Hungary, Italy and Spain: Europeanised or Souverenist Approach to Tackle Irregular Immigration in Europe

The aim of this paper is to briefly analyse and introduce the background of irregular immigration and refugee flows in the Mediterranean Sea to Italy and Spain, and via the Western Balkans to Hungary. On one hand the Italian and Spanish governments’ responses to these challenges are analysed since the end of the 1990s focusing mainly on the relationship between Italy and Libya as well as Spain and Morocco. On the other hand, recent Hungarian developments are investigated and compared to Italian and Spanish measures. The research is based on political discourse (governmental, parliamentary standpoints), opinion polls, news items, speeches, interviews and reports. Using the methodology of content and comparative analyses, the investigation focuses on the formation of social and governmental opinion on irregular migration. It is also analysed how the different government strategies regarding immigration policy changed during the last decades. Italy and Spain have traditionally been countries of emigration and turned into immigration destinies in the last decades of the 20th century, as well as into transit countries for migratory flows. Hungary was rather isolated from international migration during the Socialist era and could - for various years even after 1990 - be characterized by relatively low migratory flows. In Europe irregular migration and refugee waves have intensified recently. These have been tackled by using souverenist and / or European (Europeanised) crisis management tools. Governments, lacking a genuine European migration and asylum policy, tended to use unilateral steps and/ or bilateral agreements to deal with irregular migration, whereas political leaderships with a more pro-EU stance preferred “Europeanized” approaches and with a more Eurosceptic or populist stance preferred "souverenist" approaches. Most of the time these were not exclusive, and the measures employed were a combination of the two above-mentioned areas, with the mixture tilting between a realist-souverenist and a Europeanised toolkit for solutions.