A Migration Crisis or the Crisis of the European Union?

  • Oleg N. Yanitsky Institute of Sociology, FCTAS RAS Russian Federation oleg.yanitsky@yandex.ru
How to Cite
Yanitsky O.N. 2019. A Migration Crisis or the Crisis of the European Union? — Sociologicheskaja nauka i social’naja praktika. Vol. 7. No. 1. P. 21-36. DOI: https://doi.org/10.19181/snsp.2019.7.1.6266

Abstract

Drawing on the works of Russian and foreign scholars and using my own experience of communication with the EU migrants in the run of my long-term stay in Europe, I came to the following conclusions. Modern migration crisis should be analyzed within the frames of a current geopolitical transition conditioned by the Fourth Scientific and Technological Revolution (hereafter, the STR-4), by the dynamics of the EC political structure, ethno-confessional conflicts as well as by the wars far behind the EU, that is I consider this crisis as a moment of global geopolitical dynamics. In particular, mass migration to the EU from the Near East and Africa during last 5–7 years represents a geopolitical ‘echo’ of former European politics in that part of the world coupled with new opportunities produced by the STR-4. Actually, the EU migration politics is a politics of a’ soft colonialism’ burdened by international and local ethno-confessional conflicts. Then, the migration and following adaptation to a new sociocultural environment are always two-ways processes. The migration crisis has various scales: transcontinental, all-European, and ca particular country ones coupled with growing disagreements and conflicts inside the EU as well as between it and the US. The politics of all-European unity and allembracing tolerance failed and it has been replaced by the political principle ‘everybody each on his own.’ Current migration crisis has confirmed the U. Beck’s thesis that we are living in a society of the ‘sideeffects’, that is of the side-effects of decisions taken earlier. The main source of the above crisis is rooted inside the EU i.e. it’s the struggle for the deficit resources and geopolitical domination of the Brussels over the rest member-states as well as between them because their interests are permanently evolving.
Keywords:
adaptation, agent, bureaucracy, crisis, global dynamics, European Union (the EU), migration, political protest, the STR-4, violation

Author Biography

Oleg N. Yanitsky, Institute of Sociology, FCTAS RAS Russian Federation
Doctor of Philosophy, Professor, Main Researcher

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Harvard
Yanitsky, O. N. (2019) ’A Migration Crisis or the Crisis of the European Union?’, Sociologicheskaja nauka i social’naja praktika, 7(1), pp. 21-36. doi: https://doi.org/10.19181/snsp.2019.7.1.6266.
Section
GLOBAL SOCIETY AND DEVELOPMENT PROSPECTS