This article explores the dynamics of belonging of European Union (EU) nationals living in the United Kingdom (UK) in the context of UK's withdrawal from the EU. It uses a mixed-methods study of prereferendum and postreferendum survey and interviews and focus groups to investigate patterns of belonging among EU nationals, shifts in the parameters of these patterns, and the overall impact of Brexit on them. The study identifies four patterns of belonging and argues that Brexit has significantly disrupted them, shifting them towards a new phase of rationalisation and reaction reliant on migrantness, Europeanness, and rights. In the aftermath of the referendum, EU nationals began to rethink their belonging, constituting themselves as a collectivity by making use of EU citizenship and a shared European identity. This constitutive dynamics is consequential for the status of EU nationals in the UK, for the boundaries of the political community of the British state, and also for Europe.

The aim of this article is to investigate European Union's asylum framework and its national implementation in the case of Bulgaria; to demonstrate that national implementation is actually consistent with the deficiencies of the supranational framework; and to interrogate the normative struggle that, as the article argues, is in the root of the European failure to respond adequately to the ongoing refugee crisis. Using critical policy analysis (content and discourse) complemented by historical analysis of a recent political development, the article engages with the 'policy malintegration' within the Common European Asylum System produced in the context of refugee crisis in the case of Bulgaria. The article argues that the discrepancy between purpose and implementation in the national application of the EU framework is to be understood not so much as 'malintegration', but as a particular vision of European integration that is struggling against the idea of liberalizing asylum. Sustained by an overall uncertainty about the fate of the EU project, by economic crisis, and by nationalist ('xeno-racist') narratives on migration, such a vision of the Europeanization of asylum is bound to produce paradoxes. As the case study will demonstrate, it has effectively worked against the adequate provision of refugee protection, and against the credible Europeanization of asylum.

This study explores the way Bulgarians living in the UK interact online. We rely on an online survey of attitudes among Bulgarians in the UK, participant observation in Bulgarian support networks during the period 2016-20, as well as qualitative interaction analysis (adapted for non-visual environments) over the course of six months (2019-20) of top posts from the largest online support groups. Our findings point to the gradual consolidation of organised informal support among Bulgarians, especially and predominantly among those of 'low-status' occupations and more precarious migration journeys. We also observe a trend of emancipation and entrepreneurship enabled by online networks in the almost complete absence of formal associations of Bulgarians in the UK. Finally, we acknowledge the importance of the context of crisis and precarity for the emergence of informal support networks online. What this tells us about Bulgarians in the UK is that, while often avoided by so called 'elite migrants', informal support groups have begun to function as quasi-diasporic communities assisted by online social networking platforms, (still) facilitated by free movement but creating a unique transnational space between 'home' and 'the foreign' to enable mobility, interaction and belonging.

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The consistent securitization of migration in Europe of the past decades has been consequential: one of its most visible aspects is currently displayed in the regulation of asylum in Europe. By constructing migrants as physical and ontological threat, by re-drawing borders as barriers against otherness, by reaffirming the identity-maintenance aspects of citizenship, the securitization of migration and the lumping of asylum together with migration in all key EU regulatory moves has enabled the rationalisation of protection from asylum-seekers. This article takes up a national study of the policy narratives and practices around one of the understudied recent asylum hotspots in the EU: the Bulgarian-Turkish border forming part of the external EU border. The analysis emphasizes how the rebordering dynamics identified in Bulgaria (as a EU member-state) is embedded within similar narratives and practices at all levels of EU asylum politics. It argues that these (re-)bordering narratives and practices undermine the notion of protection, weaken the Europeanization of asylum, and threaten the legitimacy of political communities in the EU. These consequences need to be taken into account when studying the struggle between human rights and democracy in the regulation of asylum, as well as when discussing the strategic direction of EU migration governance.