6. The Politics of In/Exclusion in the EU: Refugees and Migrants

This chapter focuses on another increasingly contentious inclusion policy area: the lack of solidarity among member states when developing an effective and sustainable refugee and asylum policy, with attendant questions of redistribution, reception, integration, and border-management. These issues have produced insecurities among citizens, migrants, and refugees, and caused tensions between member state governments, with detrimental effects for the perceived performance of the EU. Coincidentally, however, civic activism for/against hosting refugees has increased, in part to fill in governmental gaps and in part as a result of societal tensions. This chapter brings together a compelling set of politicized issues regarding refugees and migrants including debates on how to best manage asylum within and migration to the EU in view of the considerable political and economic differences between states. Despite the EU’s joint values and decision-making in these areas, the EU is facing a crisis of solidarity and burden-sharing, for instance regarding the reform of the Dublin Regulation or the implementation of the Common European Asylum System. This chapter also sheds light on the challenges concerning sovereignty and the ability of the EU to de-securitize these issues for European societies, exemplified, for instance, by the Visegrad 4 states’ rejection of asylum redistribution.