Friday, March 14, 2014
Chairman's (Omni Shoreham)
The Europeanization of migration and asylum policy has often been portrayed as a give-and-take bargaining process in which restrictive member states seek to escape national-level migrants’ rights protection and pro-migration activism by NGOs, only to run up against a liberal European Commission who is successfully able to enact pro-migrant policies with the help of the Court of Justice. My paper will revisit this dichotomous portrayal of restrictive member states vs. a liberal Commission, especially in light of new developments in JHA policy. Taking the cases of the recast Asylum Procedures Directive, the new Dublin Regulation (2013), and the decision not to recast the Family Reunification Directive, this paper will consider the Commission as a pragmatic actor. Drawing on recent literature in Political Science which borrows from pragmatist philosophers and social theorists, “pragmatic” is best understood as a willingness to reconsider and reshape prior beliefs and goals in search of solutions to problems. Thus, I draw upon interviews conducted in 2013 and a review of Commission documents to demonstrate that the Commission’s position on migration and asylum cannot be defined (merely) as liberal, because this radically simplifies the degree of reflexivity and adaptability which it has shown in negotiations with the Council of Ministers, Parliament, and non-state actors. Furthermore, this paper integrates the role of policy feedback into the deliberations, both amongst the European Union institutions and between E.U. level and the member states.
