Continent by Default by Anne Marie Le Gloannec

Author:Anne Marie Le Gloannec
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2017-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

Internal and External Peripheries

This patchwork of measures that fell short of innovative strategic thinking entailed consequences that most member states were trying to evade. Despite a policy of closed doors, many migrants found their way into the EU. Eventually, far from being the impregnable “Fortress Europe,” which became a buzzword in the early years of the new millennium, the EU was more of a sieve. More worrying, these half-baked measures were a corollary to a deliberate policy of outsourcing the control of borders and migrants to the internal and external peripheries of the EU.

According to the Dublin Regulations, the EU member states that are the main countries of first arrival, that is, countries where migrants arrive first because they are close to Asia and Africa, have to register and examine applications. They have to host newcomers and, if necessary, repatriate them. Thus, they bear a particular burden that countries at the heart of the continent do not, insulated as they are by filtering procedures taken by the countries of first arrival—except in times of crisis. As the procedures may be long and costly, countries of first arrival bear a particular financial and social burden. In 2015, 850,000 migrants arrived in Greece, mostly to travel farther—before borders closed (see below). A rather poor country of 11 million inhabitants that has neither the personnel nor the funds to tackle a steady flow of refugees and economic migrants, Greece had to accommodate the newcomers—while, in comparison, Germany and its 80 million inhabitants struggled to receive a little over a million refugees. Hosting migrants may even chip away at the social fabric of a country like Greece, where parts of the population are no longer able to live a decent life because of austerity measures imposed in the wake of the debt crisis. Nor are the refugees’ rights always guaranteed. Greece is currently in breach of international law. In 2011, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Greece did not sufficiently heed the rights of refugees (ECtHR 2011). The Court of Justice of the European Union followed suit two years later, when it forbade member states from sending migrants back to countries where they might face “inhuman” or “degrading” treatment (Court of Justice of the European Union 2013).

To some extent, the EU tried to assuage differences between member states. In 2000, the Council of Ministers of Justice and Home Affairs created a European Refugee Fund (ERF) to improve, among other things, accommodation infrastructure and legal assistance to refugees, albeit with limited funding that amounted to €630 million between 2008 and 2013. Frontex was also supposed to help register refugees at points of entry, also in a limited way, as mentioned above. Thus the Dublin Regulations had a twofold consequence. They de facto established a two-tiered system within the EU, where countries of first arrival and core countries face different obligations and fare differently, and they could not ensure that borders would be efficiently controlled, especially in case of crises, when reception camps are overwhelmed.

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