal [British] jobs”, turn slowly into needed workers whose absence will make the UK economy look like a lame horse. (Iolu, 2013; Adevărul)

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Not least, one of the most effective ways of delegitimizing the dominant anti-immigration discourse consists in displaying a counter-discourse that engages voices of experts, politicians, businessmen in the destination countries. These viewpoints are outlined by the British journalists as well: The German researcher on migration issues, Klaus Zimmermann, said that lifting barriers for Romanians and Bulgarians is a good opportunity for the labor market in Germany. (Deak, 2013; Jurnalul național) Despite these tensions, a recent Ipsos Mori survey shows that more than two-thirds of Britons will welcome Romanians and Bulgarians to the UK if they integrate and work hard, according to The Guardian. (Matis, 2014; Gândul) “Beginning on January 1st, you can go anywhere in the European Union. We hope lots of you [Romanians] choose Britain. Although our leaders seem to have forgotten, Britain pushed for your country to join the EU, knowing that you would one day turn up on our doorstep”, writes The Economist. (Mătieş, 2013; Evenimentul Zilei)

In the dialectics of dismantling-establishing this dominant discourse, the Romanian press lays stress on the voices that the British media quote as favorable to Romanian migrants in order to counter the dominant discourse and reinforce the idea of an anti-immigration campaign in Britain. This strategic selection of favorable viewpoints is not explicitly integrated into a discourse showing the diversity of framings in the British media. It is not explicitly mentioned that not all the press in the UK adopted anti-immigration views. This assessment is rather implicit. What emerges is the fact that other types of discourse also circulated in the British political sphere, which was, however, dominated by an anti-immigration rhetoric.

Media Campaigns: Response and Engagement Starting in 2013, the press in Romania has increasingly resorted to the practice of media campaigns to take stands towards the public discourse regarding the Romanian migrants in the destination countries. These campaigns have been launched in response to statements from politicians in the UK or a wider dissemination of media products about Romanian migrants (documentaries, movies, reports, etc.). At the end of 2013, the newspaper Gândul and the Romanian GMP Advertising Agency launched an interactive media campaign (“We may not like Britain, but you will love Romania. Why don’t you come over?”) that engaged public participation, thus enhancing the public’s role as a social actor. This campaign consisted of publishing a series of posters with the readers’



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messages and displaying a humorous approach to stereotypes about the two countries. Its aim was to demonstrate that Romania could be a country of emigration for the Brits, more attractive than Britain for Romanians: [The Romanian campaign] is a response from Gandul.info and GMP to the British “You won’t like it here!” campaign against potential Romanian immigrants. The campaign became a viral phenomenon in Romania with more than 300,000 users seeing, commenting upon, and sharing the original posters in the first 24 hours and afterwards hundreds of users generating their own posters via a special application. (Campania Gândul “WHY DON’T YOU COME OVER?”, 2013; Gândul)

The campaign is relevant for the journalists’ taking a civic role and positioning themselves against anti-immigrant speeches that were considered derogatory to the country’s image. Consequently, they produced an identity counter-discourse in ironic tones (“Humor is intensely counter-discursive”, cf. Terdiman, 1989, p. 198) to delegitimize stereotypes used by the British journalists speaking of Romania and to establish a competitive image of their country: “Why don’t you come over?” has become a tool for Romanians to challenge stereotypes with stereotypes, and with humor. […] The Gândul campaign “Why don’t you come over?” has spread worldwide and has shown foreigners, but also Romanians, that we can speak well about Romanians and that we can promote ourselves through humor and positive news. (Matis, 2014; Gândul)

The campaign concept assumed by the Romanian journalists relies on a recontextualization of stereotypes about Great Britain, in reply to the counter-discourses published by The Guardian newspaper. The British publication had the initiative to call out to its readers to submit their “tongue-in-cheek suggestions” about particular aspects of British life that should be included in a reported UK negative ad campaign, aimed to deter Romanian immigration to Britain. The journalists from Gândul consistently place the campaign in a field of antagonistic reactions among the Romanian and British publics, by monitoring not only The Guardian campaign in Britain, but also the Romanian readers’ posters. The visibility of the British campaign contributed to legitimizing—in a spectacular way—the existence of a dominant discourse with certain dynamics. The articles that commented and justified the Romanian counter-campaign prove that journalists designed it as an alternative to national government campaigns for promoting Romania and, more generally, as a counter-strategy

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to oppose the identity discourses in the public sphere in Romania. According to the Gândul journalists, the Romanian decision-makers did not apply adequate practices of visibility and promotion of Romania in the European and international contexts: The journalist [senior editor at Gândul] says that the success of the campaign “Why don’t you come over” lies in the simple fact that it uses humor: “Imagine what our Foreign Ministry’s reaction would have been: one patriotic, stiff, something like ‘Is there anything we cannot actually eat in Romania?’. Instead of this reaction, which would have no effect internationally, we have a reaction that uses an extremely effective weapon of communication and manipulation: humor. This campaign is proving to be overwhelming, viral, it extends to the Huffington Post, Channel 4 or Associated Press”, commented Cristian Tudor Popescu. (Campania Gândul.info, 2013; Gândul)

The campaign of Gândul polyphonically articulates multiple interlocutors, the British media and the public as allocutors, as well as the public and a number of public voices in Romania as part of a shared identitarian discourse. Thus, the campaign is built and run as a dispositive of identity repositioning against the “outside” (“us” and “them”, the British) as well as the “inside” (“we” in relation to the identity stereotypes and practices we produce ourselves about us). This dispositive allowed the Romanian press to reproduce the social imaginary about “us and Europe”, and “we in Europe” put forth in recent years: our position as a state and as a nation in the European field of power implies a project of competitive visibility: The editorial director of Gândul, Claudiu Pandaru, has stated for AP: “We are mocked, denigrated and made to feel like third-class citizens. Here is a humorous, good-mannered response. We want to show the British that we have two important resources: intelligence and humor.” (Campania Gândul.info, 2013; Gândul)

In 2014, another Romanian daily newspaper, Adevărul, initiated a media campaign to unveil the “truth about the Romanians from the UK: A story about misinformation, political games, racism and prejudices” (March 24, 2014): The truth about the Romanians in Britain continues today with stories of successful Romanians who are almost unknown in the British Isles. Three journalists from Adevărul bring to you the lives of some people who are less interesting for the British public, but who substantially contribute to the economy of that country. (Roşu, Dumitru, & Varninschi, 2014; Adevărul)



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Unlike the previous campaign, this one was not designed as a real-time counter-discourse opposing the discourse established as dominant in Britain, but as a counter-discourse emerging through interviews with Romanians working in the UK, often with professionally outstanding persons who managed to gain a social and an economic status. In other words, there is more focus on the visibility of migrants as symbolic resources for the destination country than for the country of origin. The stake of the campaign was to reveal the “truth” not only about the economic contribution of the Romanians from Britain, but also about the economic environment and the climate of opinion in that country. This campaign deconstructs the discourse on Romanian immigrants of the British tabloid press, showing that the British public opinion is not actually hostile to Romanians who live and work there.

Conclusions This chapter started from the assumption that, in the public sphere in Romania, Romanian migration to the EU countries has been consistently associated with the question of how the country is perceived in Europe, based on the migrants’ actions in the destination countries. As such, as a first step, the media approached the country’s image in the European context as an identity issue (“we in Europe”), which can be adjusted by the accumulation of symbolic capital, that is by valuing any resources (including migration) that could paint a successful picture of Romania. Problematizing migration in the disruptive contexts of the economic crisis and the lifting of restrictions to the European labor market provided an opportunity for the Romanian media to redefine a public problem that was on both the national policy and the European institutional agendas. In other words, the “we” that the media assumed as an identity discourse highlights more prominently the country’s and the Romanian citizens’ status within the political-economic space of the EU. This discursive positioning of the media in Romania is embedded in direct and indirect argumentative polemics in the arenas of transnational top-down and bottom-up debates. The polemics are based on strategies of representation of migrants in and between their geographical and symbolic spaces of belonging. Romanian journalists set up an oppositional power field through counter-discourses, which acquire a performative dimension within the polemical interactions among various institutional actors (including other journalists),

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but also through the involvement of the public as an empowered actor (see the effects and counter-effects of the media campaigns). These strategies legitimize the need for political and collective decision-making in order to build a competitive image of the country in the European sphere, marked by an asymmetry of power relations. By taking on a civic role, the Romanian journalists build a “resistant” discourse anchored in a sense of collective (national and European) responsibility for the issue of migration. This discourse instrumentalizes the polyphony of voices (trans/national interdiscursivity) in order to deconstruct unequal power relations and enact a counter-power discourse that mirrors a competitive status of Romania.

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·2· debating migration Diasporic Stances in Media Discourse1 Mălina Ciocea and Alexandru I. Cârlan

Introduction In August 2010, the President of Romania, Traian Băsescu, made a statement on the opportunities stemming from the migration of highly qualified doctors and nurses, but also from “regular” migration. Other events in the same month both intensified and extended the debates around the topic of migration: France’s decision to expel Roma migrants from Romania and Bulgaria, a tragic incident in a maternity ward in Bucharest, revealing the shortcomings of the Romanian health system, and a governmental political decision on taxing independent income that produced turmoil among journalists who saw their income decrease. The president’s statement is still considered a paradigmatic moment in recent Romanian history, marking a shift in the relationship between state institutions and citizens. President Băsescu took up a theme that had circulated in the media for some time, the migration of doctors and its consequences on the already crippled medical system. His statement during an interview at TVR, the public TV station, was: Let us not make a drama out of the fact that we are going abroad. Romania’s grand objective was the liberalization of the labor market. Our right to go wherever we are

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debating migration as a public problem better off. Where our work is correctly paid. At this moment, the Romanian state cannot pay its doctors, teachers, what they deserve, it cannot, that is reality.

The interview took place in the context of an International Monetary Fund visit and many opinion articles made reference to the interview in its entirety, which stole some of the limelight from the topic under discussion here. However, the statement has become a point of reference in many debates about the issue of professional migration and has been employed in apparently distinct contexts, such as: the (lack of) good governance, (in) capacity of the state to find a solution to the problem of migration, (in) capacity to stop the brain drain (with the accompanying subtheme: the costs of training medical students for the West, the injustice towards Romanian patients, the necessity to reform the medical system). Furthermore, editorialists and bloggers have used the problem of professional migration as a subtheme in a broader debate about the challenges and missed opportunities in Romanian society development. In general, the interviews at the public station, TVR, were an opportunity for President Băsescu to pinpoint some issues circulated in the media on a public scene, free from the constraints of official declarations. In the days to follow, the press would take over the most important points and discuss them in detail. Various media outlets would structure their discourse so as to highlight the confirmation effect of the president’s speeches (the explicit position of the president confirms the type of reactions the public expect from him), the reinforcement effect (the president’s statement resonates with the politicians’ lack of interest in the individuals’ fate), and the cumulative effect (this is just one of the many offences a citizen is subjected to by politicians). Because of the format and context of the interview, the general feeling was that the president was presenting a definitive version of the facts, with some media outlets taking a critical position towards the president’s statements and building arguments to undermine them, even though he had made them with the authority specific to the presidential office. Consequently, while some journalists considered the interview an assessment of the state of affairs, others used it as a starting point for a detailed, well-grounded, expert-based analysis of the president’s assertions leading to an extended debate in the public sphere over the state’s obligations for its diasporic citizens, its alleged duty to prevent emigration, and, conversely, over the decision to emigrate as a type of citizen stand.



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Emigration and the New Governmentality State-citizen relations have been reconfigured by the emergence of new diasporas. Transnational networks can play the role of “agent of cultural de-mythologisation” (Aksoy & Robins, 2003, p. 95). While distant diasporas (especially those of pressing regimes) were seen as (or proclaimed themselves to be) the guardians of “true”, organic national identity, recent approaches to statehood have emphasized the revolutionary potential of diasporas as alternative public spheres that can influence the political life in sending countries (Appadurai, 1996; Mattelart, 2009, p. 46). The reconsideration of the civic involvement of diasporas is, in fact, a cultural product of mobility. Pressures from various quarters, among which an increasingly competitive global economy, internal struggles to get citizens (including migrants) politically engaged, and pressure to apply global norms to individuals outside national borders have triggered dramatic changes to the power relations that structure the migratory field. The emergence of a new “transnational habitus” (Nedelcu, 2012) invites debates on the system of relations between various actors in this field and migrants’ agency in governing these relations. Diasporas challenge essentialized versions of identity because their existence legitimizes various other definitions of “national belonging”. Diasporas are constructed by sending countries as objects of governance through various diaspora policies, and become agents of governance through activities such as political involvement in internal politics and remittances. With the state no longer the single container of citizenship, cultural citizenship becomes a “crucial site of governmentality” (Miller, 2002, p. 242) that can be explored. New forms of civic involvement need to be produced for cosmopolitan citizens (“if we are to have global rights and cosmopolitan citizenship, we need to evolve a language of obligation and virtue” to account for the moral commitments of cosmopolitan citizens—Isin & Turner, 2002, p. 8). A cosmopolitan community can be shaped as a politically reflexive community if we opt for “a reflexive, internally differentiated and communicative understanding of community and citizenship.” (Delanty, 2002, p. 160) Civic cultures (in Dahlgren’s terms, “cultural patterns in which identities of citizenship, and the foundations for civic agency, are embedded”—2009, p. 103) can serve as a normative framework for developing civic engagement. In response to the existence of diasporas that demythologizes the essentialized view of a bounded national identity, international relations theories have increasingly recognized the need to produce theoretical frameworks that

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avoid essentialized visions on diasporas, by not using the community as a unit of analysis (Koinova, 2012, p. 101). Such reductive analytical frameworks fail to acknowledge the variations within diasporic communities. One solution is to look at state-diaspora relations in terms of the autonomy of agents within diasporas and their positionality. Regardless of how strongly original homelands aspire to govern their populations abroad, powerful diaspora individuals, institutions, and networks enjoy a relative autonomy vis-a-vis their homeland. Their autonomy is a matter of degree, depending on their abilities to extract resources independently of the home-state or networks linked to it, and to maintain legal status in another state that precludes their unwanted return or institutional closure. Apart from their autonomy, their positionality in a given context renders them with specific power vis-a-vis other relevant political actors—such as the majority in a host-state, other powerful lobbies, other segments of the diaspora network, and other relevant international networks. (Koinova, 2012, p. 100)

Analysts have addressed the motivations behind states’ attempts to govern diasporic communities beyond their boundaries, incorporating these communities as objects of governance (and equally facilitating their construction as agents of governance). When various institutions project state power beyond national borders, this signals a different model of political organization, where citizenship is viewed as extra-territorial, and where state institutions are equally accountable to migrants and territory-bound citizens. The constructivist view encourages the extension of extraterritorial rights by home countries to citizens abroad as part of the extended nation, increasing the likelihood of expatriates contributing with human and material capital to the development of the sending country (Leblang, 2017, p. 76). In Michel Foucault’s theorization, governmentality amounts to an ensemble of reflections, strategies and technologies that aim at controlling and processing a subject area. From this perspective, the subject area (the object of governance) is not treated as preexisting or “natural”, nor as a given “problem” that requires a “solution”, but as a problematization that has to be situated on the same level with the methods and goal-definitions of the regulation. In opposition to mere subordination, governmentality aims to take into account the features of each subject area and turn them productive, thus leading to a necessity to gather knowledge about the governed subject (Foucault, 1988). Providing a systematic understanding of media within this theoretical framework, Markus Stauff makes it clear that “governmental technologies (…) are all those procedures, institutions, but also regulated practices and discourses that define a



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subject area, produce knowledge about it and link regulating approaches with the practices of self-government” (Stauff, 2010, p. 265). In this regard, while diasporas become a subject area as a problematization of emigration, media can be understood as technologies of government, which allow inquiries into “how media contribute to the problematization, to the production of knowledge, and to the control of subject areas” (Stauff, 2010, p. 266). As an object of governmentality, diasporas are treated by Rahel Kunz as instances of neoliberal forms of governance. The shift towards neo-liberal governmentality involves the responsibilisation and disciplining of civil society actors, such as the diaspora, while at the same time opening space for new forms of resistance and empowerment. This […] leads to the transformation of state-diaspora and more broadly state-civil society relations and a redrawing of public-private boundaries. (Kunz, 2008, p. 3)

If diasporas can become an object of (self)governance, then a legitimate track of analysis is the reconfigured definition and manifestations of citizenship and civil society. Another crucial development is the result of the construction of diasporas as agents of governance in terms of accountability: with the de-responsibilization of the state in the act of governance comes the responsibilization of diaspora. If non-state actors govern, analysts need to explore the rationality of these actors’ governmental practices (Kunz, 2008, p. 4), together with forms of resistance and empowerment. The performative discourse of diaspora has legitimized the shift in our understanding of new forms of governmentality: “a Foucauldian governmentality approach also highlights the importance of the constitution and mobilisation of actors through discourse and policy-making, such as ‘the diaspora’” (Kunz, 2008, p. 6). With migrants becoming actors in the act of governing, interpretive tools are needed to analyze the discourses and practices of engagement in this process. “Interpretive tools help uncover underlying implications and implicit interests, revealing the shifting meanings of return among receiving and origin countries and the addressees of their policies” (Sinatti, 2015, p. 287). Engagement can take various forms, depending on several variables, among which: the types of states seeking to engage diasporic actors, the perspectives that feed the states’ approaches to extra-territorial (national) communities, as well as the migrants’ self-definition discourses. Seeking to document diaspora engagement institutions from sending countries, Gamlen et al. (2013) build a typology of states: instrumentally-rational (for whom migrants are resources that need to be used), value-rational

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(the nation-state builds legitimacy by integrating its “lost” members), and institutionally-converging (they understand that diasporas need to be governed according to global norms). Neorealists emphasize the instrumentality of diasporas, whose loyalties can be engaged, and resources, tapped by states as rational actors. Neoliberals take diasporas as agents of development and seek to engage their loyalties in a triple-win scenario, together with sending and receiving countries. Neostructuralists, on the other hand, highlight the profound inequality of core-periphery relationships between migrant-producing, poor sending countries and exploitative receiving countries. Constructivists operate in a long-distance ethnic nationalism perspective, to acknowledge the states’ legitimacy in having extra-territorial reach and diaspora institutions’ capacity to facilitate transnationalism. Institutional theories in the broader governing perspective are preoccupied with the emerging global consensus on how to best govern diasporas (Gamlen et al., 2013). The diversity of analytical choices in accounting for diasporas is reflected in the choice for tools and methods. Instrumental approaches to diaspora as an actual community are grounded in the essentialist vision of national identity as territory-rooted. In this view, diasporas are more likely to engage actively as agents in home countries because of this shared identity and rootedness. However, the expectations of political and economic actors can become unrealistic and “such essentialized understandings limit the potential of diaspora engagement as a means of innovating the development industry by broadening understandings of what development entails and how it can be done” (Sinatti & Horst, 2015, p. 134). The homogeneity of transnational communities has been overestimated (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002, p. 324), yet the reality of diasporas as highly fragmented formations has not hindered either migrants or institutional actors to make claims in the name of the diaspora (Kleist, 2008). To avoid the “binary mobility bias” (where migrants are seen as essentially belonging to the sending country where they will eventually return), a methodological option would be to look at diaspora engagement discourse and practice from a perspective that takes diaspora as “a category of mobilization” (Sinatti & Horst, 2015, p. 137). Diaspora politicization and intensified transnational engagement are powerful incentives for migrants to get involved politically in their home countries, democratization leading to “a more collaborative and negotiated relationship between migrants and political authorities back home.” (Burgess, 2014, p. 15)



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From Problematization to Public Problems: Emigration and Diasporic Stances In his seminal work on the culture of public problems, Joseph Gusfield is interested in how situations become public problems, in a manner that resembles the Foucauldian project. Focusing on the outcome (the production of symbolic order), rather than on its broader historical and epistemic conditions, but sharing a general constructivist view, Gusfield asserts that cognitive and moral dimensions are essential for turning a phenomenon into a public problem. The moral dimensions of a public problem “enable the situation to be seen as painful, ignoble, immoral. It is what makes alteration or eradication desirable or continuation valuable.” (Gusfield, 1981, p. 9) Cognitive dimensions refer to the facticity of the problem, but also the beliefs regarding the alterability of the phenomena. In order to solve the issue of symbolic power and authority in defining the problem, Gusfield introduces the concepts of ownership and disownership: The concept of ownership of public problems is derived from the recognition that in the arenas of public opinion and debate all groups do not have equal power, influence and authority to define the reality of the problem. The ability to create and influence the definition of a public problem is what I refer to as ownership. (Gusfield, 1981, p. 10)

The avoidance of an alleged obligation to create or solve a problem is disownership. “The question of ownership and disownership is very much a matter of the power and authority groups and institutions can muster to enter the public arena, to be kept from it or to prevent having to join” (Gusfield, 1981, p. 12). Two more concepts are needed to describe the content of the problem, causal responsibility (the facticity of a situation, what generates the problem), and political responsibility, which is a matter of policy (attributing guilt, solving problems), fed by a moral understanding of the situation. “The structure of public problems is then an arena of conflict in which a set of groups and institutions (…) compete and struggle over ownership and disownership, the acceptance of causal theories, and the fixation of responsibility” (Gusfield, 1981, p. 15). A consensus over the situation as such and over moral implications is then needed to treat a phenomenon as a problem. In this analytical framework, defining public interest is rather a process coextensive with the public debates and not a product of such debates, once adjudicated. Looking at diaspora mainly as a category of practice (as opposed to treating it as an analytic category), Brubaker (2005) is interested in understanding how diasporic stances can be used to remake the world rather than merely

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describe it. Treating diaspora as “idiom, stance and claim” amounts to formulating identities and allegiances of a certain population in particular contexts, by making claims, articulating projects, mobilizing energies, or appealing to loyalties. Those formulating such identities and allegiances might not necessarily be diaspora members, but this is less relevant for the performativity of such discourses. Brubaker’s remark that “those who do the formulating may themselves be part of the population in question; or they may be speaking in the name of the homeland state” (Brubaker, 2005, p. 12) opens a direction of investigation, adopted here as well, for cases where the constellations of allegiances are invoked in public debates and various participants (members of diaspora or not) adopt a diasporic stance (even temporarily, hypothetically, provisionally) to make their discursive interventions effective. Brubaker opens up a new field of investigation with his invitation to examine how diasporic discourses impact social life. Neoliberal forms of governmentality can begin to legitimize the relationship of various communities with territory by building “diaspora” as a category (much as various migrant actors see themselves): The proliferation of state-led diaspora policies must be understood as a process, as the result of the unequal, heterogeneous, yet increasing spread of “neoliberal governmentality” as a modular deterritorialized rationality and practice of power; and, the discourse of “diaspora” has been an effective performative discourse in the legitimation of this shift. (Ragazzi, 2009, p. 383)

Taking Brubaker up on his invitation to consider diaspora as a category of practice, rather than a category of analysis, Ragazzi proposes a Foucauldian methodology for making sense of diasporic practices, where the constructionist approach replaces the essentialist understanding of diaspora: [T]he changes both in governmental policies toward their populations abroad and the increasing constitution of these populations as “diasporas” are best understood not only as expedient policies but as the result of broader structural shifts in the “art of government” and in particular in the way the relations between authority, territory and populations are rationalized, organized, practiced and legitimized at the transnational and international levels. (Ragazzi, 2009, p. 383)

His methodology is built around the elements of episteme (the context and assumptions that signal that a certain social process is a problem of government), knowledge (which knowledge tools make problems visible), categorization (what categories of practice are created and governmental rationality),



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position of the enunciator (competing visions of various social actors) and techne (techniques and technologies of government used to govern migrants) (Ragazzi, 2009, pp. 384–85). The neoliberal perspective on governmentality avoids the exclusionary consequences of the essentialized vision of territory-bounded states and identities; yet, by acknowledging the diaspora as a legitimate object of governance, “the diasporic condition is legitimized and normalized” (Ragazzi, p. 2009, p. 391).

Mapping a Debate: Problematizations and Diasporic Stances Starting from media reactions to President Băsescu’s statement, we worked with a corpus that was deliberately constituted to reflect the heterogeneity of journalistic genres and practices, and to allow an insight into the complexity of the articulation of migration as a problem in the public arena. We selected ten opinion articles, all published in August on Vox Publica, the blogging platform of the important news channel RealitateaTV (where prominent editorialists and journalists debated issues stemming from political actuality). These opinion articles are examined in relation to pieces of news and opinion articles published by the generalist daily newspaper Adevărul, and articles on the topic published by Pagina Medicală (The Medical Page), a portal specialized in news for the medical community. Our analysis is structured by two research questions: What competing definitions of the public problem of migration are made visible through the media debate? and What roles do journalists attribute to migrants and what categories of practice are thus created by journalists with reference to the “diaspora”? Methodologically, we carry out a systematic reconstruction of the media debate through a theoretically motivated framework of analysis. The first research question employs Joseph Gusfield’s framework for the analysis of public problems and aims at identifying how competing definitions of the problem of migration are structured and what types of media discourses on migration are articulated around these definitions. The second research question starts from Brubaker’s proposal to study diaspora “not in substantialist terms as a bounded entity but rather as an idiom, a stance, a claim” (Brubaker,

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2015, p. 129). Through these methodological options we aim, in our second research question, to follow what claims are made in the name of diaspora and what forms of governmentality journalists build for migrants.

Three Competing Definitions of an Ambiguous Problem It is significant that throughout the debate, a systematic ambiguity blocks the attempts to articulate the problem, because the two types of migration are discussed simultaneously: specialized/ professional migration (doctors, nurses) and general migration (unskilled labour-force and Roma migration). Further ambiguity is fed by the debate being triggered by three independent events (the president’s statement, the incidents in France, and the maternity ward tragedy). Moreover, journalists rarely approach these events in a unitary framework, even though they are discussed under the same denominator: “migration”. We will make an analytical distinction between the two types of migration as problems discussed by media. Our choice is justified by the fact that they presuppose different types of causal responsibility, despite the fact that both President Traian Băsescu’s declarations and the media discourses frequently tend to treat them uniformly. The Roma people’s expulsion from France is a separate case with journalists and, at least in our corpus, is never discussed in relation to the migration of Romanians. While in the case of general migration, journalists assume the position of owners of the problem (a position they share with the state), in the case of professional migration ownership is shared with the medical community or professional organizations (The Romanian Doctors’ National College—hereafter RDNC), but only in specialized media (The Medical Page—hereafter MP). Following Gusfield, to make ownership significant means to point to other possible owners of the problem that are yet absent in the public space, or, in our case, are not given a voice by journalists: the alternative private medical system, the western medical system (the beneficiary of professional migration), or the patients (in this case ownership is expressed by the journalist, speaking in the name of the patients), and so on. In the generalist media, more prominently in the opinion articles on Vox Publica, ownership of the problem is divided between state and journalists. It is only in the case of Roma expulsion that a wider ownership of the problem is elicited by journalists: European institutions, other states, European citizens. Proceeding inductively and organizing the corpus along Gusfield’s categories, we were able to identify three types of definitions.



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Defining Migration as a Policy Problem (The Policy Approach) What we label the definition of migration as a policy problem is in fact a definition resulting from framing the debate as a complex issue affecting the Romanian public system (public budget, public institutions, and policies). It is mainly general migration that is discussed in these terms, and this definition of the problem stems from the way journalists give visibility to the president’s declarations and reinterpret them. The president’s version of the problem, reconstructed by journalists, insists on the causal responsibility for migration: the job market liberalization in the European Union and the inability of the crisis-stricken Romanian state to provide enough jobs or social security for its unemployed citizens. In these circumstances, political responsibility is declined factually (the state can do nothing) and the decision to migrate is praised both for its positive effects on public spending and for the remittances sent by migrants back to Romania. Migration is downplayed as a public problem because it is the result of a deliberate effort of Romanian diplomacy towards the liberalization of the job market and because Romania has a lot of things to win from migration in the context of the crisis. In Gusfield’s terms, it is specifically the moral judgment—the condemnable state of affairs generating a public problem—that is contested by President Traian Băsescu. Within this policy framing, but disputing the president’s definition, journalists emphasize moral judgment. Political responsibility for the problem is systematically attributed by journalists to the Romanian state, through pragmatic argumentation, in the form of cost-benefit analysis: Even from this point of view Romania will lose, not win, as Traian Băsescu incorrectly claims. Because these migrants, as active persons, work and pay taxes that contribute to the social benefits offered by EU countries [and not Romania—our emphasis]. And when those going abroad have higher education, Romania loses twice: first it loses the investment in their education, which will no longer be recovered; secondly it loses contributors, a phenomenon that would lead to an increase in the already alarming disproportion between the active and the assisted population in Romania. (Goțiu, 2010a)

Yet the discussion does not move forward towards adjudication, since journalists assume, without further argument, that remittances and the temporary benefits for the budget invoked by the president are outrun by their negative counterparts. The conflicting definitions of the problem of migration in this policy framing, made visible in all the media investigated, accommodate the issue

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of general and professional migration alike. While the causal responsibilities are tacitly agreed upon by the two parties, it is the “problem” as such that is at stake. Specialized media discuss a particular case of the same conflict over the problematic character of the issue. The president’s remark that, at least in the largest Romanian hospitals, there is no doctors’ deficit (implicitly, less dramatic consequences if doctors go abroad), is countered by pointing either to the cognitive dimension of the problem or to causal responsibility. The first case can be exemplified by a statement of a doctors’ trade union leader that doctors’ migration leads to poorer healthcare. An illustration of the second case would be a statement by the president of the RDNC, who points to the inadequate hiring policy that causes migration: The president’s message reveals a perspective of decision makers, who are not concerned with real health policies. This jeopardizes the proper functioning of the medical system within decent standards. Vacant positions cannot be filled because hiring is blocked. Actual regulations allow only one in seven openings to be filled. This makes the functioning of the health system impossible. (Ciornia, 2010)

Within the policy framing, a separate case is represented by the reports on Roma migrants’ expulsion from France. The case stands out because it approaches the problem of migration in relation to issues of minorities’ integration and because journalists attempt to ascribe a shared political responsibility among European countries, European Union, Romania, and even cosmopolitan European citizens: “if there are no more borders, it means that this [the Roma population integration] is our problem, all Europeans’ problem, be they Romanian, French or Italian” (Cernahoschi, 2010)2. Defining Migration as Material and Professional Accomplishment A different definition of the problem of professional migration, made visible mainly in specialized media, establishes as causal responsibility for doctors’ migration their inability to achieve material and professional success in the Romanian health system. It is a definition partly agreed upon both by the president and the doctors interviewed by MP. The type of causal responsibility is different in this case (personal motivation rather than systemic causes or effects): “I know doctors aged 35 to 40 who go abroad not for material reasons, but because they don’t have career prospects, due to these ossified structures that don’t allow younger doctors to promote” (President Traian Băsescu, quoted by Ciornia, 2010). Yet there is no agreement on further causal responsibility for this state of affairs. The president refers to the “ossified structures”—which,



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in contemporary Romanian political language, is a conveniently ambiguous periphrasis for the representation of a generational conflict where older members of a community or organization (doctors, professors) do not allow younger members to fill high profile positions (a linguistic option that establishes political responsibilities with the community as such, rather than with policies). The doctor interviewed by the specialized media outlet attributes causal responsibility strictly to policies: “mid-career doctors cannot find professional fulfilment in the state system. Were there a budgetary infusion, they would reach accomplishment in their own country.” (Ciornia, 2010) The tacit assimilation of the public health system with the opportunities for a career in the country turns this definition of the problem into a subcase of the “the policy problem”. In non-specialized media, causal responsibility for professional migration is not related only to professional accomplishment, but also to material achievement and social recognition of the doctors’ status. Defining Migration as Individual Solution Against Politicians and Bureaucracy A third view of the problem emerges in opinion articles, where journalists no longer position themselves as policy evaluators, but adopt the stance of experiential journalists, developing identitarian discourses on the relation between migration and community. When they focus on non-specialized migration, they ascribe causal responsibility to incompetent politicians and an ineffective bureaucratic system, which leaves the citizen with no other solution but migration. This type of intervention was triggered by a decision of the government regarding the taxation of the income generated by the independent activities of artists, journalists, lawyers, etc. Due to poor implementation, a bureaucratic nightmare broke loose. In this case, migration is no longer discussed as a phenomenon affecting the polity but as the immediate solution against the absurdities of the polity: I refuse to believe that it’s a matter of hate, I refuse to believe in a specially designed maneuver to harm the media, including collateral casualties such as artists, advertisers, lawyers and other professionals producing independent income. It can only be sheer imbecility. Yes, for the first time I want to emigrate. Never have I felt so bad in my own country, never have I felt so hopeless, never have I felt so crumbled, never has the rulers’ spit shriveled my cheek so deep (Tache, 2010); They [my friends] simply want to leave. As far away as possible…It’s more than weariness, distrust, and hopelessness altogether. Anger no longer exists. Just the wish to escape. To run away. (Goțiu, 2010b)

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To sum up, two separate migrations, the migration of the Roma and the migration of Romanians, are discussed as two different problems, the latter involving indiscriminate references to either professional or general migration. Roma migration as a problem relies on different cognitive and moral judgments (they prejudice the image of Romanians abroad) and the causal responsibility for this migration, if discussed, is never articulated in relation to the causal responsibility of the other forms of migration. Competing definitions of the problem of migration emerging through the media debate generate complex, interconnected interpretations and representations which articulate three types of discourse. Policy evaluation discourses discuss migration in relation to expedient institutional choices and consequences; professional accomplishment discourses discuss migration in relation to individual motivations for career and status and citizen-as-victim discourses discuss migration as a solution to the confrontation between citizens and the state.

Roles and Categories of Practice Having systematized the types of discourses on migration as a public problem, we want to see what civic identities are constructed for migrants in media discourse and what stances result as a discursive effect. Following the framework developed by Ragazzi, (cf supra) we want to investigate: what assumptions about migration are salient in the media discourse (episteme); what categories of practice are created and what functions are attributed to the group (categorization); and what forms of governance are created (techne). We have touched upon two other elements in Ragazzi’s framework, knowledge and position of the enunciator, in the previous section, although we have employed a different analytical view, operationalizing his framework mainly in terms of framings of the argument (see also chapter 4 in this volume). Following the terminology developed by Balabanova and Balch (2010), we could identify both a communitarian and a cosmopolitan imagery in the media discourse. Communitarian arguments will describe the problem of general and professional migration as catastrophic for the community, diminishing community strength and development potential. A frequently occurring subtype of the communitarian argument is the “domestic social justice” argument, employing considerations on “the best social and welfare conditions for citizens” (p. 384). Cosmopolitan arguments will invoke the right of professionals to emigrate and be treated fairly from the perspective of the rights and privileges derived from European citizenship. As a subcategory of cosmopolitan



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arguments, universalist arguments will appeal to human rights imagery to discuss the individuals’ right to free movement. Another prevalent subcategory is that of instrumental cosmopolitanism, which regards “immigration as a means to maximize total welfare” (Balabanova & Balch, 2010, p. 384). The problem of migration is treated by journalists either in a communitarian or a cosmopolitan frame, although it does not necessarily follow that the employment of such frames reflects journalists’ allegiances. For the type of analysis that we conduct, it is irrelevant to try and systematically equate the types of arguments employed in the media discourse with journalists’ moral commitments. In fact, a certain stance (what we might be tempted to take as an allegiance or loyalty for communitarian or cosmopolitan ideals) is the discursive effect of journalists’ positioning towards politics. We can see journalists’ employment of communitarian or cosmopolitan arguments as instances of instrumentalization, where migrants are seen, in a political perspective, as responsible actors in the act of governance. The fact that migration is proclaimed as “good” or “bad” for community presupposes that the journalist invokes a social contract between the community and the authority, which is permanently negotiated. When journalists discuss the ethical implications of migration, they position themselves as representatives of the community. When journalists discuss the consequences of professional migration on Romania’s development perspectives, in the background we can identify an understanding of high-skilled migrants as actors endowed with moral agency (the decision to leave presupposes a form of moral struggle over a breach of contract with the polity, based on the assumption that the migrant is an agent of development). The same assumptions about the migrant as agent are visible when journalists give migrants a voice. However, migrants’ identity is built in typologies that simplify the experience of migration: the graduate who never considered remaining; the resident with high expectations for an experience abroad; the middle-aged doctor, who, although firmly established in his profession, is disappointed with the system. When migrants are quoted, they present typical, exemplary life-stories. Images of success are obviously preferred to images of failure (few, if any, doctors are worse off abroad). Success stories encourage migration and a positive image of migration as a moral act, serving the individual’s interest, rather than the common good. In the words of one interviewee, pushing a young professional to leave the country is unpatriotic (Ofițeru & Pădurean, 2010), but the articles invoke the overt encouragement from the president: since the

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president’s discourse was cynical and discouragingly honest about the state’s inability to pay its specialists, ordinary citizens cannot be expected to be loyal (Pop, 2010). Journalists build neutral stances by accumulation of detail (for instance, they discuss poor work conditions, poor funding, lack of medical equipment). The figures are taken from studies of professional organizations, studies of European organizations, and the Ministry of Health. Texts are largely informative and no involvement of journalists is evident, apart from the selection of themes and actors. If there is interpretation of data or the phenomenon at large, it comes from sources: BBC News, Newsweek, a sociologist, and interviewees. The image of the medical system, for instance, is quite vivid, yet it is so by accumulation of detail, and not by discussion or analysis. A form of engagement with the community can be read in the employment of catastrophic imagery. Professional migration is referred to as “the great migration”, “the exodus of white robes” (Pădurean, 2010), an “unprecedented” phenomenon leading to catastrophe (Ofițeru & Pădurean, 2010); the system is “at the edge of a precipice” (Costîn & Bechir, 2010). The image of a crippled health system is suggestive for the moral universe created, without being directly suggestive for the journalist’s allegiances. When journalists make claims in the name of the community, they employ personal imagery: I won’t leave. I won’t leave because, somewhere in the Hunedoara County, in the wooded countryside, in Dobra Valley, there is a church. A church built by my greatgreat….grandparents, more than five hundred years ago. In 1458. This church, the roots—I can’t fit them in my luggage. And in that village, in Roșcani, there is a school. (…) A school where my aunt still teaches. And because I don’t want this school to look, one day, like the school from Roșia Montană, I won’t leave yet. A school and a church are strong enough reasons to make it worth resisting. (Goţiu, 2010c)

However, even in this particular instance, from “within the community”, journalists can appeal to broader ethical frames and civic engagement: [Y]es, I want to emigrate (…) For two days, in my house, there have been discussions on this topic. Serious discussions. Yet, until I emigrate, I have some jobs to finish. Friday, August 27, at 11 o’clock, in front of the Ministry of Finances, people will gather to protest. I will be there. I also want a fiscal strike. And the resignation of the government. After that, I can leave in peace. (Tache, 2010)



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In general, the constellations of values invoked with regard to migration are largely consistent. For instance, communitarian arguments appeal to identitarian or civic loyalties, while cosmopolitan arguments are generally employed to justify migration. To conclude, neutral, informative articles make diasporic stances visible. Opinion articles, on the other hand, appropriate diasporic stances. The journalists position themselves in opposition to the political field. This symbolic division is visible when journalists adopt diasporic stances in order to evaluate public policies. But the management of these symbolic divisions leads to engaging the Romanian diaspora in an instrumental manner, and, as a side effect, institutes and reinforces a one-dimensional representation of diaspora, along the traditional view of the social-political victimization, in opposition with the dynamics of “new diasporas” (Beciu, 2012).

Conclusions In summary, the migration of the Roma and the migration of Romanians are discussed as two different problems, generating competing definitions and articulating three different types of discourse. Diasporic stances are made visible in informative articles and even appropriated in opinion articles. They perform various functions, which are structured around multiple symbolic divisions and categorizations in the media discourse: divisions between deficient policies and politicians, on the one hand, and the citizen as victim, constrained to go abroad because of these faulty policies, on the other; tacit divisions between Romanians’ migration and Roma people’s migration (although both groups benefit from the same social security system, it is only in relation to Romanians that this system is depicted as inefficient and leading to migration); another tacit division between journalists who decide to stay in Romania and speak for those remaining behind, and the citizens opting for migration; and finally the division between the journalist and politicians. At this level the migrant is given a voice, or the journalist adopts a (provisional) migration stance in order to evaluate public policies and the Romanian politicians. Migration as a public problem emerges as a discursive outcome of media debates that make visible types of actors and evaluations. In accounting for various positions and events of both the internal and external agenda, journalists make strategic use of the theme of diaspora in relation to the articulation of the media field and its relationship with the political field. By denouncing politicians and the consequences of their actions, journalists foster forms of

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citizenship that contest or reinforce allegiances along a communitarian—cosmopolitan continuum. The citizen as a victim of politics and the prospects of emigration become discursive devices of representation by means of which journalists substitute the political roles and construct the diasporic option as an alternative which falls under a traditional representation of diaspora, in a logic of instrumentalization. Such an analysis can reveal how media contribute to the problematization of diaspora, to the production of knowledge about it, and, to a lesser extent, to the control of this subject area; it is through diasporic stances, adopted by journalists, that diaspora is employed not only as a broad category of practice, but specifically as a category of mobilization—even if the mobilization regards the evaluations of internal policy issues, rather than the topic of emigration as such. As a consequence, diaspora becomes a topic of problematizing citizenship and allegiances towards the political body of the sending state, but also a position of evaluation. Furthering the line of research interested in how diaspora is constituted through the symbolic politics of both the sending state and various non-state actors, this study shows how media can be understood both as an actor and a technology of governmentality, actively engaged in the symbolic constitution of diaspora.

Notes 1. The first version of this article (“Debating Migration as a Public Problem: Diasporic Stances in Media Discourse”) appeared in the Romanian Journal of Communication and Public Relations, 14(4), 181–201, in 2012. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher—College of Communication and Public Relations. 2. Our study does not discuss specifically the problem of Roma migration, but it appears as a separate category in the corpus that we analyze.

References Aksoy, A., & Robins, K. (2003). Banal transnationalism. The difference that television makes. In K. H. Karim (Ed.), The media of diaspora (pp. 89–104). London and New York, NY: Routledge. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of modernity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Balabanova, E., & Balch, A. (2010). Sending and receiving: The ethical framing of intra-EU migration in the European press. European Journal of Communication, 25(4), 382–397.



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Beciu, C. (2012). Qui fait la diaspora? Le problème de l’identité dans les recherches sur les diasporas. Romanian Journal of Communication and Public Relations, 14(4), 13–28. Brubaker, R. (2005). The ‘diaspora’ diaspora. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28(1), 1–19. Brubaker, R. (2015). Grounds for difference. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Burgess, K. (2014). Unpacking the diaspora channel in new democracies: When do migrants act politically back home? Studies in Comparative International Development, 49(1), 13–43. Cernahoschi, L. (2010, August 25). Să nu ne mai plângem pe tema țigănească [Let’s stop complaining about the Roma problem]. Vox Publica. Retrieved December 15, 2017, from http://voxpublica.realitatea.net/politica-societate/sa-nu-ne-mai-plangem-pe-tematiganeasca-50975.html Ciornia, O. (2010, August 6). Update: de ce să nu desființeze Președintele sănătatea românească? [Update: Why shouldn’t the President close down the Romanian health system?] Pagina Medicală. Retrieved December 15, 2017 from http://www.paginamedicala.ro/stiri-medicale /UPDATE_-De-ce-sa-nu-desfiinteze-Presedintele-Sanatatea-romaneasca__8584/ Costîn, V., & Bechir, M. (2010, August 13). Cine rămâne în spitale după marea emigrare [Who remains in hospitals after the great migration]. Adevărul. Retrieved December 15, 2017 from http://www.adevarul.ro/actualitate/eveniment/Cine_ramane_in_spitale_dupa_ marea_emigrare_0_315569018.html Dahlgren, P. (2009). Media and political engagement. Citizens, communication and democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delanty, G. (2002). Communitarianism and Citizenship. In E. Isin & B. Turner (Eds.), Handbook of citizenship studies (pp. 159–174). London: Sage Publications. Foucault, M. (1988). The concern for truth. Politics, philosophy, culture: Interviews and other writings, 1977–1984 (pp. 255–267). New York, NY: Routledge. Gamlen, A., Cummings, M., Vaaler, P. M., & Rossouw, L. (2013). Explaining the rise of diaspora institutions. The IMI Working Papers Series, paper 78. Goțiu, M. (2010a, August 6). De ce i-a iritat Băsescu pe ziariștii britanici. Și de ce mă enervează pe mine. [Why Băsescu annoyed the British journalists. And why he annoys me]. Vox Publica. Retrieved December 15, 2017 from http://voxpublica.realitatea.net/politica-societate/de-cei-a-iritat-basescu-pe-ziaristii-britanici-si-de-ce-ma-enerveaza-pe-mine-50031.html Goțiu, M. (2010b, August 25). Tu cât mai reziști în România? [How long can you last in Romania?] Vox Publica. Retrieved December 15, 2017 from http://voxpublica.realitatea.net/ politica-societate/tu-cat-mai-rezisti-in-romania-50992.html Goțiu, M. (2010c, August 28). Săptămâna umilinței. De ce nu am plecat. Și de ce nu plec. [The week of humiliation. Why I didn’t leave. And why I shall not]. Vox Publica. Retrieved December 15, 2017, from http://voxpublica.realitatea.net/politica-societate/saptamanaumilintei-de-ce-nu-am-plecat-si-de-ce-nu-plec-51132.html Gusfield, J. (1981). The culture of public problems. Drinking-driving and the symbolic order. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Isin, E., & Turner, B. (2002). Citizenship studies: An introduction. In E. Isin & B. Turner (Eds.), Handbook of citizenship studies (pp. 1–10). London: Sage Publications.

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Kleist, N. (2008). Mobilising ‘the diaspora’: Somali transnational political engagement. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 34(2), 307–323. Koinova, M. (2012). Autonomy and positionality in diaspora politics. International Political Sociology, 6(1), 99–103. Kunz, R. (2008). Mobilising diasporas: A governmentality analysis of the case of Mexico (Vol. 3, pp. 1–23). Working Paper Series “Glocal Governance and Democracy”. Retrieved December 15, 2017 from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1. 613.3099&rep=rep1&type=pdf Leblang, D. (2017). Harnessing the diaspora: Dual citizenship, migrant return remittances. Comparative Political Studies, 50(1), 75–101. Mattelart, T. (2009). Les diasporas à l’heure des technologies de l’information et de la communication: Petit état des savoirs. tic&société, 3(1–2), 11–57. Miller, T. (2002). Cultural citizenship. In E. Isin & B. Turner (Eds.), Handbook of citizenship studies (pp. 231–244). London: Sage Publications. Nedelcu, M. (2012). Migrants’ new transnational habitus: rethinking migration through a cosmopolitan lens in the digital age. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38(9), 1339–1356. Ofițeru, A., & Pădurean, B. (2010, August 23). Medic român plătit de 24 de ori mai bine în Anglia. [Romanian doctor paid 24 times better in England]. Adevărul. Retrieved December 15, 2017 from http://adevarul.ro/news/eveniment/medic-roman-platit-24-mai-anglia1 _50ae54377c42d5a6639bba98/index.html Pădurean, B. (2010, August 20). Cluj: Exodul halatelor albe pentru salarii de 40 de ori mai mari. [The exodus of white robes for salaries up to 40 times bigger]. Adevărul. Retrieved December 15, 2017 from http://www.adevarul.ro/locale/cluj-napoca/CLUJ-Exodul_ halatelor_albe_pentru_salarii_de_40_de_ori_mai_mari_0_320368000.html Pop, L. (2010, August 8). Ura și la gară domnule președinte. [Good bye, Mr. President]. Adevărul. Retrieved September 22, 2012 from http://www.adevarul.ro/lucian_pop/Ura_ si_la_gara-domnule_Presedinte_7_313238675.html Ragazzi, F. (2009). Governing diasporas. International Political Sociology, 3(4), 378–397. Sinatti, G. (2015). Return migration as a win-win-win scenario? Visions of return among Senegalese migrants, the state of origin and receiving countries. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 38(2), 275–291. Sinatti, G., & Horst, C. (2015). Migrants as agents of development: Diaspora engagement discourse and practice in Europe. Ethnicities, 15(1), 134–152. Stauff, M. (2010). The governmentality of media: Television as ‘problem’ and ‘instrument’. In Jäger, L., Linz, E., & Schneider, I. (Eds.), Media, culture, and mediality: New insights into the current state of research (pp. 63–284). Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Tache, S. (2010, August 25). Vreau demisia lui Boc, grevă fiscală și să emigrez. [I want Boc’s resignation, fiscal strike and to emigrate]. Vox Publica. Retrieved September 22, 2012 from http:// voxpublica.realitatea.net/politica-societate/vreau-demisia-lui-boc-greva-fiscala-si-saemigrez-50984.html Wimmer, A., & Glick Schiller, N. (2002). Methodological nationalism and beyond: Nation– state building, migration and the social sciences. Global Networks, 2(4), 301–334.

