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Browsing by Subject "Council of the European Union"

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  • Negotiating Erasmus 2021-2027 : A Case Study on the Process of Trilogues in the EU Decision Making 
    Rantala, Juho (2021)
    The goal of this research is to gain better understanding of the EU legislative system through a case study of the trilogues of the Erasmus+ 2021-2027 programme. Trilogues are a series of informal negotiations between the EU legislative bodies and are a central part of the modern EU legislative process. A rich field of research exists on the topic, focusing especially on the roles of the legislative institutions and the transparency of the informal practice. The data used for the research is gathered from interviews and legislative files. A series of expert interviews were conducted with people who participated in the negotiations, representing both EU colegislators, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union. The legislative files were gathered from publicly available sources and include most importantly the Commission legislative proposal, the Parliament first reading position, the Council first reading position and a four column document from late 2020. Three interesting topics that caused intense intra- and inter-institutional negotiations are identified: the DiscoverEU initiative, inclusion and governance. These provided three different methods of finding compromise. Firstly, it is shown how the Council position can shift to correspond to the Parliament position. Secondly, it is shown how it can still be difficult to agree on the exact words of the legislation even when the goal is a shared one. Thirdly, it is shown how the Parliaments demands can turn into a compromise that is significantly closer to the Council position. A brief summary of transparency over the Erasmus trilogues is given. The main findings of the study are the methods in which the EU legislators are willing to seek compromise: in the case of Erasmus trilogues, they negotiators were more consensus seeking than adversarial.
  • The Use of Conceptual Metaphors in Political Speeches by the Representatives of the Finnish Presidency of the Council of the European Union 
    Koskinen, Kanerva (2022)
    This thesis discusses the use of English conceptual metaphors in political speeches, specifically focusing on the domains that are used in the policy-related speeches of the Council of the European Union (EU) during the Finnish Presidency term in 2019. Furthermore, the current study takes a cognitive linguistic approach, where political discourse is considered as a product of individual and collective mental processes. The cognitive account explains that metaphor is a part of the human conceptualisation system and not just a stylistic expression of oratory and literature. Moreover, it is thought that metaphor works as a mapping from well-understood source domains of experience to more abstract target domains of cultural knowledge. The four priorities of the Finnish presidency term (the rule of law, sustainable development, climate action, and security) serve as the topics of the analysis. Moreover, the data of this thesis consists of nine speech articles collected and preprocessed from the online publications of the Prime Minister’s Office using programming tools in Python. After pre-processing, the data was organised with a spreadsheet tool, for manual qualitative analysis. First, the metaphorical expressions were identified using the Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz Group, 2007) followed by categorisation according to the two-domain mapping model, which is a key element of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980a). In other words, as the study aimed to describe how the use of metaphorical expressions contributes to the framing of statements made by Finnish government officials, metaphorical expressions were first identified at the individual level of the analysis. Then, following the bottom-up approach, the metaphorical expressions were categorised into the two-domain metaphor types on the supraindividual level. Lastly, the metaphors were further grouped together in relation to emotional and experiential aspects at the subindividual level to provide the most characteristic and easily comprehensible examples to discuss the research questions as well as reduce the possibility of confirmation bias. In summary, the nine speech articles analysed for this thesis included 222 cases identified as metaphors and 102 instances marked under a mixed category. The four most used metaphor types in the nine articles were PURPOSEFUL ACTIVITY IS TRAVELLING ALONG A PATH TOWARDS A DESTINATION (n=26), UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING (n=23), CHANGE IS MOTION (n=21), and ATTENTION IS PROXIMITY (n=15). Furthermore, the most used metaphors do support the consensus-building nature of the speeches as they are used to display shared beliefs and motivate the audience to act together to achieve the desired future goals. The qualitative analysis revealed some more distinct uses of conceptual metaphors regarding specific topics. In the rule of law discourse, CONTAINER metaphors were used to discuss the measures and extent to which EU legislation extends, whereas the talk around the second priority, sustainable development, was characterised by the use of BUILDING as well as SEEING metaphors as speakers emphasised the importance of shared efforts to build a more sustainable future. For climate action, the discussion was most clearly dominated by the MOTION AND JOURNEY metaphors, which was expected since climate change is an ongoing process that the world has dealt with over many years and governmental periods. Lastly, the fourth priority, security, was mostly addressed in terms of the MOTION AND JOURNEY metaphors, but also PERSON metaphors. Previous research on conceptual metaphors suggests that metaphors influence our ideological flexibility by helping people to understand abstract issues by grounding them in something more familiar, but the conceptualisation may also infuse attitudes with subjective confidence that makes them highly resistant to change, I argue it is important to study the ways metaphors are used to generate new perspectives on persistent problems in addition to those that reinforce and defend conclusions and ideologies. As a result, this thesis sheds light on the way the representative ministers of the Finnish presidency talked about abstract contexts and what kind of conceptualisations are used in their international political discussion regarding the matters of the Council of the EU.

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