Abstract
With the establishment of the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) in 2010, a new collective actor entered the European asylum policy arena. Although the agency commands limited financial and personnel resources, and has no formal powers to directly interfere in the decision-making practices of asylum authorities across Europe, its mandate and reach of influence are a subject of recurrent dispute. We consider the struggles surrounding the EASO’s role and position as manifestations of enduring conflicts of recognition, valuation and distribution in a Europeanised asylum administrative field. By analysing civil servants’ position-takings vis-à-vis the EASO, we demonstrate that officials from a variety of member states are united by a shared belief in disinterested, apolitical bureaucratic rules of procedure, based on a notion of ‘expertise’ that transcends national boundaries and supersedes national concerns. At the same time, the discursive boundary work invested by the interviewees draws on spatial, temporal and procedural categories of differentiation, highlighting complex processes of ongoing relational positionings and practices of distinction. The corresponding hierarchies and inequalities are further indications of a transnational administrative field with its own principles of valuation.
Highlights
With the establishment of the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) in 2010, a new collective actor entered the European asylum policy arena
By analysing civil servants’ position-takings vis-à-vis the EASO, we demonstrate that officials from a variety of member states are united by a shared belief in disinterested, apolitical bureaucratic rules of procedure, based on a notion of ‘expertise’ that transcends national boundaries and supersedes national concerns
The EASO was conceived by interviewees as an actor with as yet limited material resources, but with the necessary symbolic capital to take over responsibility for the ‘management’ of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) in the long run: “It’s the most relevant agency so they can get control on everything [...] in my opinion they need more staff [...] in order to cover everything and to manage the situation because with this staff at this level they cannot do it in a proper way” (Senior Official B, 310–317)
Summary
With the establishment of the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) in 2010, a new collective actor entered the European asylum policy arena. The agency has until recently attracted comparatively little public attention It was mainly concerned with how the member states, and the heads and high-ranking officials of the national asylum authorities, viewed its role. The ensuing proposal, in May 2016, for a European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA)—which was still being discussed at the time of writing2—was far less ambitious It provided for a considerable increase in the agency’s staff and financial resources and envisaged competences beyond the EASO’s current mandate. These would be, inter alia, to steer and monitor, on its own initiative, the asylum administrative practices of a particular member state, and to intervene and address identified ‘shortcomings’ through the deployment of asylum experts if the member state concerned does not comply with the agency’s recommendations In the context of the legitimacy problems of the CEAS, the agency had become a focal point of calls for ‘more Europe’ (Guild 2016, p. 588)
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