For Better or For Worse? Border Policy and Discursive Constructions of Subjectivities

Abstract: The current refugee crisis can be said to have affected not only actual borders, but also borders within subjectivities. With a poststructuralist and deconstructive approach, subjectivities are recognized as constructed through language and within discourse, and in turn, induced through policy. Thus, in order to examine the discursive construction of subjectivities, this thesis critically engage with border policy, and more particularly with the European Agenda on Security (EAS) and the European Agenda on Migration (EAM); agendas produced during 2015 and thus has the potential to affect the future European collective identity. The implicit represented problems identified within the agendas where the dangerous other and lack of solidarity. These represented issues were in turn philosophically supported by ontological induced fear and the epistemological uncertainty was answered through emphasis on the other. The process can be seen as a linguistic interrogation of discourse where discursive reconstructions of subjects and subjectivities are revealed. As such, challenges and fractions were found within the agendas, through strategies of alienation, externalization and future rationale (constructing limitations within subjectivities), which in turn hampers, and potentially weakens, the European collective identity. Relational power structures take part in these discursive articulations and the EAS and the EAM partake in producing the future European collective identity, for better or for worse.