The Prospects for Policy-Change in EU Asylum Policy: Venue and Image at the European Level

The upgrading of the European Commission and the European Parliament's role in the EU policy-process in 1999 might have been expected to herald a shift away from the previous security- and control-orientation of asylum policy. No such shift occurred. This paper traces the continuity in EU asylum policy's trajectory to the continuity in its 'policy-image': actors seeking to fashion institutional configurations in which they can more effectively assert their preferences can facilitate this institutional change by shifting the 'image' of a policy - in other words, they can highlight new or neglected problems, creating broader pressure for these to be dealt with by new actors in new venues. We disaggregate policy-images into two elements: an element justifying an actor's function in policy-making, and an element justifying the pursuit of its substantive preferences. We argue that institutional change laid down in the Treaty of Amsterdam was facilitated by a policy-image that lacked the latter element. The newly empowered actors have subsequently struggled to assert their substantive preferences despite their institutional upgrade.