Introduction
European integration (the transfer of policymaking authority from national governments
to Brussels) presents a dilemma for national immigration authorities. The walls and borders that
divided East and West have slowly crumbled and the lines between insiders and outsiders are
increasingly blurred. The EU has expanded its membership, and will eventually allow 500
million persons to move freely across national borders. With little or no coordination on security
and immigration issues, Europe will experience an unprecedented challenge. Can nation-states
construct free trade zones – allowing free movement of persons, services and goods – without
common immigration policies? Or is a common immigration policy the inevitable product of the
functioning of regional economic cooperation, despite the national pressure to maintain domestic
control over this sensitive issue?
There is a third option. Europe’s states could try to avoid the explicit construction of
strong common immigration policies—and such policies might not be strictly inevitable in
functional terms—but they might come about through unintended institutional processes.
Looking at the history of European integration, one sees that in other policy areas (such as
gender equality or environmental protection), member state governments did not originally
anticipate the degree to which the EU’s central institutions (the European Commission, Court of
Justice, and Parliament) would eventually gain policymaking authority as the EU evolved (Stone
Sweet and Sandholtz 1998; Stone Sweet and Caporaso 1998; Cichowski 1998; Stone Sweet
2000; Stone Sweet, Fligstein and Sandholtz 2001). Thus, when the real possibility of EU-level
immigration policy “harmonization” arose in the run-up to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, the
member states tread very carefully. The EU’s involvement with immigration in the Maastricht
Treaty was kept to a minimum, weak, “intergovernmental” bargain, whereby any one member
state could veto any proposed EU immigration policy, and such policies (if passed) would only
Convention