The European Union: from politics to politicization

Abstract of the chapter

Andrew Geddes and Leila Hadj Abdou’s chapter on the European Union first de-serves praise for their apt, comprehensive, and didactic description of EU preroga-tives in the area of migration, asylum, and external borders and concrete realizations and the evolving historical and geographical context in which this policy domain emerged, became institutionalized, and is now politicized. This is no small feat. First, “EU policy” is not “US policy” or “German policy.” This is a case where some com-petences have been transferred to supranational institutions, while others have not, a case of “incomplete integration,” as is very commonly seen when studying the EU yet difficult to grasp analytically. In effect, “immigration policy” in the EU is essentially “border policy” and focused on stemming certain flows; long-term entry and stay remain a national competence. Second, they are studying a moving object, whereby rules over who decides change all the time. Over a thirty-year period, scholars have observed a quintet of northern and western European countries sign an intergovern-mental treaty on border management called “Schengen.” Free movement is a policy area involving all EU branches of government. The functioning of this policy is rela-tively arcane, almost thirty countries are involved, including non-EU countries such as Norway or Switzerland.

The preface of the book

This book was launched in 1990 at the Center for US-Mexican Studies at the Uni–versity of California at San Diego (UCSD) as part of a National Science Founda–tion research project, under the direction of Wayne A. Cornelius, Philip L. Martin, and James F. Hollifield, comparing national efforts to manage migration. National studies of migration data and control systems that grew out of the NSF project were first published in 1994 by Stanford University Press; a second edition of the book ap–peared in 2004, and a third in 2014. This fourth edition continues the effort to use systematic, cross-national research to examine the gap between the goals and out–comes of immigration policies in major immigrant-receiving countries. A generation of scholars and students has wrestled with this question, which continues to drive research agendas in the multidisciplinary field of migration studies. We hope that the fourth edition will shed new light on the dilemmas of immigration control and help to advance the comparative study of immigration policy.The fourth edition is divided into five parts, including (1) an introduction that gives an overview of the dilemmas of immigration control, followed by studies of (2) nations of immigrants in which immigration is part of the founding national ideal, (3) countries of immigration where immigration plays an important role in social and economic development but was not part of the process of nation-building, (4) latecomers to immigration—countries that once sent migrants abroad but in the past few decades made the transition from sending to receiving societies—including a new chapter on Greece and Turkey, and (5) the European Union and regional migration governance. Each country study is followed by one or more commentaries by scholars and policymakers who offer a critique and, in some cases, an alternative interpretation of policy developments.

Our work has benefited from the input of migration scholars and students from around the globe. The workshop for the second edition was hosted by the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UCSD. The third conference was organized by the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies at Southern Methodist Univer–sity (SMU) in conjunction with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The fourth con–ference, the basis for this edition, was again organized by the Tower Center at SMU, co-sponsored by the Institut Convergences Migrations, and hosted by the Collège de France. We are grateful to all who participated in this conference and to the staff of the Tower Center and the Collège de France for their invaluable administrative support. The project was underwritten by the Marian Tower International Confer–ence Fund of the Tower Center at SMU, by grants from the Institut Convergences Migrations, and by the Collège de France. The editors and contributing authors are solely responsible for the information and views presented in this book, which do not necessarily represent those of the underwriters.

Special thanks go to Nicole Rafidi, assistant to the Director of the Tower Center, for her tireless work on the project, and to Alan Harvey, Director of Stanford Univer–sity Press, and his colleagues. Without their extraordinary patience, skill, and sup–port, the fourth edition might never have seen the light of day. To them we are deeply grateful.

Read the full contribution to the book.