PhD thesis defence by Daria Glukhova
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.
Second, the dissertation goes back to the case level and explores the within-case mechanisms of arriving at opposition towards the reform in several typical cases from the identified sufficient paths. The cases include Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Belgium. This allows to make sense of the results of the QCA and better identify the causal explanations behind the states’ decisions. While Liberal Intergovernmentalism expectations are again to a large degree confirmed and Postfunctionalism expectations are partially confirmed, the within-case analysis brings to the fore the importance of the overburdened state capacities at different time periods for the temporary change in attitudes of the affected governments towards solidarity and burden-sharing among the EU Member States, thereby confirming important insights from the Core State Powers framework on European integration processes.
Finally, the thesis makes a two-countries structured case comparison between Bulgaria and Hungary – countries which had similar conditions with regards to the migration crisis, but arrived at different outcomes regarding the CEAS reform. Bulgaria supported the reform, while Hungary vehemently opposed it and any similar redistributive measures across the EU. The chapter explores the reasons for this difference and investigates what mechanisms were responsible for the respective decisions of the countries' governments, demonstrating along the way the role and importance of party politics, electoral struggle, and the role of leadership for the EU-level politics and integration. It draws special attention to the importance of the embeddedness of the political parties in power domestically into the EU political architecture and the ties particular parties in government (e.g. Fidesz) have with other EU Member States’ parties and blocks in the European Parliament.
The thesis tackles EU migration policy integration problems from several angles, thereby underlining the complexity of the decision-making process and of the various, oftentimes competing mechanisms which determine the success or failure of European integration in migration policy and which neither of the existing integration theories can single-handedly account for.