Abstract
The chapter is concerned with the conceptualisation of remedial actions, which have been deployed in response to the “migration crisis”. It discusses how the EU frame-narrative has shifted in favour of risk, resilience, and “exceptionality”, leaving human security dispersed among different types of policy actions. With this in mind, the chapter discusses at length the framing and development of specific policy instruments such as the so-called “EU-Turkey deal”, dataveillance systems, the “hot-spot approach”, or reform of Frontex and Europol, to name a few. It also discusses the emergence of resilience as an important security logic. In this respect, it analyses how this relatively new security narrative has heavily influenced EU security and policy discourse on migration and migrants, calling for increased administrative resilience of the EU asylum system, or border security system, to name a few. Further, the chapter discusses how risk management, resilience, “exceptionality” and human security have been intertwining in policy responses to terrorism, trans-border organised crime, as well as in the utilisation of EU military means in increasing resilience outside EU borders. In this respect, it looks into EUFOR “Sophia”, Frontex Joint Operations and EU capacity building and border assistance missions, discussing their securitising features.
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6.1 Introduction
The collective conceptualisation of remedial action constitutes the concluding part of the frame-narrative. It represents the institutionalisation of specific interpretations, making them a part of the security practice framework. In this respect, remedial action is supposed to be the culmination of the interpretative process and a natural and logical extension of specific security logics that informed the tasks and objectives set out in the diagnostic and evaluation segments. This, however, is not always the case. Conceptualisation of remedial action often proves to be most complex, ambiguous, and confusing part of frame-narrative (Schön & Rein, 1991; van Hulst & Yanow, 2016). It commonly becomes a forum for tensions between security logics, be it those which have already reached structuration in the diagnosis and evaluation or new interpretations that have entered the stage in the last moment (Boas & Rothe, 2016). In this sense, the remedial action phase may follow the interpretative path that has already been set up, but also include a change of internal dynamics of the frame-narrative, downgrading, emphasising specific logics, or even completely diverting from the diagnosis and evaluation, introducing ambiguities and incoherencies into the framing process (Dekker, 2017, p. 130).
As outlined in the previous chapter, the EU policy actors have diagnosed and evaluated the “migration crisis” following predominantly human security and risk management logics, both containing traces of “exceptionalist” security. The remedial action segment has proved to be a game changer in terms of application of these security logics, reshuffling their prominence and revealing their tangled nature. While risk management has sustained its prominence in the conceptualisation of remedial actions, the human security-centred interpretations of the crisis have become deemphasised into a secondary or supporting logic. Instead of focusing predominantly on humanitarian aspects of the crisis, the EU policy actors have been explicitly promoting the risk-oriented measures, emphasising the risk management approach and introducing the concept of resilience into the EU frame-narrative. This is not to say that human security-centred logic has been lost in the EU’s conceptualisation of remedial actions, but it has been rather dispersed between resilience- and “exceptionalist” security-centred measures, acting as a legitimising element rather than a guiding rationale. In this respect, the EU measures such as naval and border operations (“exceptionalist” security), as well as capacity-building operations and trust funds (resilience) have been framed as instruments of humanitarian relief and development aid designed specifically to target the root causes and alleviate human suffering. In this respect, resilience as a new addition to the frame-narrative proves to be an interesting case of intersection between the security of migrants and the notion of borders and migration management systems capable of withstanding shocks and disturbances caused by increased migratory flows. The EU policy discourse connects the effectiveness and functionality of border and asylum systems with its ability to provide necessary protection for refugees and asylum seekers. As often indicated in policy documents, without well-functioning security and asylum systems, the EU will not be able to protect migrants from organised crime or process their asylum applications in timely manner and with due diligence.
It should be also noted that “exceptionality”, even though there are more singular examples of its application in the conceptualisation of remedial actions (such as military mission EUNAVFOR MED “Sophia”), it also has a tendency to overlap with other logics. It can be identified in the framing of risk and resilience-centred policy actions such as relocation mechanism and EU capacity building missions, respectively. In this respect it can also be defined as a security logic of dispersed nature, saturating specific remedial actions with more robustness and extraordinary character.
This chapter is structured in accordance with the dominance of specific logics that manifest in the EU’s conceptualisation of remedial action towards the “migration crisis”. In this respect, the first sub-chapter is devoted to the logic of risk management that has been identified as the most dominant and the most significantly institutionalised within the EU policy responses to the crisis. It focuses on a plethora of measures, such as “hotspots” or the European Border Surveillance System that have been framed as means of surveillance and control of migrants and their movement. Further, the chapter proceeds to the analysis of resilience-centred conceptualisation of remedial actions. Resilience, being a part of a broader family of risk-driven logics, has been identified as a new development in the EU frame-narrative, reflecting a distinctive set of measures designed to increase the robustness of the EU asylum system within the EU and to address the root causes of the crisis outside of EU borders. Here, resilience coincides with human security-oriented logic, being framed as an instrument for containing migration and mitigating factors which are threatening migrants’ lives and are pushing them out of their own communities. The third sub-chapter is devoted to “exceptionalist” security logic, analysing the way militarised and border security measures have been framed as life- and migrant-saving instruments and how they have been building on the humanitarian imperative and narrative.
6.2 Risk Management
Risk management logic has retained its prominence in the remedial action segment of the EU frame-narrative, effectively becoming both discursively structured and institutionalised within the EU policy discourse on the “migration crisis”. As already noted in the previous chapter, the risk management-oriented framing has been predominantly (but not exclusively) sponsored by the European Commission, promoting the notion of stability of the EU internal security realm, as well as defining the Schengen zone, freedom of movement, and EU external borders as the key referent objects. Such framing naturally leads to conceptualisation of remedial actions, centred on helping to regain the control over the movement of population within the EU and restoring the functionality of Schengen and the external borders of the EU. In this respect, the risk-oriented security measures traditionally refer to normalised, institutionalised forms of security governance and are based on broad cooperation between security agencies and systems, often operating within the internal-external security nexus (Lund Petersen, 2012, p. 702). As such, risk management and resilience have much in common, attempting to strengthen the effectives of the system, making it more robust and capable of withstanding crisis situations. That is why it is only natural to see resilience in some elements of risk management policies. Nonetheless, what is typical of the managerial approach is a belief that crises, future shocks and disturbances are fully governable. Resilience does not subscribe to this conviction. That is why risk management-driven policy actions usually assume a conventionalised and long-term character, focusing on the future foreseeable events and ways they can be managed and mitigated. In this respect, risk management measures are based on technologies of control and surveillance of “risky objects”. They are designed to navigate and govern possible “risky futures” and achieve an equilibrium between what is considered as satisfactory security and acceptable uncertainty (C.A.S.E., 2006, p. 468).
In this regard, the conceptualisation of responses towards the “migration crisis” has been driven by the development and improvement of already existing technologies of surveillance and control, oriented on administration of migratory flows and filtering capabilities of the EU border management systems (see European Commission, 2015a, b, c, f). The overarching aim of these remedial measures is to normalise the situation, regain control and restore the desired order within the borders of the EU. In this regard, much of the risk-oriented remedial actions are heavily embedded within internal-external security dimension and the borders, which during the crisis, have proved to become a problematic space for interpretative and practical reasons. As already discussed, the borders constitute the point where the framing process shifts from human security to risk management, reshuffling security priorities and changing the definition of the referent objects. This has led to interpretative tensions within the EU policy discourse and between EU policy actors (most notably the European Commission, the Council and the European Parliament) in regard to conceptualisations of remedial actions and their securitising consequences on migration and migrants.
In the next part of this chapter, I will focus on the internal and external dimension of the risk-oriented security measures, specifically by analysing activities employed to responding to the arrival of asylum-seekers at the EU’s external borders (e.g. through the introduction of “hotspots”), measures oriented to surveillance and control of population movement (e.g. return operations, European Border Surveillance System) and the prevention of irregular migration (through border control and measures against trafficking and smuggling, and the EU-Turkey deal). I also identify the policy responses that have become the most explicit examples of the tensions between human security and risk management logic within and outside the EU, namely the “hotspot approach”, “detention, returns and readmission” and the “EU-Turkey Statement”.
6.2.1 The “Hotspot Approach”
The so-called “hotspot approach” represents one of the most prominent examples of risk-based policy responses employed by the EU and framed as an instrument for regaining control over inflows of irregular migrants into the EU. The “hotspot approach” was introduced and elaborated by the European Commission and has quickly become the symbol of the EU’s response to the “migration crisis” (European Commission, 2015b, p. 6). It has been developed and implemented as a frontline mechanism for border and migration management, specifically designed to assist the EU border states, such as Greece and Italy, in coping with sudden and increased influxes of irregular migrants (Council of the European Union, 2015d, p. 2; European Commission, 2015b, p. 5). The main idea behind this approach is to increase the efficiency of EU reception capabilities by deploying specialised EU Regional Task ForcesFootnote 1 (EURTF) and Migration Management Teams,Footnote 2 entrusted with providing “operational support to Member States to ensure arriving migrants were identified, registered and fingerprinted, and channelled into the relevant follow-up procedures” (European Court of Auditors, 2017, p. 5). As stated in the “Agenda on Migration”:
(…) a new “Hotspot” approach is based on the European Asylum Support Office, Frontex and Europol working together on the ground with frontline Member States to swiftly identify, register and fingerprint incoming migrants. The work of the agencies will be complementary to one another. Those claiming asylum will be immediately channelled into an asylum procedure where EASO support teams will help to process asylum cases as quickly as possible (European Commission, 2015b, p. 6).
“Hotspots” are commonly depicted in the policy discourse as strategically located centres for migration and risk management (Council of the European Union, 2015b, g, h, c; European Commission, 2015b, c, 2016a, e; European Parliament, 2015b, c, d). They are the frontline hubs for the EU inter-agency data gathering and cooperation, employing complementary security measures and practices aimed at “improving border management, combating irregular migration, and creating sufficient and adequate reception conditions” (Papadopoulou et al., 2016, p. 19). In this respect, “hotspots” represent a physical space, where irregular migrants arriving at the EU borders become reframed, from human security-based referent objects to objects of risk that need to be managed with security technologies such as screening, security debriefing or biometric profiling (Amicelle et al., 2015). With these practices and technologies, the personal data of irregular migrants are put into the EU’s data gathering and surveillance systems such as migrant fingerprinting system (Eurodac), Schengen Information System, and Visa Information System, effectively becoming a factor in an equation calculating risk for the security of the EU and its citizens.
This fact and the process of reframing migrants from objects of protection to objects of risk has not gone unnoticed and has been reflected in the EU policy discourse as well as the general public debate concerning the “hotspot” approach. Deployment of “heavy intelligence machinery” on the frontlines of the “migration crisis has caused significant tensions between the human security and risk management logics in the EU (Jeandesboz, 2017, p. 367). In this vein, the European Parliament has yet again engaged in the debate emphasising that “great care needs to be taken to ensure that the categorising of migrants at ‘hotspots’ is “carried out in full respect for the rights of all migrants” (European Parliament, 2016f, rec. 85) focusing not so much on security but protection and humanitarian assistance (European Parliament, 2016d, rec. 13). However, the biggest criticism has originated outside the EU, mostly in the NGO sector, which has been condemning the EU for the introduction of so-called “anti-migrant security measures”, employing “inadequate, unfair and/or repressive measures towards asylum-seekers, who have been often kept in prolonged detention without access to asylum procedures and have received inaccurate or incomplete information on the latter, or have been swiftly returned” (Niemann & Zaun, 2018, p. 6). In this respect, the EU has been specifically blamed for the lack of any specific legal framework that would protect the fundamental rights of refugees and economic migrants (Amnesty International, 2016; LIBE, 2015). The discourse of NGOs and humanitarian organisations on the situation in the “hotspots” clearly frames the approach as inhuman and in violation of human rights and dignity, while Human Rights Watch indicated that “hotspots” constitute an outstanding breach of human security pointing towards poor medical services, inadequate food supply and accommodation (Human Rights Watch Website, 2016c).
6.2.2 Returns, Readmission and Detention
Detention (or using the EU nomenclature “reception”) and returns operations of irregular migrants have been a vital part of the EU migration- security continuum and have naturally become one of the key instruments for managing increased migratory flows in the EU (Ceccorulli & Labanca, 2016; Slominski & Trauner, 2018, 2021; Tazzioli, 2017). Even though detention and returns operations function under different legal and institutional frameworks, they both share similar goal, namely separation and/or removal of problematic, risky, or threatening migrants from EU public space (Mountz et al., 2013, p. 523). As already elaborated in the previous chapter, the EU regulates detention with the Reception Directive, allowing the temporary detention of migrants in order to (1) verify their identity during processing their asylum claims, (2) secure evidence when there is a risk of an applicant absconding, (3) in order to decide upon migrant’s right to enter the EU territory, (4) when protection of national security and public safety is involved, (5) and finally when a migrant has been subjected to a return procedure (European Union, 2013a, art. 8).
Even though the EU policy discourse on the “migration crisis” promotes the idea of detention as the last resort, most commonly emphasising the need for looking for alternative forms of reception, especially in reference to vulnerable groups (e.g. children), it also emphasises the need for rigorous identification (European Commission, 2017b, p. 9; European Parliament, 2016c, rec. 8), separation and return of those migrants who do not qualify for protection in the EU (Council of the European Union, 2015a, p. 3, 2016c, p. 7; European Commission, 2015b, pp. 9–10). In this regard, particularly the Council of the European Union and the European Council highlight the importance of detention measures in curbing and managing irregular flows of migrants into and within the EU territories (see for example Council of the European Union, 2016i, j, 2017d; European Council, 2015e, 2017b). As often reiterated in the outcomes of the Justice and Home Affairs Council (Council of the European Union), “to prevent secondary movements, detention measures in line with article 15 of the Return Directive should be applied urgently and effectively” (Council of the European Union, 2015j, rec. 8; see also: 2015f; 2016c, h). In this respect, detention has also been framed as an important migration management mechanism that facilitates the returns operations and deters further inflows of unwanted irregular migrants. In this respect, the Council has been underscoring that
All measures must be taken to ensure irregular migrants’ effective return, including use of detention as a legitimate measure of last resort. In particular, Member States should reinforce their pre-removal detention capacity to ensure the physical availability of irregular migrants for return and take steps to prevent the abuse of rights and procedures (Council of the European Union, 2015c, rec. 6).
In this respect, as a complementary response to the “migration crisis”, there is a visible increase in the EU policy discourse of references to returns operations as a form of migration management though voluntary or assisted (i.e. forced) removal of “aliens” from the physical, juridical, and social space of an EU member state (Slominski & Trauner, 2018, p. 102). As already indicated in the previous chapter, the return of “undesirable migrants” has been present in the EU migration-security discourse since the late 1990s and the full operationalisation of the Schengen zone (Huysmans, 2000; van Munster, 2009). However, it is the “migration crisis” that has raised its profile and framed it as an essential part of the EU’s risk and migration management toolbox (see for example Council of the European Union, 2015c, d, European Commission, 2015b, 2017a; European Council, 2015f; European Parliament, 2014, 2015a). The EU policy discourse on returns operations focuses predominantly on the idea of swift and effective return, readmission and reintegration of irregular migrants who have not qualified for protection, legal residence in the EU and/or have been flagged as a security risk to public safety (Baldaccini, 2009). In this respect, particularly the European Commission has been promoting the image of returns operations as an effective and inevitable scenario for all “unsuccessful asylum claimants who try to avoid return, visa overstayers, and migrants living in a permanent state of irregularity” (European Commission, 2015b, p. 7).
