Flexible solidarity: rethinking the EU’s refugee relocation system after Bratislava

The remaining 27 EU member state governments met in Bratislava on 16 September for their first major meeting without the UK since the Brexit referendum in June. As Solon Ardittis writes, one of the main developments to emerge from the meeting was an apparent shift in the EU’s approach to the migration crisis, with so called ‘flexible solidarity’ being presented by some member states as an alternative model to the mandatory refugee relocation scheme which has been implemented for the past two years. Drawing on the lessons that have been learned from the crisis until this point, he outlines how this model could be made to work in practice.