Between migration and mobility discourses: the performative potential within ‘intra-European movement’

This article displays how discourses around intra-European movement are constructed to reveal the performativity of discourses. Therefore, it mainly aims to deliver theoretical contributions to the field of discursive policy analysis by empirical case study material. The overall argument is that discursive policy analysis benefits from an analytical framework that deals with a refined operationalization including ‘storyline’ and ‘poetic’ elements. This framework is applied to intra-European movement in the cases of the European Commission and the Netherlands. These cases are particularly interesting, since both authorities have competing constructions of ‘intra-European movement’, highlighting ‘migration’ versus ‘mobility’. As such, the article displays the importance of ‘poetic elements’, opens up the discursive black box of discourse analysis and unravels the performative potential of certain discourses.