Migration is part and parcel of human history and an inherent feature of social and economic growth and transformation. And yet, during the last 30 years, migration, particularly when it happens outside regulated schemes and controlled pathways, has been primarily represented and conceptualized as a ‘crisis’, as an abnormal event that disrupts the ordinary course of social and economic activity (Martin et al., 2014). In Europe, framing migration as a crisis has reinforced a securitized view of migration, making it a top concern in the European Union (EU) policy agenda (focusing particularly on the management of forced migration arising from conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere) (Estevens, 2018). Indeed 2015 was a ‘crisis year’ with over 1.8 million irregular border-crossings at the EU’s external borders (1,822,337 in 2015), of which nearly half (885,386) (Eurostat, 2017) were recorded at the Eastern Mediterranean route from Turkey to Greece. Following these flows, asylum applications reached their peak in 2015 at 1,257,000 (Eurostat, 2021), reinforcing the usage of the term ‘crisis’ to speak about both migration and asylum-seeking.
The concept of crisis is contested—as to crisis of what and for whom? Was 2015 a crisis for Syrians seeking refuge in other countries, or was it a crisis for transit and destination countries in Europe because they felt that migration and asylum flows were out of control? And what was in crisis, governance mechanisms, reception centres, welfare systems or border guard capacity? Menjívar et al. (2019: 2) rightly notes that “the term ‘crisis,’ is overused in today’s society, and its meaning is somehow diffused: today’s crises are becoming the “new norm”. In some definitions, the ‘asylum crisis’ or the ‘refugee crisis’ semantically addresses ‘refugees’ or ‘migrants’ as the main cause of the ‘crisis’, rather than investigating the real causes of the emergency (Crawley & Skleparis, 2018). In some other definitions, the notion of crisis is used as a signifier to explain its consequences on different actors and systems, notably on “Europe”, the “EU” or “the EU Member States”, such as the “European refugee crisis”, the “European humanitarian crisis” (Carrera et al., 2019; Dines et al., 2018), the European “solidarity crisis” (Grimmel & Giang, 2017), “Europe in crisis”, and as an identity and a “racial crisis that derives fundamentally from the postcolonial condition of “Europe” as a whole” (De Genova, 2018: 1765).
A crisis is commonly identified as an extraordinary event leading to increased but temporal instability and uncertainty in the pre-existing status quo or perceived ‘normality’. Policy and governance studies have been long interested in understanding policy processes in the context of financial, humanitarian, energy, and health crisis at national and international levels. Their first observation is that as there is no objective measure for identifying a ‘disruptive event’ as a crisis, the events need to be perceived as a crisis (Grossman, 2019). Policy makers and implementers try to make sense of the highly dynamic context during a ‘crisis’ through processes of naming, selecting and storytelling (Rein & Schön, 1996). A crisis often calls forth public policy responses, but the events themselves are often clouded by uncertainty and ambiguity (Grossman, 2019). Through cognitive framing, governance actors develop these policy responses (Geddes & Abd-Houj, 2018).
A second point arising from the governance literature is that diverse actors operating at different scales get involved in the crisis management process, making it multi-level. Hybrid forms of coordination and contestations emerge in multi-level governance in crisis responses that is contingent upon policy and political legacies (Liu et al., 2021). Thirdly, the actors are mainly concerned to bring “order” and a sense of “normality” rather than to ensure compliance with formalized rules (Gadinger, 2021) in such situations. Governance structures may aim to restore the pre-crisis status quo (based on reinstating “order and control”) or maintain the system or fix the experienced problems with patchwork like reforms at the margins of the legislative and policy structures (Bourbeau, 2018: 29).
This paper considers the 2015–2016 refugee emergency as a governance crisis. We acknowledge that the extraordinary flows of that period constituted an emergency that soon proved to be hard to manage with the existing governance capacity and migration policies. The inadequacy of the existing institutions and processes for dealing with the emergency paved the way to a governance crisis. We investigate this governance crisis as a process that opened up the floor for policy change through the redefinition of institutional roles, the transformation of pre-existing rules and norms as well as the emergence of new discursive frames. Thus, we zoom in on actors, legislative and policy structures and narratives to analyze how this crisis shaped migration governance in ways that have a lasting effect beyond the immediate crisis period.
The coupling of migration and crisis is not a recent phenomenon. The genealogy of the migration-crisis nexus shows that global migration was perceived as one of the ‘new’ threats challenging the international order and, thus, framed mostly as a security issue. This security lens formed the conditions of seeing and understanding the global migratory movements as a ‘crisis-generating phenomenon’ in the 1990s (Weiner, 1995). In the early 2010s, migration as a crisis became dominant in the media, policy and academic discourses to discuss migration in Europe (Cantat et al., 2020). At the global policymaking level, such a view of migration as a crisis, juxtaposed to migration as orderly and regular, is corroborated in the vocabulary adopted by the Global Compact on Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (2018) and has been criticized for its rigidity and lack of touch with reality (Triandafyllidou, 2022).
As in the 1990s and early 2010s, the depiction of 2015–2016 as a ‘crisis’—regardless of being a fact to the extent that millions of people moved from their homes to seek protection and better livelihoods in other countries—has become an omnipresent lens in the public discourse for understanding migratory movements (Hagelund, 2020; Krzyżanowski et al., 2018). This particular 2015 ‘crisis’ gave stronger political impetus to the EU destination and transit states’ migration and asylum agenda. It opened a vast space for novel techniques of fragmentation, politics of categorizing, collective securitization and the launching of restrictive policies towards both migrants and asylum-seekers, often obfuscating the distinction between the two while failing to acknowledge the realities of mixed migration (Crawley & Skleparis, 2018).
