Talking about Europe: exploring 70 years of news archives

This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of Europe as reflected in European media.

Publishing date: 02 March 2021
Authors: Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol Enrico Bergamini

Download

The authors thank Catarina Midões for her fundamental inputs and suggestions. The authors would like to thank Amandine Crespy, Francois Foret, Michael Leigh, N. Piers Ludlow, Francesco Papadia, Niclas Poitiers, Giuseppe Porcaro, Stefanie Pukallus, André Sapir and Guntram Wolff
for their valuable comments and input. We thank Kurt Jansson and Ulla Siegenthaler at Der Spiegel for their kind and helpful collaboration. Furthermore, we thank Estelle Bunout, Marten During and Frédéric Clavert for their helpful comments, and for inviting us to present an early version of this work at the C2DH workshop, as well as the workshop’s participants.

This paper quantitatively explores news coverage on the subject of ‘Europe’ in three different countries and three newspapers: France (Le Monde), Italy (La Stampa) and Germany (Der Spiegel). We collected and organised large web-scraped datasets covering the period 1945 to 2019. After ensuring the quality of the archives, we identified articles referring to ‘European’ news while leaving aside national and other non-European news, based on a mix of keyword matching, large-scale natural language processing and topic identification on the full text of news articles. Once articles were classified and datasets labelled, we performed a time-series analysis, detecting salient events in European history, across France, Germany and Italy. We analysed these events in light of the evolution of European cooperation and integration since 1945. We found that the most important events in post-war European history are easily identifiable in the archives and that European issues have gathered substantially greater attention since the early 1990s.

Recommended citation:
Bergamini, E. and E. Mourlon-Druol (2021) ‘Talking about Europe: exploring 70 years of news archives’, Working Paper 04/2021, Bruegel

About the authors

Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol

Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol is a Non-resident Fellow at Bruegel. He specialises in international economic history, particularly the history of European economic cooperation and integration.

He covers the European Union’s Economic and Monetary Union; the development of international and European banking regulation and supervision, especially the origins of the European banking union; European Public Goods; the rise of both global and European economic governance; the international debt crises of the 1980s, particularly in Eastern Europe; and the history of capitalism, neoliberalism and their relationship with European integration.

He speaks English, Italian and German.

He is also a Professor of History of European Cooperation and Integration at the European University Institute (EUI, Florence), and Co-Director of the Alcide De Gasperi Research Centre. Previously, he was a Bruegel Visiting Fellow, a Professor at the University of Glasgow and has held visiting and research positions at institutions including the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Keio University and Columbia University. He holds a PhD in History and Civilisation from EUI, Florence.
Enrico Bergamini

Enrico worked at Bruegel as a research analyst.

He is currently pursuing a PhD in Economics and Complexity at the University of Turin. He holds a BSc in Business and Economics from the University of Bologna and a MSc in Economic Policy from the University of Utrecht.

His research interests include economics of innovation, climate change, and inequalities.

Enrico is a native Italian speaker, is fluent in English and has a working knowledge of French.