Between European Solidarity and State Sovereignty: Implementation of the Temporary Protection Directive and the National Models of Integration

Sammanfattning

The Temporary Protection Directive (TPD) is an EU tool designed to protect Member States’ asylum systems from overwhelm in the event of a mass refugee influx by automatically providing beneficiaries with access to host society. Activated following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was intended to result in a uniform application across the Member States; in reality, significant divergences in national implementations were observed. Using the National Models of Integration (NMI) as a theoretical framework, the research investigates whether the national responses in France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany align with their pre-existing integration philosophies. To this end, a novel characterization of the models’ ideal types is developed and applied to TPD implementations. While none of the case countries are found to perfectly align with their expected models, the study concludes that the NMI still hold notable explanatory power and ought to be supplemented with alternative frameworks. The primary contributions of the study lie in its novel application of the NMI framework to the TPD and the development of a reproducible comparative categorization for future research.