A Reflection on the EU’s Response to the Syrian Refugee Crisis

            The blog post covering the Syrian refugee crisis was produced from a group of five likeminded students with an interest in the European Union’s response to the incoming refugees. Throughout the course of this semester, my fellow group members and I researched the political responses and policy implications regarding the social and economic effects that incoming refugees are having on the EU. The first post that my blog group submitted was mainly an overview of the Syrian refugee crisis as a whole, focusing on the origin of the crisis, how the EU became involved, and its overall significance within the global community. This provided readers an understanding as to the impacts that this humanitarian issue has on the international society and begins to provide insight into the how the EU is dealing with the mass amounts of incoming refugees. The second post was specifically centered on how incoming refugees were influencing the economic state of the EU, discussing the short and long term effects, the costs and benefits of incoming refugees, and the policy implications that could be used to reduce economic shock. This post narrowed in further on EU’s response to the crisis at hand while looking at it from an economic stand point. The third and final blog group post focused on the social impact that the Syrian refugees are having on the states within the EU, discussing the opinions and perspectives of both the EU citizens and the Syrian refugees, while specifying and analyzing the differing policies regarding refugees within various EU states. The last post took a humanitarian perspective on the Syrian refugee crisis, delving into the opinions and reactions of the people, and how the EU is choosing/not choosing to integrate refugees into European culture. We chose to cover the economic and social/humanitarian issues that the EU is responding to because they are the most controversial and discussed when regarding the EU and the Syrian refugee crisis.

            Before my peers and I began the necessary research for these blog posts, we first discussed the questions at hand, identified what we needed to cover, formulated the structure of the upcoming post, and lastly chose a method to efficiently and equally divide the work. For the first post, we chose a method where we divided the research among two individuals and the writing portion among the rest. Following this method, we decided to choose a different approach for the remaining two blogs, in which we divided the current post into specific topics, and assigned the writing and research for that topic to a member of the group. With the advice of Professor Wibben, my blog group and I decided to redistribute different roles for each member per blog, in order to have every individual participate in the different aspects of the blog. I contributed the research, citations, and summaries for specific topics regarding the first blog. For the second post, I summarized the economic benefits and losses that incoming refugees have on the economy of the EU in addition to contributing to the research and citations. Additionally, I contributed to the last blog post by researching and writing on the potential issues that could arise from various policy implications that the EU has chosen regarding how to handle the social disorder within states and communities arising form incoming Syrian refugees. In order to obtain the necessary research needed to write the blog posts, I read multiple news articles, scholarly sources from Gleeson library, and explored various organization’s informative websites including the European Parliament’s website and the IMF’s website. When reading news articles, I chose to stay away from heavily biased articles and focused on articles obtaining specifically to the topic at hand, in order to access information that had not been biased to the media. After reading many blogs, including past blogs from students of the previous Intro to International Politics class, I chose to write with an informative third person narrative in order to have less personal bias within the post. Working a long side my peers within a group setting influenced my approach to this blog because I was able to gain a new perspective on the topic at hand while being surrounded by like minded intellectual individuals with a common interest.

Being a part of a group established a sense of trust among my groups members and I, holding the ideal that we would all equally participate and finish our work accurately and in a timely matter. This sense of accountability for one another and the blog as a whole had each of us act responsibly, communicate efficiently, and cooperate with one another in order to produce an informative blog. Surrounding myself with my classmates made me feel comfortable and allowed me to express my thoughts and ideas confidently regarding the Syrian refugee crisis. I am glad that I was paired with these individuals and that we had a common interest in how the EU is choosing to respond to the incoming Syrian refugees. I chose to research this topic because I am very concerned with the state of this world crisis and the well being of the refugees. I wanted to gain more knowledge as to how the people and states within the EU were reacting and responding to this humanitarian issue at hand. With extensive research on the social and economic effects that incoming refugees have on the EU, I obtained a sense of clarity on the situation as a whole and now understand the concerns and needs of both EU citizens and Syrian refugees. Being a part of a group can have its difficulties, but with a common goal and interest in mind, my group and I were able to overcome slight setbacks and produce an informative blog. Overall the knowledge that I gained from researching my topic and being a part of a group made me into a more responsible and intellectual individual.