How Deep is the East/West Divide? Images of the EU in (18) Quality Newspapers of Eight EU Member States

Fifteen years after the largest expansion of the European Union, it seems that the continent stands more divided than ever before. Rather than diluting the differences of ‘East and West’ by the common membership in the Union of 28, political conflicts over migration, the rule of law and views on the future of Europe have given the impression that the old and new member states are in a constant confrontation. A plethora of academic articles and political commentary on these issues has contributed to the view of two incompatible camps. However, more recently authors have start-ed to warn that the idea of two ‘blocs’ has distorted a complex reality (Zielonka, 2019). Firstly, the new member states have not taken unified policy positions in several of the European challenges (Lehne, 2019). And secondly, the belief of East versus West has neglected that the societies within both old and new member states are ever more divided on a multitude of value debates, making them similar rather than different. The aim of this paper is to see whether the East/West divide in-voked by political actors finds also supports in the public sphere and media debates. The research at hand approaches the issue of divergence and convergence of old and new member states from a different angle. Analysing roughly 1140 articles published in 18 newspapers from 8 old and new member states in the run-up to the 2019 European Parliamentary Elections with the help of a multi-method research design, it explores whether the reports from ‘East’ and ‘West’ were defined by difference or similarity. It starts from the assumption that the way the EU has been por-trayed in this diverse sample of media outlets is marked by convergence rather than divergence, as it is assumed that the character of articles has been shaped by the topic of reporting, not the geograph-ic origin of the newspaper. To test this hypothesis, the contribution applies a Qualitative Compara-tive Analysis (QCA) in conjunction with a frame analysis.