While the above elements of securitization (Cantat et al., 2020), an excessive emphasis on migration control (Geddes & Hadj-Abdou, 2018; Paul & Roos, 2019), and border deaths (Pécoud, 2020) have been there for the last 20 years. We argue that the ‘governance crisis’ leads to ‘crisis’ as a mode of governance which intensifies these features of securitization and deterrence by normalizing exceptional defensive instruments such as push-backs, detention, accelerated asylum procedures, not only at the EU’s external borders but also leading to criminalization and dehumanization also within the EU (Pallister-Wilkins, 2015; Triandafyllidou & Dimitriadi, 2014). As Bello (2020) underlines, the securitization of migration is spiralling, involving an array of actors, discourses, policies, and practices embedded in a prejudiced narrative of migration in the times of crisis.
This paper seeks to take scholarly inquiry into the ‘crisis’ governance of migration a step further by investigating what are the actual characteristics of a ‘crisis mode of governance’. Can we identify the specific features that form this crisis mode? This paper focuses on the admittedly over-researched migrant and refugee emergency of 2015–2016, adopting though a broader temporal and spatial lens. We look not only at European transit points (like Greece, Italy and Hungary, Poland) or major destinations (Austria, Germany, Sweden and to a lesser extent the UK) but also at destination countries in the region, notably Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey. In addition, we do not focus on the 2015–2016 period only but extend our focus to the four years before and after covering the whole period between 2011 and 2018. The reason is that the countries in the region had felt the pressure of the Syrian civil war already since the mid-2011 and had gone into ‘crisis mode’ for dealing with the massive population flows. Expanding the focus of our inquiry we avoid over emphasizing a specific turning point (like that of fall 2015–early 2016) where a particularly acute emergency became a game changer.
Based on a meta-analysis of eleven country cases, we explore in what ways each country sought to manage the ‘crisis.’ The database used for this article is a compilation of the results from RESPOND project bringing together 78 country reports, 6 comparative thematic reports in the referred sub-fields of governance (border management and controls; reception, protection and reception) and several reports on specific sectors (e.g. housing, labour market, public health). For each sub-field and sector of migration governance, we examine three dimensions: actors, laws and policies, narratives. We investigate which were the actors involved in each country (public, private, hybrid organizations) and at what level (local, federal, national, regional and global) they operated; we look at policies on paper and practices on the ground and how they evolved as the flow of people grew during the years under study, in each country and seek for similarities and differences among these policies. We also focus on the discursive framing of asylum and migration issues in this period. We understand the connection between actors, laws/policies, and discourses as an interactive one (see Fig. 1).
Our attempt to develop a descriptive at least framework of ‘crisis’ as a mode of governance for migration arises from our critique of the Multi Level Governance approach (both type I and II) (Hooghe & Marks, 2001; Panizzon & Van Riemsdijk, 2018). Adopting MLG as our initial analytical framework in the RESPOND Project revealed several shortcomings. The first problem was that MLG treats governance from a static perspective, ignoring largely the temporal changes and complexities of interactions shaped by perceptions and power relations. Temporality is at the heart of the migration governance, particularly in a time of crisis (Sahin-Mencütek, 2018). MLG concentrates on current problems in public policymaking, assuming that the improvement of coordination and cooperation among actors is the goal and the ideal solution. Doing this, it fails to reflect on the conflicting and competing discursive frames that impact governance. It overlooks the interactive relationship between governance and narratives (see Fig. 1 above).
MLG also tends to simplify of the complex interactions among actors because it “sheds light on the possible patterns in vertical relations, while it does not effectively explore the horizontal relations, which are however crucial, especially at the local level” (Campomori & Ambrosini, 2020: 1). Third, The MLG approach partially overlooks the historical trajectory of migration and geopolitics that are crucial components of the governing of migration in regions encountering massive displacements from neighbouring countries such Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan or Iraq (Fakhoury, 2019). Moreover, due to MLG’s focus on levels and actors operating on the global, national and local scales, it fails to zoom into the micro practices or informal governing components (Fassin, 2011; Tazioli, 2019). Our development of a ‘crisis mode of governance’ seeks to overcome these shortcomings and to point to these complex dynamics as they emerged in the particular crisis period and to this day.
The paper starts by presenting the case studies and empirical materials on which our meta-analysis rests and the analysis method. The following sections discuss the migration governance features identified in the eleven cases analyzed, focusing on answering our three main research questions: who were the actors involved in the governance of the ‘crisis’ (we put the term in inverted commas to signal that it is a contested term); how did the legal provisions and policies evolved to deal with the emergency; and what were the narratives of governance promoted by the actors involved. In the concluding section, we identify the main features of what we call a ‘crisis modality’ for governing migration and asylum and discuss the implications of such a governance mode for the future of migration and asylum.
Before moving to the research design, a note on terminology is in order here. We speak interchangeably of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. We recognize as before 2015, the flows were mixed, and the motivations were also mixed (Van Hear, 2011) regardless of how they were framed by policy and media discourses put in specific, distinct socio-political and legal categories (as guests, displaced people, asylum seekers, refugees, labour migrants, irregular migrants) and in binaries (e.g. forced/voluntary; regular/irregular migration).