Kriesi, Altiparmakis, Bojár, and Oan? unpack the management of the refugee crisis faced by European Union (EU) policymakers during 2015–16 in their new book, investigating why member states and EU authorities failed to produce a sustainable policy response and reform the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), resulting in a “defensive integration” policy outcome (Rebordering Europe: External Boundaries and Integration in the European Union, Frank Schimmelfennig, 2021). In Coming to Terms with the European Refugee Crisis, Kriesi et al contend that the EU failed to adequately respond to the 2015–16 refugee crisis due to the body's low asylum policy capacity, compounded with uneven political and problem pressures and diverging interests among member-states.

The authors first establish their theoretical approach to analyzing the crisis, building upon the “polity approach” (Crisis Pressures and European Integration, Federico Maria Ferrara and Hanspeter Kriesi, Journal of European Public Policy, 2021) to European integration, which recognizes the EU as a compound polity composed of European nation-states that have consolidated through historical macro-processes of bounding, binding, and bonding (9). The framework introduced in Chapter 2 allows the authors to analyze the response to the