EU and crisis management: Afghanistan and Ukraine on social media

Abstract

The European Union (EU) is a very relevant actor in the political scene. The EU's external action is inspired by the principles of peace and rule of law. However, the EU is composed of different institutions and leaders, making it difficult to find a single voice. This promotes a feeling of remoteness that threatens the legitimacy of the EU political system. In recent years, the EU has faced many internal challenges, such as the refugee crisis and Brexit, but recent events in Afghanistan and Ukraine reveal the need to further our understanding of the role of the EU as an international actor. Bearing these trends in mind, this research aimed to explore the management of crisis communication by the EU leaders regarding the two most recent international events: Afghanistan in 2021 and Ukraine in 2022. Specifically, we analyze the profiles of Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen), Josep Borrell (@JosepBorrellF), and Charles Michel (@eucopresident). Content analysis is manually performed on 479 tweets on military conflicts over a general sample of 661 messages. The strategies and specific topics are studied based on a pretest. In addition, we calculate the impact rate of the tweets. In this sense, the data were captured for a 2-month period (15 August to 15 September 2021 and 24 February to 24 March 2022). As a result, we show the predominance of messages on Ukraine together with a significantly different action of von der Leyen in terms of strategies and employment of the tools of Twitter. Her impact rate is also higher. This study contributes to current discussions on the mission of communication to foster trust, since the anti-publicity bias of the EU requires better levels of coherence to more effectively disseminate messages.