The Migrant Crisis and EU Border Fences

 September 25, 2015

A few days ago while seeing the hundreds of refugees from the Middle East flock on Greek ferries, buses, taxis and trains in their drive north to the Macedonian border, I recalled a 20-page seminar paper I was required to write on the question of frontiers at Sciences po Toulouse.

The year was 2010, just one year before the start of the Arab revolutions in Maghreb, Egypt and the Middle East.

After briefly outlining the evolution of the European concept of frontier – the frontier as a zone like in the middle ages, or the frontier as a line like in our times – I dealt, as requested, with the question of human trafficking, illegal immigration and the options available for securing the EU’s external borders.

During the seventies I had completed my military training as a border guard patrolling Romania’s eastern frontier with what was then the Soviet Union. The reserve officers’ school provided me and my colleagues with the essential legal and logistical knowledge employed at the time to secure the country’s borders. That type of specialized knowledge proved of great assistance in 2010 for completing my assignment at Sciences po. The conclusion of my paper would not please many European policymakers, because it stated in no uncertain terms that the European efforts to make the continent’s borders impenetrable were probably doomed to fail and that a host of other solutions had to be considered in order to address the problems of smuggling, trafficking and illegal immigration.

Still, European politicians from Hungary to Ukraine or Estonia wrongly believe that a frontier can be secured by erecting fences and they are even willing to spend large amounts of cash to do so. Unfortunately, as a recent article published by American geographer Reece Jones (“Why Border Walls Fail”, Project Syndicate, September 2015) clearly proves, putting up fences between the US and Mexico, or as now around the European Union, only marginally slows down the influx of illegal immigrants. Moreover, as Reece Jones argues, fences are mainly meant to stop poor people from entering a richer country or region. That’s because people with means will always find alternative ways to reach their desired destination: fake papers and passports, bribes and so on.

At the end of WWII, according to a Canadian specialist, only five border fences or walls existed in the world, the best-known of them all being the Berlin Wall. Today we have no less than sixty-five, with two thirds of them having been built in the last twenty years. Expensive and inefficient, they stand proof however of flawed neoliberal thinking and vain efforts to securitize frontiers sometimes stretching for thousands of kilometres.

By abandoning such misguided efforts and by concentrating instead on slowing down or regularizing the flow of migrants, and by tackling the root problems that had forced them to leave in the first place, we will be in a better position to arrive at a humane solution to the plight of illegal migrants and refugees.

Sure, migrants should not be allowed to make a mockery of the EU’s external borders, even if all the billions spent on securing them were in fact a dodgy investment. Alas, most politicians would prefer to listen to sellers of border surveillance hardware than to finance a comprehensive study provided by geopolitical consultants such as myself, which would probably save their taxpayers large amounts of money. Migrants should be made to understand, as much as possible, that they should wait for their resettlement or asylum papers in the few “hot spots” (in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Greece, Italy, Serbia and possibly Bulgaria) created by the Union and the UN to that end, instead of arriving or stampeding in very large numbers inside the countries of their choice in Europe.

To be an effective deterrent against mass migration, however, such centers should provide decent accommodation and nourishment to refugees – which has not been the case until recently, according to the UNHCR – as well as fair and speedy processing of asylum applications that should become the norm and not the exception.

The EU and the Migrant Crisis

 September 13, 2015

For a continent long renowned for the excellent quality of its primary and secondary education, the beginning of the school year was until recently the season’s most important event. Not anymore. From Budapest to Brussels, government and Union officials have their hands full with the migrants’ crisis, which threatens to get out of control.

TV screens and the printed European media are full of images of tens of thousands of Syrian refugees heading for Germany as if they were heading for a second Mecca. Why Germany ? Syrians know fully well that the southern members of the Union have had their economies devastated by years of austerity and therefore could not provide the social benefits that Germany alone seems able to afford. Sure, a few hundred migrants have trickled into Denmark, Sweden or the Netherlands, but the governments and population of these countries are far less willing to accept their asylum demands.

Then there are Angela Merkel’s statements to the effect that all migrants who can reach Germany will be accepted, which have aggravated the latest exodus from Turkey. The reason why she has made such an uninspired statement – when it was already clear that the Syrians do not need additional encouragement – will remain a mystery to me. As a consequence of it, the EU is experiencing another serious split between its Western European states and the newer, ex-Soviet EU members. Hungary and the Visegrad countries have flatly refused the idea of compulsory quotas of migrants to be accommodated in their countries, while their leaders are doing their darnedest to stem the flow of Syrians towards Germany.

After the euro crisis which has provoked a split between the North and the South of the continent, a second split between West and East could further endanger the very existence of the EU. Already, opinion leaders and politicians from the Visegrad countries and even Romania have accused the EU Commission of adopting the behaviour they used to know during Soviet times. If this is not ominous for the future of the EU, I don’t know what is…