European decision-makers and their tweets about Covid-19

If you know any Europhile, you will agree that most of them consider free movement as European integration’s greatest achievement. Decades of deterritorialization of borders has lead to the implementation of the widest international border-free zone. It took years of negotiation and effort to open national borders, and every step towards more opening felt irreversible and historic. As more countries joined, European internal border controls were becoming remnants of bygone times.

And yet, as soon as the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world in early 2020, European countries’ first reflex was to shut down and reinstate controls at their national borders. As if all of this effort meant nothing, as if every country had always been ready to turn this Schengen ship on a dime. For a few months now, most European borders have reopened. But it certainly wouldn’t be fair to say that free movement is back to pre-pandemic levels. In fact, it seems that inevitable changes are coming for European borders, and they point towards more, rather than less control.

In this series of posts, I will explore how a wide range of political and institutional actors frame border issues in relation to Covid-19. My objective is double. First, I want to determine whether and to what extent Covid-19 issues permeate discourses about mobility in Europe. Second, I aim to measure the impact of the pandemic on political decisions about borders.

I thus both identify dominant discourses about the pandemic, and link them to the political forces defending them in the public sphere. In order to do so, I set to analyze twitter feeds from international, European and national actors to get a better understanding of how elites frame the crisis and how they organize around the different aspects of the issue.

Among other topics, I will look at how they present the causes of the pandemic, the possible solutions to the crisis they put forward, the economic and social impacts of the crisis, and their evaluation of the measures implemented by governments to address them.

I then verify whether their positions are translated into actual decisions about Covid, especially when it comes to borders and mobility.

European political actors took to Twitter to relay information about the virus, to mobilize citizen to follow new rules, to express solidarity with those affected, and to announce decisions about economic and social relief measures to alleviate the worst effects of the crisis. Twitter has revealed an unmediated way to reach an audience, by actors who have a political agenda: so let’s find out what they want, and whether they are successful in realizing these objectives.