Two and a Half Tales of Europe: How the European Commission Narrates Peoplehood in Migration and Citizenship Policy

Hase, Johanna Article — Published Version Two and a Half Tales of Europe: How the European Commission Narrates Peoplehood in Migration and Citizenship Policy JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies Provided in Cooperation with: John Wiley & Sons Suggested Citation: Hase, Johanna (2024) : Two and a Half Tales of Europe: How the European Commission Narrates Peoplehood in Migration and Citizenship Policy, JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, ISSN 1468-5965, Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, Vol. 62, Iss. 1, pp. 74-90, https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13479 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/288173 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Two and a Half Tales of Europe: How the European Commission Narrates Peoplehood in Migration and Citizenship Policy JOHANNA HASE WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Berlin Abstract Since 2019, the European Commission has had a vice president for ‘promoting our European way of life’, but whether a European ‘we’exists at all is disputed. This article investigates whether and how the Commission has constructed this ‘we’through narratives of peoplehood. Analysing official communications in migration and citizenship policy between 2007 and 2020, it traces three narrative elements: characters, plot and main theme. The article argues, first, that the Commission’s narrative of ‘realizing European citizenship’creates a sense of peoplehood more than its narrative of ‘achieving a comprehensive migration policy’and, second, that it has largely repeated its citizenship narrative while adapting its migration narrative. The findings suggest that the Commission is a rather subtle narrator of peoplehood and call into question whether it has a clear idea of the ‘we’whose ‘way of life’it seeks to promote. Keywords: citizenship; European Commission; migration; narrative analysis; peoplehood Introduction In September 2019, Ursula von der Leyen, the incoming president of the European Commission (hereafter: Commission), selected Margaritas Schinas as her vice president for ‘protecting our European way of life’. Afterwards, a heated discussion erupted about whether there is a ‘European way of life’and whether it needs protection (Herzenshorn and de la Baume 2019). Eventually, the portfolio was renamed ‘promoting our European way of life’, but the title raises similar questions. This article addresses the most fundamental one –how has the Commission imagined the ‘we’that supposedly shares a common way of life? The article uses the lens of European peoplehood, a notion that has fascinated scholars across the disciplines at least since the European Union (EU) became closely integrated. The mere existence of this sui generis polity begs the question whether its limited degree of statehood has been or should be accompanied by a sense of peoplehood. From a normative perspective, theorists and philosophers have debated whether European peoplehood is needed, realistic, or desirable to ensure the EU’s democratic legitimacy (Martí 2018). 1 From an empirical perspective, social scientists have studied whether different expressions of European peoplehood are evident in the attitudes and experiences of citizens (Bruter 2005; Hobolt and De Vries 2016; Sanders et al. 2012; Siklodi 2020), in the media (Koopmans and Statham 2010; Trenz 2010) and in the discourse of national 1 Although many people identify as European without feeling ‘EU’ropean, ‘Europe’has de facto come to mean ‘the EU’in large parts of the public and the academic debate (Risse 2010, pp. 50, 102). JCMS 2024 Volume 62. Number 1. pp. 74–90 DOI: 10.1111/jcms.13479 © 2023 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. and European elites (Katzenstein and Checkel 2009; Pukallus 2016; Risse 2010). As a part of this endeavour, scholars have begun to utilize a narrative lens, in what Luis Bouza describes as the ‘narrative turn in European studies’(Bouza García 2017; see also Della Sala 2010; Manners and Murray, 2016; McMahon and Kaiser 2021). The article is a part of this turn, as it uses narratives both as its theoretical framework –by assuming that the Commission builds peoplehood through evolving narratives in migration and citizenship policies –and in its methodology. The article covers the Commission’s migration and citizenship communications since the Lisbon Treaty. It focusses on the narratives in which the Commission has embedded its policies rather than on the policies themselves and on the image of ‘us’rather than visions of ‘them’. The article shows that the Commission advanced different narratives across policy areas. In its citizenship communications, it promised to ‘realize European