What media called a « refugee crisis » was in fact a governance crisis, triggered by a significant, but far from unmanageable, surge in « mixed inflows » at some EU external borders. The epicentre of the crisis was the loss of viability and legitimacy of what is a core component of any international regime, namely a mechanism for responsibility sharing that in the case of EU’s migration and asylum regime was embodied in the so-called Dublin principle. After the failure of the relocation experiment, the crisis has temporarily and precariously been fixed through different forms of externalisation targeting primarily Turkey and Libya