"Burden-Sharing or Free-Riding? Explaining Variations in States' Acceptance of Unwanted Migration"

Thielemann, Eiko (2003) "Burden-Sharing or Free-Riding? Explaining Variations in States' Acceptance of Unwanted Migration". In: UNSPECIFIED, Nashville, Tennessee. (Unpublished)

HTML Download (641Kb)

Abstract

International burden-sharing, i.e. the question how costs of common initiatives or the provision of public goods should be shared between states raises two important questions. First, the question of motivation. How do we explain calls for burden-sharing beyond the state? Second, the question of patterns. How do we explain patterns of burden-sharing in the international arena? In order to address these questions, the first part of the paper proposes and analyses two burden-sharing approaches—one based on a 'cost-benefit'-, the other one based on a 'norm-based' logic—that offer partly competing and partly complementary hypotheses for answering these two questions. The second part, analyses EU attempts to share burdens in the area of forced migration in order to test these hypotheses empirically. The results suggest that although there is still little evidence for inter-state solidarity in the EU, norm-based approaches can nonetheless offer some powerful explanations of European burden-sharing in this area.

Actions (login required)