The European Union and the Securitization of Migration

Article Abstract:

This article deals with the question of how migration has developed into a security issue in western Europe and how the European integration process is implicated in it. Since the 1980s, the political construction of migration increasingly referred to the destablizing effects of migration on domestic integration and to the dangers for public order it implied. The spillover of the internal market into a European internal security question mirrors these domestic developments at the European level. The Third Pillar on Justice and Home Affairs, the Schengen Agreements, and the Dublin Convention most visibly indicate that the European integration process is implicated in the development of a restrictive migration policy and the social construction of migration into a security question. However, the political process of connecting migration to criminal and terrorist abuses of the internal market does not take place in isolation. It is related to a wider politicization in which immigrants and asylum-seekers are portrayed as a challenge to the protection of national identity and welfare provisions. Moreover, supporting the political construction of migration as a security issue impinges on and is embedded in the politics of belonging in western Europe. It is an integral part of the wider technocratic and political process in which professional agencies -- such as the police and customs -- and political agents -- such as social movements and political parties -- debate and decide the criteria for legitimate membership of west European societies.

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The Right and the Righteous? European Norms, Domestic Politics and the Sanctions Against Austria

Article Abstract:

In February 2000, 14 EU Member States collectively took the unprecedented step of imposing bilateral sanctions on their Austrian EU partner. How can this be explained? Was it, as the 14 governments argued, because the inclusion in the Austrian government of Jorg Haider's extreme right FPO opposes many of the ideas making up the common identity of the EU? Or, were the sanctions motivated, as the Austrian government argued, by narrow-minded party political interests that lurked beneath the rhetoric of shared European norms and values? Our analysis suggests that, without the particular concerns about domestic politics of certain politicians, it is unlikely that the sanctions against Austria would have been adopted in this form. On the other hand, without the recent establishment of concerns about human rights and democratic principles as an EU norm, it is unlikely that these particular sanctions would have been adopted collectively by all member governments. Thus, while norms might have been used instrumentally, such instrumental use only works, in the sense of inducing compliant behaviour, if the norms have acquired a certain degree of taken-for-grantedness within the relevant group of actors or institution.

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Governance `to go': domestic actors, institutions and the boundaries of the possible

Article Abstract:

How to `bring Europe closer to the people' has long been a preoccupation of the policy-maker at the EU level and has recently been restated as a goal of the member governments in the Treaty of Nice. Currently, the Commission is addressing this issue through the White Paper on European Governance. Here, it is argued that the focus on `governance' as a strategy for inclusion was ill founded and underestimated the likely conflict with existing `governance' regimes at the domestic level. Moreover, the pursuit of `heroic' Europeanism with a concomitant emergence of a sense of `Europeanness' or a European `identity' as advocated in the Commission's work programme for the White Paper on European Governance was misguided. Drawing on empirical research into the activities of women's organizations in Greece, Ireland and the UK, it is argued that the extent to which EU level action may or may not succeed in bringing Europe closer to the people in the various Member States is mediated by the domestic political context; the characteristics of the groups being targeted, and the role of collective beliefs and values at the domestic level. How organizations and individuals experience the opportunities and constraints of the EU level is fundamentally affected by these three factors.

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