Bulletin n. 3/2009
January 2010
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Chou Meng-Hsuan
    The European Security Agenda and the 'External Dimension' of EU Asylum and Migration Cooperation
    in Perspectives on European Politics and Society , vol. 10, n. 4, December , Special Issue: The Politics of European Security Policies: Actors, Dynamics and Contentious Outcomes ,  2009 ,  541-559
    The consolidation of immigration and asylum as security concerns on the European Union (EU) legislative agenda has been a recent, but steadfast, phenomenon within European integration. To be sure, the European heads of state and government have repeatedly asserted the added-value of European cooperation in these two fields vis--vis third countries even before formal competence was extended to the supranational institutions in 1999. This paper will show that the formation of the external dimension of European asylum and migration cooperation has been in the making since the early 1970s and did not originate as the security problematique as it is now conventionally perceived and articulated. It will be argued that the evolution of European asylum and migration cooperation can be explained as the outcome of converging external and internal pressures for change (fluctuation in migratory flows and policy failures). However, a distinct security discourse emanated from these developments and has been re-embedded into the legislative agenda by the political actors - EU interior ministers - who dominate the decision-making process for asylum and migration measures containing an external dimension. Given that the Lisbon Treaty provisions, if and when they do come into force, did not propose any changes to the legislative procedure for such measures, the current state of play is likely to persist.
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