Debordering through Discourse: Friendship and European Integration in Regional Media of Franco-German Border Regions

This article examines how regional newspapers along the Franco–German Upper Rhine narrate the border and, in doing so, help produce everyday European integration. Drawing on a qualitative discourse analysis of local newspapers’ articles published between 2019 and early 2024 in Les Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace, Le Républicain Lorrain, the Saarbrücker Zeitung, and Die Oberbadische, the study traces media framings across key moments of the study period (the COVID-19 closures, the Treaty of Aachen’s afterlife, the war in Ukraine, and the 2024 European elections). The corpus reveals a recurring “triangular narrative” of France, Germany, and friendship, through which the border is largely depicted as connective tissue rather than a line of friction. Debordering is performed via stories of cross-border work, services, mobility, and leisure, supported by dense institutional relays (Eurodistricts, the Collectivité européenne d’Alsace) and civic initiatives, thereby normalizing a form of “banal Europeanism”. Ultimately, the analysis raises the question of capitals: here, Europe’s heart is not “far-away Brussels” but “nearby Strasbourg”.