Letizia Palumbo is Research Associate at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies Global Governance Program in the Cultural Pluralism research area. She is affiliated with the DemandAT research project. She is also a Post-doctoral Researcher in Comparative Law at the University of Palermo.

It remains woefully clear that the EU has neglected solidarity in its asylum and borders policies despite constitutionalisation by the Lisbon Treaty. Those policies were dominated by the idea of responsibility, with the Dublin regulation establishing that States must cope with their asylum seekers arriving at their borders.This principle, at odds with the idea of a European approach, led to a political debate where hypocrisy became the guiding principle.

EUI Professors Marise Cremona, Brigid Laffan, Federico Romero, Olivier Roy and Anna Triandafyllidou reply in brief to the question ‘Will the Migration Crisis Break Europe?’

The LTDH inhabited a damp and cold office, where the wall paint was peeling and there was barely enough money for paper, let alone employees. The condition of the office, however, did not reflect the mood of the two LTDH leaders who we met there. They remained ebullient and determined despite the fact that the NGO had faced legal proceedings for having signed communiqués denouncing human rights violations, and despite the fact that people rarely dared to communicate with them for fear of reprisals. The policeman outside the door was a constant warning that the state kept a hostile eye on them. In Tunisia, Big Brother wore a baseball cap.

The Syrian crisis is one of the many expressions of a radically changing landscape in the field of international migration and asylum that the EU needs to deal with boldly. The earlier watertight distinction between refugees and economic migrants no longer holds.

The EU is in crisis. It started with a crisis about words. The Commission published its ‘European Agenda on Migration’ on 13 May 2015, but it was actually an agenda concerned with migration and asylum, if not primarily asylum. A few weeks later, journalists rediscovered that it matters to use the correct term for persons trying desperately to reach the EU in order to find protection: refugee, not migrant.

“The emergence of Mr Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian PM, as the ‘guardian’ of EU borders, organizer of Central European governments’ resistance against the unruly West European leaders, and as Hungary’s savior from the ‘uncontrollable flow of migrants’ is one of the strangest turns of events in the still unfolding drama.”

“Of course, the image of the ugly German that BILD’s recent anti-Greece campaign depicts is not representative for the German political spectrum. Nonetheless, BILD’s reckless provocation and the increasingly inward-oriented coverage of other more sophisticated German media outlets give a sense of the extent to which Euro crisis politics and debate have transformed large parts of the once firmly pro-European centre-right political discourse into a defensive, stubborn, and nationalist posture.”

“Pegida groups have now been set up in many Western European countries in what looks to be the quickest spread of far right and anti-Islamic activism on record. Following widespread media coverage, online groups first started to crop up beyond Germany in December and continued to spread in the wake of the jihadist terror attacks in Paris.”

The large increase in the proportion of working mothers, one of the main labour market trends in most OECD countries, has raised many concerns about its potentially negative effect on children’s wellbeing. However, in the current economic situation, it is very difficult to keep adequate standards of living conditions if only one parent works.