Compromising Asylum. Discursive Shifts and Frame Convergence in the Reform Process of the Common European Asylum System

The 2023 agreement on reforming the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) followed nearly a decade of repeatedly stalled negotiations. While existing accounts rightly emphasize process management supported by a shared sense of urgency in enabling the breakthrough, this article argues that agreement also required a shared policy framing. Complementing process-oriented explanations with a frame analysis, we trace how the CEAS discourse evolved and shifted since 2016 and show how these shifts shaped the substance of the reform, particularly the Asylum Procedure Regulation and the Crisis and Force Majeure Regulation. We demonstrate that perceptions of external and internal threats, namely the ‘instrumentalization’ of migration by foreign actors and the electoral rise of right-wing populism, were integrated into an expanding framing of ‘crisification’ and ‘securitization’. This was accompanied by a convergence of humanitarian and securitization frames, allowing centre-left actors, notably the then German government, to agree to the reform’s restrictive core. Such frame convergence is not a new phenomenon and has been visible in narratives such as that deterrence saves lives by preventing drownings, or that only the firm rejection and deportation of so-called ‘bogus’ asylum seekers allows Europe to protect ‘genuine’ refugees. Since the launch of the New Pact in 2020, however, this convergence has intensified, with policymakers increasingly portraying restrictive measures and partial derogations from human rights standards as necessary to protect both the asylum system and the European project itself in the face of novel internal and external threats. We argue that the CEAS compromise became possible through this broadening of the security frame and its convergence with humanitarian narratives, in which Europe is no longer depicted as threatened solely by high numbers of asylum seekers, but by those who ‘instrumentalize’ migration flows to destabilize Europe, and by right-wing populists who exploit a dysfunctional asylum system to advance an anti-EU agenda.