Different narratives, one area without internal frontiers: why EU institutions cannot agree on the refugee crisis

ABSTRACT

This article contextualizes contemporary institutional responses of the European Union (EU) to the refugee crisis within the historical setting in which EU migration and asylum policies emerged – namely during the implementation of the border-free Schengen Area (1984–1995). Using the analytical framework of ‘policy narratives’, it argues that EU institutions have used the creation of the ‘area without internal frontiers’ to build coherent narratives about the nature and scope of EU action and of their own role in it. Such narratives became locked into the institutional discourse and influenced the subsequent evolution of EU politics on the topic.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union
• migration
• policy narratives
• refugee crisis
• Schengen Area

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr. Adina Maricut is a political scientist currently working as Researcher at the Center for European Union Research (CEUR) of the Central European University. In parallel, she is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Politics at Bard College Berlin. This paper was written while she was still a doctoral researcher at the School of Public Policy of the Central European University. Her dissertation explored the evolution of institutional behaviour in the European Union's area of freedom, security and justice — covering contentious issues such as immigration, asylum, and counter-terrorism policy.

Notes

1. The Schengen Area became operational in 1995 and expanded over time to 26 European countries, including non-member states Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein, but currently excluding EU member states United Kingdom, Ireland, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania, and Croatia (European Commission, n.d.).

2. The analysis excludes the European Council, which only became institutionalized in the Single European Act in 1987 and has no role in day-to-day decision-making in the field (Nilsson & Siegl, 2010, pp. 69–72).

3. See also the political science literature on discursive institutionalism, which explores the role of ideas in the official discourse of institutions (Schmidt, 2008). As its name suggests, the narrative approach seeks to disentangle the storyline aspect within an institutional discourse and does not just focus on the driving ideational forces behind it.

4. The main difference between the two is methodological. Post-positivists, who prefer to call themselves interpretivists, focus on narratives as ‘meaning-making’, inductively looking at how human beings make sense of the world and their own experiences in specific contexts by means of language. Positivists are interested in narratives as discourses that can be objectively measured based on unambiguous concept operationalization in a way that is both generalizable and falsifiable (Schwartz-Shea & Yanow, 2012, Chapter 3).

5. The working parties tackled specific topics: police and security, free movement of persons, transport, and checks on goods (Schutte, 1991, p. 549).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Central European University through its standard doctoral scholarship program.