The EU and the Current Migration Crises – A Call for Member States to Face Political, Economic, Cohesion and Social Challenges

In the last decade, the European Union Member States confronted political, economic, cohesion and social challenges. A vibrant scientific debate discusses whether and how this affects their political agenda. This paper enters this debate by specifically investigating the impact that such challenges may potentially have on the EU Member States’ propensity towards the provision of humanitarian aid. In particular, it refers to the case study represented by the current EU migration crises started in 2015. The paper thus questions whether, and eventually to what extent, any political, economic, cohesion and social challenges differently influence each EU Member State. By referring to the Fragile States Index-The Fund for Peace, the political dimension focuses explicitly on citizens’ confidence in domestic institutions and political process legitimacy; the economic dimension on a society’s (real or perceived) economic development or decline; the cohesion dimension on the perceived trust of citizens in domestic security; and, finally, the social dimension on demographic pressures. The paper then hypothesises that the EU Member States, experiencing positive political, economic, cohesion and social trends in the last decade, show a higher propensity towards the provision of financial humanitarian aid. It also hypothesises that the impact of the four dimensions has a different extent and the cohesion and the economic dimensions highly influence the propensity towards the allocation of humanitarian aid to the EU migration crises than the political and the social dimensions. In order to test such hypotheses, the paper considers, on the one hand, the EU Member States’ trends over the period 2009-2019 and, on the other, each EU Member State’s yearly contributions to cope with the current EU migration crises by referring to the EDRIS Information System by the European Commission.