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The European Union Migration Crisis

Document Cited authorities 2 Cited in Related
Vincent
Date01 May 2016
Published date01 May 2016
DOI10.3366/elr.2016.0346
Pages230-235

“Things fall apart …. The centre cannot hold”1

INTRODUCTION

On 9 September 2010 the body of a man who had fallen from a British Airways flight to Heathrow was discovered in a wealthy west-London suburb.2 It is hard to pinpoint any one precise origin of the migration crisis currently unfolding in Europe, but the migrant who fell from the sky in his extreme efforts to enter a Europe otherwise closed to him was to foreshadow something on a much larger scale which has shaken European integration to its very core. The mass movement of more than a million refugees and migrants (many fleeing conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq) into European countries during 2015,3 the migration crisis so called, has generated an extreme level of disruption and disunity in the European Union and its member states as they strive to deal with the arrivals.4 But the crisis is, first and foremost, a humanitarian catastrophe of a kind unseen in Europe since the 1930s and 40s. Images from Lesbos and Lampedusa, among others, bear witness to the magnitude of the human cost of the crisis, which is still growing at an alarming rate at the time of writing.5 This note argues that the humanitarian crisis points to more deep-seated and long-standing problems in the governance of the European Union. As the EU and its member states struggle with the pressures of mass movement of displaced people, the treatment of those people exposes what can only be described as a crisis of European values. It is, in many ways, a stark exposé of shortcomings in the application of European fundamental rights, humanitarian law, and neighbourhood policy.

 THE rOAD TO CRISIS

What was seen, and conveniently categorised, as a “peripheral glitch”,6 merely a local issue confined to the Mediterranean extremes of fortress Europe, has been evolving slowly over the last five years before reaching an unavoidable crescendo during 2015. In 2014, Daniela Caruso spoke of the “lost generation” of those who had literally been lost, drowned in the waters of southern Europe.7 Before the origins of the current crisis began to influence the shaping of member state and EU migration strategy around 2009–2010, EU migration policy had begun gradually to move from being the precious preserve of member state sovereignty to being a commonly-shaped policy. The original Schengen Agreement of 1985,8 which provided for the gradual abolition of internal borders in the then European Economic Community (“EEC”), was largely influenced by the demands of a free-moving trading community within parts of the EEC; trade, for now, trumped tight territorial control. The Third Pillar of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty can be seen as the starting point for the evolution of a common EU migration and border control programme.9 In tandem, the...

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