Genealogy of the COVID-19 discourses project
We started the COVID-19 research almost a year ago. This is a short reflection on how the project came about, and where we are now.
This research was designed in the wake of the pandemic, when European borders were closing and online discussion about the end of the European integration project and the dissolution of the Schengen area were (again) thriving. These uncertainties about the next step for EU territorial integration and the unilateral decisions to reinstate national borders in Europe both worried my as an European and intrigued me as a researcher. So building on previous research about the evolution of the meaning of borders in Europe, I set out to examine the effect of the pandemic on border discourses among European political elites.
What I found, is a healthy global discussion among supranational and national governments and political parties as well as international agencies, with strong democratic foundations and a deep engagement towards cooperation and solidarity. Also: a fair share of conspiracy theories, dissidence and conflict. In other words: a thriving political space.
Origin story
When looking at longitudinal patterns, hard borders in Europe have been declining over the past few decades, with regional integration being for a while almost synonymous with expansion:
Deep political and economic integration where new members state agree to share a large part of their sovereign powers over borders
Decision strategies are based on multi-level governance to make common decisions about border issues, both in terms of traffic, travel and foreign affairs
This debordering movement is very much anchored in a liberal-democratic vision of European integration where borders are considered as barriers to trade and mobility, so their relevance is questioned and their function limited as much as possible.
This is especially true for internal borders, but external borders were equally affected thanks to enlargement and deep regional integration through the European neighbourhood policy for example
Overall, borders were becoming less significant as hard lines of division by design: this is a goal for the EU, to overreach borders, to create a common political and economic space beyond the national state.
However, for the past decade or so, since the great economic crisis of 2008 and especially the migration crisis of 2015, we observe a shift in the border discourse, and a return of the European identity discourse at the forefront of the development of common border strategies.
This bond between borders and identity is the organizing principle of a discourse proposing an alternative to the liberal ideology behind the softening of borders and has been promoted mainly by the far right and populist parties in Europe.
This is not to say that this idea of keeping and even reinforcing borders on the basis of exclusive identities was ever outdates, but rather that it has gained acceptance and garnered more support as an alternative to the liberal discourse, pushed by right leaning conservatives.
EU Borders Discourse Project: Summary of Findings
After a phase of domination of an inclusive discourse and debordering in Europe,
We very recently witnessed the re-emergence of a more exclusive identity-base and essentialist discourse
Driven by conservative political parties across Europe
Which goes hand in hand with the rebordering movement marked by
The slowing of enlargement process
More stringent restrictions to entry
And the implementation of alternatives to membership for the rest of Europe. (Which is not already part of the EU).
March 2020
European countries one after the other unilaterally decide to close their borders in response to the spreading of the Sars-Cov-2 virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.
At first, these borders closing felt a bit anachronistic (although perhaps my own research was in a way vindicated by this initial national spasm). Is this a return to the Nation State or just a remnants of a bygone era in Europe? It felt scary to see how fast states could so easily and thoroughly reclaim full sovereignty over their borders after years of successfully sharing the management of border control. It also felt like an opportunity to be seized by the tenants of more border control to realize their ambition.
In any case, very early in the pandemic, these new national and uncoordinated responses felt threatening to the EU integration project.
This was also an interesting development for us as EU scholars, and this is the basis on which we first designed the project.
Initial Research Questions
How is the pandemic affecting discourses over international borders and mobility in Europe?
Do these discursive changes translate into the implementation of new border decisions on the continent?
My first idea in order to analyse decision-making processes during a pandemic was to look at official institutional discourse.
I have experience analysing debates in parliament, which is great to identify coalition forming and patterns of discourse convergence and divergence leading to decision-making and implementation of border policies
However, very rapidly, two problems emerged:
All over Europe, countries were declaring some kind of emergency situation, which meant that decisions would not follow the normal path of being first debated at the legislative level before they could become binding. In other words, THIS WAS AN EXECUTIVE moment, and decision were made by the government, at the highest level of the executive branch
This crisis was unfolding way too fast. Changes happened daily, even from one hour to the other and new legislation with incredibly strong effect on our way of life entered in force very fast and in quick succession
So in the beginning, it was especially hard to keep up with the pace of politics and decision.
BUT you could still be informed in real time online as Internet is designed to spread information at a very quick pace (this is not without dangers).
So I changed my initial idea and decided to turn to social media analysis. I was on social media all day anyway to try to make sense of this, so I figured: a lot of people like me must be getting their information though this channel, and this includes institutional actors who, thanks to these social media sites, have unmediated access to citizen.
Which means that they could craft their message exactly the way they intend, and spread the information at their own pace. If you can figure out how to gather and code all this information, this makes for a solid discourse analysis project.
Political elites on Twitter
I chose Twitter for many reasons, among which the data is easily available and comparable, the message must be clear and concise, and all institutional actors have a long experience of using it and must of them are quite prolific in doing so.
So I first identified all actors I wanted to study (53 all together) to look at multilevel governance of border, because this is how the border system is designed in Europe. I selected local, regional, national, supranational and international actors in France, UK, and Switzerland as well as the EU and the UN. This makes comparative studies in many different directions possible.
Before I even finished to draft the codebook, I started to gather the data. For the first round of coding, you have to go through and classify a lot of tweets by hand. In this case, it was about 60 000. It turns out that half of them were about Covid, and about a quarter of those were about mobility.
So we have plenty of data to work with.
One of the advantages of working with a lot of empirical data is that you get a good sense of the scope of the data by looking through it even before you go too deep into the conceptualization.
When it comes to this research, I had some intuitions about this discourse and I was seeking cues on international mobility.
Yet, what clearly appeared from the data was a discourse quite a bit different from what I expected in two specific ways:
the mobility discourse was not explicitly becoming more radical on border issues, and the initial fear for European integration and the survival of Schengen seemed to vanish very early in the discourse
mobility discourse was splitting into a more complex variety of mobility issues, which we early on identified as international travel, domestic movement and physical distancing.
Refocus of initial assumptions
From this initial digging in the empirical data, we settled on the project of examining:
How all these mobility discourse are constructed,
How they are interconnected and intertwined with each other
Who diffuses them and how do actors mobilize arguments
And since it’s all emergency and real time discourse production, we decided to look at the evolution of this discourse through the lens of crisis communication.
What we found will be the object of the next few posts!
