EUROPEAN UNION: THE CHALLENGE TO AGREE ON REFUGEES
EUROPEAN UNION: THE CHALLENGE TO AGREE ON REFUGEES

Summary/Abstract: In the last decade, the European Union (EU) faces a number of important challenges related to economic, political and social issues. The current refugee crisis, triggered by the breaking out of the Syrian civil war in 2011 illustrates that in the EU might exist considerably different opinions about the resolutions to take and the solutions to bring to these problems. Today’s massive population flows from Syria, but also from Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries from the Middle East and North Africa to the EU give the perception that the unity of the Member States is fragile. Today we witness collective action problems at the EU level, which suggest that the Member States put national interests before the collective ones. The purpose of this paper is to answer the question “What explains the change in EU's behaviour during the Syrian refugee crisis between 2011 and 2015 compared to the Yugoslav crisis in the 1990s?”. It will establish a comparison between two cases – on the one hand, the refugee crisis that Europe is facing since 2011, and on the other hand, the refugee crisis in the EU that resulted from the ethnic cleansing and the subsequent wars in former Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1995. During the 1990s EU’s reaction has been slower but more efficient compared to its behaviour since 2011. In this paper will be analysed the context and background of the two phenomena, the decisions and actions of the EU, and their results.

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