Union citizenship was created to provide a closer bond between the European Union and the nationals of the Member States. It provides a frame for rights to move and reside throughout the EU, and to work and live in conditions of equality and non-discrimination within a host Member State. Union citizens also have the right to be accompanied by their families when they move, even if the family members are not Union citizens themselves. The very power and scope of these rights can make them controversial. The question of whether and when Union citizens should have access to benefits, whether their same-sex family arrangements should be recognised in Member States that do not allow same-sex marriage themselves, and the extent to which Member State nationality law is constrained by the fact that each Member States national is also a Union Citizen, have all been the subject of much discussed case law.

This chapter commences by looking at how the ideas of Europe and European Union have informed debates about the European Union. It then traces the history of the European Union since the Second World War. It considers how two ideas have been central to European integration. Intergovernmentalism emphasises the place of the national State within European integration, and sees it as the only arena serving as the locus for democracy. Supranationalism allows for political decision-makers that are not national ones, the overriding of the national veto and conceives democracy as something that can transcend the nation State. The chapter then looks at the current treaties which establish the European Union. The Treaty on European Union set outs its institutions, central values and foreign and defence policy. The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union sets out its other policies. The chapter culminates by looking at the crises that have beset the Union in recent years: the sovereign debt crisis, Brexit, the crisis in liberal values, Covid-19 and, most recently, the crisis in Ukraine.

This chapter highlights the importance of government composition in explaining the nature of domestic conflict in the refugee crisis. It puts into evidence two important aspects of this composition: fragmentation and ideology. Most of the governments in our study are coalition governments and therefore should not be treated as unitary actors. The type of governments in charge during the crisis ranges from monolithic single-party governments to fractious grand coalitions. Fragmentation is fairly closely linked to the prevalence of intragovernmental conflict, while the link with ideological distance between the parties appeared to matter less. We confirm that center right governments are more likely to engage in debates centered on immigration with the opposition. However, the general relationship between ideology and partisan conflict is weak. The source of the partisan challenge matters more than the ideological make-up of the government: When the challenge comes from the radical right – and to a lesser extent, from the center right – security–sovereignty–identitarian frame types are more likely to be prevalent compared to challenges from the mainstream left, where humanitarian–solidaristic–democratic themes are likely to take center stage.

This chapter presents the institutional preconditions and crisis situation at the EU level and in four types of member states – frontline, transit, open destination, and closed destination states. We show the configuration of interests among these states based on these preconditions and the likely outcomes that derive from them. Given the cumulation of both problem and political pressures in the open destination and transit states, these states are destined to become the major protagonists not only in the national responses to the pressure but also in the search for a joint EU policy response to the crisis. For these states, stopping the inflow of refugees and sharing the burden of accommodating the refugees who have already arrived was a priority. They shared this interest with the frontline states. But the interests of the frontline and destination states differed with regard to the reform of the CEAS: Together with the other member states, open destination states were in favor of restoring the Dublin regulation, while the frontline states wanted to reform the CEAS in such a way that they would no longer have to assume the entire responsibility for accommodating the flood of new arrivals.

By applying a combination of tools from comparative politics and policy analysis to the study of policymaking in the EU polity, we showed how, in the absence of generally accepted rules, EU policymaking in the refugee crisis developed in an uncoordinated, ad hoc way that served to poison transnational relationships among member states beyond the narrow confines of asylum policy and led to the formation of transnational coalitions, which are likely to haunt EU policymaking far beyond the refugee crisis. By distinguishing between five types of member states, based on the way they were affected by the crisis, and by systematically analyzing the domestic and international (trans- and supranational) conflicts triggered by the resulting configuration of member states, our approach provides a comprehensive account of the crisis. In particular, we analyzed the reciprocal relationship between domestic and international conflicts in the two-level game of EU policymaking. With regard to crisis outcomes, our results underscore continuity. In spite of the pressure exerted by the crisis, the EU and its member states proved unable to reform the defective asylum policy. Instead, they reinforced the external borders and externalized the problem solution to third countries, which provided some respite. By relying on “defensive integration,” they have been buying time. The dysfunctional common asylum system has been left untouched.

This chapter presents the conflict structure at the EU level. International conflicts prevailed, and they were mainly of three types – vertical conflicts between the EU and its member states, transnational conflicts between member states, and externalization conflicts between the EU/member states and third countries. Other types of conflicts were secondary. The emerging conflict structure, which was consolidated only in the long period after the conclusion of the EU–Turkey agreement, is characterized by the antagonistic relationship between three camps – the EU core coalition (including destination and frontline states in addition to EU actors); the coalition of transit and bystander states; and the coalition of civil society actors, international organizations, and domestic opposition parties. The two-dimensional conflict space is structured by a dimension that opposes the pragmatic, ”realist” EU and its allies to its principled adversaries and a dimension that distinguishes its humanitarian from its nationalist adversaries.

This chapter sets the stage for the studies. It presents the outlines of the general framework, gives a brief account of the argument, introduces the gist of the empirical approach, and provides an overview of the volume.