ABSTRACT
The Commission’s Assessment of the Tampere Programme in June 2004 described the creation of an area of freedom, security and justice over the previous five years as ‘one of the most outstanding expressions of the transition from an economic Europe to a political Europe at the service of its citizens’. The process of communitarisation of asylum and immigration policies, which was stipulated in the Treaty of Amsterdam, followed nearly ten years of transgovernmental cooperation among member states, first outside of the Treaty framework, and later under Maastricht’s third pillar. It went along with the gradual strengthening of supranational procedures in these sensitive fields of domestic politics, and a widening of the substantive agenda – moving from the coordination of control to a deeper harmonisation of domestic policies. This evolution from transgovernmental coordination to supranational communitarisation has, however, not been uncontroversial, as protracted negotiations in the Council of Ministers and last-minute compromises on minimum standards show. Indeed, this difficult transition documents
member governments’ resistance to pooling authority in these core aspects of national sovereignty and identity. In strong contrast with these internal blockades, the external dimension of European asylum and immigration policies has rapidly developed into a key focus of cooperation. Taking into account the international dimension of the migration phenomenon, this cooperation seeks to engage countries of origin and transit in the control of migration flows. The result is a growing emphasis on extraterritorial control. What explains this latest shift in European immigration policies, what are
its main components, and how does this emerging foreign policy agenda relate to the internal harmonisation process? Highlighting the interplay between deepening communitarisation and widening cooperation, this account argues that the shift towards extraterritorial control is less a new phenomenon than the continuation of the transgovernmental logic of cooperation, and an escape from internal blockades. It reflects the continuity of a policy frame that emphasises the control, and, therewith, security aspect of migration. The conception of uncontrolled immigration as a societal and cultural threat and its linkage with other security issues such as organised crime, terrorism or Islamic fundamentalism blurs the distinction between internal and external security and necessarily shifts attention to the external sources of the phenomenon (Huysmans 2000; Bigo 2001; Pastore 2001). While during the 1990s the externalisation of control was strongly motivated by the fall of the ‘Iron Curtain’ to the East, today it is vulnerability to the EU’s neighbours that propels attention beyond the territory of the Union. The revived foreign policy agenda can thus be seen as the continuation of
the established policy frame in an altered geopolitical context. Its dominance over other competing approaches, in particular what has been coined the comprehensive approach – and the contrast with reluctant harmonisation of internal policies – point at the existence of other sustaining factors. These are to be sought in the institutional configuration of cooperation and immigration ministers’ efforts to preserve autonomy towards other influential actors. In this light, the search for policy solutions beyond the territory of the EU is motivated less by the search for innovative solutions than by the interest of justice and home affairs officials to increase their autonomy vis-a`-vis other actors in the domestic and European policy arenas. With the hesitant but progressive realisation of supranational decision-making procedures, this concerns mainly their room for manoeuvre vis-a`-vis other member states and strengthened supranational actors. Since they are not exposed to the same competitive electoral pressure as member states’ governments, and have a broader mandate, supranational actors, in particular the Commission and Parliament, pursue a more comprehensive approach to migration management than the Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) Council. Whereas, internally, the move towards the Community Method of policy-making tends to intensify reluctance towards transfers of sovereignty, externally it creates an impetus for cooperation without compromising national asylum and immigration systems.