Trauner and Ripoll Servent (2016, p. 1420) observe that in the EU policy discourse, return operations have gained strong security features, being employed to deal not only with problematic migratory flows and expulsion of irregular migrants, but to also as a deterrent to human smuggling operations. As noted in the European Council conclusions:
Effective return, readmission and reintegration policies for those not qualifying for protection are an essential part of combating illegal migration and will help discourage people from risking their lives. All tools shall be mobilised to promote readmission of irregular migrants to countries of origin and transit (European Council, 2015a, p. 3).
In this respect, the EU policy discourse on returns is based on the notion that mobilisation and effectiveness of these operations relies as much on the internal as external factors, promoting the need for increased cooperation with third countries under the Migration Partnership Framework.Footnote 3 Here, the European Commission along with other policy actors has been employing a rather direct or even assertive approach towards partner countries that have been reluctant to comply with readmission and/or partnership agreements, explicitly stating that while some countries comply with their international and legal obligation towards the EU, many others do not cooperate in a satisfactory manner (European Commission, 2017c, p. 12). In this respect, the European Commission and Council have visibly emphasised the element of effectiveness, promoting political and administrative actions that could speed of the returns of irregular, unwanted migrants (Council of the European Union, 2015c, f; European Commission, 2015a, b, 2016k). In this respect, the EU has called for cooperation with third countries based on leverages and incentives that could facilitate (re)negotiations of readmission agreements increasing their scope and the effectiveness of return operations. As stated by the European Commission,
Overall, tailor-made approaches should be used to identify all the interest, incentives and leverages at stake with a partner country in order to achieve targets and commitments and to offer specific support measures by the EU and interested Member States to the partner country concerned – such as effective reintegration of returnees – so as to ensure a better management of migration, and in that context to further improve cooperation on return and readmission. The EU and Member States will need to employ their collective leverage in a coordinated and effective manner to achieve this result (European Commission, 2017a, p. 13).
In a similar spirit, the EU policy actors have consistently sought to make the return policy more effective by closing loopholes and interpreting the existing EU regulations more rigorously (Slominski & Trauner, 2018, pp. 106–107). This approach has quickly translated into further tensions between human security and risk management logics within the conceptualisation of remedial actions towards the “migration crisis”. The development of the “safe country of origin”Footnote 4 list represents a good example of such tensions, introducing a fast-track procedure for evaluation of asylum claims that was supposed to facilitate and increase the rate of returns decisions. As noted by the President of the European Commission in the 2016 “State of the Union”:
We are making our return policy more effective. The proposed new EU list of ‘safe countries of origin’ will allow for faster returns where an individual has no right to asylum, and we are putting in place incentives, for specific countries (starting with Algeria, Bangladesh, Morocco and Pakistan) to ensure effective returns and readmission (European Commission, 2016k, p. 42).
In this respect, the EU, and most vocally the European Commission, has been promoting the idea that increasing the effectiveness and swiftness of detention/reception and return operations “is the only way Europe will be able to show solidarity with refugees in real need of protection” (European Commission, 2017e, p. 4). This type of framing has been contested by the European Parliament, which consistently pointed towards the dangers of detaining vulnerable groups, especially minors, indicating that “the fear of being detained, sent back or transferred, is resulting in children absconding, leaving them exposed to trafficking, violence and exploitation” (European Parliament, 2018). In a similar manner, NGOs and international organisations have been pointing out ill treatment of migrants during the administrative processing of their asylum claims (Perkowski, 2016). Papadopoulou et al. (2016) observe that, especially in the frontline member states, migrants have been kept in prolonged detention, often in undignified conditions. They have been frequently provided with inaccurate or incomplete information on asylum procedures, which commonly led to administrative mistreatment and premature return decisions (Vanderbruggen et al., 2014). Similar criticism has been raised against the Returns Directive and reliance on the “safe countries of origin” list (Slominski & Trauner, 2018; Uçarer, 2014). In this regard, NGOs have been pointing towards the danger of “blanket return decisions”, leading to disregard of individual cases and proper administrative asylum due process (ECRE, 2015).
6.2.3 Intelligence Cooperation, Surveillance and Control
In security studies literature, intelligence cooperation, surveillance and migration control are considered as the cornerstones of the risk management logic (C.A.S.E., 2006; Kessler & Daase, 2008; Skleparis, 2016). Amoore and Raley (2017, p. 12) argue that intelligence is a multipurpose tool in crisis situations, allowing policy makers and practitioners to make sense of the crisis and take informed decisions that would account not only for the current but also future shocks and disturbances. In this regard, the EU’s approach to the “migration crisis” is often described as data-driven, heavily relying on high quality operational information (i.e. intelligence) and technologies of control and management (Bellanova & Duez, 2016; Jeandesboz, 2016; Marin, 2017). Jeandesboz (2016, p. 293) notes that since 2001, systematic and large-scale gathering, analysis and use of electronic information on persons has become a preferred policy option for border control in the EU. The EU has been feeding on an elaborate network of data gathering and monitoring systems, integrated into border control, including the Schengen Information System (SIS), Eurdac, Visa Information System (VIS), Passenger Name Record (PNR), Entry/Exist System (EES), to name a few (see European Commission, 2016b, i, 2017k). This broad spectrum of risk management tools and technologies has entangled the AFSJ agencies, border and internal security authorities in a dense socio-technological web, designed for governance of regular and irregular inflows and outflows of migrants in the EU (Bellanova & Duez, 2012, p. 110). In this regard, the EU policy discourse builds on two important strands of narrative, namely “technologies of border control” and “intelligence-gathering systems”.
Let us see how these instruments for risk management intertwine in the framing of the EU external borders. As already mentioned in the previous chapter, referent objects in the risk management-driven diagnosis and evaluation of the crisis have been centred on the issue of control of migratory flows and external borders. Here, EU policy actors directly refer to smart, advanced and preventive border technologies as instrumental in regaining and sustaining control by strengthening data sharing on border traffic and migratory movements within the EU borders (see Council of the European Union, 2016h, j; European Commission, 2016b, i; European Commission Website, 2018h; European Parliament, 2016a). The framing of the data-driven policy response towards the crisis has been built on the idea of the “incomplete picture” of the “migration crisis” (European Commission, 2015e, 2017k, m; European Commission Website, 2018d), explicitly indicating that pooling and sharing information on migrants and border traffic is one of the most important pillars of the EU’s response to the crisis (European Commission, 2017h, j). The Commission’s “Agenda on Migration” refers to the need for the technologisation of migration and border management in the EU, stating that
managing our borders more efficiently also implies making better use of the opportunities offered by IT systems and technologies. The EU today has three large-scale IT systems, dealing with the administration of asylum (Eurodac), visa applications (the Visa Information System), and the sharing of information about persons or objects for which an alert has been created by the competent authorities (Schengen Information System). The full use of these systems can bring benefits to border management, as well as to enhance Europe’s capacity to reduce irregular migration and return irregular migrants. A new phase would come with the “Smart Borders” initiative to increase the efficiency of border crossings, facilitating crossings for the large majority of ‘bona fide’ third country travellers, whilst at the same time strengthening the fight against irregular migration by creating a record of all cross-border movements by third country nationals, fully respecting proportionality (European Commission, 2015, p. 5).
As pointed out by Lehtonen and Aalto (2017, p. 219), even though the “Smart Borders” initiative is not treated by the European Commission as a policy response specific to the “migration crisis”,Footnote 5 the so-called “smartening of borders” certainly is, and has been serving as an umbrella concept for curbing migratory flows with border and data surveillance systems. In this vein, the European Commission has been stressing the role of “computerized systems for the collection, exchange and analysis of data related to persons crossing its external borders” (Jeandesboz, 2016, p. 292). Along with the “Smart Borders” package (i.e. Registered Traveller Programme- RTPFootnote 6 and Entry/Exit System-EESFootnote 7) and the previously-mentioned large-scale IT systems, the European Commission has been calling for the full application of the Stolen and Lost Travel Documents (SLTD), Anti-Fraud Information System (AFIS), the Prüm framework,Footnote 8 Passenger Name Record (PNR), European Criminal Records Information System (ECRIS), European Police Record Index System (EPRIS), and Maritime Common Information Sharing Environment (CISE) (European Commission Website, 2018h). All these technologies, to different degrees, have not been maintaining electronic records on different aspects of migration, border crossing and criminal activity and have been a part of what Jeandesboz calls the “European mass ‘dataveillance’ system”, which has been consistently framed and reframed by the Commission as the only way to ensure “control over border control” and migratory flows into Europe (Jeandesboz, 2016, p. 293).
In this vein, the EU policy discourse on the “migration crisis”, particularly produced by the European Commission and the Council of the European Union, has been extensively promoting the idea of the “interoperability” of the EU information systems (Council of the European Union, 2016g, m, n; European Commission, 2015b, c, 2017k, m). As often reiterated by the Commission, one of the consequences of the “migration crisis” was the realisation that proliferation and fragmentation of different EU dataveillance systems makes it impossible to reach effective exchange of data (European Commission, 2017k). In this vein, the Commission explicitly argued that
currently, EU information systems do not talk to each other – information is stored separately in unconnected systems, making them fragmented, complex and difficult to operate. This risks pieces of information slipping through the net and terrorists and criminals escaping detection by using multiple or fraudulent identities, endangering the EU’s internal security and making border and migration management more challenging (European Commission, 2017h, p. 2).
In response to this problem, the European Commission has proposed the creation of a massive information-sharing platformFootnote 9 for migration officials, police officers and border guard, that would enable EU security officials faster and seamless access to all centrally operated EU databases,Footnote 10 which hold information on migrants, and migration- and border-related illicit activities (European Commission, 2017i). The platform was to be based on a common search engine giving access to shared biometric matching service, identity repository and multiple identity detector, designed specifically for comprehensive and fast security screenings of migrants (European Commission, 2017k, h).
This “technologisation” of the EU’s approach to the “migration crisis” is similarly visible in reference to Eurosur, which has become a prominent part of the EU risk management-oriented framing of remedial actions. As stated by the European Council, the EU needs to “increase its reactivity towards rapid evolutions in migration flows, making full use of the new European Border Surveillance System (Eurosur)” (Council of the European Union, 2014, rec. 9). According to Bellanova and Duez (2016, p. 28), the EU policy discourse has been visibly shifting the perception of Eurosur, framing it not only as a platform allowing to enhance internal security by exchange of border surveillance data, but also as a tool facilitating on the one hand law enforcement operations and on the other search and rescue missions. In this vein, Eurosur as a “system of border surveillance systems” has been commonly identified as a larger part of the EU border, irregular migration, cross-border crime, and terrorism monitoring technology that in conjunction with “dataveillance” is supposed to contribute to better risk management and “joint pre-emptive actions” on the frontlines of the crisis (Jeandesboz, 2016; Jeandesboz & Pallister-Wilkins, 2014, 2016). As stated by the European Commission:
The EU should further develop monitoring of pre-frontier area for early identification of smugglers and prevention of irregular departures of migrants, including through the use of Frontex tools, such as Eurosur. The potential of using satellite imagery following the agreement signed by Frontex and the EU Satellite Centre Sat Cen should be fully exploited. EU IT systems (e.g. SIS II, VIS) and the European Document Fraud Network should be used to improve risk analysis and enable identification of irregular entry and stay through ‘look-alike’, falsified or forged documents, or nationality swapping (European Commission, 2015a, p. 5).
These different technologies of surveillance and data gathering operate for the benefit of the EU member states’ justice and home affairs authorities, which feed the systems information and utilise it for intelligence and operational activities (Friedewald et al., 2017). In this regard, the EU AFSJ agencies, specifically Frontex and Europol, play a crucial role as facilitators of the intelligence cooperation within the EU internal security realm gathering, compiling, processing and disseminating data and analysis on broadly understood border security, irregular migration trends, irregular migrants, trans-border crime and terrorism (Carrapiço & Trauner, 2013; Pollak & Slominski, 2021). In the course of the “migration crisis”, Frontex has gained a special position in the EU policy discourse, being framed as a key operational and intelligence-oriented agency involved on the frontlines of the crisis (i.e. “hotspots” and joint border operations) and in its background (e.g. Frontex Risk Analysis) (see Council of the European Union, 2016a, f; European Commission, 2015b, 2016e, 2017m; European Parliament, 2016a).
As a part of response package to the “migration crisis”, the EU has re-negotiated the mandate of Frontex bringing into existence the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) (also referred in the academic literature as “Frontex+”) (Gruszczak, 2017; Léonard & Kaunert, 2020). As a result, the agency has significantly increased in terms of scope and size, becoming one of the biggest and best-funded AFSJ agencies in the EU.Footnote 11 One of the most controversial aspects of the renewed mandate include what is called “preventive vulnerability assessment”, based on a border stress simulation and technical evaluation of “the capacity and readiness of the Member States to face challenges at their external borders, (…) as well as their contingency plans to address possible crisis at the external borders” (European Union, 2016a, p. 3). Following a negative outcome of the assessment, Frontex has been given the right to intervene in the cases where an EU member state facing structural deficiencies is unable to properly address increasing “migration pressures” (Carrera et al., 2017, p. 45). In this situation, Frontex is obligated to deploy technical and operation assistance supporting border controls so as to safeguard the functioning of the Schengen area (Carrera & Hertog, 2016). This specific prerogative of Frontex has distinctive features of risk management and resilience logics. On the one hand, the assessment allows for management of specific sections of external border in order to divert from possible scenarios of border and migration crises. On the other, it makes the agency responsible for identification of the “weakest link” in the EU border security system and provision of support and recommendations for the purposes increasing the state’s robustness in the case of the future migration-related shocks and disturbances on the European borders. The logic of resilience will be discussed further in the next part of this chapter.
In respect to risk management logic, the new mandate expands Frontex’s intelligence gathering and sharing capabilities by reinforcing its “points of entry into maritime border surveillance cooperation and information exchange, based on networks of authorities with coast guards’ functions”, specifically Eurosur (Carrera & Hertog, 2016, p. 3). However, most importantly, the new mandate increases the scope of collecting, processing and exchanging the personal data of migrants gathered during Frontex-led operational activities (i.e. at “hotspots”, joint border operations, pilot border surveillance programmes, rapid border interventions, etc.) (Esteve, 2017, p. 14). In this regard, the mandate allows Frontex to share personal data not only on “persons who are suspected of involvement in cross-border crime, such as migrant smuggling, trafficking in human beings or terrorism” (European Union, 2016a, p. 12) but also “persons who cross the external borders without authorisation” (European Union, 2016a, p. 19). This has only increased the risk-driven securitisation of irregular migration, which has begun to operate within the same security frameworks and categories as criminals and terrorists.
