European COVID-19 Twitter Mapping: Solidarity? What solidarity?
To address the challenged raised by the COVID-19 pandemic, European actors have stated their willingness to engage further with their international partners and enhance regional cooperation. However, the data shows that they still interact essentially with other national actors. Overall, international and multilevel connections remain marginal as the crisis is deepening.
Fragmented System and Self-Contained Networks
Mapping mentions between a subset of 53 international, European, Swiss and French political and institutional actors, we observe that the wider network remains largely divided along country lines, with each country-cluster almost completely independent from each other. When ties do reach outside the country, they most likely do so vertically, forming into a loose but identifiable multi-level governance network taking shape around the WHO as a central actor.
The WHO: at the center of… what ?
The WHO (World Health Organisation) and DrTedros (Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the WHO) are the most active tweeters, and they are also gather the most mentions. This is not surprising given the central role the WHO has been playing in diffusing information about the pandemic since January 2020. What is more puzzling is the limited ways in which national and European interact with the WHO. The centrality of the WHO and DrTedros accounts is in fact driven by “self-reference” between the two actors: they mention each other over 3000 times during the period on a total of 4160 mentions. Only 239 mentions originate from outside the United Nations and merely 20 from France and Switzerland combined.
This is hardly signaling strong multilevel cooperation and global amplification of a common message. What’s more, all these actors actors relay very similar advices and information, and they share the same underlying discourses about of the necessary solidarity between all actors to address the crisis. But they still remain hesitant to use the networking tools offered by social media to reach out to actors outside their immediate political sphere.
Network Representations as Map of Twitter Interactions: France, Swiss, EU and International Political Actors, January to August 2020
Source: Marie-Eve Bélanger, 2020 (Template Credits: Network Graph by Flourish Team. Click here to access the interactive visualization online)
Homophily and the Health Connection
Although some actors reach out across political levels and countries, most relations remain contained within the country limits. A few actors act as a bridge between two levels of governance, for example Hans Kluge (regional director of WHO Europe) is mentioned both by European and International actors. When they do reach outside their country-networks, actors tend to connect with actors sharing a certain number of similarities, otherwise known as homophily. For example, Ignazio Cassis, the Swiss Federal Councilor head of the Department of Foreign Affairs is connecting exclusively with other Swiss actors, with the notable exceptions of Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne and Jean-Yves Le Drian, respectively Frances’ Secretary of State for Tourism and Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs.
For all cases, major health actors - in other words technical rather than political agencies - remain central and most active. Again however, they are seldom associating with each other across cases. Among the three major health actors outside the UN (BAG, EU_Health and Minsolisante), only the European “EU_Health” ever mentions the WHO.
TL;DR
Despite strong calls for solidarity between citizen and across countries to address issues linked to the COVID-19 crisis, the social media network reflects a fragmented European political messaging.
Looking inwards at national actors rather than opening to their wider geopolitical community, European political actors remain isolated from their international counterparts.
