Analyzing the EU Security Discourse After the Annexation of Crimea

The tragic events of Spring 2014 marked a new period of instability and confrontation in the European region. Since the Ukrainian crisis is still ongoing with periodic escalations, the return to “business as usual” in the European security sphere is impossible. This implies modifications in the security arrangements of the EU and NATO member states because they are directly affected by a military confrontation nearby their borders. Although standard international relations theories are well-suited to explain the current situation, discursive approaches can provide an alternative explication by discovering status quo strategies and ideas created and sustained by the discourse. The paper seeks to analyse the EU security discourse and explore the changes in it after the 2014 events. For this reason, two periods are chosen for analysis: 2008-2013 and 2014-2020. The Thesis uses the three levels of semiotics - syntax, semantics, and pragmatics - proposed by Morris (1938) to investigate different levels of relations between signs. The key events comments are also added to draw a more comprehensive picture of the security environment. The work finds that before 2014 the EU-Russia relations were more cooperative and peaceful, and then started to deteriorate. Many cooperative arrangements were stalled: the EU started pursuing a dual-track approach with an emphasis on global threats, while NATO abolished any cooperation with Russia. Both organisations began focusing on resilience and defence to withstand and deter any hypothetical threats. Other global challenges beyond Russia remained more or less the same, but the emphasis on the use of hybrid tactics and fragile situations in countries beyond the EU region increased gradually after 2014. Further discourse research can focus on finding inconsistencies in the security policies of some member states in comparison to the supranational level of the EU or NATO and how they can challenge the meanings of dominant ideas.