The European Commission’s role in EU–Turkey migration: political leadership through strategic framing

Abstract

This article presents an ideational perspective of new institutional leadership and applies it to the European Commission’s role in the policy process concerning the European Union (EU)-Turkey cooperation on migration from 2014 to 2016. On a conceptual and methodological level, through searching for evidence of the causal mechanism of ‘strategic framing’, the article traces how the Commission deployed its ideas in the different phases of the policy-making process. This contribution feeds into the claim for new institutional leadership by revealing how such ideas shaped some of the main policy outcomes in the EU–Turkey cooperation during the refugee crisis. The ideational perspective of new institutional leadership also suggests that the Juncker Commission’s ‘strategic framing’ was part of the EU’s broader principled realism philosophy that led the Commission to take some contestable political choices.