European Union : A(n) (in)coherent migration and asylum actor in the making?!

The year 2015-2016 marks a change in the European Union’s migration policy. Massive arrivals of Syrian refugees disembark irregularly in Europe, images of lost human lives in the Mediterranean Sea at the borders of one of the most developed and wealthy regions in the world appear in the Media. The European Union and its Member States face an unprecedentent humanitarian crisis. Drawing on the theory of actorness and bringing in the social construction paradigm, this paper suggests to examine the social construction of the Union’s policy preferences and the subsequent establishment of the European Union Agency for Asylum which paved the way for long pending asylum files to follow. That being so, the social construction of policy preference coherence among the two co-legislators and the European Commission has made asylum, one of the most sensitive, provocative, problematic issues in the Union’s history a common challenge that needs to be addressed by common solutions.