Living in Madrid, Spain for the past semester, I've seen the current global refugee crisis have a permanent place in the news and in the minds of people here. While Spain's infrastructure isn't being nearly as taxed as in Italy and Greece, whose borders are struggling with massive flows of migrants and refugees from departure points in Libya and Turkey, questions surrounding the reception of refugees feature prominently in the national discourse. While most attention has been paid to how countries like Germany are handling the influx of asylum seekers, as well as the reinstated national border controls in many Balkan states, the recent European Union-Turkey refugee agreement only serves to emphasize the supranational and global scale of this crisis.
While many have raised ethical, if not legal concerns with the deal, the huge increase in coordination and regulation required at the European level in order to properly register and hear individual asylum cases, and decide whether to accept or deport the applicant, is a Herculean task itself. Unfortunately, while the agreement demonstrates the hope to tackle this problem at the supranational level, it seems that this approach will likely suffer from the same problems that the earlier European refugee relocation scheme suffered from.
Although the deal with Turkey is still quite recent, it is poised to prove ineffective due to the coordination and common political will required for it to be truly successful. Just like the relocation scheme, which is facing legal challenges and slow progress, the most recent agreement attempting to cope with refugee and migrant flows requires supranational political cooperation that is currently lacking in the European Union.
The first eight years of the 21st century signaled increasingly substantial integration within the European Union, most notably the successful implementation of the Eurozone. However, the 2008 global economic crisis and its continuing fallout in many European states has not only made many countries reluctant to invest resources in expanding the Union, but also skeptical of how effective and useful it can be.
The more recent Paris and Brussels attacks, as well as the refugee crisis of the past year, has only further increased Euroskepticism and questions surrounding the security of the European Union. While it's natural to look towards more traditional nationalism and insular politics in response to the trying and tragic events of the past two years, the various agreements being attempted underscore the importance of increasing cooperation on border security, rather than closing them entirely and choosing to exchange information and share the burden of refugee flows instead of isolation.
The European Union is by no means perfect, affected by continual change and leaps of integration, and yet the current global refugee crisis and the various proposed solutions highlight the importance of continuing the functionalist legacy of Jean Monnet and using this time to correct weaknesses, not reinforce them. Integration outside of the economic sphere has always proved difficult for the European Union, and will most likely continue to be a challenge, but the only successful response to the current refugee crisis and the many other problems facing the continent, lies in strengthening supranational solutions.
