European Citizens and Social Media Debates About Migration

In the course of the refugee crisis of 2015/16, the freedom of movement within the European Union (EU) has become highly contested among a variety of public political and societal actors. The extent to which this crisis has lead towards politicization of the EU among its citizens - in terms of increasing the salience and polarisation of debates about European affairs and making more and more citizens talk about the EU - has so far not been systematically investigated. This paper fills this gap in the literature and asks to what extent the EU has actually been politicised in the citizen arena during the crisis, especially when compared to national and subnational levels of governance. We draw on a novel dataset of several thousand comments posted below newspaper articles that appeared on the Facebook sites of regional media outlets in Germany. We show that despite the fact that the EU possesses considerable authority in the field of migration and asylum, media coverage of the refugee crisis was extensive, and Germany saw the rise of a new radical right party, the politicisation of Europe in terms of salience and actor expansion remains low among social media users in Germany. When talking about Europe, this segment of citizens hardly refers to EU institutions or policies. Rather, other member states and diffuse notions of the geographic or cultural space dominate the debate about Europe. We discuss how these findings relate to the emergence of a new transnational cleavage in Europe and discuss its implications for EU citizenship.