When Europeanization Backfires: the Normalization of European Migration Politics

This article investigates the impact of European cooperation on the dynamics of domestic policymaking in the field of migration policy. While European migration policy has gradually communitarized since the Amsterdam Treaty, member state governments have not yet fully caught up with the new reality. This is also reflected in a state of the art that, in contrast with the developing European Union (EU) studies literature at large, is still dominated by intergovernmentalist analyses, which assume that member states have full control over the integration process. The article zooms in on the Family Reunification Directive of 2003 and its domestic political impact in the Netherlands. The Dutch case illustrates that the realities of EU migration politics are increasingly at odds with intergovernmentalist assumptions and that it is high time for scholars of migration politics to broaden their theoretical perspective.