Introduction

When is a crisis perceived as a crisis – and where? The various attributes used to describe the significant increase of forced migration in 2015 include ‘2015 European migration crises’, ‘Syrian refugee crisis’, ‘crisis in the Mediterranean’ and ‘European migration policy crisis’ – respectively focusing on the countries and regions of origin and destination, a site of humanitarian disaster and the question of ‘who is to blame?’ (Ripoll Servent 2020: 186). One could argue that the refugee situation had already constituted a long-time crisis in several regions of the world but only became a major policy and media issue once European countries were directly affected. Even within Europe, this was initially not a unified perception; for example, Germany, which had benefited from the ‘safe third countries’ – concept in the Dublin regulation which relegated asylum processes to the European borderlands, only started perceiving the situation as a crisis once large numbers of refugees moved onwards from countries such as Greece and it became a major country of destination.

However, this perception has not only been inaccurate on a global but also on a national scale and is testimony to the short memory of the news and policy debate cycle. In her article ‘The permanent refugee crisis in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1949– ‘ Lauren Stokes points out that since its inception after the end of the Second World War, the country had never experienced a decade without a ‘refugee crisis’ (Stokes 2019: 44). This calls into question the usage of the term, because ‘when speakers declare a migratory situation to be a “crisis,” they suggest not just that the situation is a departure from what is normal, but also that it is untenable in the long term, and that it requires a decisive solution’ (Stokes 2019: 20). Dines et al, on the other hand, have argued that ‘crisis has not simply become the descriptor of a succession of events, but rather a paradigmatic frame for thinking about our times’; furthermore, the ‘migration crisis’ has been increasingly linked to other long-standing crises such as lack of affordable housing, and so on (Dines et al 2018: 440– 441).

Even if the term crisis thus may not appropriately capture the history and complexity of forced migration, its usage can nonetheless have significant outcomes for stakeholders in the policy-making process: it may speed up political decisions, increase available resources and provide legitimacy for one's policy role.