EU’s Disunited Response to the 2015 Refugee Crisis: A View from the Perspective of the Psychological Theory of DID

Abstract

This article analyzes the political rupture among EU member states during the 2015 refugee crisis. On the one hand, EU members like the Visegrad Four unilaterally built fences to halt undocumented migration. Conversely, Germany and Sweden operated an open‐door policy. This disparity produced a perception of a disunited EU failing to implement its common immigration and refugee policy. Rationalist and functionalist explanations stress a lack of national political interest among states in the common immigration and refugee policy and malfunctioning of European supranational mechanisms. In line with this Special Issue, this study takes a sociopsychological angle using insights from Dissociated Identity Disorder (DID) theory that understand behavioral and functional difficulties in terms of the psychological disintegration dynamics (dissociation) of a multiple self identity. I argue based on this that in 2015 the EU’s state of multiple self may have been so dissociated and so lacking in sociopsychological integration that it could not see some of its members, like the Visegrad Four and Germany, as part of its collective self. This view then allowed the dissociated members to express their own “personality” and identity and function independently. As a result, the EU’s behavior towards refugees lacked coherence, stability, and continuity.