·3· the impact of migration on the construction of romania ’ s country image Two Intersecting Public Problems Alina Dolea

In Romania, the promotion of the country’s image has been a recurrent topic on the public agenda after the fall of communism in 1989. In the 1990s, governmental campaigns, initiatives, or slogans meant to promote and communicate Romania to the world generated so many heated and recurrent debates involving a variety of social actors that the country’s image eventually became a public problem relevant to the entire society. After the country joined the European Union, these debates about the country’s image have been closely linked with the increasing wave of Romanian migration towards Western Europe. Migrants have become a source of both positive visibility and image crisis for Romania, due to their behaviors and actions in the destination countries. In fact, migration itself has become a public problem, due to its unprecedented magnitude and socio-political complexity. The two public problems clearly intersected in 2007, when the Romanian government faced an international image crisis after a Romanian migrant in Italy was accused of homicide and the Italian and international media covered the story widely: consequently, in 2008, the Romanian Government issued its first government decision to finance a campaign to promote Romania and Romanians in Italy and Spain. This chapter draws a longitudinal analysis of the gradual interconnected construction of Romania’s country image and migration as public

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problems: it identifies several stages (between 1990 and 2010), when the government played a key role, and more recent developments (between 2010 and 2015), when various non-state actors seized the opportunity for increased visibility and instrumentalized the two public problems in brand communication campaigns. Thus, the study shows how the different stages in the construction of these public problems have been reconfigured over time and, especially, what the impact of migration on the construction of Romania’s country image has been.

The Theoretical Context This chapter investigates the impact of migration on the gradual construction of country image promotion as a public problem in Romania after 1990 and up to 2015. The evolution of different discourses about the nation reveals a current topic of greatest interest and concern at both European and Romanian national level: the shaping of national identities and images of countries in the context of increased migration, a complex phenomenon that has social, political and economic effects, and questions established political and economic models, policies and systems. At the same time, it is set within a more general context: the global preoccupation of countries to gain visibility as competing actors in a glocalized economy and culture; this has led governments across the globe to adopt various promotional practices (Wernick, 1991) from the business sector (e.g. nation branding, public relations), in a gradual process of habitualization and even institutionalization. Consequently, specific power discourses about the nation have been mobilized as part of their strategies to reposition themselves within the global arena, resulting ultimately in the gradual marketization of national identities (Kaneva, 2011; Surowiec, 2017). Although largely used long before, these practices of country promotion have started to be systematically studied and conceptualized after the 1950s, due to the global changes brought about by the rapid development and expansion of information technologies, media, and the Internet. Consistent lines of research have thus emerged: (1) in political sciences and international relations that focus on the transformations in diplomacy, often referred to as public diplomacy and the new public diplomacy (Cull, 2008, 2009; Gilboa, 2016; Melissen, 2005; Snow, 2009); (2) in economic sciences and business studies that reflect on the rise of place branding, marketing of places, and nation branding (Anholt, 2002, 2004; Dinnie, 2008; Govers & Go, 2009; Kotler,



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2009; Kotler & Gertner, 2002; Olins, 1999, 2005); (3) in communication sciences, particularly in public relations of nations or for nations (Grunig, 1993; Kunczik, 1997, 2003; L’Etang, 1996; Signitzer & Coombs, 1992; Signitzer & Wamser, 2006; Szondi, 2008, 2010; Taylor & Kent, 2006). However, much too often concepts associated with country promotion practices have been used interchangeably or even misused contributing to (the amplification of) an already existing “conceptual fog” (Buhmann & Ingenhoff, 2015). In addition, this has led to a rather positivist research dominated by a focus on efficiently mastering these practices for the competition taking place on the global neoliberal market (Dolea, 2015a). The parallel development of research on country promotion practices in different fields and disciplines that have not “spoken to each other” until very recently requires caution in investigating and understanding their origins. Most scholars in international relations, communication sciences, or economic and business studies have preferred to use the existing framework and consecrated theory in their field and discipline, and very few have explored further or embarked on interdisciplinary studies. There has been much reproduction of “how to” studies, rather than knowledge production and theory building. Consequently, during the last decade, several critical approaches to country promotion have developed mostly as an organic reaction to this parallelism in literature that has ultimately narrowed the research imagination of scholars. It is precisely for this reason that there is a need for digging deeper in the complex body of works in order to reach, comprehend, and discuss the origin of terms and concepts. It is not mere terminology. Concepts reiterate and enact an entire framework of knowledge, theory, and research existing in their “mother” discipline. In other words, they constitute a reference paradigm and a “horizon” of interpretations and understandings for various phenomena. Therefore, one needs to understand the origins of a concept, trace its evolution, and reflect on the major debates around it, before one engages in developing it, analyzing it from a different angle, or even criticizing it. One critique is the impossibility of measuring the efficiency of country promotion practices, particularly nation branding, although the prevalent case study approach in nation branding literature frames as success stories the branding of various nations (Dolea, 2015a). In the context of the global economic crisis, nation branding is facing serious challenges, since the countries presented as success stories (e.g. Spain) deal with consistent economic and social problems, and ratings downgrading due to the policies previously praised by nation branding advocates, not to mention the current turbulent

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global contexts, with the rise of nationalist parties that led to the Catalan independence referendum and proclamation in Spain, in October 2017. These developments show how necessary it is to include the discussion about nation branding practices within wider socio-political contexts and time frames. Another critique is linked to the isolation of nation branding from the other disciplines that study the practices of promoting country images. It is only recently that branding scholars have started to acknowledge the necessity of assuming an interdisciplinary approach to country promotion in both theory and practice. The rebranding of the Place Branding journal into the Place Branding and Public Diplomacy journal published by Palgrave is the result of this emerging interdisciplinarity. Perhaps the most consistent line of critique is the one voiced by scholars in media and cultural studies (Aronczyk, 2013; Kaneva, 2011; Volcic & Andrejevic, 2011). They use concepts and theories inspired by Critical Theory and apply them to nation branding to illustrate the social dimension of the phenomenon and its social implications. They bring forward issues mostly neglected until recently in nation branding literature, such as national identity or imbalance of power in society, and argue for reflecting on and interrogating practices instead of labeling or measuring them. It is interesting to notice that several scholars who assume a critical approach to nation branding come from the postcommunist region: it might be the very need of identity reconstruction in these countries that has led to the coagulation of such a critical approach and to a response to the predominantly western conceptualizations of nation branding from both academics and consultants. The reality and the specific context of these countries bring to the fore aspects that have been left out in the western perspectives on nation branding. Although a cultural context specific approach is widely advocated in nation branding literature, the overwhelming focus is on “how to” market, promote, and brand countries (more) effectively. In recent years, this critical thinking turn has also been consolidating in public diplomacy literature (Der Derian, 2009; Dutta-Bergman, 2006; Hayden, 2012; Pamment, 2012, 2014; Surowiec, 2017) and public relations (Dolea, 2015a, 2015b, 2018; L’Etang, 2009). Consequently, the practices of country promotion and particularly public diplomacy have been analyzed from a sociological perspective (e.g. Castells, 2008) and considered “social practice” (e.g. Wiseman, 2015). The outcome of this “re-setting” in thinking about country promotion is a change in the very object of research that “is not reduced anymore to the communication products and campaigns, but is



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extended to include their context, the conditions of their production, the types of discourses they embody, and how these are perceived and debated within society.” (Dolea, 2015a, p. 282) Reviewing the evolution of concepts and the research on country promotion practices in the literatures on public diplomacy, nation branding, and public relations, I have proposed a complementary approach to study the phenomenon of country promotion in postcommunist countries (Dolea, 2015b): I have transferred the main concepts and key statements of social constructivism (e.g. reality as construct, reality as social construct, interaction, institutionalization, historicity, legitimacy) (Berger & Luckman, 1966) to the study of country promotion and proposed an analytical model for empirical investigation. I conceptualize country promotion as a process with two distinct phases: one external, of communicating and engaging with foreign audiences, and one internal, which takes place within the nation. It is considered that in the internal phase several social actors engage in the public debates within the country about what is representative for that country, they construct their own definitions of country promotion and try to dislocate existing significations in society and to impose new ones, in negotiation and interaction with other social actors. This constant social construction of country promotion leads to its becoming a public problem, while the typification of practices related to country promotion eventually leads to an institutionalization. The external phase of country promotion comprises the final products—the campaigns aimed at foreign audiences, which are considered to stand for a certain definition of the country that has been temporarily imposed during the internal phase of negotiation. At the same time, it is considered that during the entire (internal and external) process the social actors define and negotiate the meaning of the techniques and instruments associated with country promotion—public diplomacy, public relations, and nation branding. Therefore, such an analysis can reveal how public diplomacy, public relations, and nation branding are understood within the nation by the social actors involved in country promotion. Such an approach facilitates an in-depth analysis of the entire phenomenon of country promotion in Romania after the fall of communism and its gradual transformation from a theme on the civil society agenda into a theme on the public agenda and into a public problem. It allows a reflection on how various social actors (institutions, journalists, experts in communication, intellectuals, etc.) contribute to a co-construction of what is representative for their nation and their national identity: country promotion practices as constructs

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(institutional, organizational, social) and subject to power relations (at institutional/ organizational/ social levels) that ultimately influence a certain vision of actors on those practices.

Linking Country Image Promotion and Migration in the Case of Romania By using such a social constructivist approach, it is also possible to identify how other public problems have come to be linked, over time, with the country image promotion problem, and have re-configured it. It is the case of the Romanians’ migration within the EU, which has become a social, economic, and political phenomenon due to its magnitude: according to the UN Report 2015 (Trends in International Migrant Stock, 2015), between 2000 and 2015 Romanian diaspora had a growth rate of 7.3 percent per annum and is estimated at over 3.4 million people living abroad (which is around 18% of the current population). This constant growth has led to the recurrence of the topic on the public agenda and, consequently, to the emergence of certain migration related practices of visibility in both Romania, as a sending country, and the receiving countries (Beciu & Lazăr, 2014). The media, in particular, have played an important role in the construction of the Romanian migration as a public problem and linked it with how Romanians are perceived abroad (Beciu, 2012). For instance, in the context of the liberalization of EU labor market, the Romanian media have reiterated and gradually legitimized the idea of “a dominant discourse in the UK that talked about an imminent ‘invasion’ or ‘siege’ of the British territory by the ‘masses’ or ‘hordes’ of Romanians, ‘the immigrants of poverty’.” (Beciu & Lazăr, 2016, p. 58) All these developments have impacted the recurrent debates within the country about how Romania is promoted or should be promoted and have ultimately triggered initiatives and campaigns. While the role of migrants and diaspora has been studied in public diplomacy and nation branding literatures, the approach has been rather functional, praising or investigating how to boost their positive potential for promoting the image of the country of origin in the destination country. However, lines of research that link country promotion practices (in public diplomacy, nation branding, public relations) with migration, transnationalism, and the construction of public problems might open a new avenue for research in the future. This study explores the interdependences of the two public problems



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in the case of Romania, while inviting more theoretical investigation and empirical research for in-depth reflection and analysis of these complex intertwined phenomena.

Methodology This chapter sums up and further develops my extensive research on the construction of country promotion as a public problem in Romania between 1990 and 2010 (Dolea, 2015b). It shows there was a constant interaction of several social actors who had different understandings and agendas of country promotion and who engaged in a symbolic negotiation of definitions and interpretations of country promotion, a process considered within a wider social and institutional context and related with the institutionalization of communication practices in Romania after 1989. The vision of state institutions is privileged in this research because, of all social actors, state institutions are the actors that have carried out most of the initiatives of Romania’s country promotion abroad. However, state institutions are not a unitary category, nor do they present a unique vision; as a result, several institutions are analyzed, each with its own specific agenda and understanding of country promotion. The vision of state institutions is always considered and analyzed in this chapter within the network of their relationships and interactions with each other and with the other social actors engaged in the process of country promotion in Romania (e.g. media, experts in communication, intellectuals, etc.). It is in the context of the recurrent public debates in Romania that state institutions constantly position themselves and de-construct, construct, and re-construct the significations of country promotion. At empirical level, this chapter: (1) identifies the state institutions that contributed to the construction of country promotion as a public problem, as well as the initial emergence of country image and migration as issues on their institutional agenda after 1990; (2) traces the historicity of the practices of country promotion in relation with migration till 2010; it is considered that these practices reflect how the state institutions in Romania use (and maybe re-interpret, re-contextualize) the terminology and the various techniques and instruments of country promotion (public relations, nation branding, and public diplomacy). Therefore, following the constructivist logic, another objective is to reveal how, in interaction with each other and with other social actors, the Romanian state institutions (3) de-construct the issue of country

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promotion, trying to dislocate existing significations about country promotion, to bring and negotiate new arguments, definitions, interpretations, and terminologies, thus re-constructing and imposing new significations; and how this is related to the issue of migration. Finally, the chapter (4) shows the evolution of different conceptualizations about country promotion within state institutions and the influence of migration on their vision of country promotion. All this in a period of 20 years in which Romania also changed its (inter)national status from a “country in transition” (1989–1999), to a “candidate country” (1999–2006), and, finally, to an “EU member country” (2007–onwards) (Beciu, 2007; Beciu & Perpelea, 2011). Starting from these aims and objectives, the chapter reflects on the following main research questions: When did the issue of migration intersect with the issue of country promotion? How did it impact the vision of state institutions on promoting the country? The state institutions selected for analysis were the ones that had on their agenda the country promotion issue and, more importantly, initiated several actions and campaigns to promote Romania abroad: the Agency for Governmental Strategies (ASG), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE), and the Ministry of Tourism (MT). The analysis aimed: (1) to trace the emergence of country promotion as an issue on each institution’s agenda and its intersection with the issue of migration; (2) to follow the development of the issue in time and point out possible key moments and distinct stages in this development; (3) to reconstitute the specificity of each institution’s discourse on country promotion before and after migration became a public problem in Romania— the position assumed, arguments, and definition of country promotion proposed, a symbolic construction or re-construction of what is representative for Romania, as the essence of what is being promoted. Thus, it is possible to distinguish how each institution’s vision about country promotion as a process has been negotiated and evolved over time, in interaction with each other and with other social actors. A mixed quantitative and qualitative methodology was used, including a historical documentary reconstitution and discourse analysis of semi-structured interviews. At the Agency for Governmental Strategies interviews were carried out with councilors, two former Presidents (Valeriu Turcan, Alfred Bulai), and the former General Director (Dan Jurcan), between August and September 2011. The interviews with the representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE) included: Simona Miculescu (former press officer, spokesperson, press secretary at the Romanian Embassy in the USA, and



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Director of Public Communication within MAE after ‘90), Oana Marinescu (former Spokesperson of MAE and General Director for Public Diplomacy within MAE between 2008 and 2010), and Amelia Tue (former Director of Public Diplomacy in 2008, former Director for Communication and Public Diplomacy in 2011). The interviews were taken between September 2011 and November 2011. For the historical reconstitution of the initiatives launched by the Ministry of Tourism, an interview was made with Carmen Moraru, General Director of the Directorate for Tourism for almost the entire period 1990–2010, in October 2011. In addition to the interviews, the research object was made up by the state institutions’ public communication (the content of their official websites, press releases, promotional materials used during the campaigns—films, spots, ad prints—and statements of the representatives of state institutions), but also the legislative framework, internal documents and strategies, the government’s decisions for the establishment or reorganization of ministries or departments. All this is considered to create a diverse corpus of materials that constitute the basis for a discourse analysis meant to reveal the institutional discourse on country promotion of the Agency for Governmental Strategies, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Tourism, and the Romanian Cultural Institute. The corpus covers a period of 20 years and makes it possible to situate individual discourses of the representatives of state institutions within the discursive practices of the institutions ever since they put the issue of country promotion on their agenda and up to the moments when the interviews were taken. In order to analyze thematically how these state institutions interact with each other and with other social actors, thus trying to dislocate the existing signification about country promotion and to impose others, an additional corpus of electronic press materials was gathered for the period 1989–2010. More than 100 articles and pieces of news were included in the corpus after searching the name of the initiative and/ or the slogan of the campaign on Google or on the search engine of newspapers and portals such as hotnews.ro, iqads.ro, evz.ro, adevarul.ro, revista22.ro, obsevatorcultural.ro, etc. This mix of quantitative and qualitative methodology and the complex corpus selected for analysis provide elements not only for examining how the country promotion problem emerged and developed within each institution, but also for showing aspects such as: distinct stages in the definition of country promotion as a public problem; how each institution legitimized the imposed definition in a specific stage; how the vision of each institution about country

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promotion evolved between 1990 and 2010, due to the constant process of interaction and negotiation with the other social actors in Romanian society. The chapter continues with an exploratory analysis of several Romanian brand communication campaigns initiated by non-state actors between 2011 and 2014. The aim is to show how the issues of country image promotion and migration have gradually become interconnected, influencing each other, beyond the sphere of institutional communication. The case studies discussed are a series of TV ads for the Rom chocolate bar (from 2010 to 2014) that link the migrants and Romania’s image. It is for the first time that a Romanian commercial brand has decided to use systematically the two issues in its brand communication campaign and this is the reason they were selected for analysis. It is thus argued that the instrumentalization of the country image and migration issue by non-state actors illustrates, in fact, the high public interest in and relevance of these issues for Romanian society. Moreover, this might actually represent a new stage in the construction of country promotion as a public problem, as the argument of citizens’ involvement in country image promotion, and even duty, is assumed, mobilized, and legitimized by non-state actors.

Stages in the Construction of Country Image Promotion as a Public Problem and the Impact of Migration Stage 1. Country Image Promotion is a Problem on the Civil Society and Media Agendas (1990–2000) Civil society is probably the first social actor to have discussed the image of Romania after the 1989 Revolution. The first post-revolutionary months were characterized by several violent protests of miners in Bucharest and by a high degree of uncertainty and anxiety among Romanians. In addition, the foreign correspondents that arrived in Romania covered extensively the “unseen” faces of the country, kept hidden by the communist regime: the existence of many children with disabilities, institutionalized children and orphanages with insufficient funding, and very hard living conditions. The national media and the Romanian opinion leaders criticized the international media for obsessively circulating these images, thus consolidating the clichés among foreign audiences, although Romania was not the only country facing these



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kinds of problems. They also criticized the government for their lack of reaction and raised the question of “What is the government doing in order to repair this?” The discourse of civil society focused on the rediscovery of Romania’s national identity, after the long years of communism, and on the need to go back to authentic values, political leaders, and intellectuals that Romania had before the dictatorship. The intellectuals, academics, and media representatives forming the civil society in the 1990s were very active at that time, ran manifestations, and were strong supporters of the historical parties and of the coming back of King Michael I. They argued for building a closer relationship with the western political powers and consolidated democracies. However, the public agenda was dominated by “We don’t sell our country,” one of the first populist slogans used in Romanian political communication after 1989 (Teodorescu, Guţu, & Enache, 2005). Briefly, it referred to the refusal of the authorities and union organizations to accept the privatization of Romanian state-owned companies by foreign investors, who were portrayed as taking advantage of Romanians. Therefore, between 1990 and 1995, the theme of Romania’s promotion abroad remained latent on the agenda of intellectuals. Starting with 1995, when Romania signed the official request to become a member of the European Union, the approach towards the West started changing and even a first action to promote Romania abroad was taken in 1996— the production of the “Eternal and fascinating Romania” photo album. The album was meant to promote a unique country with immutable values, some of them undiscovered yet. The cost of 5.7 million Euro paid by the Romanian state for 97,000 copies of the album was considered enormous by the press of that time. Journalists revealed that, in fact, only 10,000 albums were printed and only 4,200 were sent to Romania, which led to a cost of over 600 Euro per copy. There were lots of speculations regarding the printing of the album during the presidential campaign of Ion Iliescu, president of Romania at that time, who was running for a second mandate, and the possible connections with a financial scandal, known as the Costea affair (Adrian Costea, a former councilor of the president Ion Iliescu, living in France, was accused of money laundering by the French authorities). Since the album “Eternal and fascinating Romania” was produced by one of Costea’s companies with state funds, the media labeled the entire initiative as corruption. In 1996, the right wing coalition, the Romanian Democratic Convention, won the elections with a program assuming the country’s European and NATO integration (Teodorescu et al., 2005, p. 67). Nevertheless, besides the

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intensification of Romania’s international relations with the representatives of western countries, via diplomatic channels, no major initiatives to promote Romania were publicly initiated.

Stage 2: Country Image Promotion Emerges on the Government’s Agenda (2000–2004) A new stage in the construction of country promotion as a public problem was represented by the recurrence in the media of themes related to Romania’s European Union integration. This resulted in (1) a constant reporting on the economic and political actions of the government as illustrated by the regular monitoring of country reports made by the European Commission (EC) and communicated by the Raportor assigned by EC for Romania; (2) the media construction of a collective actor, “the Romanians”, shaping an identity discourse about the effects of European integration for “us, the Romanians”. However, the focus of the general media was not on the self-reflective efforts of Romanian society, but rather on the practical aspects related to the European integration that would affect Romanian old practices coming from tradition, such as the traditional Christmas sacrifice of pigs. It was in the cultural media (Alama, 2004) that an identity discourse was constructed on the dialectic Romanian identity (old tradition and values)—European identity (modernity—new values, ways of understanding life, and the relationship with authorities). It is within this context that the Social Democratic Government and its Prime Minister, Adrian Năstase, announced the program “Made in Romania”. The aim was to promote and sustain Romanian products on the internal and, especially, the external market. According to the organizers, by joining the program, Romanian producers could promote their brands, products, and services in a unified and efficient way, for a long-term period, with minimum financial efforts. Few producers actually joined the program because the costs were considered too high, so it eventually collapsed. Romania was promoted as “simply surprising” starting with 2002 and 2004, when advertising campaigns were launched by the Ministry of Tourism. The campaigns included a website http://www.romaniatravel.com, an advertising campaign with TV commercials aired on Discovery, Euronews, Eurosport, CNN, BBC and five Romanian televisions, and an action of branding several buses in Madrid, Spain, with the logo “Romania, simply surprising”. The budget used was of over 52 billion lei and was considered too high by the



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media because there were only some punctual actions that had no continuity, so that the suspicion of money laundering appeared again: journalists focused rather on how the Ministry of Tourism handled the contract than on the concept of the campaign or what messages about Romania it sent. The argument of an arranged tender was clearly formulated since five out of six competing agencies at the tender were part of the same communication group: “the competition was a ‘family’ tender” (România, “mereu surprinzătoare” [Romania ‘always surprising’…], 2004, Capital). The argument was later taken over by other journalists (Barbu & Obae, 2005), imposing the idea that public funds were used for private benefits, especially of the agencies close to the political party governing the country.

Stage 3: Country Image Promotion Becomes a Problem on the Public Agenda (After 2005) The government publicly defined country promotion as nation branding in 2005, when a series of meetings were organized to answer questions about how we promote our country It was for the first time that different actors with competing agendas (state institutions, journalists, consultants in branding and communication, politicians and intellectuals) sat at the same table discussing Romania’s nation brand. Initially, the journalists covered the initiative in a rather positive manner, endorsing it, explaining what a nation brand was, and introducing the comparative argument—how other countries built nation brands (Rusu, 2005). They also privileged the perspectives of the different actors participating in the meetings: the government’s representatives legitimized the initiative in the context of a possible delay of Romania’s integration into the EU and its effects on the status of the country; the professional associations in communication assumed an expert type of discourse and pointed out the need for research to find out Romanians’ perception about their national identity, and then the perceptions of others; opinion leaders emphasized the need for the nation brand to reflect the development of Romania (Scarlat, 2005); experts in branding underlined the “battle between different groups to catch a piece of the business in their own interest.” (Benezic, 2005) Later, as more meetings were organized, some journalists started to point out that although in July 2005 was the fifth meeting of the committee, ASG was delaying the calendar of the strategy—the task book was supposed to be finished in the following month, when the tender was also expected to be

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announced (Benezic, 2005). The president of ASG was changed, but ASG continued with the preparation of the task book for the tender and eventually launched the call for the public tender, but no agency submitted an offer. As a result, the media started to criticize heavily ASG for the handling of the nation branding project and mainly assumed the position of consultants in branding and advertising in their headlines (“Brandul de ţară păşeşte cu stângul” [Country brand starts on the wrong foot], 2006, Capital; “Brandul de ţară al României, varză la Bruxelles” [The Romanian brand, cabbage for Bruxelles], 2007, Cotidianul; “Branding Romania”, 2007, Capital). The discourse of agencies was meant to position them as experts, imposing the argument of their having the expertise and vision for implementing such a project. Eventually the project was stopped and the media furthered the argument that ASG’s committee for the nation brand was inefficient, which became the main label for this governmental initiative.

Stage 4. Country Image Promotion Makes it to the Prime Minister’s Agenda Because of Migration (2007) Towards the end of 2007, a new issue was closely linked to that of country promotion: the free movement of citizens inside EU’s borders led to a consistent immigration phenomenon towards western countries and the appearance of a numerous diaspora. Thus, a new actor in the issue of country promotion emerged, as the events in diaspora had a major impact both in the international and the domestic public space. In fact, it was only after the incident in Rome in 2007, when a Roma ethnic of Romanian origin (Romulus Mailat) killed an Italian woman, that the Romanian Government initiated its first integrated communication campaign of public diplomacy and public relations in Italy and Spain, where more than 2 million Romanians live and work. This incident, known as “the Mailat case”, and the others that followed, had to do with the problems of the Romanian Roma communities who immigrated in Europe and most of the time were associated with begging, theft, and other crimes. The question of “how we are perceived outside our borders” had gained a new dimension, focusing on dissociation from this minority and on the idea that Romanians are not Gypsies. The incident generated an international image crisis for the Romanian authorities, while within the country a heated public debate emerged and added to the already existing pressure from outside Romania. The Italian politicians used the incident in a pre-electoral context (in the spring of 2008



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legislative elections and elections for the chair of mayor in Rome were to take place). Therefore, the dominant themes imposed on the public agenda in Italy were social security and immigration, and even a decision to expel the immigrants was discussed. This also spread quickly in the international media and soon the incident grew to become a crisis situation for the Romanian Government that had to handle it. As the Romanian authorities failed to take immediate action (according to Alfred Bulai, personal interview, October 2011), “the Mailat case” was transformed into a scapegoat, as the discourse of Italian authorities mobilized a powerful emotional and symbolic context—the value and respect for human life. The symbolic construction of the Romanian immigrant as a villain gained credibility in Italy because “the Mailat case” wasn’t a singular act and had a certain history of mediatization: it occurred after a lot of problems that we had in Italy (my translation) (Alfred Bulai, personal interview, October 2011); back in 2002–2003 […] we had monitoring reports and saw the cases, especially beggars, thefts, little aggressions that happened and were visible, but they did not create a negative opinion climate. (my translation) (Dan Jurcan, personal interview, September 2011)

The Romanian media covered extensively the actions and statements of Italian politicians and legitimized a new social actor involved in Romania’s promotion abroad—the Romanian diaspora. Insisting on how the international media had told the story of the Romanian immigrant (the villain) and the Italian woman (the victim), thus placing Romania on a position of inferiority, the journalists constructed a dual image of the Romanian immigrant: the (bad) immigrants who committed crimes and the (good) law-abiding immigrants who respected the law, started various businesses, and were themselves affected by the actions of the other immigrants. In addition, the Romanian media questioned the government about what it was doing in order to solve these problems, formulating the following arguments: (1) the political responsibility of the government for the Romanian diaspora (Culcer, 2007); (2) the need for consistent social, economic programs for the development of the country (Palade, 2007); the current situation was the direct result of the government’s lack of interest in the projects of country promotion that had only negative labels: scandal, money laundering, public money spent in private, and sometimes electoral interest, projects started but not finalized. The context was manipulated with ability by experts in communication to

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legitimize their previous claims for consistent approaches, public policies, and a vision for the future development of Romania. The civil society also engaged in the public debate, placing the discussions on the Romanian diaspora and the responsibility of the state (Brăileanu, 2007) into the wider social context of the Romanian society. Therefore, the images of Romanians (Mavrodin, 2008) that “the Mailat case” had projected were considered and analyzed as part of the internal debate on the Romanian identity and the development of Romanian society. The civil society discourse about country promotion was mainly an identity discourse pointing out different actors and types of problems, all related in fact to their positioning towards the Romanian identity issue: “the Romanians” and the relationship with the Roma community—an old issue in the history of Romania with social effects consisting of marginalization and discrimination (low degree of alphabetization, increased unemployment, poverty; different traditions) (Schwartz, 2008); “the Romanians” and their relationship with Europe (the general problems of the European Union as a new political construction meant to ensure equal rights to all its European citizens—Schwartz, 2008); the diasporic actor and the problems it faced in relation with the new country and population (cultural and social integration), but also in relation with the Romanian diplomatic missions abroad (administrative aspects); the government as responsible for the development of the country and for representing Romania abroad. The Romanian diaspora in Italy, through various nongovernmental organizations, also called, via diplomatic channels, for the support and reaction of Romanian authorities, underlining the effect of “the Mailat case” on their projects, businesses, and, in general, on their everyday life (according to two councilors from ASG, involved at that time in development of the campaigns, personal interview, August 2011). Facing an unprecedented social pressure, the government was forced to react and “the Mailat case” was the turning point that transformed the governmental approach towards the issue of country promotion. It was for the first time in the history of postcommunist Romania that the government allocated significant funds for the development and implementation of a complex communication program to promote Romania abroad. In fact, “the Mailat case” transformed the very governmental approach towards the diasporic community that became more numerous year by year and grew to become an important social actor, whose problems and requests needed to be taken into account by the government when formulating public policies. Ultimately, “the Mailat case” legitimized the diasporic actor:



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The Mailat case created political decision—increased the staff at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I mean I am not referring only to the communication campaign. That was punctual (…) and only one component. The Ministry of Interior had its own program (…) to send policemen there. It was a radical change in the way the Romanian authorities in consulates and embassies handled the everyday issues and requests of the Romanian immigrants. (my translation) (Alfred Bulai, personal interview, October 2011)

The Mailat case brought legitimacy to this positioning of ASG: it was a huge “earthquake” that gave credibility to previous requests for serious budgets in order to conduct promotional campaigns, not only punctual actions (Alfred Bulai, personal interview, October 2011); We had already informed the prime minister and proposed around… 4 memorandums with preventive measures. (…) Mind you, (it was) the same memorandum (…) created 2 years ago. (it) included the project and everything, then the prime minister Tăriceanu said “ok, go for it”. (my translation) (Dan Jurcan, personal interview, September 2011)

Building on the strategic mission of ASG within the Romanian Government and on the favorable context, the president of ASG placed himself in a position of power, assuming the initiative to split the funds received, in order to start a campaign in Italy, but also in Spain. In imposing his vision, he used the argument of the sociological research that indicated the need for such an action and the signals from Spanish journalists: we built on the idea, I decided this, even against Tăriceanu, I mean I did it eventually, although I knew it would have been better not to do it, I split the sum that was approved. (…) Spain was and still is, the second country considering the (number of) Romanians (i.e. immigrants). The situation in Spain was apparently good, as compared to Italy, but it could blow up at any moment. (…) When Spanish journalists came and took interviews, absolutely all of them were asking me if the Romanians would stay there, meaning the problem was quite important and the crisis wasn’t even approaching. (my translation) (Alfred Bulai, personal interview, October 2011)

Once the project was defined internally, ASG started to work on a task book, organized a tender and prepared the campaign. Besides the concept of the campaign itself, the main aim of the campaign was to send a signal that the Romanian state was getting involved in the issues related to its immigrants, because:

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one of the accusations (i.e. on the Italian part) was that the Romanian state doesn’t do anything (i.e. for its immigrants). (…). This campaign which could not be, you know, for that money and for an entire country and only for three months, could not be phenomenal, but it was a sign that the Romanian state was getting involved, was doing something, including sending policemen there. (my translation) (Alfred Bulai, personal interview, October 2011)

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE) and the Agency for Governmental Strategies (ASG) received funds to develop and implement communication campaigns in order to promote Romania abroad. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched “Piazza di Romania” (2008), a public diplomacy campaign, taking place in Italy, and the Agency for Governmental Strategies launched “Romanians in Europe”, which was developed in Spain and Italy. Formally, the campaign “Romanians in Europe” was the first communication campaign to promote Romania abroad after 1989 and was conceived and implemented taking into account all the steps of a public relations campaign (Dolea & Țăruș, 2009): first, sociological research studies were conducted in Italy and Spain to lead to the analysis of the situation and the definition of the actual, existing, problems for each of the two countries; then the purpose and the objectives of the campaign were formulated, target audiences and key-messages were established, strategies and specific tactics were adopted for each country, but in accordance with the general communication line and the global concept of presenting success stories. Different visual and communicational identities were created: slogan, logo, posters, TV commercials, and press layouts for each country. There was a budget and a definite period of time to carry out the actions and, at the end, there was a final sociological research to evaluate the effects of the campaign. Indeed, it is for the first time that the Romanian Government used an integrated communication campaign, with components of public relations, advertising, and marketing. The media had mainly an informative discourse, initially announcing the allocation of the budget and the launch of the campaigns. Then, they assumed a questioning discourse of the events organized by ASG and MAE: some journalists pointed out the fact that the Romanian authorities were organizing concerts and public events, instead of solving the social problems caused by immigration (Rockhoff, 2008) and the specific problems faced by the Romanian community (Topciu, 2008). The stigmata of the previous campaigns of country promotion were also mentioned, the journalists arguing this was another attempt of the state to spend, without efficiency, public money for the image of Romania (Toma, 2008). However, despite these elements of



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criticism, the majority of articles were informative and insisted on the novelty of the initiative and the positive feedback of the Italian and Spanish people.

Stage 5. Country Image Promotion and Migration Used in Marketing Communication (After 2010) Starting with 2010, there has been an emergence of communication projects, initiatives, and campaigns to promote Romania, its major cities or regions launched by various non-state actors: for example, Ana Busuioc, a Romanian student at Leeds University, created a promotional video for Romania (“Why not get to know Romania?”) on YouTube that quickly became viral on social media (Iolu, 2012). The video got coverage in the Romanian media and was evaluated as “better promotion for the country than the one of the government” due to its high number of views on YouTube (220,000) as compared to the official government videos, Carpathian Garden (between 800 and 22,000 views) (O româncă invită străinii să cunoască România [A Romanian invites foreigners to get to know Romania], 2014, RomaniaTV.net). Other Romanian young entrepreneurs, Alex Filip and Toma Nicolau, have launched various projects of digital marketing aimed to promote cities (e.g. Travelers of Bucharest, Bucharest City App, #enjoyBucharest, #priNeamt) or regions (e.g. #explore Dobrogea). They are emblematic for a tendency towards projects initiated by non-state actors to generate alternative discourses about the country (or its cities and regions), while gaining more and more visibility in the public space and particularly on social media, because there is an already created context and large public interest. One of the most interesting developments after 2010 has also been the strategic decision of commercial brands to instrumentalize and manipulate this favorable context in order to link the public problems of country image promotion and migration in their marketing communication campaigns. One example is the “Why don’t you come over” campaign initiated by the Romanian newspaper Gândul and a Romanian communication group (GMP Advertising, GMP PR and Webstyler) to tackle a foreign policy issue (the UK-Romanian relations after the liberalization of the EU labor market in 2015). The campaign aimed to respond, with humor, to a series of articles published by The Guardian (Syal, 2013) on an alleged UK government campaign to discourage potential immigrants (“Don’t come to Britain. It’s full”). The Guardian invited their readers to create their own posters and messages to illustrate such a governmental campaign (Walsh & Guardian Readers, 2013).

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In a 24-hour response, the Romanian campaign said “We might not like Britain, but you will love Romania. Why don’t you come over?” in a series of posters uploaded on the Facebook account of the Romanian newspaper Gândul. The posters contained short messages that strategically mobilized either key figures in British society (Kate Middleton, Prince Charles, Prince Harry) or aspects of ordinary life (weather, beer, food, level of English): “Our draft beer is less expensive than your bottled water”; “Half of our women look like Kate. The other half, like her sister.” According to an internal document of GMP communication group, their aim was to fight discrimination by creating engaging content for gandul.info that would also energize the friends and relatives back home of those who lived in the UK or planned to go there as honest tax payers […] we looked for topics that would generate buzz for both the Romanian and British audience. From the price of beer to the Middleton sisters. (Presentation of the campaign “Why don’t you come over”, GMP, 2015, pp. 2–3)

The posters became viral on Facebook and “over 300,000 users had seen or commented or shared the posters on Facebook in the first 24 hours after posting, according to our data” said Mihai Gongu, Creative Director, GMP Advertising (Pantus, 2013). Therefore, the agency created an app so that Facebook users could generate their own posters inviting the British to come over. The “Why don’t you come over” campaign was widely covered by international media across the globe, with over 100 articles published by the press agencies Reuters and Associated Press, and publications such as Der Spie­gel, El Pais, Le Figaro, Washington Post, BBC, Daily Mail, etc. (Presentation of the campaign “Why don’t you come over”, GMP, 2015). The Romanian media also covered extensively the campaign and its international coverage. Therefore, the overall huge rate of engagement in the campaign (of Romanians both within and outside the country) obtained by the campaign can be explained through the agile and strategic exploitation of: (1) different contexts (both from the past and recent history of Romania), (2) the different sensitive issues in society (the country image and the self-representations of Romanians), (3) as well as the use of expert knowhow in managing integrated campaigns by a top communication agency in Romania. (Dolea, 2018)

Another example is that of the Romanian chocolate brand Rom and the agency McCann Bucharest: they initiated a series of brand campaigns between 2011 and 2014 that symbolically construct their core slogans and messages around the image of Romania, the migrants, the foreigners. In fact, the



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Romanian chocolate brand Rom has been using strategically its association with the country name and its packaging in the Romanian flag to stress its “Romanian-ness” and appeal to national identity. Here is a short overview of the campaigns: in 2011, Rom launched “The American Rom”, replacing the Romanian flag on the packaging of the chocolate bar with the American flag. The agency that won several international awards for this campaign (Rom Case Study: American Rom, n.d.) declared this was a courageous campaign aimed “at boosting Romanian national pride in a period when Romanian youth saw their dreams abroad, and patriotism could not be appealed to.” (my translation) (American Rom, n.d.) This idea was further developed in the following campaigns that started to heavily use symbolic moments, such as the national day of Romania (December 1), and highly symbolic aims of achieving unity, unification in order to increase exposure for the brand. On December 1, 2011 Rom launched Romanians are Smart, a campaign that invited Romanians to use a search optimization engine (in this case the Google search engine) in order to type in positive associations for Romanians. The idea behind the campaign was to alter and manipulate the algorithms so that every time someone starts typing Romanians, the first associations suggested are positive (not negative as they were at that time): The image of Romania on the Internet was not exactly favorable. And this could be easily seen on the most popular search engine where the auto-complete function revealed all the negative stereotypes associated with Romanians. That is why […] Rom launched the first campaign to change the image of the country on the Internet. (my translation) (Romanians Are Smart, n.d.)

The following year, on December 1, Rom continued the campaign under the slogan “a country, 19 million ambassadors”, with the aim to gather the positive associations under the dedicated hashtag #romaniansaresmart. Starting with 2013 Rom used even more the symbolism of the migrant and the country image in the campaign for the (re)launch of the new products (Rom Sandvis, Romtoff, Rom Milk Chocolate), which had two video ads. Under the slogan “Revenge is sweet”, one of the ads builds around the relationship between two general categories (the Romanians and the foreigners) that are constructed in the dichotomist logic of us versus them, while a certain historical sensitivity of the past is mobilized: Romanians had the best ideas. We are creative, but every time we have an idea, somebody else gets rich. Henri Coandă built the first reaction plane in France, but the French patented it. The same happened to Petrache Poenaru, the inventor of

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pen, known today as a French invention. […] this time, we took the successful ideas of the foreigners and made them Romanian, with the authentic Rom taste, and then we took revenge for the past wrongdoings. (my translation) (Răzbunarea e dulce [Revenge Is Sweet], n.d.)

In the second ad, the Romanian migrants and the foreigners are constructed symbolically through both language and action: the ads reproduce the media discourses about a certain category of Romanian migrants who work in agriculture or in households in the destination countries and the inferiority position in which they were placed (the relationship between master and servant): “For all the years that we picked their strawberries, we made their softwares and computers abroad, Rom called the foreigners to discover our fresh air and made them milk our cows for our Rom Milk Chocolate.” (my translation) (Răzbunarea e dulce [Revenge is sweet], n.d.) In fact, this is why the campaign is titled revenge, as it symbolically aims to reverse the positions between the masters (the foreigners) and the servants (the Romanian migrants), mobilizing a registry that goes beyond humor. The campaign thus instrumentalized an established media discourse in order to maximize its visibility, as well as its impact among the national audiences. Later that year, in December 2013, Rom celebrated the national day by proposing a digital unification for a day of two countries (Romania and the Republic of Moldova) that were one territory back in history, in 1918. The main idea behind the ad was “to create the Great Digital Unification, people with people and website with website. Because on the Internet there are no borders” (my translation) (Marea Unire Digitală [The Great Digital Unification], n.d.). In December 2014, Rom took the next step and addressed directly the Romanian migrants in the campaign “Romanians, come home”. It did it by targeting the Romanians at home to reach out to their friends and family abroad: Because it has become a tradition for Rom to celebrate December 1, in 2014 we went again on the Internet, waiving the Romanian flag. […] Thousands of Romanians wrote “Happy birthday, Romania!” while missing home, from thousands of kilometers away. […] we organized a plot: on intoarceteromane.ro anyone could make an emotional movie to remind their friend from abroad how good it is at home. Emotional blackmail. (my translation) (Întoarce-te Române [Romanians come home], n.d.)

All these marketing communication campaigns initiated by Rom followed the same strategy of engaging Romanians (within and outside borders) to join



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a conversation about who or how they are (e.g. smart, creative, hardworking). They used social media and the Internet, in general, as a platform for increasing brand visibility, building around highly sensitive aspects, such as unification or existent negative perceptions that could be changed if all Romanians would act as ambassadors. Moreover, as migration gradually intensified over the years, becoming a more complex social and economic phenomenon, also the public sensitivity on the issue reached a climax; the campaign Romanians, come home was a skilful manipulation of a highly emotional context.

Discussion This chapter has investigated the construction of country image promotion by various social actors in Romania after 1990 and its gradual linkage with migration within a macro context (the adoption of promotional practices by the Romanian Government) and a local context (the recurrent debates on migration in Romanian society). The main stages in the construction of country promotion as a public problem ultimately reveal a dynamic of instrumentalizing country promotion in Romania after 1990: initially it was an identity discourse of the civil society (“who are we after communism?”), followed by a media discourse of questioning the government on what it did in order to integrate Romania into NATO and the EU and to address the growing phenomenon of Romanians’ migration. In the context of a much needed transformation of the Romanian society and its institutions into democratic and modern ones, experts introduced logics of instrumentalization, along with modern practices of communication and the new terminology of branding. The media took over the discourse of experts and imposed the arguments of efficiency and effectiveness into the public debate as criteria for the evaluation of the government’s actions. As a direct result of the pressure coming from society, state institutions also assumed the technical discourse of experts. However, the logics of instrumentalization and the discourse of experts dominated the public debate, marginalizing to a certain extent the identity discourse of the civil society, which re-emerged on the public agenda especially after 2007 and the Mailat case. The questioning of “who we are” in relation to a certain category of Romanian migrants (Roma) and other Europeans, and with their stereotypical projections reveals the very limits of the instrumentalizing perspective: western “forms” have been adopted for the

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modernization of society, but the Romanian “content” is still being debated upon. The paradox is that this focus in the public debate has privileged mechanisms and institutions over the key issues of Romanian society and its identity, as illustrated by the lack of consensus and support for the country promotion initiatives and their definitions of Romania. The research illustrates that a major role in the failure of the government’s initiatives to promote Romania was due to the fact that Romanians ultimately do not feel represented by the symbols and definitions that the state institutions propose. Consequently, after 2010, there has been an emergence of initiatives of non-state actors who engage in promoting the country (and/ or certain cities and regions) within and outside the borders, to complement the failed attempts of the government. The communication agencies, in particular, have started to use their knowhow in order to develop complex communication platforms and marketing campaigns for their clients (commercial brands) that are explicitly constructed around the image of the country and the issue of migration, as illustrated in this chapter. Moreover, they seek to engage, on social media, Romanians within and outside the borders in collective initiatives of storytelling about the country and about themselves. Thus, the communication agencies end up manipulating a favorable context and a highly sensitive topic within Romanian society on matters of national identity and self-representations. The key question is to what extent they do not ultimately reproduce the instrumentalization model of the government they have contested so far? After all, they use the public problems of the country image and migration in order to gain visibility for commercial brands, and capitalize on their high sensitivity in the media and public space in order to obtain commercial benefits (e.g. increased sales). Summing up, this chapter shows that the issue of migration has not only impacted the government’s approach towards the promotion of Romania’s image abroad, but has also reconfigured the thematic repertory of brand and marketing communication campaigns in Romania. In a global context of increased corporate social responsibility, corporations, and communication agencies are linking their campaigns to the local socio-political context to make their brands more relevant. The strategic decision of the Gândul newspaper and the GMP communication group, as well as of Rom chocolate brand and McCann Bucharest to develop campaigns that tackle migration and Romania’s image proves they have seized an opportunity: these two public problems have intersected and become of interest for the entire population. At the same time, the success of the marketing campaigns in engaging



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target audiences (at home or in diaspora) to participate, share, and produce their own discourses about Romania and Romanians illustrates the extent to which the two problems of country image and migration have been interiorized at society level. Otherwise, the call for action of the campaigns would have remained without echo.

References Alama, M. (2004, March). Identitatea, o problemă actuală într-o Românie globală [Identity, a current issue in a global Romania]. Observatorul Cultural. Retrieved January 10, 2013 from http://www.observatorcultural.ro/Identitatea-o-problema-actuala-intr-o-Romanie-glo bala*articleID_10569-articles_details.html American Rom. (n.d.). Retrieved December 10, 2017 from http://www.romautentic.ro/cam panie/american-rom/ Anholt, S. (2002). Foreword. Journal of Brand Management, 9(4–5), 229–239. Anholt, S. (2004). Nation-brands and the value of provenance. In N. Morgan, A. Pritchard & R. Pride (Eds.), Destination branding: Creating the unique destination proposition (2nd ed., pp. 26–39). Oxford: Elsevier Butterworth Heinemann. Aronczyk, M. (2013). Branding the nation: The global business of national identity. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Barbu, P., & Obae, P. (2005, February 24). Reclamă publică, 12 milioane euro. [Public advertising, 12 million EUR]. Hotnew.ro. Retrieved January 7, 2013 from http://www.hotnews.ro/ stiri-arhiva-1239487-reclama-publica-12-milioane-euro.htm Beciu, C. (2007). Europa ca format mediatic. Construcția problemelor publice în discursul presei din România [‘Europe’ as media format. The construction of public problems in the discourse of the Romanian media]. In C. Beciu, & N. Perpelea (Eds.), Europa și spațiul public. Practici comunicaționale, reprezentări, climat emoțional [Europe and the public sphere: communication practices, representations, emotional climate] (pp. 25–61). Bucharest: Editura Academiei. Beciu, C. (2012). The diaspora and the transnational experience. Media coverage practices in the Romanian media. Romanian Sociology Review, XXIII(1–2), 49–66. Beciu, C., & Lazăr, M. (2014). Production d’identités et modes d’engagement dans les débats médiatiques sur la migration en Europe: Le cas de la Roumanie. Social Science Information, 54(1), 38–51. Beciu, C., & Lazăr, M. (2016). Instrumentalising the ‘mobility argument’: Discursive patterns in the Romanian media. In M. Endres, K. Manderscheid & C. Mincke (Eds.), The mobilities paradigm discourses and ideologies (pp. 48–68). London and New York, NY: Routledge. Beciu, C., & Perpelea, N. (Eds.). (2011). Europa în context. Identități și practici discursive [Europe in context. Identities and discursive practices]. Bucuresti: Ars Docendi. Benezic, D. (2005, July 12). Cum ne vindem țara [How are we selling our country]. Cotidianul. Retrieved February 2009 from http://www.cotidianul.ro/cum_ne_vindem_tara-690.html

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https://www.romaniatv.net/o-romanca-invita-strainii-sa-cunoasca-romania-clipul-careface-mai-mult-decat-orice-brand-de-tara-video_123467.html Olins, W. (1999). Trading identities: Why countries and companies are taking on each others’ roles. London: Foreign Policy Centre. Olins, W. (2005). Making a national brand. In J. Melissen (Ed.), The new public diplomacy. Soft power in international relations (pp. 169–179). Palgrave Macmillan. Palade, R. (2007, November 14). Indicele de țară Mailat. [Mailat country index]. Revista 22. Retrieved January 10, 2013 from http://www.revista22.ro/indicele-de-tara-mailat-4116. html Pamment, J. (2012). New public diplomacy in the 21st century: A comparative study of policy and practice. New York, NY: Routledge. Pamment, J. (2014). Articulating influence: Toward a research agenda for interpreting the evaluation of soft power, public diplomacy and nation brands. Public Relations Review, 40, 50–59. Pantus (2013, February 21). Mihai Gongu și Bogdan Nițu comentează rezultatele și reacțiile la campania Gândul “Why don’t you come over?”. Iqads.ro. Retrieved January 4, 2017 from http://www.iqads.ro/articol/25151/mihai-gongu-si-bogdan-nitu-comenteaza-rezultatele-si-reactiile-la-campania. Presentation of the Campaign “Why Don’t You Come Over?” (2015). GMP. Internal Document. Răzbunarea e dulce [Revenge Is Sweet]. (n.d.). Retrieved December 10, 2017 from http://www. romautentic.ro/campanie/razbunarea-e-dulce/ Rockhoff, D. (2008, October 6). Frecția la piciorul de lemn. [Useless efforts]. HotNews.ro. Retrieved February 10, 2009 from http://www.hotnews.ro/stiri-esential-4659363-frectia-piciorul-lemn.htm Rom Case Study: American Rom. (n.d). Retrieved December 10, 2017 from http://www. mccann.ro/project/case-study-american-rom/ România, “mereu surprinzătoare” când își licitează imaginea [Romania “always surprising” when it bids its image]. (2004, September 2). Capital. Retrieved January 25, 2009 from http://www.capital.ro/detalii-articole/stiri/romania-mereu-surprinzatoare-cand-isi-liciteaza-imaginea-16023.html Romanians are Smart. (n.d.). Retrieved December 10, 2017 from http://www.romautentic.ro/ campanie/romanians-are-smart/ Rusu, F. (2005, July 12). Țintele lui Stolojan: Produsele bio, loganul și turismul [The targets of Stolojan: Bio products, Logan and tourism]. Averea. Scarlat, C. (2005, July 12). Țărișoara în chinurile facerii. România fără nume. Ultimul tren ar putea fi prins cu “brand-ul națiunii”. [The little country in birthpains. Romania without a name. The last call can be the “nation brand”]. Ziua, p.5. Schwartz, G. (2008, July 23). Situația din Italia—un test pentru Europa. [The situation in Italy —a test for Europe]. Revista 22. Retrieved January 10, 2013 from http://www.revista22.ro/ situatia-din-italia--un-test-pentru-europa-4710.html Signitzer, B., & Coombs, T. (1992). Public relations and public diplomacy: Conceptual convergences. Public Relations Review, 18(2), 137–148.



