An emerging EU strategic narrative? Twitter communication during the EU’s sustainable energy week

Abstract:

This article approaches the subject of the global recognition of the term ‘Normative Power Europe’ in external energy governance by engaging with the concept of strategic narratives.

The article considers reactions to the European Union (EU) as a normative energy actor within a tripartite scheme of strategic narrative formation, projection and reception. The definition of a narrative suggests the presence of an actor, an action, a goal or intention, a scene and instrument. Those were identified for the emerging ‘Sustainable Energy Europe’ narrative and tested in one empirical case study: Twitter communications surrounding the EU Sustainable Energy Week 2013.

In its method, our analysis is among the first to explore empirically the EU’s social media communication efforts. Answering a call for richer methodologies, which view social media data not as ‘quantitative data, rather qualitative data on a quantitative scale’, our analysis uses an original methodology and codes the Twitter data using a nuanced qualitative framework.