Migrations across the Mediterranean and Europe: What does the future hold?

The Arab Spring revolutions have cast a stark light on the authoritarian nature of the regimes with which the EU had been working for years to stem the flow of migration from the Mediterranean’s southern shore to the countries of Europe. A particularly tense and critical moment in this effort, before the transformations that would overtake North Africa, came in the summer of 2005, when the Spanish border patrol and Moroccan authorities used force on migrants storming the border fences surrounding the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco: several were killed in the incident, and the migrants were then deported to locations in the Moroccan desert (Cassarino and Lavenex 2012, 284). But the incident also set off a broad debate that in December of the same year prompted the Council of the European Union to put out a policy statement outlined in a document titled “Global Approach to Migration: Priority Actions Focusing on Africa and the Mediterranean.”

“The European Council,” the policy statement says, “agrees to initiate priority actions with a focus on Africa and the Mediterranean countries,” and does so on “an integrated and global approach” that in the short term is designed to “reduce illegal migration flows and the loss of lives” and “ensure safe return of illegal migrants” but in the long term seeks to form a “genuine partnership” with the same countries, looking to “strengthen durable solutions for refugees and build capacity to better manage migration, including through maximising the benefits to all partners of legal migration, while fully respecting human rights and the individual’s right to seek asylum” (Council of the European Union 2005, 1). Among other things, this entails the need “to promote cheaper and more easily available remittance services and support ongoing efforts by international organisations to improve data on remittance flows,” as well as to “consider supporting efforts of African states to facilitate members of diasporas to contribute to their home countries, including through co-development actions, and explore options to mitigate the impact of skill losses in vulnerable sectors” (ibid., 6).

In short, what the Council issued was a two-pronged policy statement. For on the one hand it stressed migration control and the need to return migrants to their countries of origin, but on the other hand it introduced the idea that the problem of migration cannot be attacked separately from that of development. The Council accordingly embraced a codevelopment vision that supported a policy of integrating migrants and creating the conditions that would enable them to participate in the labour market.

The Council’s 2005 policy statement also stressed the need to “work with neighbouring countries” (ibid., 6). More to the point, the idea was to negotiate with Morocco, Algeria, and Libya in order to find schemes under which to

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The concept of codevelopment was introduced by the Algerian-born French political scientist Sami Nair, who described it as a proposal aimed at integrating immigration with development in such a way that the country of origin, no less than the host country, can draw benefit from the migratory flow. This means that the two countries need to establish a consensual arrangement under which the contribution that migrants make to the host country does not translate into a loss for the country of origin (cf. Nair 1997). Following France’s lead, Spain worked the idea of codevelopment into its own migration policy. As Carlos Giménez explains the idea, “codevelopment involves initiatives that two or more organizations in two or more countries linked by a migratory flow undertake for the mutual benefit of those countries under a scheme of mutual support. These initiatives are carried out both in the country of origin and in the host country. Their main thrust comes from a group of migrants in the host country” (Giménez 2004; my translation). See also Gozzi, Venturi, and Furia 2011, 5ff.

cooperate in the fight against human trafficking and in readmitting migrants to their home countries. As Hugo Brady (2012, 278) points out, however, “related negotiations have failed in the past because ‘a country with 2,000 nationals illegally resident in the EU, sending money back home, is infinitely better off than a country with 2,000 extra unemployed people,’ according to a senior official working in the JHA [Justice and Home Affairs] Council.” Implicit in that remark is the recognition that the problem of migration cannot be solved without first addressing the need to redefine Euro-Mcditerranean relations in the new landscape that was formed in the wake of the Arab Springs.

The EU carried on with its policy of closing up its borders and clamping down on so-called illegal migration. The question now is whether it is sustainable for the EU to continue along the same course after the dramatic events of the Arab Springs and the surge in migration that followed.

In 2011, while serving as European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Cecilia Mahnstrdm put forward a policy proposal to form mobility partnerships with the southern Mediterranean countries, describing this policy as built around migrants and designed to ensure that human rights are protected both in Europe and in third countries. In that spirit, she stressed the need for closer cooperation with these countries, in such a way that both sides stand to benefit. And the mobility partnerships themselves she envisioned as playing an important part in the process through which to democratize the North African countries (Malmstrom 2011).

What exactly would go into these mobility partnerships was not immediately clarified. In November 2011 the European Commission issued a communication titled “The Global Approach to Migration and Mobility” (GAMM), stating that “The Arab Spring and events in the Southern Mediterranean in 2011 further highlighted the need for a coherent and comprehensive migration policy for the EU” (EC 2011c, 2). “The Commission,” the document goes on to state, “has already presented a range of policy proposals and operational measures on migration, mobility, integration and international protection [...]. Those proposals were fully endorsed by the European Council in June,” and the EU has since

taken immediate action by launching dialogues on migration, mobility and security with Tunisia and Morocco [...] and making the necessary preparations to start the dialogue with Egypt. Similar dialogues will follow with other countries in the Southern Mediterranean region, notably with Libya [...]. The dialogues allow the EU and the partner countries to discuss [...] all aspects of their possible cooperation in managing migration flows and circulation of persons with a view to establishing Mobility Partnerships. (Ibid.)

In the document, the GAMM is described as resting on “four equally important pillars: “(1) organising and facilitating legal migration and mobility; (2) preventing and reducing irregular migration and trafficking in human beings; (3) promoting

Democratization and development 235 international protection and enhancing the external dimension of asylum policy; (4) maximising the development impact of migration and mobility” (ibid., 7).

