Europeanisation of national immigration policies

Abstract

The ‘ever closer union’ motto of the 1957 Rome Treaty was indeed one of the most assertive ‘superordinate goals’ in the history of the EU. Symbolic as it may sound, a formulation of this sort was in the aftermath of a war-stricken Europe intending to promote the initial cooperation between a number of formerly hostile states to a broader audience. For immigration issues, as part of a diverse range of policy areas in the Community’s course of action to that effect, the Schengen Treaties in the 1980s served well by abolishing the traditional border controls and setting about a deeper and wider ‘area of freedom, security and justice’. The 1997 Amsterdam Treaty was quite seminal in this latter respect. Accordingly, decision-making in immigration matters was to follow progressively supranationalist principles, with the competences of the Council to be going halves with the Parliament incrementally. Aside from a certain level of harmonisation in cross-border police and judicial affairs, nevertheless, the prevailing tendency in the EU Member States’ patterns of immigration policy-making has since then been more to the precedence of intergovernmentalism than to that of supranationalism. Perceiving this ‘back-pedalling’ to be a serious damper on the tenability of the Rome Treaty’s slogan in today’s far more crowded Union, this doctoral study aimed to investigate as its core research question the extent of ‘Europeanisation’ concerning the immigration policies of four EU members. The analysis of these cases, namely Germany, the UK, Greece and Italy, included as a matter of course their convergences/divergences in this policy field as well. The secondary question the study sought to answer by extension was in other words the similarities and differences between the selected cases’ national immigration policies. The main hypotheses to test within this framework concerned relevance of institutional strength and public attitudes. A twofold approach was followed to operationalise this quest. First, the selected cases’ historical backgrounds, institutional structures and patterns of immigration policy-making specifically with reference to the EU/Community law were treated with a qualitative textual analysis. The findings of this examination were then substantiated quantitatively by the Migration Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) and the European Commission’s annual assessment reports, backed up occasionally with the help of recent Eurobarometer Surveys. For a wider perspective of Europeanisation, the research was designed in compliance with the ‘bottom-up’ model. Having employed this model against a historical/conceptual background -where immigration, citizenship and multiculturalism constituted the three chief integral parts- and in light of data from the MIPEX and the EU Commission supplementing this framework, the study came to the conclusion that in the face of the relatively recent and rapidly expanding immigration flows, the institutional structures in Greece and Italy were not poised for effective management, which is why the two countries’ immigration policies had to undergo ‘transformation’ vis-a-vis the EU norms/standards/regulations in this category. While transposition and implementation of the relevant EU texts ran on a certain level of scepticism in all selected cases –not least because of the negative public attitudes towards immigration- Germany’s supranational commitments turned out to be more considerable than in others. Despite the strong institutional structure it possessed like Germany, the UK appeared to be a typical case for ‘Euroscepticism’ here. In any event, compared to that in Greece or Italy, the extent of Europeanisation in the UK, as well as in Germany, amounted to ‘absorption’ at most, given the latter two cases’ low-to-moderate needs for policy-change and bigger regulatory capacities. Put differently, in the end, the immigration policies of Greece and Italy were throughout the selected period of analysis illustrative of a higher degree of Europeanisation than those of Germany and the UK. Keywords: Europeanisation, supranationalisation, migration, immigration, citizenship, multiculturalism, national policies, institutional framework, EU/Community law, third-country nationals, non-EU nationals.