ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on discursive strategies and policies developed by the EU in its efforts to manage migration in the eastern neighbourhood and beyond, in the so called Wider Europe, by analysing the EU's communications on the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) published between 2003 and 2013. It examines the EU's migration policies in the context of five eastern neighbourhood countries, namely Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova, Tajikistan and Ukraine. Conventional wisdom in and outside the academic community claims that contradictions in the EU's migration policy result from multilevel factors, such as the globally felt economic crisis, heightened nationalism and security concerns, which in the European Union are counterpoised by factors such as an increased awareness of the demographic challenges faced by the majority of the member states. In the current discourse of migration, the normalisation of movements across the borders of the EU is conditioned by political stability, the rule of law and democracy in the EU's neighbourhood.
