Schengen-Dublin: The Regime that Wasn’t There

This article examines whether the seeds for the mismanagement of the European migration crisis can be traced to the time before the sudden influx of refugees in the summer and fall of 2015. I develop a Cournot-Nash game of asylum policy making in the Schengen-Dublin area to establish the conditions under which states harden their national policies unilaterally. The analysis shows that the Schengen-Dublin asylum regime critically depends on low levels of political and economic divergence between member states. Growing disparities between the member states should therefore translate into an increased risk of regulatory competition and a hollowing out of the common rules. The empirical analysis shows that the various Dublin agreements did not increase the convergence in the number of asylum application and the recognition rates among the member states. This lack of convergence is particularly pronounced for the entry of the Eastern European member states. Based on the predictions of the formal model, I examine European asylum cooperation with the help of yearly and quarterly data, covering the periods from 1986 to 2016 and 2002 to 2016. The analysis shows that the number of asylum seekers flocking to a country is largely autoregressive and that countries with higher recognition rates and higher economic standards are more attractive destinations. Refugees react negatively to growing unemployment and a change in support for right-wing parties.