European asylum and refugee policy after the Treaty of Amsterdam: the birth of a new regime?

Abstract

Asylum seekers and refugees have been a central concern of high policy in Europe during the 1990s. The most innovative aspects in the European Union’s Treaty of Amsterdam of June 1997 are a direct result of this new development. But asylum seekers and refugees have also had a major impact on the domestic politics of the member states of the European Union. Other chapters in this volume demonstrate how national welfare states in Europe have restricted access to benefits and entitlements to persons seeking asylum or those granted de facto refugee status (see Duke, Sales and Gregory, Chapter 6 and Minderhoud, Chapter 7 in this volume). Furthermore, the shifting boundaries between citizens, denizens and outsiders (inter alia labour migrants, guestworkers, Convention refugees, de facto refugees, protected persons, asylum seekers, detained asylum seekers and illegal migrants) has been determined not only by the economic premises of the post-Keynesian welfare state but also driven by moral panics artificially created by the manoeuvring of political parties generally of the conservative or neo-fascist right (Thränhardt, 1997; and in this volume Schuster and Solomos, Chapter 3 and Schönwälder, Chapter 4). The inflated fears of floods of Russian, Algerian, Albanian or Bosnian refugees have forced governments of the member states of the European Union to amalgamate an emergent common policy on refugees and asylum seekers with the still underweight Common Foreign and Security Policy. Nowhere is this more evident than in European reactions to the wars of succession in the former Yugoslavia or in the still shaky post-war settlements.