A Corpus-based Discourse Analysis of Refugee in EU Legal Texts

This chapter informs the reader about the significant progress made in EU countries, where a variety of legislative and non-legislative instruments have been made to ensure fundamental rights and regulate migration flows. Despite these significant inroads, the authors maintain, there seems to be an increasing tension between general human rights and the specific interests of each Member State at a time when the EU is striving to cooperate for the creation of a common asylum system to promote solidarity, provide protection and integration for asylum seekers, and implement and support practical cooperation among all Member States. This scenery allows the authors to narrow down to the specific topic in their case under analysis and to examine the institutionalized language of the EU case-law constructed and used mainly through judgments and opinions, dealing with the intricate issue of EU refugees. Using the methodological framework for corpus-based discourse analysis, this chapter thus looks at the most salient linguistic patterns emerging from the discursive construction of refugees within the chosen texts. While uncovering an unsafe process of social and political transformation with contradictory priorities, power struggles and contrasting ideological influences, the authors argue for such texts to also signal dangerous relations of inclusion and exclusion which foster an authorial and hegemonic type of EU legal discourse.