Far from the inner sanctum of Europe due to the legacies of the past

The use of analogy in the discourse on EU enlargement in the Western Balkans

Bibliographic Data

ID21156842
AuthorsAndrijana Baltić (University of Montenegro, corresponding author)
Year2025
Pages1-27
Publication date2025-04-22
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1468-3857 • E-ISSN: 1743-9639
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14683857.2025.2494374
OpenAlexW4409653558
LanguageEN
References cited20

The aspirations of the Western Balkan countries towards Europe have become central to the political and social life of the region. This paper examines the linguistic representation of the Western Balkans and the discourse surrounding their European integration in online pan-European media articles written in English. The discourse of European integration for the Western Balkans often includes analogical references to past conflicts, whose remnants continue to the present time and pose significant challenges to the region’s progress. By analysing the temporal domain of this discourse through the lens of Discourse Space Theory and Proximization Theory, analogical temporal proximization more specifically, and its projection of values onto the axiological domain, this paper looks at the ideological function of language and explores the extent to which the Western Balkans is perceived as a region where past conflicts threaten future stability and how EU accession is viewed as a path to long-awaited liberation and prosperity

Analogy · Economics · European union · International trade · Linguistics · Political science · Resizing · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · History · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy

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