The European Union’s ‘Home Affairs’ model and its European neighbours: Beyond the ‘Area of Freedom, Security and Justice’?

Policies and discourses that construct the European Union (EU) as an ‘area of freedom, security and justice’ (AFSJ) present threats to EU citizens as mainly being of cross-border nature. They produce a binary opposition of a safe ‘inside’ (that is the EU territory) set against an unstable and threatening ‘outside’.

Neighbouring Eastern European countries belong to the ‘outside’; they are presented in the EU's official discourse as the zones of origin and/or transit for risks to the EU's public order and security.

The ways in which security threats are construed, as well as the EU's role in mitigating or eliminating those threats, have significant implications for relationships between the EU and its European neighbours. The formulation of foreign policy relies upon discursive representations of identity, and it is a specific boundary-producing practice that co-constitutes both the ‘foreign’ and the ‘domestic’ (Campbell, 1998). From this perspective, the EU's discourse on the external dimension of the justice and home affairs emerges as one of many ways through which a common European identity is being forged. The construction of the AFSJ establishes the EU as a territory with a special ‘home affairs’ model and distinguishes the ‘inside’ from the ‘outside’.