The Refugee Debate in Central and Eastern Europe: Can the EU-Turkey Deal Survive Without Intra EU Convergence on Relocation and Resettlement?

The Global Turkey in Europe (GTE) project aims at establishing a platform to discuss and analyse the rapid transformation of Turkey in a European and global context. In this phase, the project focuses on the refugee crisis and its impact on EU-Turkey relations, as well as on the EU’s migration and asylum policies. Public discourse on the issue is polarized and often confused: GTE aims to provide a forum for people with different professional backgrounds, experiences and opinions to meet and discuss various facets of the refugee crisis, alongside field trips designed to better inform the dialogue between participants. The fourth event in this series took place in Budapest on 23-24 February 2017. The workshop focused on the refugee debate in Central and Eastern Europe and in particular on the Visegrad countries’ resistance to the relocation and resettlement schemes put forward by the European Commission.

Report from the field trip and seminar held in Budapest on 23-24 February 2017 and organized by Stiftung Mercator, Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI), Istanbul Policy Center (IPC), and Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS) within the framework of the project “Turkey, Europe and the World: Political, Economic and Foreign Policy Dimensions of Turkey’s Evolving Relationship with the EU” (Global Turkey in Europe).