In the EU discourse on remedial actions, Frontex is intertwined with Europol. The agency is tasked with supporting law enforcement authorities throughout the EU in regard to crime fighting activities, including areas specifically relevant to the “migration crisis”, namely human trafficking, facilitated irregular immigration, organised crime and terrorism, to name a few (Den Boer, 2015). Europol is often described as an intelligence hub, feeding on information provided by the Member States and other EU AFSJ agencies (Carrapiço & Trauner, 2013, p. 365). To this end, it collects, stores, processes, and analyses data for operational (e.g. supporting joint investigations) and strategic purposes (e.g. informing the European Commission and the Council of the European Union) related to EU internal security (European Union, 2016b). As a part of the EU’s response to the “migration crisis” Europol and Frontex cooperate in “hotspots”, facilitating:
(…) the process of a systematic registration, including fingerprinting of illegally entering third-country nationals according to the Eurodac Regulation and to perform systematic security checks by using relevant databases, in particular SIS II, Interpol, VIS and national police databases (Council of the European Union, 2016c, p. 5).
In this vein, Europol has re-framed from a purely intelligence-driven to a “quasi-operational” agency, capable of sending officers into the frontline of the crisis and becoming the EU’s “boots on the ground” (Scipioni, 2017, p. 6). As part of the EU remedial action towards the crisis, Europol has also gained a new mandate, which not only cosmetically renamed the agency into the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol), but also strengthened its intelligence-sharing capabilities and reinforced its transnational role in fighting terrorism, cyber-crime, and trans-border organised crime (European Union, 2016b). Consequently, Europol has opened an intelligence centre, the European Migrants Smuggling Centre, tasked specifically to cooperate with the AFSJ agencies (i.e. Frontex and Eurojust) and “support EU member states’ police and border authorities in coordination of highly complex cross-border anti-smuggling operations” (Europol Website, 2021).
6.2.4 EU-Turkey Statement
Confronted with increased and continuous migratory pressures and prolonged deployment of internal policy responses (e.g. reforming of the Common European Asylum System, re-negotiations of AFSJ agencies mandates, re-negotiations of readmission agreements, to name a few), the EU has opened up to externalisation of the migration management, attempting to curb irregular migratory flows in the pre-frontier area of the EU, preferably in cooperation with third countries. The EU-Turkey Statement of 18 March 2016Footnote 12 lies at the heart of this type of migration-related risk management strategy, building on the idea of control, containment and deterrence of irregular flows into the EU, specifically through Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean route (Niemann & Zaun, 2018, p. 8). It should be noted that the EU-Turkey statement can be defined as a political declaration and not an official part of the EU policy response to the “migration crisis”. In this sense, it is not institutionalised within any specific policy nor it is an international agreement and consequently legally binding for the EU or Turkey (Zaragoza-Cristiani, 2017, pp. 59–60). This means that the statement is not formally subjected to the European Parliament’s scrutiny or judicial review by the Court of Justice of the European Union (Carrera et al., 2017).
The content of the EU-Turkey statement focuses on pre-frontier management of migratory flows, specifically of Syrian nationals, from Turkey into Greece and is based on the following provisions: (1) as of 20 March 2016 new irregular migrants entering Greece through Turkey have been returned to Turkey. This applies to all migrants who have either not applied for asylum or whose applications have been declared “un-founded” or “inadmissible”; (2) for every Syrian being returned to Turkey from the Greek islands, another Syrian will be resettled from Turkey to the EU taking into account the UN Vulnerability Criteria (Council of the European Union, 2016f, art. 1 and 2). The statement does not allow for more than 72 thousand people being retuned through this mechanism (Niemann & Zaun, 2018, p. 8). At the same time, Turkish authorities are obligated to “take any necessary measures to prevent new sea or land routes for illegal migration opening from Turkey to the EU, and will cooperate with neighbouring states as well as the EU to this effect” (Council of the European Union, 2016f, art. 3). In return, the EU has promised to accelerate visa liberalisation negotiations and disburse three billion EUR as a part of the “Facility for Refugees in Turkey” fund and additional three billion EUR for any projects aiming to help refugees in Turkey (European Commission, 2015d). The EU has also advanced the talks on Customs Union and resumption and extension of the accession negotiations with Turkey (European Commission, 2015d).
Bauböck (2018, pp. 152–153) notes that this design of the EU-Turkey Statement makes it inherently burden-sharing and risk management-oriented, being equipped with specific return and resettlement mechanisms, migratory quotas and financial features. Nonetheless, its framing and position in the EU policy discourse is not that evident. The EU policy actors quite commonly agree that the Statement has been put into action as a way of curbing irregular migratory flows, but at the same time built an explicitly humanitarian narrative around it, describing the Statement as a life-saving instrument (see Council of the European Union, 2016f; European Commission, 2017g; European Council, 2016c). An apt example of such framing is the 2016 “State of the Union”, where the President of the European Commission noted that “we adopted on 18 March 2016 an EU–Turkey Statement to end the irregular migration from Turkey to the EU to replace dangerous journeys across the Aegean with safe and legal paths to the EU for Syrian refugees” (European Commission, 2016k, p. 42). It was also reiterated in the following year, when the President of the Commission stated that:
We have managed to stem irregular flows of migrants, which were a cause of great anxiety for many. We have reduced irregular arrivals in the Eastern Mediterranean by 97% thanks our agreement with Turkey. And this summer, we managed to get more control over the Central Mediterranean route with arrivals in August down by 81% compared to the same month last year. In doing so, we have drastically reduced the loss of life in the Mediterranean (European Commission, 2017e, p. 114).
Indeed, the rapid drop of irregular border traffic to the EU from Turkey through Greek islandsFootnote 13 has generated a momentum for optimism towards the EU-Turkey deal, gradually making it into one of the most important pillars of the EU’s remedial actions towards the “migration crisis”. The EU policy actors have been reiterating in their respective discourses the need for sustaining and deepening migration-related cooperation with Turkey as one of the most effective and key measures in stabilising border traffic and curbing irregular migratory flows in the Eastern Mediterranean (Council of the European Union, 2016b, j; European Commission, 2017g; European Council, 2015d, 2016b; European Parliament, 2016f, 2017b). In this vein, in the progress report on “Agenda on Migration”, the European Commission directly argues that:
The implementation of the EU-Turkey Statement has continued to play a key role in ensuring that the migration challenge in the Eastern Mediterranean is addressed effectively and jointly by the EU and Turkey. It continues to deliver concrete results in reducing irregular and dangerous crossings and in saving lives in the Aegean Sea. The full and sustained implementation of the Statement requires continuous efforts and political determination from all sides (European Commission, 2017f, p. 5).
Even though the EU policy discourse reflects praise of the EU-Turkey Statement for its effectiveness and rapid decrease of the migratory pressures in the Eastern Mediterranean, it has not been so vocal about its human rights and human security dimension, or rather the lack thereof.Footnote 14 The EU’s framing of the Statement conveniently marginalises certain practical, legal or moral aspects of the document, including the conditions in Turkish refugee camps, discrimination of specific groups of migrants by Turkish officials, or the varying degree of protection of Syrian and non-Syrian refugees under the Turkish asylum law,Footnote 15 to name a few (Batalla Adam, 2017). Furthermore, the EU-Turkey Statement has been brought into question in terms of its compliance with the EU and international asylum law (Barbulescu, 2017; Okyay & Zaragoza-Cristiani, 2016). As has been observed, instead of safeguarding the rights of refugees, the Statement often directly breaks them by neglecting due process of asylum law (through so-called fast track border procedures) frequently returning to Turkey those migrants who declared their intent to apply for asylum in Greece (Batalla Adam, 2017, p. 47).
Human Rights Watch directly points towards harsh and abusive practices employed by the Turkish military and border officials who while handling returns under the EU-Turkey Statement contribute to the general (in)securitisation of the situation of refugees in Turkey (see more Human Rights Watch Website, 2016a). In this respect, in several asylum cases, “the Greek appeals committee has blocked the implementation of the Statement by rejecting the fact that Syrian asylum seekers can find safe haven effective international protection in Turkey” (Human Rights Watch Website, 2016b). As observed by Cohen and Sirkeci (2016), the EU-Turkey Statement has generated a substantial amount of insecurity among Syrian refugees, introducing not only a high degree of uncertainty in terms of their journey into the EU but also a threat of their possible mistreatment by the Turkish law enforcement and border authorities.Footnote 16 While the EU-Turkey Statement has introduced high levels of insecurity at migrant level, it has certainly increased the sense of security and stability for the EU.
6.2.5 Relocation and Resettlement
Relocation and resettlement constitute yet another example of conceptualisation and further institutionalisation of risk management-centred remedial actions towards the “migration crisis”. As noted by Bauböck (2018, p. 145), relocation and resettlement, though technically separate policy responses, are commonly construed in the academic discourse as a governmental technique of migration management relating to specific group of migrants, namely refugees. Both policy instruments refer to “transfers of persons in need of international protection either from other EU Member State (relocation) or third country (resettlement)” (Barbulescu, 2017, p. 304). In this way, they concentrate on institutionalised forms of migration governance and broad cooperation between member states and the EU agencies in handling increased inflows of migrants seeking international protection and the consequent asylum applications. In this regard, resettlement and relocation mechanisms represent an attempt to find an equilibrium and a continuation of normal activities within acceptable risks and to sustain the functionality of the EU migration and asylum management system.
Let us start with resettlement, which has been well institutionalised in the EU as a form of management of migrants seeking asylum status in one of the EU member states but while still outside the EU territories (Barbulescu, 2017, p. 306). As explained in the Commission’s “Agenda on Migration”:
Resettlement means the transfer of individual displaced persons in clear need of international protection, on submission of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and in agreement with the country of resettlement, from a third country to a Member State, where they will be admitted and granted the right to stay and any other rights comparable to those granted to a beneficiary of international protection (European Commission, 2015b, p. 19).
In the EU policy discourse, resettlement is framed as an instrument, which is supposed to help “avoid displaced persons in need of protection having to resort to the criminal networks of smugglers and traffickers, consequently providing legal and safe pathways to enter the EU” (European Commission Website, 2017). The concept of resettlement shows yet another example of how the EU has been distancing itself from the inclusive migrant-centred referent object present in the diagnostic and evaluation parts of the framing process and moving towards a more restrictive and exclusive refugee-oriented perspective. Since 2015, the EU has launched two resettlement schemes, which were commonly publicised as “safe passage” for migrants escaping war and brutalities of terrorism, visibly marginalising the inclusive understanding of migrants and leaving out of the resettlement scheme those seeking refuge from economic hardship (see European Commission, 2015b, 2017e; European Commission Website, 2017; European Parliament, 2016a). In May 2015, the European Commission proposed an ad hoc European Resettlement scheme, a voluntary framework for EU-wide resettlement of over 22,000 people in need of international protection (Radjenovic, 2017, p. 12). The scheme also included execution of the EU-Turkey Statement, which envisages that “for every Syrian national returned from the Greek islands another will be resettled to the EU directly from Turkey” (European Commission Website, 2017). In July 2017, after proclaiming the success of the ad hoc scheme, which resulted in over seventeen thousand transfers mainly from Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, the Commission initiated a new round of pledges for the new resettlement scheme aiming for 50,000 transfers, this time from the regions of North Africa and Horn of Africa (European Commission, 2017m).
Even though the European Resettlement scheme has raised certain controversies, especially in relation to the member states’ quotas, selection criteria, or length of procedures, it is the so-called “relocation mechanism” that has proved to be the most contentious among all the EU responses to the “migration crisis” (Thielemann, 2018, p. 71). It should be noted that the relocation mechanism, also known as the “temporary emergency relocation scheme” was not part of the EU migration-security continuum before the “migration crisis”. It was adopted by the Council of the European Union in September 2015, for the duration of 2 years, as a new burden-sharing mechanism and an emergency response system envisaged under Article 78(3) of the Treaty on Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) (Council of the European Union, 2015d). Under the relocation scheme:
asylum seekers with a high chance of having their applications successfully processed are relocated from Greece and Italy, where they have arrived, to other Member States where they will have their asylum applications processed. If these applications are successful, the applicants will be granted refugee status with the right to reside in the Member State to which they are relocated (European Commission, 2015b, p. 4).
According to the scheme, the receiving member state was responsible for the examination of the asylum application in accordance with international, European and national standards (Thielemann & Hobolth, 2016, p. 645). The redistribution key was based on criteria such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (40 per cent), size of population (40%), unemployment (10%), and the number of already hosted asylum seekers (10%) (European Commission, 2015b, p. 4).
The relocation scheme was framed as a matter of European solidarity and a remedy for the disproportionate responsibility put on the EU “frontline countries” (Niemann & Zaun, 2018, p. 6). As a result of intergovernmental negotiations, the EU member states committed themselves to relocate altogether 160,000 refugees from the “frontlines” by the end of September 2017 (European Commission Website, 2017). The negotiations and later implementation of the scheme have been highly confrontational, bringing several member states (especially Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Bulgaria) into conflict with the European CommissionFootnote 17 (Nič, 2016; Niemann & Zaun, 2018, p. 7). The bone of contention was the mandatory character of the scheme, which obligated all the member states to accommodate the designated quotas of asylum seekers within the given timeframe. It should be noted that the mandatory relocation mechanism allowed for refusal of transfer of any asylum seeker on the basis of national security or public safety (Council of the European Union, 2015d, art. 32). This security provision was later used, or misused, by the reluctant member states to postpone transfers of asylum seekers indefinitely, thus further securitising asylum seekers and rendering the whole scheme highly ineffective (Thielemann, 2018, p. 73).
The relocation mechanism and further asylum system reform (i.e. the Dublin plus proposal) have quickly become the most problematic and dividing issues during the conceptualisation of remedial of actions in the EU. Firstly, one of the problems raised by several member states was that the mechanism diverted from the original Dublin system that has established specific set of criteria indicating which member states are responsible for examining asylum claims in the EU (Niemann & Zaun, 2018, p. 7). According to the Regulation, the establishment of responsibility should be based on a set of hierarchical criteria, one of which is the place of entry, indicating that the applicants who entered into the EU in an irregular manner shall be examined by the member state where they first arrived, limiting the possibility of secondary relocations and “venue shopping” within the EU (European Union, 2013b, art. 13). Secondly, due to the coercive character of the scheme and later proposals of “corrective fairness mechanism”,Footnote 18 the relocation has never been considered as a fully “politically legitimate solution” among the member states, generating substantial political opposition to any new ideas regarding this type of solution in the future.Footnote 19 This resulted in the official withdrawal by the European Commission from the relocation scheme in September 2017 and the subsequent failure to establish an EU permanent relocation mechanism (originally incorporated into the revision of the Dublin system), which was eventually vetoed by the Council of the European Union (European Parliament Website, 2018a). Consequently, the European Commission has sustained its position that the original relocation obligations should be honoured by the member states, but no new mandatory schemes will be introduced in the near future (European Commission Website, 2017).
