The team of the Center for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra published a book with MEDIATIZED EU results on the Portuguese case-study in December. Authored by the team’s coordinator Maria Raquel Freire, Sofia José Santos, Moara Assis Crivelente and Luiza Almeida Bezerra, the book is titled Europeanization in Debate: Media, Politics and Public Opinion in Portugal. It was first published in English, in open access, by the University of Coimbra Press (Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra), and will also be published in Portuguese in 2026.
You can download it by clicking here. You can also read the abstract below.
Europeanization in Debate: Media, Politics and Public Opinion in Portugal
From a critical and interdisciplinary perspective, this book mobilises the concepts of discourse, framing, and Europeanisation to analyse the dominant narratives about the European Union (EU) in Portugal, and how these are discursively constructed and negotiated. Focusing on media representations, this study uses their triangulation with the vision of political and media elites and public opinion, showing that the debate on Portugal’s integration into the EU and its “Europeanisation” is essentially characterised by pragmatic perspectives, formulated in terms of advantages and disadvantages, and populated by centre/periphery conceptions. The book concludes that a dualism exists across the three discursive spheres analysed: despite the dynamics of peripheralisation still being evident in the country, representations of the EU merge with a national ambition and interest in belonging to the “centre of progress,” echoing and validating what the book paraphrases as a “pragmatic imagination of the centre”.
