In this chapter we look at the transnational and domestic conflict configurations among the citizen publics of sixteen member states. In terms of transnational conflicts, we find the expected opposition between the frontline states (Greece, Italy) and the V4 countries (augmented by eastern European bystander states). The contrasting stance of the policymakers from these countries during the refugee crisis is reflected in their voters’ positions. By contrast, citizens from western European destination, transit, and bystander states generally take more moderate positions. At the domestic level, we find the expected opposition between nationalists and cosmopolitans politically articulated by the radical right on the one side and by the left on the other side. Furthermore, as transnational conflicts are ultimately rooted in domestic conflict structures, the domestic polarization appears to be more intense than the transnational one. These results underscore that the conflict potentials of immigration policies have not yet been fully mobilized and, given the large opposition to immigration in some member states, may prove to become major obstacles to joint solutions.

This chapter studies the electoral repercussions of the refugee crisis, tentatively showing that in elections close to the epicenter of events, either the right or the radical right were the grand winners from this turbulence. First, we examine the politicization of the issue of migration generally in European party-systems, exploring whether the European crises made the issue of migration more salient, polarizing, or both. Additionally, we track the agents responsible for any shift in migration, the parties who might have augmented their focus on migration issues or shifted their positions considerably on it. Finally, the chapter aims to identify the links between these changes in the supply side, with some parties paying more attention to the migration issue, and the electoral response to it, as voters also became more attuned to it. Overall, we see that a rise in attention to migration seems to have led to a rise of the right across Europe, concluding that the refugee crisis had a lasting impact on political balance.

In this chapter, we take a closer look at the cross-level episodes, which include roughly half of the national episodes of our study. This is a remarkably high share, which indicates that national asylum policymaking is taking place in the shadow of EU policymaking. These episodes have been more intensely politicized than purely domestic episodes. They have either been rooted in domestic conflicts that expanded up into the international realm or in international conflicts that were closely associated with domestic politics. We present a fourfold typology of such cross-level episodes, which distinguishes between top-down and bottom-up cross-level interventions for both international and domestic conflicts. The intense cross-level interactions in the domestic episodes during the refugee crisis demonstrate the interdependencies between the member states and between the member states and the EU in this policy domain. At the same time, they also demonstrate the difficulties in coming to joint solutions, even under great pressure, and the amount of effort that it takes to search for joint policies in a polity that requires consensual decision-making.

This chapter studies the dynamics of elite support, which varies considerably across time. This temporal fluctuations are explained by three different sets of variables: the changing political and problem pressure that governments face, the contextual characteristics that may moderate this relationship, and the endogenous dynamics unfolding between different elite groups. Far from the elite closing ranks behind government proposals as the “rally-around-the-flag” perspective may suggest, nongovernment elites rather use the strategic opportunity offered by mounting problem pressure to articulate opposition to these proposals and signal distance from governments as a result. This dynamic is mostly confined to destination and transit states, and it is more prominent during debates on border controls and in the early phase of the crisis. By contrast, the impact of political pressure is largely in line with our expectations: In response to the growing strength of the radical right, the elite steps up dissent, with the strongest effect found, again, in destination states. In addition to responding to external pressure, elite groups were also shown to engage in strategic behavior with respect to each other.

In this chapter, we show how an EU policymaking episode, the EU–Turkey agreement, the most important episode in our study, is domesticated in national policymaking and how this works out differently depending on the member state. We compare the debates in four member states and then zoom in on the debates in the two most concerned member states. For Germany, this episode was instrumental in solving a domestic conflict between the chancellor and the governing parties, including her own party. Once the agreement was sealed, the German debate did not entirely subside, but it lost intensity and eventually faded out. The Greek debate, by contrast, picked up shortly before the conclusion of the agreement and then stayed intense during the implementation phase. Several years after the agreement was concluded, it gave rise to new domestic episodes in Greece, since the problems it created for Greece continued to remain unsolved.

This chapter presents the argument that the domestic responses to the refugee crisis in the period between 2013 and 2020 exposed vastly different conflict lines running through European societies. In particular, we argue that the integration–demarcation cleavage that rose to prominence in the context of the refugee crisis triggered four types of conflicts throughout the policy debates. The two most common types of conflicts were partisan conflicts and international conflicts. In international conflicts, national governments found themselves in opposition to EU actors, foreign governments, and/or other supranational institutions such as the UN. Such conflicts were almost the exclusive remit of border control episodes. Partisan conflicts covered a more diverse set of episode types. In these episodes, mainstream opposition parties emerged as the most common adversaries of national governments. Comparatively speaking, the other two types of conflicts, societal (involving NGOs, unions, think tanks, experts, etc.) and intragovernmental conflicts were fewer.

This chapter introduces the forty-six policy episodes that we study in detail. We present their timing, their politicization, and their substantive focus. The association between politicization and pressure, both problem and political pressures, proves to be rather variable across member states and looser than expected. We account for this finding by taking into account the endogenous political dynamics during the crisis. Policy responses at the national level were not only required by the failure of the CEAS and by the inability of the leaders to adopt joint solutions at the EU level, they were also the result of a series of endogenous factors at the national level, which operated independently of problem pressure and, in part at least, created the political pressure in the first place. The strategies of political entrepreneurs – Orbán, Salvini, Seehofer, and Erdogan – most clearly fit this bill, but anticipation of crisis situations to come, legislative cycles, conspicuous events like terrorist attacks, and sequels of policy decisions made earlier in the crisis all contributed to these endogenous dynamics.