A Preliminary Assessment Of The European Refugee Crisis And Its Impact

Since the outbreak of the Arab Spring, the west Asia and north Africa region is in turmoil continuously. Especially, the Syria civil war has caused 6.5 million people homeless and 4.4 million people becoming refugees since 2012. At the same time,some terrorist organizations like Islamic State are growing fast in the region. Europe,as the neighbor, has always been the main destination of migrants and refugees from the region. In this refugee crisis, the Europe is the first to be affected. Only in 2015,the total number of refugees swarming into the Europe has surpassed one million and the situation is becoming even more serious.This Paper firstly defines the refugee problem from the perspective of international law, introducing the main principles of dealing with the problem in the international law and practice and the obligations of the countries receiving refugees. As the birthplace of modern international law, the Europe has continuously concluded the laws, regulations and experiences of handling the problem when dealing with several refugee tides. However, due to the imbalance of the European Integration, the EU has birth defects handling the refugees not only in internal coordination mechanism but also in the legal framework, which cause inefficiency and impedance.Under the circumstance, the problem becomes a real crisis, striking all aspects of the Europe along with the weak economy recovery, the furious terrorism, the Ukraine deadlock, the Brexit and so on. Now, the refugee problem has been an unavoidable issue when the EU or its member states make diplomatic, domestic or economic policies. The paper analyses the different positions on the refugees of the EU and the member states in details by listing lots of statistic data and examples, especially the Germany as ’the destination’, Eastern European counties as ’the transfer’, southern European countries as ’ front-line’ and France, the UK, the western Balkan countries,Turkey as important stakeholders. By analyzing their basic stand-points, the paper tries to forecast the future of the refugee crisis and its comprehensive impact on the Europe as well as on the world.