"Fortress Europe" and NPE: compatible? : Assessing the impact of the migration crisis on the EU’s legitimacy: shifts in Turkish discourses at the UN General Assembly debates

Sammanfattning: This thesis measures the extent of the impact of the EU’s management of its migration flow in the aftermath of the ‘Summer of Migration’ on its legitimacy and normative power towards external actors.  Although historically funded and legitimated by its commitment to Human Rights values, the EU has failed to manage effectively and ethically the migration crisis indenpently. Building upon Buchanan’s constructivist approach of the strategies of legitimation used by IOs in IR, this thesis argues that this failure, by shedding light on the union’s weaknesses and pressuring it into to unethical external deals, deteriorates its image towards external actors and provides delegitimating tools to competitors of the EU in a global context of post-US hegemony, feeding power struggles in a shifting polarized world. By creating a theoretical bridge between EU internal policies and their external consequences, this thesis investigates interconnexions and causality effects between the structural flaws of the CEAS, the 2016 EU/Turkey deal and the loss of legitimacy of the EU. The arguments defended by this thesis are supported by an empirical research based on the critical discourse analysis of the evolutions of Turkish leaders’ speeches given at the UN General Assembly debates between 2009 and 2019. Using methods deriving from Discourse Historical Analysis (DHA), the analysis of the speeches pinpoints the role of the EU’s management of the migration crisis in the shift from positive to negative discourses of Turkish leaders towards the union. Finally, the study considers that the normative arguments related to the non-commitment of the EU to its upheld HR values has become a semantic tool of delegitimation for Turkey against the EU, and to promote itself as a new leader of IR.