European External Border Management and its Narratives : Aspects of Dominance and Neocolonialism in European Foreign Policy during the “Refugee Crisis”

Abstract: Large numbers of incoming refugees since 2015 were perceived as a major challenge for European cooperation and migratory regimes and the situation has within Europe soon been seen as a crisis. Since then, European states and the European Union (EU) have intensified measures to shut down migrant routes to Europe as well as their attempts to externalise means of protection of refugees in Africa. Based on a theoretical framework consisting of political science border studies, postcolonial studies and the method of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) together with the study of narratives in politics, this thesis analyses two critical events in this field, the 2015 Valletta Summit on migration where European and African leaders discussed the terms of migration cooperation and the 2018 debate on disembarkation platforms. The focus in this work lies especially on neocolonial elements in the power relations between Europe and Africa and how these are expressed in the narratives that were used to justify and explain the action taken. For this purpose, official documents, speeches, interviews and additional utterances from European heads of states and European politicians as well as from African heads of states and African Union (AU) representatives are analysed. Eventually, the thesis comes to the conclusion that a form of neocolonial exists that is here named implicit or indirect neocolonialism.