The New Pact on Migration and Asylum in a shifting political context: Depoliticization and repoliticization in EU external migration policy

Abstract

The New Pact on Migration and Asylum, adopted in May 2024, aims to reform the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) through eight legislative files that address asylum, migration and border management. This profile article argues that the difficulties experienced in closing the Pact led the EU to see externalization as a functional response to the refugee crisis, since it shifted responsibility away by delegating border and migration management to third countries. To this effect, the EU concentrated on budgetary and technical tools that helped depoliticize migration policies. The focus on depoliticizing migration inside the EU has led to an unexpected backlash from third countries unwilling to accept purely technical and invisible agreements. Therefore, by wishing to avoid political conflicts inside the EU, EU policy-makers (and particularly the Commission) have opened a window to re-politicization and, consequently, to new deadlocks in this area. We support this argument by examining the negotiations for the Status Agreement for Frontex in Mauritania, where the government opted for an informal but highly visible deal over a binding yet largely invisible agreement and comparing them to agreements in Egypt and Tunisia, which were informal but highly visible agreements.