scholarly journals EU Refugee Resettlement: Key Challenges of Expanding the Practice into New Member States

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyra Jakulevičienė ◽  
Mantas Bileišis

Abstract Refugee resettlement is not new to EU member states. But the EU only accounts for about 10 percent of resettlements globally. Before the 2015 European Council decisions to relocate about 160,000 persons from Italy and Greece only half of EU Member States participated in resettlement programs. Relocation of refugees has emerged as a new form of resettlement as an EU reaction to the growing refugee influx. It is likely to become a permanent part of Common European Asylum Policy. The refugee emergency has intensified discussions about the application of the solidarity principle to pressure member states not yet engaged in relocation to contribute to the joint efforts of the EU. But this has created serious political controversy in many of the new (eastern) member states. The article outlines key elements of refugee resettlement and relocation that have recently emerged in the EU and discusses the prerequisites for the sustainable use of this tool in an unfavorable political and unclear legal environment, with particular focus on new member states. The main goal of the article is to identify factors that need to be considered for the design of sustainable resettlement and relocation programs, considering the aspects of political salience, legal conditions, burden-sharing, and member states’ capacity. The case study of Lithuania presented in this article suggests that such programs need to be carefully considered and adequately funded as there are ample pitfalls which can quickly discredit the idea among the citizens.

Subject EU immigration division. Significance Immigration to Europe has fallen substantially over the past three years, largely because of stricter rules in EU member states and enhanced cooperation with the EU's neighbours. This downward trend, however, coincides with growing tensions between member states over how to tackle immigration once migrants and refugees enter European territory. Impacts Unable to agree on an effect asylum seekers reform, the EU will continue funding African countries to stop irregular migratory flows. Disengagement of EU search and rescue assets and more reliance on under-trained North African coast guards will make sea migration deadlier. Divergent views on immigration burden-sharing could worsen foreign relations between populists in Italy and those in Hungary and Poland.


2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Haddad

AbstractWhile humanitarian intervention in cases of state instability remains a disputed concept in international law, there is consensus in the international community over the need to provide protection to refugees, one of the corollaries of such instability. Using the European Union (EU) as a case study, this article takes a policy perspective to examine competing conceptions of both 'responsibility' and 'protection' among EU Member States. Responsibility can be seen either as the duty to move refugees around the EU such that each Member State takes its fair share, or the duty to assist those Member States who receive the highest numbers of migrants due to geography by way of practical and financial help. Similarly, protection can imply that which the EU offers within its boundaries, encompassed within the Common European Asylum System, or something broader that looks at where people are coming from and seeks to work with countries of origin and transit to provide protection outside the Union and tackle the causes of forced migration. Whether one or both of these concepts comes to dominate policy discourse over the long-term, the challenge will be to ensure an uncompromised understanding of protection among policy-makers.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 403-407
Author(s):  
Juris Rozenvalds

Russian-speaking communities in the member states of the European Union (EU), especially the Baltic States and Germany, have earned special attention, in recent years, as subjects of important integration policies, on one hand, and the main targets of Russia’s propagandist efforts, on the other. Because a significant part of Russian-speaking communities accepted these efforts, questions were raised concerning the effectiveness of previous integration policies to strengthen the national identity and invoke a feeling of political togetherness. Thus the factors fostering and triggering integration and the relations between civic and ethnocultural components of integration are of wide interest. This paper presents a case study of Latvia, as a country with the highest share of Russian-speaking citizens among the EU member states and a clear prevalence of ethnocultural components in its integration policies in recent years. The study examines the successes and failures of the integration policies of Latvia during the last twenty-five years, using mainly direct observations and sociological data collected during the last twenty years. The results show that language knowledge, citizenship status, and socioeconomic conditions play an important role in integration. In addition, these factors appear more effective with development of inclusive political practices and civil society structures, cooperative discourse, and facilitation of mutual trust between ethnolinguistic communities.