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Signitzer, B., & Wamser, C. (2006). Public diplomacy: A specific governmental public relations function. In C. Botan & V. Hazleton (Eds.), Public relations theory II (pp. 435–464). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Snow, N. (2009). Rethinking public diplomacy. In Snow, N., & Taylor, P. M. (Eds.), Routledge handbook of public diplomacy (pp. 3–11). London: Routledge. Surowiec, P. (2017). Nation branding, public relations and soft power. Corporatising Poland. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Syal, R. (2013, January 27). Immigration: Romanian or Bulgarian? You won’t like it here. The Guardian, Retrieved January 4, 2017 from https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jan/27/ uk-immigration-romania-bulgaria-ministers Szondi, G. (2008). Central and Eastern European public diplomacy. In N. Snow & P. M. Taylor (Eds.), Routledge handbook of public diplomacy (pp. 292–313). London, UK: Routledge. Szondi, G. (2010). From image management to relationship building: A public relations approach to nation branding. Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, 6(4), 333–343. Taylor, M., & Kent, M. (2006). Public relations theory and practice in nation building. In C. Botan & V. Hazleton (Eds.), Public relations theory II (pp. 341–359). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Teodorescu, B., Guţu, D., & Enache, R. (2005). Cea mai bună dintre lumile posibile. Marketingul politic în România 1990–2005. [The best world possible. Political marketing in Romania 1990–2005] Bucharest: Comunicare.ro. Toma, C. (2008, August 29). Din nou bani pentru imaginea Românei. [Again money for Romania’s image]. Adevarul. Retrieved February 10, 2009 from http://www.adevarul.ro/articole/ din-nou-bani-pentru-imaginea romanei.html Topciu, S. O. (2008, October 1). Românii din Italia primesc ca ajutor îndemnuri de a face totul singuri. [Romanians in Italy received as help only encouragements to do all by themselves]. Adevarul. Retrieved February 10, 2009 from http://www.adevarul.ro/articole/romanii-dinitalia-primesc-ca-ajutor-indemnuri-de-a-face-totul-singuri.html Trends in International Migrant Stock. Migrants by Destination and Origin. United Nations, 2015. Retrieved November 29, 2017 from http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/ population/migration/data/estimates2/data/ UN_MigrantSstockByOriginAndDestination_ 2015.xlsx Volcic, Z., & Andrejevic, M. (2011). Nation branding in the era of commercial nationalism. International Journal of Communication, 5(1), 598–618. Walsh, J., & Guardian Readers. (2013, January 29). Putting people off coming to Britain: your pictures. The Guardian, Retrieved January 4, 2017 https://www.theguardian.com/uk/ gallery/2013/jan/29/immigration-britain-ministers-gallery Wernick, A. (1991). Promotional culture. London: Sage Publications. Wiseman, G. (2015). Isolate or engage: Adversarial states, US foreign policy, and public diplomacy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

part 2 intra - eu labor migration and deliberative practices in the public sphere

·4· media deliberation on intra - eu migration A Qualitative Approach to Framing Based on Rhetorical Analysis1 Alexandru I. Cârlan and Mălina Ciocea

Introduction In 2018, at the International Leipzig Book Fair, where Romania was a guest of honor, one of the key moments of the event was artist Ada Milea’s concert. Her lyrics were translated and discussed with the public by Herta Müller, Romanian-born novelist, a Laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The lyrics: “The border I’d put in my backpack/ The border in my backpack, the country in my backpack/ And… I’d be all packed” set the tone for the debate. They speak volumes, and not only about the Romanian migration in the EU; as Herta Müller pointed out, “the border in the backpack means freedom,” but also a sense of guilt. She conceded, though, that “whenever somebody leaves the country, every departure is watched by ‘several pairs of eyes’.” (Scherle, 2018, emphasis added) This scopic metaphor is indicative of the multiplicity of perspectives on migration, inasmuch as the guilt is indicative of a widespread emotional climate in the media debates on migration. An opposing viewpoint is the tendency to treat emigration as a potential resource for development (see also Ciocea & Cârlan, chapter “Debating Migration: Diasporic Stances in Media Discourse,” this volume). For instance, Sorin Adam Matei, an American scholar of Romanian origin and an active

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public intellectual in Romania, when asked about his view on human capital flight and the possible causal relation between systemic deficiencies in Romanian institutions and the phenomenon of brain drain, declared: “It has been the best thing that has happened to Romania after 1989. Rather than a loss, each migrant was an extension of the Romanian social and intellectual fabric. These intellectual strawberry pickers, of which I am one, enrich the Romanian culture by their mere existence. For a small nation, a strong diaspora is the guarantee of a better future. Brain Drain is, in fact, a form of Brain Gain.” (Micu, 2017) This type of discourse that tries to recontextualize migration in the logic of guilt evasion (not only of those leaving, but also of those possibly responsible for their leaving) was in fact instituted in the Romanian public sphere by President Traian Băsescu in 2010, when he declared that we should not “make a drama out of the fact that we are going abroad”, since “Romania’s grand objective was the liberalization of the labor market.” At the time, the statement triggered heated debates on the consequences of professional migration. Several years on, it is still believed to be a turning point in the ongoing deliberation on the deficient relationship between politicians and citizens and is used as an illustration of the politicians’ betrayal of citizens. (see chapter “Debating Migration: Diasporic Stances in Media Discourse”, this volume) The literature on high skilled migration discusses the direction of migratory flows and forms of mobility of professional migrants in the context of a global competition for talents. In the European Union in particular, among the factors facilitating professional migration is the lifting of restrictions on the workforce market for Romanians and Bulgarians, the particularities of the health crisis in the EU (faced with an aging population and growing demand for carers and doctors), as well as the health workforce crisis in the sending countries, caused especially by limited investment in the health system and low salaries of doctors and nurses (Triandafyllidou & Isaakyan, 2016). In the media of the host countries, however, the problem of the migration of Romanian and Bulgarian professionals has been treated uniformly, together with the broader problem of the migration of unskilled workers and “gens de voyage”. Triggered by various events, and linking the imaginary of everyday life with transnational contexts and identitarian discourses, veritable media “storms” have occurred regularly in the Romanian public sphere, debating possible courses of action to discourage professional migration. These debates, bring-



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ing together various media genres (editorials, informative articles, blogs), are illustrative for the deliberative function of the media (Beciu, 2011), and this chapter aims to clarify how this deliberative process can be understood and analyzed in relation to a particular understanding of the media. Since deliberation is ultimately an argumentative genre, we bring together theoretical contributions from argumentation theory and critical discourse analysis with standard approaches to framing, originating in media studies. We emphasize how a rhetorical approach to framing can provide analytical insights into framing processes and complement the typical quantitative approaches with qualitative analysis based on textual reconstruction. The stakes of this chapter are rather methodological and explorative, highlighting various methodological options and analytical difficulties inherent to such an approach. President Băsescu’s statement on the doctors’ right to leave Romania was the trigger that reignited the debate on migration in Romanian media. While our primary focus was on the dynamics of this debate, we were also interested in seeing whether the declaration had echoes in the media of the host countries, and, as a consequence, we initially worked with a corpus of over 400 articles treating the problem of Romanian migrants in several dailies in Romanian, French, and British media in August 2010 (129 articles in the Romanian press: Evenimentul Zilei, Adevărul, Jurnalul Naţional, Gândul, România Liberă; 207 articles in the French press: Le Figaro, Le Monde, Libération; 70 articles in the British press: The Independent, Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Express, The Sun). The corpus was deliberately selected to include various journalistic practices and genres and consequently allow an insight into the complexity of the problem articulation in the public arena (Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988), but also to highlight various methodological issues. August 2010 was the month when the French authorities decided to expel Roma migrants from Romania and Bulgaria (not before including their fingerprints in a biometric database) and paid them to return home (with negligible consequences in terms of fostering voluntary return). In the UK, many media outlets continued to explore the impact of (low-skilled) migration on the welfare system. This conjunction of circumstances led to a complex media debate where accounts from the national and French and British media fed each other and finally articulated a transnational space of deliberation. For the purposes of this chapter, we selected four texts (two from Romanian media outlets, one from Le Figaro, and one from The Telegraph) that illustrate various frames and ways of engaging in deliberative practices.

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Deliberation as Media Practice vs. Deliberation as Argumentative Genre The deliberative function of the media has been the object of significant research tradition, much of it stemming from the discussions initiated by Habermas’ work on the public sphere (Habermas, 1991). The public exchange of arguments through various media genres (news, commentaries, televized debates, talk-shows) has been treated as a form of deliberation (see for instance Beciu, 2011; Coleman, 2012; Dahlgren, 2009). Such analyses employ a broad and descriptive concept of deliberation, whose scope covers the journalists’ stances through various media genres, ideological positionings, manners of representing participants in debate, inclusion and exclusion, and the potential for the emergence of new points of view and new social actors in the public debate. One of the main foci of such analyses and a starting point for our own approach is the epistemic outcome of deliberation—what type of public knowledge do such deliberations produce? What kind of citizenship do they foster? Can an informed consensus over public issues emerge from media debates? A second, stricter concept of deliberation comes from contemporary argumentation theories, but has its roots in Aristotle’s typology of rhetorical genres and in his ethical theory. Conceived either as a specific type of dialogue (Walton, 2010), or as an “argumentative genre in which practical argumentation is the dominant mode of argumentation” (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012, p. 13), deliberation is an argumentative exchange that consists in weighing reasons that support or contest a particular type of prescriptive standpoint: a practical proposal, usually taking the form of a claim for action, or, in Aristotle’s description of the deliberative genre, an expedient choice (Kennedy, 1991). For instance, in relation to migrants, policies dealing with controlling migration can be the object of political or media deliberation: should migration be restricted? Should the social security system be adjusted to accommodate migrants? In the framework proposed by Isabela Fairclough and Norman Fairclough (the analysis of deliberation as debate which employs practical arguments), deliberation is analyzed as an argumentative genre instantiated by activity types such as parliamentary debates, which are further articulated through specific speech events. In our case, individual media texts (belonging to various media genres: editorials, opinion articles, news) are the speech events that draw upon activity types (media debates), which can further implement the argumentative genre of deliberation:



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[f]or a debate to instantiate the genre of deliberation (…) a minimum requirement is that it should focus on a normative proposition that can (but does not have to) ground a collective decision for action and (…) that it should weigh reasons in favour of an action (…) against reasons that may count against it, such as the consequences of doing the action. (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012, p. 201)

The two concepts of deliberation share a close relation with political models of deliberative democracy, the rational exchange of arguments in the public sphere, and the epistemic value of deliberation, but differ in significant ways, of which relevant for us are their domain (the broader concept describes any type of debate, while the narrow concept refers to specific standpoints and argumentation patterns), analytical categories (media genres such as editorials can be conceived as activity types, rather than genres as such), and focus (descriptive-oriented rather than normative-oriented, but both being able to accommodate a critical dimension). We will adopt as an analytical instrument the model of deliberation proposed by Isabela Fairclough and Norman Fairclough. As we have seen, in this model deliberation consists mainly of practical reasoning that supports a claim for action. On the one hand, the claim for action is justified by certain goals, and the goal is itself justified by certain values or concerns of the agents advancing argumentation. On the other hand, the action claimed is assumed to be instrumental—a means—for the achievement of the goal, and this constitutes a factual premise in the structure of the argument. A second factual premise in this model deals with the agent’s circumstances, consisting of natural, social and institutional facts that define the initial state or situation—the problem that requires the call for action. So, two dimensions are involved in this type of practical reasoning: a moral dimension, comprising goals and values, and a cognitive dimension, comprising circumstances and the means-goal relation. In the context of the debate, the call for action might be contested by participants, either by refuting the claim—usually through pointing to the negative consequences of the action requested, or by proposing alternative courses of action. Moreover, participants can dispute the acceptability of premises used in various manners: for instance, they can propose different values or value hierarchies, supporting different goals; they can challenge the instrumentality of the action (means–goal relation) or propose alternative descriptions of the circumstances. A visual representation of this model of deliberation can be viewed in Figure 4.1. The structure presented above describes the elements involved in practical reasoning. The step from practical reasoning to deliberation lies exactly

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in “the balancing in favour of one proposal for action against considerations that support various alternatives. Deliberation involves therefore considering alternative practical arguments, supporting different claims, and examining and weighing considerations that support these alternative claims.” (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012, p. 50) Such considerations of alternative claims and the possibility to challenge the goals invoked lead to the idea that goals, not only means, can become object of deliberation (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012, p. 51, emphasis in original).

Figure 4.1. Deliberation: argument and counterargument. Source: Adapted from Fairclough and Fairclough (2012), p. 51.

In line with a broader tradition in argumentation theory, the merit of such a model consists in serving as a heuristic tool for systematic reconstruction, analysis, and evaluation of deliberative discourse (Van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 2004). While the evaluation of deliberation plays an important role in Fairclough and Fairclough’s approach (hence their emphasis on the normativity of the model and on critical questions as instruments for critical appraisal of deliberation), we are interested here rather in the explanatory virtues of this model, in relation to framing. This means that agents are expected to adopt the most convenient lines of argumentation in order to be effective. Their choices in describing the circumstances, the goals, and the values in argument depend not only on their knowledge of the facts, but also “on their evaluative (including ideological) orientation towards this context and their



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particular interest in changing it.” (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012, p. 93) The concept of framing is particularly relevant in this context, since [p]eople’s claims for action follow from their own description of the context and may not follow from the ways in which their opponents define the situation. Re-describing or re-framing reality in a rhetorically convenient way is part of a strategy of action. (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012, p. 93)

Consequently, the following section will articulate how framing operates from a rhetorical perspective, through selective representation of circumstances, strategic usage of evaluative terms, and persuasive definitions of goals and values.

Framing—From Media Studies to Rhetorical Approaches The literature on frames and framing has boomed in the last twenty years, mainly in relation to discussions on media effects and, more specifically, on agenda setting, although the concept of frame, as employed initially by Goffman (1974), refers to the definitions of a social situation that are built up in accor­dance with principles of organization which govern social events and the agents’ subjective involvement in them. Frame analy­sis then refers to the examination of frames in terms of the organization of experience. In relation to media studies, a standard approach is that of Entman (1993), who defines framing as a process involving the choice of certain components of a perceived reality and then their salience, in the communication of the message, with the goal of advancing a specific interpretation of the particular situation under discussion (p. 52). For Entman, frames are not limited specifically to the domain of the text producer; he starts from the assumption that frames operate along four nodes of the communication process: the communicator, the text, the receiver, and the culture. According to Wiesman (2011), Entman’s approach can be better grasped within the integrated process model of framing proposed by de Vreese (2005), stipulating three stages of framing: frame building, frame setting, and consequences of framing at individual and societal level: The model suggests the overlapping of the four locations posed by Entman […] in the process of framing. Frame-building is the determination of the frame by the communication source and its subsequent creation in the text. Frame-setting refers to the interaction between media frames and individuals’ prior knowledge and predispositions, both of which are determined by cultural norms as well as personal experience […].

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Consequences, the final stage in the model, are the effects of these frames on individual attitudes and broader social processes. (Wiesman, 2011, p. 133)

The relation between Entman’s and de Vreese’s approaches is illustrated in Figure 4.2, and is useful for delineating the methodological site of rhetorical approaches to framing: these approaches will focus on frame building, without ignoring its constitutive link with the node of culture, since “rhetorically, a frame promotes its preferred perception by linking information to corresponding ‘culturally familiar symbols’ present in the audience’s knowledge structure that guide individuals’ processing of information.” (Wiesman, 2011, p. 133) Consequently, rhetoric can provide an analytic framework to account for the discursive construction of framing in relation to situational exigencies such as genre, audience, and symbolic resources available for producing meaning in a certain context. Epistemologically, such approaches tend to adopt various constructivist paradigms (Carter, 2013; Van Gorp, 2010; Van Gorp & Vercruysse, 2012) while, when looking at various disciplines, several tracks can be identified for their development: rhetorical criticism (Kuypers, 2010), cognitive semantics (Lakoff, 2004; Lakoff & Johnson, 1997), hermeneutics (Carter, 2013), cultural studies (Van Gorp, 2007; Van Gorp & Vercruysse, 2012), discourse analysis (Pan & Kosicki, 1993), argumentation theory (Greco Morasso, 2012; Montoya Londoño & Vallejo Mejía, 2017; Van Eemeren, 2010), critical discourse studies (Fairclough, 2017; Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012).

Figure 4.2. Situating the methodological site of the rhetorical approaches to framing in the broader context of theoretical perspectives on frames and framing.



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Two important theoretical questions with relevant methodological consequences need to be addressed prior to undertaking an analysis of the frames: where to look for analytical categories in the analysis of framing and how to justify them in relation to both the aims of the research and the categories analyzed. Usually, in framing theories, two main types of analytic categories are invoked: generic frames and issue-specific frames (de Vreese, 2005). The first type comprises categories that are defined and operationalized prior to the investigation, consequently involving a rather deductive approach, and an etic position of the researcher. Common examples of such categories are episodic vs. thematic frame, or the ubiquitous conflict frame; quantitative content analysis is usually used in this type of research. The second type comprises categories that are specific to a particular problem under discussion and are defined and operationalized by analyzing the discursive material investigated. It usually involves an inductive approach and an emic position of the researcher. For instance, a specific issue—migration—can be framed as a barbaric invasion, an economic benefit for the receiving community, or a moral obligation towards migrants who do not have the same standard of living in their sending countries. The analyst should look at framing devices, i.e. textual occurrences that constitute the symbolic resources of the frame, such as metaphors, exemplars, catch-phrases, depictions, and visual images (Gamson & Modigliani, 1989). Methodologically, such approaches require qualitative content analysis (without excluding ulterior quantification), but they can also appeal to discourse analysis or rhetorical analysis, depending on corpus and unit of analysis (Cooper, Kuypers, & Althous, 2008). Mixed types are possible, as is the case for the category proposed by Baldwin van Gorp: culturally embedded frames (Van Gorp, 2010; Van Gorp & Vercruysse, 2012). These types share a certain genericity with the first category, in the sense that frames are considered issue-specific (for instance the archetype of the villain can be used in electoral campaigns as well as in discussions about migration or social movements); yet they are inductively generated from a large corpus and are part of a cultural repertoire. Accounting for them requires a qualitative methodology, designed to reconstruct frame packages along the following analytical categories: cultural theme involved, definition of the problem, causation of the problem, consequences, moral values involved, possible solutions/ actions, metaphors, and choice of vocabulary (Van Gorp & Vercruysse, 2012, pp. 1277–1278). It is easily noticeable that these analytical categories have significant similarities with the model of deliberation proposed by Isabela Fairclough & Norman Fairclough: some of them (metaphor,

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choice of vocabulary) are instrumental in framing the circumstances, while others are constitutive for the moral dimension of the deliberation (values, cultural theme) and for the cognitive dimension (causation, consequences), sometimes overlapping with the claim for action. A theoretical consequence stemming from this observation would be that framing can operate across all types of premises and all procedural steps of deliberation: When decision-making is involved (…) framing can be viewed as the selective salience given to certain premises in a deliberative process, intended to direct an audience towards a particular conclusion (and potentially towards a particular decision and course of action). Any practical reasoning premise (goals, values, consequences, circumstances and means–goals relations) can be made selectively more salient in the attempt to direct the audience towards a preferred conclusion. The practical claim (proposal) itself can be made more salient by redefining it in a way that suggests it either should or should not be adopted. In this process, metaphors, analogies and “persuasive definitions” may be used to redefine facts in rhetorically convenient ways and thus lend support either to the practical claim that A should be performed or that it should not. (Fairclough, 2016, p. 64)

Nevertheless, metaphors, persuasive definitions, or other presentational devices are rather indicators of framing, but accounting for the process of framing ultimately amounts to revealing the rhetorically convenient consistency between the salient presentation of circumstances, the moral dimension of deliberation, and the claim for action proposed by a certain agent. Another possible mixed type, which is particularly relevant for our research, combines a deductive approach (i.e. categories of analysis defined independently, previous to the analysis of the corpus) with an issue-specific conception of frames. In their study on the ethical framing of intra-EU migration, Ekaterina Balabanova and Alex Balch argue that “attention needs to be paid to the deeper, ontological, framing which operates to inform or legitimize the ways in which ‘the other’ is subsequently portrayed” (Balabanova & Balch, 2010, p. 383). According to them, “media treatment of immigrants/ immigration is contingent upon and symptomatic of deeper (and often submerged) values and ideational structures related to the ethical basis for immigration controls themselves” (Balabanova & Balch, 2010, p. 384). Consequently, linking media framing in a more systematic way with normative political theory, Balabanova & Balch identify their categories in political philosophy (what type of arguments can be advanced for or against controlling migration) and then analyze which of them are present in media debates, which are most prominent, and to what effects (see discussion below).



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To conclude, what is specific to rhetorical approaches to framing? According to Jim Kuypers, one the most representative scholars for this approach, framing is the process whereby communicators act—consciously or not—to construct a particular point of view that encourages the facts of a given situation to be viewed in a particular manner, with some facts made more or less noticeable (even ignored) than others. When highlighting some aspect of reality over other aspects, frames act to define problems, diagnose causes, make moral judgments, and suggest remedies. (Kuypers, 2009, p. 182)

If this is the case, then a rhetorical approach to framing amounts to an analytical endeavor aiming at: a. identifying the frames, be they generic or issue-specific; b. identifying the shared cultural premises that particular frames mobilize and that the audience allegedly shares (endoxon); c. revealing how particular frames guide the debate in particular directions, create social facts, and foster participation, in relation to the type of engagement required from the audience; d. suggesting alternative framing and ways of counteracting pervasive frames. Consequently, a rhetorical approach to framing serves both a comprehension-oriented and a critical agenda. Methodologically, such an approach relies on qualitative methodologies that focus on textual analysis requiring a reconstruction of the discourse along analytical categories that are defined either in an etic or an emic manner. The basic assumptions of such an approach are that a. framing is possible whenever rhetorical choice is present, and b. agents design their speeches through expedient choices, in a “communicatively and interactionally functional way” (Van Eemeren, 2010, p. 119). Consequently, viewed rhetorically, framing “amounts to creating a context by verbal means in which what is put forward makes sense to the audience in a way that is in agreement with the speaker’s or writer’s intention.” (Van Eemeren, 2010, p. 126)

Framework of Analysis: Combining the Typology of Framing Intra-EU Migration with the Model of Deliberation The typology of arguments that we follow in the articles we analyze draws on the work of Balabanova and Balch (2010), who propose a normative approach to media debates on migration. The analysts argue that a discussion of frames employed by the media must reveal the underlying ethical arguments that can

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justify various positions. These ethical arguments are reconstructed deductively, two main positions being firstly identified in debate: communitarian and cosmopolitan. For each position specific arguments for the topic of migration are identified and are formulated in relation to recognized positionings in political theory and philosophy. Communitarian arguments will describe the problem of general and professional migration as catastrophic for the community, because it lessens community strength and its development potential. A frequently occurring subtype of the communitarian argument is the “domestic social justice” argument, employing considerations on “the best social and welfare conditions for citizens.” (Balabanova & Balch, 2010, p. 384) The cultural protectionist argument draws on the imperative of preserving national culture, the public security argument reflects fear of social insecurity, the liberal constitutionalist argument reflects the ideal of democratic society, the “priority for compatriots”, a particular (historic) understanding of good governance. Cosmopolitan arguments will invoke the right of migrants to be treated fairly from the perspective of the rights and privileges derived from European citizenship. Within this category, universalist arguments will appeal to human rights imagery to discuss the individuals’ right to free movement; the instrumental cosmopolitan arguments regard migration as “a means to maximize total welfare.” (Balabanova & Balch, 2010, p. 384) Banal cosmopolitanism reflects “personal cultural programming” (cf. Lull, 2000), which allows multiple cultural allegiances and identities. A complete overview of the types of arguments and framing produced through them is presented in Table 4.1. The terms “communitarian” and “cosmopolitan”, as used in this typology, might seem to reflect an implicit ideological polarization, while in fact some categories overlap. For instance, instrumental cosmopolitanism (consequentialism) can be analyzed as the reverse of the domestic social justice subtype of the communitarian argument: if migration is instrumental for the welfare of a community, then it should be accepted; if, in fact, it is detrimental, then restrictions on migration should be enforced. This would suggest that arguments supporting migration can be advanced in a communitarian framework. Yet, such a debate on migration amounts to a cost-benefit analysis and is divorced from any underlying ethical considerations. A further comment needs to be made regarding the possibility of distinguishing clearly between various frames, as is the case with the frames “priority for compatriots”, and “public security”, which can work as particular instances of the “domestic social justice” frame.

Cultural protectionist

Domestic social justice

Type of frame

media deliberation on intra-eu migration

Source: Adapted from Balabanova and Balch (2010) and Balch and Balabanova (2013).

(arguing for migration)

Cosmopolitan

Special ties or obligations related to the nation-state, e.g. civic practices or historical (national) conflicts/ struggles

Uncontrolled immigration ‘is putting Britons out of work’ (Daily Telegraph, 18 August 2006)

Immigration has increased unemployment … Schools, hospitals and GPs also come under pressure’ (Daily Mail, 2 May 2006) Immigration threatened ‘the very essence of our society’ (Dnevnik, 15 August 2006) ‘immigrants who can’t get jobs will survive on the streets by begging and stealing’ (Sun, 31 July 2006) ‘migrant workers are exploited in a number of sectors. Unions need to step up their recruitment and government must do more to enforce legal standards’ (The Independent, 1 May 2006)

Immigration should be controlled to deliver the best possible economic, social and welfare conditions for citizens Ethno-national arguments for controls to maintain a ‘national culture’ Uncontrolled immigration poses a threat to public order and social stability

Restrictions needed to maintain democratic functioning of the state

Examples

Argument structuring the frame

‘If you want to achieve a united Europe, to build social Freedom of movement as part of univerconditions and standards, you cannot impose restrictions…’ salist conceptions of human rights (Dnevnik, 13 September 2006) Positive: ‘mutual interest dictates our welcome’ (The Independent, 21 August 2006); Negative: ‘the consequences are Consequentialism Immigration as a means to maximize not only negative for the British people but also for the immi(instrumental) total welfare grants themselves who leave themselves open to exploitation’ (Daily Mail, 14 November 2006) Quotidian cosmo- Linkages between immigration and post- ‘Polish delis are sprouting up across the country’ (The Indepolitanism (banal) national forms of identity formation pendent, 11 June 2006)

Universalist cosmopolitanism (ecstatic)

Priority for compatriots

Communitarian (arguing for Public security restrictions on migration) Liberal constitutionalist

Position in the debate

Table 4.1. Ethical frames for understanding immigration controls.

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A clearer definition of these frames can be based on the model of deliberation presented above, which considers the values and commitments characterizing each position (communitarian/ cosmopolitan) as distinct analytical categories, thus integrating the typology of ethical frames into the broader model of deliberation. The interplay between these arguments can be quite complex. For instance, a cosmopolitan framing of Roma migration will appeal to human rights imagery to feed a discourse whose claim will be the non-exclusion of Roma. The goal reflecting these cosmopolitan values will be to build a post-national EU citizenship, and the debate will likely select circumstances such as: EU citizenship, democracy, EU regulations. On the other hand, a communitarian framing of professional migration will refer to citizens’ welfare, public order, and social stability to justify the goal, which will be the maintenance of social/ economic stability. Circumstances are expected to detail the workings of the health/ welfare system, and the action claimed will be to address professional migration.

Integrating the Ethical Framing of Migration into the Deliberation Model: Four Case Studies Integrating the ethical framing of migration into the deliberation model proposed by Fairclough and Fairclough poses several methodological and analytical problems. The first question is how a particular article contributes to the general deliberative process taking place through the media debate: it could be new ideas, it could be new claims for action or counterclaims, or a different means-goal representation. When looking at a text, the analyst could focus on: who is speaking (What are the voices in the text? Who do they represent? What position does the journalist assume?), or which are the arguments (How are they built/ distributed/ reconstructed? Are counterarguments addressed?). However, when trying to understand how a particular text echoes the general debate on the topic, the analyst reconstructs the context of the debate in accordance with theoretically motivated guidelines. For instance, one relevant problem is: What is present in/ missing from a particular text in relation to other texts that constitute the debate? Which texts should be taken into account and how should they be selected? A selective representation of circumstances means that the analyst needs to highlight what other circumstances are present in the debate, but are ignored in the text. Again, if we take



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circumstances to include both elements in the general debate on migration and situational context elements, what is the relationship between them? One answer would be to take previous elements expressed in the text as the arguer’s commitments, and thus treat them as institutional facts. Another important problem is to establish the object of the persuasive definitions and track down evaluative terms. A heuristic principle in the reconstruction and the analysis of the text is that of the rhetorical convergence of the various elements (circumstances, values, goals) in the overall argument. In an argumentative text, framing is tantamount to strategic manoeuvring seen from the perspective of presentational devices (Van Eemeren, 2010). Through topical selection, adaptation to the demands of the audience and presentational devices, the arguer aims not only at dialectical reasonableness, but also at rhetorical efficacy. The three aspects of strategic manoeuvring can be only analytically distinguished, since at textual level a rhetorical choice would at the same time constitute a form of adaptation to the demands of the audience, and a selection of a particular argument through particular presentational possibilities. Hence, “putting a certain event into one or the other contextual box (frame) significantly changes its interpretation, even when the reconstruction of the events is seemingly neutral.” (Greco Morasso, 2012, p. 198) Accounting for strategic manoeuvring amounts to revealing the convergence of particular strategies and resources used in various stages of deliberation. Consequently, the rhetorical convergence of the symbolic resources used in each element of the deliberative model can work both as a heuristic principle in the reconstruction and the analysis of the text and as an indicator of framing. The first text selected (Avramescu, L. “Trăim într-o ţară second hand?” [Do we live in a second hand country?], Jurnalul Naţional, August 10, 2010) takes arguments from President Băsescu’s speech, which it oversimplifies in order to challenge the President’s claim that people are leaving Romania because they can do better abroad: Through the voice of the father of the nation, the first and foremost thinker…we find out that we are a second-hand country. A country very much like a pawn shop, a second hand shop around the corner. We are used, dirt-cheap clothes on the market. It is good we are leaving the country, we salute doctors who are treating others’ patients (ours will soon die, anyway), it is a good thing teachers become dishwashers in Germany’s restaurants…Congratulations to those who are leaving and no longer ask anything from parents back home, the last guardians of poverty. Before checking out, the last one will turn off the light.

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The claim of the text seems to be that President Băsescu is right to think that those who choose to stay behind in this second hand country are “stupid”. The text builds reasons around this claim by emphasizing the fact that as long as people do not punish politicians, they could be indeed labeled “stupid”. People’s choice not to take a stand against politicians is a confirmation of the president’s claim. However, this argument is restructured at the end of the article: Băsescu’s policy is based on the conviction that we are stupid. What if, as I once wrote, the president is right? Might he not be right now, when he says that we are a second hand country? Isn’t the very detail that we are bearing with him as President more than enough confirmation?

Thus, the relationship between the rhetorical question in the heading and the argument in the last paragraph changes the meaning of the whole text, rendering the position of the journalist clear. How does the text contribute to the general debate on migration? The underlying claim is that (professional) migration should be stopped. The circumstances that have been selected by the journalist to build his frame are: massive migration, political non-elites, people’s tolerance of corruption and incompetent political leaders. The goal (good governance) is reached by negative description (this is a country that is not well governed). The values that feed the goal are: general welfare, justice, elites’ recognition, democracy, and order. How does the text solve the problems mentioned above? The journalist echoes both documented facts (such as the phenomenon of doctors’ migration) and themes on the permanent agenda of the press (politicians’ corruption and incompetence). Relevant absences are: free movement as a fundamental right and the burden on the social security system in case professionals choose not to leave (arguments invoked by the President). Evaluative terms (anarchy, foolishness) converge with values and goals, but also with a certain audience. The underlying values and goals build a communitarian (public security) frame, in answer to the President’s framing, which employs both cosmopolitan (ecstatic: freedom of movement is a right we have gained), and communitarian elements (domestic social justice: leavers alleviate the burden on the social welfare system). The second text (Crăciun, A. “Generaţia care pleacă” [Leavers’ Generation], Adevărul, August 24, 2010) poses a different methodological problem. There is no typical textual indicator of an argumentative text. There are few



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evaluative assertions in this text, which seeks to define a “we” (the 70s–80s generations, too young to have experienced communism as adults: “We, the dictatorship’s last children, were never sentenced…We never had to choose between Hitler and Stalin, we had to choose between Pepsi and Coca-Cola.”) Rather than being explicitly argumentative, the text tacitly advances a point of view, namely that migration has a negative impact (“All the sadder and more normal is our fleeing from the world and into the world. The best of us have left and are yet to leave. This generation was supposed to succeed here and will succeed there.”) Redefinition of a sense of belonging through presentational devices (antithesis “A new generation is tearing apart from an old country”) is more pervasive in the text than arguments (the only instance we could find was: “Romania is losing its most important resource—its educated youth” as an implicit call for policies). The methodological problem that this article raises is how to discuss a text that contributes to the general debate, but does not clearly fit the deliberative model adopted in this research. The arguments indicate a tacit claim that migration should not be encouraged (a counterclaim to the president’s declaration). The goals presented in the text are also merely suggested (a certain continuity with previous generations, a feeling of community, personal integrity in relation to belonging), and values are used to describe the leavers’ generation, rather than advance an argument. The circumstances that were selected (migration and postcommunism; migration is the choice of a whole generation, not of individuals) add something significant to the general debate: how feelings of belonging to a generation are shaped by attitudes towards emigration. However, it is difficult to identify a clear convergence between circumstances, values, and goals in the absence of a claim. With articles in host countries, circumstances, values, and goals converge to create arguments for migration control that fall into the category of communitarian framing. Generally, we have found that Romanian media discuss general migration, skilled (professional) migration, and Roma migration as separate categories, evolving into different genres, positionings and types of arguments (see Ciocea & Cârlan, chapter “Debating Migration: Diasporic Stances in Media Discourse”, this volume). In French media, references to general migration are scarce, with prominent interest in “gens de voyage”. This focus on a minority leads to frequent use of communitarian (cultural protectionist) arguments (for instance: “But the problem isn’t finding out whether ‘the Roma and Travellers’ are firstly victims of the system and popular racism or, on the contrary, ‘they’ are to blame for their ‘marginalization’”—Olivera,

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M., 2010, our translation). The reverse is, unsurprisingly, the use of cosmopolitan (ecstatic) arguments: “France, symbol of democracy (…) contributes to stigmatization” of the Roma. (Le Monde, August 18, our translation); “The security discourses that imply that there exist inferior populations are unacceptable.” (Le Figaro, August 22, our translation) In British media, on the other hand, the focus falls on general and skilled migration; the Roma migration is hinted at only when the expulsion measures against the Roma in France are discussed. Communitarian arguments tend to refer to the sphere of domestic social justice (“It is possible, although not yet proven, that immigration adversely affects the employment opportunities of young people who are competing with young immigrants from the A8 countries [lower-income Eastern European countries in the European Union]”– Daily Mail Reporter, August 19). Sometimes communitarian arguments make use of cosmopolitan imagery, as in the following example, where liberal constitutionalist arguments fall back on banal (clichéd) cosmopolitanism: The Left’s theory of patriotism is that it’s all false consciousness invented by the powers-that-be to get gormless proles to work and die for the system. But actually, it’s a two-way system that also demands a sense of responsibility by the ruling class towards their working-class compatriots. That’s all gone now and the English class system has basically ended in divorce, with the new elite running off with the equivalent of a Thai bride, who cooks, cleans and doesn’t complain, largely because she can’t even speak English. (The Telegraph, August 12)

Consequently, a methodological problem when analyzing French and British texts is to see how the selective representation of circumstances and the persuasive definitions of goals and values through evaluative terms converge to create arguments not only in the local (national) debate on migration, but also in the international debate. British media discuss the events in France from a cosmopolitan perspective; when the topic is migration to the UK, however, communitarian arguments pervade, and cosmopolitan stances are built as rather ideal (ecstatic) circumstances. For instance, in the selected Telegraph article (“Immigration is more than an economic issue”, Telegraph View, August 26, 2010), the claim is that migration must be debated not only in economic terms, but socially and culturally: To a great extent, however, the focus on economic migration misses the real target, which is the number settling here through family reunion and marriage…This raises difficult social and cultural questions that politicians are reluctant to engage with— hence their concentration on economic migration. But the political classes are



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lagging far behind the general public: it took the intervention of Gillian Duffy, “that bigoted woman”, to shoe-horn immigration into the last general election campaign. Such political timidity does the country a disservice. Immigration raises serious and potentially divisive problems that must be addressed. We ignore them at our peril.

The goal is a free debate on migration (which implies that both communitarian and cosmopolitan arguments will be used). See, for example: The public pressure for more rigorous immigration controls is far less to do with xenophobia or racism (we remain one of the most tolerant countries in Europe) and far more to do with the intolerable pressures imposed on our public services and infrastructure, and therefore on our quality of life.

The values invoked are: the quality of life, multiculturalism, freedom of expression; and the circumstances that triggered the response in the article: the political discourse does not reflect the public’s interests, opinions, and knowledge (“These figures simply confirm what people see with their own eyes—that after more than a decade of virtually unfettered immigration under a Labour Government that saw electoral benefit in such a policy, our country is desperately overcrowded.”) The same negotiation of communitarian and cosmopolitan stances is characteristic of French media, as well. Ecstatic cosmopolitanism is not missing from the texts, but, rather than being built through arguments, it is a distant/ ideal ethical framing, which does not coincide with the text as such, but is somehow expectant in the broader debate on migration. For instance, in the French article we selected for analysis (Jean-Marc Leclerc, “Roms: un fichier pour éviter la fraude de l’aide au retour”, Le Figaro, August, 17), cosmopolitan arguments belong to one of the voices in the article, not to the journalist himself: Tuesday, the Ministry of the Interior pointed that more than fifty illicit Roma camps have already been dismantled in France since the beginning of the month. At least 700 people in irregular situations will be returned to Bucharest “by regular flights”, Éric Besson pointed out. The minister also acknowledged that Romanians, members of the European Union, were involved: “They will be able to return to France, because this is the law, but they will not be able to overstay illegally and receive a fortiori help for voluntary return.” (our translation)

The claim (migration needs to be controlled), the goal (to render migration control instruments efficient), and the values (good governance, institutional efficiency) converge to build a communitarian (social security) argument:

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“Starting next September 1, everything changes. The foreigner, member of the community of travelers controlled by the police, for illicit occupation of a camp, for instance, will have his fingerprints inserted in a digital file, next to his name” (see the implicit politically incorrect assumption that the police will apply this measure against a minority they will be able to identify with the naked eye).

Conclusions The exploratory analysis of the selected texts shows how accounting for a rhetorical construction of framing in deliberative media texts has to take into account the convergence of the values, goals, and circumstances as they are discursively constructed. For articulating the frames, one has to consider values and goals, which amounts to using the model of deliberation as an instrument of textual reconstruction capable of revealing how frames operate. Yet, while values and goals can be conceived as categories to identify and label the frames, as is the case with the typology articulated by Balabanova and Balch, it is most frequently through rhetorical presentation of circumstances (by means of evaluative terms, persuasive definitions, and presentational devices) that a particular understanding of the problem and of the possible solutions is produced. A frequently employed strategy involves a negative presentation of circumstances, in opposition with convergent goals and values that are allegedly shared with the audience, in order to justify a change in the status quo. The convergence of values, goals, and circumstances can be understood as a particular case of strategic maneuvering, involving topical choice, adaptation to audience demands, and presentational devices. Thus, although framing cannot be reduced to circumstances, it is mainly in the discursive construction of circumstances that most rhetorical resources of framing are employed. The presentation of the circumstances in various articles might not be argumentatively relevant at a textual level (i.e. texts as such might not present arguments, but mere information, or might be apparently disconnected from a specific claim to action), yet they become a significant input in the deliberative process in a broader process of public deliberation (cf. contextual frame, Greco Morasso, 2012). Such an approach can prove insightful for the analysis of media deliberation on migration, because it can not only reveal how various ethical framings structure the media debate, but also allow for a clearer articulation of the role



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of values in the definition of the frames, an identification of media engagement with the audiences, and a broadening of the scope of framing theories.

Note 1. The first version of this article appeared in the Romanian Journal of Communication and Public Relations, 16(3), 73–87, in 2014. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher— College of Communication and Public Relations.

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Fairclough, I. (2017). Deliberative discourse. In J. Flowerdew & J. E. Richardson (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of critical discourse studies (pp. 242–256). London and New York, NY: Taylor & Francis. Fairclough, I., & Fairclough, N. (2012). Political discourse analysis. A method for advanced students. London: Routledge. Gamson, W. A., & Modigliani, A. (1989). Media discourse and public opinion on nuclear power: A constructionist approach. American Journal of Sociology, 95(1), 1–37. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. London: Harper and Row. Greco Morasso, S. (2012). Contextual frames and their argumentative implications: A case study in media argumentation. Discourse Studies, 14(2), 197–216. Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hilgartner, S., & Bosk, C. L. (1988). The rise and fall of social problems: A public arenas model. American Journal of Sociology, 94(1), 53–78. Kennedy, G. A. (Ed.). (1991). Aristotle on rhetoric: A theory of civic discourses. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Kuypers, J. A. (2009). Framing analysis. In Kuypers, J. A. (Ed.), Rhetorical criticism: Perspectives in action (pp. 181–204). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Kuypers, J. A. (2010). Framing analysis from a rhetorical perspective. In D’Angelo, P., & Kuypers, J. A. (Eds.), Doing news framing analysis: Empirical and theoretical perspectives (pp. 286–311). London: Routledge. Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t think of an elephant: Know your values and frame the debate. Chelsea, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1997). Metaphors we live by (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Le Figaro. (2010). Roms: deux hommes d’Église dénoncent les expulsions. [The Roma: Two people of the Church denounce the expulsions]. Le Figaro, August 22, 2010. Le Monde. (2010). Expulsion des Roms: la Roumanie et la Bulgarie haussent le ton. [Expulsion of Roma: Romania and Bulgaria raise their voices]. Le Monde, August 18, 2010. Leclerc, J. M. (2010). Roms: un fichier pour éviter la fraude de l’aide au retour [The Roma: a file for avoiding return aid fraud]. Le Figaro, August 17, 2010. Lull, J. (2000). Media, communication, culture: A global approach. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Micu, A. A. (2017). Fiecare migrant a fost nu o pierdere, ci o extindere a țesutului social și intelectual românesc. [Rather than a loss, each migrant was an extension of the Romanian social and intellectual fabric]. Interview with Sorin Adam Matei. Intervio, March 29, 2017. Retrieved March 31, 2018 from http://intervio.ro/2017/03/29/sorin-adam-matei-profesorfiecare-migrant-a-fost-nu-o-pierdere-ci-o-extindere-a-tesutului-social-si-intelectualromanesc/ Montoya Londoño, C., & Vallejo Mejía, M. (2017). Development vs peace? The role of media in the Law of Victims and Land Restitution in Colombia. Media, War & Conflict, Prepublished May 25, 2017. DOI: 10.1177/1750635217710677.



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Olivera, M. (2010). Dénoncer l’anti-tsiganisme sans s’attaquer à ses racines? [Denouncing anti-racism without attacking its roots?]. Le Monde, August 10, 2010. Pan, Z., & Kosicki, G. M. (1993). Framing analysis: An approach to news discourse. Political Communication, 10(1), 55–75. Scherle, A. (2018). Granița în raniță înseamnă libertate. [The border in the backpack means freedom]. Deutsche Welle, March 16, 2018. Retrieved March 31, 2018 from http://www. dw.com/ro/granita-in-ranita-inseamna-libertate/a-43001952 Telegraph View. (2010). Immigration is more than an economic issue. The Telegraph, August 26, 2010. Triandafyllidou, A., & Isaakyan I. (Eds.). (2016). High skill migration and recession. Gendered perspectives. London and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Van Eemeren, F. H. (2010). Strategic maneuvering in argumentative discourse: Extending the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Van Eemeren, F. H., & Grootendorst, R. (2004). A systematic theory of argumentation: The pragma-dialectical approach (Vol. 14). Cambridge and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Van Gorp, B. (2007). The constructionist approach to framing: Bringing culture back in. Journal of communication, 57(1), 60–78. Van Gorp, B. (2010). Strategies to take subjectivity out of framing analysis. In D’Angelo, P., & Kuypers, J. A. (Eds.), Doing news framing analysis: Empirical and theoretical perspectives (pp. 84–109). London: Routledge. Van Gorp, B., & Vercruysse, T. (2012). Frames and counter-frames giving meaning to dementia: A framing analysis of media content. Social Science & Medicine, 74(8), 1274–1281. Walton, D. (2010). Types of dialogue and burdens of proof. In Proceedings of the 2010 conference on computational models of argument: Proceedings of COMMA 2010 (pp. 13–24). Amsterdam: IOS Press. West, Ed. (2010). Why foreigners are the new working class. The Telegraph, August 12, 2010. Wiesman, P. (2011). We frame to please: A preliminary examination of the daily show’s use of frames. In T. Goodnow (Ed.), The Daily Show and rhetoric: Arguments, issues and strategies (pp. 131–151). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

·5· romanian immigration in the british newspapers Engaging Audiences During the Brexit Referendum Campaign Irina Diana Mădroane

Introduction This chapter examines the ways that, during the EU referendum campaign in 2016, the British newspapers with a strong pro- or anti-Brexit stance built their positions on Romanian immigration, which is taken as an entry point into the debate on EU immigration to the UK. As EU citizens and beneficiaries of unrestricted free movement in the European Union, who had previously been at the center of prominent debates in the British public sphere, Romanian migrants were a visible category in EU immigration-related arguments during the Brexit campaign, alongside other CEE migrants, and even non-EU migrants (Turks, Albanians, etc.) viewed as a future risk by the rightwing press (Gerard, qtd. in Barnett, 2016, p. 47). The British media coverage of the EU referendum campaign stood out through the openly partisan positions adopted by the mainstream newspapers, the absence of appropriate deliberation, and the alleged influence of the written press in setting the British media agenda (see studies in Jackson, Thorsen, & Wring, 2016). The post-referendum statistics indicate a “heavy” bias in the press coverage (Levy, Aslan, & Bironzo, 2016, p. 33), with a ratio of 60% to 40% of articles in favor of “out,” assessed to be even higher—80% to 20%—if

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newspaper sales are factored in (Deacon, Downey, Harmer, Stanyer, & Wring, 2016, p. 34). According to scholars, the major newspapers, “[l]ed, inevitably, by the viscerally anti-EU Mail, Sun, Express and Telegraph newspapers,” engaged in “a ferocious propaganda,” in a manner detrimental to British democracy (Barnett, 2016, p. 47). One of the chief issues debated in the pro-Brexit, right-leaning newspapers, was EU immigration, which took precedence over other topics at key moments in the campaign, to the benefit of the Leave camp (Deacon et al., 2016, p. 34; see also Levy et al., 2016). The resonance of the right-wing publications among “Leave” voters occurred against the background of their consistent Eurosceptic and anti-immigration coverage over the years, whereas “the Remain campaign was unable to build a positive case for Europe partly because those narratives had not been comprehensively established in the past by media and politicians.” (Berry, 2016, p. 14) The study seeks to cast light on how British newspapers enacted, through their dispositives, practical arguments in favor or against Brexit, starting from the issue of Romanian immigration, a category of EU immigration that received attention in the campaign. These arguments are situated against representations and claims construed around Romanian immigration at significant times in the past, and are also examined from the point of view of audience engagement. The wider framework of interpretation is the media construction of Britain’s EU membership as a public problem, EU immigration being an important part of it (see Geddes & Scholten, 2016).

