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#aGreekment in the Twittersphere

By Max Hänska and Stefan Bauchowitz

To what extent does twitter provide a platform for the emergence of a European public sphere? Around 47% of Europeans use social media at least once a week, making it a potentially important source of information and a promising platform for debate. Indeed, it has sometimes been suggested that the interactive affordance of social media may provide the ideal platform for a more participatory public, and for a transnational one structurally less confined to the borders of nation states.

By tracing the visibility of EU (and Eurozone) issues, or issues relating to European countries in national twitterspheres we can gain an impression of how twitter is Europeanized:  the volume of tweets using specific keywords allows researchers to detect whether national twitterspheres synchronise around specific issues or events, while the multi-directional interactive nature of twitter allows us to observe cross-border interactions between users, both of which can be understood as indicators of Europeanization.

We report on results from our study which maps the European twittersphere by tracking twitter activity during key European events. Part of our study focuses on the recent negotiations leading up to the third Greek bailout agreement. The stage for these negotiations was set by months of acrimony between the newly elected Greek government and its creditors. An agreement between the Greek government and its creditors was finally brokered at a European Council summit, which was tensely anticipated because a Greek exit from the Euro, or even the EU, no longer seemed improbable, but a real possibility.

Among other questions, we were interested in how tweets were distributed across countries (degrees of Europeanisation), and the amount of boarder-crossing interactions between users in the European twittersphere. Through the twitter streaming API we downloaded tweets matching a set of keywords relevant to Eurogroup and European Council meetings between 12th and 13th of July. We used the Google Maps Geocoding API to convert the user-specified location data to geographic coordinates.

Peaks and troughs in the volume of activity in the European twittersphere are clearly related to events in Brussels. For instance the European twittersphere responded across the board when European Council President Donald Tusk tweeted at 8:55 on Monday, 13 July that:

EuroSummit has unanimously reached agreement. All ready to go for ESM programme for #Greece with serious reforms & financial support

Following Tusk’s tweet, activity is at its highest – between 9am and 10am alone we collected 15,376 tweets from users located within the EU28. Tweet volumes by country are plotted in Figure 1. While the second peak clearly relates to the conclusion of the summit, the first relates to the emergence of the #thisisacoup hashtag the previous night.

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Figure 1

 

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Lebanon: contesting trash politics

By Adham Saouli

345059CThe 29 of August 2015 may one day be remembered as historic in Lebanon’s turbulent history. At 6pm angry people from different ages, walks of life, regions, and sectarian communities began to gather in Martyr’s Square in central Beirut. Carrying Lebanese flags, banners, and lots of grievances, they protested against Lebanon’s ruling class. ‘Enough’, ‘Get off our backs’, and ‘Down with the rule of the Mafia’, banners read. Holding her children’s hands, one elegantly dressed woman said ‘I am here to scream in the face of this ruling mafia, enough…leave us alone!’ This is a ‘peaceful protest to rid Lebanon of the sectarian political class that has divided us’, another protester cried. Eager to change the world and echoing their peers in the Arab world, angry youth shouted: ‘The People want the fall of the regime!’. A less hopeful woman’s banner read ‘Politicians are like sperm, one in a million turns out to be human being!’

Political rallies are not new to Lebanon. Since 2005 Martyr’s Square has seen more than eight major demonstrations and sit-ins. After the assassination of Lebanon’s prime minister, Rafic Hariri, in 2005, the square attracted two major protests, March 8 and March 14, each claiming to represent the soul of the divided country. But the August demonstration was different. For the first time in the country’s history, the Lebanese protested not against one another but against a ‘political class’, resembling the ‘indignados’ or ‘aganaktismenoi’ anti-establishment protests that engulfed Spain and Greece and the Midan al-Tahri demonstration in Egypt. Indeed, similarities abound: a disenchanted, otherwise apolitical and heterogeneous, multitude rising against a corrupt ruling elite and challenging traditional political forms of contestations. In the protest two young men, one from the Shi’a southern suburb and another from a Sunni neighbourhood of Beirut, chanted together against the ruling elite that deprived them of their basic needs: water, electricity, jobs, and the collection of trash.

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Eurovision in (Euro-) crisis?

By Maria Kyriakidou

Away from the political and economic battlefield of the Euro crisis, there is another crisis evolving with regard to one of Europe’s institution, namely the Eurovision Song Contest. Although easily dismissed by sceptics as a meaningless and wasteful celebration of kitsch, the Contest counts millions of fans in its 59-year-long history. As an annual media ritual, it symbolically brings together European cultures and is an arena both for the performance of European and national identities and for the negotiation over the meanings and frontiers of Europe.

With this year’s Eurovision Final being less than three months away, the 37 participant countries have started procedures for deciding their representative acts. Despite the enthusiastic preparations of the hosts in Copenhagen, as well as the devoted fans’ excitement, there are clouds hanging over the 59th Competition, reflecting the broader climate of austerity and hardship amidst the Euro crisis.

The 2014 Eurovision contest will be marked by a large number of absences, some of countries with a strong, even winning, history in the competition, most of them due to financial difficulties faced by the national broadcasters. Bulgaria was the first to announce their intention not to participate in the 2014 contest, with Cyprus, Serbia, Slovakia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia (who claimed organisational difficulties) following foot last autumn. Slovenia only came to the decision to participate in the last moment. Greece, which also seemed to have organisational difficulties due to the sudden shutdown of its state broadcaster last summer, now hopes for a smooth continuation of the competition through its new public broadcaster NERIT. At the same time, Turkey, another past winner, has not been attending the competition since last year in protest to the “big five” rule of the competition, which secures a position to the final to the five main financial contributors of the competition, namely the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

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Solana at LSE: The EU in the Eye of the Storm

Javier Solana (2007)Our partner LSE IDEAS will celebrate the launch of their Southern European International Affairs Programme with a public lecture at LSE by Javier Solana on Monday 14th October (6.30-8.00pm, Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building). Dr Solana’s lecture will be discussed by LSE IDEAS Visiting Professor Robert Cooper and chaired by LSE IDEAS Co-Director Professor Michael Cox.

Solana, currently President of ESADE Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics, among many other distinguished current and former roles, has written widely on the ongoing crisis, from an examination of the nitty gritty of ‘a new business model for Cyprus‘ to a broader analysis of ‘a new chance for European Politics‘. Meanwhile, shortly after taking up his visiting chair at LSE IDEAS, Cooper debated to the topic of ‘Reinventing Europe: one crisis, many futures’, and recently delivered a lecture at LSE on ‘Europe on the Brink: From Crisis to Collapse‘.