In 2012 the European Council aims to conclude the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) providing for the harmonization of member states’ asylum legislation. Although CEAS was regularly confronted with the postponement of deadlines, the overall speed of harmonizing this policy area – from purely intergovernmental cooperation characterizing the 1990s to widespread integration today – marks a significant transformation of the state. So far, this process was overwhelmingly explained from an intergovernmental framework arguing that European co-operation provides institutional and discursive opportunity structures allowing national executives to develop common policies to increase the states’ autonomy to control refugee movements. Beginning with the adoption of the Qualification Directive, the last years have, however, witnessed the constitutionalization of refugee rights in the European Union (EU) questioning this baseline theoretical approach. Based on a broader theoretical framework linking a bottom-up research design with an explanatory framework based on different mechanisms of Europeanization, the paper empirically analyses the interactions between the national asylum policies in Germany with the developments in the EU. Focusing on three separate aspects of asylum policies – refugee status, asylum procedures and reception conditions – the paper clearly shows the continuing dominance of member states in the uploading and downloading dimension of European policy-making largely determining the developments in national asylum policies. Nevertheless, Europe does today also provide room for policy learning improving refugee rights. Overall, the different mechanisms of Europeanization provide a theoretically more appropriate framework to account for the increasing diversity of Europe’s refugee policies. They explain how during the last decade the European level has lost some of its early attraction for national home affairs ministries aiming at restricting refugee movements. The anew institutional changes introduced by the Lisbon Treaty will contribute to this process but incremental policy changes will continue to dominate this policy area in the future.