citizenship’, whereas in its migration communications, it called for a ‘comprehensive migration policy’. The article argues that the citizenship narrative has more potential to construct peoplehood. While the Commission maintained its citizenship narrative in core elements, it adapted character, plot and main theme of its migration narrative in the mid-2010s, when many people sought protection in the EU. However, it did not completely replace this narrative, and the aim of a comprehensive migration policy remained. The analysis leaves the overall impression that the Commission has been telling what figuratively amounts to two and a half tales of Europe –one narrative in the area of citizenship and one and a half in the area of migration. The article first details the theoretical framework and its implications for studying European peoplehood. It then sketches its narrative analysis, presents and discusses the Commission’s two and a half tales of Europe and points to avenues for future research in the conclusion. I. Theory: The Commission as a Narrator of Peoplehood? Psychologists, sociologists and cultural theorists have understood humans as storytellers, homo narrans, who make sense of themselves and create their social world through narratives (Bruner 1991; Koschorke 2018; Somers 1994). From this perspective, political communities, as a part of the social world, are ontologically grounded in narratives. Unlike descriptions or arguments, narratives connect events and characters on a timeline into a plot (forming the story), express this story in a certain form (the text) and convey it in a communicative act from a narrator to an audience (narration) (Shenhav 2015, pp. 16–17). Rogers Smith’s concept of peoplehood lends itself well to this approach: He argues that while a people partly relies on coercion, it depends on an ‘imagined scenario of how the future will unfold, made credibly by a certain account of the past and present’ (Smith 2003, pp. 43–45). 2 The concept is productive for further reasons –for instance, it is not conceptually bound to any polity (as opposed to many conceptions of nationhood). In fact, while state-building in terms of ‘constructing effective institutions of governmental power’eventually requires a sense of peoplehood, a people does not necessarily have a state (Smith 2003, pp. 51–52). Furthermore, the concept clearly captures a 2 Smith uses narrative and story interchangeably (Smith 2003, p. 44). As this article uses ‘story’as one of three narrative components, Smith’s concept is referred to as ‘narratives of peoplehood’. Two and a Half Tales of Europe 75 © 2023 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. collective construction rather than an individual’s feeling of belonging (as opposed to identification). As narratives are omnipresent ‘like life itself’(Barthes, cited in Koschorke 2018, p. 1), it is helpful to differentiate between narratives of peoplehood and other narratives in the political sphere, such as policy narratives. Peoplehood and policy narratives operate at different levels: The former operate as deeply held convictions, ‘public philosophies’ (Schmidt 2011, pp. 111–112) or political myths (Della Sala 2016, pp. 524–525), the latter as less entrenched ‘strategic constructions of a policy reality promoted by policy actors’ (Jones et al. 2014, p. 9; Schmidt 2011, pp. 108–109; see, for a similar differentiation in International Relations, Roselle et al. 2014, p. 76). While conceptually distinct, they can empirically overlap: Documents justifying a certain policy may at the same time convey a narrative about the people for whom it is implemented. The quest to create a community is what this article sees as the decisive feature of narratives of peoplehood (Smith 2003, pp. 44–45). To this end, the people in some form must arguably feature as a relatable character in such narratives. Smith differentiates between narratives of peoplehood with economic themes of material advantages, political themes of individual or collective political power and ethically constitutive themes of what supposedly inherently defines the respective people –be it culture, values, race, ethnicity or something else. These are often combined, but at different times, different themes may dominate (Smith 2003, pp. 59–71). In either of these themes, narratives of peoplehood can be expected to forecast some kind of progress to give the audience a reason to identify as part of the people (Smith 2003, pp. 44–45). While everyone can narrate peoplehood, political leaders have to do so. They strategically portray themselves as heroes in order to ‘achieve and maintain power’(Smith 2003, pp. 32–37). European leaders, too, tell stories to secure their legitimacy and ontological security (Biegoń2013; Della Sala 2018). But in contrast to policy narratives, narratives of peoplehood cannot be reduced