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.

This chapter presents the theoretical framework that is applied in the study. We expect the management of the refugee crisis to be heavily shaped by the underlying political conflicts in the compound EU polity of nation-states, by the crisis situation that prevailed as a result of the policy-specific heritage, and the combination of problem and political pressures at both levels of this polity in interaction with a set of particular characteristics of the EU polity. The vertical and horizontal territorial conflicts that are typical of this compound polity are expected to have been exacerbated by two aspects of the crisis situation in particular – the limited number of competences of the EU in the policy domain of asylum policy and the asymmetrical incidence of the refugee crisis among the member statesWith respect to the outcomes of the crisis, we expect more continuity than change – in terms of both policy and conflict structures – and limited spillovers from policy to polity change.

This chapter examines how the refugee crisis was framed and portrayed by right-wing actors. Its main puzzle is how the initially sentimental, humanitarian approach to the coverage of the refugee crisis was gradually transformed to present refugees as an existential threat to European societies. We track the frames and themes utilized by mainstream and radical right parties in their official speeches, documenting that utilizing a framework focusing on security and identity, they slowly managed to shift the perceptions on immigrants arriving at European shores. Furthermore, their rhetoric aimed at actively downplaying the humanitarian element, claiming instead that the search and rescue operations had perverse effects, motivating immigrants to make the crossings into the EU and worsening the refugee crisis. Therefore, in Hirschman’s terms, a rhetoric of jeopardy and perversity dominated the right's reaction to the refugee crisis, slowly eroding sympathy toward migrants.

In this chapter, we describe the main elements of our empirical design for studying the refugee crisis. In the first part of the chapter, we describe our case selection, which involves two steps. In the first step, we classify EU member states into five main types: frontline, transit, open destination, closed destination, and bystander states. In the second step, within selected countries, but also at the EU level, we study the crisis by breaking it down into key policymaking episodes. The policymaking episodes we have chosen involve legislative acts as well as administrative decisions and novel practices by state institutions. In the second part of the chapter, we expand upon the empirical approaches we employ for studying the crisis. Our book draws upon a variety of original datasets involving various methods of data collection. While many of these are mixed throughout the book, the central dataset we rely on uses policy process analysis (PPA), an original method for capturing the policymaking and politics surrounding policy debates using media data, which we describe more thoroughly in this chapter.