That the Lisbon Treaty lays the foundation for a supranational asylum and immigration policyis surprising, even more so for Liberal Intergovernmentalism (LI), whose founder AndrewMoravcsik predicts that no such development will take place. While the article uses LI as its pointof departure, it shows that it runs into problems with regards to the policy area of asylum andimmigration. The article therefore turns to the (neo-)functionalist concept of spillover. Whileworking with the concept, it was deemed necessary to create a more coherent typology ofdifferent spillovers. The article suggests that the concept of spillover may be both descriptiveand explanatory. With regards to descriptive spillover, it seems valuable to differentiate betweenwidening and deepening spillovers, but concerning explanatory spillovers, more options becamevisible: there are unintended or intended functional spillovers, as well as unintended political,cultivated and social spillovers. The argument is illustrated through a detailed study of Sweden – a‘reluctant European’ that within the area of asylum and immigration made a fundamental U-turnwith regards to a supranationalism, a change that can be described as a social spillover.

It is a contested issue to what extent international conventions on human rights actually constrain states. While earlier shown that courts may invoke international conventions, this article investigates to what extent legislators, when it comes to migration, are similarly restrained. In a context where the trend is that states limit immigration and curb asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants' social rights, the answer would seem to be that states are obviously unhampered. However, in Sweden there have been changes to the Swedish Aliens Act and to the entitlement to health care which have rather safeguarded asylum seeking and undocumented children's situation. This article discusses the role that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has played in this development and considers whether this has restrained Sweden's ability to act.

The most direct way to regulate immigration is to decrease the possibilities to reach a state’s territory through visa demands, carrier sanctions, and limiting the chances of granting a residence permit even when a person succeeds in reaching a state’s territory. However, during the last decade several scholars noted that in an attempt to decrease the number of asylum seekers, states have also started to curb asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants’ right to work and social benefits. Intriguingly, even though Sweden has followed this international pattern of using direct ways to curb the number of asylum seekers, this paper shows that to a large extent Sweden has abstained from using the more recent indirect methods. Although there are examples of reductions in social benefits, the trend has generally been the reverse in Sweden. Unexpectedly, we suggest that an economic crisis, such as the one that occurred in Sweden in the early 1990s, may lead to an increase of certain rights. We also discuss a number of possible explanations for the Swedish case, including whether a proportional electoral system creates possibilities for small parties to influence policies pertaining to social rights. Furthermore, since we demonstrate that in recent years children have been the primary beneficiaries of an increase in social rights, we suggest that groups perceived to be vulnerable are more likely to experience an increase in social rights.

Despite a general acknowledgement that knowledge about identities is essential for understanding international relations, surprisingly little has been written about what actually activates one of a state’s many identities and not another. More generally, the article suggests that situational relevance and commitment are of importance. More specifically, it is suggested that a policy area’s legitimisation is a factor that may affect the commitment to a collective identity. The argument is illustrated by the case of ‘Norden’, as the inhabitants of Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden call their territory. The end of the Cold War and Sweden and Finland joining Denmark in the European Union (EU) put Nordic identity under severe stress in the beginning of the 1990s. As shown, this collective identity was intensely active in the case of the Nordic Passport Union, but less so in the case of environmental negotiations.