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The ‘refugee crisis’ experienced by the European Union (EU) since 2011 has raised issues ranging from refugee welfare to the EU’s longevity, especially at its peak in 2015. Indeed, the plight of asylum-seekers and refugees fleeing catastrophes and poverty has always been framed by EU leaders as an EU problem. This is seen in the fatalistic statements about Europe’s inability to cope with the influx, and the multiple calls for solidarity and unity amongst EU Member States. In March 2019, the European Commission’s (EC) First Vice President Timmermans announced the end of the ‘refugee crisis’, calling on EU Member States to work in solidarity with each other and share responsibility in order to “be equal to the migration challenge”. These responses demonstrate the changeable nature of the ‘refugee crisis’: a crisis of migration management, a potential crisis for EU unity, and, crucially, a continuous crisis for the asylum-seekers and refugees themselves, who have been at the mercy of internal EU politics with little security for their protection. In this piece the term ‘refugee’ is extended to ‘asylum-seekers’, denoting migrants who are yet to receive refugee status but are subject to EU asylum procedures. The aim of this piece is to highlight how the ‘refugee crisis’ encompassed multiple crises, the outcomes of and solutions to which were focused on EU objectives, thus entrenching a Eurocentric attitude at the cost of refugee welfare.
One of the first things to note is how the term ‘crisis’ came to be used and what it describes. In mid-to-late-2015, some EU Member States re-introduced internal border controls in response to the growing numbers of asylum-seekers entering EU territories, the associated public pressures[if !supportNestedAnchors][endif] for enhanced border control and the breakdown of the EU Dublin Regulation regarding asylum claim procedures. These national acts of securitisation culminated in Hungary building a fence along its southern border in order to redirect flows of migrants away from its territory. This response was portrayed as a reaction to the fatalistic belief that there were “too many” asylum-seekers to cope with, old rhetoric used during previous European immigration ‘crises’. Bhambra highlights the Eurocentricity of this frame: statistics show that the approximate 885,000 asylum applications made to the EU between 2011 and 2016 accounted for fewer than 0.25% of the population of Europe, numbers which stand in stark contrast to those of Lebanon, where asylum applicant number are equivalent to around 20% of their population. Lebanon’s situation, unlike Europe’s, is rarely reported on by the European press as a ‘crisis’.
Thus, the refugee crisis had multiple elements. The first was a migration management crisis, whereby the EU was unable to respond as expected to these applications in accordance with its commitments under international laws and treaties, including those on human rights of asylum-seekers and refugees. The second crisis, more critical for future migration management was that “the raison d’être, added-value and resilience of the European integration project [were] increasingly called into question”. Indeed, the principle of solidarity has always been central to the functioning of the EU. Referring to the Chapter on the creation of an “Area of Freedom, Justice and Security” which also governs migration and asylum in/to the EU, Article 80 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union states that “the policies of the Union set out in this Chapter and their implementation shall be governed by the principle of solidarity and fair sharing of responsibility, including its financial implications, between the Member States.” The actions of the Member States in 2015, followed by the rejection of the supposedly binding EU emergency relocation mechanism in May 2016 by the Visegrád group served as a reminder of the fragility of the EU structure.
However, this display of individualism belies the fact that over the last two decades, EU Member States have worked collectively to develop policies aimed at restricting access of asylum seekers to the EU. One example is the Mobility Partnerships Facility (MPF), an EU initiative which aims to operationalise certain aspects of the EC’s Global Approach to Migration and Mobility (the framework for EU external migration and asylum policies), proposed by Member States in cooperation with non-EU partner countries. These agreements seek to build capacity in the partner countries to prevent irregular migration into the EU, through initiatives such as enhanced border surveillance and management and enabling asylum-seeker processing within the partner country, in exchange for opening legal migration pathways for the partners country’s citizens. Regardless of its shortcomings, this is a clear example that, despite internal disagreements, EU Member States act with solidarity on issues relating to external border control and asylum policy, even relinquishing governance to EU bodies.
These legal agreements also exemplify the Eurocentricity of the response to this crisis. Indeed, they are criticised as ‘burden-shifting’ or ‘burden-shirking’, where the EU pressures partner countries to adopt restrictive migration policies to ease what Uçarer calls “politically undesirable asylum burdens” by, among other things, shifting the responsibilities to other states outside the EU. Along with benefiting the EU at the expense of the partner countries, the agreements also reinforce restrictive biases that continue to place migration to the EU in a security framework rather than a human rights-based approach.
This brings us to a final remark on the status of the asylum crisis. In response to Timmerman’s statement that the crisis was over, Amnesty International projected the words “humanity first: refugees are welcome” on the walls of the Acropolis on the 20th March 2019, stating that the EU-Turkey deal, another example of an EU external border initiative, has “condemn[ed] thousands of people to a life of fear and limbo, the exact contrary of the values the EU says it treasures”. This, again, shows that the response to the crisis has been Eurocentric in nature: the focus remains on the impacts on the EU, which has prioritised EU objectives in its policies and legislation instead of the human rights of the asylum seekers and refugees and meaningful support for transit or origin countries. Thus, despite the development of legislation and policies designed to mitigate the crisis, it remains a crisis of human rights, due to the EU’s failure to cope with migrant inflows. This is indivisible from the crisis of EU solidarity in the face of increasing tensions about how to respond to a situation that, despite what has been said, is simply not going away.