DISCOURSES OF EUROPEAN ‘STABILITOCRACY’ IN SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE ACCORDING TO CROATIAN AND SERBIAN PRESS AFTER 2007

Abstract

The paper focuses on the discursive construction of so-called ‘stabilitocracy’ in Croatian and Serbian press between 2007 and 2017. A large corpus of articles from four ideologically diverse daily newspapers from both countries is explored using the methods of corpus-driven discourse analysis. With the help of collocation and concordance analysis, the paper demonstrates how a concept of Southeastern Europe as an inherently unstable region in need of a firm rule is linguistically constructed, as well as how Western expertise is discursively transferred in the analysed media. Findings about this language use demonstrate similarities and differences in the reproduction of essentialist stereotypes about Southeastern Europe in the regional press of the two analysed countries.