Relocation of migrants - a burning question of fragmentation within the European Parliament

This thesis studies the positions of the political groups in the European Parliament by examining the debates, focusing on the question of migration and more specifically on the policy of relocation of migrants. With the increasing number of people migrating into Europe, migration is an important question to study in the context of the European Union. The European Parliament consists of 200 different national parties composed in eight different political groups trying to agree upon common policies for legislation, which makes the political battle taken place in the Parliament even more interesting. This thesis seeks to describe the positions of the groups within the Parliament by using dimensions and categories of state security vs. human security and EU-integration vs. state sovereignty. The study finds that a majority of the party groups in the Parliament emphasises further integration, however there is a more evident difference between seeing the issue of migration as a state security or a human security matter between the political groups. These findings are interesting, demonstrating that even in a sensitive issue as migration, related to states’ sovereignty, a majority seems to emphasise cooperation between states, indicating that further cooperation may be taken in other policy areas as well. Key words: European Union, European Parliament, European integration, Migration, Security, Securitization, Human security, Human rights, State sovereignty, Dimension analysis