A Alemanha unificada: trave-mestra da Nova Europa ou gigante über alles? O debate na imprensa periódica portuguesa

• Autor(a) principal: Mouro, Ana Luísa Santos Freire
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34624/rual.v0i1.9563

The German Unification, signed on 3rd 1990, accelerated the advent of a new era for Europe, which, from that moment, started the process of building a  community based on the principles of unity, solidarity and cooperation. It is interesting to understand how this event, which had strong repercussions in Europe, was received in Portugal, one of the so-called PIIGS, an acronym with obvious negative connotations, but with strong projection in the economic and financial fields. The analysed corpus (opinion articles, reports, news, interviews and editorials) was collected from the quality Portuguese press, namely the weekly Expresso and O Independente, as well as from the daily Público and Diário de Notícias, in what the period from July to December 1990 is concerned. The editions that were published in the same newspapers from January 2011 to November 2012 were also taken into account, once the economic and political crisis we are now facing in Europe has drawn wider attention to Germany and to the way this country has been assuming a leading position among the European institutions, specially in the political and financial sectors.* The acronym PIGS was originally used to describe Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain, the four peripheral European countries with weaker economies. In 2008, the acronym became PIIGS, when Ireland, following the banking crisis that broke out, joined the group (cf. Krouse, 2012)