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From the Eurocrisis to the migration crisis, and from Brexit to a strengthening far right, the European Union (EU) faces multiple stressors. But while crises unleash anxiety, they do not necessarily portend the worst: because they disrupt old routines, crises can open space for new political possibilities. As a self-consciously hybrid, ‘post-national’ political form, the EU would seem poised to take advantage. Instead it is stuck. In this paper, taking an ontological security approach and focusing on EU migration governance, I propose that one cause of paralysis could lie - ironically - in an aspect of the EU that is crucial to its normative power: Europe’s long peace. An ontological security perspective highlights the management of existential anxiety as crucial to identity, suggesting how different modes of anxiety management have different political effects. Applied here, EU narratives and routines preserving ‘no war’ might suppress relations of structural power; they might mimic primitive defense mechanisms; or they might be symptoms pointing to unconscious processes keeping difficult knowledge - including colonial pasts - undealt with. I suggest how migration governance might manifest these mechanisms, contributing to the difficulties of desecuritising migration and linking its governance to EU values and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Implementation has often been described as a key weakness affecting European Union (EU) counter-terrorism. However, this view is often adopted as a given and there has not been so far a systematic examination of the degree to which this represents an obstacle to the effectiveness of the EU response. This paper aims to contribute towards this goal through the use of primary sources in the study of the legal transposition of counter-terror instruments into national law, a key stage in the implementation process. It shows the presence of major implementation delays in this policy sector but, importantly, also significant cross-national variation with regards transposition failure associated with the administrative endowment of the individual member states. Furthermore, the mechanisms deployed by the Union to encourage a fluid implementation of European measures are critically evaluated and the potential impact in the process of the institutional transformations brought about by Lisbon is also examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Refugee protection efforts have been shown to suffer from substantial collective action problems due to the capacity of restrictive policy measures adopted by one region as a means of shifting refugee responsibilities to other regions. Such responsibility-shifting dynamics have been identified between north and south as well as within these regions. European Union (EU) cooperation on asylum and refugee policies has been criticised for facilitating the adoption of restrictive policy measures and the creation of a 'Fortress Europe'. Fears about the hollowing out of refugee standards have been coupled with concerns about the EU's free-riding on the refugee protection efforts of countries outside the EU. This paper shows that overcoming collective action problems between the Member States has indeed been a key motivation for EU cooperation in this area. However, a comparative analysis of EU asylum laws and refugee protection efforts with those of similar developed countries outside the EU leads to the rejection of some of the assumptions and implications of the 'Fortress Europe' thesis. While there is evidence of north/south burden-shirking and substantial room for improvement in the EU's asylum and refugee regimes, comparative legal research and the analysis of available UNHCR data on other OECD countries suggests that there is no evidence to support the claim that European cooperation has led to uniquely restrictive refugee policies and protection outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]