Presentation of the analyses

In my usage, the conceptual pair of trajectory and turning point and the textual-intertextual mode of analysis primarily serve as means of organisation, as guidelines for selecting and ordering the empirical material. The investigation of the selected material will consist of two analytical rounds.

In the first round of analysis (chapter 5) the six speeches, two declarations, and the newspapers’

coverage of them will be presented. Here, I shall focus on the speaker- and audience-positions, the personae, and the agency options created in the eight main texts. Furthermore, I shall seek to establish the relationships between the texts and the responses to them, and I shall describe the dynamic of the debate as it unfolds chronologically. The purpose of the first round of analysis is to create an overview of the sequence of events and the communicative network of which the debate consists and to provide a first characterisation of the positions available to the participants in the debate.

The former aim entails a focus on public opinion formation, and here convergences and persisting disparities will be established. To that end, I shall be especially attentive to the centripetal and centrifugal forces of the debate. The search for unifying and diversifying features is inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding that these two opposite dynamics co-exist in any communicative process (Farmer, 1998, p. xviii). Analysis of these forces not only illuminates the different existing versions of the debate, but also points to conservative and reformatory elements of the discussions. In order to reach the second aim of the first round of analysis – establishment of the positions and proposals forwarded by the participants in the debate – I shall prioritise the issue of collective identity formation. In the first round of analysis I shall explore how first, second, and third personae are constituted in the utterances, and seek to establish how the identification of the various personae enables and delimits further participation in the debate. At this stage legitimation will be studied primarily in the speaker’s direct appeal to legitimacy and in the two declarations’

establishment of official positions that are perceived as being legitimate. That is, I shall be introducing the relationship between legitimacy, identity, and public opinion as political actors addressing the broader public explicitly conceive it.

The second round of analysis (chapter 6) concentrates on the spatio-temporal relations that are established within the individual utterances and on the substantial and formal features that link the various utterances to each other. Whereas the first round of debate is conducted

chronologically and relies heavily on the notions of the trajectory and the turning point as well as on the textual-intertextual mode of analysis, the second round is conceptually guided and studies the

utterances according to generic categories. During this investigation the concepts of topos, kairos, and chronotope will take over the guiding role, which the trajectory-turning point and textual-intertextual distinctions played in the first analytical round. The final analytical moment in which generic and dynamic features will be brought together will be steered by the concept of telos. These four analytical concepts – of which three were briefly mentioned in the establishment of the

rhetorical perspective – will be introduced further when they are taken into use.

The purpose of the second round of investigation is to explain how meaning is created within and between the utterances. General assessments of the five national versions of the debate on the future of Europe will be made, and it will be discussed whether and how a debate that transcends national contexts and takes on genuinely European proportions may be emerging. The analysis will culminate in an empirically informed reconsideration of the relationships between legitimacy, identity and opinion formation in the context of the EU, and on that basis the evaluation of the theories of European constitution will be conducted.

Since both rounds of analysis deal with the same set of texts there will be some overlap between them. Yet the two rounds have different explanatory purposes, wherefore the recurrence will hopefully not become circular. To sum up the analytical procedure and the purposes of the two analytical rounds it could be said that the first deals primarily with the what of the debate and that the second focuses on the how. First, I shall be looking at what meanings are articulated in the different contexts and what developments occurred in the debate as a whole, establishing the main features of the various contexts and the general developments of the debate as such. Second, I shall seek to explain how the meanings were constituted and explore the various modes of national and European meaning formation.

Common to both rounds of analysis is the general concern with explaining the meaning formation of the debate in terms of the interdependency between the general and the particular, the established and the emerging. Moreover, the rhetorical-social scientific

understanding of public opinion formation, identification, legitimation and the relationships

between these three processes constantly guides the analytical endeavour. A final unifying feature is that the entire study is conducted from within the constitutionist rhetorical perspective. The study is aimed at explaining how meaning is formed in concrete situations and processes and all analytical insights and conclusions remain hermeneutically bound to the utterances under study.

5.