The Media Construction of Public Problems It is now widely accepted that, in the process of mediation, journalists provide publics with ways of knowing and understanding social reality that, once they acquire a degree of visibility and generality in connection with the public interest (Beciu, 2007, 2011), invite certain forms of identification and action (Chouliaraki, 2006; Silverstone, 2007; see also Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012). In Schudson’s words, “[t]he news constructs a symbolic world that has a kind of priority, a certification of legitimate importance,” becoming “a resource when people are ready to take political action” (Schudson, 1995, p. 33). Essential, therefore, to the well-functioning of a democracy, public knowledge1 is constituted through the valorization, in the media sphere, of particular types of information, which gain salience in the mediation of an issue and, as such, have the capacity to orient publics towards



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certain interpretations. They derive from and feed into the public culture of a given society and, ultimately, into a social imaginary, i.e. “the ways people imagine their existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.” (Taylor, 2004, p. 23) In shaping the significance of events and “transforming” them into public problems, journalists draw upon existing formats and modes of interaction, institutionalized communication and discursive practices, as well as the worldviews and norms that have currency in a public culture (Beciu, 2011, pp. 105–106). A public problem emerges in the course of symbolic struggles among various institutional and social actors, unfolding in the public sphere, over the definition of an issue, in contexts that require some form of policy intervention (Gusfield, 1981; see also Beciu, 2011; Ciocea & Cârlan, chapter “Debating Migration: Diasporic Stances in Media Discourse,” this volume). According to Gusfield (1981, pp. 9–10), it has two interrelated “dimensions”: (1) a cognitive one (what the issue is about), correlated with the attribution of “causal responsibility” for “the existence of the problem”; (2) a moral one (what should be done), which leads to the attribution of “political responsibility,” in other words identifying who should intervene to solve the problem and in what manner. In the competition among social actors to impose a definition and, hence, establish “ownership” of a problem, social and symbolic spaces of interaction—“public arenas”—are formed (Gusfield, 1981, pp. 10ff.). Within them, social actors deploy a range of discursive strategies, which are also invested with a rhetorical, “dramatic quality” (Cefaï, 1996; Gusfield, 1981; see also Beciu, 2007, 2011). As actively engaged actors, with a stake in the definition of public problems, the media may foreground themes and participants, emphasize one angle of interpretation over another, assign responsibility, and attempt to influence decision-making, as could be seen in the UK referendum debate. In these struggles, they build upon previous discursive articulations and types of public knowledge about an issue, instituted and accumulated over time, in various socio-political contexts (Beciu, 2011), adapting them to the new situation and attempting either to reinforce or transform them. In the construction of Britain’s EU membership as a public problem, the media coverage of the Brexit referendum campaign is only a moment, preceded by a long string of debates and problematizations, going back to the 1950s. Moreover, at the time of the campaign, immigration from the A8 and A2 countries (Central and Eastern European states that acceded to the EU in

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2004 and 2007, respectively) was already deeply enmeshed in this construction: the “immigration issue” had resurfaced on the British political and media agenda in the years 2000 “because of the steep increase in EU citizens moving to the UK, particularly after 2004.” (Geddes & Scholten, 2016, p. 22; see also the Ipsos MORI report, “Shifting Ground,” 2016) In what concerns Romanian immigration, two defining episodes were (1) the public debate in 2006, before the EU enlargement wave on January 1, 2007, when the UK took the decision to introduce transitional restrictions for the A2 nationals (Romanians and Bulgarians); (2) a similar public debate in 2013, prior to the full liberalization of the British labor market for the A2 nationals, under EU legislation, starting on January 1, 2014. The right-wing print media, especially the tabloids, put pressure on the British authorities to impose restrictions on the economic migrants’ access to the labor market, in the former case (Mădroane, 2009; Somerville, 2007), and to renegotiate EU regulations regarding economic migrants, in the latter (Mădroane, 2014). By June 23, 2016, the date of the referendum, a set of representations, identities, journalistic positionings, and claims for policy-making on EU immigration from the A8 and A2 countries had entered British public culture. Dominant among them were those produced by the conservative media (and politicians). They had been circulated and challenged in other public spheres in the European Union, for example in Romania, in ways that point to their assimilation into the member-states’ struggles for repositioning themselves in a European field of power relations, and even to the emergence of a transnational agenda (Beciu, Mădroane, Ciocea, & Cârlan, 2017). The prominence of the EU immigration issue on the agenda of the right-wing newspapers, the high circulation rates of these publications, and the general dynamics of the public conversation on the matter can be taken as evidence that, in Gusfield’s terms, the British conservative media “owned” the definition of the problem even before the referendum debate. All these representations and claims—broadly speaking public knowledge about the issue in the period leading up to the Brexit vote—cannot be dissociated from the British newspapers’ enactment of arguments on EU immigration or from their modes of engaging audiences during the referendum campaign. For this reason, in the next section, I review several characteristics of the construction of Romanian immigration in the British print media2 (construal of identities, discursive strategies, positions), in correlation with the socio-political contexts in which the main debates took place. I focus on the years 2006 and 2013, for the reasons mentioned above, and on the year 2011



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(a transition year after the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition came into office in 2010). Since they are constitutive of the public problem concerning Britain’s EU membership, I consider them relevant for interpreting the arguments and positionings on Romanian immigration in the EU referendum campaign in 2016.

Romanian Immigration in the British Newspapers: Representations and Claims before the Brexit Referendum Debate The Romanians’ migration within the European Union developed as a transnational phenomenon of cross-border spanning and “simultaneity of connection” in multiple, networked locations (Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004; Vertovec, 2009). These processes intensified after 2002, when Romanians obtained the right to travel without visas in the European Union, as part of the pre-accession negotiations, and especially after 2007 (Anghel, 2008; see also Diminescu, 2009; Sandu, 2010). According to Anghel (2008), the supranational institutional framework provided by the European Union, in particular through free movement legislation, transformed migration from Romania into “mass migration,” and changed dramatically the Romanians’ transnational practices and patterns, which had previously resembled U.S. transnationalism. A “cornerstone” of European citizenship, freedom of movement is “the principle that has made it possible to ‘deepen’ integration” (Recchi, 2015, pp. 1–2), by enabling mobility as “one of a broad set of transnational behaviours that spill over into a stronger European identity” (Recchi, 2015, p. 137) and lay the ground “for opening the ‘nation-state’ container” (Mau & Mewes, 2012, p. 12). As noted earlier, the British public debates on labor migration from the CEE states inevitably revolved around EU integration and free movement. Geddes and Scholten (2016, pp. 23–24) stress that “the impact of EU free movement both in terms of EU citizens moving to Britain and on the politics of immigration” was a “key change” after 2004, leading to “the Europeanisation of migration politics” in the UK and, consequently, to new dynamics on the political scene. Romanian immigration would soon find itself at the core of these dynamics. Between 1997 and 2010, British immigration policy was shaped by New Labour’s “managed migration” approach, which put a positive spin on the benefits of immigration to the British economy (Geddes & Scholten, 2016; see

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also Balch & Balabanova, 2016; Boswell, 2009). In the period 2002–2004, the Labour Government resorted to expert knowledge to legitimize this approach, instituting “a technocratic mode of justification” for immigration policy decisions, which British journalists accepted, but also used “to substantiate other sorts of claim” (Boswell, 2009, p. 127). For example, conservative newspapers invoked think-tank findings, notably by Migration Watch, “to bolster a generally anti-immigration stance” and “to disclose government transgressions” (Boswell, 2009, p. 127). On subsequent occasions, the British press would continue to rely on expertise from various sources (government, academic research, think-tanks) with a view to “making sense of immigration as a policy issue” (Balch & Balabanova, 2011, p. 901), while filtering it through a media logic. This resulted into opposing, but equally simplified, frames in the leftwing and the right-wing newspapers: immigration “as complicated/ knowable” vs. immigration as “chaotic or ‘out of control’” (Balch & Balabanova, 2011, p. 900). Such claims and counterclaims about migration inflows, grounded in research and statistical data (predictions, risks), have surfaced, ever since the early 2000s, in British public debates on EU immigration. Under “managed migration,” in 2004, the UK was one of only three EU member-states that fully opened their labor markets to the A8 nationals (Geddes & Scholten, 2016). On the eve of the 2007 EU enlargement wave to Romania and Bulgaria, the levels of immigration from the A8 countries had surpassed by far the Home Office forecasts (Geddes & Scholten, 2016; see also Balch & Balabanova, 2011), and fostered a marked anti-EU immigration public sentiment (Somerville, 2007). There was also growing dissensus on the political scene and more opposition to the Labour Government’s immigration policies than in 2004 (Balch & Balabanova, 2016; Mădroane, 2009; Somerville, 2007). Throughout the year 2006 and especially in the latter half, the right-wing, Eurosceptic tabloid media (Sun, Daily Mail, Express) raged against unrestricted labor migration from Romania and Bulgaria, taking a firmly nationalist stance on EU immigration. They employed statistics and expert knowledge to make predictions about an “invasion” of Romanian and Bulgarian nationals, depicted through metaphors of deluge and siege (Mădroane, 2009; see also Fox, Moroşanu, & Szilassy, 2012; Light & Young, 2009), and to endorse the view of an immigration “system in chaos” (Balch & Balabanova, 2011, p. 896). The rhetoric of numbers was coupled with representations of Romanians and Bulgarians as criminals, carriers of disease (AIDS and tuberculosis), or impoverished, lazy people, who were looking forward to British welfare



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benefits (Mădroane, 2009; see also Fox et al., 2012; Light & Young, 2009). The estimated figure of “45,000 undesirables [criminals]” who would arrive from Romania and Bulgaria, mentioned in a leaked Home Office report, can be considered emblematic of the representational patterns at the time. The right-wing newspapers repeatedly invoked it to demonstrate that the Government had lost control on immigration (Balch & Balabanova, 2011; see also Mădroane, 2009). Through a cultural lens, these representations have been interpreted as the outcome of the West’s “gaze” on the semi-civilized Balkans (Light & Young, 2009; Mădroane, 2009) or as proof of the racialization of migrants from the CEE countries, accentuated in the case of the Roma (Fox et al., 2012). Balabanova and Balch (2010), who look at a corpus of articles from conservative and liberal newspapers in the year 2006, read such construals in connection with “ethical frames” that justify policy controls on immigration, along a communitarian-cosmopolitan “continuum.” Their research shows that communitarian, nationalist frames are prevalent (76%), especially the frame of “domestic social justice,” which legitimizes the control of immigration so as “to deliver the best possible economic, social and welfare conditions for citizens,” and the frame of “public security,” which sees migration as “a threat to public order and social stability” (p. 386); on the other hand, cosmopolitan frames, including “freedom of movement as part of universalist conceptions of human rights” (p. 386), identified mainly in the Independent and the Guardian (liberal broadsheets), are less frequent (24%). The transitional restrictions for the A2 nationals, announced in October 2006, did not put an end to the criticisms against the Labour Government because their effect was considered limited under EU legislation (they had to be lifted in maximum seven years). The public pressure on reducing EU immigration went up in the context of the financial crisis of 2007/2008 and the economic recession that followed, and, later on, in the context of the refugee crisis. The year 2010 opened a new age in British immigration policy—“good immigration, not mass immigration”—under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition that came into office. This line of policy was maintained by the Conservative Government after their victory in the 2015 general elections, in which “the right to free movement” had been “a subject of intense debate” (Geddes & Scholten, 2016, p. 33). PM David Cameron’s promise to bring net migration down to “the tens of thousands” (The Andrew Marr Show, 2010) proved “unattainable” in the long run because of EU free movement legislation, and this failure eventually damaged the Remain campaign during the EU referendum debate (Geddes & Scholten, 2016, p. 37; see also Geddes,

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2016). The year 2013 saw a strategic convergence in viewpoints on immigration across the Conservative-Labour political divide, in response to a gradual rise in the voters’ preferences of the populist, Eurosceptic right-wing party UKIP (Balch & Balabanova, 2016; Geddes & Scholten, 2016; Mădroane, 2014), while immigration ranked high among the Britons’ concerns. In September 2015, 56% of the British public considered immigration to be “an issue facing Britain,” “the highest level ever recorded for the issue since the series [of Ipsos MORI surveys] started in the 1970s” (“Shifting Ground,” 2016, p. 1). Returning to media coverage, in 2011, the representations of Romanian migrants in the right-wing publications tended to legitimize the policy goals announced by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition (Mădroane, 2012), signaling high inflows of Romanian low-skilled workers, migrant-related crime, and the overburdening of the welfare state. The mid-markets and tabloids wrote about armies of strawberry-pickers from Romania, “migrant scroungers,” “vendors of the Big Issue,” “Romanian traffickers,” “Romanian squatters,” the tripling of numbers of jobseekers from Romania, etc. (Mădroane, 2012, pp. 115–116). The theme of competition for jobs between EU migrants, especially low-skilled workers, and British workers gained visibility due to the economic recession. However, the representational patterns and the claims they supported displayed similarities with the conservative media discourse in 2006, in that they reinforced a view of immigration from a nationalist perspective. A few exceptions, in the sense of a more nuanced discussion of immigration from the CEE countries, came from the left-wing publications (Guardian and Independent) and from the Times (Mădroane, 2012). If, in 2011, Romanian migrants were not the subject of many articles in the British press, the coverage became more intense as the moment of liberalization of the UK labor market for the A2 nationals approached. In 2013, it was fraught with anti-immigration claims, grounded in “domestic social justice” and “public security” norms, generally found in the right-wing press, in combination with a weakening of the counterclaims in the liberal press (Balch & Balabanova, 2016, 2017). The conservative newspapers launched into the already familiar rhetoric that construes the UK as an “El Dorado” endangered by floods of Eastern European job snatchers, “benefit scroungers,” and criminals, therefore in a crisis (Mădroane, 2014). “The absolute fiend in this drama” was considered the European Union, which imposed “a tight grip on British national sovereignty and paralyzing control in matters of immigration policies” (Mădroane, 2014, p. 252). On the other hand, the left-leaning publications—Guardian, Independent, Daily Mirror—retained a distinct rhetorical



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vision of immigration, highlighting positive aspects and advocating for a balanced, dispassionate approach to the management of migration (Mădroane, 2014). Their strategy was to expose a false immigration crisis, manufactured by the British right-wing politicians and the conservative media (Mădroane, 2014; see also Balabanova and Balch’s (2010) mention of this tendency in the liberal press in the year 2006). A convergence of themes in the right-wing and left-wing publications could, however, be noticed in 2013, in the common emphasis on “the British public’s justified concerns about the strain on public services and unfair competition on the job market” (Mădroane, 2014, p. 259; see also Balch & Balabanova, 2016), consistent with the dynamics on the political scene. These developments, as well as the lower number of articles on immigration in the liberal newspapers and their lower sales figures, “have enabled a domination of narratives that focus on the potentially negative consequences of immigration.” (Balch & Balabanova, 2016, p. 20; see also Mădroane, 2014) As Balch and Balabanova show, the “narrowing of ideas in the press coverage” also sets limits to the conceptualizations of the European Union in the British public sphere; what stands out in their corpus is a construction of “the EU as productive of transnationalism, using immigration to erode nation-state sovereignty, but itself operating as a new (supranational) sovereign dictating to the UK” (2017, p. 251). By the start of the EU referendum campaign, the public knowledge about immigration from Romania—and the CEE countries—was characterized by the pervasiveness of media representational patterns that portrayed EU migrants and their transnational practices as a threat to the British state, from a nationalist perspective (unfair competition on the labor market, benefit tourism, networks of crime, burdening of welfare services, disruption of social cohesion), often riddled with negative stereotypes. Warnings of an impending “invasion,” exposed inaccuracies in the government’s statistics on immigration flows, and an emphasis on crime and poverty were likely to engender not only anti-immigration public attitudes, but also fear and, presumably, outrage against British politicians and the European Union, as responsible parties. In the media, this way of seeing EU immigration and defining the problem (and the solution) originated with the right-wing, Eurosceptic newspapers. As discussed above, there was a parallel watering down of the counterarguments in the liberal press. The EU referendum debate took place against the backdrop of these tendencies, which only continued and strengthened after the year 2013, adding illegal immigration from the Middle East and terrorism to the

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list of potential risks incurred by the UK as an EU member-state (see Balch & Balabanova, 2016; Geddes & Scholten, 2016). What I examine in this chapter are the ways in which the British newspapers enacted the arguments regarding Romanian immigration (as a visible category of EU immigration) and engaged the British publics in the months preceding the referendum vote; a dimension that I will consider is the newspapers’ reliance upon past representations and claims (when it emerges in the selected corpus). While media effects on public attitudes and behavior are hard to demonstrate, understanding the British newspaper dispositives can reveal how particular claims became salient (or not) during the debate, how readers were positioned towards various actors (politicians, the EU, journalists) in relation to the issue of EU immigration, and, importantly, how they were engaged as voters through these mechanisms.

Analytical Framework The framework I work with integrates elements from dispositive analysis, within the socio-communicational approach of the French School (Charaudeau, 2011a; Soulages, 1999; see also Beciu, 2007, 2011; Beciu, Lazăr, & Mădroane, 2017), and from the analysis of political discourse as practical argumentation, developed within critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2016; Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012). It is a framework I am developing for the analysis of television advocacy campaigns (Mădroane, 2016; see also my other study in this volume), but which can be equally applied to newspaper campaigns or to the coverage of public debates that are supposed to end with a practical decision about what to do (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012). From a socio-communicational perspective, any discursive event takes place in “a situation of communication,” being subject to constraints or “conditions of realization” that are recognizable and accepted by the participants, to the extent that one may speak about “a contract of communication.” (Charaudeau, 2011a, p. 52, my translation) Four main “external conditions” configure the “internal,” semiotic articulation of an “act of communication”: the participants’ identity (an “instance” of production and an “instance” of reception, or, in our case, media producers and consumers); the aim(s) of communication; the macro theme/ thematic “universe” (what the communicative exchange “is about”); the dispositive, which refers, in a narrow sense, to the material conditions and the organizational set-up of the communicative



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act (Charaudeau, 2011a, pp. 53–54, my translation). They create a “space” of enunciation, of discursive mise-en-scène by the participants, who take up partially pre-defined roles, but at the same time pursue their own communication goals (Charaudeau, 2011a, pp. 54–55). In a broad sense, the dispositive is an “ensemble” of elements—physical, symbolic—that “structures” the interaction among participants, i.e. the ways they mobilize various discursive resources (verbal, visual) and strategies, from different positions of power (Beciu et al., 2017, pp. 4–5). Central to the 2016 referendum campaign was practical argumentation on Britain’s membership in the European Union. In practical arguments, a claim for action is made in order to achieve a goal formulated by the social actors, starting from a particular “set of circumstances” (“natural,” “social,” and “institutional facts”); both the circumstances and the goal are undergirded by values as “source[s] of normativity,” and the fulfillment of the goal is expected to bring about a “future state of affairs,” seen as desirable by the actors in relation to their current circumstances (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012, pp. 39ff.; Fairclough, 2016). A decision is taken following a process of critical evaluation of the argument, during which the social actors can test the “rational acceptability” of the premises, the inference from the premises to the conclusion, or the conclusion itself (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012, p. 63; Fairclough, 2016, p. 60). The only possibility to rebut the conclusion and therefore reject the proposal for action as unreasonable is by showing that the “intended and unintended” consequences of the action proposed are unacceptable in view of the social actors’ commitments, and in light of existing evidence (practical arguments are defeasible arguments) (Fairclough, 2016; Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012). On the other hand, a claim for action “can also be supported by arguments from positive consequence.” (Fairclough, 2016, p. 59) According to Fairclough (2016; see also Fairclough & Mădroane, 2014), the discursive modalities of emphasizing premises in a practical argument are ways of framing an issue, understood as “steering” audiences towards a “preferred conclusion” in taking a decision, for example whether Britain should leave or stay in the European Union (see also Cârlan & Ciocea, chapter “Media Deliberation on Intra-EU Migration,” this volume). The British newspapers, among other media, shaped the public debate on Britain’s EU membership, by using particular discursive strategies to make salient circumstances, values, and claims on Romanian immigration, and by situating social actors (journalists, news actors, intended audiences) in particular configurations, which presuppose different modes of engagement and

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assigning responsibility (Beciu, 2007, 2011). I see the British newspapers as media dispositives within which, in the course of enacting practical arguments on Romanian/ EU immigration, journalists performed the role of advocates, in addition to the traditional roles of information providers and facilitators of public deliberation (Christians, Glasser, McQuail, Nordenstreng, & White, 2009), and positioned British publics on the “in” or “out” side of the debate. In so doing, they also relied upon the accumulated public discourses on the issue debated (see Section 3). My concern here lies with performativity and modes of engagement rather than with the specificity of each newspaper dispositive or the deployment of all the semiotic and material components available (no visual analysis will be carried out). What I consider essential is the positioning of the social actors involved and the modalities in which this is achieved through the enactment of the argument in the newspaper dispositives (common patterns in the pro-Leave and pro-Remain newspapers). In this regard, dispositive analysis can help to bring out the performative, drama-like, rhetorical dimension that is embedded in the construction of public problems (Cefaï, 1996; Gusfield, 1981; see discussion above). For my purposes in this study, I will look at the following elements: (a) the premises supporting the practical claim that the UK ought to exit the European Union—the main argument of the Leave camp—and the critical objections brought to this claim by the other side in the debate; I will only examine those aspects related to CEE immigration, with a focus on Romania and representational patterns of Romanian migrants; (b) the linguistic means through which the British newspapers enact these arguments, making salient premises and viewpoints, positioning actors, and engaging citizens to vote in a certain way; these elements generally fall under the “interpersonal metafunction” of language (Halliday, 1994), as applied in critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003; Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Liebhart, 2009), but they can be extended to include modalities of enunciation in the socio-communicative approach (Charaudeau, 2011a); at a macro-level, they have to do with elements in the genre structure of media articles (for example, certain uses of narrative structure, of testimony and other genres, the sources cited and the ensuing types of knowledge, register shifts) and, at a micro-level, with a range of devices (metaphor, evaluation, modality, assumptions, speech acts, rhetorical devices, etc.) (Charaudeau, 2011a; Fairclough, 2003; Richardson, 2007, among others).



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Corpus The corpus was selected from the database LexisNexisUK, with the search works Romanian* and migrant*, for the period March 1–June 23, 2016, and was completed with a search in the online archives of the newspapers, during which the search word immigrants was added. The analysis will be made on newspapers that were openly for or against Brexit in their editorial positions and that became engaged in the referendum campaign on one side or the other (this does not mean, however, that they published only articles in favor of the side they supported). The right-wing newspapers selected are the mid-markets Daily Mail and Express, the tabloid Sun, and the broadsheet Telegraph. The left-wing newspapers are the broadsheets Guardian and Observer, belonging to the same media group. While the Daily Mirror is credited with running the most “tenacious” anti-Brexit campaign (Firmstone, 2016, p. 36), the number of articles on Romanian migrants was small, and therefore it has not been included in this corpus. The number of articles is 90 in the conservative newspapers (Daily Mail—30, Express—26, Sun—17, Telegraph—17) and 36 in the liberal ones (33 in the Guardian and 3 in the Observer). As already mentioned, the study looks only into one of the arguments made during the Brexit referendum debate, i.e. the argument concerning EU immigration, using Romanian immigration as an entry point. Given the visibility of Romanian migrants in the problematization of EU immigration and, in correlation, of Britain’s EU membership, the findings, even though limited to this aspect, can bring an insight into the practical argumentation on the issue.

Findings and Discussion The EU Immigration Argument in the Right-Wing Newspapers: Romanian Immigration The Sun, Express, Daily Mail and Telegraph make up distinct media dispositives, with the Telegraph standing further apart due to the tabloid-broadsheet divide. I will, however, discuss them together, since their construal of EU immigration in the period leading up to the referendum is fairly unitary at the level of argumentation and positioning, and I will point out specificities as the case may be. The reconstructed practical argument concerning EU immigration is as follows:

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Table 5.1. The practical argument on EU immigration in the right-wing newspapers (in the selected corpus). Circumstances premises:

Goal premises:

British citizens are confronted with a series of problems (increase in crime, overcrowding and overburdening of public services and housing systems, disruption of community cohesion, unfair competition, and wage depression on the labor market), caused by EU immigration, in particular from the CEE countries (in this corpus, Romania features centrally among them). An additional problem is the illegal immigration brought about by the refugee crisis. A Britain that does not have to face the problems ensuing from EU immigration (as presented in the circumstances premise). A Britain that is not constrained by EU legislation and political decision-making (with a stress on free movement rights).

A Britain restored to its former (before EU membership) glory, seen in nationalistic terms. Values premises: Commitment to the British nation and, from this perspective, to the interests of British citizens in various forms (having to do with national security, economy, culture, political decision-making). Means-goal premise: Leaving the European Union. Alternative option: Remaining in the European Union. Addressing Highlighting the negative consequences of remaining in the alternative option: European Union as unacceptable, especially the worsening of the situation created by EU immigration and the conditions that led to it. Claim: Britain should leave the European Union. (British citizens have the power to fulfill the goal by voting “out” in the referendum). Source: Adapted from Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012, p. 88.

One of the discursive strategies used by the right-wing newspapers analyzed here is to overemphasize the negative impact of EU immigration on the UK, at the moment of the debate, which corresponds to the circumstances premise in the practical argument. I have only looked at articles where Romanian migrants are mentioned, but Romania always appears in a constellation of other CEE countries that are sources of EU immigration to Britain, some of which tend to be perceived as especially problematic (Romania is one of them, Poland is another).



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Several recurrent themes concerning Romanian migrants are given various degrees of prominence3 in the four publications. Crime is dominant in the tabloid and mid-market newspapers: 10 occurrences in the Sun, 15 occurrences in the Express, 15 occurrences in the Daily Mail; not only does it come up more frequently than other downsides of EU immigration, but it is the principal subject of many articles, which brings the issue of security to the forefront. The Telegraph, on the other hand, prioritizes the overburdening of public services and housing systems (6 occurrences) over crime (4 occurrences). In the Sun, wage depression and the unfair competition to British workers and small businesses are also foregrounded (7 occurrences) and so are the benefits that migrants receive (6 occurrences), followed by the overburdening of the public services and housing systems (5 occurrences). After crime, the Express highlights the overburdening of public services and housing systems (14 occurrences), and the disruption of community cohesion (4 occurrences), whereas, in the Daily Mail, the disruption of community cohesion is the second most frequent theme (7 occurrences). The themes and their distribution uphold a nationalist perspective, in full resonance with the past discourses on EU immigration in the right-wing press (see Section 3), but in a more intense and totalizing manner. A range of discursive and linguistic realizations can be identified in the construction of the circumstances premise. The reliance of the British media on expert and official discourses (see Section 3) that attest to the growing numbers of EU immigrants remains in place: the newspapers cite statistics from various institutes (notably the anti-immigration think-tank, Migration Watch), police, judicial and ministerial reports, or simply unattributed studies, backed up by statements by the local authorities and political representatives. EU immigration-related figures (incoming migrants, migrant criminals, migrants in employment and on benefits) register frequent occurrences in all four newspapers: 12 in the Sun, 21 in the Express, 13 in the Daily Mail, and 10 in the Telegraph. Increases in the number of criminal migrants, in particular, are constantly tied up with Romanian nationals: There were 18,127 Romanians arrested in England and Wales last year against 17,398 in 2014, an overall rise of four per cent. […] Latest figures from the Ministry of Justice reveal that 702 Romanians are held in the nation’s jails, an increase of 75 per cent in the past five years. A study last year found that a Romanian in the UK was six times as likely to be in jail than a migrant Pole, or eight times as likely as a Briton. (Syson, 2016; Sun)

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The alarmist rhetoric of “staggering” or “shocking” figures, analogies between the inflows of migrants and the size of British cities or football stadiums that they would presumably fill, or the metaphors of Britain as a container ready to give way under migrant pressure add drama and a sense of concreteness to the expert statistics and official reports. The newspapers make use of colorful descriptions, short narratives, and ordinary people’s testimonies from the sites affected by EU immigration— British towns with a large population of migrants—or from the countries of origin, where British reporters travel to conduct their own investigations into networks of crime or to follow up on the investment of remittance money. The voices of British citizens from various walks of life converge with the expert and official discourses in confirming the negative effects of EU immigration, in an emotional tone of outrage and even despair: Anne, 77, of Romford, East London, said: “Before we went into the EU we were a prosperous country and we made our own decisions. We were the envy of the world but now we’re a laughing stock. The change is radical and it’s going too fast. We can’t even deport criminals. There are some people coming here and ripping the heart out of my country. I’ve heard Romanians say they will rob and cheat people if they don’t get benefits. I want my grandchildren to be able to go to university, get a job, and a home they can afford. I can see a better future ahead if we leave.” (A. Jones, 2016; Sun)

Certain locations and stories are endowed with a symbolic status, due to their presence in more than one newspaper or due to their repeated inclusion in the news over the years. Examples from the former category are the Annette Street School in Glasgow, where all the pupils are children of immigrants, the jobless Romanian migrants who rough it in a car park in South London, or the Romanian driver of a lorry that was transporting illegal immigrants into the UK. An example from the latter category is the town of Țăndărei, a place where Romanian Roma are believed to have invested British benefit money in the construction of sumptuous villas: At first glance, this is very much a town on the up […] But the brightly-coloured streets hide a much darker secret: this is a town allegedly built on British benefits, where law-abiding locals fear their neighbours return. (Dumbara, 2016; Daily Mail)

The town, a British news topic in 2011, as well (Mădroane, 2012), comes to epitomize for the British publics the gains that Romanian migrants fraudulently obtain at their expense; it weaves together the themes of remittances,



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abuse of benefits, crime, and the (racialized) Roma issue. The emblematic locations, scenarios, and panoply of negative characters (the Romanian homeless migrant, the Romanian beggar, the Romanian gangster, the Romanian benefit scrounger) essentialize Romania as a source of crime for the UK, via EU mobility rights. The British reporters’ undercover investigations unravel an authentic underworld that spreads out over the entire ex-communist region, encompassing countries that are not yet EU members, but can gain access because of the endemic corruption in CEE member-states, such as Romania: Led by mastermind Grigory Volkov, the gang arranged false papers for reporter Katerina Kravtsova and gave her a cover story to peddle if challenged. Volkov has seven citizenships and sat in on her appointment at the Ministry of Justice office in the town of Galati, which lies on the border with Moldova and Ukraine. […] “Under the gaze of his henchmen, Grigory Volkov handed out packs of documents to those who had paid to obtain Romanian citizenship illegally and fulfil their dream of a life in Britain, Germany or Italy.” (Royston, 2016; Sun)

The representational associations (Van Leeuwen, 2008) between Romanian migrants and non-EU migrants, including, in the recent context, Syrian refugees, or between Romania and countries outside the European Union magnify the scale of illegal practices and the threat to security posed by the CEE states. The use of this discursive mechanism is not new: in the 2006 media coverage of the A2 countries, the British tabloids repeatedly warned about the risks of an invasion of Moldovans, who had easy reach to Romanian citizenship, or placed Romania, a Balkan country plagued by poverty and backwardness (Mădroane, 2009; see also Light & Young, 2009), alongside developing countries from Africa and Asia. The associations highlight the risks that the Leave campaign attributes to the alternative course of action for Britain, i.e. remaining in the European Union. The “steering” of the British publics towards the “preferred conclusion” (Fairclough, 2016; Fairclough & Mădroane, 2014) of rejecting this alternative as unreasonable does not rest solely on building the image of an intolerable status quo (the circumstances premise), but on demonstrating that the consequences of such a decision are unacceptable (the argument from negative consequences) because they would only deepen the crisis the UK has been plunged into. Allegations about the next EU enlargement waves to countries where Islam is the main religion—Turkey, in particular—and warnings of “invasions” from these countries, criticisms against the EU approach to the Middle East migrant crisis, and predictions of exponentially increased migrant

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numbers paint a bleak picture for Britain if it were to stay in the EU. A gradual interconnection between “EU free movement and the Mediterranean refugee crisis” had been made in the British “immigration debate” by the year 2015 (Geddes & Scholten, 2016, p. 34), which was activated by the right-wing newspapers during the referendum debate. In the symbolic construction of the impact and possible consequences of EU immigration, we are dealing with a twofold discursive strategy. On the one hand, there is a dramatized description of the existing state of affairs as an ongoing, real crisis (Britain “at breaking point”). On the other hand, the failures of the past and present governments (whether Labour or Conservative) to accurately predict and manage migration flows, compounded by a shift of “control” from the UK to the European Union, are taken as solid indicators of the risks lying ahead of Britain. Leaving the European Union is consistently presented and legitimized as the only solution to the problem, as well as the necessary and sufficient condition to achieve the desired goals. In a move characteristic of advocacy argumentation (Mădroane, 2016), British citizens are called upon to change the situation by voting “out”. If we turn to citizen engagement and mobilization, of equal importance to the media foregrounding of certain premises is the positioning of social and institutional actors as participants in the debate. I will consider how British readers are situated within the right-wing newspaper dispositives in relation to the Remain and Leave politicians (and other campaigners), the European Union, and the newspapers/ journalists. In this process, a major part is played by the attribution of blame and political responsibility for the crisis. The representatives of the Leave camp make it their mission to explain to the British publics the nature and causes of the situation, assessed as the outcome of misguided policy decision-making, to hold accountable the responsible parties, and to issue warnings about the future (on the basis of statistics and reports, as noted earlier). They are widely and favorably quoted in the four publications, with a focus on the statements of the two Tory leaders of the campaign, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. The Conservative Government in office and the previous governments, in particular Labour under Tony Blair, are exposed for what is considered their mismanagement of migration. Given that PM David Cameron was the leading figure of the Remain camp, the accusations directed at him were also intended to undermine the Remain campaign. The Leave advocates benefitted immensely from the release, by the Office for National Statistics, of the net migration figure in 2015—333,000—of which almost half accounted



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for EU immigration (the highest number on record), contrary to Cameron’s pledge to reduce migration to the “tens of thousands” (Geddes, 2016; Geddes & Scholten, 2016). This unfulfilled political commitment supplied the Leave camp with yet another reason for denouncing the British Government as incapable of predicting or controlling EU immigration: The Government’s total loss of control over immigration was laid bare yesterday as figures revealed net migration hit an astonishing 333,000 last year. (Newton Dunn, 2016; Sun) The gap between ONS migrant figures and the truth is as wide as the Grand Canyon. We are owed an apology. (Pearson, 2016; Telegraph)

We notice the same strategy that the right-wing publications started using in the early days of the turn to expert knowledge in British migration policy, namely dedicating “most attention […] to findings that appeared to expose the government’s dishonesty over claims about the level of immigration, its inability to control influx or its prevarication over the negative social impacts of immigration.” (Boswell, 2009, p. 127; see also Balch & Balabanova, 2011) The British elites are accused not only of inefficiency, but also of deliberately hiding the “real” figures of EU migrants and the long-term EU policy plans. At the same time as being assigned the blame for the EU immigration crisis in the UK, the targeted officials are made to appear deprived of agency, which lies with EU institutions and laws. This double move is likely to arouse feelings of insecurity and fear among publics, but also to give credibility to conspiracy theories, an important ingredient of the Leave campaign, which is not new, either; similar accusations regarding unreleased figures had been made in other public debates on Romanian immigration, for example in 2013, the year before the lifting of transitional restrictions (Mădroane, 2014). The European Union emerges as the chief decision-maker and the true villain, an identity that buttresses the claim that Britain should leave the Union. Of the four newspapers, the Express builds the most explicit case against Britain’s EU membership (it is also the newspaper where UKIP members, especially Nigel Farage, are often quoted). It dwells upon a “golden age” of the British nation before it joined the EU and identifies the principle of free movement and the EU “oligarchs” as directly responsible for the negative effects of immigration in the UK. More than the other three newspapers in my corpus, the Express spells out the negative consequences of EU membership for Britain; it does not simply present a state of affairs or lists of migrant

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numbers, leaving readers to connect the dots, but interprets them as the undesirable end results of European Union policies: For us in Britain the consequences of EU membership have become intolerable. Because of the Brussels doctrine of free movement more than 500 million people in Europe now have the right to live here. Desperate assurances from the pro-EU brigade that few will exercise that right are contradicted by the reality of ever-rising numbers. (“Migrant chaos cannot continue”, 2016; Express)

Within this frame, British citizens are portrayed as victims of the EU and their own governments, both in terms of the values they cherish, linked to a past ideal of the British nation, and of the impact on their everyday lives (see also the coverage of the right-wing press in 2013, discussed in Mădroane, 2014). In support of this view, ordinary Britons from diverse social categories are quoted as making the claim that the UK should leave the European Union, a claim grounded in their own experience with EU immigration and other policies: And from beleaguered fishermen in Grimsby to overstretched NHS workers in Romford, East London, and young mums in Lincolnshire, voters on the front line are pleading: “We want our country back.” (Jones A., 2016; Sun)

Crucially, however, these citizens are also the only ones who have the capacity to make a difference through their vote, a message that is forcefully conveyed by Leave campaigners and by the newspapers’ columnists, with a view to mobilization. The Sun employs an inclusive, solidarity “we” in the calls, while the other newspapers combine instances of “we” with symbolic evocations of the British public, voters and even nation, pitted against the elites: Our only hope for national salvation lies in our exit. (McKinstry, 2016; Express) Once again, as so often in politics, it is the poor, the low paid and those least able to shape their own destiny who are ignored. Which is another reason why on June 23, if we want to return to self-government, to have political debates whose outcome we get to decide and to show that we won’t be cowed by Project Fear, then it has got to be a vote for Leave. (Pollard, 2016; Express) It is people like him, decent people who are fundamentally welcoming to outsiders, inhabitants of the provinces’ largely ignored by the Westminster village who may in less than two months’ time decide that enough is enough with regard to unfettered immigration from the European Union and vote in favour of Britain leaving the EU. (Tweedie, 2016; Daily Mail)



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In this manner, the Leave campaign comes off as a democratic exercise of empowering the British people, articulated, as can be seen in the examples above, through a class-based, populist opposition between the ordinary Britons affected by EU immigration and the elites (the British political class, the EU, global corporations that use migrant labor, etc.). The entire layout of the EU immigration argument upholds the “Take Back Control” slogan (see also Barnett, 2016) by describing a Britain in disarray and a loss of political control to the EU, followed by a strong call to British voters to step in and redress the situation. The call is premised on a unison of voices making the same claim, that Britain should leave the EU, rising from “a consensus on the ‘public interest’” and on “shared values or principles” (Birks, 2011, p. 132) that these publications construct regarding EU membership. The newspapers, in particular the mid-markets and the tabloid Sun, perform through their dispositives a hybrid media role of watchdogs for the British people and advocates for the cause of leaving the EU, manifested in their overtly one-sided engagement in the campaign, from news reports to editorials. A special place in this regard is held by investigative practices: A group of migrants have been living in a UK “car park camp” of dumped motors for more than a decade, a Sun investigation can reveal. (Well & Patten, 2016; Sun) Two cruel carers who tied up an 88-year-old dementia sufferer so they could have a quiet shift have been told they face jail. Romanian husband and wife Cosmin and Ana Focsa bound Brenda Lea with a bath towel and left her in bed. […] The Daily Mail has highlighted the shocking treatment of elderly and vulnerable people in nursing homes and hospitals as part of our long-running Dignity for the Elderly campaign. (Levy, 2016; Daily Mail)

In addition to providing evidence of the EU immigration impact and risks, the investigations legitimize the newspapers’ status of representatives of the British citizens. It is an identity built upon a past record of anti-EU and anti-immigration campaigns, most likely familiar to their readers, usually transposed into a “demotic style” and “populist political rhetoric” (Conboy, 2003, p. 48, about the Sun; see also Mădroane, 2009, about the investigative practices of British journalists and the campaigns run before Romania’s accession to the EU). Overall, the mediation of the Leavers’ EU immigration argument reunites, in these newspapers, the central features of a populist style, in the appeal to a sovereign people, the opposition between this people and various elites (Westminster, EU, global corporations, etc.), on the one hand, and CEE migrants, on the other, the generalized alarm about the consequences of “uncontrolled”

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immigration (among other risks), and the simplistic presentation of arguments in a conversational, emotional register (Canovan, 1999; Charaudeau, 2011b; Moffitt & Tormey, 2014).

The EU Immigration Argument in the Left-Wing Newspapers: Romanian Immigration The Guardian and its sister Sunday newspaper, the Observer, used their dispositives to bring to the publics’ attention critical objections to the Leave argument on EU immigration, in an attempt to defeat it and, ideally, to produce a counterargument. The chief modalities of realization consist of “challenging” the following premises: the circumstances premise regarding the immigration crisis in Britain, by exposing exaggerations and outright lies, breaking down stereotypes, and advancing explanations; the values premise, by unmasking the racism, xenophobia, and fervent nationalism underlying the Leave argument; the means-goal premise, by showing that leaving the EU is not the necessary and sufficient condition for solving Britain’s immigration problem; the conclusion premise, by demonstrating that the unintended consequences of the proposed course of action, primarily the costs to the British economy, are unacceptable to the UK, and, hence, that the claim should be rejected as unreasonable (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012, p. 63ff.; Fairclough, 2016, p. 60). The largest space in the coverage is dedicated to challenging the “rational acceptability” or the “truth” of the circumstances premise. This is achieved through objections to the Leave campaigners’ statements about the EU immigration crisis (or statements easily traceable to their argument), raised by a multitude of social actors, across several journalistic genres: columnists (opinion articles); officials on the Remain side, EU representatives, and experts (studies by the Office for National Statistics, the Oxford Migration Observatory, the London School of Economics, etc.) (news stories, debate reports, and news features); EU migrants in Britain, including Romanian migrants, but also British citizens from towns with a large migrant population (opinion, news features containing interviews, and migrants’ success stories). Significant objections are raised to the Leavers’ claims about the negative effects of EU immigration (in their totalizing dimension), to the attribution of blame to the European Union for the immigration crisis, or to the unsubstantiated predictions about Turkey’s and the Balkan states’ EU accession and future massive inflows (as a means of questioning the grounds for the risks envisaged by Brexit supporters):



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Housing, welfare, health, defence and foreign policy are all in our hands. In fact, the biggest problems we face as a country are in areas such as housing and health, where we call the shots. But aren’t many problems really the result of immigration? Can’t we pin the blame on those foreigners? That is what the “control” argument is really all about: Portuguese nurses, Polish plumbers, Romanian pea-pickers. (Patten, 2016; Guardian) Even if Ankara and the EU could resolve the sticking points that have blocked talks for years, huge doubts remain about Turkey’s membership prospects. […] One senior European politician who supports Turkish accession told the Guardian recently that the EU should stop “permanent hypocrisy” on Turkish accession negotiations. “We should tell them there is no way to join the European Union,” the source said. (Rankin, 2016; Guardian)

An important focus is the clarification of the net immigration figure in 2015, the highest on record and a point of major criticism by the Leave camp. The Remainers’ explanations construe EU mobility as a complex process, which accounts for the authorities’ difficulties in accurately recording and regulating migrant flows (see also Balch & Balabanova, 2011, on similar strategies of using migration-related numbers in the left-wing British newspapers). Intended to take away from the Leave campaign’s rhetoric surrounding the figure, including accusations of a governmental cover-up, these explanations articulate a fundamentally different view of EU immigration. A booming economy, presented as an achievement of Britain’s EU membership, is the major pull factor, and EU migrants actively sustain this economy through their contributions: HMRC figures published last week said that recent EU migrants had paid £3.1bn in income tax and national insurance in the tax year to April 2014 and claimed £556m in benefits—making a net contribution to the economy of more than £2.5bn. (Travis, 2016; Guardian)

It is important to point out that, in some respects, concerning the growing number of migrants, the refugee crisis, security, or certain benefits, the Remain campaigners concede, to an extent, to the points made by Leavers (these tendencies were already noticeable in 2013, see Balch & Balabanova, 2016; Mădroane, 2014). The answer, however, does not lie in exiting the European Union, but in tackling the issues through the available institutional channels, in cooperation with other EU member-states:

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The trouble is that information about convictions still isn’t being shared consistently or quickly enough between EU countries. […] How leaving the EU will help us to get better at sharing information with our neighbours, Vote Leave hasn’t yet made clear. (Benedictus, 2016; Guardian)

To account for those cases where a joint approach would not work in Britain’s best interests, the newspapers underscore PM David Cameron’s progress in his negotiations with Brussels over a “special status” for the UK. The explanations around the net migration figure provide thus an opportunity for the Guardian to turn the blame attributed to the Prime Minister by the right-wing publications into an accomplishment. Another discursive strategy aimed at deconstructing the EU immigration crisis calls onto the British publics to take an inward look at their own prejudices about other European nations. It is a self-critical, self-reflexive challenge to the national community, a “we” that is collectively responsible for failing to see beyond the negative stereotypes and anti-immigration attitudes profoundly rooted in its public culture: So, the good news, I tell the first Romanian I interview, is that a British newspaper wants to print a story about Romania that isn’t about immigrants stealing their jobs or Gypsy beggars getting their teeth fixed free on the NHS. And the bad news, he asks? I pause. That, according to the Observer’s survey, most Brits believe that Romanians come to Britain to steal our jobs and get their teeth fixed on the NHS. (Cadwalladr, 2016; Observer)

This approach, manifest in opinion articles and news features, is directed at questioning clichés and exposing ignorance. The principle of free movement is connected with an ethos of cosmopolitan solidarity (see also Balabanova & Balch, 2010; Balch & Balabanova, 2016), for which the Brits are presumably not yet prepared: Pro-migration arguments have so far relied entirely on myth-busting and fact-flinging, which is counterproductive. Nobody wants to hear that migrants boost the economy with their demand for goods and services, and bring in tax receipts that more than pay for their child benefit. […] Bagging people up in those instrumental terms creates deep insecurities in all of us, which cannot be allayed by anything as simple as money. Freedom of movement can be welcomed only by people who are secure, and security is founded on compatriotism—the insistence that we have solidarity with one another, and that all our living standards are each other’s business. (Williams, 2016; Guardian)

Solidarity, cultural pluralism, respect for human rights (free movement is placed in this category), awareness that in the contemporary, globalized world



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problems are likely to have transnational solutions are the values that the two newspapers oppose to the racism and isolating nationalism they read in the Leave argument. Nonetheless, direct reference to such values is not frequent in my corpus. Similarly, while the positive impact of EU immigration is highlighted, the curtailment of EU immigration is rarely mentioned as an unacceptable consequence of voting “out.” What is viewed as unacceptable, in this scenario, are the losses incurred by the British economy. A “normative hierarchy” (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012, p. 68) is thus created in which economy trumps immigration—whatever problems might be caused by immigration in British society, they pale by comparison with the risks that the British economy will be facing outside the European Union: And yet, ironically, many of these workers [who complain about CEE migrants] depend as much as the rest of the country on access to the European single market. For example, DP World, the Gulf logistics superpower, is investing in turning Thurrock into the largest deepwater port in the world, partly in order to serve European and global markets. And Proctor and Gamble’s enormous plant in Thurrock creates vast vats of soap for export to the rest of Europe. (Leonard, 2016; Guardian)

It is true that EU migrants are construed as an indispensable cog in the British economy machine, but this approach instrumentalizes immigration and de-emphasizes its inherent worth (see also Balch & Balabanova, 2016). The positioning of social and institutional actors in the Guardian and the Observer dispositives is entirely different from the right-wing newspapers. The European Union is a source of economic progress, welfare, democracy, and free movement for its member-states, Britain included. Through its political representatives in office (present and past), the UK has become one of the major players in the EU, securing for itself the right balance of engagement and independence. The Leave campaigners are accused of manufacturing an EU immigration crisis to stir up fear and xenophobia among British citizens, while the right-wing media come under the spotlight for unprofessionalism, occasionally in an ironic tone: How can they [Gypsy gangsters] be stopped? Fortunately the Sun’s intrepid reporters have travelled to Țăndărei in Romania […] Naturally, most of the mansions were empty when the Sun visited, because all the Gypsy gangsters were away swindling in Britain. […] Luckily, one swindling Gypsy gangster did answer the door when the Sun called and was prepared to talk. Indeed, surprisingly, he just confessed to all his crimes. “Britain is easy money for us,” the man said. “They give it away.” Again, the Sun forgot to get the gangster’s name, but doubtless it will have passed its interview and his address to the police. (Benedictus, 2016; Guardian)

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In this respect, the newspapers employ the same strategy they used in other public debates on CEE migrants (see Section 3). The journalistic role assumed by the Guardian and the Observer is that of informing and educating the British publics on every aspect of the European Union and its institutions. Special sections and articles with a Q&A structure are created for this purpose. The newspapers invite their readers to self-reflection and offer explanations for the appeal of the Leave argument in the context of a public culture dominated by stereotypical views of other Europeans, failed election commitments by Labour (to impoverished regions in Wales, for example), or inappropriate management of EU immigration, also by Labour. It is a position that institutes a distance from the publics and, at the same time, lays upon them the burden of responsibility for making the right choice for the UK, by voting “in.” The two newspapers do not pursue mobilization through direct calls onto potential voters (in the selected corpus). They use complex interpretations to guide their readers to the conclusion that the UK should remain in the European Union: critical objections, a rejection of racist and nationalistic stances (associated with shame as a moral sentiment), an analogy with the 1975 referendum, when Britain upheld the decision to become an EEC member-state, and the upward trajectory it followed as a result. On the other hand, the only instance in my corpus where British citizens are explicitly empowered to build, through their votes, a new future state of affairs for the UK is the excerpt below: Having said this, a remain vote cannot be purely about stopping a campaign that fans racism. I’m backing Another Europe is Possible, which begins a tour of the country on Saturday. Rather than defending the status quo, this campaign wants to unite with people across the continent to build a just, democratic Europe that is run in the interests of the majority. (O. Jones, 2016; Guardian)

Rather than positioning British publics as saviors of the nation from the hands of self-interested elites and EU “dictatorship,” the liberal publications analyzed here (and the Remain camp) opted for taking them on a journey of critical introspection and enlightenment, at the end of which they were expected to support Britain’s EU membership as the only reasonable course of action. The contrast with the champions-of-the-people approach in the right-wing newspapers (and the Leave campaign) and their repeated claims for British citizens to vote “out” could not be more striking.



