The Refugee Crisis as a Lens which Focuses the Deficits of European Integration

Abstract

In the wake of the financial crisis, the survey indicators of what citizens of most EU member states were afraid of mostly concerned economic questions. The level of declared discontent would remain relatively strongly correlated with the depth of crises, through which particular countries were muddling through. In the span of the last few years, those economic fears were pushed to the background by those associated with the inflow of migrants, which was to some extent an effect of the easing of crisis conditions in most countries, but mostly resulted from the migration crisis being the key issue of public debate in 2015. On the basis of survey data as well as arguments in the public sphere, the present paper utilized a dichotomous juxtaposition of the cosmopolitan and the nationalist attitudes as an interpretative tool for analyzing contemporary tensions around the migration problems.