Author : Tamara Ehs
Tamara Ehs currently does research at the Department of Legal History and Social Sciences at the University of Salzburg. She also teaches on questions of democracy and the Austrian constitution at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna.
There is no refugee crisis, but a crisis of solidarity and responsibility; no refugee crisis, but a crisis of politics.
As if war, expulsion and being on the run were not already terrible enough, the European Union turns this traumatic experience into a complete disaster. Since the agreement reached with Recep Tayyip Erdogan in March 2016, Turkey is more than ever a European border post. Two million mainly Syrian war refugees currently live on Turkish soil; to make it impossible for them to continue their journey to Greece, and to comply with the EU-deal, the Turkish coast guard engages the inhuman, life-threatening method of so-called push-backs. The militarisation of the EU's external border is accompanied by a reduction of refugee protection that should put us to shame. People fleeing war are caught in barbed wire fences on the citadels of Fortress Europe in Ceuta, Melilla, Calais; others sink to t...