The EU policy discourse on resettlement and relocation reveals a dynamic and conflict-driven framing of these specific remedial actions. The relocation scheme has certainly gained more substantial prominence in the discourse, especially in the first years of the “migration crisis”, where it was framed as the “European solution” (Council of the European Union, 2015k; European Commission Website, 2017; European Parliament Website, 2018a). At first, the EU policy actors supported the principle of the scheme, following the framing of the Commission, which promoted the relocation as driven by solidarity among the member states and as effective management and diffusion of unprecedented migratory pressures from the EU “frontlines” (Council of the European Union, 2015d; European Commission, 2015b, 2016a; European Parliament, 2015b). As explained by the Commission,
the volumes of arrivals mean that the capacity of local reception and processing facilities is already stretched thin. To deal with the situation in the Mediterranean, the Commission will, by the end of May, propose triggering the emergency response system envisaged under Article 78(3) TFEU. The proposal will include a temporary distribution scheme for persons in clear need of international protection to ensure a fair and balanced participation of all Member States to this common effort (European Commission, 2015b, p. 4).
However, this initial agreement between the actors has quickly turned into a framing conflict, a dissonance of interpretations between the Commission, the Parliament and the Council regarding the conceptualisation of nature of this measure. On the one hand, the European Commission, with the support of the European Parliament, has been producing a narrative on relocation putting emphasis on its technical and political character, embodied in the values of European responsibility and solidarity. Here, both institutions have been promoting the obligatory character of the scheme, at the same time repeatedly calling for its full implementation and even intensification within a long-term EU policy scheme (European Commission, 2015g, p. 4, 2016k, p. 25; European Parliament, 2015b, p. 7). In this respect, the Commission has been framing relocation as normalised and institutionalised permanent part of the EU migration policies. As stated by the President of the European Commission in the 2015 State of the Union:
A true European refugee and asylum policy requires solidarity to be permanently anchored in our policy approach and our rules. This is why, today, the Commission is also proposing a permanent relocation mechanism, which will allow us to deal with crisis situations more swiftly in the future (European Commission, 2015g, p. 5).
On the other hand, the Council of the European Union has been promoting a rather different image of the relocation scheme, distancing itself from its institutionalisation within the EU policy framework and explicitly framing it as a temporary and extraordinary measure (Council of the European Union, 2015k, l, 2016e). In this vein, the Council has been using the language of urgency showing that this is indeed an exceptional moment requiring exceptional measures, but it is only temporary and should not be considered as a long-term solution. As stated by the Council:
(…) in the light of the current emergency situation and of the EU commitment to reinforce solidarity and responsibility, agreed on the temporary and exceptional relocation over two years from the frontline Member States Italy and Greece to other Member States (Council of the European Union, 2015k, p. 1).
This dissonance in framing of the relocation mechanism has revealed tensions within the policy environment, specifically between the Council and the Commission. In the course of the “migration crisis”, the European Commission has proven its devotion to institutionalisation of all forms of migration and border management, attempting to push forward the reform of the European asylum and migration framework and expand its control over the realm EU internal and border security (see European Commission, 2015b, 2016a). Along with the reforms of the AFSJ agencies and the development of border-migration intelligence framework, the permanent relocation scheme was supposed to be another step towards centralisation and Europeanisation of migration control. Yet, as opposed to the rest of the proposed remedial actions, the relocation scheme has had the biggest political consequences for the member states, transferring the “migration crisis” from one state to another, making member states’ governments prone to internal criticism and loss of popular support (Bauböck, 2018, p. 153). Consequently, the relocation scheme has gained a lot of opposition from some of the member states but also reignited a conflict over the institutional locus of migration control in the EU (Barbulescu, 2017; Willermain, 2016).
6.2.6 Comments
Risk management has clearly saturated the EU’s conceptualisation of remedial actions towards the “migration crisis”, becoming deeply institutionalised within the EU’s contemporary approach to migration and border policies. In this way, it has secured its dominance in the EU migration-security continuum pushing framing of migration even deeper into the realm of normalised, institutionalised and often technology-driven modes of securitisation. The risk management-centred conceptualisation has visibly distanced the EU framing of the “migration crisis” from an inclusive humanitarian and migrant-centred referent object, promoting the idea of regaining control over mobility and external borders as the highest security priority. In doing so, the EU has introduced a plethora of instruments and policies that were supposed to lead the way back to normalcy and stability on the borders, regulating migratory flows into Europe, and flushing out “risky migrants” within the migratory flows. This type of framing has generated visible tensions with the human security-centred logic.
In this regard, the so-called “hotspot approach” has become one of the sites of such tensions, quickly becoming a symbol of the EU’s frontline and operational involvement in the “migration crisis”. In the EU policy discourse, “hotspots” have been defined as sites for the swift identification, registration and fingerprinting of incoming migrants. They were supposed to assist national authorities in managing migratory flows by selecting and channelling migrants into proper administrative procedures. According to observers and practitioners, thus construed “hotspots” represent some of the most explicit sites of securitisation of irregular immigrants and asylum seekers, subjecting them to security practices and restrictive border and migration policies. They have been reframing migrants and turning them into objects of risk, collecting biometric information and generating security dossiers in the name of the security imperative. As noted by an interviewed Frontex officer:
In their essence “hotspots” are not about humanitarian assistance but assigning illegal migrants into a category, making them visible in the system for now and future reference. It is about turning them from “unknown” into “known”, or better from “unmanageable” into “manageable”. Identification and processing of those illegal migrants, refugee status or not, is our security imperative and cannot be ignored whatever the crisis (Frontex-2).
Evidently the need for management, control and monitoring of increased migratory flows has translated into actions of identification, registration, screening and surveillance at the EU level. This is not to say that migration-oriented technologies of data surveillance and control were not present before the “migration crisis” but they have certainly become more prominent in the EU’s conceptualisation of responses to the “migration crisis”. The increased technologisation of the EU migration and border policies has further normalised and institutionalised risk management in the EU policy discourse, moving conceptualisation of remedial actions to what Bigo (2002) calls “managers of unease” – technocrats, experts and professionals responsible for calculating uncertain futures. This has resulted in the more prominent mobilisation of EU agencies and proliferation of dataveillance systems tasked with targeting asylum seekers, irregular, but also regular migrants in search for threats to security. This incorporation of broad categories of migrants into the risk equation has a significant securitising effect, going beyond the “migration crisis”. In this vein, an interviewed Europol officer observed that:
Because of this crisis, migration has become one of the sites of security and risk management. For instance, when I train Europol officers for the “hotspot” duty, I keep telling them that they do not interview migrants but debrief them. The task is to collect sensitive, operational data that can be used in on-going criminal investigations, counter-terrorist operations etc. These intercepted migrants are the source of this information, they can be valuable, but they also can be dangerous because of their willing involvement in certain illicit activities. The operative word is that they “can be” a problem and it is our job to know which ones already are a threat or can turn into one in the future. One way or another, they have become a serious part of a security problem that has emerged in the course of the crisis and there is nothing we can do about it. I think that this crisis has permanently changed the relationship between security and migration (Europol-2).
As observed by Niemann and Zaun (2018, p. 16), the “hotspots” and other instruments of intelligence gathering and sharing are now cogwheels in a more complex European administrative machinery that allow border and migration authorities to categorise, select and process irregular migrants in accordance with their protection or security status but also desirability. In this respect, the managerial approach to the crisis is strongly reflected in the promotion of policy instruments that enable managing and moving different categories of migrants within and out of the EU. Here, the elements of the detention and return of migrants have proved to have a significant securitising effect, labelling whole groups of migrants as risky or undesirable (often in the name of public safety), subjecting them to security practices eventually resulting in expulsion from the EU territories. In the EU policy discourse, returns represents a peculiar way of claiming control over the uncontrollable force of human mobility. In this sense, return operations are supposed to secure the outflows of migrants; they are a safety valve which can and will be used whenever there is a too much pressure in the migration and border system.
While the returns and detention are aimed at the broadly understood removal of risky and unwanted migrants, resettlement and relocation are directed at those who deserve protection and have passed administrative pre-screening and pre-processing, at the latest. In this vein, the EU has been framing relocation and resettlement as legal pathways or safe passages for refugees into their destination countries, at the same time indicating the need for solidarity among the member states in sharing the burden of international protection. As application of these measures (specifically the relocation mechanism) has proved to contentious, the idea behind resettlement and relocation has revealed strong managerial and externalising tendencies in the conceptualisation of remedial actions in the EU. An interviewed Member of the European Parliament observed that:
The whole idea of returns and resettlement is based on a filtering process. It is about letting in “good migrants” and pushing out “bad migrants” and the security, border and migration apparatus is the “filter” here. The thing is that the EU’s approach to this filtering process is to do it at a distance, preferably in Libya, Turkey, everywhere but not here. That is why resettlement was much less controversial than relocation. Resettlement places migrants outside the borders and they come in only when we choose to let them, while relocation is about migrants-refugees who are here and now, and they have to be dealt with whatever EU’s or Member States’ preferences. That is why EU likes the deal with Turkey so much. It gives you a chance to manage the “migration crisis” outside the EU and keeping, at least some of the migrants, at bay (European Parliament-3).
Indeed, the EU-Turkey deal has become the symbol of the externalisation of management of migratory flows into the EU. Thanks to the mixture of border security measures and resettlement schemes, it has allowed the EU to deter some migrants from crossing the Mediterranean and the EU to regain some control over the migratory flows. In doing so, it has also introduced a more restrictive border regime with serious consequences for the security of migrants attempting to cross the Eastern Mediterranean into Greece. In this respect, there is a tension between logics inscribed into the EU-Turkey Statement, reflected in sacrificing the human security of migrants in the name of regaining of control over migratory flows. As noted by an interviewed European Asylum Support Office officer:
The deal gave the EU a sense of control and space to breathe and think about the next steps. It pushed the flows back and externalised the problem, dropping it in Turkey’s lap. We keep forgetting that tightening border security and distancing the problem does not make the flows stop. Push and pull factors remain as they were. The change is that migrants have to find new, often more dangerous, ways of travel from there to here. They choose other routes or stay in Turkey, hiding from the Turkish authorities and paying additional fees to smugglers, who only benefit from attempts to contain the problem instead of solving its underlying causes (EASO-2).
The analysed policy discourse and accounts of interviewees indicate that the elements of management of borders, migration, and migration-related risks have indeed made a deep mark on the conceptualisation of the remedial actions towards the crisis. The Union’s discourse on the “migration crisis” is characterised by a distinctive risk-centred framing, oriented on regaining of control over EU external borders and migratory flows. To this end, the EU has promoted mobilisation of security measures and IT systems that allow identifying incoming irregular migrants, categorising them and managing them according to their status and the level of risks they generate. Thus, in response to the “migration crisis”, the EU has sponsored and enhanced a specific blend of border security and risk management measures built on tailor-made modes of migration governance (e.g. “hotspots”) or technology and intelligence-driven policy instruments (e.g. data surveillance or interoperability of information systems) in order to create and maintain a sense of order and manageability of future migration-related risks.
6.3 Resilience
The inclusion of resilience in the conceptualisation of remedial actions towards the crisis has emerged on the wave of its increasing popularity among international security actors such as NATO (Hady, 2017; Prior, 2017), the UN (Marulanda Fraume et al., 2020), and of course the EU (Juncos, 2017; Wagner & Anholt, 2016). According to the logic of resilience, the notion of security revolves around structural and institutional robustness to negative scenarios that will certainly materialise at some point in the future (Brassett et al., 2013; Coaffee & Fussey, 2015; Manyena, 2006). With this assumption in mind, resilience is centred on the conceptualisation of long-term remedial actions that allow development of an interconnected, flexible and adaptable system, capable of withstanding any possible shocks and disturbances that may affect the stability or even existence of referent objects (e.g. the EU asylum system or the EU as whole) (Bourbeau, 2013). In this respect, resilience-oriented policy actions are focused on elimination of extreme vulnerabilities within the targeted system by building up its structural and institutional strength (Bourbeau, 2015, p. 1963).
During the “migration crisis”, resilience has become the new leitmotif of the EU’s approach to security. This specific logic is sponsored most visibly by the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, with contributions from the European External Actions Service (which was the result of the framings of the Commission and the Council). These framing actors have expressed a common interest in the external security realm of the EU and were already invested in the external dimension of resilience, promoting development, a comprehensive approach to security, disaster early warning and preparedness programmes, or the idea of community resilience in the EU neighbourhood (Wagner & Anholt, 2016). Broader internalisation of resilience came with the 2016 EU’s Global Strategy, which explicitly indicates the role of this particular logic within the EU’s external policy framework:
It is in the interests of our citizens to invest in the resilience of states and societies to the east stretching into Central Asia, and south down to Central Africa. Fragility beyond our borders threatens all our vital interests. By contrast, resilience – the ability of states and societies to reform, thus withstanding and recovering from internal and external crises – benefits us and countries in our surrounding regions, sowing the seeds for sustainable growth and vibrant societies. Together with its partners, the EU will therefore promote resilience in its surrounding regions. A resilient state is a secure state, and security is key for prosperity and democracy (European Commission, 2016h, p. 23).
This is not to say that resilience is limited to the external dimension of EU policy. It strongly intertwines with the internal security domain, gaining significance, also in relation to border control and migration management. Here, the EU policy discourse concerning the crisis strongly communicates the need for building up resilience within the internal-external security nexus, identifying structural vulnerabilities (e.g. by external border vulnerability assessment) and strengthening the capacity for crisis management (Council of the European Union, 2016d; European Commission, 2015b, 2016g, h; European Parliament, 2014, 2016f). As stressed by the Council of the European Union in its Conclusions on the EU’s Internal Security Strategy, there is a “necessity to strengthen protection of critical infrastructures and the need to ensure resilience, operational preparedness and political coordination to react, deal with and mitigate crises and natural/man-made disasters” (Council of the European Union, 2015e, p. 2).
As a result, the logic of resilience is prominently visible in the conceptualisation of remedial actions towards the “migration crisis”, specifically while addressing its root causes (external dimension) and the EU’s capacity for processing asylum seekers (internal dimension). It should be stressed that in relation to the root causes of the crisis, the logic of resilience seems to be intertwining and corresponding with the human security-centred diagnosis and evaluation of the crisis. Here, human suffering and poverty, defined as the key push factors for the 2015 increased migratory flows to the EU, are addressed with external interventions of a capacity-building nature, aimed at enhancing the societal, economic and political resilience of countries of origin and transit (Council of the European Union, 2016b, f; European Commission, 2015h; European Parliament, 2016f, 2017a). In this respect, the European Commission has been communicating that:
a special focus in our work on resilience will be on origin and transit countries of migrants and refugees. We will significantly step up our humanitarian efforts in these countries, focusing on education, women and children. Together with countries of origin and transit, we will develop common and tailor-made approaches to migration featuring development, diplomacy, mobility, legal migration, border management, readmission and return. Through development, trust funds, preventive diplomacy and mediation we will work with countries of origin to address and prevent the root causes of displacement, manage migration, and fight trans-border crime (European Commission, 2016h, p. 27).
