Seminar Series - Pranav Thamballapalle, 2026 Edward A. Kolodziej Fellow

Abstract

Whether or not supranational institutions facilitate cooperation remains one of the prevailing dilemmas in the interstate cooperation dynamics. For the most part, existing literature examines how institutional design promotes cooperation or how public discourse contributes to institutional policy change. As such, there has been comparatively less attention directed toward answering whether supranational reform influences elite cooperation favorability. This study attempts to fill this gap by examining the effect of the European Union’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum on elite discourse regarding cooperative migration enforcement. Building upon core neoliberal institutionalist theory, I argue that the Pact reduced the costs of cooperation on migration policy through its flexible solidarity mechanism, which granted member-states flexibility in determining how each would contribute to sharing the burdens of migration enforcement, thereby positioning heads of government to be more favorable towards cooperative migration security. In this study, I conduct a multi-case process tracing analysis of official statements made by the heads of government of Germany, Greece and Poland, both before and after the introduction of the Pact. However, the findings ultimately provide little support for the proposed theory, as elite discourse maintained consistent positions on cooperative migration security across all cases, before and after the reform. Instead, the accumulated evidence suggests that leaders maintained their positions on cooperation, despite the fact that reform was implemented to address their concerns. These findings indicate that on its own, supranational reform may be ineffective in altering elite discourse and suggest that preexisting policy preferences and domestic influences may play a larger role in shaping elite opinion on achieving security through cooperation.