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European Union and justice and home affairs

This thesis looks at justice and home affairs (JHA) policy-making in the European Union (EU). JHA refers to those areas which have traditionally been the domain of interior and justice ministries on the national level and which are now dealt with on the EU level on the basis of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and includes areas such as immigration and asylum, visa policy and police co-operation. In short, this thesis aims to examine why the governments of the member states chose to start co-operating on these issues within the EU, what the nature of this co-operation is and what does it tell us about the EU in general. The thesis looks firstly at the forms of JHA co-operation prior to the TEU and how this led to the national governments deciding to give it a Treaty basis within the EU. There is then an account of how the negotiations on the TEU developed and resulted in JHA being governed by a set of Treaty provisions quite different to those for other policy areas. This is followed by two case studies looking in detail at how JHA policy was made after the TEU entered into force; these deal with visa policy and immigration and asylum. To help in this, two theoretical approaches, taken from political science studies of European integration, are used, namely neofunctionalism and liberal intergovernmentalism. These allow us to identify the extent to which the same processes and factors influence JHA policy-making as in more traditional areas of Community policy-making, and allow for conclusions to be drawn on what JHA policy-making can tell us about wider issues of European integration.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:285115
Date January 1999
CreatorsMyers, Philip
PublisherUniversity of Sussex
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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