Author(s):  
Emma Lantschner

The Covid pandemic has revealed how far we, as a European society, still are from the proclaimed Union of Equality. This book explores how the promise of equal treatment can become a reality and compliance with the EU acquis relating to equality and non-discrimination be improved. It studies enforcement and promotion aspects of the two watershed Directives of 2000, the Racial Equality Directive 2000/43/EC and the Employment Equality Directive 2000/78/EC, through the lens of reflexive governance. This governance approach is proposed as having a great potential in enhancing the likelihood of sustainability (or continuation) of reforms in the current candidate countries and EU Member States through its emphasis on reflexive learning processes and the cooperation between EU institutions, national authorities, and civil society actors. In order to deploy this potential, there is, however, a need for more consistent and transparent monitoring, both with regard to candidate countries as well as old and new Member States, and a reconsideration of the understanding of monitoring as such. It should be seen as helping to deconstruct own-preference formations and as an opportunity to learn from successes and failures in a cooperative and recursive process. To work on these lacunae and improve learning and monitoring processes, this book identifies indicators that are deduced from the comparative review of the implementation practice of the Member States. It is thus a contribution to the existing literature in the fields of Europeanization, governance studies, and the right to equality and non-discrimination.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-197
Author(s):  
Nina Paulovicova

Societies around the globe have been witnessing the emergence of the radical right, often seen as the result of neoliberal globalization. Democratic governance, liberalism, human rights, and values are being questioned while populist, authoritarian, and ethnonationalist forms of governance are being offered. In the European Union, the tumultuous developments have been testing the viability of the identity marker of Europeanness and its perseverance in EU member states. What we are witnessing are significant shifts in the discourse about sameness and otherness, the convergence of left and right ideologies and the emergence of hybrid forms of authoritarianism and democracy that have been dubbed as illiberal democracy or authoritarian liberalism. The rise of the radical right and its mobilization across the EU member states is reflective of these processes, and it is the goal of this author to understand the mechanisms behind the empowerment, mobilization, and normalization of radical right through the case study of Slovakia. In particular, the effort of this paper is to understand how the far-right party Kotlebovci – Ľudová Strana Naše Slovensko (ĽSNS) in Slovakia re-conceptualized the notion of nation and normalized far-right ideology as a pretext of a broader mobilization.


Author(s):  
F. J. Brewerton ◽  
Jane LeMaster

Globalization has been responsible for a number of ongoing interrelated trends including an accelerated worldwide movement toward economic integration, an ongoing proliferation of new multinational corporations, a widening search for new economic opportunities by multinational corporations, and an increasing concern for and attention to bankruptcy as a contingency strategy for multinational corporations when primary strategies catastrophically fail. The economic benefits associated with the removal of trade barriers is also attracting new member countries to the EU and other trading blocks but these new member countries bankruptcy law provisions may have uncertain contingency strategy implications for MNCs.This paper comprises (1) a brief summary of the general trends associated with globalization; (2) a discussion of why international bankruptcy law is becoming increasingly important in the formulation of contingency strategy in multinational corporations; (3) a discussion and analysis of bankruptcy law provisions in new EU member states; (4) a discussion of the strategic implications associated with new member states bankruptcy laws; and (5) general conclusions regarding the attractiveness of new member states bankruptcy laws to multinational corporation strategists.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-140
Author(s):  
Iva Vuksanović Herceg ◽  
Tomislav Herceg ◽  
Lorena Škuflić

AbstractUnlike the old member states that compensate the negative net birth rate with immigration, the new EU member states face both migrational and natural demographic decline. In the last decade, poor level of economic development as well as the accession to the EU encouraged net emigration from the new member states. Panel data for the 12 new member states for the 2007 - 2016 period were used to determine how the length of membership and GDP per capita trailing behind the EU average affect the proportion of the net emigration. It has been shown that on average a country has to reach at least 85 percent of the average EU GDP p.c. (measured in PPS) to prevent emigration, but this level increases with each year of membership by 1.37 percentage points.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-75
Author(s):  
Gediminas Valantiejus

