Make Europe Great Again: the ‘New’ Geopolitical Pro-European Narrative of Macron as a Black Mirror

European Union studies are undergoing a narrative turn (Bouza Garcia 2017). Academic debate is starting to consider both the importance of socio-cultural representations of Europeanness for understanding citizens and civil society attitudes towards the EU and the usage of narrative strategies by EU political actors and institutions to select, frame, emplot and represent political strategies on EU integration. Although the current interest for narratives of the EU is part of the broader argumentative turn in social sciences in the last two decades (Forester 1993) it also departs from previous approaches in that narrative replaces discourse without explicit elaboration. Often authors and political commentators refer to narratives as metaphors of a dominant discourse or the zeitgeist on a particular issue. This departs clearly from post-structuralist understandings of the role of discourse in power struggles (Fairclough 2003), as narrative analyses are less interested in the intentions of the authors than in the text itself. In order to contribute to analyse how ‘Europe’ is narrated in the current politicised environment, we analyse Emmanuel Macron’s discourse on Europe from 2017 until 2019. Our findings indicate an appropriation of ‘Europe’ that we identify as a ‘Black Mirror’: while attempting to increase the popularity of Europe, Macron is laying the grounds for anyone that opposes Macron’s idea of ‘Europe' to be understood as ‘anti-European’.