External Border Control and Asylum Management As EU Common Goods. A Budgetary Perspective

Abstract

The removal of internal border controls across most of the European Union (EU) has increased the interdependencies between the Member States, triggering the emergence of many different EU common goods. In the fields of external border controls, asylum and migration, Article 80 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) implicitly recognizes the existence of such common goods and the challenges related to their effective provision, by establishing solidarity and fair sharing of responsibility between the Member States as governing principle for relevant common policies. An analysis of negotiations on the EU's Multiannual Financial Frameworks since 1993 and of data on budgetary implementation since 2000 show that pooling of financial resources at EU level and the establishment of common structures have advanced slowly, despite efforts from the European Parliament and the European Commission to gain momentum. Both specific features of the EU budgetary provisions and institutional characteristics of these sensitive policy areas have contributed to the slow progress. Against this backdrop, the 2015-2016 surge in arrivals of asylum-seekers has led to an emergency-driven increase in joint financial efforts, which nevertheless remain limited as compared to national expenditure in the policy areas. Scattered data suggest that the latter is unevenly distributed across the Union. These questions acquire renewed salience in the context of the negotiations on the post-2020 Multiannual Financial Framework. While pooling of financial resources at EU level cannot alone ensure fair sharing of responsibility, a series of possible developments in this domain have the potential to strengthen the contribution of the EU budget to the implementation of the principle that is to govern the common policies on external borders, asylum and migration according to the Treaty of Lisbon.