ABSTRACT
In chapter 8, Christian Lahusen and Marius Wacker discuss the administrative cooperation of asylum agencies in the Dublin system as an example of a European field of public administration. In recent years, the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) has come under particular strain. Public and scientific debates have focused on political conflicts regarding adequate policy responses to forced migration, but have largely ignored the cross-national work of public administrations in this policy field. This chapter takes a closer look at the ‘Dublin system’, which was established to allocate responsibilities for reviewing asylum applications within the EU+ territory. The authors discuss three questions: Has this system established a stable field of administrative cooperation? How is the division of labour structured cross-nationally? Which rationale governs this field? The chapter shows that the asylum agencies of ‘Dublin Member States’ have indeed established a transnational bureaucratic field. Available data on the exchanges within the Dublin system have demonstrated that this field is patterned by core-periphery structures of cooperation. While administrations operate in the shadow of political contentions, this chapter shows that administrative cooperation is governed by a bureaucratic rationale with its own rules, challenges and contentions.
