The EU Performance during the Refugee Crisis

In the face of massive refugee flows between 2015 and 2016, EU institutions and migration agencies – such as FRONTEX and EASO – were unable to cope with the emergency and Member States progressively reverted to unilateral actions by temporarily suspending the Schengen agreement. In the aftermath of these events, the EU was extensively criticized by scholars, policy-makers, and politicians for producing poor results. Why did the EU perform so poorly? In this paper, based on a performance approach, we argue that the poor performance of the EU was due to both external and internal determinants. We show that a combination of factors including inadequate staffing and resources, leadership deficit as well as lack of consensus and power politics among Member States can explain the EU’s poor performance during the crisis. In theoretical terms, we add a performance approach to the study of EU governance and engage with recent European integration contributions. Empirically, we show how the lack of supranational capacity of FRONTEX and EASO hindered an effective response at the European level during the crisis.