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Conclusions This chapter has examined the enactment of the Romanian immigration argument, as an entry point into the debate on EU immigration, and the modes of engaging audiences in the British newspapers, during the Brexit referendum campaign. Both the right- and the left-leaning publications mobilized representational patterns of Romanian (and other CEE) migrants, discursive strategies, and claims about EU immigration and the principle of free movement that they had mobilized in previous public debates (such as the key debates in 2006 and 2013, regarding EU citizens from the A2 countries). A public repertoire of essentialized identity categories of Romanian and other CEE migrants, arguments, and positionings, in other words, of defining the problem of Britain’s EU membership in relation to intra-EU migration, was already in place at the time of the referendum, with the conservative, Eurosceptic side having successfully called for “ownership” (Gusfield, 1981). The novelty of the 2016 context was the referendum, hence the high stakes of the debate and the prospect of change, against the backdrop of a number of developments that turned out to be favorable to the Leave argument: the consequences of the economic recession, the refugee crisis, and the proximity of terror attacks, as well as increased levels of discontent at how these crises were managed in the European Union. The impact of these factors could be seen in a tendency towards narrowing the diversity of viewpoints on EU immigration and radicalizing certain claims in the British media and political spheres, given the compromises made by the Conservatives and, especially, by Labour, in order to counter the rise of radical right-wing parties. In hindsight, it is, perhaps, of little surprise that the populist coverage of the Leave campaign in the conservative print media, their compelling construction of the immigration crisis, portrayed as threatening to engulf and ruin the entire British nation in the near future, and their unfaltering engagement in the service of the “people” resonated with certain categories of voters. They positioned themselves as champions of the people, in opposition to the political elites, made claims grounded primarily in nationalist values, and projected a British citizenry that had the power to change the fate of Britain. The Guardian newspapers responded by formulating a number of critical objections, by deconstructing stereotypes on Romanian (and CEE) migrants, and by providing complex arguments and explanations on EU immigration, where a pragmatic understanding of economic advantages co-existed with an orientation to cultural pluralism, solidarity in a global world, democracy, and

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human rights. This approach put them in a position of educators of their readers, who were confronted with their own prejudices about EU immigration and ignorance of the EU benefits for the UK; at the same time, it created a distance, by comparison with the right-wing publications. The study has explored the ways in which the British newspapers, credited with setting the public agenda during the EU referendum debate, became engaged in the campaign and engaged their publics, not least by building upon construals and claims about immigration from the CEE countries that had been assimilated into the construction of Britain’s EU membership as a public problem. The findings bring some insights into how the mediation of the issue played out in the two campaigns, via the argument on Romanian immigration, but a larger corpus would be necessary for generalizations.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Isabela Fairclough (University of Central Lancashire, UK) for illuminating discussions on the critical discourse analysis of practical arguments.

Notes 1. Public knowledge is viewed here in a broad sense. 2. I have limited the scope of the review to the British newspapers because they are the focus of my research in this chapter and because I start from the premise, supported by other scholars (Barnett, 2016; Somerville, 2007), that they have been particularly influential in the public debates on EU immigration, especially the right-wing tabloids. 3. Each theme has been counted once per article. The counting does not take into account the fact that certain articles may develop a single theme in detail, whereas others mention it in passing.

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The Andrew Marr Show. (2010, January 10). BBC One. Retrieved October 2, 2017 from http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/andrew_marr_show/8450542.stm Travis, A. (2016, May 18). Number of EU migrants working in UK rises to record level; Number of people from EU countries working in Britain rises 224,000 in a year to 2.15 million. The Guardian (LexisNexis Database). Tweedie, N. (2016, May 7). A rapist protected. Daily Mail (LexisNexis Database). Van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and practice: New tools for critical discourse analysis. (Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vertovec, S. (2009). Transnationalism (Key Ideas Series). London and New York, NY: Routledge. Well, T., & Pollard, C. (2016, May 13). Revealed: The car park migrant camp hidden in the heart of London where some have been living for 10 years. The Sun. Retrieved August 19, 2017 from https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/1173967/revealed-the-car-park-migrantcamp-hidden-in-the-heart-of-london-where-some-have-been-living-for-ten-years/ Williams, Z. (2016, May 31). You can’t sell freedom of movement to people who are insecure; Until the precariousness of life in Britain is addressed, toxic myths about migration will trump the truth. The Guardian (LexisNexis Database). Wodak, R., de Cillia, R., Reisigl, M., & Liebhart, K. (2009). The discursive construction of national identity (A. Hirsch, R. Mitten, & J. W. Unger, Trans. 2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

part 3 identity negotiation in the transnational field : agency and discourse

·6· migrant identities and practices in media advocacy campaigns The Construction of Claims and Audiences Irina Diana Mădroane

Introduction One of the deeply problematic fallouts of Romanian intra-EU migration has been the formation of vulnerable social categories, such as the children and the aged parents left behind in the country of origin. The magnitude of the phenomenon (approximately 3.5 million Romanian migrants) has exposed serious deficiencies in social assistance at a national level, against the background of challenges in care provision across borders. By assuming a mission of positive intervention in society, the mainstream media have come to play a major part in the process of initiating policy action to redress the situation of these vulnerable groups. Among other things, journalistic engagement finds expression in a media format that has attained increased visibility in the Romanian public sphere over the past two decades: media advocacy campaigns. Characterized by strategic objectives, these campaigns aim to pressure decision-makers into taking action, by raising awareness of social problems and mobilizing a variety of publics in support of policy-related measures (Coffman, 2002; Cox, 2006). In Romania, they have touched upon a number of significant issues and can boast successful policy change (to name but a few cases, legislation on animal rights, volunteering, child adoptions). Generally

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speaking, the campaigns reflect, within their specific dispositives, the transformations of the journalistic profession in postcommunism: the personalization of communication (for example, a cultivation of proximity and affect in the relationship with the publics), the redefinition of the journalist’s roles in a changing media system, reconfigurations of power relations, the drive towards commercialization, etc. (Beciu, 2011; Beciu, Lazăr, & Mădroane, 2017; Coman & Gross, 2012; Lazăr, 2008). Acting under the banner of social responsibility and social justice (Mădroane, 2015, 2016a), Romanian journalists usually adopt a denunciating stance in relation to the authorities, enacted in an “interpellative” mode (Beciu, 2011). Adversarialness permeates the already hybridized role they perform as campaign organizers, a role that subsumes the more traditional postures of information-giving and interpreting to advocacy goals, but also, ideally, to goals of civic debate facilitation (Christians, Glasser, McQuail, Nordenstreng, & White, 2009; see also Birks, 2010, 2011). Importantly, media advocacy campaigns put journalists in a position from which they can make claims to represent particular social categories, or citizens overall, in the name of a general interest, concerning “all of us” (Beciu, 2011; see also Birks, 2011; Michailidou & Trenz, 2012). When the social problems are caused by migration and the public is comprised of migrants and non-migrants, the legitimization of policy proposals and the stances adopted by journalists raise complex issues of identification, positioning, and engagement, which the present study addresses. The campaign under scrutiny here—“Tu știi ce mai fac părinții tăi?” [“Any idea what your parents are doing right now?”]—was run, in the year 2014, by ProTV, a commercial TV channel whose brand is linked to television advocacy campaigns in Romania; it advocated for the Romanian elders’ entitlements to care assistance. The point of departure for the campaign was the plight of the migrants’ aged and incapacitated parents, but the problem was generalized to other Romanian elderly (Mădroane, 2016a, 2016b). While the campaign has not led to policy modification yet,1 it helped to put the issue on the agenda and, in doing so, it converged with the ongoing construction of intra-EU migration as a public problem in Romania (see other studies in this volume). By 2014, images of suffering children left in the country of origin—called by the media the “orphans of migration”—and of equally suffering migrant parents, with an emphasis on mothers, were already part of the Romanian public culture, as were the main arguments and positionings on their situation. The theme of the difficulties facing families with migrant members—“transnational families” in



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the specialized literature (Baldassar, Baldock, & Wilding, 2007)—had been configured in the public sphere and had been institutionalized through incorporation into policy-making. ProTV had been engaged in these dynamics. In 2007, for instance, it organized the campaign “Tu știi ce mai face copilul tău?” [“Any idea what your kid is doing right now?”], in which journalists called attention to the trauma of the children left in Romania by their migrant parents. That campaign made a contribution to policy in the area of child protection, received an Emmy award in 2008 (among other awards), and had a follow-up in 2011. In 2014, in the course of constructing the Romanian elderly as a vulnerable group, the ProTV reporters made a connection with these previous representations and claims: “Tu știi ce mai fac părinții tăi?” brought back to the publics’ attention aspects of caregiving “at a distance,” in families split up by migration, the issue of remittances, and the problems associated with caregiving in Romanian society. Among the key audiences targeted by ProTV, with a view to mobilization, were migrants and non-migrants with aged parents, alongside regular bystanders who could have extended the base of support for the campaign objectives (see Cox, 2006). Of significance here is the symbolic negotiation of identities, values, and claims for political action and representation, which, due to the inclusion of Romanian migrants in the campaign, crossed the national borders. This chapter is concerned with the following research questions: How are the identities and practices of Romanian migrants construed in the campaign argument(s) and what are the implications of the construals for the process of claim-making? On what grounds (values, norms) and in what ways (discursive strategies) are the intended audiences called upon to accept the policy proposal made in the campaign? How do the mobilized migrant and non-migrant publics position themselves towards the TV channel’s claims for action and representation? The first two questions focus on the discourse of the campaign, whereas the third one will be discussed starting from the answers Romanian publics posted on the campaign’s petition site. The analysis explores how an issue portrayed as concerning migrant families is connected, in the campaign dispositive, to “our” public interest (therefore an issue concerning Romanian society), what positionings and modes of engagement this entails, and what types of identification are generated among the mobilized publics (migrantnon-migrant). The study intends to cast light on how a television advocacy campaign, geared at social policy change within the borders of the sending

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country, employs symbolic resources and strategies in order to forge particular relationships between migrants, non-migrants, and the media, across the transnational space, which could lead to mobilization and societal transformation. These aspects have received less scholarly attention to date.

Calls for Action, Representative Claims and Audiences in Media Advocacy Campaigns Without generalizing (advocacy may take diverse forms), media advocacy campaigns are often built around a “problem-solution structure, correlated with particular goals underlain by values, norms or obligations.” (Mădroane, 2016a, p. 170) This structure is similar to that of practical arguments (Fairclough, 2016; Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012), in the sense that the publics are engaged in a form of decision-making, oriented to granting support (or not) to a call for policy intervention. It is therefore possible to analyze such campaigns as making a claim for action, starting from the claimants’ analysis of the following elements: the actors’ circumstances in relation to particular goals (a “future state of affairs”); cherished norms and values; the means to achieve the intended goals; the consequences of the action proposed (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012, p. 39ff.). In advocacy argumentation, however, it is not deliberation, as is the case in practical argumentation, but rhetoric (not necessarily fallacious or manipulative) and mobilization that prevail in the presentation. In recent studies, I have looked at how such arguments are enacted in media advocacy campaigns, that is at how various construals, premises, and actor positionings are articulated and made salient (Mădroane, 2016a, 2016b; see also my other chapter in this volume). My focus is on the rhetorical and performative dimensions of arguments, within media dispositives, defined as material and symbolic frames of interaction that both constrain and facilitate a certain use of semiotic resources by social actors (Charaudeau, 2011; see also Beciu et al., 2017). Another aspect that needs to be considered in media advocacy has to do with the campaign journalists’ implicit or explicit claims to represent the public interest or, sometimes, the interests of a specific group, cast in terms that resonate with as wide an audience as possible, by “appeal[ing] to shared values or principles” (Birks, 2011, p. 132; see also Michailidou & Trenz, 2012). Such claims of representation, derived from the watchdog function of the media (Birks, 2011), fall into the category of what Michael Saward



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(2006, 2010) theorized as “representative claims,”2 which can be made by elected, but also unelected representatives, for example celebrities, who often take a public stance for all kinds of causes (Saward, 2006, 2010), or journalists (Michailidou & Trenz, 2012, p. 141). Saward’s approach lays emphasis on the symbolic, discursively constructed and, importantly, performed nature of representative claim-making. He distinguishes between actors such as the maker and the subject of the claim, the object and the referent, the audiences addressed by the claim, those who are “spoken to,” and the “actual constituencies,” “those who recognize a given claim as being made about and for them, or who see their interests as being implicated in the claim.” (Saward, 2010, p. 49, original emphases) The claim of representation takes the following “basic form”: “A maker of representations (‘M’) puts forward a subject (‘S’) which stands for an object (‘O’) that is related to a referent (‘R’) and is offered to an audience (‘A’),” who may in turn react by accepting the claim or by formulating counterclaims (Saward, 2010, pp. 36–37, original emphases). Representative claims are therefore constituted in a process of signification and performance in the public space, wherein the use of contextually appropriate cultural and aesthetic “resources” has an essential role (Saward, 2010, p. 56ff.). As Michailidou and Trenz note (2012, p. 140), mediated political communication lends itself particularly well to an analysis from this perspective, especially with the rise of interactive technologies that enable “audiences and constituents” to “respond to a political claimant’s representative claim spontaneously, within the same media frame (article, broadcast) on a grander scale than ever before.” In this study, I interpret the claims made by ProTV both as proposals for action—claims in the advocacy argument—and (implicit) claims of representation. This combined perspective, compatible with the approach to public problems in this volume, has the capacity to offer insights into the complex configuration of positionings involving claimants, claims, and the multiple layers of audience called upon to back up a policy initiative. An advocacy campaign has two main categories of audience, according to Robert Cox (2006, pp. 256–257): a “primary audience,” consisting of decision-makers who can implement the policy measures proposed, and “secondary audiences,” who encompass “the campaign’s base (its core supporters),” “the opponents of a campaign,” and those labelled by Cox “persuadables, members of the public who are undecided but potentially sympathetic to a campaign’s objectives.” The campaign organizers embark upon an effort “to mobilize the support of relevant constituencies to hold the primary audience accountable

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for its decisions” (Cox, 2006, p. 256), by rallying “public demand” (p. 255) for a set of policy measures. Striking a chord with diverse audiences, from those who are direct stakeholders to bystanders, presupposes convincing them to accept, to a relevant extent, the symbolic construals in the campaign and the values invoked for legitimizing action. The mobilized publics are thus brought into existence as constituencies that uphold the policy proposal as well as the claim of representation and, moreover, take action to that effect, for example sign a petition. How are these processes and relationships configured in a nationally-based media advocacy campaign that reaches out to audiences with a transnational way of life, alongside other categories of audience?

Analytical Tools and Corpus The research questions asked in this chapter deal with new facets of a campaign that I have examined in previous studies (Mădroane, 2016a, 2016b). As mentioned above, I have interpreted the campaign “Any idea what your parents are doing right now?” (2014) as the enactment, in the ProTV media dispositive, of an advocacy-oriented, practical argument (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012). Within this approach—a brief presentation of the findings will be made in the following section—I now turn in more detail to the identities and roles assigned to Romanian migrants in the construction of the argument. The analytical tools employed for this purpose are the discursive modalities of representing social actors and actions (Fairclough, 2003; Van Leeuwen, 2008), as incorporated into the argument (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012) and performed in the campaign dispositive. I then revisit the values conjured up in the representation of the circumstances and campaign goals (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012), the attribution of political responsibility, and the ensuing modes of engagement (Beciu, 2011; Cefaï, 1996; Gusfield, 1981; see also other studies in this volume). I discuss ProTV’s implicit claim to represent the elders’ interests, extended to the general interest of Romanian citizens (Saward, 2006, 2010). Finally, I look at the comments that audiences posted on the campaign petition site (for the most part, mobilized publics who signed the petition). In this regard, I carry out qualitative content analysis to establish the main categories and themes in the posts, as well as discourse analysis of the symbolic identity construals and the positions assumed by participants; the posts are seen in correlation with the discourse of the campaign (identities, stances, claims for action and representation).



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The corpus is made up of all the transcripts of campaign-related news stories and features that could be found on the ProTV site.3 The campaign started on February 16, 2014, and lasted until the beginning of April, but did not make the subject of daily broadcasts. A site was made available for citizens to show their support by signing a petition and making comments. By the end of the campaign, over 40,000 signatures had been gathered,4 and 220 people had posted comments on the site. The comments, included in the corpus analyzed here, cover the period February 24–March 23, 2014, and most of them were made by members of the public who also signed the petition. The site was taken down some time in 2016, but, while it was up and running, citizens could still sign the petition and post comments. In the following sections, I first present the campaign dispositive and the main argument, partly based on previous work (Mădroane, 2016a, 2016b), and then I move on to a discussion of the current findings. All the examples are in my translation.

Findings and Discussion “Any Idea What Your Parents Are Doing Right Now?”— Media Dispositive and Argument The campaign was initiated by the investigative journalism team behind the Romania, Te Iubesc [Romania, I Love You] TV show (2008–present), affiliated with the ProTV News Division. Like other advocacy campaigns produced by ProTV, it consisted of a series of reportages, stories, and interviews with the major stakeholders (the elderly and their relatives or care providers, local and national authorities, volunteers, NGOs, and priests). They were broadcast during the evening news bulletins, accompanied by a call for action (petition-signing), and then brought together, with extensive comments, in the Romania, I Love You TV show. One edition of this fifty-minute weekly show was entirely dedicated to the topic (February 23, 2014), and another half edition to summing up and concluding the campaign (April 6, 2014). The objectives were, first, to raise public consciousness of the issue—inappropriate care for the elderly in Romania—and, second, to mobilize support for a proposal for action grounded in input from NGOs and other civic groups. In running the campaign, ProTV situated itself on a par with these organizations, taking on a similar role of engagement in society.

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Romania, I Love You is concerned with social issues, which it puts on the public agenda with the intention of holding accountable those responsible and changing “laws, systems, mentalities” (Despre “România, Te Iubesc” [About “Romania, I Love You”], 2017). The investigative news show exposes fraud and misgovernment, and introduces the publics to Romanians with exceptional achievements, heroes who could be considered representative of an idealized Romanian (national) identity. The social problems are first described through the eyes of the ordinary people affected by them, during incursions into the private sphere (depending on the topic). This view is then expanded by bringing in the opinions of actors who are in the sufferers’ immediate proximity, and the explanations of local and state authorities. On a characteristic note, Romania, I Love You gives examples from developed states confronted with similar situations (usually in Western Europe) to serve as inspirational and pragmatic models for Romanian policy-makers. Expert reports (provided by civic organizations), general observations, based on journalistic investigation, and reflections on Romanian society are integrated at key points in the campaign discourse (introductions, transitions, conclusions). The whole structure emerges through spatial-temporal shifts, which locate the event in a “specific horizon of space and time,” “contextualizing” it “as a historical moment with its own ethical norms and possibilities of acting for itself.” (Chouliaraki, 2006, p. 64) The style of reporting is interpretive, in an emotional and often dramatic register, as well as deeply adversarial towards the Romanian authorities. “Any idea what your parents are doing right now?” fits perfectly into this format. The argument enacted in the campaign invites the publics to make a choice between the existing state of affairs, portrayed as one of acute crisis for the Romanian elderly, and a future state of affairs, in which senior citizens will be properly cared for. The present situation is regarded as the outcome of the Romanian authorities’ inadequate actions, whereas the (desirable) future state of affairs will be brought about by the measures that civic organizations, together with ProTV, propose (see the quote below). The campaign puts forward two interconnected claims: (1) the Romanian authorities should implement the proposal for action; (2) the concerned citizens should sign a petition, in order to empower ProTV, as the maker of the claim, to take the issue to the authorities (100,000 is the number of signatures required in Romania for a policy proposal to be formally considered):



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All elderly people have a right to live their final years with dignity. In Romania, they are left to die alone in their homes, because no state institution will take responsibility for elderly care provision. (Semnează petiția [“Sign the petition”], 2014, Paula Herlo) Our parents and grandparents are as valuable human beings as our children. Being old does not have to mean disease, marginalization, and loneliness. (Semnează petiția [“Sign the petition”], 2014, Anca Nastasi) Together [ProTV and the citizens who sign the petition], we ask the authorities to take action by: • respecting human dignity • improving legislation and developing a strategy for supporting the elderly who have no family • developing home care services • increasing the capacity of homes for the elderly • encouraging the foundation of private homes and day care centers for the elderly • introducing an emergency number for the elderly • doing a census to establish the number of the elderly who live alone (Semnează petiția [“Sign the petition”], 2014)

In the construction of the circumstances that prompted the campaign, the ProTV reporters stress the conditions, depicted as inhumane, in which the elderly deprived of family support have to live in Romania. Individual stories take viewers, led by the Romania, I Love You team, into the space of private dwellings in the Romanian countryside, where the elderly live in a state of solitude, disease, and helplessness. All this suffering is attributed to ineffective or poorly implemented legislation, financial waste, and lack of involvement on the part of the Romanian authorities and other institutions (social care services, the Orthodox Church, etc.). A contrast is created between these sites of misery and the space of retirement homes managed by private entrepreneurs, volunteers, and, on occasion, Orthodox priests,5 but where the number of available spots is below the needs and government subventions are insufficient. The contrast gets even sharper when the presentation moves to successful practices of elderly care provision in states like Italy or Norway. Every story brings to light another area where improvement is necessary and for which the campaign organizers offer suggestions and solutions. ProTV gives legal, political, and, especially, moral reasons towards “the conclusion that the course of action currently pursued by the Romanian authorities has unacceptable consequences and is therefore premised on unreasonable decisions,

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so it ought to be abandoned” (Mădroane, 2016a, p. 178); hence, the call upon publics to sign the petition that would set policy change in motion. In addition to the emphasis of certain premises (circumstances, values, negative consequences of past policies, and positive consequences of the campaign proposal), at work in the enactment of the campaign argument is a strategy of “public denunciation” (Boltanski, 1999; see also Chouliaraki, 2006) of the Romanian politicians in office. Central to this strategy is the arousal of emotions of pity for the elders and moral indignation at the local and state authorities, who are unequivocally blamed for the situation (Mădroane, 2016a, 2016b). Viewers are positioned as “protesters,” through interplays of empathy for the suffering elders and legitimate anger at the political representatives, which “articulate the demand for public action.” (Chouliaraki, 2006, p. 148) This stance is discursively achieved by a structured mosaic of compassionate reportages about the elders, interpellative interviews with Romanian officials, factual presentation, and positive evaluation of aged care policies in other European countries, where Romanian migrants work. While the campaign cultivates mostly a regime of “emergency,” the transfers between these discourses, positionings, and different types of distance created thereby open it up to a “demand for reflexivity” among publics (Chouliaraki, 2006, p. 148).

Symbolic Construals of Romanian Migrants’ Identities. Modes of Audience Engagement Not only are the Romanian migrants’ identities and practices present in the campaign argument, but they are essential to the way it is performed in the media dispositive, as I will demonstrate in this section. To begin with, the phenomenon of successive emigration waves, accentuated after 2007, is emphasized as the triggering factor that has made the elders’ condition visible in Romanian society: Three million Romanians, who went to work abroad, left behind suffering, and, especially, lonely parents and grandparents. The authorities turn a blind eye and pretend we don’t have these problems. Even though their children send money home and pay them a visit, at least once a year, in the summer, thousands and thousands of elders die in humiliation because the social services ignore them. Thousands of emigrants have tried taking their parents abroad, to have them by their side. But this was not a solution because the elders want to live their old age with dignity, at home. (“Bunicii români vor să-și trăiască bătrânețea cu demnitate…” [“Romanian grandparents want to live their old age with dignity…”], February 28, 2014)



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The numeric classification—“three million Romanians”—coupled with the action of going abroad institutes the migrants’ physical absence from the national space, on a large scale. The campaign discourse constructs, in this manner, and reinforces, by repetition, a social fact with which Romanian society is confronted. On the other hand, the migrants’ symbolic presence, through financial remittances and attempts at transnational caregiving, is assessed as limited in terms of the elders’ well-being needs. Romanian mentalities and practices foster strong expectations that care for the elderly or for children should be provided by family members who live in close geographical proximity (see Baldassar et al., 2007, on this widespread assumption). The campaign endorses this view about care, which transnational migration is otherwise constantly challenging (Baldassar et al., 2007), without attaching any blame to the migrants, either for leaving the country of origin or for not being able to look after their elders the way they would if co-present in the same space. The construals of migrants as children who struggle to provide care across borders, but often fail, are used to establish the elders’ vulnerability, and, thus, to demonstrate they qualify for state assistance, according to Law no. 17 of the year 2000. They further transfer responsibility to the Romanian authorities. Alongside the form of generic representation discussed above, the migrants feature in the elders’ stories as individuals with names, agency, and personal histories. The affective ties between parents and children connect the space of Romanian homes with that of the host country: In Olari, a village in Arad, two elders are weeping because they miss their daughter. She’s been in Italy for five years now. They still have their strength, but the distance from her and their grandchildren is killing them. They are left with the photos. We found their daughter, Marinela, in a retirement home near Torino, where she works as head nurse. When we asked her about her parents, she burst into tears. (“Statul doar se face că îi îngrijește pe bătrâni…” [“The state merely puts on an act of caring for the elderly…”], March 12, 2014)

Both the generic and the individualized migrant representations are employed strategically in the campaign, to articulate the relationships between migrants and their parents, between migrants and other non-migrants (ordinary people and citizens), and between migrants and the Romanian authorities. Two major aspects come into play: the migrants’ departure from Romania and their partial integration in the societies of the destination states.

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The first aspect, the migrants’ decision to leave the country and, as a result, their children and parents, is represented as the consequence of lack of economic prospects, for which, from the perspective built in the campaign, it is the political class in postcommunist Romania that bears responsibility. The migrants are therefore victims of ill-advised transition policies, who resort to migration as the only remaining solution, an individual resource as well as a reaction in the face of systemic failure (see Ciocea & Cârlan, chapter “Debating Migration: Diasporic Stances in Media Discourse,” this volume): Izabela has been living in Italy for eight years. She doesn’t have time for her mother because she has to work. She takes care of elders in a retirement home. […] “If you want to give your children a chance at a future, you leave [Romania]! It’s the only way.” (“Bunicii români vor să-și trăiască bătrânețea cu demnitate…” [“Romanian grandparents want to live their old age with dignity…”], February 28, 2014)

The construction of the status of victim in relation to state policies and the Romanian political class lies at the core of a generalizing mechanism, because it is shared among several categories: the elderly, their migrant children, other non-migrant children who encounter similar obstacles in providing translocal care, and, at a certain level, every Romanian citizen. Embedded in this process is a co-existence of emotional states, structured by constant transitions: from the excess of feeling in the portrayal of the suffering elderly (words, voices, and close shots of teary gazes) to an anticipated, ritualistic emotion in the digital or telephonic encounters with their migrant children, to painful acceptance, to, finally, a sublimation of these sentiments into bitterness—but not resignation—at the way things are in Romania. The mechanism is not based on a progression that leads to a distance from the elders’ situation, but on shifts between proximity and distance, between intensity and a more contemplative mode, which can generate political action (Chouliaraki, 2006). In parallel, an extension of the elders’ identity takes place, from the parents and grandparents of “the generation who went West” to “our” parents and grandparents, and to “us,” as citizens and human beings. The conceptualization of the elderly as having the “[human] right to live their final years with dignity” is ingrained in their identity and remains in the picture at all times. The manner of constructing the object of political representation (Saward, 2006, 2010) illustrated above, used throughout the campaign, aims to instill a sense of solidarity in the intended audiences: moral solidarity, premised on the elders’ entitlement to social, cultural, economic, and, ultimately, basic human rights, and civic solidarity in holding the Romanian



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state accountable for protecting these rights. In the absence of family, filial obligations are transferred to the community—the elders’ well-being becomes “our” responsibility—and to the state. In addition, the claim to social assistance for the elderly is legitimized by their lifelong economic contributions to society, on the basis of civic values (Mădroane, 2016a, 2016b). Closely tied to this type of legitimation is the invocation of the Romanian migrants’ continued involvement in the country of origin through remittance-sending. It is an argument routinely present in the debates on the transnational migrants’ right to vote, including in Romania, and integral to the journalists’ civic-adversarial stance in relation to the Romanian authorities, on issues regarding migration (Mădroane, 2016c): By ignoring them, the state mocks the past and, especially, condemns to humiliation a generation of parents whose children sent to Romania, only last year, over three billion Euros. (“Statul își bate joc de generația…” [“The state mocks the generation…”], February 18, 2014)

The migrants’ identities are thus part of a configuration of positionings shot through by a sense of urgency, emerging from a situation that requires immediate relief (“sign the petition”), but also, to a degree, by a reflexivity that arises from the multiplicity of spaces and times, types of emotion and distance, articulated in the campaign (see Chouliaraki, 2006). Keeping the proportions, the dramatic construction of the circumstances of action has certain toned-down characteristics of a “mediatized public crisis” (Cottle, 2006, p. 424; see also Cottle, 2005), interpreted as a “mediatized ritual” “in which solidarities are summoned and moral ideas of the ‘social good’ are unleashed and exert agency in the public life of societies.” (Cottle, 2006, p. 411) The second aspect mentioned earlier, the migrants’ integration into the societies of the destination countries, brings into focus the practice of remitting, which it takes to another level: the solutions advanced in the campaign aim to integrate the “ideas, behaviors and social capital” that Romanian migrants acquire in host states (Levitt, 2001, p. 11; see also Mădroane, 2016c). Romanian migrants are indirectly engaged as actors of change and subjects of claim-making (not only objects or audiences). The campaign raises the provision of aged care in Italy to the status of model for Romanian policy-makers, the choice being far from random. Italy is the host of the largest community of Romanian migrants in the European Union (according to statistics cited by Popescu, 2015), and many are employed as care workers for the elderly:

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Paradoxically, while in Romania, parents and grandparents live their final years alone and forgotten, in the houses they built for their children, in Italy their children and grandchildren are paid to take care of the parents of others. In Italy, absolutely everything that is necessary for professional aged care at home […] is funded by national health insurance institutes and local social assistance services. (“Pe banii trimiși de români în țară…” [“Romanian migrants send money back home, but…”], February 23, 2014)

The representations of Romanian migrant women who are caregivers in Italian retirement homes are central to several rhetorical and argumentation strategies that culminate with the migrants’ symbolic engagement as agents in Romania’s transformation. First, the partly tragic, partly heroic figures of women care workers are in full consonance with the symbolic image of the “good” Romanian migrant, of whom “we,” as a national community, can be proud (Beciu, 2012), and with whom “we” can empathize as victims of the same policies that constitute migration push factors. This identity, itself a source of country image capital for Romanians, and, therefore, a type of remittance, easily blends into the social imaginary that has taken shape through the problematization of intra-EU migration in the Romanian public sphere (see Beciu, 2012; Mădroane, 2016c). At the same time, a valorization of the occupation of care worker takes place, which gives prestige to the Romanian migrants who do this job in Italy—predominantly women—in contrast with more widely spread media representations of exploitation and inferior social status. Second, a comparison is introduced between the practices of aged care provision in the migrants’ home and host states. The contrast between the grim sites of suffering in Romania and the bright spaces of an old age lived with joy and dignity, in Italy, puts the situation into perspective as well as strengthens the grounds for discontent with the Romanian authorities (Mădroane, 2016a). The comparison evokes another symbolic image, that of the Romanian state in transition to a developed, democratic state, a destination it set out to reach after the fall of communism, but which appears to remain elusive. The negative effects on the migrants, who end up looking after “the parents of others” in Italy and other EU countries, can be located within this larger frame of reference. Third, ProTV creates a scope for the migrants’ involvement in the home country as agents of development and modernization (Mădroane, 2016c), a measure that needs infrastructural support from the Romanian state. It is a role the campaign invests Romanian migrants with, by means of granting symbolic recognition to the care work and experience they have gained in Italy:



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Italy and the Romanian women who work there hard give us a lesson in humanity, with the church, the state, the Health Ministry, the National Health Insurance institutes, and the local authorities working together to offer their citizens a serene old age. (“Pe banii trimiși de români în țară…” [“Romanian migrants send money back home, but…”], February 23, 2014) “I’ve thought many times about doing this in Romania; it’s a pity that we can’t use our experience at home,” says the old man’s daughter-in-law. (“Nea Vasile, ‘victima’ unor legi făcute pe genunchi…” [“Uncle Vasile, the victim of superficially drafted legislation…”], March 22, 2014)

If, at first glance, the Romanian migrants’ presence in the campaign discourse seems minimal, the analysis shows that they occupy multiple positions in the argument: starting point for the campaign; object of the “representative claim” (Saward, 2006, 2010) advanced by ProTV, extended from the interests of the elderly to the interests of everyone affected by aged care policies and, extrapolating, by the Romanian political class; audiences with a potential to be mobilized into active publics (see Mădroane, 2016c), on the basis of moral and civic values shared with non-migrants; partners in effecting change in Romania through social remittances (the mentality and experience migrants have gained as care workers in Western European states), in addition to financial ones. Finally, we can talk about a strategic posture for the migrants at the level of campaign rhetoric, a discursive reification intended to resonate with various audiences. In this sense, the campaign resorts to forceful images and essentialized identities that are already entrenched in the Romanian public culture and social imaginary: the heroic, resourceful migrant, the remittance-sending migrant, equally heroic (Mădroane, 2016c), the migrant-victim of the Romanian state, the figures of women care workers in Italy, etc. ProTV, as maker of the claim, positions itself in a complex relationship with the migrants, at all the levels detailed here. The journalists assume a critical-adversarial voice (see also Beciu et al., 2017), which suffuses most of the interpretive coverage in the campaign, but is also supported by (less extensive) detached presentations of facts, in a newslike style. This role naturally converts to that of advocate for the rights of the elderly and the interests of Romanian citizens: At a stone’s throw away from the town hall, grandmother Maria stands in the doorway, waiting for help that does not come. […] In her situation are a million elders, isolated in poverty and forgotten by the politicians in office, who not only ignore their needs, but squander public funds. Sign the PETITION. It’s high time we put

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them to work, [we made them] do the job we pay them for. (“Statul doar se face că îi îngrijește pe bătrâni…” [“The state merely puts on an act of caring for the elderly…”], March 12, 2014)

The positionings carved out for the actors involved in the campaign—objects, subjects, or audiences of the “representative claim”—coalesce around the journalists’ critical-adversarial stance, enacted in the making of the claim. The stance finds justification in the depiction of the Romanian authorities as breaching political and legal commitments, as well as moral obligations to Romanian citizens, inside and outside the national borders (Mădroane, 2016a, 2016b); its goal is to motivate audiences by empowering them to bring about change in society. The media’s “appeal to moral solidarities oriented to how society should be […] can only come alive when actively read by audiences/ readerships who are prepared to commit to them as symbolically meaningful.” (Cottle, 2005, p. 53) In what ways do the migrant and non-migrant audiences who respond to the call identify with the roles, values, and relationships construed in the campaign?

Campaign Audiences: Accepting the Claims for Action and Representation In this subsection, I discuss several positionings and identifications in the comments made by members of the public on the petition site. The respondents are, for the most part, people who were mobilized into signing the petition— who accepted the claims, in other words—but the site also allowed for counterclaims. Two out of the 220 respondents engaged in negative comments (for example, a refusal to sign because aged care provision is seen as an individual and a family obligation, not a state’s obligation), and two made constructive critical comments. Most participants did not regard the site as an instrument of debate or mutual exchange (ten threads were generated in all, the longest containing six posts), but rather as an opportunity to express support and commitment, as well as opinions and reasons for taking action. The posts were addressed either to the ProTV team or to Romanians, in general (a communitarian, solidarity “we”), but not to the other respondents (with the exception of the threads). The number of signatures gathered through the petition—over 40,000—did not reach the 100,000 threshold, but provided the campaign organizers with sufficient support for a promise to be made by the Minister of Labor at the time (however, no legislative change has been made to this point).



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Regarding the respondents’ identity, 54 have been classified as migrants (because of mentions they made or the city/ country they specified as residence) and three as returned migrants. The other 163 are non-migrants (including five representatives of civic organizations); however, it is difficult to establish this with a degree of maximum certainty because some respondents may have opted not to refer to their migration experience and to give the locality in their Romanian identity cards.6 The comments reinforce the civic and moral values underlying the circumstances and goals in the campaign argument. Some viewers understand the campaign title as a direct question/ interpellation and feel compelled to start by stating, “Yes, I know what my parents are doing right now” or “My parents are well/ unwell,” positioning themselves within the media dispositive set up by ProTV. Family obligations of care provision are brought up in 8% of the posts—the moral capital parents hold on to children—while many respondents refer to efforts at caregiving in their own families, an aspect that gains more visibility on the petition site than in the campaign itself (also explicable as a mode of identification among viewers). The Romanian elders’ civic entitlements to social assistance, as contributors to the Romanian state, but also their children’s, are highlighted in 7% and 2% of the posts, respectively: …what is even more outrageous is that they [politicians] mock people who have worked their entire lives and paid taxes. (posted on February 28, 2014) Our parents are abandoned, alone, but the state uses the money that Romanians send home every year. (posted on February 28, 2014)

In many comments, a sense of moral obligation towards the elderly is conveyed in terms of gratitude, respect and love (6%), old age with dignity (4%), a common humanity (2%), and general understandings of morality related to Christianity, filial and societal duty (8%). These positionings are indicative of the reflexivity that the campaign instills among viewers, beyond the compassionate identification with the elders as victims of particular policies (Chouliaraki, 2006; Cottle, 2005). On the other hand, the way towards the more general, reflexive stances is through an identification with kin (“[I sign the petition] because I love my mother,” says a respondent), within the family sphere. The gradual movement away from and, at the same time, through individual identification, fosters among the petition signers the realization that Romanian society, as a national community, has to take action to improve the elders’ situation:

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We don’t have a balance, economic or otherwise, and, to an extent, I’m inclined to think it’s our own doing, because we stand by and allow all sorts of characters to run our country, we let ourselves be trampled on, and so we cast aside every principle or value and forget how to be human?! (posted on March 12, 2014) …and we hope we’ll succeed [with the campaign] and we’ll show those MPs that we, the Romanian people, are capable of doing something for our fellow human beings. (posted on March 12, 2014) I hope from my heart that we’ll manage to do something about this because the elders truly deserve it! […] We have to stand united and solve the problem, in the future it could be us who are abandoned… (posted on February 28, 2014)

The moral solidarity the campaign forges among the publics, based, to an extent, on a reflexivity derived from different forms of emotional involvement, engenders a shared responsibility, at national community level, “our responsibility” for the type of society we want to live in (see Cottle, 2005), starting from the elders’ problem. Some viewers bring up the moral sentiment of shame, conflating the humiliation of the elderly in Romanian society with the inefficiency and corruption of the political class, and, importantly, with Romania’s country image in Europe (see other studies in this volume): It’s a shame on Romania, we make a fool of ourselves whenever we can… (posted on March 1, 2014) Patriotism is ridiculed in Romania, it’s just for showing off (thanks to our politicians); in Europe, you feel ashamed to say you’re Romanian. Yet, you say “Romania, I Love You!”… (posted on February 28, 2014) I hope the Romanian people wakes up to reality, opens its eyes to what’s going on in the country. We have to change everybody in parliament… they are worthless, they can’t do anything but steal. We have to think of the elders who live every day in torment, because it could be us in their place. Romanians, wake up…let’s change the country’s future. (posted on March 08, 2014)

Against this background, it is to be expected that a large number of posts (33%) speak from the critical-adversarial stance assumed by the campaign organizers, targeting criticism at the state, in particular, but also at other institutions (church, hospitals, social services, etc.). Solidarity emerges through common identification—migrants and non-migrants—with the position of citizens unprotected by the state, which arouses moral indignation, and is not uncommon in the Romanian public sphere, in situations of opposition to the government (see, for example, the 2014 presidential elections, but also various



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civic protests in which the diaspora took part alongside non-migrants). Three open calls for protest are made by the respondents (one illustrated above) and fourteen calls for public support for the campaign action. It is from this position that the publics who sign the petition also accept ProTV’s implicit claim of representation, a claim that extends to the Romanians across borders: 30% of the posts assess the campaign positively, 12% specifically endorse ProTV as advocate, and 6% legitimize the campaign organizers as better representatives of the Romanians’ interests than elected politicians: I’ve been watching your show with interest and I wish you good luck! Maybe you will succeed in changing something in poor Romania, by exposing all the bad deeds of those in power positions! (posted on March 13, 2014)

Some viewers make suggestions of other campaigns that ProTV could run on equally problematic issues, confirming, beyond the case at hand, the role of advocate that the TV channel has taken on. A few participants make appeals for help with personal cases, due to the partially humanitarian orientation of the campaign. The acceptance of the campaign claims and symbolic construals prompts, from migrants and non-migrants alike, offers to contribute money, ideas, work experience in order to assist the elders or the Romanian authorities (eleven participants volunteer assistance with caregiving): I’m a nurse, I’ve been working in the UK, in a care home, for five years, and I’d like to apply at home the expertise I have acquired all these years, and help out these souls. If I can be of assistance, please get in touch with me. (posted on February 27, 2014)

The campaign sustains, in this way, a bottom-up process of channeling remittances to the country of origin, in the transnational social field (see also Mădroane, 2016c). Overall, the forms of interaction and identification on the petition site do not create consensus through debate or a community per se; however, they do generate a commonality of positions that carries a potentiality for (civic) collective identity building among the campaign’s migrant and non-migrant publics.

Conclusions This chapter has looked into the symbolic construction of Romanian migrants in the dispositive of a media advocacy campaign about the elders’ entitlement to social assistance in Romania, run by a commercial TV channel with a tradition of positive intervention in society. It has focused on the modes of

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identification and engagement created by the dispositive, grounded in civic and moral values, and upheld by a particular interplay of emotions. The double claim-making—a claim for action and a claim of representation—has been analyzed in its performative and rhetorical aspects, within a framework that I am developing for the analysis of advocacy-oriented (practical) arguments. The main points of interest, in the context of the present volume, have been the roles assigned to migrants in relation to non-migrants, the integration of a transnational dimension into a national campaign (at the levels of object and subject of the claim, and intended audiences), and the positions emerging from the mobilized publics’ acceptance of the claim. The findings indicate a multifaceted articulation of Romanian migrants’ identities, which the analytical framework helps to bring out: (objective) cause of the phenomenon of abandoned elders; victims and sufferers because of misguided policies (alongside non-migrants); audiences with a potential to become mobilized (alongside non-migrants); and, not least, symbolic partners in bringing about change in Romanian society. The public performance of a crisis in presenting the circumstances of action and the attribution of political responsibility to the Romanian institutions connect audiences with the situation in a regime of emergency (hence, a surge of pity, anger, and moral indignation leading to action). At the same time, the campaign displays openness to reflexivity, through shifts in distance and emotional engagement, and to social change, stemming from an ideal of society that respects and protects citizenship and human rights. The moral solidarity expressed on the petition site by the mobilized publics, which brings together migrants and non-migrants, confirms (without the possibility of generalizing) the mechanisms identified in the analysis of the campaign discourse. The petition signers accept both the claim for action made by ProTV and the claim of representation, investing the campaign organizers with the symbolic status of advocates for an issue with transnational implications, due to the migrants’ involvement. We are dealing here with a kind of transnationalism that has a national gaze, manifest in the campaign’s orientation towards Romanians as a (civic) nation. It relies upon strategic uses of the migrants’ identities in the campaign discourse, while at the same time providing a media frame for bottom-up transnational interaction, favorable to their empowerment as civic actors, who act jointly with non-migrants. All these elements deserve further exploration in other contexts of mediation and engagement.



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Notes 1. In an informal meeting with students at the West University of Timişoara (April 8, 2017), Paula Herlo, one of the journalists who ran the campaign, expressed the intention to continue it. The issue was covered in the opening episode of the new season of the România, Te Iubesc [Romania, I Love You] TV show, on September 17, 2017, titled “România căruntă” [“Grey-Haired Romania”]. 2. I am grateful to Alexandru I. Cârlan for bringing Saward’s approach to my attention. 3. In this study, I have not analyzed multimodal discourse (the campaign videos), with the exception of some brief considerations in the presentation of the dispositive. 4. This figure is mentioned by Paula Herlo in the Romania, I Love You show broadcast on April 6, 2014. By May, 2015, when I gathered the corpus, 42,265 people had signed the petition (the site remained functional for two years after the campaign was brought to a close and some people continued to express their support). 5. With the exception of individual examples, the Orthodox Church is criticized for its lack of engagement. 6. Only holders of Romanian IDs could sign the petition, as five respondents complained.

References Baldassar, L., Baldock, C. V., & Wilding, R. (2007). Family caring across borders: Migration, ageing and transnational caregiving. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Beciu, C. (2011). Sociologia comunicării şi a spaţiului public. [The sociology of communication and of the public sphere]. Iaşi: Editura Polirom. Beciu, C. (2012). Diaspora și experienţa transnaţională. Practici de mediatizare în presa românească. [The diaspora and the transnational experience. Media coverage practices in the Romanian media]. Revista Română de Sociologie, XXIII(1–2), 49–66. Beciu, C., Lazăr, M., & Mădroane, I. D. (2017). Mediating public issues in Romanian broadcast talk: Personalized communication strategies. Television & New Media, 1527476417697270 (online first). Birks, J. (2010). The democratic role of campaign journalism: Partisan representation and public participation. Journalism Practice, 4(2), 208–223. Birks, J. (2011). The politics of protest in newspaper campaigns: Dissent, populism and the rhetoric of authenticity. British Politics, 6(2), 128–154. Boltanski, L. (1999). Distant suffering: Morality, media and politics (G. Burchell, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bunicii români vor să-și trăiască bătrânețea cu demnitate, în țară. Semnează petiția și convinge statul să acționeze [Romanian grandparents want to live their old age with dignity, in their country. Sign the petition and convince the state to take action]. (2014, February 28). “Tu știi ce mai fac părinții tăi?” Știrile ProTV/ România, te iubesc [ProTV News/ Romania, I love you]. Retrieved January 25, 2015 from http://stirileprotv.ro/campanii/parinti/buniciiromani-vor-sa-si-traiasca-batranetea-cu-dem nitate-in-tara-semn eaza-petitia-si-convingestatul-sa-actioneze.html

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Cefaï, D. (1996). La construction des problèmes publics. Définitions de situations dans des arènes publiques. Réseaux, 14(75), 43–66. Retrieved September 20, 2017 from http://www. persee.fr/doc/reso_0751-7971_1996_num_14_75_3684 Charaudeau, P. (2011). Les médias et l’information. L’impossible transparence du discours (2nd ed.). Bruxelles: De Boeck-Ina. Chouliaraki, L. (2006). The Spectatorship of Suffering. London: Sage. Christians, C. G., Glasser, Th. L., McQuail, D., Nordenstreng, K., & White, R. A. (2009). Normative theories of the media: Journalism in democratic societies. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Coffman, J. (2002). Public communication campaign evaluation: An environmental scan of challenges, criticisms, practice, and opportunities (Prepared for the Communications Consortium Media Center). Harvard Family Research Project. Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA. Retrieved November 20, 2015 from http://www.hfrp.org/ evaluation/ publications-resources/public-communication-campaign-evaluation-an-environmental-scan-of-challenges-criticisms-practice-and-opportunities Coman, I., & Gross, P. (2012). Uncommonly common or truly exceptional? An alternative to the political system–based explanation of the Romanian mass media. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 17(4), 457–479. Cottle, S. (2005). Mediatized public crisis and civil society renewal: The racist murder of Stephen Lawrence. Crime, Media, Culture, 1(1), 49–71. Cottle, S. (2006). Mediatized rituals: Beyond manufacturing consent. Media, Culture & Society, 28(3), 411–432. Cox, R. (2006). Environmental communication and the public sphere. London: Sage. Despre “România, Te Iubesc!” [About “Romania, I Love You”]. (n.d.). România, te iubesc [Romania, I love you]. ProTV News Division. Retrieved November 12, 2017 from http:// stirileprotv.ro/romania-te-iubesc/despre/ Fairclough, I. (2016). Evaluating policy as argument: The public debate over the first UK Austerity Budget. Critical Discourse Studies, 13(1), 57–77. Fairclough, I., & Fairclough, N. (2012). Political discourse analysis: A method for advanced students. London: Routledge. Fairclough, N. (2003). Analyzing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge. Gusfield, J. R. (1981). The culture of public problems: Drinking-driving and the symbolic order. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Lazăr, M. (2008). Noua televiziune şi jurnalismul de spectacol [The new television and sensational journalism]. Iaşi: Editura Polirom. Levitt, P. (2001). The transnational villagers. London: University of California Press. Mădroane, I. D. (2015). Campaign journalism on Romanian televisions: Towards a normative view of advocacy in the media. Revista română de sociologie, XXVI(5–6), 415–430. Mădroane, I. D. (2016a). Metaphors and calls for action in media advocacy campaigns on social issues. In L. Pungă (Ed.), Language in use: Metaphors in non-literary contexts (pp. 169–191). Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.



