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Representations of Europe and the European Union in Parliamentary Discourse from a Corpus-Assisted Perspective

This article examines how Europe and the European Union are represented in parliamentary discourse across three contrasting European political trajectories: the United Kingdom, Slovenia, and Ukraine. Using the ParlaMint 5.0 corpora — uniformly encoded, linguistically annotated, and enriched with sentiment and topic metadata — the study applies a longitudinal, cross‑linguistic corpus‑assisted discourse approach. Mentions of the EU and Europe in English, Slovenian, and Ukrainian were extracted through targeted queries, supplemented by sentiment profiling, topic distribution analysis, and collocational comparison across three built-in subcorpora (Reference, COVID, COVID,War). The findings show that although the two concepts can overlap, their discursive functions diverge systematically: Europe appears as a broader cultural and geopolitical frame, while the EU attracts more policy‑oriented uses. These differences intensify at moments of institutional change or crisis, with sentiment around Europe displaying sharper fluctuations than sentiment around the EU. Cross‑national patterns align closely with each country’s EU membership status — past, present, or aspirational — shaping how the EU is invoked, assessed, or contested. The study demonstrates the value of multilingual, longitudinal corpus analysis for tracing the evolution of political concepts and for understanding how parliaments discursively negotiate Europe’s shifting institutional and geopolitical landscape.