The Regulation on the Provision of Emergency Support within the Union: Humanitarian Assistance and Financial Solidarity in the Refugee Crisis

Regulation 2016/369 establishes an emergency support mechanism for the provision of humanitarian aid in response to natural or man-made disasters giving rise to severe wide-ranging humanitarian consequences within the European Union. Although its scope of application is much broader, the Regulation has been adopted as an emergency measure for the management of the ongoing refugee crisis. It is therefore promising to look at the newly established mechanism against the background of other measures adopted or proposed in response to the crisis. In this perspective, the Regulation appears to fit within an overall strategy whereby Union funding is used as an instrument of policy-making to bring about further centralization. Finally, the analysis of the mechanism, which is meant to provide support to Member States “in a spirit of solidarity”, suggests a few conclusions on the meaning of the principle of solidarity and its implications in the context of the refugee crisis. It is suggested that two very different visions of solidarity, an emergency-driven and a structural one, coexist and may interact with each other in two ways.