Framing Migration and Belonging: A Critical Discourse Analysis of European Prime Ministerial Speeches
Abstract
This study conducts a critical discourse analysis of European prime ministerial speeches on migration and national belonging, using Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Nair’s postcolonial theory. It explores how political discourse constructs migration as a site of legitimacy and control, focusing on language that shapes conditional belonging and exclusion. The findings reveal that both speeches reproduce bordered humanitarianism, where migrants are framed through crisis narratives, legal vulnerability, and procedural compliance. Europe is discursively positioned as a normative center of ethical and legal governance, while migrant legitimacy is granted selectively based on legality or suffering. The study highlights the persistence of postcolonial hierarchies in European discourse and calls for more inclusive, agentive, and epistemologically just models of migrant representation
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