The European refugee crisis: has the EU-Turkey deal worked?

Abstract

The current refugee crisis which primarily stems from the Syrian Civil war has largely affected the European states thus forcing the EU to seek for alternative measures to deal with the mass influx of people. Since the largest number of irregular migrants was penetrating into the EU through Turkey the former decided to cut the deal with Turkey to curb the irregular flow. The objective of this study was to find out whether the deal contributed to the refugee crisis management and how this affected the EU-Turkey bilateral relations. For this purpose, the qualitative research based on the content analysis of five progress reports prepared during the implementation of the EU-Turkey statement as well as Turkish and European newspapers covering the period from fall 2015 to spring 2017 is conducted. The study arrived at the following conclusions: 1) The deal with Turkey, which envisages to resolve the refugee crisis through the resettlement and readmission, helped to drastically reduce the number of irregular arrivals thus making the arrivals more or less manageable for the EU despite the fact that 1:1 mechanism has not been followed and has resulted in more people resettled than readmitted. 2) The deal has not tangibly affected the EU-Turkey relations since the latter has not got the visa waiver by the due dates and accession talks are assumed to be stalled nevertheless Turkey is getting funding from the EU which assists Syrian refugees’ management and maintenance within Turkey.