Under the first pillar, the GAMM was focussed on a number of priorities that included facilitating the mobility of youth, students, and researchers; streamlining the visa programme; and making it easier to find information about job openings (ibid., 15).

Under the second pillar, the GAMM priorities included (a) the “transfer of skills, capacity and resources to partners to prevent and reduce trafficking, smuggling and irregular migration, to ensure return and readmission, and to strengthen integrated border management”; (b) “cooperation on document security, paving the way for visa facilitation for frequent travellers from priority partner countries”; and (c) “initiatives to provide better protection for and empower victims of trafficking in human beings” (ibid., 17).

Under the third pillar, the document reads, “the EU needs to enhance solidarity with refugees and displaced persons and such efforts should become an integral part of the GAMM. The EU should increase cooperation with relevant non-EU countries in order to strengthen their asylum systems and national asylum legislation and to ensure compliance with international standards. This could enable these countries to offer a higher standard of international protection for asylum-seekers and displaced people who remain in the region of origin of conflicts or persecution. The EU should encourage its partner countries to incorporate this dimension in their national poverty reduction strategies” (ibid.).

On 12 June 2013 the European Parliament approved an asylum package establishing a framework legislation for building a common European asylum system (outlined in EC 2014). Under this system, effective from the fall of 2015, all EU member states can rely on a common framework for granting asylum, enabling “more countries [...] to take responsibility for the people who come for protection in Europe” (Malmstrom 2013).

Finally, under the fourth pillar, the GAMM priorities include (a) “diaspora investment vehicles that could channel the voluntary contributions by the diaspora and adding EU resources to boost the development-oriented initiatives and investments in priority countries, such as in the Southern Mediterranean”; (b) “private-public partnerships to engage migrant entrepreneurs and SMEs in trade, investment and skills transfers between EU Member States and partner countries,” with a view to capacity-building in these countries; and (c) “assistance to partner countries to identify and monitor bona fide recruiters in order to empower migrants, notably with a view to facilitating circular migration” (EC 2011c, 20).

However, despite these principled policy statements, the EU has yet to commit to a global approach to migration and mobility: its focus continues to be aimed at clamping down on migration and stemming its flow (Lavenex and Stucky 2011, 136). Indeed, “Schengen countries have reintroduced border controls on around 70 different occasions since border controls first came down in 1995” (Brady 2012, 275). In June 2011 the European Council met to discuss migration with a view to renegotiating the Schengen principles. In its conclusions to this meeting, the Council stated that “a safeguard clause could be introduced toallow the exceptional réintroduction of internal border controls in a truly critical situation where a Member State is no longer able to comply with its obligations under the Schengen rules” (European Council 2011, p. 8, § 22).^[1]

To be sure, the Schengen Borders Code, of 2006, did include language under which “Member States should also have the possibility of temporarily reintroducing border control at internal borders in the event of a serious threat to their public policy or internal security,” and so the European Council conclusions of 2011 had a legal basis in their intent to make border controls easier in the face of the perceived threat posed by migration. But the “Schengen rulebook” has become an object of debate in the wake of the Arab Springs, and a wide range of positions have taken shape in this regard across Europe. Hugo Brady identifies four camps: we have (») the “nervous policemen” of Northern Europe, “including France and Germany, for which Schengen’s border and policing arrangements do not guarantee enough security”; (ii) the “disgruntled border guards” of southern Europe, who “want the right to make exceptions to the EU’s ‘Dublin regulation’ on asylum, which stipulates that they must care for all asylum seekers who reach their shores first without sending them on to richer countries further north,” but who “have no wish to see reform damage the rights of their own citizens to move around freely”; (Hi) the “idealistic free movers [...] of the Schengen area to the east,” who “hugely value passport-free travel and arc therefore suspicious of any changes to the Schengen system”; and (iv) the “libertarian legal eagles,” who “are not states but EU institutions such as the European Commission, Parliament and Court of Justice,” and whose “mission [...] is to maintain the openness of national frontiers to goods, services, capital and people,” considering as well that they are “largely immune from anti-immigration politics” (Brady 2012, 276).

These divergent views and competing interests explain the European impasse on immigration and Europe’s inability to coalesce around a coherent policy vision on which basis to address the challenge posed by the flow of immigrants coming into Europe. To this end, as suggested, there needs to be an appreciation that the challenge can no longer be framed exclusively as an emergency situation or a security problem but is tied in with broader trends that are bound to have a lasting effect. It is for this reason that Euro-Meditcrranean relations need to be set on an entirely new basis, proceeding from an understanding of migrants as transnational actors capable of contributing to the development of the countries they leave behind as well as the countries they find refuge in.

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• [1] Compare the language in the motion for a joint resolution subsequently introduced in the European Parliament: “Member States want, as a very last resort, in the framework of this mechanism, the introduction of a safeguard clause to allow the exceptional réintroduction of internal border controls in a truly critical situation where a Member State is no longer able to comply with its obligations under the Schengen rules” (European Parliament 2011, 3, whereas M). 2 Regulation (EC) No 562/2006 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006 Establishing a Community Code on the rules Governing the Movement of Persons Across Borders (Schengen Borders Code). OJ L 105, 13.4.2006, p. 2, § 15.