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Studies on European narratives predominantly focus on which narratives about the EU exist and which are more salient for political actors and audiences. The question remains as to how political actors can strategically utilize those EU narratives at a national level to justify their decision-making and further their objectives. We argue that to render narratives efficacious in convincing audiences of the appropriateness of political decisions, actors engage in Gefühlspolitik – emotional politics – rather than Realpolitik by strategically (re)constructing EU narratives and emphasizing their intersections with national narratives and collective memory to construct emotionally compelling stories and moral imperatives. Therefore, how EU narratives are utilized on a national level is more dependent on the national context and their affective appeal than on their actual content. We demonstrate our argument by looking at the case of the German government narrating the EU during the migration crisis. We show how the government anchored the European peace narrative in German collective memory to construct compelling moral imperatives that significantly narrowed the discursive space and let the German government's policies appear as apolitical necessities without alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article synthesizes scholarship on narratives and Kleinian defense mechanisms against anxiety to develop a framework that enables a nuanced understanding of ontological security‐seeking dynamics in times of crisis. Using the case study of the German narrative of the European Union during the so‐called migration crisis of 2015, this article engages with the broader question of how unconscious phantasy influences and guides decision‐making processes on a collective level as well as the question of how exactly narratives help subjects to manage anxiety to maintain a sense of ontological security. We show that, in the case of Germany, the EU offers a highly affective political myth that has guided both the decision‐making of the government during the crisis and the construction of German self‐identity narratives by attempting to introject the good part‐object of "Europeanness." Crucially, German self‐identity narratives and narratives on the EU were not only inextricably linked but the EU also became an idealized (Kleinian) part‐object. During the so‐called migration crisis, this fostered processes of projective identification whereby decisions subverting European values and humanitarian narratives as well as general "badness" were externalized and projected onto other member states, most notably the Visegrád states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]