Constructing European Identity in Nigerian Foreign Policy Discourse: A Critical Discourse Analysis

This doctoral study employs Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine how European identity is constructed, contested, and deployed in Nigerian foreign policy discourse across official government communications, parliamentary debates, media commentary, and civil society advocacy texts produced between 2010 and 2024. The study advances an original constructivist argument that Nigerian foreign policy actors are not passive recipients of European identity constructs but actively participate in the discursive construction of 'Europe' as a foreign policy Other, shaping how the EU and European states are positioned in Nigeria's strategic imagination. Drawing on Fairclough's CDA methodology and Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, the research builds an original analytical framework for examining Nigeria-European discourse dynamics. A comprehensive corpus of 500 policy texts, including Nigerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs white papers, National Assembly foreign policy debates, Nigerian newspapers' EU coverage, and diaspora media discourse, is subjected to systematic CDA. The study identifies dominant discourse formations around European identity including 'Europe as development partner', 'Europe as colonial ghost', 'Europe as rights imposer', and 'Europe as migration enforcer', and analyses how these formations serve specific political and ideological functions in Nigerian foreign policy debates. Original contributions include the discourse corpus, the analytical framework, and theoretically grounded findings on the role of European identity construction in shaping Nigerian foreign policy formulation. Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, European identity, Nigerian foreign policy discourse, constructivism, discourse theory.