The European Union's Promotion of Humanitarian Aid: A Critical Linguistic analysis

This paper sets out to investigate the language features of the humanitarian aid policies promoted by the European Union with the aim of exploring the connection between discourse and politics, the way humanitarian aid projects are encoded and presented to the public and the socio-political meanings they may both reflect and convey. In particular, three areas interfacing the policy-making and the communication strategies related to the EU’s humanitarian action have been identified: language codes, cultural issues and international relations. The way in which these aspects are encoded in documents addressing a large public may be considered revealing of the deep-seated attitude assumed by the European Union towards third countries and of its political stance on aid relief. At the same time, the analysis of EU’s aid discourse will also contribute to define and identify a European identity which constitutes itself in relation to the distant world of the others, the third(-world) countries.