EUROSICK · Europe, Covid Politics and the (Un)Expected Surge of Nationalistic Narratives

In the face of the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, the unity of the European Union, at least at the beginning of the crisis, started to crumble. By closing their borders and introducing a travel ban for the Schengen Area, European countries have retreated into national fortresses. These initial policies and the recent vaccine-related management of the pandemic shows the role nationalism plays in the context of public health responses to emergencies, including evacuations and quarantines, travel and socio-cultural constraints. While many scholars have started to document the impact of these measures on citizens, human rights, migrants, and so on, almost no attention has been paid 1) to examine and to compare configurations of different European national identities that were generated in the course of the management of the pandemic, and 2) to a sociohistorical perspective to investigate the possible links between those nationalistic and war-related discourse and the exclusionary and inefficient policies and practices that surge in Europe and beyond. Eurosick will innovatively conjoin the sociology of migration and nationalism with research on historical disasters to fill this gap. It will do so, benefitting from my expertise in the analysis of discourse-practice nexus, and through an examination of media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and the related policy documents in three European countries (Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland); and in three points in time: before the outbreak in Europe, at the time of the outbreak, and at the beginning of 2021 following the implementation of the COVID-19 vaccination programmes. The analysis will be carried out using critical discourse analysis, an interdisciplinary approach used to study oral and textual discourses, which views language as a social practice. These learned lessons will impact the capacity of Europe to tackle the future crises in a more collective and efficient way.