Narrating 'Our European Way of Life' in Migration and Citizenship Policy

Since 2019, the European Commission has a Vice-President with the controversial portfolio of ‘promoting our European way of life’. However, whether a European ‘we’ exists at all has been a subject of heated public and academic debate. This paper taps into these debates and investigates how the European Commission itself has (re)narrated ‘European peoplehood’, focussing on its migration and citizenship policies as two policy areas that draw legal and symbolic boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. On the basis of a longitudinal narrative analysis of key Commission documents since the signing of the treaty of Lisbon and background interviews with EU officials, the paper compares the changes in the core elements of narratives of European peoplehood across time and the two policy areas. First results suggest that most core narrative elements have been repeated over the years, pointing to the continuity of narratives of peoplehood. However, there are important differences between policy areas: In citizenship policy, the narratives of peoplehood are much more pronounced in constructing a European ‘we’ than migration policy documents. Furthermore, there are some remarkable changes with regard to the main themes within European citizenship narratives, and with regard to plot, characters, and themes in migration narratives. The paper finally interprets these changes against the background of evolving external circumstances, different narrators and audiences, and the distinct institutional context of European migration and citizenship policy. Overall, the paper makes a threefold contribution: First, it demonstrates the analytic potential of a narrative approach to studying ‘European peoplehood’ in the context of migration and diversity; second, it provides a deeper understanding of how narratives of peoplehood change; and third, it sheds light on what the ‘European way of life’ has meant to the European Commission in recent years.