Similarly, the idea of building up the resilience of the EU migration and border control capacity is framed as a matter of protection of human life, alleviation of the suffering and exploitation of migrants at the hands of human smugglers and traffickers. In this respect, the EU policy actors produce a coherent message that only by improving the capacity and resilience of the EU’s asylum system, Europe is able to fulfil its international obligations and provide international protection to those who are entitled to it (European Commission, 2015h; European Parliament, 2016f). Here, the resilience-driven framing points towards the need for strengthening the Common European Asylum System directly referring to centralisation and harmonisation of the EU-wide capacity for dealing with the current and future increased migratory flows (European Commission, 2016c, p. 4).
In the next part of this chapter, I will discuss some of the most prominent examples of application of the logic of resilience in conceptualisation of remedial actions towards the crisis. In doing so, I will focus specifically on three types of actions framed in the EU policy discourse, covering the internal (i.e. Common European Asylum System) and external (i.e. EU Trust Funds, and CSDP capacity building and assistance missions) dimensions of the resilience-building activities.
6.3.1 Reforming Common European Asylum System
As aptly noted by Costello and Mouzourakis (2017, p. 263), the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) is “neither truly common nor a system”. It is rather a legislative framework, consisting of a package of EU directives and regulations “defining common minimum standards to which Member States are to adhere in connection with the reception of asylum-seekers; qualification for international protection and the content of the protection granted; and procedures for granting and withdrawing refugee status”Footnote 20 (International Association of Refugee Law Judges, 2016, p. 15). The idea behind development of the CEAS is harmonisation and centralisation of the main features of the EU’s migration management and asylum policy. This includes establishment of EU-wide mechanisms that would discourage secondary movements and “venue shopping”, as well as ensure uniform treatment of asylum seekers and balanced recognition rates across the EU (European Commission, 2016c, p. 2).
Some of the most prominent features of the CEAS have already been covered in this chapter, specifically referring to the issues of reception-detention, relocation, resettlement and dataveillance. That is why in this section I will focus on the CEAS as a whole, taking into account its specific framing in the EU policy discourse on the “migration crisis” and its underlying security logic. Within the timeframe of the writing of this book, the CEAS is still considered to be “under construction”, being a prominent part of the EU policy discourse rather than an effective component of the EU policy action framework (Bauböck, 2018; Niemann & Zaun, 2018). This does not mean, however, that its importance and prominence in the conceptualisation of remedial actions towards the crisis is any less significant. Quite the contrary, the framing of CEAS in the EU policy discourse reveals a very important, resilience-driven aspect of this process.
As already noted earlier in this chapter, within the EU policy discourse on the “migration crisis” the CEAS is often framed with a distinctive blend of human security- and resilience-centred logics. The EU policy actors, and the Commission in particular, have been promoting the idea of CEAS as a tool for ensuring protection and strengthening human security, noting that a well-functioning and uniform asylum system is “supposed to ensure the legal avenues to Europe for migrants seeking protection” (European Parliament, 2016f, rec. 15), at the same time “guaranteeing humane and efficient asylum policy reinforcing protection of the fundamental rights of asylum-seekers, paying particular attention to the needs of vulnerable groups, such as children” (European Commission, 2015b, p. 12). In this regard, the CEAS is unequivocally depicted as an instrument for providing protection, or as the European Commission puts it – “an area of protection and solidarity for the most vulnerable, (…) setting out common high standards and stronger co-operation to ensure that asylum seekers are treated equally in an open and fair system – wherever they apply” (European Commission, 2018, p. 1). Here, the European asylum system is connected to the notions of fairness, responsibility for asylum seekers and solidarity among the EU Member States in treating all the asylum applications in accordance with the highest EU standards and international obligations (European Parliament, 2016e).
In the course of the “migration crisis”, the EU’s framing of the CEAS displayed a distinctive note of “wishful thinking”, indicating that the current state of this particular system is rather a liability than opportunity in dealing with the crisis (Costello & Mouzourakis, 2017, p. 272). In this respect, the state of CEAS becomes defined as dangerous, affecting the EU security with its dysfunctionality and vulnerability. As reiterated throughout the EU policy discourse, the increased migratory flows have revealed an inherent weakness in the EU asylum system, rendering the CEAS fragmented (European Commission, 2016c, p. 3), defective (Council of the European Union, 2017d, p. 8; European Parliament, 2016g, rec. 12), and enabling unwanted practices such as “venue shopping” and secondary movement of asylum seekers (European Commission, 2018). This has translated into concerning lack of resilience, and a collapse under the strain of increased arrivals of migrants. When the European Commission proposed reform of the CEAS it established that state CEAS defies its purpose, as it is
characterised by differing treatment of asylum seekers, including in terms of the length of asylum procedures or reception conditions across Member States, a situation which in turn encourages secondary movements. Even though CEAS sets out the standards for the recognition and protection to be offered at EU level, in practice recognition rates vary, sometimes widely, between Member States. There is also a lack of adequate convergence as regards the decision to grant either refugee status (to be accorded to persons fleeing persecution) or subsidiary protection status (to be accorded to persons fleeing the risk of serious harm, including armed conflict) for applicants from a given country of origin (European Commission, 2016c, pp. 4–5).
Under more critical investigation, the “migration crisis” reveals itself not as a crisis of migration but of migration and policies employed at the member states and the EU levels (Niemann & Zaun, 2018, p. 3). It is a crisis of resilience and functionality that feeds on the vulnerabilities of the EU asylum system, which has failed the test of the increased migratory pressures.
As a result, the EU policy discourse indicates that it is not the CEAS that should be considered as a remedial action towards the crisis, but its reform, which is supposed to build up the EU’s resilience to the future shocks and disturbances related to increased migratory flows (Council of the European Union, 2017d; European Commission, 2016c, d; European Parliament, 2015d). As noted in the European Council conclusions,
there is a common understanding that the reformed CEAS needs to strike the right balance between responsibility and solidarity and that it needs to ensure resilience to future crises. The system has to be efficient, be able to withstand migratory pressure, eliminate pull factors as well as secondary movements, in compliance with international law, fight abuse and provide adequate support to the most affected Member States (European Council, 2017a, p. 11).
In this respect, the European Commission has proposed further harmonisation and centralisation of the EU asylum instruments, framing the European Asylum Support Office as instrumental for implementation of the Common European Asylum System “by collecting and exchanging information on best practices, drawing up an annual report on the asylum situation in the EU and adopting technical documents, such as guidelines and operating manuals, on the implementation of the Union’s asylum instruments”Footnote 21 (EASO, 2017, p. 2). The majority of provisions included in the reform did not arouse many objections in the EU, except for the Revision of Dublin Regulation (Pastore & Henry, 2016).
The so-called Dublin system (currently in its third instalment under the Dublin III Regulation) has been present in the EU migration-security continuum since the 1990s. In the course of the crisis, it has become one of the most controversial and problematic aspects of the CEAS and the EU’s approach to migration and asylum management (Bauböck, 2018; Huysmans, 2000). The Dublin system has established clear indicators for assigning responsibility for handling asylum applications to one specific EU member state, thus limiting the secondary movements and so-called “venue shopping” (Kaunert & Léonard, 2012). In this regard, the regulation introduces a hierarchy of criteria such as “family unity, possession of residence documents or visas, irregular entry or stay and visa-waived entry” (European Parliament Website, 2018b). There is, however, one element of this set of criteria that has quickly become the symbol and the main issue of the system, namely the criterion of irregular entry, which means that “the Member State through which the asylum-seeker first entered in the EU is responsible to examine his/her asylum claim” (European Parliament Website, 2018b). During the crisis, this criterion, along with the Dublin system, has proved not only impractical but also potentially devastating for the asylum systems of EU frontline countries such as Greece or Italy, making them solely responsible for handling the migratory pressures on the EU Mediterranean border (Thielemann, 2018, p. 78). This vulnerability and inapplicability of the Dublin system has not gone unnoticed in the EU policy discourse, focusing attention around the relocation mechanism (already discussed in this chapter) and its institutionalisation within the reformed CEAS (Council of the European Union, 2017a; European Commission, 2016c, 2017i; European Parliament, 2015d).
In this respect, the framing of the CEAS reform, intertwines with the framing of the relocation mechanism revealing elements of resilience-centred thinking. Here, the reform of the EU asylum and the Dublin system is specifically promoted in the EU policy discourse as a response to the exposed shortcomings in the design and implementation of the EU asylum policies. As stated by Dimitris Avramopoulos, the Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship, “the CEAS and the whole Schengen zone is as strong as its weakest link, and now this weakest link is the Dublin system” (Ripoll Servent, 2018, p. 89). In this sense, the policy discourse concentrates not only on the issue of processing asylum seekers, but also on the matters of resilience of the Dublin system and its ability to provide clear and binding rules regarding redirecting of increased migratory pressures into less strained components of the system (European Commission, 2016c, p. 7). For this reason, building on the idea of solidarity, fairness and trust between the member states, the European Commission has been framing the reformed Dublin system as a resilient and reliable mechanism that provides clear rules governing relations between the member states in regard to examination of asylum applications, at the same time creating “means of detecting early problems in national asylum or reception systems, and address their root causes before they develop into fully fledged crises” (European Commission, 2018, p. 1). With this outspoken outlook on the future crises, the reform of the CEAS and the Dublin system is framed as an instrument for increasing resilience, making the asylum system more balanced, flexible, and robust in the face of not so much the “migration crisis” of 2015 but rather future migration-related challenges which will, sooner or later, materialise at the EU’s doorsteps.
6.3.2 European Union Trust Funds
The EU policy discourse on the “migration crisis” frames financial aid and development programmes as some of the key instruments for addressing the external causes of the crisis, enabling direct humanitarian-, reconstruction- and development-oriented interventions in the communities and countries of origin of irregular migrants (see Council of the European Union, 2016b, d; European Commission, 2016a; European Council 2017c; European Parliament, 2017a). It is continuously reiterated, specifically by the Commission, that “EU external cooperation assistance, and in particular development cooperation, plays an important role in tackling issues like poverty, insecurity, inequality and unemployment which are among the main root causes of irregular and forced migration” (European Commission, 2015b, p. 8, 2016a, f). The Parliament has supported this type of framing, especially in reference to its human security-centred features, often underlining that “the root causes of violence and underdevelopment need to be addressed in the countries of origin in order to stem the flow of refugees and economic migrants” (European Parliament, 2015d, rec. 16; see also 2016f, 2017a).
Here, the EU’s framing revolves around developing resilience in its neighbourhood and beyond. This idea is based on the notion that by increasing financial transfers and tailored development aid it is possible to strengthen the capacity of countries of origin to alleviate human suffering, fight structural problems and, in the long term, withstand economic, social and political shocks that produce and/or facilitate irregular migratory flows (Ceccorulli & Lucarelli, 2017). This again pinpoints the intertwining of resilience with human security in the EU discourse. The EU policy actors have been coherently promoting the idea of adjusting or reorienting development funds for the purpose of increasing resilience in the countries of transit and origin, creating a stronger EU neighbourhood that could contain the migratory flows, even before they reach the EU’s borders (European Commission, 2015h; European Parliament, 2017a). Here, the Council of the European Union offers an apt example of such framing, noting already in the early stages of the “migration crisis” that
A sustainable solution can only be found by intensifying cooperation with countries of origin and transit, including through assistance to strengthen their migration and border management capacity. Migration policies must become a much stronger integral part of the Union’s external and development policies (European Council, 2014, p. 3).
In this respect, the EU policy discourse is filled with calls for increased synergy between migration, trade and development policies, underlining the need for more comprehensive and coordinated actions that could address the internal and external dynamics of the crisis (for example: Council of the European Union, 2015c, e, f; European Commission, 2015b, h; European Parliament, 2017a). Along with a whole plethora of already existing financial programmes that have been earmarked to address the external root causes of increased migratory flows,Footnote 22 the EU has been specifically focusing attention on one type of financial instrument that is depicted in the EU policy discourse as the best stimulant of resilience, namely EU Trust Funds (EUTFs).
Trust Funds are commonly described as ad hoc and temporary instruments that allow pooling and sharing of significant volumes of financial assets from different sources in order to fund a specific goal (Hauck et al., 2015, p. 2). The funds may vary in scope, covering a specific country, region or even the whole globe while responding to identified policy priorities. They are governed by legal arrangements between donors and beneficiaries and are subjected to extraordinary financial reporting requirements for the purposes of monitoring spending priorities (Guder, 2009, p. 36). The trust funds have quickly become a preferred mode of financial intervention, proliferating in international development politics and turning into a “standard financing modality for delivering aid in coordinated international responses in fragile and post-conflict environments and complex emergencies” (Hauck et al., 2015, p. 2).
The EU started to develop its own trust fund scheme in 2013 as a way of increasing its political visibility on the international stage by creating a financial instrument for rapid and high impact interventions in external crisis situations (Hauck et al., 2015, p. 3). The main idea behind the EUTFs was to introduce a dose of flexibility into the existing development schemes, allowing the Commission to create and manage its own EUTFs that would not only leverage additional contributions from the EU member states but also remain open to financial transfers from non-EU donors and private entities (Hauck et al., 2015, p. 3). In this way, as an added value to already existing development programmes, the EUTFs are “supposed to bring a more coherent and integrated EU response to crises by merging various EU financial instruments and contributions from within and outside the EU into one single flexible mechanism for quick disbursement” (European Commission, 2017n).
Since the early days of the “migration crisis” the EU policy actors, especially the Commission and the Councils, have been framing the EUTFs as rapid and custom-tailored financial instruments for increasing resilience. This commitment to the EUTF concept is clearly visible in the Valletta Summit Action Plan, where the EU has confirmed the importance of trust funds in responding to the “migration crisis”, indicating that they will provide countries of origin and transit with:
additional funding and will contribute to a flexible, speedy and efficient delivery of support to foster stability and to contribute to better migration management. More specifically, the Trust Funds will help address the root causes of destabilisation, forced displacement and irregular migration, by promoting economic and equal opportunities, strengthening resilience of vulnerable people, security and development (European Council, 2015f, pp. 1–2).
In this respect, the EU quite directly indicates that the strength of EUTFs lies in their flexibility that allows mobilising additional financial resources and the possibility to finally factor-in the ties between migration control, labour mobility and trade, thus enhancing incentives for cooperation in the areas of border management and readmission (European Commission, 2015g, p. 27).
