Political image of the EU in the context of global economic crisis

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Аннотация: Global economic crisis has become one of the biggest challenges in the history of the EU: it has put under a question mark the relevance of the European project not only from the economic but also from the political perspective. In current conditions the EU faces double challenge: the actor must not only emerge from the crisis, it should also restore its image, gain trust of own citizens and make them believe that the European project faces an optimistic future. To reach these objectives, it is necessary to establish an efficient system of communications, aimed at restoring trust to the European project among European citizens (internal communications), as well at enhancing the reputation capital of the EU as global political and economic actor (external communications). Current article examines the components of European image discourse including ways of possible image discourse transformation in crisis situations and proposes a theoretical approach for creation of a crisis response model aimed at restoring damaged internal and external image of the EU. Structural analyses of the European image, discourse analyses of the EU imageand its transformation process in a crisis situation. One of the key tasks for the EU is to make the process of the image discourse transformation in crisis situations manageable. To achieve that the EU should develop a flexible and comprehensive internal and external communication system which would make it possible to minimize the devastating influence of a crisis and keep the reputational capital of the EU among the target audiences (the EU citizens and the world community) on a high level.

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