The EU’s response to the Syrian refugee crisis: a battleground among many Europes

ABSTRACT

This article examines the European Union (EU)’s response to the 2015–2016 refugee crisis. Departing from the understanding that Europe is a contested phenomenon, it investigates how different – Thick, Thin, Parochial and Global – Europes influenced the EU’s management of the crisis culminating in the March 2016 EU-Turkey ‘refugee deal’. Two findings are advanced. First, European actors reacted differently to the EU’s initially attempted Thick Europe approach to the crisis, following their respective Europe conceptions. Second, faced with growing divisions, they ultimately united around a lowest common denominator solution represented by the refugee deal which illustrated Thin Europe at the expense of a more norm-based policy associated with Thick and Global Europes. The findings demonstrate the significance of embedding the various European reactions to the crisis within different Europe categories while showing that consensus was still possible to tackle an external problem.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee crisis
• European Union
• solidarity
• Turkey
• refugee deal

Notes

1 Although the terms ‘refugee’ (see, the 1951 Refugee Convention, Art. 1(2)) and ‘migrant’ do not always imply the same categories of people, they are used interchangeably in this article to refer to people fleeing from the Syrian civil war to seek asylum elsewhere.

2 The article states: ‘In the event of one or more Member States being confronted by an emergency situation characterised by a sudden inflow of nationals of third countries, the Council, on a proposal from the Commission, may adopt provisional measures for the benefit of the Member State(s) concerned’.

3 This was most particularly evident in the slow progress of relocation and resettlement across the EU. Two years after the JHA Council’s relocation decision (September 2017), only 27.700 people had been relocated from Greece and Italy, prompting the Commission to urge the member states (particularly, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic) to start relocating and pledging to receive migrants (European Commission, 2017).

4 To illustrate, Germany’s shift in policy is rooted, inter alia, in the rising domestic political opposition to Merkel’s open-door policy to refugees, both from her own Christian Democratic party and the Eurosceptic, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland Party (whose rising popularity and wins in the 2016 state elections are attributed to its politicisation of the refugee crisis). Criticisms against Merkel reached their peak following the December 2016 Berlin ISIS attacks carried out by a Tunisian migrant. Similarly, for France, a crucial factor has been the popular fear of importing islamic terrorism via welcoming refugees, following ISIS’ November 2015 Paris attacks.

5 In so doing, some Thick Europeanists (e.g. Christian Democrats represented by CSU) were also motivated by the ‘Fortress Europe’ vision, i.e. the idea that common European (Christian) civilisation should be protected from Muslim ‘others’ like Syrian refugees.

6 Indeed, throughout the crisis and after, both the EU’s official rhetoric and member state discourses on Turkey predominantly referred to Turkey as a key ‘strategic partner’.

7 An evaluation of Turkey-EU relations is beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say that before the refugee crisis, the EU emphasised the importance of Turkey’s democratic reforms (stagnant since 2013) for the opening of further negotiation chapters. The link between democratisation and membership talks was firmly signaled, among others, by former European Council President Herman Van Rompuy (Bloomberg, 2014) and former EU Commissioner for Enlargement and Neighborhood Policy Stefan Füle: ‘Energising the EU accession process and strengthening democracy by respecting rights and freedoms are two sides of the same coin’ (Füle, 2013).

8 The minutes quote Juncker as saying: ‘please note that we postponed the progress report until after the Turkish elections. And we got criticised for this delay’ (Bialasiewicz & Maessen, 2018, p. 221).