Easier said than done: assessing elite crisis framing and patterns of decision-making in the context of EU’s Eastern border

Over the last decade, the European Union (EU) has faced multiple crises of exogenous and endogenous origin that have affected both the direction and the nature of the integration process. In particular, the proposed analysis will focus on the challenges posed by the Belarusian border crisis (2021) and the travel ban towards Russian citizens (2022) in the context of the Nordic-Baltic EU members states of Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Sweden. Aware of the tight connection between national debates and supranational decision-making, the paper addresses the impact of these two challenges on the elite’s narratives and crisis framing in connection to the decision-making context of the European Parliament (EP). Accordingly, national elite discourses are collected, coded, analysed, and juxtaposed with the EP debates. The discursive patterns identified are also tested in the light of the legislators’ voting behaviour and coalition patterns in the EP, by capturing the tension between partisanship and nationality. Despite its growing role in shaping EU internal and foreign policy stances, the EP is traditionally disregarded in favour of the Council or the Commission and studies discussing its voice in the current crises appear very limited. This paper considers the EP not only as a precious study laboratory to assess the impact of nationality and ideologies on political decisions, but also an effective analytical connector between domestic and the supranational level of decision-making. To achieve its empirical goals the study will collect and analyse Prime ministers and foreign ministers’ speeches and governments’ official communiques, while the parliamentary analysis will be based on pre-vote debates and roll-call votes available in the EP minutes.