to strategic instruments as they ‘do not merely serve interests, they also help to constitute them’(Smith 2003, p. 45). This article focusses on the Commission for several reasons. First, in contrast to the European Parliament and the Council, which represent the interests of their electorate and the Member States (MS), the Commission has a mandate to ‘promote the general interest of the Union’(Article 17, Treaty on European Union), which may include creating a sense of community. Second, as a supranational agenda setter without direct democratic legitimacy, it arguably depends especially on narratives to portray it as the hero. Third, the Commission is engaged in policies –like the former ‘Europe for Citizens’programme –that promote a European community. In other words, the Commission’s narratives can inform its policies (see also Maricut 2017). Since political leaders also narrate who the people are not (Smith 2003, p. 56), they tend to offer narratives of peoplehood in policy areas that define who belongs. Paradigmatic examples are migration and citizenship policy: While citizenship remains the ultimate instrument of ‘social closure’(Brubaker 1992, pp. 21–34), migration policies are ‘gatekeepers’, regulating access to territory, labour market and welfare systems (Orgad 2015, p. 84). Therefore, the Commission’s migration and citizenship narratives are the focus of the article. Its powers are limited in both of these areas. The Amsterdam Treaty of 1999 increased the EU’s competences to harmonize migration and asylum policies, excluding volumes of admission. Ever since, the Commission has proposed legislation on many aspects of migration, but has found more support among Johanna Hase76 © 2023 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. divided MS for measures curbing irregular migration than opening legal pathways, so that the ‘framework remains incomplete’(Geddes et al. 2020, p. 169). The Commission, in particular the Directorate General for Migration and Home Affairs, put forward a new set of proposals in the ‘New Pact on Asylum and Migration’in 2020, hoping to give new impetus to the difficult negotiations. European citizenship policy has its roots in the freedom of movement of workers established in the 1950s. It was constitutionalized as a status derived from MS’nationality in the Maastricht Treaty in 1993. The Court of Justice has increased its ‘personal and material scope’through case law, claiming that it is ‘destined to become the fundamental status of the nationals of the Member States’ (Menéndez and Olsen 2020, pp. 94–104). MS have to design their citizenship policies with due regard to EU law. Nevertheless, the Commission and its responsible Directorate General for Justice and Consumers may not propose legislation on access to EU citizenship and mainly enforce EU citizens’rights. While political leaders may more flexibly adapt policy narratives to new circumstances, people do not easily accept changes to narratives about who they are (Smith 2003, pp. 54–55, 121–125; Risse 2010, p. 31; Dixon 2018, p. 11). Nevertheless, some change always occurs when (re)telling a narrative (Shenhav 2015, pp. 56–67; Hase 2021). When and why political leaders intentionally change what aspects of narratives of peoplehood remains undertheorized. However, there are a couple of points of departure: First, a narrator may be replaced or develop new visions. Second, the narrator may react to a changed audience (Dixon 2018). Third, they might react to crises at ‘critical junctures’ or, even if rarely, undeniable facts (Risse 2010, pp. 32–33; Koschorke 2018, p. 202). Furthermore, political leaders narrate peoplehood under certain constraints. First and foremost, their narrative needs to be acceptable to the audience who should identify as the people (Smith 2003, p. 34). Additionally, a powerful narrator may be freer to change their narrative (Schmidt 2011, pp. 119–121), but then be bound to it once it is institutionalized (Koschorke 2018, p. 267). From this perspective, the Commission deals with different legal competences of boundary-drawing. In any case, some narrative change is to be expected, resulting from new Commissioners, new audiences among MS and their populations or new circumstances. The article adds to a wealth of interdisciplinary studies on European peoplehood and narratives. The long-standing debate on European identity has departed from the dichotomy of a political and cultural version of Europe (Risse 2010), showing that these ideas differ across time, policy areas and actors (Carta and Wodak 2015; Oshri and Shenhav 2018; Saurugger and Thatcher 2019). Previous studies on migration and citizenship policies often contrasted the Commission’s version of free movement and the attraction of high-skilled migrants with the Council’s version of statist cooperation on security and the Parliament’s