The rights of European consumers: from language practices to identity building

Abstract Constructing the profile of a European citizen aware of her/his identity and rights entails consideration of new identity-building elements in the creation process of a Common European Space for citizens, such as safety, education and better living standards. The analysis concentrates on the way European identity and citizens’ solidarity are formed and developed through new communication policies. Communication between Institutions and citizens largely aims at providing information about rights and safeguard provisions enshrined in EU law. The communicative process is increasingly centred on the empowerment of citizens/consumers through information and awareness-raising initiatives aimed at ‘shaping’ the profile of a conscious, ‘harmonised’ community of individuals. This is reflected in the informative material of the EU, from the more traditional leaflets to the most innovative booklets promoting laws against unfair behaviour towards consumers . The paper draws upon studies on the effect of economic change on the transformations of language and identity (Heller 2003; Castells 2000, 1997). The research work focuses on the way new modes of belonging are constructed in discourse by means of new identification codes. This new profile corresponds to the figure of the European consumer, whose needs become commodified, valuable and directly linked to his/her belonging to the European ‘consumership’. This perspective recalls Fairclough’s ideas (2006) on changes in orders of discourse and on the relations between new market discourses in which citizens are represented as ‘consumers’ of services. References Castells, Manuel 1997. The Power of Identity. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Castells, Manuel 2000. The Infromation Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Fairclough, Norman 2006. Language and Globalization. London and New York: Routledge. Heller, Monica 2003. Globalization, the New Economy, and the Commodification of Language and Identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7/4, 473-492