Policy Versus Praxis: Has the European Union Failed to Respond to the Refugee Crisis?

Abstract

This study analyzes the effects of supranational governance on the refugee crisis in the European Union (EU). The main argument is that the supranational institutions of the EU have often failed to adequately manage the refugee crisis according to its foundational principles of fair burden sharing and solidarity. This failure has gradually discredited the Union’s basic normative principles such as solidarity, hospitality, and respect for human rights. We show that the gaps between certain policies adopted at the Union level and the practices at the national level have widened, and this has led to a familiar defeat of the normative domain by realpolitik, following some central tenets of classical realism. We aim to show that in several areas of EU policy, as well as how individual states have responded to them, national interests and burden shirking, rather than sharing, have unfortunately prevailed. © The Author(s) 2020.