Angela Merkel accompanied by Turkish PM Ahmet Davutoglu, talks to refugees during a visit at the Nizip refugee camp in Gaziantep province, southeastern Turkey, Saturday, April 23, 2016. Lefteris Pitarakis/Press Association. All rights reserved. One of the agenda items for the European Council of 15 December 2016 was on the newly fashioned principle of ‘effective solidarity’ in the field of EU migration policy.
This was the latest addition to a number of previous attempts to build consensus in this critical policy area, including through such diametrically opposed principles as a fully fledged and legally binding solidarity policy, based on the relevant provisions of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and other subsequent instruments; and a system of ‘flexible solidarity”, as proposed by the Visegrad Group during the Bratislava summit of 16 September 2016.
How many more terminological innovations will be needed before the matter can be settled once and for all? As President Martin Schultz remarked during the summit, “it is deplorable that none of the solutions proposed so far was either flexible, effective, or had much solidarity at its heart”. “It is deplorable that none of the solutions proposed so far was either flexible, effective, or had much solidarity at its heart”.