AbstractIn 2016, the European Union has launched a new and ambitious project for the future regulation of international trade in the European Union and the rules of its taxation: since the 1 May 2016, the new Union Customs Code (UCC) has entered into force. It revokes the old Community Customs Code (CCC), which was applied since 1992, and passed in the form of EU regulation sets brand-new rules for the application of Common Customs Tariff and calculation of customs duties (tariffs) in all the EU Member States. It is oriented to the creation of the paperless environment for the formalisation of international trade operations (full electronic declaration of customs procedures) and ensuring of a more uniform administration of customs duties in the tax and customs authorities of the Member States in the European Union. Therefore, the article raises and seeks to answer the problematic question whether the Member States of the European Union themselves are ready to implement these ambitious goals and does the actual practice of the Member States support that (considering the practice of the Republic of Lithuania). The research, which is based on the analysis of case law in the Republic of Lithuania (case study of recent tax disputes between the taxpayers and customs authorities that arose immediately before and after the entry into force of the UCC), leads to the conclusion that many problematic areas that may negatively impact the functioning of the new Customs Code remain and must be improved, including an adoption of new legislative solutions.


Author(s):  
Danislav Drašković ◽  
Dragoslav Mihajlović ◽  
Ljubo Glamočić ◽  
Samir Hrnjić

The European Parliament and the European Council have adopted the Directive 2008/96/EC relating to the safety of traffic infrastructure. This Directive binds the EU Member States to implement the guidelines on roads comprising the parts of the Trans-European traffic network, regardless of the stage those roads are in. EU Member States have a possibility to adopt the guidelines and regulations from the Directive and build them into the national regulations on parts of the roads that are not a part of the Trans-European roads. Based on the facts stated above, there is a research problem in a form of a question “Can the Directive 2008/96/EC be applied in the traffic in Bosnia and Herzegovina?” i.e. are its guidelines implemented as a manner of approximation with the EU regulations, and what are the effects of its implementation. This is a traffic problem in its nature, closely related to road traffic safety, and we find the answer to the research problem in theoretical and empirical research in this area.


2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 290-304
Author(s):  
Bhaswati Mukherjee

The emerging dynamics between President Trump, NATO and EU promises to constitute a fascinating new narrative of the changing contours of the international order in this millennium. President Trump has completely reversed American policy towards NATO. As a businessman, Trump has made it clear that henceforth US funding and support would be linked to the US getting a ‘good deal’ from its NATO partners. NATO had earlier anchored itself to the benchmark goal that 2% of a country’s GDP should go to defence spending. President Trump is yet to establish close and friendly relations either with NATO Secretary General or leaders of NATO Member States. Trump’s public embrace of autocratic rulers has caused resentment within NATO. On CSDP the earlier European approach was to lean heavily on the Americans to fund NATO. The friction between the goals of NATO and CSDP increased under the Trump Presidency because of Trump’s insistence on burden sharing of resources and funds among NATO Member States. The CSDP and NATO have overlapping mandates which could be complicated in crisis situations. An independent CSDP remains the core issue causing friction. The U.S. and other non EU weapons producing countries (chiefly Norway and soon the U.K.) also believe that CSDP is manipulating the rules of defence procurement in favour of companies based on EU soil. Is the US justified in attacking CSDP? Many EU Member States believe that protecting European defence industries is a small price to pay for ensuring that a NATO under American leadership not get involved in small regional wars, as an example, in Francophone Africa. Brexit is casting a long shadow. EU and NATO would need to realign themselves from a strategic perspective. NATO and the EU need to prepare for a strategic scenario post Brexit. Following Brexit, 80 percent of NATO defence spending will come from non-EU members. This would shift the onus of decision making within NATO away from the EU. One of the greatest challenges for NATO and the EU is America’s new narrative on Iran and North Korea. EU and NATO are slowly waking up to the new reality that there will be no “business as usual”. If NATO’s military deterrence loses its credibility, this will undermine the credibility of both EU and NATO and endanger international peace and security. What could the EU and NATO do next? Are there any “low hanging fruits” that could be picked in the near future? The EU and NATO understand that there can be no ‘business as usual’. The new global narrative on security would depend on how NATO and EU respond to America’s changed narrative. A timely response is the need of the hour.


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