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A common refrain heard at every summit
meeting held over the past few years is “The
refugee crisis is a European issue in need of a
European solution”.
Nevertheless, the ways in which individual
Member States have dealt with this situation have
not reflected even the semblance of a unified ap-
proach and the patent lack of solidarity between
them on this issue is casting doubt upon the fun-
damental tenets of the Union, which finds itself
mired in a serious crisis of values.
In May 2015, at the height of refugee arriv-
als along the Greek and Italian coasts, the
European Commission announced a new
“European Agenda on Migration”, which in the
opinion of the UN’s Special Representative of
the Secretary-General for International
Migration Peter Sutherland, constituted the first
serious step towards the reform of European
asylum system.
This agenda called for a series of immediate
measures:
– An augmentation of the budget allocated
for search and rescue operations conducted
by the European Border and Coast Guard
Agency Frontex (Triton and Poseidon
Operations).
– The redistribution of refugees arriving in Italy
and Greece by means of a resettlement pro-
gramme.
– The resettlement of 20,000 displaced per-
sons stranded in other EU Member States.
– Actions against criminal networks, an up-
grade of border management practices, the
negotiation of cooperation agreements with
third countries that offering incentives to
collaborate and ongoing pressure on these
countries to fulfil their readmission obliga-
tions.
We find ourselves once again faced with a
European agenda offering short-term, poorly fo-
cused measures that repeat errors committed in
the recent past, which is to say, policymaking based
a single fixed logic – controlling migration flows
and borders from a securitisation perspective
1
.
1
For more information regarding the theory of securitisa-
tion and critical studies, see: Pérez de Armiño, K., Medina
Azcue, I. (eds.):
Seguridad Humana. Aportes críticos al de-
bate teórico y político
. Tecnos, 2013 (in Spanish).
The common European
asylum system adrift
Estrella Galán and Paloma Favieres