This paper deals with the refugee crisis and its impact on the European Union. The absence of a common immigration policy, even the existence of diametrically opposed attitudes and different practices of individual member states in the regulation of the refugee wave, caused a complete failure of European Union migration and asylum policies. It has, on the one hand, deepened the refugee crisis and, on the other hand, pointed to the structural and political crisis of the European Union, since they have brought into question the fundamental values of European integration, in particular human rights, unity, cooperation, solidarity, freedom and democracy. Similarly, the conflict of supranational and national interests and policies very pronouncedly came to light. The refugee crisis has also become a serious test for not only migration and asylum policies, which have proved unsuccessful, but has brought to the fore the structural and political weaknesses of European integration. Consequently, they have raised the issue of redefining the modalities of cooperation and institutional structure, especially relations of the European Commission and nation states, as well as relations among member states, particularly big and small ones.
The article deals with the issue of political participation in the network society. It examines how new forms of public communication enabled by ICT mediated communication (especially new media), as well as virtual socialization and the resulting new social structures (especially social networks), affect political participation, particularly citizens' influence on the government and the political decision-making processes. An analysis of these relationships shows that the changes brought by ICT, in both the social structure and the area of public communication equally, and the expansion of space of political freedom and political communication, do not increase political participation by themselves. It is determined primarily by technological requirements, and then by sociostructural and sociocultural factors, as endogenous properties of certain societies that substantially determine their overall social and political dynamics. In that sense, the level of development of the virtual sphere, the numbers and diversity of social networks and new media, cannot by themselves be considered to be independent variables, nor can they be considered outside of the specific social context. This is particularly noticeable in transitional societies in which specific (undeveloped) sociostructural and sociocultural factors are the key obstacle to the development of political participation, and hence democracy.
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