In his State of the Union speech, delivered at the EP on September 9th 2015, Jean-Claude Juncker addressed a number of critical issues for the future of the EU, among which the refugee emergency, the economic crisis and UK opt-out option. In this paper, we will propose an analysis of Juncker’s State of the Union speech based on a methodology for the analysis of political language that combines qualitative and quantitative aspects and is based on the analysis of the symbols contained in political speech, that is, of phrases that carry evaluative content. We will compare Juncker’s speech with the four speeches delivered by Barroso between 2010 and 2013 and we will map the symbols that characterize their descriptions of the EU value-sphere and are called to guide and justify EU political action. In particular, we will observe where the symbols are located along the four lines of conflict that characterized the EU process of de-conciliation: a) market efficiency vs. solidarity; b) supra-nationalism vs. national sovereignty; c) opening vs. closure; d) discipline vs. flexibility (Ferrera, 2014). We will explore, moreover, the different meanings that the speakers attach to the postulated EU-räson (Ferrera, 2015), i.e., ‘the reason to keep bounded together’, that expresses the normative foundation of the EU. Accordingly, we will test the hypothesis that Juncker’s speech is characterized by a predominant reference to social values, such as solidarity, as the normative foundation of the legitimacy of the European polity. Lastly, we will investigate whether Juncker’s speech is carrying a distinctive appeal to a political dimension of EU decision-making process – as opposed to the technocratic and ‘econocratic’ characterization that is usually assumed to represent EU model of action –, where conflicts are solved by strictly ‘political’ choices that carry with them a more or less explicit assumption of responsibility.