version of common values and fundamental rights (Maricut 2017; Lavenex 2019). Other studies focussed on the Commission, arguing that it shifted from a theme of a functional single market with common values in the 1970s to a theme of a cultural community in the 1980s and arriving at an image of Europe as a participatory democracy in the late 1990s and 2000s (Bee 2008; Biegoń2013). Gilbert finds unity in this diversity and cautions against the common portrayal of European integration as desirable and inevitable in both political and scholarly narratives (Gilbert 2008). While some of these works use the term narrative, studies in recent years rely on it centrally in theory and empirics when studying political discourse (Manners and Two and a Half Tales of Europe 77 © 2023 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Murray 2016; Cloet 2017; Kaiser and McMahon 2017) and citizens’perceptions (Beaudonnet et al. 2022). Within this ‘narrative turn in European studies’(Bouza García 2017), the question of whether and how the Commission (re)narrates European peoplehood in its migration and citizenship policies has received less attention. Therefore, this article contributes with its narrative approach to debates about European peoplehood and with its use of the peoplehood concept to narrative scholarship within European studies. II. Methods: Tracing the Commission’s Narratives The analysis encompassed three steps. First, official communications were derived from the Commission’s online registry, 3 filtered for the keywords ‘migration’,‘third country national’,‘integration’,‘citizen’,‘citizenship’, document type COM, which denotes the Commission’s political strategies and legislative proposals, and the Commission departments responsible for migration and citizenship policy. 4 The time frame was set between the signing of the Lisbon Treaty in 2007 –the last treaty change –and the end of 2020, after von der Leyen’s mandate started with the New Pact on Migration and Asylum and the Citizenship Report 2020. In a first screening, documents not touching core aspects of migration or citizenship policy were omitted for reasons of scope, while additional communications discussed in the secondary literature were included. Together, the corpus enlisted in the appendix consists of 137 documents. While not allencompassing, it captures many of the Commission’s strategic outputs over thirteen years. Official communications are the bread and butter of the Commission. They undergo a complex drafting process involving different departments until the college of Commissioners ultimately adopts them. The communications convey the Commission’s proposals to Member States, media and the wider public and thus contain policy narratives. At the same time, they are an opportunity for the Commission to intertwine them with narratives of peoplehood. The article investigates whether and how the Commission makes use of this opportunity. In a second step, the corpus was analysed with respect to elements of story, text and narration, largely following Shenhav’s guidelines on studying social narratives (Shenhav 2015). In order to make an analysis of the large number of documents feasible, it focusses only on those sections that embed the communications in a larger context – typically those entitled ‘introduction’,‘context of the proposal’,‘conclusions’or ‘next steps’(Shenhav 2015, p. 86). While this is a limitation, these parts are arguably most relevant to narratives of peoplehood. Especially those segments that Shenhav calls concise narratives, which connect the events furthest in the past and in the future and that contain its ‘temporal and thematic identity’(Shenhav 2015, pp. 62–63), can be reasonably expected within the framing sections of the documents rather than in a detailed subsection. The article furthermore employs a historical-structural approach and focusses on the elements that it considers to be central features of narratives of peoplehood in line with the theoretical framework –the (relatable) characters, the plot towards a bright future and the main theme, as summarized in table 1(Shenhav 2015, p. 65). 3 https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/documents-register/. 