An ever farther union: an analysis of the failure of the European Union’s Emergency Relocation Scheme (2015–2017)

What conditions explain the non-cooperation of European Union (EU) Member States in policies concerning the reception of asylum seekers and refugees? Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), this article examines compliance with the mandatory quotas of the EU’s Emergency Relocation Scheme (2015–2017) across 22 Member States. It considers three conditions: governments’ stance on immigration, public opinion toward forced migrants, and prior asylum-seeker and refugee presence. The findings identify two sufficient pathways to non-cooperation, reflecting distinct domestic dynamics. A political-institutional pathway combines restrictive government preferences with limited prior asylum-seeker and refugee presence, while a societal pathway combines unfavorable public opinion with similarly limited prior presence. These results show that non-cooperation cannot be attributed to a single domestic factor. Rather, different configurations of political and societal constraints can generate equivalent obstacles to EU cooperation, while prior exposure to forced migrants emerges as an important contextual condition shaping these dynamics.