Masteroppgave i Statevitenskap

Since the early 1990s the EU has pursued an externalization of its migration policies. The effects of EU decision-making in the field of migration governance are increasingly moved outside of European borders, as the EU attempts to initiate cooperation agreements with third countries and enroll them in the pursuit of the EU’s interests in this field. After the EU expanded in the early 2000s and the internal borders were abolished through Schengen, the EU has become increasingly preoccupied with minimizing irregular migration and cooperating with third countries on readmission and return. The process of externalization has evolved through different time periods, characterized by different historical events that have shaped the EU’s approach to neighboring regions and third countries. The arrival of migrants from the Middle East and Africa hit its peak in 2015 after the Arab uprisings from 2011. The asylum-system in the EU proved ill-equipped to tackle the pressure of migration, and the Dublin Regulation contributed to an uneven distribution of migrants in Europe. While some countries were forced to process hundreds of thousands of applications for asylum, the pressure was much lower in other countries further away from the Mediterranean. Different countries responded differently, but the issue of migration became a priority on the EU’s political agenda. When this ‘crisis’ hit in 2015, the EU had been pursuing an externalization policy for more than two decades, the aim being to avoid irregular migration into the EU while upholding international standards of human rights. To the extent that 2015 stands as a hallmark for the failure of externalization, and indeed there were indications of its lack of success long before 2015, why has it continued? How can we understand the evolution of the EU’s externalization if it has not delivered on the desired results? This study takes a historical institutionalist approach to understand, and in part also explain, the development of the external dimension to the EU’s migration policy. It traces the process of externalization through three different time periods as it looks for the presence of a path dependency, departing from the assumption that the year 2015 represents a critical juncture. The study is shaped by an interpretivist epistemology and applies ‘explaining-outcome process-tracing’ as outlined by Beach and Pedersen (2013). This form of process-tracing allows for a within-case study of a specific political phenomenon without attempting to generalize the findings. Through document analysis and explaining-outcome process-tracing, I address specific policies and the different ways they are, or are not, dependent on past ones. In this way, this study explores how the concepts of path dependency and critical juncture may provide an understanding to the process of externalization of the EU’s migration policy. The main finding is that the EU still follows the path of externalization and pursues similar strategies to migration governance as it did before 2015, and that while the evets of 2015 posed many challenges for Europe, it did not significantly change the EU’s approach to migration governance