‘The problem with refugees’: international protection and the limits to solidarity

This article demonstrates the ambiguity of solidarity as articulated in the European Union’s 2015 relocation schemes for persons in need of international protection. These schemes are shown in turn to reflect the wider limits to solidarity when it comes to the location of people in need of protection. The article also argues that in International Relations theory, the present limits to solidarity are still often either reified or denied, which limits in turn our ability to understand the ethics of global problems and interventions. The final section of the article sketches out a via media which collapses—rather than bridges—the ‘real’ and the ‘ideal’ and which might better serve our understanding of the ethics of difficult problems like the refugee ‘problem’.