Policing and Immigration: The Creation of New Policy Spaces

Abstract

Abstract An analysis is made of the creation of new European Union (EU) spaces for cooperation in policing and immigration policies. The Treaty of Rome was silent on both topics, and before the Maastricht Treaty on European Union (TEU), European Community (EC) states had begun to coordinate their responses to specific problems – such as terrorism, drugs, and asylum seekers – usually on a bilateral basis, with multilateral forms of cooperation fragmented, ad hoc, and outside EC structures. The chapter has three main sections, the first of which briefly describes the institutional landscape in policing and migration in Europe before the TEU. Section 2 assesses the major internal and external changes – the Single Market and the collapse of the Iron Curtain, respectively – that provoked the move toward institutionalizing police and migration cooperation at the EU level; it devotes particular attention to the domestic crisis in Germany resulting from massive migrations from the east, and the policy entrepreneurship of Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Section 3 analyses how the Third Pillar of the TEU, that on Justice and Home Affairs (in which policing and immigration policies were combined) borrowed from existing institutions – most notably the Second Pillar (the Common Foreign and Security Policy); the Amsterdam Treaty (1996) then partially separated policing and migration again – but with a completely different institutional structure within the European Union.