The European Union’s response to the Mediterranean ‘refugee crisis’: The normalisation of securitisation

Abstract

The goal of this chapter is to explore the European Union's (EU) response to the Mediterranean ‘refugee crisis’ mainly from 2013/4 to 2016, as well as beyond this ‘peak’ period, by means of the triangulation of document and discourse analysis, newspaper articles and secondary scholarly literature. We provide an overview of the main events, the EU’s responses (including the Member States), and discuss the consequences of what we identify as the ‘normalisation of securitisation’. We conclude that this increasingly common practice is detrimental to the European integration project as well as to the freedoms of its citizens in addition to promoting the exclusion of non-EU citizens.