The National Sense Making of EU Visa Policy

Abstract

Before one’s arrival in a diplomatic or consular post abroad, not only the high-ranking staff but also low-level employees are interested in learning the national policy in that country, the national interests, and the problems at stake. That is essential knowledge to work in consular posts. Civil servants share narratives that convey sense to visa policy on the ground, by suggesting the issues at stake in delivering visas and what visa policy should do, and to officers’ work, by suggesting the purposes to which their daily action is bent. Narratives place current action in a series of past events. Thus, history differentiates contexts also from the point of view of the sense attributed to EU visa policy. National understandings persist although EU visa policy. Thus, the understandings of visa policy in Morocco vary considerably. According to Belgium, visa policy is ‘sensitive migration control.’ According to Italy, it is ‘scorned migration control.’ According to France, it is ‘migration control and diplomacy.’ Narratives also portray Moroccan applicants therefore nourishing very different subjective representations of the policy recipients. To Belgium, France, and Italy respectively, Moroccan applicants are ‘networked,’ ‘demanding and clientes,’ and ‘wrong.’