Responding to the refugee crisis: How common is the Common European Asylum System?

The unprecedented increase in the movement of refugees across the European Union’s borders has presented a critical challenge for member state and EU institutional leaders and policy makers. Despite the establishment of the Common European Asylum System, which was created in order to harmonize national asylum laws and establish a legal framework for the foundation of a common EU policy on asylum, the crisis has revealed the continuity of diverging national asylum policies and standards. The paper interrogates the superficial coordination of national policies and differential implementation of the CEAS, and argues that the imprecision of the CEAS has allowed for member states to maintain existent national policy preferences, traditions and practices. Under the strain of the refugee crisis, the disparity among national policy practices, institutional structures and values have undermined coherence at the EU policy making level with the prevalence of competing national interests and policy approaches. The paper thus raises the question: to what extent is the CEAS common? Upon what values is it grounded? Which interests does it represent? The paper departs from rationalist approaches that define material interests and formal institutional rules as the main independent variables affecting domestic policy transformation and EU decision-making and employs Sandra Lavenex’s Europeanization framework to argue that it is interests, institutions and importantly norms that have influenced the domestic implementation of the CEAS. The paper develops the analytical framework further in order to interrogate how discord between the CEAS and existing member state interests, institutions, norms and values have had a feedback effect at the EU level, challenging policy formation and implementation in response to the crisis. The paper explores these questions through a comparative analysis of Germany and Italy. The crisis, and the subsequent politicization of the issue of asylum within domestic politics, has increased the salience of these questions and the importance of analyzing domestic policy transformation.