4 Directorates-General COMM, DEV, EAC, EEAS, EMPL, HOME, JLS, JUST and SG. Johanna Hase78 © 2023 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. A narrative’s characters may be people, animals, machines, institutions or concepts, as long as they seem to have human-like intentions, thoughts or feelings (Shenhav 2015, pp. 25–27). The analysis asked who the characters in each document were and how often they appeared, but most importantly what their role in the action was and whether there was a relatable character among them. While narratology offers several typologies of characters, the succinct differentiation between heroes (who fix problems), villains (who cause problems) and victims (who suffer from problems) was borrowed from the narrative policy framework (Jones et al. 2014, p. 6). It further asked whether the wording suggested a common perspective between character, narrator and audience through the use of ‘we’or ‘our’–a move to make social narratives relatable (Shenhav 2015,p. 50). Narratives of European peoplehood could feature relatable characters such as ‘we’, ‘citizens’,or‘Europeans’. A plot connects events and characters on a timeline (Shenhav 2015, p. 32). There are several plot typologies. The one originally developed for Western literature, which differentiates between tragedy, irony, romance, and comedy can be applied to other fields. Tragedy is a story of the hero’s failure. Irony fluctuates between regress and progress and has no predefined resolution nor a strong hero. Romances are not necessarily love stories, but they tell how the pure hero achieves their end, usually overcoming a challenge or villain. In comedies, an initial equilibrium is disturbed, and the heroine faces potential failure before eventually achieving a new equilibrium (Forchtner et al. 2020, pp. 208–213). As romantic and comic plots lead towards a bright future, they are arguably more useful in narratives of peoplehood. The plot has implications for the communities narrated by them: Romances can create solidarity, but lack self-reflection (Jacobs and Smith 1997, pp. 67–70). Forchtner and colleagues argue that comedy and romance convey certainty of a better future and a faultless heroine at the cost of collective learning processes (Forchtner et al. 2020, p. 212). Building on this, Özvatan argues that ‘tragic and ironic stories facilitate spanning social boundaries, while comic and romantic stories draw rigid and conclusive social boundaries’(Özvatan 2020, pp. 287–288). Between romances and comedies, the difference is one of degree, but significant: Due to their disturbance of the Table 1: Core Elements of Narratives of Peoplehood Element Definition Types Character People, animals, institutions, concepts, etc. that seem to have intentions and to take actions (Shenhav 2015, pp. 25–27) •Heroes who fix problems •Villains who cause problems •Victims who are saved (Jones et al. 2014,p.6) Plot The way in which events are connected into a whole (Shenhav 2015, p. 32) •Romance •Comedy •Tragedy •Irony (for instance, Forchtner et al. 2020) Main Theme The type of story and events that can create a community and raise allegiance (Smith 2003, pp. 59–71) •Economic •Political power •Ethically constitutive (Smith 2003, pp. 59–71) Two and a Half Tales of Europe 79 © 2023 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. equilibrium and the hero’s moment of self-doubt, comedies are more open to learning processes and inclusivity than romances. Lastly, to identify the main theme of the narrative as economic, political or ethically constitutive in line with Smith (2003, pp. 59–71), the substance of the events was interpreted. For instance, a narrative that forecasted how citizens would become wealthy as a result of the common market was taken to indicate an economic theme; one that aimed for a more democratic or powerful EU was understood as a political theme and one that spoke about inherently European values was classified as an ethically constitutive theme. These themes were frequently intertwined, so particular attention was paid to concise narratives. In a third step, the core elements of each communication were compared over time and across policy areas to shed light on whether the Commission put forward narratives of peoplehood, and when and how it changed them. As some degree of fluctuation is expected between documents, only clusters of new elements were interpreted as change. This qualitative approach to narrative analysis required interpretation when selecting the documents and their relevant sections, when assigning a character, plot and theme type to each document and when identifying changes over time. To make these interpretations as clear as possible, this section lay open the questions asked, while the following substantiates interpretations with quotes from the original documents. III. Results: The Commission’s Narratives in Migration and Citizenship This section presents the Commission’s citizenship and migration narratives –their characters, plots and themes and their potential to create a sense of European peoplehood. Figuratively speaking, the Commission presented two and a half tales of Europe: one narrative of ‘realizing European citizenship’, which was repeated over time, and a narrative of ‘achieving a comprehensive migration policy’. As the latter was neither repeated nor replaced, but changed in some elements at certain moments, it seems like one and a half rather than two separate narratives. The Narrative of ‘Realizing European