Negotiating with Third Countries under the New Pact: Carrots and Sticks?
27 Friday Nov 2020
By Elspeth Guild, Jean Monnet Professor ad personam, Queen Mary University of London and emeritus, Radboud University Nijmegen.
The most pressing problem for the EU as regards working with other countries and international partners on migration and asylum is the EU’s own image in this area. The image has two faces, one inwardly facing, how is the EU’s record perceived within the EU itself and the other outwardly facing, how is the EU’s record in this area perceived by states around the world. In this blog I will only examine the external dimension, how the international community views the EU’s policies, legislation and action on borders, migration and asylum. The new Pact on Migration and Asylum (2020) promotes greater cooperation with partner countries to achieve EU borders, migration and asylum objectives. The assumption is that states outside the EU are willing partners to achieve EU goals in this area. However, as I will discuss here, this rosy picture is not entirely justified. The EU finds itself face to face with a condundrum: the greater EU and Member State exercise of coercion in border, migration and asylum policies, the harder it is for the EU to find countries willing to partner with it to achieve the EU’s border management objectives.
The EU’s action (or inaction) in this area is by no means a secret. International media around the world extensively covered the 2015-16 refugee arrivals into the EU, revealing the appalling conditions of arrival and first ‘reception’ which pushed almost 2 million people in desperate need of refuge and assistance to walk the length of Europe in search protection. This attention has been sustained in the international media, from the New York Times to Al Jazeera or the South China Morning Post (to name only a few of the English language outlets with an international reach). Rarely are the images positive regarding the reception of asylum seekers or migrants at EU external borders or border control operations. Instead, almost without exception they focus on the horrors – the Moria refugee camp in flames, the Presidents of the Commission, Council and Parliament at the Greek Turkish border encouraging border guards to prevent people who resemble the popular image of a refugee or refugee policy in general.