Integrating insights from foreign policy analysis, integration theory, and social theory and providing an in-depth analysis of both refugee and security policy, the book develops an innovative framework for analysis that is capable of accounting for an incremental 'de-Europeanization' in Germany's EU policy.

This book fills a significant lacuna in our understanding of the refugee crisis by analyzing the dynamics that lie behind fifteen years of asylum policies in the European Union. It sheds light on why cooperation has led to reinforced refugee protection on paper but has failed to provide it in practice. Offering innovative empirical, theoretical and methodological research on this crucial topic, it argues that the different asylum systems and priorities of the various Member States explain the EU's lack of initiative in responding to this humanitarian emergency. The author demonstrates that the strong regulators of North-Western Europe have used their powerful bargaining positions to shape EU asylum policies decisively, which has allowed them to impose their will on Member States in South-Eastern Europe. These latter countries, having barely made a mark on EU policies, are now facing significant difficulties in implementing them. The EU will only identify potential solutions to the crisis, the author concludes, when it takes these disparities into account and establishes a functioning common refugee policy. This novel work will appeal to students and scholars of politics, immigration and asylum in the EU.

Master's Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 2,0, College of Europe (Department for European and Governance Studies), language: English, abstract: In the years 2015 and 2016, the European Union (EU) and (some of) its member states were facing a very high number of asylum-seekers. This inflow revealed the shortcomings and dysfunctionalities of the European asylum system and plunged the EU into one of its biggest crises: Member states could hardly agree on common measures, and different national preferences for dealing with asylum-seekers led to profound and ongoing political divisions. Germany, which particularly was affected by the inflow, sought to ‘europeanize’ the phenomenon and to distribute the loads more evenly across the EU – but met major resistance. Contrarily to the widely held view – both in the academic literature and the European public – that Germany, in recent years, has shaped and even dominated European politics, it largely failed with its main policy proposals in the refugee and migrant crisis. To uncover the reasons, the present thesis applies an analytical model of ‘political leadership’. Based on current academic research, relevant newspaper articles and self-conducted expert interviews, it is argued that there might have been supply but not sufficient demand for successful German political leadership. In doing so, this thesis so far is the only larger academic paper that explicitly links the latest research on political leadership with Germany's role in the EU's refugee and migrant crisis.

Includes statistics.

International migration is one of the most controversial political topics today which demands innovative approaches of global and regional governance. The book provides a fresh theoretical framework to understand European responses to the international migration of people and explains the dynamics of Germany’s migration and refugee policy during the last two decades. Against traditional theories and their inherent focus on the national political sphere, the book highlights supranational and multi-level political processes as increasingly important factors to account for national policy changes. Confronted with the most recent developments of international migration, the study offers students and practitioners the necessary background to participate in today’s debates.

An unprecedented number of people is currently on the move seeking refuge in Europe. Large parts of European societies respond with anxiety and mistrust to the influx of people. Nationalist, anti-migrant parties from Slovakia over Germany to the UK have gained increasing support among the electorate and challenge the political mainstream. Europe is struggling how to respond. While the search for solutions is ongoing one pattern seems to be emerging: Fortress Europe is in the making. Unfortunately, few of these discussions and measures consider the structural root causes and dynamics of migration, the motives of migrants or societal challenges more thoroughly. This book seeks to address this deficit. Taking migration and asylum policies as a starting point, it analyses the various dimensions underpinning migration. In doing so, it identifies why receiving countries are in many ways part of the problem. To eschew an overtly Euro-centric perspective and stimulate a debate between science and politics, it contains contributions by academics and practitioners alike from both shores of the Mediterranean.

There is a tension influencing asylum policy in liberal democratic states. Rather than a simple binary tension affecting open or restrictive asylum policy, this tension is complex. The national interests, rights and obligations of states, the role of international norms, and human and moral concerns, as well as the experiences of citizens within liberal democratic states, form an entangled web of influences on the policies and practices governing the entrance and integration of asylum seekers. I explore the scholarly research concerned with the composition and manifestation of this complex tension and then apply the academic literature to the case study of Germany during the recent European migrant crisis. The German case study gives context to the academic literature and provides evidence validating the existence and influence of the identified tension. In demonstrating the existence and consequences of this tension in Germany asylum policy, I also extend previous arguments by noting the changing regional and international context and thus the evolving influence of the tension on not only German but also EU asylum policy. Since the Refugee Convention came into force in 1951, in the ensuing halfcentury the integration of European states into the EU, and the evolution of the international and regional environment have broadened and added complexity to the way asylum policy is considered and implemented. This has occurred alongside the conflation of asylum policy with other policy areas, such as defence and intelligence. The key policy decision in Germany to introduce an open door policy to Syrian asylum seekers in September 2015 is a prominent example illustrating the arguments I make in regard to the existence and increasing influence of the complex tensions shaping asylum policy in Germany, Europe, and other parts of the world.