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The article discusses the Reflection Papers published by the European Commission (EC), which focus on Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), and defence and the social dimension of European Union (EU) activity. Topics include Great Britain's decision to leave the European Union, also known as Brexit, Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) that includes migration management and national security, and EU's budget revenues.

Political debates about immigration provoke strong nationalistic pushback from citizens, constraining the policymaking capacity of states. This paper investigates to what extent labour market policies shape economically motivated preferential divides among European citizens. On the one hand, I concentrate on prospective job loss threats indicative of economic grievances and assess the impact of unemployment risk exposure on immigration policy attitudes. On the other hand, as the original contribution of the paper, I contend that, if such an economically motivated explanation holds, this relationship should vary based on the labour market institutions in each country. Multi‐level analyses of 16 European countries over a decade since 2002 reveal a remarkably robust relationship between unemployment risks and more restrictive immigration policy attitudes. Importantly, more protective employment regulations seem to have a dampening effect on the impact of job loss threats on immigration policy attitudes. Conversely, there are larger attitudinal divides between the risk‐exposed and the more secure workers in countries with generous and expansive unemployment compensation policies. Overall, the paper helps explain the cross‐national variation in economically motivated cleavages about immigration policy attitudes in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the migration policies of Hungary and Germany with a particular focus on the role of elites in the legal, factual, and discursive dimensions of elitist policy agenda‐setting and implementation between 2015 and 2017. Theoretically, the elitist policy‐making model is supplemented with democratic theories and the theories of regional integration. Methodologically, the paper is a comparative analysis aiming to account for the variance between two EU member states with opposite approaches to migration. Indeed, while Hungary and Germany are usually pitched against each other as two radically different examples of migration policy, the elite‐centered approach shows a puzzling symmetry of differences between these two case studies. While policy results are divergent, there is a palpable cohesion of behaviours and narrative patterns, indicating that the political elites are the primary driver behind shaping and implementing migration policies. After establishing the theoretical underpinnings, the paper compares national legislations, accepted migrant quotas, and the official narratives of the Hungarian and German governments. The case analysis allows for the reinterpretation of seemingly contradictory migration policies and, as such, offers new solutions to the problem both on the national and international levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is inscribed into a new line of scholarly work seeking to cast light to the ways in which migrants convert their motivations into action within a policy framework that is characterised by many restrictions and limited opportunities to move. Drawing on recent fieldwork (2013‐2014) on irregular migrants from Afghanistan, Albania, Georgia, Pakistan and the Ukraine, in Greece, we investigate how they perceive opportunities and navigate restrictions eventually crossing borders whether unlawfully (from unguarded border areas or with fake documentation) or legally (abusing the terms of their entry/stay). The paper adopts the notion of social navigation as a heuristics tool to conceptualise the social, temporal and spatial character of the migration journey, its nodal points, and the interaction of migrants with different actors and factors that shape their migration plans and explores different types of migrant agency (recuperation, resilience and resistance) developed during the navigation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we develop a conceptual and methodological approach that psychologists and other social scientists can employ to study emergence. We consider relevant social psychological approaches and conclude that, for the most part, social psychology has tended to focus on processes of normalisation following disruptions, rather than examining emergence in itself. An exception to this is G. H. Mead, whose work we draw on to theorise emergence with a focus on contemporary "affective politics." In the second part of the paper, we use focus group data on the European Union referendum in the UK to empirically illustrate our theoretical points. We discuss in particular three axes for exploring the emergent politics of Brexit: political values, political authority, and the authority of affect. We conclude our discussion by reflecting on some of the theoretical and political implications of our analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2016, the United Kingdom held a referendum on EU membership; 52% of those who voted, voted to leave, and 48% voted to remain. During the referendum campaign, two identities emerged: "Brexiter" and "Remainer," which remained salient post‐referendum. This study explores how the categories of Brexiter and Remainer were deployed by posters online. Data comprise comment threads collected from four online newspapers both during the campaign and after the vote, which focus on the