The EU Failure To Offer A Viable And Compassionate Response To The Refugee Crisis
Jean Monnet, frequently viewed as the forefather of European integration and the neofunctionalist perspective, “always believed that Europe would be built through crises, and that it would be the sum of their solutions”. Howbeit, the European Union’s response to the refugee crisis has been insufficient, sporadic and disunited. This essay will seek to highlight the layered nature of the E. U. ’s failure, demonstrating that the root of this failure has been the conflicting interests of member states coupled with the failed policies of the Dublin Regulation and the Schengen Area, whilst doing so in the context of theories of European integration.
Initially, the migrant crisis was an exogenous issue that, once evolved in nature to a matter of European concern, did much to expose the ‘major deficiencies of integration2’, as well as the intrinsically flawed nature of pre-existing E. U. policies that attempt to account for asylum seekers, namely the Dublin Regulation. Given the content of the regulation and its inherently hierarchical structure, coupled with its lack of burden-sharing amongst member states, not only is much of the pressure left on nations such as Greece and Italy, but also due to the sheer volume of refugees, the actual processing of asylum seekers is convoluted and ineffective as well.
Though the Dublin Regulation was modified twice, most recently as Dublin III in 2014, its latest revision aimed to clarify the conditions under which a member state must claim responsibility of a refugee, by asserting that asylum seekers cannot be transferred to states with ‘systemic flaws’, though the regulation never defined exactly what might constitute a ‘systemic flaw’. This has debatably provided a loophole to prevent the efficient transfer of refugees, doing more to perpetuate rather than alleviate the pre-existing lack of burden-sharing that the Dublin Regulation fosters amongst E. U. nations. At its core, the Dublin Regulation’s ‘first-entry criterion’ limits refugees to peripheral countries that, simply put, do not have the means to facilitate such high numbers of migrants. Thus, the refugee crisis has produced ‘severe intergovernmental distributional conflict’. Despite the severity of the crisis, member states have been unable to agree on cohesive integration progress. Despite attempts to propose alternative policies to better cope with the frequency of refugees, including quota systems and more supranational border management, all such suggestions have been rejected with no proposed viable alternative. Instead, the Dublin Regulation has remained largely unchanged, and member states have been left to manage the crisis on a national level, such as by partially suspending Schengen rules or alternatively by negotiating agreements with neighbouring tertiary countries.
What must also be considered theoretically speaking is the effect of an increase in the politicization of the crisis in the context of integration. Whilst an increase in politicization does not necessarily imply integration or disintegration, neofunctionalists and postfunctionalists argue its effects in contrasting ways. The former hypothesizes that politicization of crisis would lead to further integration, but in favour of ‘transcending the nation-state and promoting political integration’, whilst the latter foresaw such politicization as a mobilizing force for euro-skepticism, thus undermining support for European integration. Though both theories can be reasonably corroborated in the context of the refugee crisis, it would appear that the post functionalist view is most prevalent in the emerging populist governments of nations such as Hungary and Poland, who have served as roadblocks to effective policy change. The overarching reality of the European Union’s insufficient response to the refugee crisis is that, simply put, the Schengen regime has been ill-prepared to deal with the number of migrants it has been faced with and the pressure that accompanies such a phenomenon16. The monitoring of external borders and the logistical framework of processing asylum requests continues to be the responsibility of individual member states.
The Schengen regime ‘is based on the principle of mutual recognition18’, meaning that in order for an asylum seeker’s application to be on course to be accepted in any Schengen country, the others must recognize it as well19. With this being said, given the fact that asylum processes differ in various countries throughout the Schengen area, this makes the process of mutual recognition, as well as the asylum process as a whole, significantly more convoluted, which has been a major failure of the E. U. in appropriately managing the refugee crisis. Moreover, it leads to a climate of ‘asylum shopping’ and ‘secondary movement’ of migrants to countries other than the ones they arrived in. Not only this, but in the Schengen area as well as the EMU, governments did not know that they had to agree on ‘common rules to ensure the working of the integration regime’, instead seeking to ‘keep core state powers…under national control’. Thus, when considering the rapid increase in numbers of asylum-seekers in particular, it is unsurprising that the E. U. has been unable to effectively accommodate such high volumes of refugees; not only is there a ripening politicization and consequent euro-skepticism surrounding the topic, as well as the technically flawed terms of the Dublin Regulation, but there is also no effective mechanism in the Schengen area to tackle the high numbers of refugees that the E. U. is faced with. The uncompassionate response of the European Union to the refugee crisis can be largely attributed to the individualistic mentality of each member state and its peoples, thus leading to certain member states outwardly refusing to cooperate with migration policies at an E. U. level. Schimmelfennig distinguishes between member states’ positions in the crisis based on their ‘frontline, destination, transit and by-stander’ geopolitical roles.
Frontline states such as Greece and Italy are immediately affected by the crisis given their geographical placement and the burden left upon them by the Dublin Regulation, whereas destination states such as Germany and Sweden are affected by ‘secondary migrant movement’, being that they are examples of ideal states that migrants would hope to settle in. Hungary, on the other hand, is an example of a transit country, given that it is on a migration route leading from frontline states to destination states. By virtue of the nature of these countries, frontline and destination states have endorsed the redistribution of refugees throughout the EU, whilst transit and by-stander countries have opposed relocation to deter from any potential burdens on their own state. As a result of these mixed interests, based chiefly upon geopolitical placement, ‘the migrant crises have been characterized by high politicisation’.
Looking closely at the levels of politicization of the crisis in different states and its subsequent informing of responses to the dilemma helps to better contextualize the political positioning of certain nations on the matter. Only a minority of 37% Europeans claim to be well-informed about matters concerning immigration. Moreover, Europeans have statistically been shown to on average overestimate the proportion of immigrants in their country, indicative of a skewed public perception of migration not always rooted in fact. Furthermore, although over half of Europeans feel comfortable with immigrants, this statistic varies dramatically across different countries, with nations such as Hungary and Bulgaria demonstrating a more hostile attitude on average in comparison to nations such as Spain or Sweden, with only 17% and 15% of the former countries feeling comfortable with migrants compared to 83% of Swedes and Spaniards. It is no wonder, then, that it has been difficult to generate broad consensus amongst E. U. nations as a whole. Where there are nations that would not be opposed to redistributing migrants and composing new policy to implement such measures, other nations have vested interests and would benefit far less from such measures, consequently opposing changes to migration policies such as the Dublin Regulation or previous attempts to enforce new refugee quotas. It is clear, then, that the current policy-positioning of the E. U. lacks concision and consensus. The Dublin Regulation places the burden of monitoring and housing refugees unfairly upon peripheral countries and, moreover, has not been effectively revised to take into account the current flows of migration that have increased exponentially in recent years.
The reality of the E. U. ’s policies, or lack thereof, is worsened by the rising politicization and consequent euro-skepticism in various countries throughout the Schengen Area, making the failure of the European Union to provide viable policy-change and aid to the influx of migrants entering the region unsurprising. Thus, given the expansive, all-pervasive nature of the migrant crisis that the European Union has been faced with in recent years, overwhelming consensus shows that the chief shortcoming of the EU’s response to the crisis is an overall lack of comprehensive policy to alleviate the burdens that select member states have been faced with.
