Abstract
Does Europeanisation of borders and migration policies necessarily infringe national sovereignty? This paper proposes to question this commonplace by analysing the entanglement of three internal tactics of bordering promoted by national-populists in the wake of the 2015 “crisis” with the Dublin Regulation – namely, the EU legal framework governing the allocation of asylum seekers across EU Member States (MS). Not only does the biometric database related to Dublin Regulation (the EURODAC) enable national authorities to diminish the number of applicants for whom they are deemed responsible, but it may also be used in a variety of ways for setting administrative traps against other categories of third country nationals (TCN). Thus, against the widespread belief, this paper argues the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) might be, in some respect, highly needed for enacting national sovereignty in the Schengen context. Whereas the policies presented here were publicised in the name of “re-nationalising” the management of asylum flows against the EU leadership, they might have paradoxically relied on the wide usage of dataveillance instruments offered by the EU itself. Thus, this article will finally offer a better understanding of some ambivalences of Eurosceptical parties in their relation to the CEAS.