This chapter presents the institutional preconditions and crisis situation at the EU level and in four types of member states – frontline, transit, open destination, and closed destination states. We show the configuration of interests among these states based on these preconditions and the likely outcomes that derive from them. Given the cumulation of both problem and political pressures in the open destination and transit states, these states are destined to become the major protagonists not only in the national responses to the pressure but also in the search for a joint EU policy response to the crisis. For these states, stopping the inflow of refugees and sharing the burden of accommodating the refugees who have already arrived was a priority. They shared this interest with the frontline states. But the interests of the frontline and destination states differed with regard to the reform of the CEAS: Together with the other member states, open destination states were in favor of restoring the Dublin regulation, while the frontline states wanted to reform the CEAS in such a way that they would no longer have to assume the entire responsibility for accommodating the flood of new arrivals.

This chapter begins with the problem of Donald Trump on social media—both the propaganda that led to his election and the companies’ seeming inability to control his supporters while in office—leading up to the January 6 2021 coup attempt. It contextualizes these events in a broader narrative about social media “political bias,” which turns out not to be a problem of bias so much as an effort by politicians to intimidate companies into under-moderating their allies. Such efforts aim to leverage the inability of the companies to exercise self-control in the face of short-term temptations and threats. Platforms, like governments, have problems with internal governance, in which personnel have incentives that diverge from the interests of the overall organization or operate under suboptimal time horizons. In the literature on governments, the tools to mitigate these problems tend to travel under the rubric of “the rule of law.” This chapter defends the idea of dispersing power to independent institutions under the control or at least supervision of diverse groups of employees and nonemployees as a key tool to create a kind of platform rule of law.