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The chapter focuses on the civic engagement and social movements during the so-called refugee crisis of 2015. Which were the people and organisations that have been doing so much for the reception and accommodation of refugees? Who were their predecessors in Europe? Who got active and for what reasons? The answers to these questions will help to judge how sustainable their engagement will be. The chapter reveals the more ephemeral character of volunteering and the more durable quality of organizational networks related to refugee protection.

The chapter deals with the reaction of important groups of political actors and administrative authorities. Concerning asylum and refugee politics, their activities are characterized as ‘organized non-responsibility’, by which tasks and duties are pushed to other collective or corporate actor groups that, at the same time, are blamed for what they are doing. This confusion enabled the corresponding actors to move the responsibilities back and forth between the local, regional or district, federal and EU levels and thus to disguise their own inactivity by pointing to the shortcomings of others – at the expense of the refugees directly affected. As will be shown, due to power relations in the fields of legitimacy there had not been many possibilities to breach this wall of reciprocal paralysis until refugees acted in social networks and civil-society-organized collective action.

The chapter analyses the often-cited ‘causes of refuge’ and especially the context of the so-called refugee crisis of 2015. It argues that the approach on the development–migration nexus has to be broadened to analyse the vicious circles of lack of development, organized violence and forced migration. This is considered to be the new transnational social question of the twenty-first century. The chapter especially treats the role of organized violence in its different forms and presents empirical evidence from two broader regions, where its entanglement with lack of development and forced migration could be observed, that is: Central–North America and sub-Saharan–North Africa–Middle East–Europe.

The chapter reconstructs the events of autumn 2015 and argues that these can be understood as a complex network of rational decisions, spontaneous acts of desperation, courageous actions and tactical behaviour by individual and collective actors: refugees, their non-profit or for-profit assistants, state bodies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and politicians on the local, national and European levels. Some sociological rules such as the ‘unanticipated consequences of purposive social action’ and the Thomas theorem, according to which ‘if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’, help to explain these processes.

The chapter deals with the great opportunities for European societies not only to let refugees arrive, but to arrive as society at oneself in the sense of a more adequate self-perception and concept. Three levels are distinguished. First, arriving at oneself includes reflecting the experiences of persecution, displacement and flight during and after the Nazi regime. Second, the treatment of the ‘guest-worker’ generation in Germany and elsewhere during the second half of the twentieth century could be critically reconsidered in terms of arrival. Third, Germany and other countries get the historic opportunity to arrive in Europe in a more substantial and sustainable way. Although the societal and political development after 2015 may invite more sceptical or pessimistic analysis and prognosis, the ‘refugee crisis’ contains a great opportunity to refine the project of a European society in a globalized world.

Finally, the challenges and opportunities of letting refugees and other social groups arrive are discussed, first by presenting the empirical case of Germany during 2015, when almost 1 million unregistered refugees entered the country. Second, different models of social integration and deepening the understanding of arrival are exhibited. Third, arriving as a concept in a broader perspective, such as that developed by Hannah Arendt, also means remembering and rooting. The new transnational social question invites us to arrive at the current state of the global world by taking over global responsibility.