The European Council and EU asylum policy: revising the Fusion model between venue shopping and liberal constraints

Asylum policy has become one of the most dynamic policy areas of the European Union, undergoing continuous developments throughout the last decades. The legal provisions ruling this policy area brought to an enhancement of competences for the EU, largely impacting EU institutional setup as well as relationships among different EU institutions, including the European Council, the Council of the European Union, the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union. However, a gap in the field exists relating to the possible role of the European Council in EU asylum policymaking, both at the theoretical and at the empirical level. Thus, the present paper aims at exploring the role of the European Council within this policy area throughout a timespan of ten years (2012-2022), taking into account the multiple crises faced by the EU. Therefore, the paper presents an overview of the major developments of EU asylum policy, mainly considering the changing competences assigned to the different institutions. Furthermore, the attention is drawn to the European Council, especially considering its evolution with the Lisbon Treaty and its task of providing strategic political guidelines. From a theoretical perspective, the paper attempts at contributing to the Fusion model (Wessels), by merging elements of the venue shopping and of the liberal constraints theses. Such combination allows the description of the European Council as having a major role both within the vertical multilevel system and along the horizontal multi-institutional setting. Empirically, the paper presents an analysis – taking the Narrative Policy Framework as the analytical lens – of European Council Conclusions, representing a well-developed multilevel consensus. The aforementioned analysis not only strives to support the theoretical framework advanced, but also exemplifies the role of the European Council in the evolution of EU asylum policy for future research steps.