In Focus Europe’s ‘Refugee Crisis’
| Author | Benjamin D. Hennig |
| Date | 01 September 2018 |
| Published date | 01 September 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2041905818796573 |
20 POLITICAL INSIGHT • SEPTEMBER 2018
In Focus
Europe’s ‘Refugee Crisis’
Article 18 of the EU Charter of
Fundamental Rights outlines
the European Union’s legal
framework for asylum. This
policy has come under intense scrutiny and
political pressure as the number of refugees
trying to reach the continent from conict
zones in Africa and the Middle East has risen
sharply.
While refugee numbers have since
declined to pre-2015 levels, the political
debate has not disappeared and continues
to heavily inuence European politics, with
major shifts towards the right of the political
spectrum in many member states.
There has been a notable tension between
national politics and the aims of a joint EU
approach towards migration. The Dublin
Regulation – that the country of entry is
responsible for handling and processing an
asylum application – has proved a particular
challenge as most refugees have landed at
member states around the Mediterranean Sea.
The smaller cartograms in the graphic
demonstrate how Greece, Italy and
Spain were the main destinations for
Mediterranean arrivals in the past ve
years, according to estimates from the UN
Refugee Agency. (2018 shows gures for
the rst half of the year.) During the height
of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015/16,
Greece became a major destination, with
856,723 arrivals in 2016 alone. Italy showed
consistently high numbers of arrivals in
the tens of thousands with Spain seeing a
signicant increase in 2017 and 2018.
These shifting patterns reect political
interventions which are often a response
to pressures from national-level politics.
The events of 2015/16 saw an agreement
between the EU and Turkey to stop the
crossings towards Greece. A more hardline
approach by Italy led to routes shifting
towards the Spanish shores as well as the
Spanish exclaves on the African continent.
The overall toughened response resulted
in refugees taking ever more dangerous
routes which explains why, despite declining
overall numbers, the number of dead or
missing people stays in the thousands and
was consistently rising as a share of refugees
between 2015 and 2018.
The European-wide eorts to secure
the outer borders have led to an increased
perception (and reality) of a ‘fortress Europe’.
The Dublin Regulation aimed to nd a
joint EU approach but that has proved
unworkable not least due to the lack of
solidarity that it requires. Richer western and
northern European countries are the least
likely countries of arrival for asylum seekers.
Southern European economies, in
contrast, are still recovering from the impact
of the economic crisis. Responsibility
for hundreds of thousands of refugees
is an enormous challenge which puts
considerable pressure on many small
communities that were the rst point of
Migration has moved to the centre stage of European politics.
Benjamin D. Hennig maps the development of ‘fortress Europe’ for
refugees.
The right to asylum shall be guaranteed with due respect for the
rules of the Geneva Convention of 28 July 1951 and the Protocol
of 31 January 1967 relating to the status of refugees and in
accordance with the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty
on the Functioning of the European Union.
arrival, such as Greek islands in the Aegean.
While these communities responded
with a huge amount of solidarity and
eort, the symbolic images of refugee
camps helped to feed a European-wide
narrative of the political right that refugees
and asylum seekers are a burden rather
than a vulnerable group of people that
have the right of protection according to
international conventions.
In addition to a fortication of the outer
borders, individual states have increased
eorts to secure their own national borders
through increased controls. Instead of a joint
responsibility for vulnerable international
migrants, there has been even greater
fragmentation of responses among dierent
member states.
The current number of asylum
applications across Europe demonstrates the
highly unequal distribution of applications,
not only in absolute numbers but also in
relative terms, as the main maps show.
Agreements to allocate asylum seekers
across the participating states have so far
not led to an equal number of applicants
per country. Of the most populous countries
in Europe, Greece continues to have the
highest number of applications (5.3), while
most other countries apart from very small
states receive around two applications
per 1000 people. All Central and Eastern
European countries remain just at or far
below the 0.5 mark in the statistics.
In addition to these statistics, it also needs
to be kept in mind that these numbers do
not reect the number of asylum seekers
that will end up living in these countries,
as these numbers are not approved
applications. Here, the diculty of individual
countries in handling the bureaucratic
process becomes even more evident:
Germany, which received the largest
number of applications, made nal decisions
(granted or rejected), on approximately
30,000 cases in 2017. Mediterranean
PI September 2018.indd 20 27/07/2018 15:12
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