A comparison of Japan’s and Switzerland’s immigration policies disclaims both globalist and public choice explanations that would predict a similar increase in immigrant numbers and an expansion of immigrant rights in liberal democracies. Although both countries have traditionally espoused a rather exclusionary approach towards immigration, Japan is unique in having hitherto succeeded in preempting large numbers of immigrants from entering the country and in having avoided the legal and societal integration of those migrants already present in its territory. In seeking to explain the different trajectories followed by immigration politics in Japan and Switzerland, despite their similar internal and external economic constellations, this article highlights the role of domestic institutions and norms in filtering economic pressure for immigration. Whereas these internal determinants explain to a large degree why Switzerland has become a country of immigration while Japan has not, the central factor explaining the recent expansion of foreign residents’ rights in Switzerland lies not so much in internal determinants but in the country‘s progressing approximation to the European Union and its single market. Notwithstanding these differences, the article concludes that Japan‘s greater resistance to change might now have reached a critical juncture, where demographic pressure and economic demand will make an opening up to increased labor migration unavoidable.
The ‘wider Europe’ initiative opens the possibility for a far-reaching association of the EU’s eastern and southern European neighbours which, by offering ‘everything but institutions’ (Prodi), proposes an alternative to membership. This article presents this initiative as part of an ambitious external governance agenda by the enlarged Union with the aim to manage its new interdependence in an altered geopolitical context. Focusing on the conception of interdependence and the institutional configuration of EU relations with its near abroad, external governance is defined and examined in three prominent ‘soft security’ issues: justice and home affairs, environmental and energy policy. It is argued that external governance seeks to expand the ‘legal boundary’ of the Union with only limited openings of its ‘institutional boundary’, thereby oscillating between an inclusionary and exclusionary approach towards its near abroad.
The linkage of development cooperation with migration policies has been promoted widely by international organizations from 2000 onwards. This paper analyses the factors that have prompted and impeded a reorientation of the dominant migration policy-frame within the EU towards the realization of a migration– development nexus. It is argued that external events such as the international debate on the migration–development nexus and the external shocks provoked by the events in Ceuta and Melilla prompted the EU to rethink its traditionally rather narrow approach, focusing on the repression of migration flows. However, the persistence of the estab- lished policy-frame and the existing institutional setting limit the scope for balanced policy coordination, introducing development mainly as an instrument of migration policy rather than the other way round. Challenging the literature that argues that there is a necessary trade-off between a development and a security-orientated migration policy, it is shown that this dichotomous juxtaposition hides the many ways in which different orientations can be combined, depending on the institutional context within which they are framed.
Inspired by the experience of Eastern enlargement, much of the academic debate on EU external relations and the European neighbourhood policy conceives of external influence in terms of the Union’s ability to induce third countries’ adaptation to predetermined EU norms and regulations. This article introduces a more structural perspective on EU external influence that scru- tinizes the institutional extension of sector-specific governance frameworks beyond EU membership. Whereas the traditional notion of influence only focuses on the shift of the EU’s regulatory boundary, extended governance involves also the opening up of organizational structures within the relevant policy field. These new forms of horizontal flexible integration are made possible through the internal flex- ibilization of the modes of policy-making within the EU, and, in particular, the advent of network governance. Despite its integrative potential, case studies from three policy sectors also document that, under current circumstances, extended network governance is not void of hegemonic traits.
This article analyses the modes of governance through which the EU seeks to ensure the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) countries’ participation in the realization of its internal security project. Although the EU, given the strong interde- pendence in these ‘soft security’ issues, has strong incentives to govern by conditionality in order to ensure the ENP countries’ compliance, efforts to transfer policies by such hierarchical means encounter serious limitations as a result of lack of supranational competence and insufficient incentives that the EU can offer third countries to compen- sate for adaptation costs. By comparing Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) issues with different degrees of communitarization and representing different constellations of interests in relations with ENP countries, we find that the EU increasingly focuses on the extension of internal transgovernmental networks as an alternative form of external governance. Although theoretically allowing for horizontal patterns of co-owned coop- eration, the integrative potential of these networks is hampered by the lack of mutual trust and institutional incompatibilities in ENP countries. As a result, extended network governance becomes an attempt at unilateral policy-transfer by ‘softer’ means.
From the point of view of modes of governance and constellations of interdependence, EU research policy offers ideal conditions for the flexible inclusion of non-member states: it is based on transgovernmental coordination through policy networks rather than supranational legislation, it follows scientific rather than political imperatives, and cooperation is in the interest of both the EU and of Switzerland. This article analy- ses the degree to which these factors have allowed for Switzerland’s inclusion into the regulatory and organisational aspects of EU research policy, and highlights the limits of such flexible sectoral integration.
