Denis Duez et Agathe Piquet se rendent du 30 juin au 1er juillet à Lyon à l'ASFP. Ils interviendront dans la section thématique 27 (Espaces politiques et frontières extérieures de l’Union européenne à l’épreuve de l’enjeu migratoire) avec leur papier "From the hotspot approach to the Pact on Migration and Asylum: agencification and (de)politicisation of EU’s external border management"
Abstract
Since 2015 EU agencies have been at the center stage of EU’s migration and external border control policies and have witnessed a reinforcement of their capabilities. One striking illustration is the amendment of the regulations of Frontex, Europol and EASO and/or their replacement by new legal basis in a short period of time, with critical changes such as the creation of a standing border corps for Frontex, now the EBCG, or the transformation of EASO into EUAA. The Pact on Migration and Asylum (PMA), adopted in 2024, is the continuity of these developments with the expansion of both the monitoring and the operational powers of EU agencies (Tsourdi, 2022).
The literature has demonstrated that agencification, as the creation and empowerment of agencies, is not new at EU level, especially in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ). However, the literature has partly failed to capture the importance of the post-2015 dynamics. The changes brought by the 2015 refugee crisis to EU’s AFSJ agencies appear at first limited in comparison to the massive delegation of powers to supranational agencies which occurred after the Eurozone crisis (Börzel and Risse, 2018; Pollak and Slominski 2021). Yet, agencification in reaction to the 2015 events happened both de jure and de facto. Indeed, the hotspots, brought to life by the European Commission through non-legislative texts, have led to an unprecedented deployment on the ground of the staff from EU agencies to help national authorities screen, identify and register migrants. This deployment is new in terms of its duration, of inter-agency cooperation and of the activities EU agencies have been in charge of, exceeding their legal provisions in some cases.
This communication argues that the depoliticisation strategies used by the European Commission also contributed to this quiet agencification. We consider here depoliticisation ‘as a set of governing “tactics and tools”’ (Fawcett et al., 2011, 5), as a “political entreprise” (Maertens, 2018, 348) that can be activated by EU actors in reaction to bottom-up pressures (Bressanelli et al., 2020). In this respect, depoliticisation aims to dilute the political nature of an issue and is enacted by actors through different channels. When considered as social and political processes, politicisation and depoliticisation might coexist, and as political strategies they may initiate reactions and potentially fail.
This paper demonstrates that, against a backdrop of intense politicisation of the 2015-2016 events at domestic level, the European Commission has attempted, through the hotspot approach, to depoliticise European policies in this area by expanding the capacity for action of EU agencies, both de jure and de facto. These critical transformations in the role of agencies have led to a “politicization backlash” (Schmeer, 2023, 210), particularly around the issue of fundamental rights violations resulting from agencification. This partial failed depoliticization did not prevent the Commission from using the same strategy during the PMA negotiations. The very intense politicisation of other aspects of EU migration and asylum policies has benefited the agencification pushed quietly by the Commission, both in European law and in practice, with remaining concerns regarding the fundamental rights of migrants.