Brexit campaign promise: "We send £350m a week to the EU. Let's fund our NHS instead." We draw on membership categorization analysis and discursive psychology to analyse when categories were made salient and what responses to the invocation of categories were. Analysis revealed that posters explicitly categorize the out‐group and in doing so implicitly define their group. Posters resisted other political identities when attributed to them in relation to the referendum. The analysis shows how Brexiter and Remainer are new, albeit contested, political categories and identities in their own right, with other political identities resisted when used. The paper highlights implications for the political system in the United Kingdom and for social divisions within U.K. society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the moment of Brexit and its political aftermath in order to challenge dominant academic and popular conceptions of the political subject as singular and coherent. Instead, we suggest that there is an urgent political and analytical need for a view of the subject as multiple, contradictory, and dialogic. As interdisciplinary scholars working on the borders of policy studies and cultural studies, we think this is a critical site for transdisciplinary conversations about such conceptions of the subject. In the political field, such subjects are selectively and unevenly addressed and mobilized by political projects—such as Vote Leave—that invite them to recognize themselves as part of an imagined collective identity. In the twin disturbances of the European Union referendum and the 2017 general election, we suggest that it is possible to see that other voicings, other identifications, and other projects remain possible. Specific political mobilizations are neither singular nor stable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of literature problematises the role of the Mediterranean, as both civilisational hearth and liminal frontier, in both ancient and modern Europe. However, much less attention has been directed to the inland sea at Europe's northern edge: the Arctic. Increasingly, as the Arctic becomes attractive to non-Arctic European capitals as a potential site of investment and (in)security, European states, and perhaps the EU as a whole, are seeking to construct the Arctic, like the Mediterranean, as a space that is both marginal and central to the continent's future. This paper seeks to investigate the extent to which the Arctic is, to paraphrase Viljhalmur Stefansson, Europe's 'Polar Mediterranean' and what this means for Europe as it constructs institutions and identities that, as in the Mediterranean, use the concept of the inland sea to both incorporate and differentiate its internal and external 'others.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution has three overarching objectives. First, it seeks to describe the logics of fracture and cohesion governing current geopolitical dynamics in the Mediterranean. Second, in the face of these contradictory tendencies, it proposes the notion of archipelago-frontier as a concept for deepening our understanding of an ever more dispersed and ubiquitous geography defining the Southern border of the EU. In this light we draw on the contemporary resonances of the destabilising cartographic imagination of Al-Idrissi (1100-1165). And we argue that, read today, it helps us rethink the current symbolic, terminological (and hence geopolitical) abduction of the Mediterranean by the European Union, which the very term 'Euromediterranean' encapsulates. Finally, the paper underlines the necessity of forging new vistas on the Mediterranean engendering perspectives that are more dialogical, plurivocal and sensitive to permanent transformation, as evoked by a long-term spatial as well as political horizon of struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the figure of the migrant has come to be seen as a potential terrorist in the West, under the condition of a double, but completely opposed, set of crises internal to the nation-state. The refugee crisis in Europe can no longer be understood as separate from the crisis of terrorism after the Paris attacks on 13 November 2015. In fact, the two crises were never really separate in the nationalist imaginary to begin with. The difference is that, with such a quick shift of attention between crises, we now see what was only implicit in the European response to the Syrian refugees has now become explicit in the response to the tragic attacks in Paris: that migration is understood to be a form of barbarian warfare that threatens the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite technological upgrading of borders at the edges of Europe, 'Fortress Europe' continues to fail as an effective means of controlling irregular migration. As a consequence, European states are restructuring their border regimes by externalizing migration management to non-EU countries beyond the border and creating new programs and policies to do so. Autonomy of Migration (AoM) offers a distinct way for thinking about border control mechanisms and goals of managing mobility. AoM does not read this off-shoring of borders through the lens of centralized and coordinated state powers, but develops an autonomous gaze that supplements these institutional readings of apparatuses of capture with a view that takes as its starting point the ways in which border architectures, institutions, and policies interact with and react to the turbulence of migrant mobilities. By engaging current EU externalization policies, this paper illustrates the shifting relationship between border control and mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]