Emotional Advocacy in EU External Border Control

“Our debate must be based on facts, not illusions and emotions” (Tusk, European Council 2015). By its negation European Council President Tusk underlined that EU decision-making, far from being a technocratic exercise, is characterized by a clash of emotions. However, most research on the role of emotions in EU politics has focused on domestic politics and the electorate concerning, for example, Brexit and the eurocrisis (see Capelos et al. 2018; Garry 2014). Much less attention has been paid to the way in which emotions shape the decision-making among EU policy-makers. This paper draws on insights from the emotional turn in International Relations (e.g. Bleiker & Hutchison 2014; Hall 2015; Koschut 2018; Markwicka 2018; Mercer 2010) and institutional policy analysis, in particular Advocacy Coalition Framework (Sabatier 1998; see also, Palm 2017) and Discursive institutionalism (Schmidt 2010) to answer the question: How does emotional advocacy shape the EU’s decision-making? To analyze the emotional quality of ideas (Cox & Béland 2013) in the EU’s multilevel policy-making, I will conduct a case study of the decision-making process of Regulation 2016/1623 on the European Border and Coast Guard in 2016. To this end, I will 1) develop a framework that ties the valence of emotional vocabulary to their temporal dimension (i.e. backward- and forward looking) and their social/relational dimension (i.e. other- or self-regarding) and 2) systematically study the different strategies of emotional advocacy and formulate expectations on their impact on EU policy-making. This way the paper makes a threefold contribution: 1) conceptually, it distinguishes different types of emotions and strategies of emotional advocacy to be able to account for the variation in impact, 2) empirically, it demonstrates how emotions feature in the coordinative discourse among policymakers in an international policy process.