The 2019 European Commission’s proposal for a portfolio named ‘Protecting our European way of life’ raised substantial criticism and media coverage, but this idea is not new and has been marking the European Union’s (EU) collective discourse since its inception, particularly in the context of its security-related policies. The main goal of this paper, as part of an ongoing exploratory project, is to identify key narratives and discuss their implications stemming from the EU’s securitisation of 'the European way of life' discourse from a critical geopolitical (CG) theoretical perspective. While this paper focuses primarily on the results of a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of key narratives produced in the context of the EU’s crisis management policy, it also touches upon early analytical and theoretical incursions concerning the securitisation of policy fields that have not been traditionally linked to security, such as asylum and migration, in the context of a growing approximation between domestic and external security and the implications of discursively ‘spatialising’ European ontological security. The identified strategic narratives within the EU’s crisis management policy reveal an asymmetry, as well as a logic of alterity between the EU and its external interlocutors: the EU assumes that others want to emulate its standards, brands itself as an ideal model, and places itself at a superior level, while simultaneously increasingly attempting to preserve and brand its own ontological security. In this paper we also discuss the pertinence of using CDA anchored in CG to discuss the implications of this rhetoric in different policy areas for notions of citizenship, belonging, and identity, due their focus on deconstruction and critique of asymmetric power relations, their effort to ‘denaturalise’ meta-narratives, and due to the importance of language and discourse in the affirmation and legitimation of actors’ identities and the ‘spatialisation’ thereof at various levels.

--

European Union,securitisation,citizenship,critical geopolitics,discourse,identity