The EU’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum: Towards a Long-Term Sustainable European Migration Policy?

Abstract

From the late 1990s onward, the European Union has been busy developing a common asylum policy. The Common European Asylum System (CEAS), which first came to serve as the Union’s primary framework for internal co-operation around migration issues, has since been subjected to multiple reforms, aimed at harmonizing the disparate asylum systems of the individual EU member states. In 2015, with the Union confronted with perhaps the biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War, major deficiencies in its asylum system came to light. In 2020, the European Commission thus announced a set of reforms, known as the New Pact on Migration and Asylum adopted in the spring of 2024. This chapter examines the historical trajectory towards a unified EU-wide asylum and migration policy, assessing the extent to which the new Pact on Migration and Asylum can be said to succeed or fail in addressing the fundamental contradictions inherent in that policy, hampering it and frustrating its ambitions. The key question is whether a supranational entity like the EU can even ever be in the position to develop and implement a coherent and sustainable common migration policy. The challenges the Union may need to overcome to achieve that goal are discussed.

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