Discursive Inclusiveness and the Geopolitics of EU Enlargement: A Representative Claims Analysis of EU Public Discourse

Starting in 2009, a number of successive crises, from the Great Recession, to growing security concerns and a migration crisis of unprecedented scale, chipped away at both the internal and external perceptions of the appeal and legitimacy of European integration. More recently, the EU’s interdependence with countries like Russia and China has exposed the EU’s vulnerabilities. As a result, the EU’s internal and external roles are often contested and politicized. In this context, the debates over the potential accession of Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, have taken on a new significance, as efforts to both create a bulwark against Russian aggression and to shore up the continued relevance of the European project. As the EU is seen to be placing greater emphasis on systemic rivals, strategic autonomy, and economic security, this research seeks to enhance our current understanding of enlargement as one of the EU’s key geopolitical tools. By asking How inclusive is the Commission and Council’s discourse on enlargement? this paper examines the EU’s official discourse to improve our understanding of EU membership as a key venue for the articulation of supranational representation and legitimacy. Taking an interpretivist-constructivist approach to representation, this paper is informed by a sociological understanding of legitimacy, defined by the belief within constituencies of the appropriateness of the exercise of authority: as such, the exclusion (and inclusion) of relevant audiences, by those seeking legitimation, is of particular importance. This research applies a Representative Claims Analysis (RCA) lens to analyze inclusiveness within the EU’s official discourse. RCA is a content analysis method and its basic unit of analysis are claims, which are operationalized as normative evaluations or demands related to policy, made by actors in the public sphere. As such, this research uncovers who EU executive actors claim to represent, which other representatives they identify, but perhaps even more crucially, who and which kind of stakeholders they exclude from current debates on membership (civil society, political parties, government actors, etc.). How the Commission and Council conceive of constituencies, authority and legitimation in discourse on enlargement is crucial: (i) in times of politicization and weak or no formal consent mechanisms, the nature of discursive inclusion vis-á-vis existing and prospective EU Members is an important legitimation tool; (ii) this focus can shed further light on the instrumentalization of geopolitics as a source of internal and external legitimacy of the EU. This contribution advances current debates by reflecting on conceptions of supranational legitimation in an era of contestation and geopolitics, and by providing empirical grounding to perceptions of representation and EU membership at the intersection of elites and their constituencies. At the same time, it also develops our understanding of how EU enlargement is being shaped by these trends.