Title

The right to rule: Discursive legitimation of European Union migration governance in the Communication on a New Pact

Abstract

This thesis examines the European Union’s Communication on a New Pact (2020), a foundational text outlining the EU’s updated approach to migration and asylum governance. The research aim is to uncover how contemporary EU migration policy is discursively justified in the text and constructs the EU’s authority and expertise. To investigate such issues, an interpretivist discourse analysis methodology was used, exploring the EU’s discursive processes of legitimation. Analysing the text reveals that the EU employs a variety of discursive strategies to construct itself as a central actor of migration governance, including appeals to a de-historicized system of unifying values. Next, the EU naturalizes the existence of migration as crisis, to justify its proposed measures and create a state of exception, limiting the rights of asylum seekers. Analysis of EU migration governance was chosen due to its securitization trend and the power of discursive legitimation to justify and enact such policy-making.

Exam committee

• Dr. Cécile Vigouroux (Supervisor) 
• Dr. Maite Taboada (Committee member) 
• Dr. Alfonso Del Percio (External examiner, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland)