Beyond Suasion: Overcoming the Populist Deadlock in the Dublin IV Regulation

The distribution of asylum-seekers within the EU has been the most contested issue during the 2015 asylum crisis. Although the EU had adopted a relocation decision to support border countries that received exceptionally high numbers of migrants, this decision suffered from poor implementation, especially among the Central Eastern European Member States. Scholars (Biermann et al. 2018; Zaun 2018) have explained this state of affairs through the Suasion Game in Game Theory. According to this theory, cooperation is unlikely as countries which currently receive few asylum applications have no incentives to support top recipient countries by taking asylum-seekers in those countries and sharing the responsibility. This paper looks at recent decision-making on the Dublin IV Regulation, trying to understand the dynamics behind the failure to find collective solutions. The Suasion Game would expect policy deadlock on the Dublin IV Regulation to be overcome through side payments and package deals to compensate countries that are unwilling to take on additional asylum-seekers. However, these strategies seem to have been unsuccessful, especially in European Council negotiations. Therefore, in this paper we examine to what extent politicisation has made it impossible to find a solution to the Suasion Game and whether failure to do so has led to a watering down of the responsibility-sharing mechanism in Dublin IV.