Integrative Organized Hypocrisy? Normative Contentions within the EU and the Refugee Migrant Crisis

In 2015 and 2016, 2.3 million individuals applied for asylum in Europe, the highest number since the creation of the EU. The unprecedented strain on the Common European Asylum policies (CEAS), along with the asymmetric pressure on external border countries and the lack of unified support for border controls, highlighted the tensions between member-state sovereignty and regional competence. According to Lavenex (2018), the Refugee and Migrant Crisis (RMC) was first and foremost a crisis of governance, expressing doubts about the EU’s ability to “fail forward” into further integration in the long-run because of “organised hypocrisy”, an unintended organisational strategy deployed to cope with otherwise irreconcilable differences between normative aspirations and real-life actions concerning asylum. This article revisits Lavenex’s premise of European governance and organised hypocrisy and argues for a more optimistic outlook on European integration. Using the infrastructural Europeanism framework as identified by Pelizza and Loschi (2023), this article argues that despite the legal and legislative gridlocks that surround important issues such as asylum, European integration in relation to asylum is ‘failing forward’ in no small part due to organised hypocrisy and not in spite of it.