By the end of 2017 the EU had created and promoted three major EUTFs that were supposed to directly contribute to addressing the root causes of the crisis by building up societal, political and economic resilience in the relevant countries and regions. The first EUTF, framed as a policy response to increased migratory flows was launched in mid-2014 under the name “Bêkou Trust Fund” (or EUTF CAR) and concentrated predominantly on the Central African Republic (CAR) (European Commission, 2018). The Fund has been tasked with streamlining donor operations into CAR and funding post-conflict and transition-related activities, reducing human suffering and displacement by alleviating structural fragility of the state (European Commission Website, 2018b). With a broad scope of projects concentrated on employment generation, access to health services, development of water and sanitation infrastructure, and refugee support, the EUTF CAR has become a new type of Trust Fund linking relief, rehabilitation and development (LRRD) in one EU financial intervention (Niemann & Zaun, 2018, p. 12). In this way, even though limited in terms of budget (64 million EUR), the EUTF CAR has set out an overarching principle for the development and implementation of the other Trust Funds that were supposed to tackle the root causes of the “migration crisis”.
The “EU Regional Trust Fund in response to the Syrian Crisis” (also referred to as “the Madad Fund” or EUTF Madad) was established in 2014 to address the challenges of the Syrian refugee crisis in Syria and neighbouring countries (i.e. Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon Turkey), and affected regions (i.e. Western Balkans) (Den Hertog, 2016, p. 3). The EUTF Madad focused on providing help to up to 1.5 million Syrian refugees, supporting basic public services and necessities, covering access to basic and higher education, health services, socio-economic support, and development of water and wastewater infrastructure (European Commission Website, 2018a). Since its inception, the Fund has been framed as an instrument for development and resilience, covering programmes aimed at decreasing “the pressure on countries hosting refugees by investing in livelihoods and social cohesion and supporting them in providing access to jobs and education that will benefit both refugees and host communities” (European Commission Website, 2018a). With the escalation of the “migration crisis” in late 2015 and early 2016, the Madad Fund rapidly gained in significance in the EU’s development aid scheme, relatively easily exceeding the target contribution of one billion EUR and amounting to total volume of 1.5 billion EUR in 2018 (Den Hertog, 2016, p. 3).
Encouraged by the initial success and overall support for the Trust Fund for Syria, in 2015 the EU initiated another fund, this time focused specifically on Africa and programmes oriented to stemming irregular migration (Niemann & Zaun, 2018, p. 12). The “EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa” (EUTF for Africa) focused specifically on three regions, which produce the highest numbers of irregular migrants in the EU, namely Sahel and Lake Chad, the Horn of Africa and North Africa (European Commission, 2015b, p. 5; European Commission Website, 2018e). EUTF for Africa is a great example of how the EU policy actors have started to reorient the focus of development aid specifically for the purpose of migration management and resilience. The Fund is described as an instrument for removing push factors for migration by building up economic security (e.g. addressing skills gaps, improving employability through vocational training, supporting job creation and self-employment) and broadly understood resilience covering food and nutrition security, as well as good governance, rule of law and human rights protections, to name a few (European Commission Website, 2018f; European Parliament, 2016b). In this sense, the discourse on the Fund has very distinctive migration-resilience features, oriented on improving migration governance by addressing the drivers of irregular migration, encouraging legal mobility and fostering effective returns and reintegration.
6.3.3 EU Border, Capacity Building and Assistance Missions
The CSDP non-kinetic (e.g. capacity building- and assistance-centred) responses to the root causes of the “migration crisis” have become a prominent part of the resilience-centred framing in the EU. In this respect, with the Council of the European Union as the main sponsor, the EU policy actors have been expanding the understanding of the CSDP operations within the EU migration and border management scheme discussions (Council of the European Union, 2016b, c, g, 2017a; European Commission, 2015b, 2016g; European Parliament, 2017a). They have been consistently framing the EU’s military and civilian missions as one of the instruments that “will support different paths to resilience, targeting the most acute cases of governmental, economic, societal and climate/energy fragility, as well as develop more effective migration policies for Europe and its partners” (European Security and Defence College, 2017, p. 22). The mandates of the missions are predominantly centred on elimination of the weakest links in the border and security system of host countries, focusing on security sector reform, capacity building, border assistance, and advisory and training activities. These are supposed to supplement and complement other EU efforts in strengthening political, economic and societal resilience in the regions producing highest numbers of irregular migrants (Haesebrouck & Meirvenne, 2016, pp. 269–270). In this regard, the EU policy discourse on the “migration crisis” highlights three CSDP missions in particular – EU Border Advisory Mission Libya (EUBAM Libya), EU Capacity Building Mission Sahel Niger (EUCAP Niger), and EU Capacity Building Mission Sahel Mali (EUCAP Mali).
EUBAM LibyaFootnote 23 is an explicit example of the resilience-centred framing of CSDP instruments. In the EU policy discourse, the mission is framed as a support and capacity building capability, which is supposed to assist the Libyan (legitimate) border, migration and justice authorities in regaining control over its borders and the internal security realm (Council of the European Union, 2016k; EEAS Website, 2017). To this end, its mandate “is carried out through advising, training and mentoring Libyan counterparts in strengthening the border services in accordance with international standards and best practices, and by advising the Libyan authorities on the development of a national Integrated Border Management” (EEAS Website, 2018). However, EUBAM Libya is more than a border assistance mission. Indeed, it has very prominent migration and border control features, but it also includes strong criminal justice and counter-terrorism components, which strategically connect security and defence planning, migration and policing within one broad CSDP assistance-expertise package (EEAS Website, 2018). The EUBAM Libya shows an interesting securitising potential in the conceptualisation of external migration control, merging capacity building with elements of militarisation of migration (Jones & Johnson, 2016, p. 196). In this respect, the mission is based on the idea that the strength of the EU borders starts with the strength of the EU neighbourhood and by extension its ability to control its territories and contain migratory flows (Jones & Johnson, 2016, p. 197). In this respect, the mission’s mandate literally brings migration and border control in Libya under CSDP crisis management mentorship, generating a distinctive securitising or even militarising move towards human mobility, merging elements of resilience and “exceptionalist” security thinking.
Another example of the application of CSDP missions for the purposes of curbing migratory flows are the EU Capacity Building Operations Sahel NigerFootnote 24 and Sahel Mali,Footnote 25 both mandated with security sector reforms, counter-terrorism training, and capacity building of migration control and criminal justice systems. The intensification of CSDP operations in the Sahel is not a coincidence. In the EU policy discourse, the region is defined as one of the key points of reference for security, migration and resilience building activities (Alberto & Tebas, 2015). As noted by the EEAS, “Europe has numerous interests in the region, ranging from combating security threats, terrorism, organised crime and illegal migration to assuring energy security” (EEAS Website, 2016a). In this respect, the scope of both EUCAP Sahel operations remains relatively broad and concentrates on assisting and mentoring national security authorities in security sector reform and management of the internal security system (EEAS, 2017a, p. 19). In regard to migration control prerogatives, the EUCAP, frames the national Nigerian and Malian security forces as the primary “managers” of migration, effectively supporting militarisation of migration control in Mali. As specified in the mandate of EUCAP Sahel Niger, one of the key priorities of the mission is to “support the security forces’ capability to better control migration flows and to combat irregular migration and associated criminal activity more effectively” (EEAS Website, 2016a). Similarly, EUCAP Sahel Mali has been emphasising the need for “supporting Mali in managing migrating flows and border management by strengthening of the Malian internal security forces capacity in the fight against terrorism and organised crime” (EEAS Website, 2016b). With this type of framing, it becomes evident that the clue of the EU’s approach to migration control and resilience building in its neighbourhood lies with the effectiveness of national security authorities in controlling their borders and containing irregular migration.
6.3.4 Comments
The prominence of the logic of resilience in the conceptualisation of remedial actions towards the “migration crisis” indicates that broader risk-oriented framing is strongly favoured. Resilience, even though it belongs to the family of risk logic, proposes a set of measures and objectives for dealing with migration-related challenges separate from risk management. While risk management-centred policy responses concentrate on the idea of managing, averting or mitigating potential threats, resilience focuses on building up the structural robustness of the referent object to the upcoming shocks and disturbances (Kaufmann, 2016, p. 102). In the EU’s framing of the crisis, this notion of increasing resilience, though not present in the diagnosis and evaluation, has been institutionalised into the policy responses. In this respect, in the remedial actions phase of the framing process, resilience-oriented instruments have become juxtaposed with human security and “exceptionalist” logic, inducing a specific mixture of humanitarian relief, development, capacity building and security into the internal (European Common Asylum System) and external (EU Trust Funds and CSDP missions) dimensions of EU migration and border management. In both these dimensions the EU’s framing of resilience-building reforms or interventions carry a significant potential for securitisation, to various extents linking asylum and external migration control with the realm of security.
As discussed above, within the EU’s internal dimension the logic of resilience is most prominent in the conceptualisation of the Common European Asylum System reform. Here, the CEAS is framed in the EU policy discourse as one of the key EU’s vulnerabilities, reflected in its ineffectiveness and inability to absorb pressures caused by increased numbers of applications from asylum seekers. This lack of resilience of the CEAS has been continuously reiterated in the EU policy discourse, encouraging calls for deeper and more decisive centralisation and harmonisation of EU asylum procedures at the EU level. Here, the EU’s strategy towards the identified vulnerability falls under the category of “adaptation”, which suggests the adjustment of the system within the existing policies and institutional frameworks in accordance with the identified vulnerabilities and specific types of future risks (Methmann & Oels, 2015, p. 54). This element of resilience-building adaption quite visibly pushed asylum seekers deeper into the realm of security, on one hand attempting to strengthen the effectiveness of the system, but on the other integrating it more with the EU’s internal security realm. As noted by the interviewed European Asylum Support Office officer:
From EASO’s point of view, the whole commotion around CEAS is good. It finally puts us on the map calling for strengthening of our mandate and centralisation of the whole system. But if we look closer what the EU is trying to do here, we will see that in fact in the name of protection of asylum seekers it proposes to bring closer the asylum security systems, especially in terms of identification of potential threats, terrorists, and irregular migrants among asylum applicants. For instance, the reform proposes a major increase of Eurodac competencies and scope, allowing for collecting more detailed and, using security language, operational information on asylum seekers. This data will be then, under certain circumstances, shared among EU security agencies, national security authorities that investigate asylum seekers. Another example is EASO’s rapprochement with Europol and Frontex, what is already visible in hotspots. With the new mandate we will be institutionally, organisationally and what is more important operationally closer than ever with these agencies, which are all about security – we are not. EASO is about protection, even though we do not provide protection as such (EASO-3).
In this respect, the idea of building up resilience to the future migration-related crises is linked not only to harmonisation and centralisation of specific aspects of the EU asylum system, but also its securitisation.
The logic of resilience has assumed a slightly different shape in the conceptualisation of actions addressing the external dimension the crisis. Resilience-building instruments have been commonly framed in the EU as the most suitable for addressing what is believed to be the human insecurity and root causes of the “migration crisis”; however, under closer scrutiny it becomes evident that they have been designed to externalise migration management and outsource responsibility for containment of irregular crossings into the EU. Indeed, the EU’s conceptualisation of remedial actions outside the EU borders embodies the very idea of externalisation of migration control by increasing the resilience and effectiveness of the migration and border authorities in the countries of transit or origin of irregular migrants. In this sense, the EU has been framing such external action instruments as the EU Trust Funds and the CSDP civilian missions as interventions that were supposed to assist national authorities in increasing their capacity for border and migration control. The neighbouring countries and countries of origin, with the EU’s assistance, were supposed become stable enough to absorb all kinds of shocks (be it economic, societal or environmental) and contain migrants (often their own citizens) within their borders.
Here, the EU Trust Funds represent a financial intervention that was supposed to disarm socio-economic factors pushing migrants out of their host communities, while the CSDP capacity building missions concentrate on assisting security authorities (e.g. the military) in addressing migration-related challenges, including irregular migration and trans-border organised crime, and terrorism. These resilience-centred instruments to different degrees integrate migration with the realm of security, sometimes even militarising migration control in the third countries, fortifying the EU against future migration-related shocks. As noted by the interviewed Member of the European Parliament:
The EU’s understanding of resilience to migration is about building walls outside already existing walls. The EU is trying to make different countries, especially neighbouring ones, responsible for stopping flows of migrants whatever the cost. Let’s not kid ourselves, Europe needs stable countries with stable borders in its proximity, even if they are difficult to accept for obvious reasons. Look at the EUCAPs in Sahel, they literally teach military and security personnel in those countries how to deal with illegal migrants and how to secure borders. This is not as much about the protection of migrants or citizens of those countries, but about containing them and stopping anyone who wants to illegally cross their borders into Europe or wherever. It is about building that wall. EUTF’s on the other hand allow transferring money to specific sectors that stimulate illegal migration to limit the flows, but thanks to those funds money is also transferred to civilian security sector, mostly related to border security under the “Train& Equip” scheme. You have it in the Africa Trust Fund. It does not look like addressing push factors to me. It looks like resilience according to the EU comes down to maintenance of security authorities of specific countries rather than investing in their social and economic robustness and sustainability (European Parliament-2).
Indeed, the EU’s conceptualisation of external remedial actions towards the crisis carry a distinctive blend of relief, development and security. It depicts resilience-building interventions as a development or even humanitarian assistance to the regions producing highest numbers of migrants, at the same time prominently focusing on providing assistance to the security sector that in this case is identified as the key manager of migration. This type of framing, merging humanitarian and risk, resilience and “exceptionalist” features has become symptomatic for the EU. Here, the application of human security seems to have an important legitimising effect, serving as a justification for the mobilisation of restrictive and securitising policy instruments, such as the training of the Malian military in migration management techniques, all in the name of alleviating suffering and increasing the societal, economic and governmental resilience of vulnerable groups and regions outside the EU. This framing points towards a specific type of exploitation or appropriation of the humanitarian narrative, which when coupled with “exceptionalist” security measures may lead to what could be described as “humanitarian securitisation” (Stępka, 2018). This trend is better fleshed out in the next part of chapter, dedicated to the application of “exceptionalist” security logic.
6.4 “Exceptionalist” Security
Remedial actions driven by “exceptionalist” security logic are commonly associated with the state of exception, reflected in mobilisation of exceptional and reactive measures, which are designed to combat and eradicate perceived security problems in the name of maintaining the status quo and the survival of the referent object (Buzan, 1991, p. 116). Exceptional security measures are usually, but not exclusively, initiated by extraordinary procedures, bypassing normal politics and mobilising a significant amount of force and resources for a limited period of time (C.A.S.E., 2006, pp. 465–466). In the case of the “migration crisis”, the Council of the European Union with the support of the European Commission have proved to be the most outspoken sponsors of the exceptional security framing of the remedial actions towards the crisis. The active role of the Council does not come as a surprise, as it has been traditionally employing a more realist approach towards the framing of international crises, commonly building on the intergovernmental or militarised approach of the Foreign Affairs Council (Roselle et al., 2014). The Commission, however, is a more unlikely promotor of “exceptionalism”, as it has been traditionally invested in policy framing based on risk-oriented logics. Here, the imperative for decisive action, so present in the diagnosis and evaluation of the “migration crisis”, has pushed the Commission towards a blend of risk and “exceptionalist” thinking, aligning it with the Council in supporting mobilisation of military or militarised operations in response to increased migratory flows. In this respect, the analysis of the EU policy discourse reveals elements of exceptional security logic applied in conceptualisation of remedial actions in two distinctive policy responses, namely EUNAVFOR MED – Operation “Sophia” and Joint Operations coordinated by the Frontex. As discussed later in this chapter, both types of operations represent a dynamic blend of predominantly “exceptionalist” security framing with distinctive elements of risk and human security-oriented logics.
