5. Euro-renovations: Borderscape Discourses

This chapter analyses and provides a typology of the second ‘related array’ of constituents of the CEE borderscape—‘discourses’. It shows how the EU and EU member states have produced a combined discourse of ‘Freedom, Justice and Security’, which is central to Schengen zone governance. The accession of the EU-8 to the EU and the Schengen zone showed a transitional discourse ‘from Hierarchy to Belonging’ while the development of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and Eastern Partnership (EaP) rested simultaneously on discourses of ‘Shared Values and Interests’ and ‘Divergent Values and Interests’. Finally, the EU’s relations with its Eastern Neighbours and Partners, including Ukraine, were also characterised by securitizing discourses of ‘Threats and Fears’. The chapter highlights how these discourses enacted borderings and how these borderings impacted on identities and orders in CEE. The chapter also shows the often contradictory nature of these discourses, which juxtaposed integrative narratives with exclusionary tendencies. Overall, the chapter argues that the EU has layered negative, exclusionary discourses over the positive, inclusionary discourses that characterised its own historical achievements. In this way it failed to learn lessons from its own successes and created some of the conditions for the neighbourhood and migration crises. Yet this layering is shown to be shoddy work, of the kind familiar to Ukrainians under the name ‘Euro-Renovations’, and thus leaves open the possibility to transform these crises should the EU and its member states summon the political will and discursive ability to do so.