ABSTRACT
Instead of viewing conspiracies as mere products of paranoia and hopelessness, this chapter shows they are powerful political tools. This emerges from an analysis of news stories published in the East StratCom’s disinformation newsletter collecting disinformation stories published in pro-Kremlin media in Eastern Europe. News stories reported as fake by the newsletter between October 2015 and January 2017 are chosen as the dataset for analysis. Seventy-eight news stories published in seven countries are found to have contained elements of conspiracy theories about the EU in this period, which is 9.21 per cent of the total number of reported disinformation stories in the same period (847). Through further analysis of these news stories, four main conspiracy narratives are found: (1) The EU institutions want to destroy the ‘true’ European identity, (2) The refugee crisis was planned out by the EU authorities (3), The EU is a totalitarian regime, (4) The EU is a vassal of the US. This chapter is an example of how discourse analysis can be used in conspiracy theory research arriving from political science and a call for more contributions from political scientists and scholars of European Studies to the growing area of research into conspiracy theory studies and their political function.
