28 March 2011
The European Union (EU)’s foreign policy regarding the continuing political unrest and conflict in the Arab world has been cruelly exposed as ineffective and fragmented. Hesitancy over Tunisia and Egypt has been compounded by an inability to coordinate any sort of intervention in Libya. What’s new, you might ask?
Well, the problem is that there is another major crisis about to hit Europe and judging by the EU’s initial handling of the issue, a mighty row is about to ensue.
The crisis is migration: not the traditional forms of illegal migration that has plagued Europe since the end of the Cold War or state-supported migration policy which has resulted in failed experiments in multiculturalism but possibly the opening moves in a mass migration process which will result in literally several million people converging on Europe from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia minor.
For some time now, EU border agencies in the south of Europe, including the Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Greek have been struggling to stem the tide of mass migration and to process those who avoided detection and now seek asylum in Europe. The numbers are high – tens of thousands crowded into make shift immigrant reception centres in small islands in the Mediterranean from the Balearics to Lampedusa.
In Greece, the Authorities fear that they cannot cope and this is despite the deployment of FRONTEX, the EU’s border management agency. The number of migrants crossing the Turkish border into Greece has forced the cash-strapped Authorities in Athens to consider erecting old-fashioned wire fences, a clear move away from the Schengen ethos and the Copenhagen Criteria.
Spain ritually calls upon the rest of the EU to assist her as she tries to handle the flotilla-based migrant flood coming from as far away as Equatorial G uinea on the south Atlantic Ocean but as usual the calls fall on deaf ears. Too many EU partners remember Madrid’s unilateral decision a few years ago to grant citizenship to nearly a million illegal immigrants in Spain, which of course had a knock-on effec t across Europe, and are unwilling to help her out.
More recently, the political events in Tunisia, Egypt and now Libya have simply increased the pressure on the EU and Italy in particular. Since January, thousands of illegal immigrants from North Africa, mostly young men, have made their way to Lampedusa, a small island near Sicily. As expected, the Italians have requested the EU and other Member States to help them resettle the influx of asylum seekers and provide financial support. The fear in Rome is that hundreds of thousands of other migrants, many based in Libya itself or in Chad might take the opportunity to turn the first steps of movement towards Europe into a sustained migration.
How will the EU react to this crisis? So far, the Union has avoided any explicit reference to the problem, possibly in the hope that it might go away. However, wishful thinking is no substitute for resolute decision-making and the obvious options are not hard to see.
The first option is to struggle on as before, with some form of communal support mechanism being set up to alleviate the financial hardship of the most exposed EU Member States but this is hardly a policy. Indeed, attempts to downplay the severity of the crisis or longer tem implications, might simply fuel existing anti-immigration sentiment across Europe, with all that this implies.
The second option – and one favoured by the EU in the past – is to negotiate the problem away. In a bizarre twist of fate, it was Colonel Ghadaffi, the Libyan leader, who was at the forefront of EU attempts to control the flows of illegal immigrants in return for sizeable sums of EU aid and technical assistance – now clearly a policy dead in the water!
More robust border patrolling and interdiction is a distinct third option but one which demands a more muscular approach to illegal immigration and possibly an abandoning of international human rights legislation which compels states to accept and process refugees, irrespective of cost. For the EU to adopt this policy would signal a real retreat from the ethos of the ‘Founding Fathers’ and the political elite in Brussels, who still maintain a liberal-progressive stance on such matters, despite the reservations of the European people.
Irrespective of which option is more suited for the moment, the reality is that the options themselves could become redundant.
Over the next few years, the potential for the mass migration to intensify in strength and resolve is almost palpable. Under the current global economic stresses, the potential for such a migration movement to morph into a more politically charged, rich versus poor issue is almost guaranteed. It is also possible that the mass migration could become more structured and controlled, with the adoption of more aggressive and robust measures to evade or combat those seeking to block their advance to Europe. Under this scenario, frequent and bloody clashes between migrants and the EU’s border management agencies might become inevitable.
Given the EU’s general inadequacy in external policy formulation and unwillingness to open the migration issue for public debate and scrutiny, what kind of solution can we expect regarding this new crisis? Sadly, probably not the right one!