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Mădroane, I. D. (2016b). Rhetoric and decision-making in media calls for action: A discourse analysis of advocacy campaigns. Paper presented at the Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines (CADAAD) Conference, Catania. Mădroane, I. D. (2016c). The media construction of remittances and transnational social ties: Migrant–non-migrant relationships in the Romanian press. Identities, 23(2), 228–246. Michailidou, A., & Trenz, H. J. (2012). A media perspective on political representation: Online claims-making and audience formation. In S. Kröger & D. Friedrich (Eds.), The challenge of democratic representation in the European Union (pp. 135–154). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nea Vasile, victima unor legi făcute pe genunchi. Cât de greu găsești un cămin în România, chiar și atunci când ai bani [Uncle Vasile, the victim of superficially drafted legislation. How hard it is to find a place in a state home for the elderly in Romania, even when you have money]. (2014, March 22). “Tu știi ce mai fac părinții tăi?” Știrile ProTV/ România, te iubesc [ProTV News/ Romania, I love you]. Retrieved January 25, 2015 from https:// stirileprotv.ro/campanii/ parinti/nea-vasile-victima-unor-legi-facute-pe-genunchi-cat-degreu-gasesti-un-camin-in-roman ia-chiar-si-atunci-cand-ai-bani.html Pe banii trimiși de români în țară, statul își bate joc de părinții și bunicii lor. Cum sunt îngrijiți vârstnicii în Italia [Romanian migrants send money back home, but the state mocks their parents and grandparents. How the elderly are looked after in Italy]. (2014, February 23). “Tu știi ce mai fac părinții tăi?” Știrile ProTV/ România, te iubesc [ProTV News/ Romania, I love you], Part 1. Retrieved January 25, 2015 from https://stirileprotv.ro/romania-teiubesc/emisiuni/2014/sezonul-1/pe-banii-trimisi-de-romani-in-tara-statul-isi-bate-joc-deparintii-si-bunicii-lor-cum-sunt-ingrijiti-varstnicii-in-italia.html Popescu, A. L. (2015, December 21). Harta românilor plecați în străinătate [The map of Romanians abroad]. Gândul [Thought]. Retrieved November 12, 2017 from http://www. gandul. info/international/harta-romanilor-plecati-in-strainatate-topul-tarilor-ue-in-careromanii-reprezin ta-cea-mai-mare-comunitate-14926732 România căruntă [Grey-haired Romania]. (2017, September 17). Știrile ProTV/ România, te iubesc [ProTV News/ Romania, I love you]. Retrieved November 10, 2017 from https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9hpg-V3kaM România, te iubesc [Romania, I love you]. (2008–ongoing). ProTV News Division. Producer Cristian Leonte. Correspondents [in 2017]: Paul Angelescu, Alex Dima, Paula Herlo, Rareș Năstase, Cosmin Savu. București: ProTV. Saward, M. (2006). The representative claim. Contemporary Political Theory, 5(3), 297–318. Saward, M. (2010). The representative claim. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Semnează petiția [Sign the petition]. (2014). “Tu știi ce mai fac părinții tăi?” Știrile ProTV/ România, te iubesc [ProTV News/ Romania, I love you]. Retrieved May 13, 2015 from http://campanii.stirileprotv.ro/petitie [no longer available]. Statul doar se face că îi îngrijește pe bătrâni. Situația absurdă din Sântana, unde aleșii au uitat promisiunile din campanie [The state merely puts on an act of caring for the elderly. The absurd situation in Sântana, where the elected officials have forgotten their campaign promises]. (2014, March 12). “Tu știi ce mai fac părinții tăi?” Știrile ProTV/ România, te

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iubesc [ProTV News/ Romania, I love you]. Retrieved January 25, 2015 from https://stirile protv.ro/campanii/parinti/statul-doar-se-face-ca-ii-ingrijeste-pe-batrani-situatia-absurda-din-santana-unde-alesii-au-uitat-promisiunile-din-campanie.html Statul își bate joc de generația ai cărei copii trimit în țară 3 miliarde de euro pe an [The state mocks the generation whose children send home 3 billion Euros every year]. (2014, February 18). Știrile ProTV/ România, te iubesc [ProTV News/ Romania, I love you]. Retrieved January 25, 2015 from https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/social/tu-stii-ce-mai-fac-parintii-taibatranii-in-grija-nimanui-departe-de-copii-ignorati-de-stat-si-de-biserica.html Tu știi ce mai face copilul tău? [Any idea what your kid is doing right now?]. (2007). Știrile Pro TV [ProTV News]. Producers: Paula Herlo and Cosmin Stan. București: ProTV. Tu știi ce mai fac părinții tăi? [Any idea what your parents are doing right now?]. (2014). Știrile ProTV/ România, te iubesc [ProTV News/ Romania, I love you]. Producer: Cristian Leonte. București: ProTV. Tu știi ce mai fac părinții tăi? [Any idea what your parents are doing right now?]. (2014, April 6). Știrile ProTV/ România, te iubesc [ProTV News/ Romania, I love you]. Producer: Cristian Leonte. București: ProTV. Retrieved November 12, 2017 from http://protvplus.ro/ produs/roma nia-te-iubesc/video/2492-romania-te-iubesc-tu-stii-ce-mai-fac-parintii-tai Van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and practice: New tools for critical discourse analysis. (Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

·7· media hospitality to diasporactivism and diasporapathy in the news community 1 Nicolae Perpelea

Introduction: Long Distance Ethical Interpellations The present study investigates how the thematization of the new Romanian diaspora’s experiences through the spectacular mechanisms of the media produces active moral feelings, thus intensifying critical expressions and justificatory demands among various audiences—designated by the concept of news community. The theoretical aim of this research is the conceptual clarification of a previous study (Perpelea, 2012) where I have analyzed how the media act as symbolic power agents in order to create a stage for the formation of a public around a series of diasporic interrogations. This study is based on an anti-essentialist model of analyzing long distance moral interpellations and the transfer of moral causes into news discourse. With obstinate (diasporapathetic) drifts and regressions, the news community displays an ambivalent hospitality to questions regarding the diaspora experience and its moral order. But are there well-grounded reasons to expect that people will respond consistently to claims made in their name by political entrepreneurs and diasporactivist associations? In speech interactions (in samples drawn from Internet discussion forums, for instance), it can be observed how this bewildering multiplicity of interpretations of diasporic experience is used as a category of practice in order to articulate new claims and projects.

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The publicized waves of dismay and compassion regarding the diaspora experience of the “new European citizens” resonate with a moral panic whose inflated pathos urges sociological research to analyze how media frames manage to convert this new kind of intra-European migration into political messages. But before reaching this stage (the alert regarding the existence of power structures; the claim of certain status competences), the information on the social situation (the joys and sorrows of these people) takes a proto-political form, such as ethical interpellation. Thus, it is necessary to conduct a pragmatic analysis of the active publics’ construction and presentation of the diaspora experience with the ethical grammar of the public scene. As an introductory example of what I understand by interpellation and ethical grammar, I will take the case of two moral emotions: mercy and compassion. In order to become both moral and political feelings, they must be discursively stimulated—they must support the public’s identification with the sufferer by eliminating the distance between the stage and the viewer. Let us see how this problem appears in Boltanski’s model: The movement which led from a spiritual to a political kind of generality thus takes on an explicit concern with the dimension of distance. In fact, distance is a fundamental dimension of a politics which has the specific task of a unification which overcomes dispersion by setting up the “durable institutions” needed to establish equivalence between spatially and temporally local situations. (2004, p. 7)

An interesting argument, which justifies the spectacularization of the news in various communities of media recipients, is to be found in Boltanski’s studies. In Distant Suffering, Boltanski proves that, if such a show is not articulated in a discourse about the causes of the suffering endured by a person, a group, or a community, for example, then sympathy can easily dissolve either into a feeling of terror (therefore of rejection) or into selfishness (“What about us? Who takes care of us?”) and indifference (the recipient of the news might think “Well, they kind of deserve it.”). In his later studies, he denounces the use of humanitarian arguments as a “facade for dissimulating political actions”—for instance, by referring to suffering as a universal moral cause (Boltanski, 2000). The present research adopts a clearly anti-essentialist approach to diaspora, following R. Brubaker’s suggestions. The American sociologist criticizes “groupism”2—the substantial approach to “national identity”—and applies a similar function to the term “diaspora”. The following meanings result from the analytical reconstruction of diaspora’s lexical field: “abstract nouns designating a condition (diasporicity or diasporism), a process (diasporization,



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de-diasporization and re-diasporization), even a field of inquiry (diasporology or diasporistics). There is the adjective ‘diasporist’, designating a stance or position in a field of debate or struggle.” (Brubaker, 2004, p. 4) The terminology used in the title of this chapter is also inspired by Brubaker’s study, but the terms have a much more generic meaning: “diasporapathy—to characterize putative members of a diaspora who do not respond to the appeals of diasporactivists.” (Brubaker, 2005, p. 14)3 The tension that might emerge between diasporactivists and diasporapathetics could be instructively analyzed having in mind Joseph Gusfield’s warning against the analytical dispersal of such latent conflicts: This absence of alternative modes of consciousness is also the subject of analysis of the structure of public problems. Acceptance of a factual reality often hides the conflicts and alternative potentialities possible. Ignoring the multiplicity of realities hides the political choice that has taken place. (Gusfield, 1987, p. 13)

In this context, I will consider the concept of news community and expand the categories that concern the construction of media information. Therefore, I have to mention that, from an empirical point of view, different exemplifications have been chosen. They fulfill a triple function: supporting the cumulative capacity of the theoretical model; offering empirical coverage for a wider range of moral emotions; refining the illustration of how the three moral topics4 (denunciative, sentimental, and aesthetic) balance each other out. The examples will be taken from a corpus of media reports on the Romanian diaspora. The term media has been broadened through a conventional understanding of what is generally called convergent media; thus, I have included print and TV, as well as websites, forums, blogs, and social networks (Facebook interactions and selfies), where various audiences construe the information communicated to them through media formats via trans-media. Let us mention that the use of the term corpus does not express the methodological intention of conducting content analysis—this perspective would be somehow inappropriate for a study regarding the presence/ absence of certain moral categories in the communicational space. Thus, the design of this corpus does not require a sampling of the mini-map type, supposed to mirror a hypothetical real phenomenon, but a set of news articles typical for a specific reception situation: that in which the phenomena presented are attributed meaning not after having been seen, but through the act of being seen. Any form of moral interpellation figure (sheer emphasis, feeling, “taking to heart”, daily shared indignation, publicly expressed denunciation, alerting

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the authorities and the civic organizations, instigating to boycott, resorting to supererogatory actions, etc.) transcends geographic and cultural boundaries insofar as it points out moral deficiencies and global inequalities. From this assumption several research questions can be drawn: Media hospitality is summoned as a virtue that can substitute deficient democratic institutions. But does this type of media discourse instill ethics in excess or does it generate new forms of hiatus between ethics and politics— namely, an hostipitalité, in the words of Derrida (Derrida, 2000)? How do the media accelerate the dissemination of ethical interpellations? Which media dispositives contribute to the creation of a community of gazes (based on a silent public agreement translated in “I see what you see”) where a ritual of (mis)interpretations may take place? Recent research announces a potential for cosmopolitan solidarity inherent in convergent journalism, whose virtues would be the “insertion of ordinary voice in a broader structure of Western journalism, which works through a series of selective re-mediations, inter-mediations and trans-mediations of voice along the old/new media and online/offline axes.” (Chouliaraki, 2013b, p. 267) But the empirical research of this performativity raises many questions: for instance, is the convergent performativity of the Facebook dispositive of I have a voice a mechanism of “semiotic solidarity” encouraging “pop cosmopolitanism” (Jenkins, 2013)?

Proper Distance. Moral Engagement Systems in Mediapolis The proponents of media austerity find by the minute new examples to demonize mass-media. We have the right, though, to be outmoded and ask ourselves in a Kantian manner if the media might not contribute to the achievement of an open mentality. In Media and Morality, Roger Silverstone (2006) proves that the crucial moral challenge of the new media landscape—what he calls mediapolis—is whether it can change the way we conceive social relationships with what is different from us, with the Other. Silverstone employed the term proper distance5 to designate the ethical policy by which otherness is seen in its specific terms. Print, television, and Internet features are all part of public space mechanisms that manage the visibility of people and communities who, in their turn, receive a benefit or live a physical or moral discomfort caused by explicitly assuming a risk situation. To which extent is this management guided by an ethics of care?



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Let us take the example of the Romanian diasporic community—or the “new Romanian diaspora,” in the terms used by C. Beciu (2012)—to analyze this issue. The media is concerned with the behavior of Romanian citizens who left their home to work in the EU. A somewhat cynical assumption is that this collective emotion holds the function of legitimizing a certain moral distance, that is the proto-political form generating political indifference. By means of exemplifications, I will find arguments showing that invoking moral difference is a strategy to justify passivity. Could this be the media’s moment of responsibility fatigue? Silverstone’s hypothesis—proper distance—implies a European panculturalism where the prescription of accepting the Other without effort is deeply rooted and allows us to employ the expression “eyes shut, eyes open” (a structural metaphor defining the field of tolerance) not as skilful handling of ethical distance (improper distance, in Silverstone’s terms), but as an opening of those identity borders that allow individuals and communities to become aware of the moral joy and suffering of others. The rather optimistic view described above is also reflected in the methodological approach. This implies giving up the epistemic delights of a ritual lament regarding the media culture’s tendency to “mine” the paths that would allow the public space to develop a healthy democracy. Since this is an on-going debate, I will only choose a couple of representative authors. According to P. Dahlgren, the new televisual genres and the new media create the circumstances for a jump-start political participation, as they incorporate a model of civic culture where six subtle dimensions—values, affinities, knowledge, practices, identity, and discussion—interact in a “dynamic circuit” (Dahlgren, 2003, p. 156). Jones (2005, p. 192) adopts Dahlgren’s model and shows how New Political Television (NPTV) and various forms of engagement through interactive technologies play the role of instigating the audience to discursive activities, as they supply them with values such as honesty or responsibility in a way that can lead to a healthy rumination (mulling over). Nevertheless, as Jones mentions, the question that remains is whether such “textual commitments” correspond to a “political commitment”. Certainly, contemporary politics is ruminated in the everyday imaginary under a textual form, but it would be wrong to neglect the identification of electioneering politics and law-making process with political participation through passionate TV engagement. Yet, how can we avoid understanding active viewing as a simple substitute for non-contextual political behavior? One solution is conceptual complexification. In the present example, I will use the term mediation for

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the process of unifying the frame of happy or unhappy action (risk condition, suffering) with the debate setting, the two originally different states becoming a unique situation as a consequence. In order to clearly perceive the methodological purpose of this concept, we will take a step back and review certain aspects of the public (audience). The classical meaning of the terms public or publicity excludes certain groups, forms of communication, or participation channels from the area of possible exemplifications. Most sociologists consider the main dimension of the ideal-type of public to be the effort of searching for a common, integrative discourse. However, there are authors who wonder whether certain “publics” can prove to be irrational or even hateful (Dayan, 2006). The definition of the concept of mediation given above allows us to classify as publics even those social groups that represent the others as permanent “strangers” or act in the spirit of an irrational bias. Hence Sonia Livingstone’s call to consider the “public” as an adjective rather than a noun: “to say or to do things in public, to do public things, to display relations in public—elements that distinguish public from private, but that impose, however, less stringent requirements when it comes to identify the public.” (Livingstone, 2004, p. 33) For diasporic experiences, a comparison with moral crusades might be more adequate, as J. Gusfield (1986) suggests.6 Thus, from simple daily routines, by mediatic enhancement, they become public issues. As Gusfield states: Public problems have a shape which is understood in a larger context of a social structure in which some versions of “reality” have greater power and authority to define and describe that “reality” than do others. In this sense—of responsibility—the structure of public problems has a political dimension to it. The existence of overt conflict and debate makes the politics of an issue manifest. (1987, p. 13)

To legitimate a problem, social actors employ a variety of discursive strategies and resources and, as a consequence, it is legitimate to research the hypothesis that the very “publics are formed in the process of public problem justification” (Beciu, 2011b, p. 80). In these terms, we can build an analytical framework in which the coordination of public opinion voices can be analyzed starting with the requirements of action and engagement practices. In this context, I will carry out an analysis based on the distinction between dispute and social peace.7 A public operationalization of vigilante figures (public denunciations, indignation transferred into public interpellations) is achieved in the frame of dispute practice.



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Romanian armchair viewers watch, from their homes, “news about the diaspora” as if it were a show where some do better, others worse, some suffer, others are happy. The distance from those people compels us to passivity and yet, a curious inner reflexivity situates us in an acceptable moral frame, where we show a particular interest towards misfortune. In order to see how these inner voices are articulated in a news discourse style, I will introduce two dimensions of data collection. The first one concerns the emotional stance: from benevolent attention and empathy to compassion and pitying as public policy.8 The second one concerns especially the argumentative stance. It refers to the ways of establishing common conventions for the “measurement” of merits, guilt, reparation injunctions, etc. The conceptual framing of this study is based on the distinction between three types of “media coverage” of moral-emotional alerts conjured by the diasporic experience: sentimental (emotional) topics, topics of denunciation (denunciative), and aesthetic (expressional) topics. In my previous study (Perpelea, 2012), I exemplified the various engagement practices in each of these topics and I looked at which of three news types— adventure news, emergency news and ecstatic news (presented below)—is most used in the associated scenic dispositives. New observations suggest that the news types that will be discussed here are used in all these topics in order to rhetorically impose a hierarchy of distant suffering.

A Model of News Analysis In this analysis I use the models presented, not contrastively, but to describe in a topologic space (Boltanski 2004) various media frames that aim to build a hierarchy of distant suffering, starting with the differentiated spreading of moral-emotional figures (moral blindness, moral fatigue, compassion, mercy, indignation, denunciation, sublime narrative, etc.) of various events and phenomena generically described by the concept of diasporic experience. The broader theme developed in L. Boltanski’s studies has to be recognized here: This reflexive apparatus, which serves no purpose in the case of compassion since the helper immediately goes into action without being encumbered by discourse, reduces the tension confronting a politics of pity which cannot do without the conveying of distant suffering. It affects, albeit not to the same degree, the two constraints which have to be taken into account by someone who considers the unfortunate from afar. On the one hand it affects the constraint of symmetry, as we have seen. The asymmetry of the report is reduced since the spectator himself becomes an object of

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description like the unfortunate who is suffering. On the other hand, the apparatus also affects, although less convincingly, the constraint of having to act. In fact, if the spectator always remains really inactive, nonetheless by making himself present within his report he demonstrates his awareness of the fact that one should act. By involving himself as subject in his own story he takes a step in the direction of involvement within a situation and points the way to action. (2004, p. 44)

I will use here the three news categories from L. Chouliaraki’s model (2006, 2013a). The relations described by Boltanski are conceptualized by L. Chouliaraki in a model of discourses of news where we can track various degrees of the audience’s moral and emotional involvement: adventure news, emergency news and ecstatic news.

Adventure News The term adventure is borrowed by L. Chouliaraki (2006) from Bakhtin’s narrative model.9 Adventure news claims a “maximal distance” from the audience, to whom it suggests an ethical apathy. In media terms, this information is called breaking news. Less often, it is called dispatch and, more emphatically, news alert. How to explain the increasingly frequent use of the term news alert? Surely, journalists would be annoyed at the following explanation: this term would temper the meaning of news that stirs moral curiosity (funny occurrence; he made a mistake, but confessed it). Here is an example drawn from the daily newspaper Adevărul, June 25, 2012: Aged 34, Alexandru Dan Dumitru was among those who carried the Olympic torch, today, in Leeds (England). While he was running downtown, an Italian woman approached him and she was detained by the Metropolitan Police. The woman admitted to having made a mistake, but she confessed that she tried to touch the Olympic torch out of superstition…Of Italian roots, owner of a peninsular restaurant, Gilda Porcelli confessed that she was hoping her gesture would bring luck to “Squadra Azzura” in their semi-final match against Germany. Alexandru Dumitru Dan, who was—unwillingly—involved in this funny incident, was participating in carrying the Olympic torch, today, on the streets of Leeds. Aged 34, he is involved in charity actions that aim to support underprivileged children. (http://www.adevarul.ro/sport/antifotbal/sport-Jocurile_Olimpice_ 2012-flacara_olimpica-Alexandru_Dan_Dumitru-incident-italianca-Leeds-fan-E uro_2012_0_725327746.html, my translation)



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Even the key words used by the editors are expressive for the definition of this information genre: sport, 2012 Olympic Games, Olympic torch, Alexandru Dan Dumitru, incident, Italian, Leeds, fan, Euro 2012.

Emergency News While adventure news refers to “adventuristic reports on irrelevant misfortune” (Chouliaraki, 2006, p. 143), emergency news is news by means of which the audience can identify with a person’s life problems and even has the option to act in the case of “distant misfortune”. Emergency news is achieved through complex narratives where multiple connections are present, as well as new possibilities of action for the participants in the scene of suffering and for the audience called upon to express various forms of moral feelings, meant to initiate emergency actions. The function of these pieces of news is to build, on the TV screen, an internal hierarchy of suffering people and actors of a potential charity.

Ecstatic News In this case, the mediatic construction of the relationship between viewer and the scene presented stimulates a reflexive identification where the viewer engages in a continuum mode with the diasporic experience. The term ecstatic is of Heideggerian descent and signifies a temporality that breaks with the current narrative order. This experience is also somewhat narrated in order to be felt with the same astonishment depicted through mass-media events such as “the tsunami catastrophe” or “the 9/11 terrorist attacks”. Through media formatting, a radical opening of these extraordinary events takes place: those moments when a minute lasts for a lifetime or when you do not notice the week slipping away. It is a relationship of identification that, subsequently, allows commitment to a universal moral position, such as the one towards the 9/11 events. This type of positioning is used in the attempt to legitimize political projects, such as “the war on terrorism”.

Neglected News The Romanian media context suggests that there are more news categories than the three types established by Chouliaraki. This model can be expanded by adding a fourth category, discussed by Stijn Joye: neglected news (2010,

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pp. 586–601). The concept of mediation (the unification of the action frame with the debate setting, so that the two originally different states become a unique situation) requires a special analysis of the information mechanisms used to achieve “the public condition”. Let us notice that the definition is based on a theory of action between speakers who are placed in a circumstance that makes it possible to define meaning as “an action brought to bear upon possible actions.” (Foucault, 1982). The category of neglected news, though, refers to the irony of an action brought to bear upon forgotten actions. A Romanian translation of the term assigned by Stijn Joye could lead to untended news (“ştiri neglijate”). However, I have opted for the translation fallow news (“ştiri părăginite”), in order to underline the idea that their initial effect has a moral relevance that is lost through public oblivion, inducing a particular kind of moral fatigue.

The News Community: An Example The theoretical model of this study outlines three moral-emotional topics that constitute the core of news informational phenomenology, gather novel audiences, and initiate debates through media framing. For example, the continued growth of Facebook will create a new mass audience for particular types of news. Unlike Chouliaraki’s approach to identifying a hierarchy of these pieces of news based on their contribution to forming an ideal-type of diasporic public, in the present study this classification has only a heuristic purpose. Two main consequences arise, which are relevant methodologically. First of all, this implies seeing a news item, an instrument, a media frame as a space of attributes where certain virtual characteristics prevail: adventurous, emergency-incentive, ecstatic, omissive (no longer in the public’s attention). Then, the public will not be researched through generalizations of certain reception situations predefined by Eco’s model of ideal reader inscribed in the text. Namely, rather than a sort of group predefined by a certain consumption of news about diaspora, through diasporic public I understand a type of self-definition behavior: that of explicitly seeking to “be among the public,” of risking to publicly confess (a private conversation, an Internet forum, etc.) the personal way of morally and emotionally interpreting the diasporic experience from the news repertoire, be it adventure, emergency, ecstatic, or neglected news.



media hospitality to diasporactivism and diasporapathy 209 The main dimensions of this concept of news community are: a. The simultaneous consumption of the same media images; b. The intangibility systems publicly available (ad-hoc conventions; moral, social, and legal standards; interests and motivations; reading competencies) that mobilize the real reader to become a learned reader, or, in other words, able to observe and analyze his/her own reactions along the process of updating the text.

The first dimension of the news community refers, obviously, to Benedict Anderson’s research, which analyzes the ethnic community as an imagined community.10 The second one derives from hypotheses drawn from the concept of interpretive community, introduced by Stanley Fish (1980). Even in expressions such as affective imagined community, the term imagined is not a construct of fantasy (lacking any real basis), but must be understood in the sense of belonging to a represented community. Thus, for B. Anderson: …the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. (…) In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. (1991, p. 6)

Let us now discuss the increasingly frequent diasporic-related selfies. Is Facebook just an “ego-technical media” (Sloterdijk, 2011, p. 203) capturing narcissistic forms of witnessing migrant experience expressed through frivolous, self-indulgent, and self-contagious faces, which “secures the solitary confinement of every individual within an interconnected bubble” (Sloterdijk, 2011. p. 205), as it appears in the cynical vision of diasporactivist morality? On the basis of Anderson’s concept, one can make observations about the way the subjects of a diasporic experience trace, through self-witnessing, their relationship with and their political attitude towards the “imagined community of social media onlookers” receiving these images.11 The second dimension of the concept says more about the constancy of the idea of simultaneity. Through interpretive community, Stanley Fish (1980, p. 48) designates reading conventions that urge the real reader to do every-

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thing in his/her power to become informed (informed reader). This informed reader is “learned” in three ways: • he/she is competent in reconstructing textual symbols (“the reader inscribed in the text”); • he/she takes into account the evolution of textual meaning—his/her actions are “regarded not as leading to meaning but as having meaning” (Fish, 1980, p. 158); • most importantly, he/she takes into account his/her own consciousness transformation because of the text. Finally, nowadays there is an array of opposed models, from one methodological end (that looks for arguments about the significance of the mediatic text) to the other (more radical) end (that includes observations on what the mediatic text does to us). The concept of news community is not designed to fit one side or the other. It seems to be closer to Fish’s model, but only to underline the function of interpretive communities to offer the “reader” the possibility of a receptive activity (“simultaneous reading contexts”) during which something is happening within himself/herself. For this reason, it is important to stress that the main dimension of this concept is not the identitarian one (the author’s prescriptions, specific conditions of media production, social attributes of the sender and the receiver), but the way the information is designed in a cognitive-affective arrangement that connects the news show to a type of discourse in which viewers are encouraged to identify with the mediated persons or actions. An interesting conceptualization in this sense is the one developed by Stanley Cohen (2001), starting from his criticisms against hypocritical humanitarian activism. According to him, in the mindset of the viewers belonging to such a news community there is an active imaginary container model, which authorizes the idea that irrationality or mere “consciousness flaws” are to be understood as the fruit of an existence outside our righteousness. According to Cohen, it is clear that sentimentalism has to be criticized: behind the tender-hearted charities there reside self-satisfaction, courtesy, hypocrisy and…vanity. But without the spread of vulnerability and dependency patterns, altruism and social justice would not exist as political needs (Cohen, 2001, p. 183).



media hospitality to diasporactivism and diasporapathy 211 1. (…) Whether or not your feel threatened by people is totally irrelevant to their race/background/origin. It’s the way they make you feel at the time. There are some Romanian people who would “stab you as soon as look at you”, there are also English (and French, German, African…) people who would do the same thing. And I walk down Humberstone gate frequently, I live in the city centre.—KH, Leicester commented on September 10, 2009 12:04 2. Love all you politically correct mainstream idiots, maybe if everyone could talk frankly and openly about whatever differences they may have then there wouldn’t be so much hate in this world. By the way, Romanians are not a race, they are from Romania, in the same way the English are from England so stop playing the boring race card where it isn’t relevant.—Frank, Leicester, commented on September 10, 2009 12:13 3. Does anybody actually realize why people from other countries (not just Romania) come to England? The answer is simple England started it and what goes around comes around.—A Romanian, Humberstone Gate, commented on September 10, 2009 12:23 4. Mr Romanian, yes thats the real reason right? They just come becasue we went there, like an exchange student right? Gimme a break, you have no idea what racism is, me & my people we know the racism!—Ahmed Ashed, Leicester, commented on September 10, 2009 12:36 Note: This is the case of a local British counselor, Robert Fraser, who was accused of instigation to racial hatred after declaring, in a public meeting, that Romanians would stab somebody as soon as they saw them; his remarks were posted on YouTube. For further details, see http://www.realitatea.net/ un-oficial-britanic-spune-ca-cine-intalneste-romani-risca-sa-fie-injung hiat-intr-o-clipa_472687.html, and http://www.thisisleicestershire.co.uk/ Race-rant-Leicestershire-councillor-suspended/story-12033721-detail/story. html

Above is an excerpt from a conversation which is typical for the meaning of news community as a space of dialogue for diasporactivism. Let us observe how discussants (3) and (4) prove themselves to be “informed (actual) readers” of the same news community, but invoke a different communitarian reference. By telling the Romanian discussant that he sees this (the diasporic experience,

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the immigrant condition) as a “student exchange”, Ahmed not only accuses him of banter (The answer is simple England started it and what goes around comes around), but also of tacitly introducing the assumptions of a western interpretive community. In other words, Ahmed’s definition of the situation aims to radically differentiate between the representational field of racial discrimination (Gimme a break, you have no idea what racism is, me & my people, we know the racism!) and the circumstantial representations of Romanians and other Eastern Europeans, which can be encountered in the forum contributions of English and Irish people.

New Media Publics Activation through Moral Rhetoric Processes Sentimental Topics As Boltanski analyzes this moral rhetoric figure, “in this case the internal state is treated as the internal inscription of an exteriority, as testifies the possibility allowed the inspired subject to report on his own states as if they were foreign to him” (2004, p. 81). Affection and Sympathy (Empathetic Curiosity) Through adventure news media framing, the simplest informative emotion is activated; I will call it affection, giving it the meaning that M. Nussbaum (2003, p. 302) attributes to empathy: “Empathy is simply an imaginative reconstruction of another person’s experience.” On a scale of moral-emotional feelings, affection is at the bottom, compared to feelings such as compassion or mercy. Information is conveyed in a random and isolated chain of curiosities that do not impose any explicit emotional demand on the viewer. Short descriptive narratives, classifiable as so-called daily news or daily risks where space and time are particular: this process restricts the moral viewer’s closeness to scenes of suffering or similar dramas. But isn’t there a sort of moral mechanism involved? In the following example (Many Romanian painters are repainting the Eiffel Tower—Figure 7.1), over the picture of the Eiffel Tower, a warning can be noticed: The process of repainting the tower is very dangerous.



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Figure 7.1. Many Romanian painters are repainting the Eiffel Tower. Source: libertatea.ro, April 1, 2009 (https://www.libertatea.ro/stiri/stiri-externe/mai-multi-zugravi-romanirevopsesc-turnul-eiffel-331731)

Figure 7.1. Caption: “The process of repainting the tower is very dangerous” Text: “25 Greek and Romanian painters, equipped with brushes, paints and climbing ropes, have started the work for changing the look of the Eiffel Tower, the trademark of Paris, the French capital. For accomplishing this mission, the workers will use 66 tons of ‘Eiffel Tower brown’ paint and 50 km of climbing rope. The cost of the entire work is 4 million Euros. The painters will work for 18 months to finalize the project. Repainting the tower became a tradition, after the builder of the monument, Gustave Eiffel, explained that it must be painted every seven years.” (my translation) Through this explicit care, the text producer pre-empts the accusation that the news discourse lacks moral value. At the same time, in order not to escape the voracious boundaries of the news (news as novelty), readers must not put in too much moral effort, as they are only required to show dispersed proofs of their competency to have a daily curiosity for the potential unfortunate condition of the Other. In Confessions (1998, X.55., pp. 211–212), St. Augustine mentioned, in this sense, the malady of curiosity, “the lust of the eyes” (concupiscentia oculorum), which is “cloaked” under the name of

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knowledge and learning: “This motive is again at work if, using a perverted science for the same end, people try to achieve things by magical arts. Even in religion itself the motive is seen when God is ‘tempted’ by demands for ‘signs and wonders’ (John 4: 48) desired not for any salvific end but only for the thrill.” In the two news receivers’ comments presented below, a neurotic pamphlet style can be noticed. This is often seen as a reaction to the inflation of rhetorical narratives about the conditions of the Romanian diaspora world: Ion+: What national pride for Romanians, a greater victory than the ones at Călugăreni or Mărășești! Little Paris thanks great Paris from the bottom of its heart for the honor that was given to us. The ever-so-grateful Homeland! psychedelic trance: let the French painters come over as well to “paint” the most important Romanian symbol, which is… (my translation) To conclude, recalling what was named here, for analytical purposes, news community and the moral state of the informed reader, one cannot state that the transformation of the reader’s consciousness is the fruit of an ethical choice. Let us refer to a line from the conversation above: let the French painters come over as well to “paint” the most important Romanian symbol….The reference by which a diasporic experience is being shaped here (“the Romanian painters in France”) contributes to the process of substantialization and essentialization of a reified community (the painters in France) with its own will and specific interests. We can talk about a discursive interactivity motivated by ethical choice only from another perspective, when—opposed to an implicit “evil”—there is an explicit moral request that engages (when talking about an unfriendly community) with the Other, found in an unfortunate situation. Only then can it be called sympathy. This can also regress to mere curiosity: “Lidia fell from Whispering Gallery, whose acoustic system allows a person at one end to hear whispers from the other end”. Lidia Dragescu, a student from Romania, died after falling down inside the famous Saint Paul Cathedral in London, writes The Guardian. The incident happened on October 11 and the family have paid an emotional tribute to her. “She was the most beautiful person in the world. She had a heart of gold. She was a remarkable student and a talented skater.



media hospitality to diasporactivism and diasporapathy 215 Beautiful, intelligent and kind”, say her family, in a statement issued by London Police. According to The Sun, the Romanian-born Lidia was living in Essex, being a student of business in London and an ice-skater. Lidia fell from Whispering Gallery, whose acoustic system allows a person at one end to hear whispers from the other end. (http://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/international/o-tanara-originara-din-romaniaa-murit-dupa-ce-a-cazut-din-catedrala-saint-paul-din-londra.html?utm_ source=libertatearo&utm_medium=referral, my translation)

Compassion and Pity Both feelings attract the audience on the public stage to express the way they observe the Other’s suffering. The function of news is to achieve an imaginary transfer, but the generalization criteria are different. According to M. Nussbaum (2003, p. 301), compassion is “a painful emotion occasioned by the awareness of another person’s undeserved misfortune.” Compassion is a complex emotional construct that includes a significant cognitive dimension: “…such cognitive beliefs as that the suffering of the other is serious, and that the suffering person does not deserve the pain.” (Nussbaum, 2003, p. 306) Unlike mercy policies (that rely on means of imaginary transfer of the unfortunates’ condition—statistics, life stories and hyper-publicized pictures—in order to touch the public able to launch a collective deliberation that would affect administrative procedures), compassionate policies are not generalized according to explicit criteria. Hannah Arendt (1967, p. 123)12 noticed a curious muteness of compassion, which does not require “verbosity” or too much eloquence in order to transpose individuals, natural groups, or audiences into an engaging state. Compassionate policies are co-sufferings, but addressed in singular form, locally, and with a “practical aim”: they are updated when particular situations of media dispositives (for example, the campaign “No invisible child”—Figure 7.2) achieve a certain type of presence between “those who do not suffer” and “those who suffer”. In this campaign, star figure Andreea Bănică tells us that in Romania there are 3.9 million children and that she supposedly identified (through her own effort) 12,000 children in difficult situations: a form of abuse, neglect, or exploitation.

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Figure 7.2. No invisible child. Source: http://www.prokid.ro/stiri/societate/andreea_marin_banica_si_povestile_copiilor_invizibili



media hospitality to diasporactivism and diasporapathy 217 Figure 7.2. Caption: “In Romania there are 3.9 million children. 70,000 boys and girls are separated from their parents. 12,000 children are subject to a certain form of abuse, neglect, or exploitation. The project is run in: 8 counties, 64 communes, 110,000 children, 12,000 children in difficult situations. First priority: No invisible child. Beneficiaries: 100 teenage mothers, 200 children and families with no ID, 1,500 children from single-parent families, 2,000 families without social security/ medical insurance, 3,000 children from poor families, 5,000 children with migrant parents. Save them now!” (my translation)

Here is a short storytelling of the generic Popescu family, in which we can find three of the 5,000 neglected children, as a result of the parents’ emigration: (…) Three very beautiful and playful children. Their mother left them two years ago and has never contacted them since. Meanwhile, their father went abroad in order to offer them a better living. Who knows, without their grandparents’ care and without the community’s support, they might have ended up in the streets or in a child care facility. They miss their father very much and they enjoy the moments when they get to talk to him, on the phone or on the Internet. They don’t talk much about their mother…but they nostalgically remember those times when their family was together. Now that vacation has started, Anghel is helping his grandfather raise sheep. Although thin and weak, he takes the sheep to be milked. They receive social assistance, but a cold and absent institution cannot replace family love. Children have to stay at home. Family love is invaluable. (my translation) Is this campaign an example of “ethics of click, donate, and (possibly) forget it” (Orgad, 2013)? Compassion is an amalgamation of feelings, evaluations and beliefs, but certainly it is dependent on what Nussbaum calls eudaemonistic judgment: “…the recognition of one’s own vulnerabilities in the suffering of another. One sees in another’s woe a potential for similar distress in one’s own life. The terror of such vulnerability is essential to the experience of compassion” (2003, p. 319). Probably the most general eudaemonistic factor, which achieves the imaginary transfer, is the telephone/ Internet (for in-depth analysis of the theme, see Nedelcu & Wyss, 2015). But how many of the Romanian viewers of this campaign realize that, although they do not have to ask

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their children to help with sheep farming, they condemn them to virtual affectivity? Mercy and Sympathy I will analyze a variation of what H. Arendt calls “a crisis of the politics of pity,” which occurs when the excessive distance between happy and unfortunate is invoked as a pretext for the exemption from moral obligation. The connection between the ones here and the ones there is minimal and abstract (potentially substituted by the activity of some NGO, religious group, or media channel). Here is an account of Realitatea TV (Two Romanians have been waiting for five days now in a utility van, in Eastern France—September 10, 2009) that invites us to acknowledge a certain interpretive context of long distance suffering: “Absurd and dramatic situation for two Romanians in Eastern France. The regional newspaper Le Progrès from Lyon writes in its Thursday edition that, since Saturday morning, a Romania registered van has been stuck in a roundabout, following an accident. Lacking the money for repairing the vehicle, the two Romanians have been sleeping in the utility van for five days and the authorities haven’t done anything yet, except for acknowledging the accident. They do not speak French and, the quoted source states, they seem to have been abandoned by their employer. There is a repair shop near the place of the accident, but the employees refuse to repair the car free of charge. The locals, interviewed by the newspaper, say that they initially believed there were prostitutes in the van. The waitress of a nearby bar cynically states: Everyone is leaving them to starve, naturally, they are Romanians.” (my translation) https://www.realitatea.net/video_906627_exclusiv-online--ultima-apari tie-televiza/%20http:/:%20http:/doi-romani-stau-de-cinci-zile-intr-o-aut outilitara-in-estul-frantei_611227.html Vindication This emotional stance implies a value reference (especially moral emotions: honor, shame, fear of contagion, fear that the issue might not be brought up to decision-makers) crystallized in vindictive systems (Verdier, Poly, & Courtois, 1985) that establish assistance obligations according to the public qualification of the needy or the offender. The following example from the corpus reveals a particular topic related to vindictive systems: the entitlement to be help-needy (to need help). An example



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of emergency news, from Antena 3, August 31, 2009, titled Romanian, hero in Spain, after he died saving a child and a German tourist from drowning, represents a moral alert regarding the tragic end of a Romanian citizen in Spain: • The authorities are blamed because, although they were informed (“the Spanish Government, NOT the Romanian one. Obviously…” states, ironically, a commentator on the Internet forum) • and they had a contractual obligation (“May he rest in peace! What is the Romanian Government doing? Don’t they have several thousand Euros to bring this man home? (…) They only want the money sent by the people who work abroad, that’s it! When it comes to helping them with something, they become invisible?”), • they remained passive (“When it comes to helping them with something, they become invisible?”) when faced with this case. The event involving the Romanian citizen is described both in the news report (emergency news type), as well as in the viewers’ comments, as belonging to the natural responsibility sphere.

Topics of Denunciation As could be seen in the introduction, the moral-emotional phenomenology of each topic can be analyzed within multiple engagement systems. In the present text, I will exemplify a few cases of denunciative rhetoric on the following dimensions: actions, relations, and non-relations; the public good guaranteed (usurped) by an affair; appreciation (value of proof); the figure of the agent (victim/ prosecutor/ benefactor; meta-descriptor: journalist, neutral eyewitness, proxy witness, painter). Here is a case where the good is described through the satisfaction of an accomplished action, the capacity to protect, and the relevant proof consists in the ability to evaluate the functionality of the environment. The publication I discuss (AFP, quoted by NewsIn) offers the example of a Romanian doctor, recruited with the financial contribution of the local community, who quit his position after only two months: “The Doctors’ Syndicate [in France] declared they were dissatisfied with the tendency of Romanian doctors to leave their jobs in rural areas, in the context of these areas being seriously affected by a lack of medical care.” In this news item provided by Realitatea TV, the French doctors’ syndicate denounces the inventiveness of some Romanian doctors who have turned the benevolence of the French system (the benefactor) into

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a business. Apparently, this is a simple and neutral declaration, but, in reality, it contains explicit denunciative characteristics. Thus, the French syndicate denounces the breach of the moral promise made by Romanian doctors: they came to fill a gap (private practice in difficult areas, underpaid, “in the countryside”), but “almost 89% of the Romanian doctors in France are employees in [city] hospitals.” The tacit meaning conveyed to the Romanian news community is that Romanian doctors occupy positions that, according to unwritten communitarian law (of Salic and Gallic origin, not of European descent), would belong only to French citizen-doctors. A denunciation can, however, aim at the very person of the painter (see explanation of the concept under “Expressional topics”). In this respect, let us notice the reactions of the fans of a popular TV station towards the kitsch aesthetic valorization of the social position of a person from diaspora. I will give below one example, noting that in the news forums one can find an increasing number of protests against this kind of shallow and stereotyped interpretations: “outside (the country)”, “a little Romanian (românaş, pejorative)”, “well integrated”, “misunderstood”, “victim of”… Woman from Oltenia in Paris. In the largest business neighborhood of Paris, a Romanian woman works hand in hand with the French and knows what it means to be successful. Adriana Popescu left Romania in 2003 to study abroad and now runs a department in a large French bank. She has earned everything through hard work and she has never been ashamed to say that she is Romanian! She is 28 years old and left Targu Jiu when she was in the 12th grade, leaving behind her family, home, and friends. Adriana says it was quite difficult; she came to France in 2003 with a scholarship, worked hard, and graduated with an MA degree. In order to support herself, Adriana took night shifts in a fast-food shop. She recalls that the French were looking at her with reluctance, back then. Meanwhile, things have changed in France too. (Source: Jurnal TV [TV Journal], Kanal D, June 4, 2009, my translation) Excerpts from the Internet forum: Olteanca la Paris—de D.Pavel (Vizitator), sâmbătă, 6 iunie 2009—14:53 I am surprised by this phrase [the French were looking at her with reluctance], as I moved to France long before her and no one looked at me as if I were some exotic animal in the ZOO (my translation) Exagerare—(Vizitator), miercuri, 2 septembrie 2009—13:53



media hospitality to diasporactivism and diasporapathy 221 Stop exaggerating! There are many other successful people there and they do not appear in the press! Working in a bank in France (Paris) is nothing interesting. All bank employees here are high-school graduates and that’s about it! So drop it! (my translation)

Expressional Topics As previously discussed, these pieces of news belong to the field of humanitarian communication and have an expressional value inasmuch as they invite the public to remain in an acceptable moral frame or, at least, to show an active attitude towards the mechanism of mediation. On the other hand, a manifestation of this disposition—of course, the cynical, as well as “the amorphous citizen” (Fromm, 1968) are excluded—requires, on the public’s part, the effort of carrying out a symmetrical action: describing, at the same time, what they can see in the public space, as well as what they can feel. In the topics of emotional mediation, the public mention of the active disposition is made through emotional feeling. Otherwise there would be no way to justify why we are “spiritually touched” by a symbol, why we show compassion, or why we are merciful. In the topics of denunciation, we are struggling to weigh situations, characters, and processes in order to define them as just or unjust and to get outraged about them. In the case of expressional topics, the justification of the effort to describe an instance of somebody’s suffering and the way in which this is felt (by the audience) are done through the category of the sublime. I will start with the following definition of the narrator agent given by Boltanski: A painter or, more generally, an exhibitor who is able to get us to see suffering in its sublime aspect. The painter sees the unfortunate suffer and depicts his suffering. But how, it could be objected, can this character, who does nothing either for or against the unfortunate and who oddly resembles the spectator himself, be given the status of an agent? He can because by painting the unfortunate’s suffering, by revealing its horror and thereby revealing its truth, he confers on this suffering the only form of dignity to which it can lay claim and which it gets from its attachment to the world of the already painted, of what has already been revealed within an aesthetic register. (2004, p. 116)

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But is the public (and its media) capable of such quality of viewing? Do the media and its public not yield in front of sympathetic interactionism? Let us re-analyze now the adventure news of June 25, 2012 [http://www. evz.ro/detalii/stiri/romanul-care-a-ptat-flacara-olimpica-in-august-o-aduc-intara] as it is reformulated according to expressional topics: EXCLUSIVE: The Romanian who carried the Olympic torch: “In August, I will bring it home!” The Romanian immigrant who on Monday carried this summer’s Olympic torch explained, for EVZ, why he was chosen and what this event means to him. The images have captured Dan carrying the torch in a relaxed manner, surrounded by people wishing him well, on the streets of Leeds, where he lives. He was accompanied by Romanians carrying the national flag since dawn. An Italian woman tried to touch his torch. But Dan is amused when thinking about this. There were no incidents and—he jokes—maybe the woman’s gesture did bring the Italians some luck in their football match. When he is not carrying the Olympic flame, Dan Alexandru Dumitru is an engineer at a biscuits factory in Leeds; he runs in marathons and works for charity. Dan says he hopes that his gesture will inspire other immigrants to “do good deeds”. EVZ: What is it like to carry the Olympic torch? Dan Alexandru Dumitru: (…) Words cannot describe how I felt. But the experience was unique, given my nervousness at the time. Especially when I saw all those Romanians around me. It was something to be proud of; I did it first and foremost for the Romanians in the UK. (…) I’m bringing the torch to Romania, in August. What was the atmosphere like on the road, when you passed with the torch? There was an Italian woman who wanted to touch it. But the lady didn’t harm me, she just touched the torch for a bit, that’s all. But maybe this brought her some luck because Italy won the match against Germany last night! If the torch I am carrying does bring luck, you must know that I will bring it to Romania in August and I will leave it there until the crisis passes! (he laughs) The item remained in my possession and I will bring it to Romania. It is my motivation and my inspiration. (my translation)



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It can be easily noticed how journalists, as well as the audience initially bond over what could be called formal sublime (What is it like to carry the Olympic torch? (…) It was something to be proud of (…) I’m bringing the torch to Romania, in August), but they do not have the ability to maintain this quality of viewing. Eventually, this too becomes a piece of neglected news through the insidious (and ironic) effects of the stereotypes mentioned by the forum users (“the Romanian Gypsies who steal the torch”, “the corruption at the customs”). Finally, let us attempt some generalizations, starting from the following news item that invokes the merits/ flaws of the “painter” (Romania has talents. Romania has plenty of wonderful people. Too bad that the Romanian media, tributary to old values, if not worse, serves other interests than…) very often commented upon in the Romanian media: Stefan Atirgovitoae, an 11-year old boy from Iasi, won the Italian contest “Ti lascio una canzone”. Stefan Atirgovitoae, aged 11, won the contest-show “Ti lascio una canzone” aired by Rai Uno, with the song “Profeta non saro”. (…) The young man had already qualified in the finals after the second round when he received the technical jury’s trophy for his interpretation of a song considered to be very difficult, “Una canzone per te”. Another member of the jury, Francesco Facchinetti, congratulated the Romanian and stated that, behind every song he sings, one can notice the titanic, “Stakhanovist” amount of work put in to perfectly express every note, but advised the Romanian not to forget that music is also “fun” (my translation) https://www.hotnews.ro/stiri-diaspora-10798236-video-stefan-atirgovi toae-baiat-11-ani-din-iasi-castigat-concursul-italian-lascio-una-canzone. htm Analyzing the forum comments, it can be seen that most media reports (and the related comments of the audience) are building a type of sublime that reveals the “quality of viewing” through a ridicule aestheticization (Bravo, kids, here you would have lost in front of a “Tzutzu” at “Romania’s Got Talent” …/ I am Romanian and I am proud of it and I do it mainly because I know that this nation is the descendant of a really important one: the Dacian nation.). Let us point out here a conversion from emotions to a register of protest, specific to denunciative topics (The contest-show aims to promote Italian and international music of the past 50 years. What do we promote? The Wonder Kid? Guta? Salam? Let my enemy die? Wow, how cool is my woman? you’re free to add whatever you want if you know what I mean.).

