Research Papers

Looking at the functioning of the political institutions of the European Union, scholars have observed that the European Commission relies on external expertise in order to increase its legitimacy in the policy-making process and to strengthen its impact on the other European actors, in particular the EU Member States (cf. Boswell 2008, Wallace 1996). While the Commission has had a tight network of contacts to NGOs, international organizations, lobby groups and think tanks for many years, even in relation to the governance of migration and asylum, the European Migration Network (EMN) is a comparatively new element within this policy-supporting environment. As this paper argues, the EMN, established by a formal decision by the Council of Ministers in 2008, provides some distinct advantages for the Commission and its endeavor to enhance its policy-making capacities: The EMN is a Brussels-coordinated structure composed of ‚National Contact Points’ (NCPs) in each EU Member State; their mandate is to provide up-to-date, objective, reliable and comparable information on migration and asylum issues to each other, to the Commission and to the public, with a view to supporting policy-development and decision-making. As the EMN NCPs are most often situated in national ministries or government agencies such as the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees or the Swedish Migration Board, the Commission gets direct access to information and expertise available at national ministerial and executive levels. Building upon academic work on the role of expert knowledge for policy-making in the EU and the role of the EMN in particular (Boswell 2008), the aim of this paper is to explore and critically scrutinise the functioning of the EMN from an ‚insider’ perspective with a view to explaining how it contributes to the further development of European migration and asylum policies.