6.4.1 EUNAVFOR MED “Sophia”
From the beginning of the crisis, the EU policy discourse has been filled with calls for the mobilisation of decisive security measures in the EU’s fight against human smuggling and exploitation of migrants in the Mediterranean routes (Council of the European Union, 2016a; European Commission, 2015a, b, 2016b; European Parliament, 2015a, d). As stated in the Commission’s “Agenda on Migration”:
The criminal networks which exploit vulnerable migrants must be targeted. The High Representative/Vice President (HR/VP) has already presented options for possible Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) operations to systematically identify, capture and destroy vessels used by smugglers. Such action under international law will be a powerful demonstration of the EU’s determination to act (European Commission, 2015b, p. 3).
In June 2015, the EU member states decided to launch an unprecedented military naval operation (originally under the codename EUNAVFOR MED, later renamed EUNAVFOR MED-Operation “Sophia”) and mandated it with border security activities centred on two main tasks: (1) disrupting trafficking and smuggling of human beings; and (2) preventing further loss of life on the Mediterranean high seasFootnote 26 (Council of the European Union, 2016a, p. 1). To achieve this goal the mission focused specifically on disruption of the business model of human smuggling and trafficking networks in the Southern Central Mediterranean through the identification, capture, and disposal of vessels and associated assets suspected of being employed for smuggling or trafficking activities (European Council, 2015b). The operational area of the mission covered Southern Central Mediterranean, specifically focusing on migratory inflows from the coasts of Libya (EEAS Website, 2016c). Since 2017, it has been conducted under the so-called Chapter VII “peace-enforcement mandate” (UNSC resolution 2357 (2017)), which authorised kinetic operational activities such as boarding, search, seizure and diversion, on the high seas, of vessels suspected of being used for human smuggling or trafficking (EEAS Website, 2016d).
The EU policy framing of Operation “Sophia”, specifically produced within the Council of the European Union, has been based on an explicit humanitarian note (Council of the European Union 2016a, l, 2017c, e). One of the most distinctive moves, framing the operation as a predominantly humanitarian endeavour, was the renaming of the mission from EUNAVFOR MED to Operation “Sophia”. For this purpose, Federica Mogherini, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, has been inserting into the official EU discourse a narrative about a baby girl named Sophia born on an EU naval vessel:
We all know that we need to work together – the international community, Europe, Libya and neighbours – to stop the smugglers, dismantle the criminal networks, save lives and stop this human tragedy. I particularly think of women and children and babies, one of them born on one of our vessels – this is why Operation “Sophia” is called like this (EEAS Website, 2017).
This human security-oriented frame has been continuously reproduced by other EU policy actors. For instance, the European Parliament has been expressing its continuous support “for the aims of navy operations such as Operation ‘Sophia’, and stresses the need to protect life, emphasising that all aspects of the operation should ensure that migrant lives are protected” (European Parliament, 2016f, rec. 9). In a similar tone, the European Commission has been framing the operation as one of the key and most effective EU actions and symbols of the European unity in saving human lives at high seas and from exploitation of human smugglers (European Commission, 2016k, 2017c, d, f).
The EU policy actors quite uniformly promoted the humanitarian features of the mission, but also welcomed its decisive and robust character, even going as far as describing it as the “spearhead” of the EU policy response to the “migration crisis” (LIBE, 2016, 2017). Following the general trend in the EU policy discourse, the framing of Operation “Sophia” has been changing over the course of the “migration crisis”. In this regard, the human security features were most emphasised in its early days of the mission, specifically in the discourse surrounding its development and deployment, and then gradually turned into a more security-oriented and militarised tone (see Council of the European Union 2016c, 2017c, e). This is not surprising, as under more careful scrutiny of the mission’s mandate, the element of prevention of loss of human life is rather marginal in comparison to its security-related features. As stated by the Commander of the mission during a hearing at the European Parliament on search and rescue activities in the Mediterranean:
Operation “Sophia” is not a search and rescue mission, and it should not be treated as such. We save lives because it is our international obligation, but let us not lose out of sight the primary objective of the mission and that it is combating human smugglers and traffickers and disrupting their business model (LIBE, 2017).
Indeed, starting in 2017 the framing of the mission moved towards exceptional security-oriented, emphasising and celebrating its kinetic features such as the boarding, inspection, seizure and disposal of vessels used in human smuggling and trafficking activities (Council of the European Union, 2017c, e). This turn in framing can be best observed in the human security-free description of the mission, offered in the European External Action Service’s CFSP/CSDP Missions Review:
Operation “Sophia” is a military crisis management operation that contributes to improving maritime security in the Mediterranean and supports the return of stability and security in Libya. Its primary goal is to contribute to disrupting the business model of the migrant smuggling and human trafficking networks in the Central Mediterranean (EEAS, 2017a, p. 28).
In its later stages, the activities of “Sophia” have been framed within a security package in the Mediterranean, oriented not only to kinetic activities, but also surveillance activities (thus including elements of risk management) (EEAS, 2017a, pp. 28–30; Council of the European, Union 2016a). In this regard, its mandate and operational capability have been designed to be comprehensive and open to cooperation with the EU AFSJ agencies, primarily Frontex and Europol, as well as external security actors, namely NATO Operation “Sea Guardian”Footnote 27 (Council of the European Union, 2016l). As a consequence, Operation “Sophia” envisaged operational support in saving lives at sea, but also increased cooperation with the AFSJ partners and NATO in its decisive offensive against human smugglers, proceeded with extensive “monitoring, intelligence gathering and adaptation to the evolving modus operandi of smugglers” (European Commission, 2017d, p. 8). This visible shift towards security and a risk-oriented understanding of “Sophia’s” tasks did not go completely unnoticed and uncontested. The European Parliament was monitoring developments in the EU’s engagement in the Mediterranean and was contesting the exceptional security-oriented remedial actions, underlining that “military operations should not be the predominant aspect of any holistic approach to migration and reiterates that Operation “Sophia” must not distract assets already deployed in the Mediterranean from saving lives at sea” (European Parliament, 2016f, rec. 10). This concern, however, did not resonate in the EU policy discourse and was rather limited to the Parliament.
6.4.2 Joint Border Operations
According to the European Border and Coast Guard Regulation (Frontex), a joint border operation is a “package of technical and operational reinforcement as well as capacity-building activities” (European Union, 2016a, p. 19). It is coordinated by the Agency in cooperation with a member state, which is “faced with a situation of specific and disproportionate challenges, especially the arrival at points of the external borders of large numbers of third-country nationals trying to enter the territory of that Member State without authorisation” (European Union, 2016a, p. 19). It represents a blend of risk (managerial and resilience-oriented) and exceptional security logics, being interpreted as both an instrument for control of migratory flows, as well as a response to persistent and severe threats to the integrity of the EU borders (Sagrera, 2013, p. 171). In respect to the “migration crisis”, the framing of the missions included one more logic that visibly seeped from the diagnostic and evaluation segments of the frame-narrative, namely human security.
The framing of joint operations has been built around a sense of exceptionality and urgency reflected in the rhetoric of “human tragedy”, “emergency” and “structural deficiency of border control” at the same time intersecting with discourse on the existentially threatened Schengen area (Council of the European Union, 2016d, o; European Commission, 2016a, b, g). This has contributed to increased calls for urgent deployment of robust measures capable of addressing security and humanitarian challenges unfolding on the EU borders (Council of the European Union, 2015i, 2016b; European Commission, 2015b, 2016j; European Parliament, 2015d). In this respect, in the “Agenda on Migration”, the European Commission explicitly defines the border operations as the spearhead of the EU humanitarian engagement on its borders, calling for maintained and intensified involvement of the member states:
Europe cannot stand by whilst lives are being lost. Search and rescue efforts will be stepped up to restore the level of intervention provided under the former Italian ‘Mare Nostrum’ operation. To triple the budget for the Frontex joint-operations Triton and Poseidon, the Commission has already presented an amending budget for 2015 and will present its proposal for 2016 by the end of May. When implemented, this will expand both the capability and the geographical scope of these operations, so that Frontex can fulfil its dual role of coordinating operational border support to Member States under pressure, and helping to save the lives of migrants at sea. In parallel to this increase in EU funding, assets (ships and aircrafts) are being deployed by several Member States. This welcome solidarity will need to be maintained for as long as the migratory pressure persists (European Commission, 2015b, p. 3).
The EU promoted mobilisation and operational expansion of border missions on an unprecedented scale, emphasising their role in search and rescue, patrolling, policing and guarding the irregular immigration routes, mostly on the Southern flank of the EU external borders.Footnote 28 With this broad catalogue of activities in mind, the EU lunched three large-scale Frontex-led sea border operations – Joint Operations “Triton” and “Themis” in Italy, and Joint Operation “Poseidon” in Greece.Footnote 29
The search and rescue-oriented activities played a prominent role in the framing of the operations. They were also reflected in the revision of Frontex’s new mandate, which in addition to traditional border and internal security tasks, made the agency responsible for coordination and facilitation of search and rescue activities on the EU external borders (European Union, 2016a, art. 8). At first, the prerogative of saving lives was listed as a primary goal of the EU’s presence of the borders, with the European Parliament and the Commission underlining the humanitarian imperative of the operations (European Commission, 2015b, 2016j: European Parliament, 2015d). The first Frontex-led joint operation, “Triton”Footnote 30 (2014–2018), was a continuation of a unilateral Italian search and rescue mission “Mare Nostrum”.Footnote 31 “Triton” was promoted as a support mission to Italian border and coast guard authorities, focusing on border security and saving migrants’ lives in the Central Mediterranean (Frontex Website, 2018e). Its operational area covered the territorial waters of Italy as well as parts of the search and rescue zones of Italy and MaltaFootnote 32 (European Commission, 2016j, p. 1). The joint operation “Poseidon”Footnote 33 at first represented a similar type of mission, covering search and rescue in the Greek sea border with Turkey and the Greek islands (Frontex Website, 2018d). However, it has quickly embraced more security-driven activities, on the one hand strengthening search and rescue activities, but on the other focusing on identification and registration of saved migrants as well as support of returns and readmission (European Commission, 2016j, p. 1).
As it was in the case of EUNAVFOR “Sophia”, the security features of the joint border operations became more robust with the progression of the crisis. Each review of the operational mandates of the missions added new security components. For instance, while reviewing Operation “Triton” in 2017, the European Commission stated that even though “Triton” was initially launched with a focus on support to search and rescue, the state of the EU borders required its rapid expansion to “include cross border crime, such as people smuggling, drug trafficking, illegal fishing and maritime pollution” (European Commission, 2017d, p. 5). With time, the explicit search and rescue profile of the mission was substantially downscaled within the Operational Plans of both “Triton” and “Poseidon”, putting the emphasis on the tasks related to enhancement of border security, operational cooperation in combating transborder crime, terrorism and irregular migration (Frontex, 2015a, b). Since 2015 and the major revisions of the EU border regime, the joint missions have gained a significantly militarised character, employing a “‘rescue-through-interdiction’/‘rescue-without-protection’ model” of operations (Ghezelbash et al., 2018). As Moreno-Lax (2018, p. 130) argues, the EU border operations have been using the narrative of search and rescue as an excuse for increased security activity in the Mediterranean, mainly focusing on combating cross-border crime and counter-terrorism activities. This model has been more explicitly reflected in Operation “Themis”, which in 2018 replaced “Triton” in the Central Mediterranean area of operations. “Themis” focused predominantly on security and law enforcement operational tasks, leaving very little space for any search and rescue activities (Frontex Website, 2018b, c). The operation has been equipped with extensive security components specifically tailored for combating and tracing illicit trans-border activities, including terrorism (Nielsen, 2018). The operational mandate included “collection of intelligence and other steps aimed at detecting foreign fighters and other terrorist threats at the external borders” (Nielsen, 2018). As stated by the executive director of Frontex, “We need to be better equipped to prevent criminal groups that try to enter the EU undetected. This is crucial for the internal security of the European Union” (Frontex Website, 2018c). In this respect, the framing of the joint operations included human security logic only in the initial stages and the operations, keeping it to the point when the operation was established enough to shed its humanitarian features and become a more kinetic and security-driven response to the crisis.
6.4.3 Comments
In regard to the conceptualisation of remedial action, the logic of “exceptionality” was reflected in the mobilisation of multipurpose robust border operations and deployment of military naval vessels, vehicles and armed border guards under the special security circumstances. Here, Operation “Sophia” and Frontex-led joint operations represent such a security response, an EU reactive force symbolising a security presence on the frontlines of the “migration crisis”. The analysis shows that the framing of these operations remained dynamic and reflected in the intertwining of surveillance and security features (monitoring and reacting to threats) and humanitarian orientation (search and rescue).
The initial stages of Operation “Sophia” and Frontex-led joint operations were driven by the human security-centred framing. In the case of Operation “Sophia”, the EU has been actively promoting this anti-human smuggling and anti-irregular migration military operation as a humanitarian mission, regardless its explicit security-oriented mandate. A similar framing move has been applied in the case of Frontex-led operations, which have been mandated as both border control and search and rescue missions. As noted by one of the interviewees:
there is something wrong with mandating one mission with stopping and saving migrants at the same time. In my experience if you couple security and humanitarianism in one mandate, security always wins. There is an inherent contradiction in that. We have to remember that especially “Sophia” is not a search and rescue operation. You have vessels with big guns, sailors, soldiers hunting human smugglers and if they have a chance, picking up migrants at sea. They are not really prepared for that. I am not saying that there should not be such a mission but let us stop calling it humanitarian. It is a hardcore military operation mandated by the UNSC resolution to combat organised crime. (European Parliament-2)
It has become increasingly visible that the human security-oriented framing of the missions has been rather used to explain and justify political decisions on deployment of military assets in the centre of the “migration crisis” (Cusumano, 2017; Little & Vaughan-Williams, 2017). In other words, they served as a legitimising factor, allowing the launch of an explicitly military operation, which then was swiftly reviewed and transformed from “search and rescue” to “seek and destroy” mode (Ghezelbash et al., 2018; Stępka, 2018). This reflects a rather narrow and utilitarian understanding of human security and humanitarian obligations, granting irregular migrants escaping life-threatening situations the right to be rescued at sea, but very little beyond that.
Even though this securitisation or militarisation of humanitarian action has been successful, it has proved to have a rather limited effect on EU security (Johansen, 2017). The reviews of the missions, indicate that saving migrants lives turned out to be the most tangible result of the missions given that there is little evidence that Operation “Sophia” or joint operations have significantly disrupted human smuggling or terrorist activities in the Mediterranean (Johansen, 2017, p. 515). Regardless, in the later stages of the “migration crisis” the EU policy actors, except for the European Parliament, have been favouring this surveillance and kinetic refocus of all the operations, emphasising the need for adaptation, and a stronger and more decisive involvement in combating human smuggling and terrorism in the Mediterranean (Council of the European Union, 2016a, l, 2017b; European Commission, 2015a, b, 2016h; European Council, 2015c, 2016a, b, 2017d).
