EU visa diplomacy in world politics

The EU visa policy, also known as the Schengen visa policy, relies on a “positive” list of third-country nationals (TCN) exempted from visas to travel to the EU, and on a “negative” list of TCN subject to visa obligations. Visa requirements play an essential role in international relations but are overlooked in the case of the EU, whose visa policy has mostly been studied as a tool to limit irregular immigration. This project “VISADIPLO: EU visa diplomacy in world politics” consists in an innovative and comprehensive study of the making of the visa requirement lists. It addresses a series of three research objectives. The first objective is to map the priorities linked to EU visa diplomacy, not only border enforcement but also trade, tourism attractiveness, energy supplies or sanctioning foes, as the recent suspension of EU-Russia visa facilitation agreement demonstrates. The second objective is to understand how these priorities are negotiated by the Member States’ representatives, in spite of concurring national interests. The last objective is to question the distributional effects of EU visa diplomacy and bring evidence of the global travel inequalities resulting from EU visa requirements. This project adopts an interdisciplinary approach, drawing inspiration from Migration Diplomacy and Sociology of the EU. It relies on an original multi-method approach combining a quantitative study of the evolutions of visa requirement lists, qualitative semi-directed interviews with EU decision-makers and geovisualization analysis, since the findings on the unequal distribution of global mobility resulting from EU visa diplomacy will be represented in the form of an interactive map, published and available online. VISADIPLO aims to have a societal impact by bringing awareness and transparency to a policy whose opacity and negative impact on human mobility are often criticized.