Conference Agenda

This research aims to explore the role of emotions, particularly fear, in the discursive construction of the EU’s external borders, seeking to contribute to the growing research on how the bordering of the Union has been framed in the official discourses of its institutions since the implementation of the Schengen agreements into EU law. We focus on the management of emotions exercised by European institutions to justify the growing securitisation of the EU’s external borders, aiming to assert the extent to which discursive expression of emotions in public statements of the EU have contributed to authorise and reinforce bordering practices and logics that further perpetuated insecurities faced by refugees and asylum seekers trying to cross borders.

We begin by delving into the construction of the EU external border during the implementation of the Schengen agreements into EU law, the militarisation and externalisation of EU border management, and the emergence of the concept of “fortress Europe”. Following this, we discuss the debates on the (in)security experienced by migrants crossing the EU borders and how the EU border regime has been related to violent practices and Human Rights violations.Specifically, this work studies the role of fear in the EU discursive construction of threat within the migration/security nexus, and shed light on how such developments are made possible through the deployment of registers of emotions in securitisation discourses.

Building up on a cross-disciplinary theoretical framework we aim to unpack the role of emotions in the productive power of the EU and how such component was mobilised in the framing of refugees and asylum-seekers since the establishment of the Schengen zone under specific categories of subjectivity that has helped to naturalise the process of border fortification and externalisation which, in turn, resulted in insecurities for individuals crossing the EU border.

Since the focus is on the discursive expression of emotion, the chosen methodology was Critical Discourse Analysis. We appraoch the topic trying to identify how the transformation of specific groups of migrants into a security discourse was made possible in the EU, seeking to understand whether emotional elements are present or not and to what extent such elements are a structuring part of the border policies advanced by the EU.

In an era marked by complex global events like the COVID-19 pandemic, rising geopolitical tensions, Russian assertiveness, China's expanding influence, Brexit, the refugee crisis, and the Ukraine conflict, the European Union (EU) is compelled to present a unified stance on key issues such as threat assessment, military readiness, and diplomatic efforts. This need is underscored by the United States' (US) reduced involvement in European affairs, bringing the EU's Strategic Autonomy and Strategic Compass into sharper focus and influencing discussions on its strategic culture in security and defense.

This paper examines the extent to which the EU has developed a cohesive strategic culture that guides its foreign policy and global interactions. It explores how this culture, embodying the Union's collective identity, shapes its foreign policy decisions and the challenges in aligning the diverse security and defense perspectives of its member states. It particularly focuses on the strategic cultures of Germany and France during the 2014 Ukrainian crisis, using this as a case study to understand the impact of individual member states on the EU’s collective security and defense policy. The analysis also discusses the challenges and possibilities of harmonizing different national strategies within the EU and the importance of their convergence for a unified strategic culture.

This article aims to contribute significantly to the discourse on integrating diverse national strategies within the EU, enhancing understanding of its evolving strategic culture in a dynamic geopolitical environment. It underscores the importance of understanding the EU’s role in international relations, especially in light of current global challenges and changes, emphasizing the significance of strategic culture in shaping the EU’s responses to these challenges.

In the history of European integration, the role of peace has often been emphasised as a sine qua non condition for grounding a supranational region based on democracy and market economy. However, the more the European Union (EU) becomes a complex polity the more it needs to cope with its external dimension and inherent relations. At this level, and although it may sound like a truism, ignoring geopolitics (as Biscop (2018) has stated) would appear as a mistake, given the ongoing geopolitical power interplay by which the EU is surrounded.

For long, the EU has addressed its external relations, especially those based on territorial proximity, with reference to the enlargement and neighbourhood policies, two successive territorial rings, beyond the EU borders. The connection between both policies is obvious, but the whole logic has long been focused on the preservation and the expansion of the characteristics of the inner European circle (the integrated EU member states), and thus only allowing membership condition to states willing and effectively making a substantial transition towards EU patterns, as defined in the enlargement criteria. Internal peace and stability have therefore been underlying conditions for this process. Other neighbours, in turn, meet the economic and political support of the Union, namely through partnerships, which serve the twofold function of providing them with means for development, and the Union with a ring of stability and presumably friendly partners around.

In this context, the case of Ukraine is by no means standard and inaugurates a new and potentially risky approach to enlargement. The European Union has been supporting Ukraine against Russia and is at the same time negotiating the acession of Ukraine to the EU. In the broader geopolitical context major challenges to multilateralism and democracy have emerged, which might frame the support to Ukraine as an EU statement, with reference to those challenges; or, at the very least, as a defensive strategy, in seeking to contribute to the stabilisation of a bordering nation. In the process, the EU has had to re-access and to reinforce its connections with NATO and the ‘Western bloc’, but also to consider its own ‘strategic autonomy’. The whole process begs the question on whether the EU is going through its own looking glass and embracing new power challenges that take it well beyond the ‘normative power’ Europe we were used to. This is the core question discussed in the paper.

Disinformation, information manipulation and interference are forms of hybrid threats manifesting across the world. The threat is expanding, and a growing number of actors, mainly originating from the EU’s Eastern neighbourhood are using an increasing number of tactics. This study, besides the conceptualisation of the terms disinformation and resilience, intends to inspect the agencies created, the policies and instruments used by the European Community and its Member States meant to tackle this phenomenon. More precisely, the research is aimed at examining the societal dimension of resilience building to disinformation originating from the EU’s eastern vicinity, by implementing the whole-of-society approach. While the qualitative assessment of the Disinformation Resilience Index and of the EU Disinformation Review will reveal the level of exposure and vulnerability of certain EU member states to disinformation, the study also focuses on inspecting the actual measures that were taken to counter disinformation by bolstering societal resilience. Besides evaluating the efficiency of the initiatives launched at Community level (such as, the Rapid Alert System against Disinformation or the EEAS Eastern Stratcom), the paper also prioritizes familiarizing the reader with disinformation countering measures launched at the level of the civil society (EU DisinfoLab, ECAS’s Civil Society Against Disinformation coalition, Bellingcat, ReBaltica etc.)