6.5 Conclusion
The remedial action phase marks a shift in the dynamics of the interpretative process as well as between the EU policy actors. Here, the framing of suitable policy responses has been visibly dominated by the European Commission, the European Council, the Council of the European Union and, to some extent, the European External Action Service – the actors that have the most significant impact on the shaping and implementation of security policies and in the EU. As a result of this changed dynamic, the European Parliament has lost its prominence in the remedial action phase, either aligning with the dominant players or on a rare occasion attempting to promote the incorporation of human security logic in the EU’s policy response. With this decline of the role of the Parliament and the rise of the member states and the Commission, the internal dynamics of the framing process and the specificity of security logics applied in the frame-narrative has changed in comparison to the diagnosis and evaluation.
Firstly, the EU policy discourse on the conceptualisation of remedial actions has proved to be far more contentious, revealing tensions between logics (e.g. human security and risk regarding the “hotpots”, detention and returns, the EU-Turkey Statement) and conflicts among the actors (e.g. between some member states and the Commission regarding the relocation scheme and the Dublin system reform). Secondly, it revealed the dynamic and complex nature of security logics, which became increasingly entangled in the conceptualisation of remedial actions. The logic of human security has been repositioned in the EU policy discourse, leaving space for more robust introduction of another risk-oriented logic – resilience. This has confirmed the explicit dominance of risk logic in the EU frame-narrative on the “migration crisis”, which has saturated both the internal and external dimensions of the EU interventions. The fate of human security was very different. It has lost its prominence and has been “dissolved” between different policy responses, most notably resilience- and “exceptionality”-oriented measures.
The explicit dominance of broadly understood risk logic in the framing of the “migration crisis” is reflected in both risk management and resilience-oriented remedial actions. The risk management-centred interpretations have been discursively well-structured within the EU migration-security continuum and the diagnostic and evaluation segments of the frame-narrative. Building on the need to regain control over the EU’s external borders and internal security realm, the Commission and the Councils strongly promoted security measures oriented to the control, management and surveillance of human mobility. With the introduction of specific sites (i.e. “hotspots”) and measures (e.g. Eurodac, PNR system) irregular migrants and asylum seekers have been successfully reframed from objects of protection (as in human security) to objects of risk that need to be controlled for security purposes.
The prominence of risk was continued with the promotion of resilience-centred measures, which have been introduced into the EU’s frame-narrative as means for addressing the root causes of the crisis and building up the institutional robustness of the EU’s asylum system. Here, the EU started to create two categories of asylum seekers, framing them as desirable and legitimate applicants, and irregular migrants who harm the system by submitting bogus asylum claims. Resilience-centred policies have been oriented to fortifying the internal and external realm of the EU, building up the capacity to withstand future migration-related shocks and disturbances that are believed to manifest themselves sooner or later. The framing of resilience-building measures deployed outside the EU borders distinctively feeds on human security logic, being interpreted as instruments bringing relief, development, rehabilitation and security to the countries and communities ridden with underdevelopment and human suffering. In this sense, human security logic is being dissolved within resilience-centred framing, as a secondary interpretative thread which legitimises interventions outside the EU borders.
A similar trend is visible in the application of “exceptionalist” security logic in the conceptualisation of remedial actions. Here, militarised and robust security measures such as EUNAVFOR “Sophia” or Frontex-led border operations include the humanitarian narrative in a more utilitarian fashion. Here, the notion of “saving lives at sea” and humanitarian actions were successfully used for justification and legitimisation of the mobilisation of extraordinary security measures in the Mediterranean; however, they were swiftly marginalised in favour of more security-centred modes of operation. In this respect, in the later stages of the crisis (i.e. late 2016 and 2017) the mandates of the EU missions have been gradually revised and reframed to assume tasks centred on “seek and destroy” rather than “search and rescue”. As a result, the protection and wellbeing of migrants has been deemphasised in the EU’s conceptualisation of remedial actions, making space for more risk and security-oriented framing, focused on the strengthening of external borders, control of mobility, identification of foreign fighters and terrorists within the migratory flows, and the fight against trans-border organised crime.
Notes
- 1.
EURTF is a specialised administrative unit responsible for coordination of the activities and information exchange between different teams of experts involved in the “hotspot approach”. This includes EU agencies (such as Frontex, EASO and Europol) as well as authorities of the host country. EURTF and operational expert teams support the work of the host Member State on the ground (e.g. registration and screening of irregular migrants at the ports of disembarkation, pre-return assistance in pre-removal centres) (Statewatch, 2015).
- 2.
The European Commission defines a Migration Management Support Team as a team of experts deployed within the framework Frontex, EASO, or another relevant EU agency. The teams are entrusted with technical and operational support to Member States at hotspot areas (European Commission Website, 2018g).
- 3.
The Migration Partnership Framework regulates returns to third countries as well as passing back irregular migrants from a member state to another on the basis of bilateral readmission agreements (see European Commission, 2017l).
- 4.
The concept of a “safe country of origin” defines countries which, based on the stability of their democratic system and compliance with human rights standards, are considered safe to live in (Niemann & Zaun, 2018, p. 9).
- 5.
In this regard, the European Commission frames the “Smart Borders” as an instrument dealing with recording short-term legal stays of third country nationals (European Commission, 2016i, p. 1).
- 6.
RTP is a border control system which facilitates crossing of EU external borders for visitors from third countries traveling frequently to the EU. It is based on pre-vetting of specific groups of travellers before their arrival at the border (European Parliament Website, 2018c).
- 7.
EES gathers data on non-EU nationals (both visa-required and visa-exempt travellers). It gathers travel information and records entry and exit information with a view to facilitate the border crossing and identify overstayers (European Commission Website, 2018d). The system has an important security feature as it is designed to “support the identification of terrorists, criminals as well as of suspects and victims of crime. It also provides a record of travel histories of non-EU nationals including crime suspects, perpetrators or victims of crime. It would thus complement the information in the SIS” (European Commission Website, 2018d).
- 8.
The Prüm framework is an information exchange tool, which grants EU member states mutual access to DNA analysis files, fingerprint identification systems and vehicle registration data (European Commission Website, 2018c).
- 9.
In order to reach satisfactory levels of interoperability, the European Commission has also proposed strengthening the mandate of eu-Lisa – an AFSJ agency responsible for maintenance and management of the EU IT-large scale dataveillance systems, specifically the Schengen Information System and the Visa Information System. The proposition of the Commission envisages that eu-Lisa would be responsible not only for management but also development of the new systems and would contribute to increased interoperability of the EU data gathering and surveillance (European Commission, 2017i).
- 10.
The interoperability platform initially encompasses the following databases: Schengen Information System, Eurodac, Visa Information System, Entry/Exit System (EES), European Travel Information and Authorisation System, European Criminal Records Information System for third-country nationals, Interpol’s Stolen and Lost Travel Documents (European Commission, 2017i).
- 11.
In 2016 Frontex was given a 54% budget increase, amounting to 176 million EUR. In 2017, the budget reached 302 million EUR with another increase of funds negotiated for the budgetary term 2020–2027. The staff size has increased from 304 in 2016 to 488 in 2017. For comparison the budget of European Asylum Support Office is approx. 75 million EUR with staff of 200 people (ECRE, 2017).
- 12.
The content of the Statement has become a “blueprint” for similar partnership frameworks with Afghanistan, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Ethiopia (European Commission, 2017l).
- 13.
Many have credited the EU-Turkey Statement for the lower numbers of refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean to Greece via Turkey. Overall, arrivals in Greece decreased by 98% between 2015 and 2016 and recorded deaths and missing persons in the Aegean Sea went down by 94% (Niemann & Zaun, 2018, p. 8).
- 14.
This changed after 2019, when President Erdogan has started to use the Statement as a leverage against the EU. The European Commission and the High Representative has begun to recognise the humanitarian consequences of Turkey’s actions on the borders and in Syria (Stanicek, 2020).
- 15.
The Turkish authorities apply the 1951 Geneva Convention and not the 1967 Protocol, thus only recognising refugees coming from Europe (Niemann and Zaun, 2018, p. 8). Even though Turkey reformed its asylum laws in 2013 allowing Syrians to be considered for temporary international protection and therefore more rights, other refugees are still not eligible for protection and their rights are in danger (Batalla Adam, 2017, p. 47).
- 16.
As stated in the Human Rights Watch report, Turkish border guards have shot at refugees trying to cross the border (Human Rights Watch Website, 2016a). Amnesty International also reported that large numbers of Syrians have been transported from Turkey back to Syria (Amnesty International Website, 2016).
- 17.
On 15 June 2017, the Commission launched an infringement procedure against several Central and Eastern European Member States, referring specifically the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland to the Court of Justice of the EU for non-compliance with their legal obligations on relocation (European Commission, 2017o).
- 18.
Under the so-called “Dublin plus” proposal, the Commission offered a new mechanism, which stated that whenever an EU country receives dipropionate numbers of asylum seekers (exceeding a pre-set reference number by 150 per cent), it will be automatically unburdened and the surplus of asylum seekers will be relocated to other EU countries. If an EU country declines participation in the scheme, then it will be expected to make a “solidarity contribution” (250,000 EUR for each refused applicant) (Thielemann, 2018, p. 77).
- 19.
There have been alternative visions of the relocation. For instance, “flexible solidarity”, specifically promoted by the countries of the Visegrad Group. According to this proposal, the distribution of refugees would be voluntary. The idea behind this specific principle is that some member states could take in refugees, others could instead offer some financial support or expertise (for more detailed overview see Nič, 2016).
- 20.
The legislation defining CEAS includes the Eurodac Regulation (regulating collection and exchange of biometric information on asylum seekers), the Temporary Protection Directive (regulating subsidiary international protection), the Dublin III Regulation (setting out criteria for assigning responsibility for processing asylum applications), the Reception Conditions Directive (setting out condition for detention of migrants), the Qualification Directive (setting out grounds for granting international protection), and the Asylum Procedures Directive (setting out quality standards for asylum procedures) (for more detailed overview see Costello and Mouzourakis, 2017). Even though not considered as part of legislative instruments of CEAS, the Returns Directive, the Family Reunification Directive and the Long-Term Residents Directive, and the European Asylum Support Office Regulation are also commonly connected to the CEAS framework as part of a wider EU migration and asylum policy package (International Association of Refugee Law Judges, 2016, pp. 17–19).
- 21.
The reform consists of seven individual legislative proposals including Revision of the Dublin Regulation, Recast Eurodac Regulation, Renegotiation of European Asylum Support Office Regulation, Reform of the Asylum Procedures Directive, Reform of the Qualification Directive, Reform of the Reception Conditions Directive, Development of the EU Resettlement Framework (Bauböck, 2018, p. 147). The main points of the reform included “(1) relocation of applicants from countries overburdened with asylum claims; (2) shorter time limits for transfers of applications between Member States, thus removing shifts of responsibility; (3) discouraging venue shopping and secondary movements with aim of claiming asylum in different EU Member States; (4) stronger guarantees for unaccompanied minors and reworking of the definition of ‘family members’”(European Parliament Website, 2018a; European Union, 2016c).
- 22.
Migration and Integration Fund, Internal Security Fund, Humanitarian Aid from the Emergency Aid Reserve, External Borders Fund, to name a few (for more detailed overview see European Parliament Website, 2018d).
- 23.
EUBAM Libya was launched in May 2013, as a civilian mission under the framework of CSDP. It was extended twice by the Council of the European Union, most recently in 2016 when the EU framed it as a response to the 2015 “migration crisis” and strengthened its mandate with capacity building of criminal justice (EEAS, 2017b).
- 24.
EUCAP Sahel Niger was launched in 2012 as a capacity building mission providing training and advice to the Nigerian security authorities, specifically in reference to counter-terrorist and anti-organised crime activities. In 2015 the mission was extended and operationally expanded to cover capacity building of migration control and fight against irregular migration (EEAS, 2017a, p. 19).
- 25.
EUCAP Sahel Mali was launched in 2015 as a capacity building mission tasked with providing assistance and advice to the national police, the national gendarmerie and the national guard in the implementation of the security reform. EUCAP Sahel Mali closely cooperates with United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali in execution of its mandate (EEAS, 2017a, p. 20).
- 26.
The first incarnation of the mission EUNAVFOR MED was authorised by the UN Security Council Resolution 2240 (UNSCR 2240) to “inspect vessels on the high seas off the coast of Libya that they had reasonable grounds to suspect were being used for migrant smuggling or human trafficking from that country” (UN Security Council, 2015, art. 4 and 5).
- 27.
NATO Operation “Sea Guardian” was announced in July 2016. It is a non-article 5 maritime operation tasked with support of the EU and other stakeholders operating in the Mediterranean. The mandate of the mission includes supporting the situation awareness, upholding freedom of navigation, conducting interdiction tasks, counter-terrorism, countering proliferation of weapons, and protection of critical infrastructure (NATO Website, 2018).
- 28.
Major Frontex-led Joint Operation (JO) with a mandate specifically related to increased irregular migratory flows: JO “Minerva”, JO “Indalo”, JO “Hera” – Spain; JO “Triton”, JO “Aeneas”, JO “Themis” – Italy; JO “Poseidon”, JO “Poseidon Land” – Greece Frontex Website, 2018a).
- 29.
“Themis” is a joint operation launched in 2018, exceeding the timeframe of the study. Nonetheless, it is mentioned here as a relevant example of militarisation of the EU-led search and rescue operations.
- 30.
In 2016, Joint Operation “Triton” was comprised of 509 guest border officers, 16 vessels, four surveillance aircraft and two helicopters, all deployed under the auspices and coordination of Frontex. It is important to note that even though the renewed mandate of Frontex does allow for purchase of equipment, the joint operations are based predominantly on staff and equipment contributions from EU Member States (European Commission, 2016j, p. 1)
- 31.
“Mare Nostrum” was launched in 2013 as a response to the tragic events off Lampedusa. It was an Italian-led military mission with humanitarian mandate, tasked with search and rescue as well as disembarkation of irregular migrants attempting to cross the central Mediterranean route to Europe. The mission covered search and rescue zones near Italy and Malta (Panebianco and Fontana, 2018, p. 7).
- 32.
Often, Frontex-coordinated vessels and aircraft were redirected by the Italian Coast Guard for search and rescue purposes in maritime zones far away from the original operational area of “Triton” (European Commission, 2016j, p. 2).
- 33.
Joint Operation “Poseidon” consisted of 680 guest border officers, 21 vessels, one surveillance aircraft and one helicopter (European Commission, 2016j, p. 1).
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Stępka, M. (2022). Analysing the Conceptualisation of Remedial Actions Towards the “Migration Crisis” at the EU Level. In: Identifying Security Logics in the EU Policy Discourse. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93035-6_6
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