Suchergebnisse

Verlagsinfo: This book fills a significant lacuna in our understanding of the refugee crisis by analyzing the dynamics that lie behind fifteen years of asylum policies in the European Union. It sheds light on why cooperation has led to reinforced refugee protection on paper but has failed to provide it in practice. Offering innovative empirical, theoretical and methodological research on this crucial topic, it argues that the different asylum systems and priorities of the various Member States explain the EU's lack of initiative in responding to this humanitarian emergency. The author demonstrates that the strong regulators of North-Western Europe have used their powerful bargaining positions to shape EU asylum policies decisively, which has allowed them to impose their will on Member States in South-Eastern Europe. These latter countries, having barely made a mark on EU policies, are now facing significant difficulties in implementing them. The EU will only identify potential solutions to the crisis, the author concludes, when it takes these disparities into account and establishes a functioning common refugee policy. This novel work will appeal to students and scholars of politics, immigration and asylum in the EU

This article explains recent changes in the negotiation dynamics concerning EU asylum policies, the policy failure in the Common European Asylum System and the deadlock in its post-2016 reform. Combining the Core State Power framework with the literature on punctuated equilibria and bounded rationality, it argues that EU asylum policies have important redistributive implications. In earlier phases, these were concealed by a regulatory policymaking approach which depoliticized EU legislation in that area. The 2015 asylum crisis demonstrated that this approach failed to produce the expected integration and entailed an even unfairer distribution of asylum-seekers, hence leading to information updating among Member States. Together with the ascent of right-wing populism in many Member States, this has fundamentally changed the negotiation dynamics from a situation with a few dominant Member States to a highly politicized environment in which previously passive Member States acted either as promoters or as blockers, thus producing deadlock.

AbstractBuilding on Moravcsik's Liberal Intergovernmentalism, I offer an explanation of the non‐decision on permanent EU refugee quotas. Some traditionally influential Member States in EU asylum politics, such as Germany, Austria and Sweden, received large numbers of refugees and faced strong domestic pressures to engage other Member States in responsibility‐sharing. Yet, governments of Member States with small application numbers (among whom several Eastern European governments were particularly vocal) had incentives to undercut responsibility‐sharing to avoid similar pressures. Having a better alternative to the potentially negotiated agreement, these governments successfully blocked the introduction of permanent refugee quotas. Besides explaining the absence of an effective response to one of the root causes of the asylum crisis (unequal strains) through asymmetrical interdependence, the article further develops Liberal Intergovernmentalist arguments and shows how national electorates influence positions taken by governments at the EU level when they are mobilized by right‐wing populist parties.