‘Arm’ versus ‘pillar’: the politics of metaphors of the Western European Union at the 1990-91 Intergovernmental Conference on Political Union

Article abstract:

This article explicates the metaphors of the Western European Union used at the 1990-91 Intergovernmental Conference on Political Union. In the conference debates, the Western European Union, a defence pact made moribund by the Cold War, became a significant discursive locus for conflicting metaphors symbolising collective security and defence in post-Cold War Europe. On the one side, the United States and the more Atlanticist Member States of the European Communities wanted to see the organisation as a 'pillar' in the Atlantic alliance. On the other side, more Europeanist Member States wanted to see in the Western European Union the defence 'arm' of the planned political union. The organicist metaphors of the Europeanists undermined the architectural metaphors of the Atlanticists, and represented the European Union as the political subject of a European community dissociate of the Atlantic community. It is argued here that the peculiar form of this representation can be explained by at least two factors: a human tendency to anthropomorphise abstract political phenomena, and a tradition of organicist symbolism in the representation of community in political discourse.