I’ve been on my PhD program for about half a year now.
During that time my research has turned toward a legacy of my upbringing. I
grew up in newsrooms, learned the rudiments of good storytelling there. Later,
I helped to teach them. Knowing what happened is only the beginning of
reporting news. It’s also necessary to eviscerate why an event happened. Who
was involved? How did said event
transpire? Over what geographical and temporal scope did an event occur? If you
can’t organize these elements according to a crisis-conflict-resolution
narrative format, you don’t have a story.
When your life revolves around academic thought it’s easy to
forget ‘real life’ experiences that sponsored those insights. A recent
family trip to Amsterdam, Antwerp and the D-day beaches of Normandy inspired me
to reflect on narrative’s power. My research seeks to explain popular
resistance to EU integration as resulting from negative framing of intra-EU
migration in issue-narratives of national news medias. Scholarly investigation can distance the
researcher from the object which that person is studying. My trip brought to
mind storytelling’s power to influence opinions. Its propensity to intensify
interest.
In Amsterdam, we stayed in an apartment less than a block away
from the city’s West Church. The sizable structure was usually surrounded by
the line for the attraction next door: The Ann Frank House. My mother informed
me that we had pre-reserved appointments for entry to that attraction on the
last day we were in Amsterdam. I’ve never read the famous diary. When compared
with attractions such as the Rijks Museum, I expected it to be the low point of
the Dutch part of our odyssey.
The Rijks Museum was the first attraction we visited. I was
intrigued by the exhibitions. Our time in Amsterdam progressed. I noticed that other
attractions enticed throngs of interested individuals who lined up en masse in
order to gain entry. One such experience
took place at the Van Gogh Museum. My journalist mother solidified the allure
of these attractions over others: “The Rijks Museum? That has some famous
paintings.” She interpreted. “Van Gogh? That’s someone whose life people want
to know more about”. Indeed, the Ann Frank House’s slogan reads “A museum with
a story”.
I was impressed by my visit to the Ann Frank House much more
than I expected. The exhibit enthralls the visitor in the narrative of a
family’s struggle to survive. In so doing, it exemplifies one group of people
as representative of a larger, more abstract, tragedy that occurred over
seventy years ago. It puts a face to the story – a news format I learned from
my mother years ago. In spite of (or perhaps because of) this knowledge the
exhibit inspired me to reflect.
 |
| Where my ancestors departed Europe - now a car park |
In Antwerp, I discovered some of my own forgotten history. I barely remembered that my Slovene progenitors’
point of departure from Europe was the Belgian city's port until my mother
reminded me. They left almost exactly a century before I moved to Europe and claimed
my Slovenian passport. We spent most of an afternoon at the Red Star Line
Museum. While there, we confirmed the
Anzur family’s passage on that line’s routes in the exhibit’s information
section. Simultaneously, we fielded questions about our own story from other
visitors. My mother (and I) took pride in saying that a century later I had come
back to Europe. She’s thinking of writing a book about it – four generations of
a Slovenian family. After 100 years my
family’s narrative had begun to resolve into a full circle.
In Normandy, I came face to face with a battle of ideas: a struggle to define the narrative of modern European history. I became
interested in the EU while living in Europe. I’d always thought of the EU’s genesis
and subsequent expansion eastward after the Cold War as the EU explains it: an initiative
by European countries to drive their own future. The American exhibits at many of
the D-day sights told a different side of the story. They maintained that European
integration would not have been possible if it weren’t for American involvement
in World War II. At first, I was somewhat bemused by this contention. Still, as
I was subjected to this story frame again and again I began to see a certain appropriateness
in it. Reflecting on this now, I should say that reality is probably somewhere
in the middle. The US was needed to help win the war, but it was the Europeans
who picked up the ball and ran with it afterwards. Telling multiple stories on
the same issue can influence one to adopt certain stances on the
broader issue to which they relate, or even create. I use this concept in my
research. Yet, standing in front of those American exhibits I realized I was
still susceptible to the narrative framing of issues. |
| The specter of war |
Many times during my visit to Normandy my father remarked that a conflict on the scale of the Second World War could not occur today. I’m still not sure why he kept saying this. Still, as I watched clips of old news reels from both sides of the conflict, it dawned on me that he might be right. Taking place just before the dawn of mass media, WWII was one of the last conflicts where belligerent governments could almost completely define the story of the war to their own publics. In light of the more pronounced anti-war sentiment during conflicts later in the 20th century, I find it ironic that the framing of the Second World War persists even today, often regarded as somehow more righteous than subsequent campaigns. To what extent this is true I leave open for contemplation.
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