‘This is exactly how the Nazis ran it’: (De)legitimising the EU on Wikipedia

Abstract

This article addresses how the Wikipedia community has grappled with controversial elements of the European Union’s (EU) history from 2001 to 2019. It also examines what perspective on the EU the Wikipedia editors develop in debates about the institution’s history and if/how the community has (de)legitimised the EU’s existence today in the context of discussions about the EU’s predecessors. The data examined consist of Wikipedia contributors’ debates that took place on a Wikipedia discussion site (‘talk page’). Taking a corpus-assisted approach combined with argumentation analysis and aspects of systemic functional linguistics, I found that Wikipedia editors repeatedly propose that Nazi Germany might have been a precursor of the EU today. However, the Wikipedia community ultimately rejects this notion and emphasises the voluntary nature guiding the EU’s creation process. Thus, while the EU’s legitimacy is indeed contested in the course of the debates, the Wikipedia community eventually rejects this challenge.

An Overview of Research on Discursive Legitimation

“…The former patterns are short-ranged in nature, focusing on the efficiency of the actions (de)legitimized, while the latter are used to legitimize the long-rooted ideological biases about self and others. Kopf (2020) examines how the Wikipedia community makes sense of the European Union and how it legitimises the institution's existence through an argumentation analysis and from aspects of systemic functional linguistics. Catenaccio (2021) draws on discourse analysis and argumentation theory to investigate macro strategies of self-representation and patterns of dialogic interaction, including favoured argumentative schemes, and concrete linguistic choices at micro levels used to generate consensus and legitimation of their core activities.…”

Corpus-assisted analysis of legitimation strategies in government social media communication

“…While it is common to use quantitative measures, such as word frequency rankings, keywords or collocations as entry points into large datasets and then focus on a detailed qualitative analysis of a smaller subset of text (e.g. Kopf, 2020; Ross and Rivers, 2020), in our study of legitimation strategies the order of these stages was reversed. First, we carried out a qualitative, manual analysis of the entire corpus to identify the uses of three types of legitimising appeals.…”

Discursive Legitimation: An Integrative Theoretical Framework and Agenda for Future Research

“…Narrative reconstruction. Studies adopting an explicit or implicit narrative perspective offer unique insights into how history is reconstructed for legitimation purposes (Cappelen & Pedersen, 2021;Currie & Brown, 2003;Kopf, 2020). While narratives generally help actors make sense of and legitimate certain phenomena (Brown, 1998), they may also be used explicitly as discursive resources for legitimation (Anteby, 2010).…”