EU Member States’ International Migration Policies and the Fragility Challenge

This article investigates the European Union member states’ response to international migration and shows how domestic considerations influence their policy-making. Records from the last 20 years show a steady increase in international migration crises. This led the EU and member states to provide coordinated help through the common EU Humanitarian Aid policy and/or member states’ national interventions. Contextually, international migration crises often impact the EU and member states directly through territorial inflows of migrants. International migration policy-making has thus gained considerable relevance as an issue with high political priority for states. Hence, the article adopts a quantitative approach to compare EU member states’ policies responding to this political challenge. It refers to the notions of territorial sovereignty and state political fragility to theoretically frame this challenge. Territorial sovereignty grounds the categories of the moral and political dilemma between state authority over the inflows of migrants and coordinated response to international migration crises. The choice is thus between member states’ national intervention towards migration crises and common intervention through the EU Humanitarian Aid policy. State political fragility refers to the increase/decrease in domestic member states’ political legitimacy, public services and respect for human rights and the rule of law as dimensions of a possible process of state fragilisation. The article develops an original model illustrating member states’ varying approaches to international migration policy-making due to the combination of (i) increase/decrease in fragility and (ii) national/European intervention. Hence, the paper discusses the possible impact of fragilisation on international migration policy-making. It hypothesises that fragilisation affects states’ approach to the reduction of the inflow of migrants and the effectiveness of the response. Indeed, fragilization would (i) determine states’ preference for the defence of territorial sovereignty through national intervention to reduce the inflow of migrants towards their territories; or (ii) privilege the contribution to the EU Humanitarian Aid policy intervention to possibly increase the effectiveness of the response. The paper statistically tests the correlation between fragilisation and intervention by referring to all the EU and member states’ interventions in international migration crises since 2004. Results allow identifying four categories of member states: (i) fragilised/national; (ii) non-fragilised/national; (iii) fragilised/European; (iv) non-fragilised/European. The four categories finally allow providing insights into the member states’ possibly different approaches to the dilemma between the defence of territorial sovereignty and commitment to European response to international migration crises.