Failure to Reform the EU Migration and Asylum Rules: Explaining Divergent Member State Decisions on the CEAS Reform

The 2015 European migration crisis made it obvious that Migration and Asylum policy in the EU had to be reformed to overcome the persistent problems in policy implementation, burden-sharing, and solidarity among the Member States. However, no such reform of the Common European Asylum System and Dublin III Regulation has been adopted up until today. This paper investigates why the Member States did not manage to solve this integration problem and opposed the CEAS reform proposed by the Commission at the end of 2015. It does so in two steps, using the set-theoretic multi-method research design. First, a comprehensive analysis of the decisions of 25 countries of the EU participating in the CEAS is done with the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) method to arrive at the combination of conditions that lead to the opposition to the reform. This is the first-ever systematic review of the conditions and positions of the participating Member States. Through this, the paper tests three major European integration theoretical frameworks - Liberal Intergovernmentalism, Postfunctionalism, and the Core State Powers approach, - for their capacity to explain the problems and successes of integration in migration. The results of the QCA suggest one necessary condition and two configurations of conditions that are sufficient for the opposition to the CEAS reform. The necessary condition is the absence of public support for a relocation mechanism among the EU Member States. Sufficiency is achieved via two paths. The first pathway states that countries which were not heavily impacted by refugee arrivals during the crisis and where the public opinion towards redistribution and fairer burden-sharing was unfavourable decide to vote down the reform that would introduce a relocation mechanism, regardless of whether the right-wing Eurosceptic parties performed well in the national elections before the crisis or not, and regardless of whether the state’s resources for migration management are challenged significantly or not. The second pathway states that regardless of the affectedness of the state by the amount of asylum seekers, if the state faces a situation of combined unpopularity of the redistribution scheme among the population, no large support for the right-wing Eurosceptic parties in elections, and no high exposure of its capacities in migration management, the choice is also against the reform proposal. The key takeaway of these findings is that individual conditions derived from the three theoretical approaches explaining European integration dynamics do not produce the outcome on their own, but do so only in combination. In the second step, the paper goes back to the case level and explores the within-case mechanisms of arriving at reform opposition in several typical cases. The cases of Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Belgium help to interpret the results of the QCA and demonstrate the importance of domestic politics and electoral struggle for the EU-level migration decisions of the Member States’ governments. Mobilization of exclusive identities and politicization of migration is employed not only by radical right parties and especially intensifies when a government faces an upcoming national election, preventing integration.