The Digital Publics of #Schengen and #Eurozone During the Coronavirus Crisis

RESPOND Policy Brief [2020/3]

Authors: Prof. Umut Korkut - Dr. James Foley, Glasgow Caledonian University | Dr. Ozge Ozduzen, Brunel University London

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The pandemic in Europe and the outbreak of the coronavirus paved the way to abrupt and extensive border closures in the Schengen zone. More generally, it hindered the solidarity essence of the EU integration. The Schengen zone had temporary border closures in the past, in particular in 2015, amidst the sudden increase in the number of irregular migrant arrivals to Europe. However, at the face of the coronavirus health crisis almost all Schengen states introduced border controls starting with early March 2020. The border closures also implied states’ intervention with the transportation and expropriation of healthcare products across their borders. Furthermore, some EU states banned foreigners, including the citizens of other EU states from entry. This put the solidarity essence of EU integration in further peril. While the RESPOND Project WP6 team has worked on how the EU politicians consider the future of EU integration in view of external migration and their emerging conflicting conceptualisations of Europeanisation, the border closure within the Schengen zone brought forward yet another conflict to do with Europeanisation involving free movement of EU citizens and European solidarity.

 In order to understand the repercussions around internal border closures and travel controls within the Schengen zone, and in particular how some EU publics see the internal mobility in view of the coronavirus crisis and Europeanisation, the WP6 team primarily collected tweets with #Schengen hashtag from France, Italy, Hungary, Germany, and Romania. The selected countries reflect the linguistic ability of the WP6 team members based at Glasgow Caledonian University. We have also harnessed tweets with hashtags of #border, in French #frontiere, in Hungarian #hatar, and in Italian #confini and #frontera. In an attempt to explore solidarity a bit further, we also followed the #Eurozone hashtag. The social media data analysis includes a period from 10th March 2020 to 10th May 2020. The former date corresponds with when Austria closed its Schengen border with North Italy. While we collected tweets from France, Italy, Germany, Hungary and Romania, the bulk of the tweets with #Schengen were from France and Italy. In total, this policy brief reflects a dataset of around 8000 tweets collected with the abovementioned hashtags in the designated time period.

 For our analysis, we interpreted the texts of the tweets to have a grasp of how some European publics felt about the Schengen border closure and their eventual opening – a very essential element of Europeanisation considering the mobility of EU citizens and the smooth operation of the Single Market. We introduce a brief summary of our observations below from tweets in Italian and French language following #Schengen, as the tweets in these languages were the predominant tweets of the whole dataset. The tweets in other languages did not present a consistent viewpoint about the publics in these countries.

 ·      While the closure of internal borders of the Schengen area did not receive much comment in French and Hungarian language tweets, there is an extensive and outspoken resentment against the removal of planned border controls for the summer of 2020, particularly in French language tweets.

·      The majority of tweets in French, reaching 90%, consider the Schengen mobility a problem of Europeanisation and identify Schengen as an “infectious zone”.

·      Considering tweets in Italian, the closure of Schengen borders received more attention at the outset of the coronavirus crisis. The majority of twitter users viewed overturning the Schengen mobility yet another failed element of the EU project alongside the Eurozone.

·      ‘Open borders’ became a contentious issue to do with the EU integration after 2015. The coronavirus crisis brought further criticism from some European publics to it.

·      However, we also note that twitter analysis is only a way to understand how certain themes are represented, but it is not always representative.

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