Europe in the Face of the Refugee Crisis Héctor Romero Ramos María Magnolia Pardo López
Introduction It is on everyone’s lips today: the European Union is in crisis, its worst crisis yet. It is even debated whether the future of the Union is threatened. The United Kingdom confirms what until recently was unthinkable: a reversal in the integration process, and the many Member States, to the east and west, are questioning the benefits of adopting the euro and belonging to the Union, with a lively and bitter social debate between the transfer of sovereignty or the national withdrawal. It is true, talking about a European Union in crisis or its uncertain course or seeing it plunged into paralysis is part of recurring rhetoric, almost a tradition. Suppose the already effective exit from the United Kingdom has been the most significant evidence of the said crisis in recent years. In that case, the pandemic generated by the spread of Covid-19 in late 2019 and early 2020 threatens to become the new emblem of that disturbing internal division. However, the narrative about the crisis has been part of constructing a success story about the European integration process until today. According to this narrative, the integration process’s main actors have actively sought the development of “crisis” situations to promote the European project’s advancement. This has been interpreted as authentic turning points —understood as opportunity cost— where the European Union must choose between greater integration or jeopardizing what has already been achieved. Obviously, from this dilemma, the first option was an inevitable choice as a product of the zero-sum game between national and European interests, while the emerging crises allowed agreements between political leaders and public opinion about the need for greater integration. The main consequence of that European narrative was a broadening of the term "crisis" semantic field by adding the meaning of "stimulus" to it. Its main use value lay in its explanatory capacity to describe the passage from one stage to another in the integration process. (Moreno Juste, 2016, p. 230)
But the ideological function of this rhetoric seems to have been broken. Today we have gone from thinking about the crisis, using the terminology of Janet Roitman (2014), from the account of the error to doing it from the account of the complaint where moral arguments predominate over the institutional or technical explanations. The account of error gives us a definition of a crisis as a result of an institutional or agent error. As such, it can be corrected through institutional reforms and behaviors, which leads to a “happy ending” when we reach the foreknowledge that we have lacked until now. The second account is about the denunciation of the immorality of the world. It shows that the crisis is the result of the moral deficiencies of the institutions or the decisive agents in the events. This supposes that, if there were a moral reform, things would happen
