journal of european integration history revue d'histoire de l ...

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comme une référence omniprésente dans les réflexions du temps sur l’union européenne, il aurait
peut-être été judicieux d’inclure une étude sur leur réaction à ce plan Briand demeuré sans postérité,
mais qui marqua toute une génération de responsables européens.
Laurence Badel
Maître de conférences à l’Université de Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne
Institut Pierre Renouvin
Nathalie BERGER – La politique européenne d’asile et d’immigration. Enjeux et perspectives.
Bruxelles. Bruylant. 2000, 269 p. – ISBN 2-8027-1299-3. –57,02€.
The European asylum and immigration policy is striving for a common basis and succeeds
little by little in establishing an identity of its own. This is what Nathalie Berger intends to
demonstrate in a work based on her doctoral thesis. In her capacity as a committed jurist,
she studies the evolution of this policy by analysing closely the Treaties and Agreements
having been signed from the Single Act to the Treaty of Amsterdam.
After having described the institutional framework both of the European immigration
policy and the asylum policy, she studies each of these two policies in their evolution: an
evolution, which has been chaotic in the early stages of the Schengen Agreement, the founding
text, which aimed at a “close union of the peoples of the member States; then, with the
signing of the Single Act and the Maastricht Treaty which merely favoured “intergovernmental
cooperation”, the development stagnated – to progress again with the Treaty of
Amsterdam which incorporated “the Schengen acquis” and which set itself the goal of creating
an “area of freedom, security and justice”.
Even though she states the common will for a supranational policy and thus for a common legislation,
and despite the efforts made since the economic crisis of the seventies, Nathalie Berger
insists on the differences in the usual practices existing between the various European countries,
which she attributes to the fact that the definition of the word “foreign” which in international law is
always linked to the notion of national sovereignty, varies from country to country.
One part of her demonstration rests on the emphasis laid on the contradiction between the will
shared by several member countries to favour immigration in order to answer the needs for
labour force, and the absence of a common definition of “third-country national”. Thus, on one
hand she points out the ease with which European countries are achieving more and more positive
results as regards the reinforcement of frontier controls and cooperation between police
forces; on the other hand she shows up to what extent they are powerless in the face of countries
that like the UK or Ireland continue to be opposed to all transfer of sovereignty, when the protection
of these peoples is at stake. In the same way, in the face of the economic and social problems
brought about by immigration and asylum, the author illuminates the Community’s difficulties
regarding the conflicts of competence existing between the European Commission, the Council
of Europe and finally the Court of Justice, which make it de facto possible for the member States
to keep to their national legislation. The analysis of the asylum policy defined by the Dublin convention
comes to the same conclusion. Its application too comes up against a variety of national
procedures, even if at the level of principles, it constitutes a positive step in comparison with the
Geneva Convention. The work gives not only an account of the situation, it also actively attempts
to outline institutional solutions that materialise the Community’s political will to combine ethics
and cautiousness.
For the author, who describes very exhaustively the different national exceptions, the asylum
and immigration policy in its present state of realisation amounts to nothing more than an intensi-