ABSTRACT
This chapter merges the analysis of EU political statements about border issues with those present in mediated political discourse in one crucial transit/destination country, Austria. That country's mid-2010s implementation of “border management systems,” with annual caps on asylum applications, shows a discursive normalization of symbolic and material/physical borders within the dichotomous frame of national versus European agency (which European institutions are also discursively renegotiating within the Schengen regime), as well as a discursive normalization of far-right positions. Using the Discourse-Historical Approach, this chapter conceptualizes borders as social constructions that are historically contingent and express power relations in order to investigate and contrast discourses at the national level of Austrian media and the transnational level of EU press releases in the critical years of 2015 and 2016. The results, based on a data set comprising press releases by EU officials and institutions and media reports on Austrian politics, show a strong renationalization and reterritorialization of the national body in Austrian politics, and the implementation of securitizing measures consolidating what can be best described as “Fortress Europe” at the EU level.
