Does the EU Have a Past? Narratives of European Integration History and the Union’s Public Awareness Deficit

This article examines the public visibility and media salience of European integration history since the 1960s. More specifically, it analyzes the narratives of four key moments in the history of today's European Union (i.e. the Schuman Declaration of 1950, the 1957 Treaties of Rome, The Hague summit of 1969 and the 1992 Maastricht Treaty) as they have been produced, picked up and disseminated by the media in four Western European countries during the period from 1960 to 2017. Combining quantitative and qualitative forms of analysis, the text demonstrates that the overall media salience of European integration history has remained comparably low. Qualitatively, the forms of the narratives in which European integration history is presented have varied considerably for the four events and over time.