Citizenship’ The distribution of roles in the Commission’s citizenship communications was usually the following: The heroes were the Commission and the EU, which adopted policies, wrote reports and implemented programmes to bolster EU citizenship. Often, these documents themselves appeared as characters, which seemed act on their own [‘The Report […] puts forward concrete proposals’(European Commission 2017, p. 4)]. However, they were place holders for the real actors (in the example above, the Commission that published the report). The role of the victim was typically held by EU citizens, a relatable character, who suffered from the deficiencies of EU citizenship. The story went that once the EU’s respective policies would have made EU citizenship a tangible reality, citizens would embrace their EU citizenship. In contrast to heroes and victims, there were no unambiguous villains. Sometimes selected MS played this role when they implemented unpopular policies, such as measures to ‘attract investment by granting investors citizenship or residence rights’(European Commission 2019a, p. 1). But the MS’characters could likewise be victims, for instance, when other MS’investor citizenship schemes affected them Johanna Hase80 © 2023 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. negatively (European Commission 2019a). Most often, however, the Commission portrayed MS as supporters to whom it intended ‘to provide guidance […] with the objective of bringing a real improvement for all EU citizens’(European Commission 2009,p. 2). It is also worth mentioning the characters that did not take centre stage: Third country nationals seldomly appeared, and if so, they typically appeared as family members of EU citizens. 5 They were not explicitly villainous ‘others’against whom a community of European citizens was constructed. With regard to the second element, the plot, the Commission’s communications most close resemble a romance. For instance, some started with the Maastricht Treaty and ended –after progress had been made due to European policies –with European citizenship becoming an everyday reality. While not without obstacles, there was rarely a moment in the story where the hero might have failed. At times, however, the Commission presented a comedy including such a moment. For instance, in its report on investor citizenship, some villainous MS introduced citizenship-for-sale schemes that undermined European citizenship (disturbance of the equilibrium), and the Commission would ‘take necessary action’so that the MS would in the future mitigate the concerns (re-establishment of the equilibrium) (European Commission 2019a, p. 24). However, these comic plots did not cluster enough to indicate a fundamental change. 6 As for the element of the main theme, the Commission put most emphasis on a political one of empowering citizens, as European citizenship would be lived through ‘the full enjoyment of citizens’rights’(European Commission 2020a, p. 27), especially political participation, freedom of movement and consular protection. This suggests that the Commission has partly continued the depiction of a democratically engaged Europe of the early 1990s and 2000s (Bee 2008; Biegoń2013) and supports Pukallus’finding of the post-Lisbon focus on rights (Pukallus 2016). Interestingly, there seems to be a gap between this political theme and Menéndez and Olsen’s analysis that in fact, ‘the political value of European citizenship has become progressively devalued’(Menéndez and Olsen 2020, p. 135). Furthermore, the Commission portrayed EU citizenship not only as an empowerment of its citizens but to some degree as descriptive of who they are: ‘EU citizenship embodies shared rights and values as well as the rich diversity of a Union of different nationalities and languages’(European Commission 2017, p. 3). In this way, the Commission intertwined a political theme with an ethically constitutive one. It also narrated the realization of EU citizenship in an economic theme of how freedom of movement benefits citizens and the European common market. However, these do not dominate at a particular moment in time. 7 The EU Citizenship Report 2017 illustrates the typical citizenship narrative well: Since EU citizenship was first enshrined in the Maastricht Treaty twenty-five years ago, significant progress has been made to ensure the effectiveness of EU citizens’rights in practice. 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Supporting Information Additional supporting information may be found online in the Supporting Information section at the end of the article. APPENDIX S1. Corpus of Commission Communications. Johanna Hase90 © 2023 The Authors. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies published by University Association for Contemporary European Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.