Browsing by Subject "gas pipeline"

Nord Stream 2 has sparked an unprecedented amount of discussion within the European Union. Its proponents see it as a crucial and welcomed addition to the European energy infrastructure, while those opposing it consider the pipeline a geopolitical tool of Russia. This division has centred especially around Germany and the eastern Member States, Poland and the Baltic States in particular. This thesis adopts a qualitative approach and utilises tools from discourse and argumentation analyses to provide an in-depth analysis of the intra-EU debate on Nord Stream 2. The source material used is a large variety of different EU documents ranging from parliamentary questions to different types of official reports. The debate is found to feature arguments from three dimensions: environmental, economic and political. The central argument advanced is that the EU is less divided on the topic of Nord Stream 2 than has been commonly argued, especially in the media. The EU’s internal debate has been dominated by those opposing Nord Stream 2 and support for the project is rarely voiced. Furthermore, all three main EU institutions – the European Commission, the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament – have voiced concerns over the pipeline project. The second main result of the analysis, achieved through the systematic classification of different types of arguments into the three dimensions, is that the pipeline project has been most commonly framed in a political context, with appeals to the EU’s core principles such as solidarity and diversification of energy supplies being some of the most important characteristics of the internal debate. This thesis supports earlier research on the EU-Russia energy relationship by highlighting the negative perceptions of Russia within intra-EU debate. However, this thesis also challenges the Russia-focused angle of analysis, as the analysed documents show that the debate has focused on internal issues of the EU. These results are highly interesting because they show that although Russia is undoubtedly tied to the EU’s energy policy, the real issues might be structural and go beyond just questions related to energy policy.