Peace, Prosperity and Protection: Narratives of Integration and the ‘Justification Jungle’ of Europe's Public Spheres

Abstract The European Union (EU) is in search of a new narrative to create sense common purpose, but it unclear around which values that should be built. To analyse how different narratives resonate Europe's public spheres, this article presents novel dataset based on claims analysis newspaper articles from Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland and Denmark between 2012 2019 the issues migration, Economic Monetary (EMU), trade counterterrorism. Descriptive logistic regression analyses show frames have been used for various policy agendas. This reveals considerable variation, comparatively low levels explained variance. spheres can thus described as ‘justification jungle’, where many actors use range arguments back up diverging political demands. poses formidable obstacle any single integration.