This study seeks to analyse how migration has been constructed into a security question in the European Union during 2015. As denoted by the Copenhagen School, something is a security problem when elites declare it to be so, and securitization legitimises extraordinary measures beyond the political established norms. Migration has been portrayed as a potential threat for the continuity of the cultural identity, the preservation of the public order as well as for the economy stability of the Member States, and consequently it has been securitized. The implication of the European integration process in the construction of the concept of migration into a security question, with the creation of common migration strategy, an increased in surveillance and a reinforcement of border control will be developed. From this standpoint, during 2015 the Union has attended to the biggest refugee influx since the end of the Second World War, and the current research aims to analyse how the Member States have responded to it. To that end, the political discourse of three selected countries: Germany, Hungary and the Czech Republic, is going to be examined and compared. Key Words: European Union, securitization, refugee crisis, migration, asylum-seeker

This doctoral thesis examines the issue of crisis governance of the European Union in the context of migration developments after 2015. The author investigates how relevant EU institutions (European Commission, Council of the EU, and European Council) construct exceptionality within the common asylum and migration policy and what might be its impacts on the functionality of this policy. Theoretically, the research is based on the concept of "state of exception" originally introduced in the works of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben. The main objective of the thesis is to analyze and interpret the extraordinary migration measures from 2015 to 2018, which were proposed and implemented by the EU political actors to address the migration situation. The institutional level is further broadened and contextualized by including three EU Member State governments - Hungary, Austria, and Germany - and their involvement in the interactive shaping of emergency policies. The author studies how the exception is constructed in the EU official discourse, the relationship between exception and normality, and the exercise of power to create a state of exception at supranational/intergovernmental level of the EU as an international organization. The thesis approaches the topic using critical discourse analysis. It...