European Enlargement in Times of Crisis: Is the EU Building Borders?

In the history of European integration, territorial policies have consistently been inclusive. The borders of the European Union (EU) were constructed as open – permeable concentric circles, across which countries move towards the center as they adopt the standards of liberal democracy and economic integration. This post-Cold War consensus has come under pressure since the mid-2000s. On the Eastern outskirts of the EU, the liberal democratic and community-building discourses are challenged by the rise of Russian great-power nationalist discourse. Inside the EU, the challenge has come from concerns about the EU’s “absorption capacity” and “enlargement fatigue”, populist domestic opposition against further enlargement, and the recent recurrence of crises: the constitutional crisis (2004-05), the financial and euro crisis (from 2008), the geopolitical Ukrainian crisis (from 2013) and the ongoing refugee crisis (2015). Both these external and internal developments have led to increased contestation of the meaning of borders and membership in the EU and in its Eastern neighboring countries. This contribution aims to identify and map EU’s contemporary territorial discourses by studying the impact of the recent changes in internal and external European context on the discourse about borders and membership. The effects of these discursive changes on neighborhood and enlargement policy will then be analyzed and discussed. A database of political statements based on a political claim analysis of EU’s institutional discourses will serve as raw data for this study. The examination of these claims aims to classify the nominative and argumentative strategies used by relevant political actors in the EU to justify the consistency or shifts in their respective discourses about territorial integration. In conclusion, we will link the turn towards exclusion in the discourse to shifts in territorial practices such as reinstatement of border control, reinforcement of conditionality for membership and implementation of alternatives to enlargement.