The Common European Asylum System at Stake: How and Why to Advocate for Responsibility-Sharing Mechanism

The Common European Asylum System (CEAS) cannot ensure the processing and hosting of asylum seekers in the asylum institutions of its member states (Scipioni 2017). This failure is exemplified in so-called crises like the ‘Arab spring’ or the ‘refugee crisis of 2015’. The CEAS is in urgent need of reform. Reform proposals highlight the importance of responsibility-sharing mechanisms as measures to counterbalance the uneven distribution of asylum applications. Responsibility-sharing mechanisms can take many forms: they can share norms, share money, or share people (Noll 2000). The European Parliament (EP) was mandated to reform the CEAS not later than 2012. Responsibility sharing mechanisms were the crucial reform instruments in these discussions. However, no substantial reform was implemented. An analysis of speech acts investigates these discussions in the EP to find out why and how Member of Parliaments (MEPs) argued in favor of responsibility-sharing mechanisms. The speech acts are coded by using video protocols of all relevant sessions in the seventh term of the EP (2009-2012). The coded speech acts are then analyzed by a multinomial logit model. The analysis shows that, in general, the EP is in favor of responsibility-sharing mechanisms. There is no real asylum policy contestation in the EP. Statistical simulations show that the type of responsibility-sharing mechanisms under discussion is the strongest determinant of the conducted line of argument, whereas the political ideology and the country of origin of an MEP do not matter. This points to a problem-oriented discourse in the EP. The reforms of the CEAS have been blocked, in fact, by the Council of the European Union (Zaun 2017). This blockage causes a political ossification of the CEAS, which is currently governed by court ruling and exception measures and it harms asylum seekers as the vulneralbe target group of the CEAS.