Political (non-)reform in the euro crisis and the refugee crisis: a liberal intergovernmentalist explanation

ABSTRACT

The objective of this contribution is to account for the different political reform trajectories resulting from two of the most recent governance challenges faced by the European Union (EU), the so-called euro and refugee crises. While the euro crisis triggered various EU-level reforms, the refugee crisis has produced calls for policy and institutional reforms, most of which have – to date – not been adopted or implemented. We employ a liberal intergovernmentalist framework and show that differences in member states’ preferences in the two crises ensue from different exposures to negative externalities. Moreover, we attribute differences in EU member states’ willingness to engage in political reforms to variation in preference constellations among member states, producing different situation structures and bargaining dynamics. While the EU’s response to the euro crisis reflects a situation structure, which highlights both redistributive conflict and a demand for joint action, the response to the refugee crisis resembles a ‘Rambo’ game situation: the states least affected by migratory pressure were satisfied with the institutional status quo, and were thus able to leave the more affected states aggrieved.

KEYWORDS:

• Euro crisis
• interstate bargaining
• Liberal intergovernmentalism
• preferences
• refugee crisis

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the members of the International Relations research colloquium at LMU Munich, the audience of the bi-annual conference of EUSA in Miami (2017), as well as Bernhard Zangl and Frank Schimmelfennig for their comments and suggestions. Felix Rüchardt provided excellent research assisstance. We are also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their perceptive and challenging input.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Felix Biermann is a research fellow at the Department of Political Science, LMU Munich, Germany.

Nina Guérin is a research fellow at the Department of Political Science, LMU Munich, Germany.

Stefan Jagdhuber is a research fellow at the Department of Political Science, LMU Munich, Germany.

Berthold Rittberger is a professor of international relations at the Department of Political Science, LMU Munich, Germany.

Moritz Weiss is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Political Science, LMU Munich, Germany.

Notes

1. The CEAS encompasses several different regulations, such as the Dublin regulation, as well as a set of legislative measures aiming at adoption of common minimum standards for asylum that were adopted between 1999 and 2005 (such as the reception conditions directive or the temporary protection directive).

2. Given space constraints, we cannot systematically explain the origins of member state preferences in the two crises contexts, as we would do if our main focus was to explain preferences. We hence employ an analytical ‘shortcut’ by defining positional characteristics of states, i.e., their economic or socioeconomic vulnerabilities in patterns of interdependence, to assess their preferences for policy co-ordination.

3. We are indebted to one of the reviewers for pointing out the Dublin system’s hierarchy of legal criteria for determining the member stare responsible for evaluating asylum claims (see chapter III of regulation 2013/604). The pre-eminent criteria for assessing member state responsibility highlight the aspect of family reunion, visa issuance and asylum applicant’s physical circumstances (Chalmers et al. 2014: 541). However, as most asylum seekers are neither covered by the rules concerning family reunion, nor do they enter the EU with a visa, the Dublin system shifts the responsibility to register refugees and to examine their asylum application to the state of first entry into the EU. We refer to this situation as the de jure status quo (in deviation of a strictly legal understanding). By de facto status quo, in contrast, we describe the situation in which the Dublin system is officially still in place but no longer implemented.

4. Greece has had an incentive to cease implementing the Dublin regulation already after 2011, when the European Court of Human Rights ruled in the case ‘MSS vs Belgium and Greece’ that a refugee should not be sent back from Belgium to Greece in light of the conditions that were considered inhumane. We owe this important consideration, which points to the internal inconsistencies of the CEAS, to one of our reviewers.

5. We assume two behavioural options for each player. Co-operation implies open borders (i.e., Schengen) and, at the same time, support for the Commission proposal to establish a burden-sharing mechanism (i.e., reform of the Dublin system). In contrast, defection refers to the unilateral closure of borders and, at the same time, opposition to a burden-sharing mechanism.

6. At least theoretically, AS could try to use Schengen as a bargaining chip in order to ‘persuade’ NAS to engage in burden-sharing. However, as both NAS and AS have a preference for open borders and NAS are in a strong bargaining position concerning migratory pressure, this threat is not credible. Thus, the trade-off between border-closure and burden-sharing is not to be seen as constituting a zero-sum but rather, as we argue, a Rambo situation.

7. The following NAS so far received refugees (number of refugees received in parentheses): Latvia (6); Lithuania (5); Portugal (12); Spain (57).