Europeanization of Asylum Administrative Practice? Transnational Administrative Cooperation between European Asylum Agencies

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christian Lahusen
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2012 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 172394079

The Common European Asylum System (CEAS) introduces political and administrative rules and procedures that lay the ground for a coordinated approach to handling asylum applications throughout the European Union. But this does not necessarily lead to a less segmented, more integrated European bureaucratic field, because the latter depends not only on a supranational frame of reference, but requires horizontally coordinated and structured bureaucratic goals, procedures and practices. In fact, the bureaucratic field operates at the 'street-level', where caseworkers interact with asylum-seekers, administer applications and take authoritative decisions. Over the past three years, we focused on transnational administrative cooperation and the generation of common, European frames of reference and investigated how these are implemented, adapted or changed in a country-comparative study of German and Swedish asylum authorities. During the next three years, we aim to complement this comparative perspective with a systematic analysis of the transnational dimension of administrative procedures and practices. It is our aim to reconstruct the emerging street-level division of labor between public authorities across Europe and thus better understand the ongoing transformation of the bureaucratic field, its factual administrative practices, the related reconfiguration of state power, and its effects on social order in Europe. The "Horizontal Europeanization" research group's questions and objectives are at center stage within our own work: analysis of transnational coordination between administrations in regard to goals, procedures and practices requires systematic consideration of power asymmetries and inequalities between countries and regions. Moreover, our research will direct attention to analysis of elements of crisis, structural contradictions and politicization processes, and their impact on reconfiguring the European asylum administration field.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 1539: Horizontal Europeanisation - An Emerging Social Entity Between National and Global Scales
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Karin Schittenhelm