Revising Africa, Remaining Normative Power: Verbal (Re-)Production of National Identity in German News Coverage on Minusma

Democratic journalism is meant to be balanced, providing ‘neutral’ information in order to enable citizens to form their own opinion. Nonetheless, news coverage is influenced by cultural and historical contexts, which affect and are mirrored by the language used. This contribution provides an outlook on which (historically developed) ideas about ‘western’ and ‘non-western’ countries appear in German online newspaper covering the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali, MINUSMA. Beneath the thematic content of the news coverage linguistic devices like metaphors, catchphrases and labels have major impact on the perception of the intervention as well as the nations and actors associated with it (e. g. Mamadough 2022). I argue that, even though the idea of a powerful global north that enables the capacities of the global south is not made explicit in German news, the popular idea of the non-western Other which needs “either to be feared [...] or to be controlled” (Said 2019: 301, Thomas-Olalde & Velho 2011) is subliminally reproduced by several linguistic devices. Most striking in the coverage I analyzed are the diametrically opposed membership categorization devices (Peter & Chiluwa 2022) used to describe Malian and German actors and the family metaphor (Lakoff 1995). The former portray the separatist from Northern Mali as inhumane terrorists and the UN soldiers as empathic rescuer. The latter replicates the idea of Germany being the superior mature “grown-up”, either caring for the (inferior) Malian civil society (“child”) or trying to rear the (morally inferior) military government (“teenager”). Overall, German actors are described as subjects being capable to act purposeful, while the Malian civil society is the passive object and the separatists are acting haphazardly. Overall, the coverage reflects the idea of Germany being part of ‘Normative Power Europe’ which distinguishes from the Other framed as inferior and / or threat (Diez 2005).