Malignant Europeanization: Schengen, Irregular Migration Governance, and Insecurity on Europe's Peripheries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the relationship between open borders and free mobility in Europe, the Schengen regime, and security around Europe’s peripheries. Schengen is a constitutive element of the European project. Its maintenance depends on what the EU refers to as “compensatory measures” for addressing uncontrolled migration. I ask two questions: What is the relationship between the European project and changes in irregular migration systems? How do Schengen’s compensatory measures meet the EU’s stated foreign policy goals of fostering a ring of stable democracies in its near-abroad? My causal argument is that Schengen’s compensatory measures cause changes in irregular migration systems, which result in insecurity around Europe’s peripheries. I argue these dynamics are evidence of Malignant Europeanization, which I define as insecurity and regressive practices and norms resulting from Europe’s regional integration. I situate this project in the Europeanization literature, which analyzes relationships between European integration and changes in practices, institutions, and norms. Europeanization’s main indicators are reform toward democratic governance, rule of law, rights protections, and liberal market economies: benign Europeanization. In contrast, I identify eight indicators for Malignant Europeanization: migrant insecurity; increased transnational crime; security sector corruption; emboldened militarized non-state actors; domestic political contestation; entrenched authoritarianism and democratic backsliding; burden-shifting and regional tensions; and international norm degeneration. Findings are based on comparative case studies across four irregular migration systems: the Western Mediterranean, Central Mediterranean, Western Balkans, and Central and Eastern Europe. Evidence is derived from three years of fieldwork. Variation depends on domestic characteristics in transit states and external incentive structures. In the absence of membership incentives Europe lacks leverage to foster benign Europeanization. Findings problematize the framing of Europe as a progressive global influence. They also raise significant questions about the effectiveness of European foreign policy goals of fostering a ring of stable democracies around its near abroad.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".