Elliott, Aideen (2021) Making Migration Policy to Save Europe. PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.

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Abstract

This thesis is an ethnography of EU migration and asylum policy. It explores questions relating to how policy makers conceptualise their roles in shaping migration and in shaping the EU. I have combined fieldwork in Brussels and a Weberian understanding of ethics to argue that policy workers understand their work as operating with an ethic of responsibility to save Europe. An ethic of responsibility is a form of consequentialist ethics that involves basing decisions on foreseeable results, and each chapter of this thesis demonstrates that policy workers evaluate migration and asylum policy in terms of the foreseeable results for Europe, that is they view migration through an EU lens. Making migration and asylum policy to avoid harming the EU means, for policy workers, avoiding policies that could undermine solidarity between member states or deepen tensions between the institutions, and choosing policies that can demonstrate to the public that the “numbers are under control” in order to avoid fuelling the rise of far right, nationalist and Eurosceptic political parties that challenge “European values”. Saving the EU is seen as an ethical endeavour because the alternatives risk posing a threat to the achievements of the EU including the border free Schengen area, and the EU is considered to be a union of values. This thesis argues that by furnishing ethnographic depth to the area of migration policy formation we can better understand the persistence of the policy direction characterised by attachment to border control, and the motivations of policy makers.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Keywords:	Migration Policy; Save Europe;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Anthropology
Item ID:	16545
Depositing User:	IR eTheses
Date Deposited:	20 Sep 2022 13:38
URI:
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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