FMHT: Sojka Discusses EU Migrant Crisis

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The Initiative on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking, a research initiative at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, hosted Dr. Aleksandra Sojka on November 29, 2016 for a conversation on the migrant and refugee crisis in the European Union, supranational policy and political identification in Europe.

Sojka, a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Center for European Studies, is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Granada, Spain Department of Political Science. Her teaching and research interests include comparative politics, European Union politics and political sociology of Europe with a special focus on the politics and societies of Southern and Central Eastern Europe.

Sojka’s talk was entitled “Making or Breaking the Union: Migrant and Refugee Crisis, Supranational Policy and Political Identification in Europe.” She discussed how current global trends toward nationalism have affected European integration.

“The rise of reactionary nationalism in the EU has been translated into the rise of Euroskeptics,” Sojka said. “Those parties and politicians try to appeal to potential voters by questioning the institutions, the policies and the whole idea of European integration. That’s a very specific European development, but I think it follows are more global tide. We have seen that with Brexit on one side of the Atlantic and the presidential elections in the United States.”

According to Sojka, while the EU was established on the basis of economic integration, the potential for the creation of a political community was also an intention during the establishment of the EU.

“The EU has been established based on economic integration, however, since the beginning the potential for creating a political community was there,” Sojka said. “The idea of an ever-closer union among the people’s of Europe is in the text of the treaty that established the European Economic Community in 1957.”