Values in the European Politics - The Cases of the Greek and Bulgarian MEPs During the Migration and Refugee Crisis

Starting in 2009 with the economic crisis, the European Union has completed a decade full of challenges regarding its future. While the economic crisis has brought dissatisfaction between the member-states, examining the strength of a common economic policy for the Union, it is the rise of the refugee and migratory flows that completely reshapes the European Union political agenda. Although the flows attained their peak after 2014, it seems that the member-states were unaware of the problem’s significance, resulting in the stuck of the European integration process. Their ignorance and weakness to react to those emerging challenges for the European Union, took place while radical-right populist parties were on the rise in Europe. Adopting an anti-immigration agenda, radical-right parties took advantage of the space they found. As a result, they generated pressure for the mainstream political parties and tried to reshape the Union’s attitude to those groups. In order to achieve that, they developed their own, ‘European’, identity colliding with what is known as the ‘European Values’. While the above took place at a national level, in the European Parliament’s level, as Reif and Schmitt declared for the first time in 1979, there are different stakes. Reif and Schmitt’s theory focuses mainly on the differences between the national and the European political arena, regarding the strength of party identity for the parliamentary members and their priorities every time they vote for crucial political issues, in comparison with what happens in the national level. As a result of the above, our main research question is: How have the ‘European Values’ been imprinted in the Members of the European Parliament discourse? Having constructed our research question, we will specify the time and the sample of our study. Therefore, we turn our interest to the last two completed terms of the European Parliament, meaning the periods 2009-2014 (7th term) and 2014-2019 (8th term). The coincidence of those two periods with the beginning and the core of the migration and refugee crisis will offer us the ability for an in-depth understanding of those political and cultural collisions regarding the ‘European Values’. To achieve that, we will analyse the official discourse of the Members of the European Parliament, specifying our research to Bulgaria and Greece, as the most affected, from the refugee and migration crisis, countries in Southeast Europe. To proceed with our research and manage validity for our results, we will use the grounded theory methodology in combination with the MAXQDA software.