Coming to terms with the European refugee crisis

Organised by

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• EGPP: European Governance and Politics Programme

The refugee crisis 2015-16 was not the first of its kind in Europe, and it was not the only crisis Europe had to face in the more recent past. However, it was the most critical for the EU’s resilience. Based on an original method to analyse policy-making processes, surveys, election campaign analysis, and speech analysis, this study shows how the policymakers in the compound EU polity tried to come to terms with this crisis. The book argues that the policy-specific institutional context, characterised by limited EU competences and inadequate regulations, in combination with asymmetrical problem pressure among the member states and intense domestic political pressure, led to a highly politicised mixture of conflicts both at the transnational and the national level. This served to constrain the potential for intergovernmental agreement, coordination and joint action, resulting in short-term minimum common denominator solutions, and prevented the reform of the dysfunctional European asylum policy.