Failure to reform the EU migration and asylum rules : explaining divergent member state decisions on the CEAS reform

Abstract

The 2015 European migration crisis seemingly made it obvious that Migration and Asylum policy in the EU had to be reformed in order to overcome the persistent problems in policy implementation, burden-sharing, and solidarity among the Member States. However, no such reform of the Common European Asylum System and Dublin III Regulation has been adopted until now. This thesis investigates why the Member States did not manage to solve this integration problem and opposed the reform of the CEAS proposed after the peak of the crisis at the end of 2015. It does so in three steps, using a multimethod design. First, a comprehensive analysis of the 25 countries of the EU participating in the CEAS is done with the help of QCA to arrive at the combination of conditions that lead to the opposition to the reform. This is the first systematic analysis of the conditions and positions of the Member States participating in Migration and Asylum integration. Through this analysis, the thesis tests major European integration theories, including Liberal Intergovernmentalism, Postfunctionalism, and the Core State Powers approach, for their capacity to explain the problems and successes of integration in a particular policy area. The QCA results produce two sufficient pathways for opposition to the reform and show that while Liberal Intergovenmenatlism largely accounts for much of the variation in the decision on the CEAS reform, Postfunctionalism rightly stresses the importance of domestic public opinion for the EU integration processes.