Unity Amid Barbed Wire: Asylum Restrictions, European Integration and the Migration Crisis

Abstract

This article examines how the recent European response to Syrian refugees was shaped by and remains closely entwined with the Europe Union’s reaction to asylum-seekers since the 1990s. The wars in Bosnia and Kosovo led to the expanded use of barriers to entry, temporary forms of protection and coerced refugee returns. These policies have undermined Europe’s humanitarian obligations to vulnerable migrants. European policies have also failed to significantly improve conditions in the countries of origin, undermining political stability and economic development and driving new rounds of migrants to Europe. Successfully addressing migration from Syria and other countries well beyond Europe’s more secure borders will require unprecedented commitments to deliver effective international assistance from EU countries already debating the future of the union.

Keywords:

• refugees
• asylum
• European Union
• Bosnia
• Kosovo
• temporariness
• borders
• migration
• exclusion

Notes

1 The EU Statistical Agency counted 2.7 million registered asylum-seekers from Syria in Turkey, compared with 6.5 million displaced persons within Syria.

2 ‘Irregular migrant’ is EU parlance for any person lacking legal right of entry.

3 UN Security Council Resolution 1244 provided for the international administration of Kosovo until its final status could be agreed.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carl Thor Dahlman

CARL THOR DAHLMAN is Professor and Director of International Studies at Miami University. He is the author of numerous peer reviewed articles on geopolitics and migration and the co-author of Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and Its Reversal (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Email: [email protected]