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Aesthetic Performances and the Emergence of a “Selfie” Ethic in Selfies-as-News The moral panic and the popular critique surrounding selfies as visual media come from the fact that the primary representational object in selfies is the self/ subject or subjectivity. This meaning can lead to the assertion that the selfie offers nothing but the means through which the author represents himself/ herself as an object of seeing—a sign of narcissism (an exacerbation of what Augustine and later Luther called homo curvatus in se) and political disengagement—this way the function of the selfie, of enacting intersubjectivity and construing perspectives, is obscured. Diasporic-related selfies are not simply aesthetic performances of digital self-representation; these faces embody an implicit ethical address because the selfies were made in specific conditions, in the context of a very different quality of life compared to social network viewers. This means claiming that the potential for empowerment is inherent in the visual structure of the selfie. The “diasporic-related selfies” are a paradigmatic case of digital self-representation as ethical address if the image evokes the seeing subjects in the social contexts in which they were made. But to see in a selfie something more than a narcissistic form of witnessing, to engage the public in a more nuanced debate about the selfie ultimately requires critical visual literacy (Zhao & Zappavigna, 2017). Let us take the conversation in the example below as a case of achieving such selfie literacy (Gunthert, 2015; Foggia, 2015; Kunstman, 2017). Tens of friends assume that the face in the technocultural circuit of this “progeny of digital networks” (Frosh, 2015) is the expression of resonance with a principle of joy—self-irony as a ludic conversational genre through which the authors pre-emptively acknowledge their own failure to accomplish something significant—and is not yet occupied by meaningful public representations. But the very increase in the audience of selfies in horizontal networks (Facebook) overloads them with constraints to signify what is typically diasporic as citizen testimonies. Causing public interest (impartial spectatorship), they shift vertically to become selfie-as-news through a process of recontextualization (editing, reframing, renarrativizing) and “remoralization” of professional media organisations (Chouliaraki, 2015).



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Figure 7.3. Facebook post.

Figure 7.3. Caption: “I am superior because I work abroad. Yes, this is the truth. My mentality has changed. Now I think like a modern man, in another language. In Romania people are starving, they have no place to sleep, they work like slaves. In a word, they do not have time to live their life. Abroad you work 12 hours a day, 7/7, but you do have a 1-hour break. The working conditions are different. Work is fun here. Food is good and we, Romanians, know how to take advantage of sales. We eat good, cheap food. We live with friends and family in the same house, soul to soul.

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11 souls stuck to one another, in a 10 sq. room. At least we sleep in warm (bunk) beds. And we live our lives, we go out all the time. Every day we wake up at 5 in the morning and return home at 8 at night. Then we have all the time in the world to go out and have fun. At 9 we go to sleep, except on Saturdays, when we go to sleep at 11, because we take a shower. We have cars, we go to tanning studios, to the hairdresser’s—before coming back home, because, well, we need to show the world we are emancipated. We’ll talk when I come back home—I kiss you all and ciao a tutti little Romanians who enjoy the system abroad. Peace man!” (my translation) Let us note how this Facebook post was “reinvested” with moral discourses suitable to the news platform in the well-known paper Evenimentul Zilei (Tuesday, August 22, 2017): “Parody, pulling one’s leg, joke or truth! Take this message of a FUNNY Romanian from the diaspora as you wish”. (http://evz. ro/parodie-bascalie-umor-mistouri.html). The self-photo is explicitly re-mediated as an invitation to a negotiation of meanings. The co-authors of this dialogue feel that the directness of the public eye on the diasporic condition has become unbearable and, to secretly hide this, react self-ironically as an expressive subterfuge in the public space (subterfuge means etymologically “secretly flee”; “fugere to flee”; subter + fuge). At the same time, interpretively, the subjects of the news community can wonder whether this re-mediation of the role play with Facebook friends does not have the perverse effect (unintended consequences, in a Mertonian sense) of capturing the ludic-ironic selfie into a dispositive that accentuates an entrepreneurial project of the self, by means of which diasporactivists claim a normative position in defining an ideal diaspora.

An Encouraging Conclusion for Sociologists Using an analytical framework belonging to expressivist pragmatics, I have examined the way some Romanian citizens’ happiness, success, or misfortune and suffering in their diasporic experiences were expressed in the media. The core question was whether the media discourses articulated around these experiences generate particular positionings along the continuum between diasporactivism and diasporapathy, both in diaspora and in the news community. And the illustrations in this study provide arguments for a paradoxical conclusion.



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On the one hand, in what I have defined as news community (an interactive system of frameworks for the mutual surveillance of interpretations), a mediation process takes place (that is, two originally different states appear as a unique situation) and instigates the publics themselves to think of values such as honesty or responsibility, which may lead to a healthy rumination (mulling over). This implies an optimistic vision, that of overcoming communication distance through mediation, that is “putting an end” to moral distance. Through sensitivity to suffering, causes are built that people get engaged into, become united for, and dispute. On the other hand, from the same examples, it can be seen how, as soon as they are embedded in interpretive frames through interactive features such as discussion forums, the same pieces of news generate a viewer position (in Boltanski’s terms) or improper distance (Silverstone 2006), where moral difference can be invoked as a strategy to justify passivity. Through the collective redistribution function of information, media frames create the conditions for a cosmopolitan solidarity—by expanding, for instance, the limits of compassion. At the same time, though, as audience shares are needed, these posts play the role of sensitivity traps that enable a promiscuity of voyeuristic attention—a form of media addiction. From here derives the justification for lamentation used by media austerity proponents, who can ask themselves—not just rhetorically—if this spectacularization of shock news does not de-legitimize humanitarian communication. Of course, the critique of the tactical use of the humanitarian argument remains a permanent analytical insight of the observations into the very nature of the political. One can answer them that an authentic humanitarian communication can take the form of an extended hand (and not only the abstract clothing of universal fraternity that inevitably ends up in a globalization of emotions) only if it is embodied into a singular friendship; and that, in the form of media sublime, the news spectacle can conceive a good exteriorization of interiors—a psycho-moral mechanism that helps conceive this special form of humanity that we generally call singular friendship. Media sublime does not signify, though, a universal hedonism. I must recall, in this sense, Kant’s position when talking about the sublime as a quasi-political exigency towards building a possible universal community. This kind of exigency requires the viewer to sympathize with misfortunes, as they allow themselves to be seen by the public eye. Certainly, we should not lose sight of the perverse media effect of marketing the public speech in expressional topics.

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Unlike media formats specific to the topics of denunciation (where journalists express a preference for protest situations), in news reports belonging to expressional topics they tend to embody the sublime by presenting suffering people or groups as having a sort of “moral capacity to be affected” (see the case of the media genre called reality-show). In the topics of sentiments, media reports tend to ignore the prosecutor in order to focus on the benefactor. In expressional topics, what is defined as ecstatic news captures the attention of the news community through the aesthetics of frames and the painter’s capacity (the journalist, the communicator, etc.) to depict the general picture of misfortunes. Frequently, though, dysfunctional cases occur (excessive lamentation from Romanian journalists, readers, and Internet users regarding the facts and the condition of the new Romanian diaspora) that induce a perverted effect: the regression of public indignation from the protest register into a mundane (concupiscentia oculorum) and voyeuristic affection. With obstinate drifts and regressions, within what is called the news community, individuals show a strong interpretive appetence, which is nothing else than a sort of media hospitality coverage of the interrogations regarding the diasporic experience as a category of practice; its main goals are to engage energies and articulate new claims and projects, and not simply to look into “ideal” diasporic behaviors versus “diasporapathetic behaviors” with a view to remaking an ideal Romanian (national) identity in the new European space. The conclusion is encouraging for sociologists: this convergent performance of I have a voice will remain an everlasting object of critical research of the diasporic experience.

Notes 1. The first version of this article appeared in the Romanian Journal of Communication and Public Relations, 14(4), 203–221, in 2012. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher—College of Communication and Public Relations. 2. “I mean the tendency to treat ethnic groups, nations, and races as substantial entities to which interests and agency can be attributed” (Brubaker, 2004, p. 8). 3. In his latest synthesis on diaspora research, Brubaker reasserts his initial hypothesis: “In sum, rather than speak of ‘a diaspora’ or ‘the diaspora’ as an entity, a bounded group, or an ethnodemographic or ethnocultural fact, it may be more fruitful—and it would certainly be more precise—to speak of diasporic stances, projects, claims, idioms, and practices. We can then explore to what extent, and in what circumstances, those claimed as members of putative diasporas actively support, passively sympathize with, or are indifferent or even hostile to the diasporic projects pursued in their name” (2015, p.130).



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4. I follow Boltanski’s understanding of the concept of “topic”, “in the sense of ancient rhetoric, that is to say as involving inseparably both an argumentative and an affective dimension” (2004, p. xv). 5. Silverstone claims that the term proper distance is nothing else than a way of translating the Kantian concept of ‘open mentality’ (Silverstone, 2006, p. 44). 6. He shows how this “analysis frame” is used by some sociologists who avoid the monocausal explanation (“group interests”, such as the way of life that includes protestant ethic values) of a deviant phenomenon (alcoholism, sexual libertinism, etc.), by considering the dramatic stigmatization of alcohol use as an element of a symbolic struggle for protecting universal values (Gusfield, 1986). 7. Regarding the concept of “engagement practice” as a way of channeling “ethical unrest” within the grammar of public debates, see Perpelea (2012). 8. As, even from a virtual point of view, the result of these acts of coordination targets a future action based on conventional public processes, some authors call them “policies”. For example, in the logic of the implications arising from the French Revolution, Hannah Arendt talks about the emergence of a pitying policy, whereas L. Boltanski analyzes “compassionate policies” as opposed to “vigilante policies”. 9. The main assumptions of Bakhtin’s theory (1984) can be used to operationalize the act of communication through media dispositives: semiotic pluralism, polyphony, heterogeneity of linguistic and non-linguistic elements; all acts of speech are social acts, not just the performatives; all utterances are discursive social acts that impose a “social obligation”. Through utterance discursiveness (the carnivalesque speech)—friendliness and animosity, agreements and disagreements, sympathy and repugnance—dialogism opens up to create possibilities, to organize a relationship of cooperation or, on the contrary, domination. 10. For a detailed approach to this issue, see Perpelea (2002). 11. Similarly, contrary to Sloterdijk’s vision, M. Jablonowski (“Dronie Citizenship?”, in A. Kuntsman (Ed.), Selfie Citizenship, 2017) discusses ‘selfie dronie’. 12. H. Arendt starts from a difference made by J. J. Rousseau between natural mercy and self-conceit in order to identify in the public space a specific type of emotional policy: abstract mercy, “principled”—a sort of sadness of the “political body” without being “physically” affected. In an archetype sense, this mercy is incarnated by The Grand Inquisitor who, transforming it into a public virtue mechanism, confers it a “potential of cruelty superior to the one of cruelty itself” (1967, p. 129).

References Anderson, B. R. O. G. (1991). Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, C. W., Downie, L. Jr., & Schudson, M. (2016). The news media: What everyone needs to know. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Arendt, H. (1967). Essai sur la révolution (M. Chrestien, Trans.). Paris: Gallimard. (Original work published 1963).

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Bakhtin, M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Beciu, C. (2011a). Practici de mediatizare a migraţiei forţei de muncă [Practices of mediation of labor migration]. Revista Română de Sociologie. New Edition, XXIII(1–2), 21–47. Beciu, C. (2011b). Sociologia comunicării și a spațiului public [The sociology of communication and of the public sphere]. Iaşi: Polirom. Beciu, C. (2012). Qui fait la diaspora? Le problème de l’identité dans les recherches sur les diasporas. Romanian Journal of Communication and Public Relations, 14(4), 13–28. Beciu, C., Mădroane, I. D., Ciocea, M., & Cârlan, A. I. (2017). Media engagement in the transnational social field: Discourses and repositionings on migration in the Romanian public sphere. Critical Discourse Studies. doi: 10.1080/17405904.2017.1284682. Boltanski, L. (2000). The legitimacy of humanitarian actions and their media representations: The case of France. Ethical Perspectives, 7(1), 3–16. Boltanski, L. (2004). Distant suffering: Morality, media and politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brubaker, R. (2004). Ethnicity without groups. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Brubaker, R. (2005). The ‘diaspora’ diaspora. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28(1), 1–19. Brubaker, R. (2015). Grounds for difference. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chouliaraki, L. (2006). The spectatorship of suffering. London: Sage. Chouliaraki, L. (2013a). The ironic spectator: Solidarity in the age of post-humanitarianism. Cambridge: Polity. Chouliaraki, L. (2013b). Remediation, intermediation, transmediation. Journalism Studies, 14(2), 267–283. Chouliaraki, L. (2015). Digital witnessing in conflict zones: The politics of remediation. Information, Communication & Society, 18(11), 1362–1377. Cohen, S. (2001). States of Denial: Knowing about atrocities and suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press. Dahlgren, P. (2003). Reconfiguring civic culture in the new media Milieu. In J. Corner & D. Pels (Eds.), Media and political style: Essays on representation and civic culture (pp. 151–170). London: Sage. Dayan, D. (2006). La terreur spectacle. Terrorisme et Télévision. Paris: INA/De Boeck. Derrida, J. (2000). Of hospitality. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fish, S. (1980). Is there a text in this class? The authority of interpretive communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Foggia, G. D. (2015). About the Anti-Figurativeness of #selfie. (Location of #selfie). Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA, Postgraduate Network, 8(6). Foucault, M. (1982, Summer). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777–795. Fromm, E. (1968). The revolution of hope. Oxford, England: Harper & Row. Frosh, P. (2015). The gestural image: The selfie, photography theory, and kinesthetic sociability. International Journal of Communication, 9, 1607–1628. Gunthert, A. (2015). ‘La consécration du selfie’, Études photographiques, 32 | Printemps 2015, http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/3529



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Gusfield, R. J. (1986). Symbolic crusade: Status politics and the American temperance movement (2nd ed.). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Gusfield, R. J. (1987). The culture of public problems: Drinking-driving and the symbolic order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jablonowski, M. (2017). Dronie Citizenship? In Kuntsman, A. (Ed.), Selfie citizenship (pp. 97–106). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jones, P. J. (2005). Entertaining politics: New political television and civic culture. New York, NY: Rowman and Littlefield. Jenkins, H. (2013). Spreadable media. Creating value and meaning in a netwroked culture. New York, NY: New York University Press. Joye, S. (2010). News discourses on distant suffering: A critical discourse analysis of the 2003 SARS outbreak. Discourse & Society, 21(5), 586–601. Koffman, O., Orgad, S., & Gill, R. (2015). Girl power and ‘selfie humanitarianism’. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 29(2), 157–216. Kuntsman, A. (Ed.). (2017). Selfie citizenship. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Livingstone, S. (2004). Du rapport entre audiences et publics. Réseaux, 4(126), 17–55. Nedelcu, M., & Wyss, M. (2015). Liens transnationaux et régimes de coprésence à l’ère du numérique. Le cas des migrants roumains en Suisse. Revue Suisse de Sociologie, 41(1), 59–78. Nussbaum, M. (2003). Upheavals of thought: The intelligence of emotions. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Orgad, S. (2013). Visualizers of solidarity: Organizational politics in humanitarian and international development NGOs. Visual Communication 12(3), 295–314. Perpelea, N. (2002). Corpul comunicării provocat. Modele sociologice ale pragmaticii cognitiv-expresiviste. [The challenges of performativity in communication. Sociological models of pragmatic expressivism] Bucureşti: Editura Expert. Perpelea, N. (2012). Publicul diasporic şi retoricile morale în comunitatea de ştiri [The diasporic audience and the moral rhetoric in the “community of news”]. Revista Română de Sociologie, New Edition, XXIII(1–2), 21–47. Saint Augustine. (1998).  Confessions (H. Chadwick, translation, introduction, & notes). Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Silverstone, R. (2006). Media and morality: On the rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge: Polity. Sloterdijk, P. (2011). Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Verdier, R., Poly, J-P., Courtois, B. (1985). La Vengeance dans la pensée occidentale. Paris: Editions Cujas. Zhao, S., & Zappavigna, M. (2017). Beyond the self: Intersubjectivity and the social semiotic interpretation of the selfie. New Media & Society. doi.org/10.1177/1461444817706074.

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Identity-Building Strategies in Debates with Non-Migrants1 Camelia Beciu

Introduction After the fall of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, in 1989, economic migration from these countries towards EU member states has become a constant phenomenon, indicative of a new cultural situation. One of the particularities of this type of migration is the circular mobility of certain social actors, who are looking to improve their life satisfaction and, in some cases, their “post-return economic situation” (Bartram, 2013, p. 418). The expansion of the EU as a “new symbolic and institutional context” (Triandafyllidou, 2009, p. 240) has accentuated the dynamics of the European labor market and actors of migration. The practices by which migrants appropriate mobility are diversifying, including the ways in which “the return” to the country of origin is incorporated into a “here” and “there” continuum, as a hybridized sense of belonging (Boccagni, 2012). Not least, the perception of migration actors, especially in the home country, is also formed on the basis of the visibility their mobility practices acquire in the public sphere. For instance, in the Romanian political and media spheres, the topics of debate vary from the causes of migration to the spectacular or dramatic trajectories of Romanians who work in EU countries, from the socio-economic consequences

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(disjointed families, the traumas of children left behind in the home country, the implications of economic migration for demographic structures, especially in the rural environment, the so-called “brain exodus,” referring to the migration of qualified workforce, etc.) to remittances and the need for public policies that encourage the return of migrants (see Ciocea & Cârlan, Chapter “Debating Migration: Diasporic Stances in Media Discourse,” this volume). Media debates on economic migration in relation to mobility practices have highlighted representations of migrants as subjects of power and agency in a field of transnational social relations (Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004). The media have built this field by favoring different scales of visibility for migration actors: local (migrants in relation to the communities of belonging in the country of origin/ destination), national (policies and positionings towards migrants in the country of origin/ destination), European (the country of origin/ destination as a European actor, the positioning of European institutions towards migration). At the same time, the media as engaged actors have positioned themselves towards the Romanian migrants in EU countries, examining critically the unequal relations in which migrants act (Beciu, Mădroane, Ciocea, & Cârlan, 2017). For example, the media have frequently stated that the Romanians’ migration to EU countries cannot be dissociated from “us” as society and collective identity (Beciu & Lazăr, 2015). The Romanian migrants’ problems in the countries of destination are the object of journalistic interpellation, targeted both at the inefficient measures taken by the institutions in the country of origin and at a collective responsibility—“our responsibility,” a national “we”—towards migrants. Therefore, the media discourse has reproduced an “identity imagination” (see Mihelj, Bajt, & Pankov, 2009, for the concept of “national imagination”) in relation to the migrant theme.2 Through this mode of engagement towards Romanian migrants, the Romanian media have situated the sending country in a transnational field of migration, first as an actor within a symbolic struggle for relocation in a hierarchy of international relations, via the migrants’ actions, and, second, from the perspective of identity construction. This type of media discourse on migration has contributed, over time, to establishing migration as a permanent topic on the public agenda and as a theme of society, which has generated debates not only about the role of institutions and policies in managing the migration phenomenon, but also about the ways in which communities and individuals perceive and interpret intra-EU migration as ongoing social change. A social imaginary of the “Other” has thus emerged, where the “Other” means Romanians who work in EU countries.



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Starting from these premises, the chapter proposes an analysis of the ways migration is understood by non-migrants, namely social actors belonging to different social and cultural categories, who witness this phenomenon and the debates in the Romanian public sphere. Taking into consideration various points of view expressed in focus groups, therefore semi-public discourses (Wodak, 2002), the analysis pinpoints discursive mechanisms through which these social actors position themselves towards migrants, at the level of identity discourses. The hypothesis behind this study is that, in the construction of public problems (concurrent definitions, types of discourses, and communication practices), social actors redefine power relations and establish meanings of collective and national identity. A range of studies approach the identity construction of migrants by looking at networks and ties of belonging (Bauböck, 2010; Nieswand, 2008; Ryan, Erel, & D’Angelo, 2015). Some of them discuss this aspect in the context of the new migration after 1989, from Eastern to Western Europe. Triandafyllidou (2009), for example, analyzes how migrants from postcommunist Europe negotiate their identity in interactions with previous migration waves, groups of co-ethnics from the countries of destination, and actors and institutions in the country of origin. Fewer studies, however, have paid attention to how migration is framed in the non-migrants’ everyday discourse. How do non-migrants situate themselves towards migrants within a context in which the theme of migration is part of the everyday discourse in the (semi-)public spheres? I see the analysis in this chapter as a contribution to the understanding of the migrants’ transnational practices in relation to home societies, namely “the expectations and strategies of non-migrants” (Boccagni, 2012, p. 118), considered one of the multiple ties that migrants have to their homeland. The research identifies discursive patterns through which non-migrants position themselves towards the actors of migration by means of a proximity-distance relationship. Such positionings reproduce certain meanings of collective identity and, at the same time, recontextualize discourses on migration that are dominant in the Romanian public sphere.

Migration, Transnationalism, Public Discourses As a tendency, various lines of research approach transnationalism starting from the bottom-up or top-down practices of individual or collective actors (state actors, non-state actors such as NGOs, communities, etc.). A number

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of studies discuss the migrants’ agency in relation to diaspora projects (De Fina & King, 2011; Köngeter & Smith, 2015; Ogunyemi, 2015; Ryan et al., 2015) or the pluralization of ways of belonging (“multiple lives,” Lacroix, 2016, p. 182) that migrants practice by means of actions at a distance, formed at the intersection of social networks. In this respect, some authors (Boccagni, 2012; Featherstone, Philipps, & Waters, 2007; Georgiou, 2006) consider that transnationalism, as an analytical perspective, investigates the production and reconfiguration of social relations within cross-border mobility-settlement practices. Faist (2010, p. 9) points out that the transnational approach is applied to “various types of social formations,” as well as ethnic, religious, national communities, and groups, including social movements. Of central importance for the understanding of the dynamics of transnational practices is the notion of network, which indicates a way of analyzing actions at a distance as embedded in various and overlapping “political flows and circuits” (Featherstone et al., 2007) and “shared imagination” (Faist, 2010). Other researchers investigate how state actors practice a “politics of belonging” (Yuval-Davis, 2006) as an expression of a “long distance nationalism” (Glick Schiller, 2005), through which sending countries try to recreate the symbolic ties of belonging as a resource of competitive repositioning in the transnational field. Public actors in sending countries use different types of migrant capital strategically, for development goals (Gamlen, 2008; Mugge, 2013; Ryan et al., 2015; Sinatti & Horst, 2015; Weinar, 2010, etc.), or for the legitimation and delegitimation of political actors. These studies focus on how governments in the countries of origin engage with migrants, especially those who can contribute through their professional and economic capital to strengthening the economic competitiveness of the country, on the basis of policy strategies and “extraterritorial citizenship strategies” (Ho, 2011) that certain authors believe to be the expression of a transformation “in the way the relations between authority, territory and populations are rationalized, organized, practiced and legitimized at the transnational and international level.” (Ragazzi, 2009, p. 383) The bottom-up or top-down practices in which the transnationalism of social actors is configured cannot be separated from the typology and variety of their social ties, global and local circumstances, the trajectory, resources and strategic actions of individuals, or the repertoire of opportunities in the countries of origin and destination. As stated by Ryan et al. (2015, p. 8), “networks do not operate in a vacuum, and it is important to consider how networking



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processes emerge from the interaction of identities, shared needs, individuals’ strategies and wider social structures.” Lacroix (2016) underlines in this sense the need to expand the analysis of transnationalism so that researchers take into consideration the ways the migrants’ “personal strategies” are part of “multiple insertions” (p. 187) in “their structural context at destination and origin and how they co-evolve” (p. 188). According to him, the migrants’ “multi-level trajectory” explains the “multi-polarization of their social positioning” (Lacroix, p. 187), which can be analyzed by considering both the dynamics of transnational practices and the dynamics of institutions, actors, and discourses in the social settings where migrants act. This perspective is complementary to the “transnational social field” approach (Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004), which views transnational practices as configured through multiple sites of power (institutions, organizations, symbolic universes in which migrants get jobs or recreate ties of belonging): When people belong to multiple settings, they come into contact with the regulatory powers and the hegemonic culture of more than one state. These states regulate economic interactions, political processes and performances, and also have discrete nation-state building projects. Individuals are therefore embedded in multiple legal and political institutions that determine access and action and organize and legitimate gender, race, and class status. (Levitt & Schiller, 2004, p. 1013)

Both approaches attempt, first, to overcome the well-established dichotomy between “methodological nationalism” and transnationalism; second, to explore in depth the social mechanisms that shape the practices and strategies developed by migrants in multiple contexts of belonging and action, in the country of origin and the country of destination. An important mechanism of this kind is the public and semi-public discourse that constructs transnational relations, such as those between migrants and non-migrants (Beciu et al., 2017). By means of their positioning towards migration and its actors, public and non-public voices in the country of origin and destination create or dislodge certain patterns of visibility and perception of migrants, and foster interpretations of migration and the public interest, by operating with “the deeper, ontological, framing” in order to “inform or legitimize the ways in which the ‘other’ is subsequently portrayed” (Balabanova & Balch, 2010, p. 383). The social actors (media, institutions, organizations, political leaders, etc.) in the country of origin and destination recontextualize, from the top down, already established public discourses on migration,

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shaping expectations and legitimizing the practice of remitting with a view to public policies (Mădroane, 2016). Also, from the bottom up, some public discourses about migrants or the circumstances of migration are recontextualized by individuals, groups, communities, in various contexts of daily life or public action. A recent example for the top down recontextualization is the modality in which the Romanian media, starting from public discourses on Romanian migrants in the country of destination, situated themselves as an actor in a transnational field.3 Another example is the dominant discursive practice in the Romanian public sphere revealing a compassionate registry of enunciation about migrants and Romanian citizens in general. A fertile field for research has to do with the ways migrants engage with the discourses and public voices in the country of origin and destination, in order to position themselves in relation to their status and belonging. Therefore, the analysis of the modalities in which public and semi-public discourses on migration are incorporated into social practices of action at a distance provides a new point of entry into the study of transnational social fields; thus, this type of analysis can bring insights into (1) the negotiation of the migrants’ and other actors’ status, in specific social contexts of action at a distance, by articulating certain repositionings, modes of engagement, and power relations; (2) the configuration of social relationships of which migrants are part, in other words, “the real empirical extent” (Boccagni, 2012, p.120) of the transnational field (it can also be shown that sending and receiving countries encompass a variety of actors who establish transnational ways of acting and positioning towards migrants, therefore the so-called sending/ receiving country perspective is not reducible to the action of governments); (3) the dynamics of naturalizing and reconfiguring certain symbolic repertoires (values, symbols, norms, practices, etc.), and the dynamics of particular discourses on migration as a public problem. Within this research, focus groups with non-migrants were run at a time when, in the Romanian public sphere, the theme of intra-EU migration was already a topical issue in public debates, benefiting from high visibility. We4 were interested in analyzing (1) how focus group participants positioned themselves towards migrants, and the meanings of collective identity that were negotiated; (2) how participants used public discourses from the political and media spheres, regarding migration and other public problems, in order to legitimize their own interpretation of the implications of migration.



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Research Design The design included six focus groups with non-migrants, scheduled during May–June 2012. The groups were formed in accordance with the criterion: contacts with Romanians who work in EU countries, correlated with the level of education and age, as follows: two groups of persons who had contacts with Romanians working temporarily in EU countries (family, friends, acquaintances) and three groups of persons who had no ties with such migrants: • the first group: college educated (25–35), without first-degree relatives abroad; • the second and third group: high school graduates (35–50), without first-degree relatives abroad; • the fourth group: college educated (25–40), with first-degree relatives abroad; • the fifth group: high school graduates, heterogeneous in terms of age, with first-degree relatives abroad; • the sixth group: mixed, consisting of persons who have contacts with Romanian migrants as well as persons with no such contacts. Operators were also asked to select persons who read/ watched news and social and political shows with moderation, therefore persons who were not disconnected from the media sphere, without being massive media consumers. For this particular study, we were interested in recurrent discursive elements, discursive patterns within the corpus, beyond the socio-demographic particularities of the groups and their ties with Romanian migrants. In essence, the focus group participants discussed various aspects regarding the Romanian migrants in European countries, for example the perception of Romanian migrants in the destination countries, the relationship between migrants and the Romanian state, between migration and social change, etc. Focus groups are semi-public interactions carried out as partially regulated debates (by moderators, who lead the debate based on a question guide), but at the same time emergent (to the extent that certain questions and debate topics take shape in the interaction). A difficulty faced by researchers when they design focus groups is that their questions, regardless of how calibrated they are to avoid directing the respondents, can produce an effect of framing the answer. For instance, when preparing the question guide, we were faced with a terminology-related conundrum: how should we refer to the

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Romanians abroad so as not to create categories that influence the participants’ ways of problematizing the issues we were interested in? On the other hand, the more a focus group has a predominantly interactive dynamic, with a flowing exchange between participants, during which new aspects emerge (without abandoning the topic), the more a pre-determined “communication situation” can be avoided. When processing the findings, we considered relevant especially the sequences to which we assigned a higher degree of “authenticity,” namely those in which participants interacted with each other as if they had forgotten about the question that was asked. The findings will be analyzed by using critical discourse analysis (CDA) tools (Fairclough, 2003; Wodak, 2010) in order to highlight the ways in which power relations are created and expressed by means of language. CDA identifies mechanisms of reproducing dominant discursive practices or dislocating them, which entails “a better understanding of discourse and other elements of social life, including social relations, ideologies, social institutions and organizations, and social identities, and better ways of analyzing and researching these relations.” (Fairclough, 2003, p. 78) In this study, in order to examine the identity relationships with the “Other,” I will use two analytical instruments commonly encountered in CDA. The first one refers to the representation of social actors—how focus group participants establish certain discursive portrayals of Romanians working in EU countries through classifications, nominations, attributes, and assessments. The discursive representations of migrants will be interpreted from the perspective of the proximity-distance relationship, as well as from that of the inclusion/ exclusion of social actors. For the analysis of these representations, I will take into account: (a) referential strategies (Wodak, 2010): linguistic structures and elements of language (e.g. metaphors, nominal collocations, types of pronouns) designating individuals and groups, which build categories of belonging; (b) predication strategies, attributes of actors/ their actions in specific circumstances (e.g. evaluations, adjective phrases, etc.). The second discursive mechanism refers to the modes of engagement (Cefaï, 2013; Beciu & Lazăr, 2015) with migrants and migration as an issue of public interest, expressed by the participants’ normative statements (e.g. norms, values, responsibilities, commitments), placing social action in a perspective of both generality and engagement, that is, in a public interest area (linguistically, engagement can be constructed by evaluations and assumed values (Fairclough, 2003) and by claims for political/ public action, enunciation



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practices such as obligations (Charaudeau, 1992), rhetorical questions that mark the need for an option, etc.). Finally, I will investigate to what extent the representations and modes of engagement identified show how the participants recontextualized, from the position of non-migrants, certain representations and evaluations of migrants frequently used in conversational networks and the media. I rely mainly on Fairclough (2003), who defines the practice of recontextualization as the appropriation of elements of one social practice within another, placing the former within the context of the latter, and transforming it in particular ways in the process […] These principles underlie differences between the ways in which a particular type of social event is represented in different fields, networks of social practices, and genres. Elements of social events are selectively “filtered” according to such recontextualizing principles, some are excluded, some included, and given greater or lesser prominence (Fairclough, 2003, p. 32; p. 139).

As mentioned above, the issue of labor migration is constantly debated in the Romanian public sphere, as well as in the spheres of daily life; therefore, the respondents were expected to appropriate representations and types of discourse that circulated in the public sphere at the time of the focus groups, and to incorporate them in their positionings.

Findings “Us” about “Them”. The Discursive Construction of the Proximity/ Distance Relationship The first step was identifying discursive patterns beyond the socio-demographic particularities of the focus group participants. As a tendency, it was noticed that the participants built, in their discourse, symbolic power relations with the migrants, alternating proximity with “distance”. These two instances are therefore not exclusive, but strategically mobilized. How does the proximity-distance dialectic function, discursively, in relation to the “Other”? In a first move, the participants expressed distance towards the migrants by situating them in certain categories (people who are brave, take chances, winners, losers, victims, etc.), which indicates a form of alterity and, usually, a compassionate positioning; in a second move, generally in the same discursive sequence, the participants introduced a relation of communitarian proximity to the migrants, by including them in a collective identity (an identitarian

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“we”); in its turn, the collective identity was redefined, according to (1) the moments and topics of debate/ interaction and (2) certain principles of generality, based on which participants discussed collective identity, giving it particular meanings. In what follows, I will discuss this pattern in detail, by presenting three types of migrant inclusion strategies, and, accordingly, the meanings assigned to collective identity.

The Essentialist Strategy: Reaffirming Collective Identity The focus group participants approached a series of aspects directly or indirectly related to the topic of the Romanians’ intra-EU migration. Every time a new topic was introduced by the debate moderators, the participants talked about migrants first by identifying symbolic barriers between “us” (here in the country) and “them” (the Romanians who left), which they later softened by redefining them through identity inclusion strategies. Therefore, first, the opposition between “us” and “them” was mostly built by evaluative attributions, both negative (or, in any case, problematic) and positive. For instance, the participants often assigned qualities to migrants in comparison to “us”, the ones who are here, especially as regards the concrete ways in which they reaffirm their attachment to the country of origin as civic subjects: R3: R1: R4:

“They’re more patriotic than we are…They queue up to vote… whereas we…” “Yes, they are very connected to what’s going on here. They’re better informed than the Romanians in the country.” “I think they could make a change and bring something new, new ways of working and systems and so on…sometimes they are more determined…”

Drawing attention to these differences, the groups produced representations of the migrants in relation to the collective identity, which was deconstructed by pointing to aspects and practices that, in their opinion, required more awareness, both from individuals and from the community. Next, oppositions of the type “them” compared to “us” (coexisting categories) or “them” vs. “us” (exclusive categories) were mitigated by means of an essentialist inclusion strategy. Thus, the focus group participants referred to migrants as a generic group (“them”), included in another generic group (“us”): “our fellow Romanians in Spain,” “they left, but they’re still our people”; “There were also news stories



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sympathetic towards our Romanians in Spain”; “there are few news stories that talk positively about us” [news stories about migrants]. Linguistically, this strategy is based primarily on the use of the first person plural pronoun as well as the possessive pronoun/ adjective (“ours”/ “our”). This type of positioning was noticed especially when the participants in the focus groups discussed aspects such as the difficult situation faced by Romanians who work in other countries, the excessive press coverage of negative events involving Romanian migrants in the EU, therefore contexts in which migrants are put in an unfavorable position, both in the countries of destination and in the country of origin (see in this sense the matter of the diaspora vote). Depending on the thematic context of the focus group, the participants used this strategy first in order to capitalize on collective identity, as a principle that has primacy over any other features or ways of understanding “the Romanians there”. Second, by this manner of enunciating inclusion (“they are all still ‘ours’”), they constructed a collective responsibility (related to the assumption of a collective identity), “extended” to the Romanians who work in the EU. An argument frequently brought up in the Romanian public sphere is that some negative situations in the diaspora, in which Romanian citizens are involved, should be assumed as such by the Romanians in the country of origin, with all the consequences thereof for the country’s international image, the Romanians’ reputation, etc. Another example pertaining to the essentialist inclusion strategy is the controversy created around a so-called “diaspora vote” in the presidential elections in 2009. The controversy arose immediately after the end of the electoral campaign, when especially in online comments it was discussed that the Romanians living abroad (the diaspora) voted mainly in favor of the opposition candidate, this type of explanation for the president’s election triumph becoming one of the main themes of the post-presidential election period. The media debated the allegations—of which some revealed a partisan political discourse—that deplored that the victory in elections had been “decided” by the diaspora, going on to say that those who do not live permanently in the country should not vote. Within the focus groups, this topic also generated several types of positionings. Some respondents redefined the subject of voting from the beginning, by showing that it was not relevant for society, and introduced another problem, that of political participation in terms of voting (“I wanted to say, I don’t know if it’s clear what I meant, that it’s a false problem, whether Romanians abroad should vote or not. Our problem is right here, that we don’t go [to vote] to make our choice known.”). Other

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participants, who agreed, in principle, that it would be unfair for the Romanians in the diaspora to turn the balance of the ballot, first built a relationship of exclusion (“we, the ones who live here,” have a different understanding of the problems that we face from “them, those who live there,” who participate at a distance), and then shifted it into one of inclusion, based on the argument that Romanians abroad are part of the national community (“They see things differently from us. And, on the other hand, it is legitimate to claim that they should vote, because they’re our people.”). For them, the vote of those who work abroad is rather justified as a “concession” that is rational, substantiated by collective identity. For those who showed themselves skeptical about the relevance of this issue, what matters is to change some patterns of political participation (such as absenteeism or lack of civic mobilization), also considered to be rooted in certain mentalities. In both cases, participants do not discuss voting in terms of citizenship rights.5 Hence, collective identity is invoked as a principle of intrinsic belonging to the national community. The specific mode of engagement towards migrants consists in the reaffirmation of collective identity, a “given” symbolic condition that is constitutive of the daily reality, local or transnational, positive or negative.

The “Moral Inclusion” Strategy: Interrogating Collective Identity Another way in which focus group participants attempted to reduce the opposition between “them” (the Romanians working in EU countries) and “us” (the Romanians who stayed at home) is through moral positioning. Thus, participants often assumed a moral positioning towards migrants, in order to explain the decision of those who go to work in another country (“after all, they are the ones taking a chance and, as such, we must understand them”), including certain options and mentalities that they have, with which the subjects do not necessarily identify. The participants constructed a relationship of solidarity with the migrants, based on a strategy that I have labelled “moral inclusion”. In many of their interventions, the respondents highlighted the sacrifice made by the Romanians who went to look for a job in other countries, given the lack of opportunities and viable policies in their home country. As the participants continued to show, the courage of those who left in search of a new life should be recognized and taken into account by “us,” who stayed in the country.



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“But it’s about the pain he goes through there, absolutely nothing can make up for that.” “It’s hard, it’s hard for Romanians. I met Romanians in the month I was there, and it’s very hard, they wanted to come back home, even if life is harder for us, here.” “It’s about two sisters who had a hard time trying to find a job here [in Romania], for a year or so. They both graduated with grade ten, at the top of their class. They just couldn’t find work.”

In the next step of the interaction, the participants redefined the issue of the Romanians’ migration and their sacrifice, stressing that these aspects actually revealed the “real” problem, namely the way in which Romanian society has evolved after the fall of communism (“the problem is not theirs; it’s ours, as a society”). In the participants’ opinion, “we” (as a national community, but mostly with reference to non-migrants) also have a moral obligation to recognize the actual state of society. In this sense, a range of identity self-interrogations and value judgments were used, through which collective identity was deconstructed, being debated in relation to themes and contexts such as the enactment of various forms of solidarity, poor promotion of competencies, or instability of systems (such as education), with direct consequences on the individual and the communities: R1: R3: R5:

“We rather bend the rules and we manage in any way that we can…” “Let’s be more conscientious, more serious, more involved, more responsible.” “We should learn by ourselves, because when we leave here and get there, we become suddenly responsible and hardworking, and diligent…”

It is noticeable that, although the participants started from the fact that economic migration was caused by the absence of coherent policies in the country of origin, they pointed to the decision-makers’ responsibility only implicitly, placing instead emphasis on a collective responsibility to recognize that the current state of society could also be explained through collective ways of being. The discursive construction of the moral inclusion of migrants is therefore integrated into a type of identity discourse. Thus, the migrants’ sacrifice is recast as a source of collective self-reflexivity regarding the collective “we”.

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The Instrumental Strategy: Competitive Identities The focus group participants constantly assessed the actions of Romanians working in the EU from the point of view of Romania’s image—this was the dominant pattern throughout the focus groups. The migrants’ positive deeds (“heroes”) became “ours,” the Romanians’; the negative deeds associated with Romanian migrants in the countries of destination were assumed (as an inclusive “us”), but also condemned, and, at the same time, used to criticize certain public opinions in the destination countries (political leaders, journalists, anonymous persons, etc.) for transferring the negative image generated by individuals and groups (criminals, etc.) to the entire Romanian society: “Yes, because they generalize. If some individuals steal and they happen to be Romanian citizens, they say all Romanians are the same…”. In the focus group interventions, the migrants were represented predominantly as “resources” for the reconstruction of collective identity. In other words, migrants were assigned a “role,” that of contributing to “the nation’s symbolic capital” (Beciu & Lazăr, 2015, 2016), that is to a competitive country image. I have labelled this strategy the instrumental inclusion of migrants. The issue of the perception of migrants and, by extension, the perception of “us” as a collective identity was defined by participants based on a principle of generality, that of competitive identity: thus, certain cases (for instance migrants who distinguished themselves by means of positive actions in the countries of destination) were considered relevant for the category of “exemplary Romanians,” while other cases, negative ones, fell under a derogatory category. From this perspective, competitive migrants must “represent” and “symbolize” their country, and, therefore, they must “succeed” wherever they go. When they are assigned this “role,” migrants are also assigned a moral responsibility. As a reaction to this type of understanding, dominant in the interaction between participants, another point of view took shape at a certain point, less intensely expressed: “That man does not represent Romania; he represents himself, individually”; “There’s talent everywhere. The only difference between one people and another is just that: a difference in language, traditions, customs. There’s nothing else; we’re all humans, there’s no other difference.” Several examples illustrating these positionings below: R1: R2:

“The people I know there have success stories (…) I get emotional when a Romanian is praised, when they live well, when they are commended.” “I’d like them to represent our country differently than they have done so far…But, anyway, they’ve changed many things, for the better, too,



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because all this time they’ve been gone they’ve sent so much money to the country…” “I’d like them to represent us better…” “I think it’s better if we say ‘the Romanians abroad,’ so that they’re described as a unitary category…” “But there are also Romanians who made a good impression abroad (…) This made me feel proud, when a Romanian saved a child from drowning somewhere in Italy, if I remember well.” “I don’t think the exceptional ones are presented—or, if they are, they are presented to a very small extent. In general, they report on gossip, whenever somebody steals something…” “I saw on Romania, Te Iubesc! [Romania, I Love You TV show], like a month ago, a Romanian living in Australia who made it. He made I don’t know how many million dollars there.”

This way of representing the migrants is based on language that is common in the promotional sphere (“success stories,” “image,” “category,” etc.), used constantly by the media and the political class. Relying on this type of language, the participants underline the need for desirable actions from migrants, the need to produce the category of Romanian “winners,” people “who made it” (actually one of the interviewees used the term “category” to refer to the Romanians who are successful abroad). On the other hand, these discursive practices establish a relationship of power—a “symbolic ownership” (Beciu & Lazăr, 2016) of the Romanians who work in the EU, from whom exemplary performances or deeds are expected. In order to better understand this positioning towards migrants, we must take into account a type of discourse that has gained ground in the Romanian public sphere, regarding the country’s international image. After 1990, Romania’s image has become a recurrent theme in the public space. Around this media topic, the civil society and political actors have negotiated symbolically all kinds of definitions and interpretations, a process that acquired significance during Romania’s EU candidacy, and that has continued after Romania gained access in 2007. During this period, various ways of constructing the country image as a public problem have taken shape: from types of arguments and expressions in public discourses (“Romania’s external image,” “Romania’s image,” “the country image”, “tourism brand,” “country brand,” etc.) to institutional approaches (governmental programs and campaigns). The concept of “country brand” (Marat, 2009; Volcic & Andrejevic, 2011) has been increasingly employed in public debates, contributing to the formation of a dominant discourse, according to which, in a globalized and

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competitive world, Romania should position itself as a brand. As shown above (see also Beciu & Lazăr, 2015), in Romania and other postcommunist countries, national branding is used not only in the sphere of expert advice and discourse, but also in the media sphere and everyday life. The participants in the focus groups recontextualized, thus, public discourses that have been frequently encountered in the political and media spheres over the past few years: a political-entrepreneurial discourse in terms of “country brand,” but also a compassionate-sensationalist discourse, present in TV shows such as “Românii au talent” [“Romania’s Got Talent”], “România dansează” [“Romania’s Got To Dance”] or “Vocea României” [“The Voice of Romania”], a combination of entertainment and reality TV shows that scout artistic talent among anonymous people, turning them into “national heroes.” In fact, during the discussion, the participants oftentimes stressed that they would like the media to cover the migrants and their exceptional deeds more extensively and in the same manner that these reality TV shows, which they named explicitly, presented ordinary Romanians.

Discussion This chapter has analyzed representations of intra-EU Romanian migrants in the discourses of non-migrants who have an indirect connection with this phenomenon (family, friends, etc.) or who are merely observers of the phenomenon, which has been intensely debated in the political and media spheres in Romania. The chapter highlights discursive mechanisms by means of which non-migrants built modes of engagement and “proximity-distance” relationships towards migrants and, in this context, (de-)constructed and negotiated meanings of collective identity. I was also interested in analyzing how these groups recontextualized political and media discourses formed over time in relation to migration and other issues. In this sense, the main hypothesis was that debating public problems has a constitutive function in the individual and collective identity construction of social actors. First, the research has shown that the participants (non-migrants) approached the theme of migration as a background for launching a debate on collective identity. Their positionings towards migrants revealed various practices of reaffirming collective identity. Within the focus groups, migration was discussed in relation to aspects such as economic and social issues, inadequate policies, or the migrants’ experiences in the receiving country, but collective



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identity was central in the interventions, both as a theme and a mode of enunciation (the participants used, most of the time, the pronoun “we”). One of the peculiarities of these exchanges is that the respondents alternated an essentialist understanding of collective identity, viewed as intrinsic belonging to the national community (“our Romanians”), with practices of collective identity deconstruction, by stressing a collective responsibility for what “is going wrong” in society. Second, the research has uncovered a certain pattern in the construction of the “proximity-distance” relationship with migrants. In a first move, the respondents identified a series of differences: “they” vs. “we”; then, in a second move, these oppositions were “normalized” through the use of inclusion strategies. The analysis of strategies of inclusion has revealed certain meanings that the participants attributed to collective identity in relation to specific problems (mentalities, the relationship between “us,” Romanians, and the international public opinion). By using these strategies, the participants in the focus groups constructed a relationship of symbolic inequality with the “Other,” whom they relativized, indicating, in this way, the existence of identity problems that the entire Romanian society is faced with. Finally, at group level, the representation of migrants and the problematization of migration from the perspective of collective identity were mediated by dominant discourses in the political and media spheres, in relation to issues directly or indirectly linked with intra-EU migration. Thus, the instrumental positioning towards the Romanians who work abroad (“categories” of migrants were constructed) indicates the recontextualization of media practices of making economic migration visible (see the praise bestowed upon the Romanians who contribute, by means of their exceptional performances or deeds, to a good international reputation for Romania). The focus group participants interpreted only tangentially the potential roles assigned to migrants from the perspective of the social and cultural experience that they acquire in a transnational situation and, implicitly, the influence that they could have with regard to citizenship practices in the sending and receiving countries.

