In whose name? Construction of the EUropean agency in the European Union’s institutional discourse on the war in Ukraine

This article examines how European Union (EU) institutions discursively construct EUropean agency in their social media communication on the war in Ukraine, interrogating the legitimising strategies that constitute the Union's evolving role as a security actor. Grounded on poststructuralist understandings of discourse, legitimation and performativity, the study develops a novel model of EUropean agency attribution that accounts for its multi-actor fluid nature. This model is then applied to a large dataset of X posts published between 2022 and 2024 by the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the EU/European Council. The findings reveal profound institutional divergences: the European Commission deploys expansive and multilateral attributions of agency, performing a self-authorised role of a geopolitical orchestrator; the Parliament foregrounds itself and its members as the primary agents of response and the Council privileges abstract invocations of “the EU” as a unitary actor. Citizens and member states, by contrast, are largely absent as discursive agents, indicating a centralisation of symbolic authority at the institutional level. These patterns underscore the plural and contested nature of EUropean agency with broader implications for debates on EU legitimacy and symbolic authority in the security domain.