Constructing Europe's Borders: Membership Discourses and European Integration
Funded by the Swiss National Foundation (SNF) and the Chair of European Studies at ETH
Research Summary
This research project traces and maps the transformation of the political discourses on Europe’s borders and membership, both in the European Union (EU) and in its contested neighborhood. It is designed to show how the positions and arguments of political parties on membership issues have shifted over time in a range of European countries, and how these changes influence membership practices. In doing so, it contributes to a better understanding of the historical changes that the region of Europe is currently undergoing, above all the contestation of “Europe” and the move toward “differentiated (dis)integration” in the region.
Objectives
In this project, we seek to establish how membership discourses are structured, how they diffuse among European actors, and how they impact membership decisions. To address these questions, we focus on three aspects: (1) the content of membership discourse; (2) the aggregation of membership discourses into discourse coalitions; and finally (3) the effects of discursive shifts on institutional practices of membership.
Contributions
This research makes four important contributions to the study of European territorial integration. First, it examines the most recent political discourse after the “big bang” enlargement of the mid-2000s and studies the impact of the current changes in the internal and external European context. Second, it broadens the scope of analysis to include Eastern European “contested territories” and Russia, which have not been part of comparative studies of membership discourses and politicization so far. Third, it builds on discourse network analysis, an innovative methodological tool, to analyze actor and party positions on membership issues, the frames they use, and the formation and change of national and transnational discursive coalitions over time, based on an extensive dataset of parliamentary debates. Finally, it connects shifts in membership discourses to a new range of membership practices, via the discourse institutionalization model.