Faculty Talk with Sandra Lavenex

Guest Speaker: Sandra Lavenex, Professor of European and International Politics at the University of Geneva and Visiting Professor at the College of Europe

Discussant: Dr. Federica Zardo, Senior Researcher at the Department for Migration and Globalisation at the University for Continuing Education Krems, Austria

Where do EU asylum and immigration policies take effect, and why? What do we mean when we speak of "externalization" in this regard, and what drives this phenomenon? Member States' inclination to mobilize EU institutions in search for migration solutions beyond EU borders while shirking away from harmonized policies within the EU is well-documented. What is less well known is the shift of EU migration policy cooperation "across" sectors of EU policy-making and beyond the sphere of EU justice and home affairs. In this presentation we retrace how EU asylum- and immigration policy making has shifted from cooperation inside the EU to the sphere of external relations and, most recently, other fields of EU external policy, with a focus on trade policy.

We explain this trajectory by the interplay between Member States' attempt to maximise the gains from Europeanization while minimizing the sovereignty constraints resulting from supranational commitments and the European Commission's strive to bolster its competence in this politically sensitive policy field. The result is an increasingly complex and fragmented set of formal and informal EU asylum and migration commitments across policy areas which becomes ever more difficult to properly implement and supervise.