The EU has not succeeded in developing a uniform approach in response to the exceptionally high number of asylum seekers entering Europe. Instead, the EU’s recent handling of irregular migration...Show moreThe EU has not succeeded in developing a uniform approach in response to the exceptionally high number of asylum seekers entering Europe. Instead, the EU’s recent handling of irregular migration has been marked by unilateral action, mutual accusations and political deadlock. Moreover, the European migration crisis of 2015 has demonstrated that the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) is unable to handle migratory pressure and actually stimulates secondary movements. However, the current East-West divide prevents the emergence of any meaningful compromise that would allow the CEAS to be successfully reformed. For this reason, the question examined by this thesis is whether the CEAS can be reformed through using differentiation and if so, how and to what extent this would be possible. In order to answer this question, three topics surrounding EU asylum and migration policy are discussed, i.e. Schengen, external border management and the relocation program. The analysis of this thesis concludes that differentiation cannot be applied to Schengen and is not required to enhance external border management because of an emerging consensus. Still, differentiation does have the potential to improve the functioning of the relocation program but this would require member states to centralize their asylum policies, something that is unlikely to happen in the near future. Even so, a coalition of the willing should aim to reform the CEAS into a centralized EU asylum system because only then will the EU be able to effectively control high levels of irregular migration into Europe.Show less
This thesis seeks to interrogate the response of the European Union to the events known as the Arab uprisings, with a particular focus on the political transitions experienced by Egypt and Tunisia...Show moreThis thesis seeks to interrogate the response of the European Union to the events known as the Arab uprisings, with a particular focus on the political transitions experienced by Egypt and Tunisia since early 2011. It conducts a thorough textual analysis of major European Neighbourhood Policy documents and ‘speech acts’ related to Egypt and Tunisia, using Norman Fairclough’s three- dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). In each instance of ENP discourse, this study sees a text, a discursive practice and a social practice. It identifies the particular discursive configurations of democracy promotion in these text samples, noting a significant change in tone since the launch of the ENP in 2003. More specifically, it points to the new neighbourhood agenda developed by the EU since the wave of protests in the Middle-East and North Africa, characterised by greater ownership of ENP policies by EU partners, considerable differentiation in their objectives and a heightened concern for the stabilisation of the region. Rooted in a critical, constructivist approach to discourse analysis, it eventually contends that the seemingly less voluntarist narrative developed in South Neighbourhood policy documents is the result of higher threat perception in the Union. A threat narrative is indeed highlighted, as a particular instance of a crisis rhetoric, resulting in a notable downscaling of EU normative ambitions in the region. Investigation of the Egyptian and Tunisian cases since 2011 provides important information regarding these developments in the ENP. This thesis eventually points to civil society assistance as a narrative of inclusiveness which could prove to be a significant addition to ENP democracy promotion agenda, while recognising the limits of this endeavour.Show less
