ABSTRACT
In 2019, the incoming executive of the European Commission nominated a vice-president for migration and security issues bearing the title “Commissioner for Protecting the European Way of Life”. This allusion to a continent under attack, and in need of protection, prompted months of controversy about the meaning attached to “European” borders and boundaries. The centre-right European People’s Party, who proposed the title, insisted they had not meant to raise the drawbridge against refugees: “this means to rescue people in the Mediterranean [...] not to close harbours” (Zalan, 2019). Yet both supporters and critics saw matters differently and interpreted it as a move designed to absorb xenophobic narratives into the EU’s most cosmopolitan structure. Marine Le Pen hailed “an ideological victory”; by contrast, socialist and Green MEPs saw it as surrendering to a notion of an embattled “European civilisation” promoted in the discourses of leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. The controversy would eventually force a small but crucial change, with “protecting” becoming “promoting” the European way of life. But the polarised reaction had already established a crucial fact about the continent’s political identity: today, any talk of a “European way of life” carries new ideological baggage. Where the continent’s institutional boundaries and political responsibilities have expanded, so have anxieties about proximity to a non-European “other”.
