The last two decades witnessed a new effort on the part of the EU to transform itself into a key international actor with a global vision and set of goals. As part of this effort, the EU was forced to consolidate its activities with respect to various dimensions of its external relations (or foreign policy in the non-traditional sense of the term) and, as such, has been facing problems of overall coherence and consistency. The EU’s foreign policy is often characterised as based on the external projection of a set of norms and values that ‘Europe’ is founded upon (such as respect for human rights, the rule of law and democracy). In this respect, EU foreign policy is seen as the pinnacle of the EU’s progressive, open and normative character.
By approaching migration policy as part of this broader conception of foreign policy, this paper assesses the discursive theme and binary oppositions that construct the EU’s normative approach and identity and argues that identity building is a performance of inclusion and exclusion at the same time, hence migration policy may be problematized as a discursive site of reifying certain civilisational/primordial/religious aspects of the EU identity, and also as a site of “panopticon”, a performance of a continuous self-conscious gaze disciplining both the owners of the identity as well as its “other”s. The paper notes that the discursive themes and binary oppositions are present in not only the EU’s identity construction process, but also its relations with the wider world, particularly within the framework of its efforts in constructing a common border and a home affairs policy. To explore these tendencies, the paper analyses the narrative on migration and asylum policy within the EU from a Foucauldian perspective to highlight the paradoxes of the EU’s so-called normative foreign policy and identity.