Notes 1. The first version of this article appeared in the The Romanian Journal of Sociology, XXIV(5– 6), 369–386, in 2013. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher. 2. This discursive pattern can be found in various forms of media discourse on migration: from newspaper sections and media campaigns to (non-)governmental policies and actions.

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3. The documentary “The Romanians Are Coming,” broadcast by Channel 4 in 2015, generated intense debates in the Romanian media sphere regarding the fact that the film was based on a stereotypical discourse and generalizations on Romanian migrants (Beciu et al., 2017). 4. The plural is used in the presentation of the focus groups design because the research project was conducted in a team (together with the co-editors of this volume). The findings discussed in this chapter are the result of individual work. 5. During the next presidential campaign, in 2014, the media explicitly debated “the diaspora vote” in relation to the practices of citizenship, stressing that the Romanian migrants who worked or lived abroad had the same rights as the Romanians in the country of origin.

References Balabanova, E., & Balch, A. (2010). Sending and receiving: The ethical framing of intra-EU migration in the European press. European Journal of Communication, 25(4), 382–397. Bartram, D. (2013). Migration, return, and happiness in Romania. European Societies, 15(3), 408–422. Bauböck, R. (2010). Cold constellations and hot identities: Political theory questions about transnationalism and diaspora. In R. Bauböck & T. Faist (Eds.), Diaspora and transnationalism: Concepts, theories and methods (pp. 295–321). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Beciu, C., & Lazăr, M. (2015). Production d’identités et modes d’engagement dans les débats médiatiques sur la migration en Europe: Le cas de la Roumanie. Social Science Information, 54(1), 38–51. Beciu, C., & Lazăr, M. (2016). Instrumentalising the ‘Argument of Mobility’: Discursive Patterns in the Romanian Media. In M. Endres, K. Manderscheid, & C. Mincke (Eds.), The mobilities paradigms. Discourses and ideologies (pp. 48–67). London: Routledge. Beciu, C., Mădroane, I. D., Ciocea, M., & Cârlan, A. I. (2017). Media engagement in the transnational social field: Discourses and repositionings on migration in the Romanian public sphere. Critical Discourse Studies, 14(3), 256–275. Boccagni, P. (2012). Rethinking transnational studies: Transnational ties and the transnationalism of everyday life. European Journal of Social Theory, 15(1), 117–132. Charaudeau, P. (1992). Grammaire de sens et de l’expression. Paris: Hachette. Cefaï, D. (2013). L’expérience des publics: Institution et réflexivité. EspacesTemps.net Travaux. Retrieved March 4, 2013 from http://www.espacestemps.net/ articles/lexperience-des-publicsinstitution-et-reflexivite/ De Fina, A., & King, A. K. (2011). Language problem or language conflict? Narratives of immigrant women’s experiences in the US. Discourse Studies, 13(2), 163–188. Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge. Faist, T. (2010). Diaspora and transnationalism: What kind of dance partners? In R. Bauböck & T. Faist (Eds.), Diaspora and transnationalism: Concepts, theories and methods (pp. 9–35). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.



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Featherstone, D., Philipps, R., & Waters, J. (2007). Introduction: Spatialities of transnational networks. Global networks. A journal of transnational affairs, 7(4), 383–391. Gamlen, A. (2008). Why Engage Diasporas?. ESRC Centre on Migration, Policy and Society Working Paper, 63. University of Oxford. Retrieved from https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/ media/WP-2008-063-Gamlen_Why_Engage_Diasporas.pdf Georgiou, M. (2006). Diaspora, identity and the media. Diasporic transnationalism and mediated spatialities. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Glick Schiller, N. (2005). Long-distance nationalism. In M. Ember, C. R. Ember, & I. Skoggard (Eds.), Encyclopedia of diasporas: Immigrant and refugee cultures around the world (Vol. 1, pp. 570–580). New York, NY: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. Ho, E. L.-E. (2011). ‘Claiming’ the diaspora: Elite mobility, sending state strategies and the spatialities of citizenship. Progress in Human Geography, 35(6), 757–772. Köngeter, S., & Smith, W. (Eds.). (2015). Transnational agency and migration: Actors, movements and social support crossing borders. Preface and acknowledgments (pp. 1–20). New York, NY: Routledge. Lacroix, T. (2016). Hometown transnationalism. Long distance villageness among Indian Punjabis and North African Berbers. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Levitt, P., & Glick Schiller, N. (2004). Conceptualizing simultaneity: A transnational social field perspective on society. International Migration Review, 38(3), 1002–1039. Mădroane, I. D. (2016). The media construction of remittances and transnational social ties: Discourses and identities in the Romanian Press. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 23(2), 228–246. Marat, E. (2009). Nation branding in central Asia: A new campaign to present ideas about the state and the nation. Europe-Asia Studies, 61(7), 1123–1136. Mihelj, S., Bajt, V., & Pankov, M. (2009). Television news, narrative conventions and national imagination. Discourse & Communication, 3(1), 57–78. Mugge, L. (2013). Ideologies of nationhood in sending-state transnationalism: Comparing Surinam and Turkey. Ethnicities, 13(3), 338–358. Nieswand, B. (2008). Ghanaian migrants in Germany and the social construction of Diaspora. African Diaspora, 1(1), 28–52. Ogunyemi, O. (2015). Journalism, audiences, and diaspora. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ragazzi, F. (2009). Governing diasporas. International Political Sociology, 3, 378–397. Ryan, L., Erel, U., & D’Angelo, A. (2015). Migrant capital networks, identities and strategies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sinatti, G., & Horst, C. (2015). Migrants as agents of development: Diaspora engagement discourse and practice in Europe. Ethnicities, 15(1), 134–152. Triandafyllidou, A. (2009). Migrants and ethnic minorities in post-Communist Europe. Negotiating diasporic identity. Ethnicities, 9(2), 226–245. Volcic, Z., & Andrejevic, M. (2011). Nation branding in the era of commercial nationalism. International Journal of Communication, 5, 598–618. Weinar, A. (2010), Instrumentalising diasporas for development: International and European policy discourses. In R. Bauböck & T. Faist (Eds.), Diaspora and transnationalism: Concepts, theories and methods (pp. 73–89). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

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Wodak, R. (2002). Fragmented identities: Redefining and recontextualizing national identity. In P. Chilton & C. Schäffner (Eds.), Politics as text and talk: Analytic approaches to political discourse (pp. 143–169). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Wodak, R. (2010). ‘Us’ and ‘Them’: Inclusion and exclusion—Discrimination via discourse. In G. Delanty, R. Wodak, & P. R. Jones (Eds.), Identity, belonging and migration (pp. 54–77). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Yuval-Davis, N. (2006). Belonging and the politics of belonging. Patterns of Prejudice, 40(3), 197–214.

final remarks Media, Migration, and Transnational Practices Camelia Beciu, Mălina Ciocea, Irina Diana Mădroane, and Alexandru I. Cârlan

Transnational migration in relation to the media has been amply treated in empirical studies based on analytical frameworks specially designed for addressing this topic. In general, the specialized literature has turned its attention to media practices in the host states as resources of visibility for migration and its actors. The chapters included in this volume have identified certain particularities of intra-EU labor migration and engaged in the analysis of the sending country perspective, as it is articulated in media discourse, proposing a number of methodological tools for examining the ways the media appropriate the migration topic. The fall of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe and the EU enlargement to some of these states have resulted into large flows of economic migrants, in particular from countries such as Poland, Romania, or Bulgaria to Western European member-states. In this context, the sending country has come to the fore not only as a socio-economic actor, but also as a site of debate on the social phenomenon of migration. In Romania, the empirical focus of this volume, the topic is embedded in the “national conversation”, from various claims, often related to policy-making, and calls for public action, to arguments on the reconfiguration of social solidarity and identity discourses; from media and social campaigns to institutional and media debates. In most of

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these countries, emigration is therefore viewed not simply as an event that occurs at a certain moment and captures the public attention for a short span of time, but as an ongoing social reality, with broader implications for social life and governance. This is the major premise that informs the studies in this volume and that, we believe, can be extended to other public spheres, in sending countries where migration has intensified. On its basis, several areas can be developed for future research at the intersection of migration, media, and discourse studies.

Media, Migration, and the Social Construction of Public Debate The new contexts of migration (e.g. intra-EU labor migration) make necessary a reexamination of the role played by the media as one of the actors engaged in practices of visibility of and debate on migration. In general, the studies that take a critical approach to media discourse identify a series of particularities regarding the media coverage of migration, media representations, and frames. But how can these particularities of the media landscape be explained in relation to the public space? An area of research that deserves further attention is the social actors’ symbolic negotiations of the issue of migration in connection to the public interest, out of which meanings, claims, responsibilities, and calls for action arise. The modalities of covering and framing migration by the media cannot be dissociated from certain stages of debate in the public sphere. These can be characterized by stable configurations of meanings, ways of seeing a problem, and modes of engagement (“ownership”, in Gusfield’s terms, 1981) or, on the contrary, by new articulations that come together through a dislocation of the established ones (“disownership”). In other words, the identification of a set of topics or frames would be enriched by an analysis of the positionings that are formed around events, actions, and statements about migration. The social actors’ positions are grounded in various forms of generality (Cefaï, 2013), such as norms, values, commitments, responsibilities, public actions, etc., which reveal practices of negotiation around what should be considered a matter of public concern. Of course, these processes are embedded in a variety of media formats and practices (ranging from infotainment to debate-oriented formats). We have linked all these aspects to the concept of public problem, which we consider useful to the analysis of media discourse and of the public



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sphere because it permits the correlation between media practices, with their specificities at a moment in time, and the social construction of a particular debate, as a dynamic and competitive landscape of positionings and arenas. On the other hand, within this construction, we can distinguish specific accountability practices and types of public action, including arenas of debate where the emphasis is not always on mobilizing decision-makers into taking action (for example, debates around themes that are only just emerging as social problems, therefore at a stage where the need for public action is not yet clearly felt). The concept of public problem also allows for an illuminating analysis of the role of the media in constituting a public around a problem. Through discursive practices, the media build various stances for the public and, in this volume, we were interested in highlighting such discursive mechanisms. The influence of the media cannot be reduced to the “media text” and the circumstances of reception, but is constitutive of the formation of the public as a social actor, who communicates or gets mobilized around a problem.

Migration and the Media as Engaging/ Engaged Actor Starting from the topic of intra-EU labor migration, we have looked more closely at a particular aspect in the production of the public space, namely the changing role of the media in the construction of public problems. We have been interested in identifying discursive practices through which the media define public problems by formulating claims. The extensive literature on the public space generally explores the role of the media from the perspective of public opinion formation, achieved by means of “managing the level of visibility” (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013, p. 792) of events, actors, and issues in terms of agenda, ways of framing, journalistic practices, and media structures. The advent of the new media has shifted the scholarly discussion on the public sphere to an “emerging model of the digitally enabled citizen.” (Papacharissi, 2010, p. 19) The studies in this volume have centered on the ways the media of a sending country—Romania—confer visibility to the debates on migrants and to the modes of engagement towards migration as a phenomenon that concerns “us”, as individuals, citizens, and society. The journalists’ practices of taking a stance on the multiple facets of migration have been the main focus of several chapters. We view such practices as a manifestation of a growing

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trend regarding media agency. The journalists’ performance of a critical role is an essential mechanism in the construction of public problems and the production of public space, which requires nuanced analyses, given the pluralization of public spheres, the hybridization of media genres and formats, and the increasing fragmentation of publics. On the other hand, post-Habermasian, non-normative approaches to the public space can be strengthened, at an empirical level, through the analysis of the modalities in which social actors, the media included, become engaged in the legitimization of public problems.

The Media within the Transnational Social Field We have discussed at length the participation of the media in the construction of migration as a public problem through practices of appropriating the transnational. A key aspect we have highlighted shows that, in particular contexts/ circumstances, the media construct a transnational social field, and, at the same time, position themselves as actors in this field. Starting from this assumption, future research could refine methodological instruments and provide new analytical insights into how the “national angle” is shaped within the dynamics of establishing transnational public arenas. As Antonsich and Matejskova (2015) have recently stated, the national, as a symbolic-discursive and institutional referent, is redefined within a plurality of connected contexts and practices: “Far from a homogenous, singular, fixed, stable referent, the national as a symbolic register has always been continuously remade, adjusting to mutating socio-political and economic circumstances.” (Antonsich & Matejskova, 2015, p. 502) It thus becomes relevant how the media in sending and destination countries appropriate transnationalism through practices of interpretation or reification of its multiple manifestations (diaspora projects, identity reconstructions in various contexts of migration, emergent forms of mobility, citizenship and cross-border mobility, etc.). The direction of research we propose is not concerned with the extent to which the transnational as an external referent can be found in media discourse, but with how the media construct positions for various social actors in relation to the transnational, while at the same time articulating one for themselves, within a specific field of symbolic struggles. Related to this direction is the analysis of a discursive nexus where media discourses, along with institutional ones, problematize, produce knowledge, and aim at controlling the specific subject area of emigration by implicitly



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producing normative models of diasporas. Diasporas emerge thus as actors in an extra-territorial form of governmentality, which further leads to the transformation of state-diaspora and, more broadly, state-civil society relations. Media discourses are crucial in rendering such transformations commonsensical and integrating them into an everyday agenda, through all kinds of practices (naturalization, definition of problems, representation, etc.). Research into the role of the media in the mediation and appropriation of transnationalism could provide complementary analyses to the study of immigration policies, diaspora engagement by state and non-state actors, or patterns of transnational migration in established fields, such as international relations or political geography.

References Antonsich, M., & Matejskova, T. (2015). Immigration societies and the question of ‘the national’. Ethnicities, 15(4), 495–508. Cefaï, D. (2013). L’expérience des problèmes publics: Institution et réflexivité. Sur la sociologie des problèmes publics. EspacesTemps.net. Retrieved October 15, 2017 from https://www. espacestemps.net/articles/lexperience-des-publics-institution-et-reflexivite/ Gusfield, J. R. (1981). The culture of public problems: Drinking-driving and the symbolic order. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Papacharissi, Z. (2010). A private sphere. Democracy in a digital age. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Tenenboim-Weinblatt, K. (2013). The management of visibility: Media coverage of kidnapping and captivity cases around the world. Media, Culture & Society, 35(7), 791–808.

about the contributors

Camelia Beciu is Professor at the University of Bucharest and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Romanian Academy. She has published extensively on the media construction of public issues, political communication, and the public sphere. The construction of migration in public discourses has been one of the prominent research projects she has coordinated. Among the most recent publications: invited editor (with Mădroane, Ciocea, Cârlan) “Power relations, agency and discourse in transnational social fields”, Critical Discourse Studies, 2017; “La crise des réfugiés comme discours sur l’Europe. Le cas de la presse roumaine en ligne” (2017); “Mediating public issues in Romanian broadcast talk: Personalized communication strategies” (co-author), Television and New Media, 2017. Alexandru I. Cârlan is Lecturer at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration and a member of the Communication, Discourse, Public Problems (CoDiPo) Laboratory. In his research, he applies insights from rhetoric and argumentation theory to the analysis of various public problems as they are constructed by media and institutional discourses, investigating how these discourses claim, perform and (re)shape collective identities.

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Mălina Ciocea is Reader at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration (SNSPA), Bucharest, and a member of the Communication, Discourse, Public Problems (CoDiPo) Laboratory of the Centre for Research in Communication. She has been a team member in two research projects coordinated by Professor Camelia Beciu (Diaspora in the Romanian political-media sphere. From event to the media construction of public problems and The phenomenon of workforce migration and the formation of the diasporic public: impact on the public space and institutional practices). She is currently coordinating a group of young researchers working on the new Romanian diaspora (Spiru Haret Grants). Alina Dolea is Lecturer at Bournemouth University, UK. She holds a PhD in Communication Sciences and received the EUPRERA PhD Award for Excellent Doctoral Theses in 2015. She was Fulbright Senior Scholar 2015–2016 at USC Annenberg School and SCIEX Fellow 2015 at Fribourg University. Mirela Lazăr is Professor at the University of Bucharest. She has a PhD summa cum laude in philology from the same University. She has authored, among other works, The newspaper in the likeness of television (2005) and The new television and sensational journalism (2008). Irina Diana Mădroane is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the West University of Timișoara (Romania). She has a PhD in philology (West University of Timișoara) and an MA in sociology (Lancaster University). Her main specializations are critical discourse analysis and the study of media discourse, and she has done extensive research on the construction of migrant identities in public discourses. She is the author of the book Romanians in the right-wing British press: A critical discourse analysis approach (2014), and of numerous studies published in peer-reviewed, national and international journals and volumes. Nicolae Perpelea is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Sociology, Romanian Academy, and Associate Professor at the University of Bucharest. He is the author of several books, including Corpul comunicării provocat. Modele sociologice ale pragmaticii expresiviste [The challenges of performativity in communication. Sociological models of pragmatic expressivism] (2002), and Images of contemporary sociology (2007), in which visual imagery (paintings, photos, film, new media, and images of sociology projected through popular fiction) is used to teach sociology and to advance understanding in social research.

index

A A2 nationals, 142, 145 See also labor market access accountability, 19, 44, 67, 255 Adevărul (newspaper), 71, 130–31 adventure news, 206–7, 212 adversarialness, 176 advocacy campaigns, See media advocacy campaign(s) advocate, journalist’s role as role as, 189, 193, 194 affection, as sentimental topic 212–14 aged care provision. See elder care agency, migrants’, 17, 65, 234, 236 Aksoy, A. 17, 65 Amossy, R., 44 Anderson, Benedict, 209 Andrejevic, M., 86, 111, 247, 251 Anghel, R. G., 143

anti-immigration discourse, 52 anti-immigration campaign(s) 50, 54, 159 claims 146 coverage 140 discourse 52 public attitudes 147, 162 rhetoric 52, 54 See also debate, Brexit Appadurai, 65, 80 Arendt, Hannah, 215, 218 argument, 131 framing and, 120–25 in media advocacy campaign, 181–84 argumentation theory, 117, 118 argumentative genre, deliberation as, 118–121 Aristotle, 118 audiences diasporic, 16–17

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Facebook and, 208 in media advocacy campaigns, 177, 179–180, 184–193 response to mediation of distant suffering, 20 See also public Augustine, St., 213, 224

B Băsescu, Traian, 1–2, 13, 63–64, 72, 74, 77–78, 116, 117, 129–130 media reaction to statement, 71 badanti, See also care workers 12 Bailey, O., 16–17 Bakhtin, M., 206 Balabanova, E., 18, 76, 124, 125, 134, 147 Balch, A., 18, 76, 124, 125, 134, 147 Balkans, perceptions of, 145, 155 Bauböck, 21, 33, 36, 235 Beciu, C., 203 belonging, 237 ways of, 236 Berger, P., 87, 108 Billig, 15 Blair, Tony, 156 blame, in Brexit debate, 156 Bleich, E., 18 Boccagni, P., 6, 15, 29, 33, 43, 58, 233, 235–236, 238, 250 Boltanski, L., 200, 205–6, 212, 221 brain drain, 64, 116 See also migration, professional Brexit debate. See debate, Brexit Brexit referendum campaign, debate about. See debate, Brexit Britain campaign to deter Romanian immigration, 47, 55 discourse on Romanian migrants in, 9, 50–57, 88, 132, 141–166 economic contribution of Romanians in, 57

immigration policy, 18, 143–44 number of migrants in, 161 restrictions for A2 nationals in, 145 Roma in, 47 See also debate, Brexit; government, British; labor market access; media, British; newspapers, British Brubaker, R., 21, 34, 69–70, 71, 72, 81 200–201

C Cameron, David, 145, 156, 157, 162 capital, migrants’, 10, 236 capital, economic, 236 capital, human, 66, 116 capital, material, 66, capital, moral, 191 capital, social, 8, 187 capital, symbolic, 13, 57, 246 capital, country image, 188 See also remittances capital, symbolic, 13 care provision, 13, 27–28, 175–194 care workers, 12, 187–89 See also elder care; migration, professional Castells, M., 86, 108 categorization, 23, 70, 76 causation, 124 Cefaï, 14, 19, 23, 32, 34, 141, 150, 167 Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), 4, 6 See also postcommunist countries; sending countries Charaudeau, P., 140, 148-49, 150, 160, 178, 241 children of migrants, 13 See also orphans of migration Chouliaraki, L., 19, 20, 34, 140, 168, 182, 184, 186, 187, 191, 196, 202, 206–208, 224, 230 circumstances, in practical reasoning, 124 in Brexit debate, 149, 152, 153–54, 160–64

index in debate on migration, 132 in deliberation, 119 in media advocacy campaign, 178, 180, 183–84 negative presentation of, 134 selective representation of, 128–29, 132 citizen-as-victim discourses, 25, 75–76, 186, 191 citizen, diasporic, 64 citizenship, cosmopolitan, 65 citizenship, cultural, 65 citizenship, European, 126, 143 See also debate, Brexit; European Union (EU); movement, freedom of civic change, 10 civic culture, 65 civic engagement, 65 See also engagement, values civic role, of Romanian journalists, 55, 58 civil society, 92–93, 98 claims, 178–79 for action, 121 in Brexit debate, 143–48 in media advocacy campaigns, 176, 178–79, 182 of representation, 179, 190 cognitive dimension, of deliberation, 124 Cohen, N., 10 Cohen, Stanley, 210 collective identity, 14, 241–48 communitarian arguments, 43, 76–79, 126–28, 145 in analysis of Băsescu’s statement, 130 in debate on migration, 131, 133 in debate on Roma, 132 in French media, 133–34 community of gazes, 202 compassion, 215, 217 conclusion, preferred, 155 See also frames/framing Confessions (Augustine), 213 Conrad, M., 42 consequences, in practical reasoning, 119, 124, 127, 147, 152, 155, 157, 184

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consequentialism, 126 constructionist approach, to understanding diaspora, 70–71 See also media construction of migration constructivists, 68 convergent media, 201 corruption, 93, 155 cosmopolitan arguments, 76–79, 126–28, 145 in analysis of Băsescu’s statement, 130 in debate on migration, 133 in debate on Roma, 132 in French media, 133–34 cosmopolitan solidarity, 162 Cottle, S, 18, 34, 43,59, 187, 190–192, 196 counter-discourses, 44, 45 analyzing, 45 identity, 24, 43, 55 macro-strategies in, 51 as strategy of (de)legitimizing dominant discourses, 46, 50–57 country image, 50 civil society and, 98 impact of migration on construction of, 83–107 Roma migration and, 76 Romania’s, 13–14, 24, 25, 192, 246–48 See also country image promotion; country status; nation branding; public problem of country image country image capital, 188 country image promotion, 83 campaigns, 93, 99–105 diaspora and, 96, 97 on government’s agenda, 94–95 linkage with migration, 96–105, 106–7 in marketing communication, 101–5 by Ministry of Tourism, 94–95 as nation branding, 95 research on, 84–85 Romanian diaspora and, 97 See also country image; nation branding; public problem of country image country status, 24, 41–54

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See also country image; country image promotion; nation branding Cox, Robert, 179 crisis, public performance of, 194 See also media advocacy campaign(s) critical discourse analysis (CDA), 29, 43, 46, 117, 148, 150, 240 Critical Theory, 86 critical thinking, in public diplomacy, 86–87 cultural pluralism, 162

D Dahlgren, P, 65, 81, 118, 135, 203, 230 Daily Mail (newspaper), 151 See also debate, Brexit; media, British; newspapers, British Daily Mirror (newspaper), 146, 151 See also debate, Brexit; media, British; newspapers, British Dayan, D., 204 debate(s), public, 69, 148 on Britain’s EU membership, 149, 247 on country promotion/image/brand, 87, 89, 96, 98 on migration/transnationalism, 2, 7, 15–16, 42, 70, 142, 144, 157, 164–65, 238, 254 See also public problem. on French expulsion of Roma, 131–33 on migration, 18, 125, 131–34 (See also debate, Brexit) positions in, 126–28 (See also communitarian arguments; cosmopolitan arguments) public, 7 See also deliberation debate, Brexit, 26–27 analytical framework, 148–150 appeal to sovereign people in, 158–59, 165 blame in, 156 British government in, 156–57

claims in media and, 143–48 discursive strategies in, 149–150, 152–160 engagement in, 150 expert knowledge in, 153–54, 157 Leave campaign, 165 left-wing newspapers in, 160–64, 165–66 performativity in, 150 political responsibility in, 156 populist style, 159 practical argumentation in, 149, 151–165 Remain campaign, 165–66 representational associations in, 155 representations in media and, 143–48 right-wing newspapers in, 151–160, 165 deliberation, 117, 125, 128 as argumentative genre, 118–121 cognitive dimension of, 124 as media practice, 118–121 model of, 119–121, 126–135 moral dimension of, 124 (See also values/ concerns) See also debate deliberative practices, 117, 118–121 democratization, 4, 68 denunciation, 184, 221, 228 denunciative rhetoric, 219 Derrida, J., 202, 230 destination countries. See host countries development, migrants and, 9, 115, 188 de Vreese, C. H., 121, 122 diaspora, 3 accounting for, 67–68 as actual community, 68 autonomy of agents within, 66 categories of practice and, 11, 21–22, 70, 71, 76–79 as category of analysis, 21–22 as category of mobilization, 11, 68 constructionist approach to understanding, 70–71 essentialized visions of, 66 governmental approach to, 98

index growth rate of, 88 as homogeneous, 10 ideal behaviors, 228 identities and, 65, 68, 70 as object of governmentality, 67 political engagement and, 68 role of media and, 17 state-citizen relations and, 65 vote and, 13, 187, 243–44 See also migrants; migration diasporactivism, 29, 201, 211 diasporapathy, 199, 201, 228 diaspora reification, 21, 24, 189 diasporic experience, 208 interpretations of, 199 mediation of, 24 news community’s hospitality to, 199 diasporic public, 28 diasporic stance(s), 69–71, 79–80 Diminescu, 5, 6, 8, 30, 34, 143, 168 diplomacy, 84, 86–87, 100 discourse delegitimizing, 46, 50, 52–54 governmental, 10–11 as integral part of social structures, 21 legitimizing, 51–52 on migration, media practices and, 17–18, 21 relation with globalization, 21 as set of practices, 44 in transnational social field, 44 See also counter-discourses discrimination, 7–8, 10, 12 discursive interactions, 21 discursive representation(s), 46, 51, 240 See also representation, identity discursive strategies, in Brexit debate, 149–150, 152–164 discursive themes, 11–12 disownership of public problems, 69 distant suffering, 19–20, 28–29, 200, 205 doctors’ exodus, 11 See also migration, professional

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E economic crisis (2007/2008), 8, 42, 145, 146 economic migration, intra-EU, circular, 2, 4–5, 11–12, 233–34, 245, 249 economy in Brexit debate, 163 migrants’ contributions to, 8, 161 See also remittances ecstatic news, 207 elder care, 13, 27–28, 176–194 emergency news, 207, 219 emigrants, neglected, 10 emotional mediation, topics of, 221 empathetic curiosity, 212–14 engagement in Brexit debate, 150 of diaspora, 67 in media advocacy campaign, 180, 184–190 modes of, 46, 240–41 engineers’ exodus, 11 See also migration, professional entitlement to be help-needy, 218 See also elder care Entman, R. M., 121, 122, 135 entrepreneurs, country image promotion and, 101 enunciator, position of, 71 episteme, 70, 76 essentialism, strategic, 24 essentialist inclusion strategy, 242–44 ethical frames, 126–135, 145 ethical interpellation, 200, 202 eudaemonistic judgment, 217 European actor, Romania as, 53 Europeanization, 41–42 European status, 41 See also country image promotion; country status; nation branding European Union (EU) Romania’s accession to, 4, 5, 6, 41

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Romania’s country image in, 50 (See also country image; country image promotion; country status) See also debate, Brexit; labor market access; movement, freedom of European Union referendum campaign, debate about. See debate, Brexit exclusion, 11 expert knowledge in Brexit debate, 153–54, 157 in British approach to immigration, 144 in country image promotion, 105 in “Romania, I Love You”, 182 in stance against immigration, 144 Express (newspaper), 140, 151, 157 See also debate, Brexit; media, British; newspapers, British expressional topics, 221–24, 228

F Facebook, 201, 202, 208, 209, 224 Fairclough, Isabela, 118–19, 120, 123, 128, 166 Fairclough, N., 46, 118–19, 120, 123, 128, 149, 241 Faist, T., 21, 236 families, transnational, 176 See also orphans of migration; parents, migrants’ Farage, Nigel, 157 feminization of migration, 12 See also women Fish, S., 209–10 Foucault, M., 45, 46, 60, 66, 81, 208, 230 frames/framing, 27, 117, 120–25, 129–130, 145 as convergence of elements in debate, 129, 134 France debate on migration in, 132, 133–34

expulsion of Roma migrants, 7, 63, 72, 74, 117, 132, 133 media, 117, 132, 133–34 Fraser, Robert, 211

G Gamlen, A., 67 Gândul (newspaper) campaigns to take stands towards public discourse regarding Romanian migrants, 54–56 Geddes, A., 143 Georgiou, M, 16,18, 33, 35, 236, 251 Glick Schiller, N. 16, 22, 35, 36, 44, 60, 143, 169 globalization, relation with discourse, 21 goals, in practical reasoning in Brexit debate, 149, 152 in deliberation, 119 in media advocacy campaigns, 178, 180 Goffman, E., 121, 136 Gove, Michael, 156 governing, actors in, 67 government country image promotion and, 94–95 media as technologies of, 67 responsibility for migrants, 7 See also politicians/bureaucracy; state institutions; states government, British, 94, 145–46 in Brexit debate, 156–57 management of migration, 157 See also Brexit debate government, Romanian diaspora and, 10–11, 64, 97–98 public problem of country image promotion and, 96–101 governmentality diasporas as object of, 67 emigration and, 66–68

index neoliberal forms of, 70, 71 grassroots social integration, 6 groupism, 200 Guardian (newspaper), 47, 55, 101, 145, 146, 151, 162 See also debate, Brexit; media, British; newspapers, British Gusfield, J., 19, 27, 32, 35, 69, 71, 72, 73, 81, 141, 142, 150, 165, 169, 204

H Habermas, J., 118, 136 health care, 11, 63, 64, 74, 78, 189 See also elder care; migration, professional home countries. See sending countries Horst, C, 11, 68, 236 hospitality, media, 202 host countries debate on migration in, 131–34 (See also debate, Brexit) media in, 117 (See also media, British; media, French) migrants’ actions in, 13–14 migrants as symbolic resources for, 57 See also Britain; France; Italy; Spain human capital flight, 116 See also migration, professional human rights, 162 humor, as counter-discursive, 55

I ideal reader, 28, 208 identity, 4, 70 identity, civic, 76 identity, collective, 14, 235, 241–49 identity, competitive, 246–48 identity, European, 94 identity, migrants’ construction of, 27–28

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in media advocacy campaign, 184–190, 194 media and, 17 identity, national. See national identity identity, Romanian, 94, 98 identity, transnational, 21 identity construction of migrants, 234 mobility as site of, 6 of non-migrants, 11 identity counter-discourses, 24, 43, 55 identity imagination, 234 identity relationships with Other, 240 Iliescu, Ion, 93 immigration policy, British, 143–44 improper distance, 227 inclusion, 11 inclusion strategies, 242–48 Independent (newspaper), 145, 146 See also debate, Brexit; media, British inequality, migration as sphere of, 12 informed reader, 210, 211–12, 214 institutional theories, 68 instrumental cosmopolitanism (consequentialism), 77, 126 instrumentalization, 9, 14–15, 44, 47, 92, 106 See also logics of instrumentalization instrumental strategy of inclusion, 246–48 interactions, discursive, 21 interactive structures, 42 interdiscursivity, European public sphere and, 42, 58 See also recontextualization Internet, 103, 202 See also public spaces; social media/ networks See also Facebook interpretive community, 209 Italy badanti, 12 country image promotion in, 99–101 elder care in, 187–89

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Mailat case, 83, 96, 97, 98–99, 105 promotion of Romania in, 83

J Johnson, Boris, 156 Jones, P. J., 203 journalism civic role of, 58 convergent, 202 heterogeneity of, 71 See also media; media construction of migration; newspapers journalists, taxation of independent income and, 75–76 Joye, Stijn, 207–8 Jurnalul Naţional, 129

K Kaneva, N. 24, 35, 84, 86, 109 Kant, I., 227 knowledge, 70 knowledge, expert. See expert knowledge knowledge, public, 140–41, 147 Kunz, Rahel, 67 Kuypers, Jim, 125

L labor market access, 18, 42, 47, 50, 52–54, 73, 88, 116, 142, 144, 146 labor migration, intra-EU, 4–6, 9, 11–12, 16, 24, 26–7, 29, 42, 44, 47–, 50–3, 143–44, 241, 253–4 Lacroix, T., 237 Lakoff, G., 122, 136 language interpersonal metafunction of, 150 power relations and, 21, 43, 45–47, 49, 58, 65, 238, 240–41 240

Leave campaign. See debate, Brexit Levitt, P. 8, 16, 22, 35, 36, 44, 60, 143, 169 Livingstone, Sonia, 204 Lochard, G., 42 logics of instrumentalization, 105–6 long distance moral interpellation, 199 Luckman, T., 87, 108 Luther, Martin, 224

M Mail (newspaper), 140 See also debate, Brexit; media, British; newspapers, British Mailat case, 83, 96, 97, 98–99, 105 managed migration, 144 marketization of national identities, 84 Matei, Sorin Adam, 115–16 means-goal in practical reasoning, in Brexit debate, 152 media as engaging/engaged actor, suggested research on, 255–56 intra-EU economic migration in, 2 representations of migrants’ mobility patterns, 6 role of in defining migration as public problem, 25 (See also media construction of migration) role of in relation to diasporic communities, 17 as technologies of government, 67 within transnational social field, watchdog function of, 178 See also journalism media, British, 18 Brexit debate in, 139–166 construction of Britain’s EU membership as public problem, 141–43 discursive strategies used by, 152–160 on French expulsion of Roma, 132–33 left-wing newspapers, 160–64 on migrants, 9

index right-wing newspapers, 142, 151–160 media, French, 117, 132, 133–34 media, international, 92–93 media, non-diasporic, 17 media, of host countries, 3, 131–34 See also media, British; media, French media, of sending countries, 3, 24 See also media, Romanian media, Romanian, 9, 117 campaigns to take stands towards public discourse regarding Romanian migrants, 54–57 migration issue in, 42–58 (See also media construction of migration) use of identity counter-discourses, 43 See also media construction of migration media, transnational, 16–17 media advocacy campaign(s), 27–28, 175–194 argument in, 181–84 audiences in, 179–180, 184–193 calls for action in, 179 circumstances in, 183–84 claims in, 176, 182 representative claims in, 178–79, 190 solidarity in, 194 values in, 191 media and migration studies, 16–20 Media and Morality (Silverstone), 202 media construction of migration, 25, 88 media discourse on migration as public problem, 16 See also debate(s), public types of, 25–26 media hospitality, 202 mediapolis, 202 media practices deliberation as, 118–121 discourses on migration and, 17–18 mediation, 203, 204, 208, 227 medical community. See migration, professional medical system. See health care; migration, professional

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mercy policies, 215 Michailidou, A., 179 migrants as agents of development/modernization, 188 categories of, 13 moral distance towards, 24 number of, 175, 184, 185, 253 representations and evaluations of, 241 as symbolic resources for destination country, 57 See also diaspora migration, 4, 6, 11, 24 causal responsibility for, 73 context of, 4–5 factors in, 6 feminization of, 12 as goal, 9 governmentality and, 66–68 magnitude of, 2, 5, 12 management of, 6–7 in marketing communication, 101–5 problematization of, 44–58 (See also media construction of migration; public problem of migration) public perception of, 11 stages of, 5 views of, 115–16 See also Băsescu, Traian; diaspora migration, professional, 9, 64, 72, 116 as accomplishment, 74–75 causes of, 74 debates on consequences of, 116–135 healthcare and, 74 ownership of public problem, 72 See also diaspora migration, transnational, 2 migration, unskilled/general, 12, 72 See also diaspora; Roma migration policies approach to, 73–74 British, 18 of high-skilled vs. low-skilled migrants, 9 mobility, 6, 65

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See also diaspora mobilization, in advocacy argumentation, 178 modernization, 188 See also development moral dimension, of deliberation, 124 moral distance, 24, 227 moral inclusion strategy, 244–45 moral interpellation, 201 moral judgment, 73 motivations, for migration, 233 movement, freedom of, 6, 126, 139, 143, 145, 162 See also diaspora Müller, Herta, 115

N national identity, 43, 200 diasporas and, 65 establishing meanings of, 235 marketization of, 84 rediscovery of, 93 shaping of, 84 as territory-rooted, 68 nationalism methodological, 237 transnationalism and, 43–44 nation branding, 14, 84, 85 country image promotion as, 95 critical approach to, 86 in postcommunist countries, 86, 247–48 by Spain, 85–86 See also country image; country image promotion neglected news, 207–8 neoliberals, 68, 70, 71 neorealists, 68 neostructuralists, 68 network, 236–37 new public diplomacy, 84 news, categories of, 206–8 news alert, 206–7

news analysis, model of, 205–12 news community, 199, 227 concept of, 201 dimensions of, 209–12 hospitality to diaspora experience, 199 as space of dialogue for diasporactivism, 211 newspapers, British, 26–27, 150 conclusions about Brexit debate in, 165–66 left-wing, 160–64 right-wing, 151–160 Romanian immigration in, 139–166 sales figures, 147 See also debate, Brexit; media, British; newspapers, Romanian, 71 See also media, Romanian; non-migrants, 29 collective identity and, 248–49 inclusion strategies, 242–48 relation with migrants, 185, 241–42, 249 Romania’s image and, 246–48 understanding of migration, 235 normative approach, to media debates on migration, 125 norms, in media advocacy campaigns, 178 Năstase, Adrian, 94 Nussbaum, M., 212, 217

O object of political representation, construction of, 186 online publics formation, 28 opinion articles, 27, 79 orphans of migration, 11, 176–77 Other engagement with, 214 identity relationships with, 240 migrants as, 234 suffering of, 215 ownership of public problems, 69, 72

index

P parents, migrants’, 13, 27–28, 176–194 performativity, in Brexit debate, 150 personal imagery, 78 petition regarding elder care, 189–190 pity, 184, 194, 205, 215, 218 pluralism, cultural, 162 polemics, direct, 44, 47, 57 polemics, indirect, 44, 47, 57 policy approach, 73–74 See also migration policies policy change, 175 policy evaluation discourse, 73–74, 76 policy problem, migration as, 73–74 political engagement, 65 political remittances, 10 political responsibility in Brexit debate, 156 in media advocacy campaign, 180 See also government; politicians/ bureaucracy; states politicians/bureaucracy, 64 blamed for migration, 186 defining migration as individual solution against, 75 public denunciation of, 184 responsibility of, 24 state-citizen relations, 65 See also Băsescu, Traian; government, British; government, Romanian; state institutions positioning, migrants’, 17 postcommunist countries critical approach to nation branding in, 86 freedom of movement in, 6 migration and, 4 national branding and, 247–48 See also sending countries power agents, symbolic, 199 power discourses, country image promotion and, 84 power relations, 45

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language and, 240 redefining, 235 symbolic, 43, 51–52 in transnational field, 16 practical arguments, 26, 148 See also practical reasoning in Brexit debate, 149 concerning EU immigration, 151–165 practical reasoning, elements in, 119 predication strategies, 240 presentational devices, 131 problematization/mediation, 44 problematization of labor migration, 44–58 See also public problem of migration problems created by migration, 11 female migrants and, 12–13 orphans of migration, 11, 176–77 parents, migrants’, 13, 27–28, 176–194 See also orphans of migration; parents, migrants’ professional migration. See migration, professional promotional practices, 84 proper distance, 202 proximity/distance relationship, 241–42, 249 public, 204 role as social actor, 54 use of term, 204 See also audiences public, diasporic, 28, 208 public commitment, 44 public discourse, as object of empirical analysis, 23 public issues, 2 publicity, use of term, 204 publicization, of public problems, 19 public knowledge, 140–41, 147 public performance of crisis, 194 See also media advocacy campaign(s) public problem, 4 Britain’s EU membership as, 140, 141–43 (See also debate, Brexit) cognitive dimension of, 141 concept of, 19, 204

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debating migration as a public problem

country image promotion as. See public problem of country image creation of, 14 framework for analysis of, 71 integration into media and migration studies, 20 media construction of, 23, 140–43 migration as, 11–16, 19, 25 (See also public problem of migration) moral dimension of, 141 publicization of, 19 redefining, 57 symbolic struggles and, 141 public problem of country image, 87 civil society and, 92–93 impact of migration on, theoretical context of, 84–88 linked with public problem of migration, 13–14, 88 on media agenda, 92–94 on prime minister’s agenda, 96–101 on public agenda, 95–96 stages in construction of, 92–105 public problem of migration, 3, 11, 83 ambiguity of, 72 construction of meanings of, 45 definitions of, 71, 72–76 discursive outcome of media debates, 79 elder care provision and, 176 linkage with public problem of country image promotion, 13–14, 88 media’s role in construction of, 88 non-migrants and, 29 policy approach to, 73–74 study of, 21 public relations, 84 publics, formation of, 204 public spaces, 202 discursive analysis of, 19 transnational(ized), 2 public sphere See also debate(s), public problem European, 41–42 shaping of, 44

R racialization of migrants, 145, 211 See also Roma Ragazzi, F., 9, 71, 70, 76, 236 RealitateaTV, 71, 218 receiving countries. See host countries recontextualization, 47, 53, 55, 224, 238, 241, 249 referential strategies, 240 reflexivity demand for, 184 in media advocacy campaign, 191, 192, 194 self-collective, 24 Remain campaign. See debate, Brexit remittances, 8, 9, 177, 187, 188, 193 remittances, financial, 8, 185 See also capital, migrant remittances, political, 10 remittances, social, 189 representation, claims of, 178–79 representational associations, in Brexit debate, 155 representation(s) of migrants/migration/ diaspora, 3, 6, 12, 16–17, 22–23, 26–28, 57, 79–80, 140, 142, 146, 185, 188, 234, 240, 242, 248–49, See also discursive representations, representational patterns, representations and evaluations of migrants, selective representation of circumstances See also discursive representation representational patterns, 145–47, 150, 165 representations, in Brexit debate, 143–48 representative claims, 179, 190 resistance, 21, 44–5, 67 See also counter-discourse resources, symbolic, 24, 53, 57 responsibility, collective, 243 rhetoric, in advocacy argumentation, 178 rhetorical analysis, 27 Richardson, J., 150

index Robins, K, 17, 65 Roma, 5 country image and, 96 depictions of, 10 discrimination against, 7–8 distinguished from Romanians, 7, 76, 79 expulsion from France, 7, 63, 72, 74, 117, 132, 133 image of Romanians abroad and, 76 migration of, 72 racialization of migrants and, 145 in receiving countries, 7 Romanian identity and, 98 in UK, 47 Romanians distinguished from Roma, 7, 76, 79 restrictions on, 142 See also diaspora; migrants; non-migrants; Roma Ryan, L., 236

S Sandu, D. Saward, M., 178–180, 186, 189 Scholten, P., 143 Schudson, M., 140 selfies, 201, 209 selfies-as-news, 224–26 self-reflexivity, collective, 245 sending countries, 2, 4 image/status of, 8, 13 impact of austerity policies on, 48 in the transnational social field, 43, 234 migration on the public agenda/in the media of, 19, 88, 234, 253, 255 migrants as capital/resource (symbolic, material) for, 14, 24, 66 See also host countries political engagement in, 68 position of, 2 return to, 5, 9, 64 as transnational actor, 3

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sentiments, topics of, 228 Silverstone, R., 140, 170, 202, 203, 229, 231 Sinnati 11, 67, 68, 236 Sloterdijk, P., 209 social assistance, 175, 185, 191 See also elder care social integration, 6, 185, 187–89 social media/networks, 201, 209 online publics formation, 28 selfies-as-news, 224–26 social problems media advocacy campaigns and, 175–194 orphans of migration, 11, 176–77 social remittances, 189 society, Romanian modernization of, 105, 106 socio-communicational perspective, 148 solidarity, 11, 162, 192, 194, 202 Soulages, J.C., 148 space, public. See public spaces, transnational(ized) Spain country image promotion in, 83, 99–101 nation branding by, 85–86 Spivak, G., 24 stances, diasporic, 79 stances, neutral, 78 state assistance, 185 See also elder care state institutions, 89–92, 105–6 See also government; politicians/ bureaucracy states diasporic communities and, 66, 67 migration management by, 6–7 typology of, 67–68 See also government; politicians/ bureaucracy Stauff, Markus, 66 stereotypes, 26, 55 struggles, symbolic, 16, 141 sublime, category of, 221

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suffering, distant, 19–20, 28–29, 200, 205, 218 suffering, Other’s, 215 symbolic capital, 13 symbolic exclusions, 4 symbolic missions, 4 symbolic power agents, 199 symbolic resources, 24, 53, 57 sympathy, 212–14

T taxation of independent income, 63, 75–76 teachers. See migration, professional techne, 71, 76 television advocacy campaigns. See media advocacy campaign(s) them, vs. us, 14, 241 See also non-migrants themes in Brexit debate, 153–55 convergence of, 147 Thévenot, L., 19 transnational families, 176 transnational field transnational actor(s), 3, 17, 21–22, 23 transnational identity See also identity transnational migration/migrants, 21, 185, 187, 253, 257 transnational practices, 4, 27, 43, 143, 147, 235–37 discourse in, 44 migrants’ repositionings in, 16 power relations in, 16 suggested research on, 256–57 transnational habitus, 65 transnationalism nationalism and, 43–44, 194, 237 as potential attribute of social relations, see Boccagni, 15 and country promotion, 88 and public agenda/mediation/sphere, 16, 17, 147

in public/media discourse, 21, 44, 235 reification of transnationalism, 44, 256 research on, 235–38 understanding of, 43 transnational media, 16–17 Travellers. See Roma Trenz, H. J., 42, 176, 178, 179 Triandafyllidou, A., 42, 116, 233, 235

U UK. See Britain UKIP, 157 universalist arguments, 77 unskilled labor-force. See migration, unskilled/general us responsibility to, 24 vs. them, 14, 241 (See also non-migrants)

V values/concerns, 26, 122 civic values, 187, 189, 191, 194 moral values, 123, 191, 194 See also: practical reasoning in Brexit debate, 152, 163 in deliberation, 119 invoked with regard to migration, 76–79 in media advocacy campaigns, 178, 180, 191 Van Eemeren, F., 120, 122, 125, 129 van Gorp, Baldwin, 122, 123 Van Leeuwen, T., 46, 180 Vertovec, S, 143, 171 victims citizen-as-victim discourses, 25, 75–76 elders as, 191 migrants as, 186 vindictive systems, 218–19 visibility, 45, 56, 234 See also country image; country image promotion

index voices management of, 46, 51, 77 public, 50 Voirol, O., 45 Volcic, Z., 86, 111, 247, 251 vote, diaspora 13, 187, 243–44

W Walton, D., 118 watchdog function of media, 178 we, collective, 245

we, national, 11, 234 Weinar, A., 3–4, 21, 37, 236, 251 Wiesman, P., 121 Wodak, R., 46, 51, 235, 240, 252 women, Romanian, 11, 12, 188 workers, Romanian/Bulgarian, 42 See also labor market access

Y young people’s exodus, 11 Yuval-Davis, N., 236

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Simon Cottle, General Editor From climate change to the war on terror, financial meltdowns to forced migrations, pandemics to world poverty, and humanitarian disasters to the denial of human rights, these and other crises represent the dark side of our globalized planet. They are endemic to the contemporary global world and so too are they highly dependent on the world’s media. Each of the specially commissioned books in the Global Crises and the Media series examines the media’s role, representation, and responsibility in covering major global crises. They show how the media can enter into their constitution, enacting them on the public stage and thereby helping to shape their future trajectory around the world. Each book provides a sophisticated and empirically engaged understanding of the topic in order to invigorate the wider academic study and public debate about the most pressing and historically unprecedented global crises of our time. For further information about the series and submitting manuscripts, please contact: Dr. Simon Cottle Cardiff School of Journalism Cardiff University, Room 1.28 The Bute Building, King Edward VII Ave. Cardiff CF10 3NB United Kingdom [email protected] To order other books in this series, please contact our Customer Service Department at: (800) 770-LANG (within the U.S.) (212) 647-7706 (outside the U.S.) (212) 647-7707 FAX Or browse online by series at: www.peterlang.com