[CANCELLED EVENT] The European Union and migration challenges. Discussing the role of differentiation

[CANCELLED EVENT] 

Dimitris Avramopoulos –former European Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs, and Citizenship (2014-2019), former Greek Minister for National Defence (2011-2012, 2013-2014), and former Foreign Minister of Greece (2012-2013)– will discuss migration and differentiation with Blanca Garcés, Research Coordinator and Senior Research Fellow at CIDOB, Emmanuel Comte, Senior Research Fellow at CIDOB, Juha Jokela, Programme Director  at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs and Eulalia Rubio, Senior Research Fellow at the Jacques Delors Institute. 

Dimitris Avramopoulos will share his unique experience as European Commissioner during the 2015–16 migration crisis at the EU borders. In that instance, both the absence of internal border controls inside the EU under Schengen cooperation and the related Dublin mechanism to allocate asylum seekers among EU member states threatened to disintegrate. He will recount the policy preoccupations of the main stakeholders during this episode, including Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain, and Greece. He will also present his vision of the best way to organise the EU’s migration policies to prevent such crises. 

EU IDEA experts will then discuss with Dimitris Avramopoulos the role of differentiation in addressing the EU’s migration challenges. Differentiation refers to a degree of flexibility in the cooperation among EU member states. Can we find a solution to migration challenges with less differentiation, i.e., more harmonised rules, and stronger institutions at the European level? Or, on the contrary, in more differentiation, i.e., ad hoc cooperation among selected member states and non-member states? What are the relative strengths and weaknesses, to solve crises, of European harmonisation and unification on the one hand and flexible rules, flexible participation on the other hand? 

>> The session will be streamed live at CIDOB’s Youtube channel

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822622.