Open Arms Behind Barred Doors: Fear, Hypocrisy and Policy Schizophrenia in the European Migration Crisis

• Date: 01 May 2016
• Published date: 01 May 2016
• Author: Kelly M. Greenhill
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/eulj.12179

Open Arms Behind Barred Doors: Fear,

Hypocrisy and Policy Schizophrenia in the

European Migration Crisis

Kelly M. Greenhill*

Abstract: In 2015, over one million refugeesand m igrantsarrived in Europe, laying bare the

limitations of the EU’s common border control and burden-sharing systems. This article

examines consequences of the EU’s disjoint, schizophrenic and, at times, hypocrit ical

responses to what has become known as the European migration crisis. It explains how

unilateral, national-level responses have made the EU as a whole particularly susceptible to

a unique brand of coercive bargaining that relies on the threat (or actual generation)of mass

population movements as a non-military instrument of state-level coercion. After outlining

who employs this kind of foreign policy tool, to what ends, and under what circumstances,

the article offers an illustration of this kind of coercion in action, by analyzing the March

2016 deal between the EU and Turkey. The article concludes with a discussion of broader con-

sequences of the deal and implications both for the displaced and for the EU going forward.

I Introduction

During 2015, more than one million refugees and migrants arrived in Europe, about half of

whom were fleeing the civil war in Syria and about one third of whom were seeking political

asylum. The question of who should bear responsibility for the new arrivals and how those

responsibilities should be shared generated very different, sometimes schizophrenic, policy

responses among European Union (EU) member states, withmany states prioritizing na-

tional interests over European solidarity. These divergent national responses generated

fierce political debates over legal and normative obligations to the displaced within and

across member states. In many capitals, these debates also (re-)kindled national divisions

in ways that redounded strikingly to the benefit of right-wing, nationalist political parties.

The lack of EU solidarity and absence of a collective responseto the humanitarian and

political challenges imposed by the influxfurther laid bare the limitations of commonbor-

der control and migration and refugee burden-sharing systems that have never been

wholly and satisfactorily implemented.

1

By year’s end, half a dozen members of the

Schengen Zone had unilaterally reinstituted internal border controls under the ‘excep-

tional circumstances’provision of the Article 26 of the Borders Code.

2

Other states, such

as Hungary, erected physical barriers to entry along borders with non-Schengen states.

* Associate Professor at Tufts University and Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of

Government Belfer Center for Sc ience and International Affair s. Harvard University, 79 JFK Stree t,

Cambridge,MA 02138, USA.

1

S. Fratzke, ‘Not adding up: the fadingpromise of Europe’s Dublin system’,MigrationPolicy Institute Report

(March 2015), available at file:///Users/kgreenhill/Downloads/MPIe-Asylum-DublinReg.pdf.

2

These countries were Austria,Denmark, France, Germany,Norway and Sweden.

European LawJournal, Vol. 22, No. 3, May2016, pp. 317–332.

© 2016 John Wiley& Sons Ltd. 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK

and 350 Main Street,Malden, MA 02148, USA

In part in response to these acute stresses and strains on the common European enterprise,

in early January 2016, European Council President Donald Tusk declared that the EU had no

more than 2 months to save its passport-free Schengen Zone and maybe even theunion itself.

A failure to find a solution could, Tusk warned, lead to the EU failing as a political project.

3

Should Tusk’s dire prognostications come to pass, it would not be the firsttimethata

mass migration catalysed a fundamental reconfiguration of the international political

landscape. The mass exodus of East Germans to Austria through Czechoslovakia and

Hungary in the summerof 1989, for instance, impelledthe German Democratic Republic

to open its westernborders, leading to the fall of the BerlinWall and the subsequent reuni-

fication of East andWest Germany.

4

While the exodusfrom East to West did not happen

in a political vacuum, it was in the end a mass migration, rather thana military invasion,

that destroyed East Germany, sounded the death knell for the Warsaw Pact and

prefigured the end of the Cold War and ultimately the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Whether a similar fate could befall the EU is as of this writing an open question. What is

certain, however, is that both recent and proposed EU member state responses to the recent

unregulated influx—including mass detentions and deportations, unilateral border closures

and calls for foreign military action—illustrate anew the potential power of unregulated mi-

gration to make people and governments feel insecure and under threat. British Prime Min-

ister David Cameron invoked insects when he warned of a ‘swarm’of ‘illegal migrants’

invading Europe,

5

while Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán declared that, ‘from a

European perspective, the number of potential future immigrants seems limitless, [and

most new arrivals] are not Christians, but Muslims’. Orbán further added that the refugees

entering Europe ‘look like an army’.

6

For his part, Polish Law and Justice Party official and

former PrimeMinister JaroslawKaczynski warned thatMuslim refugees wouldbring par-

asites and diseases to the local population,

7

while the leader of the Sweden Democrats

Jimmie Åkesson declared that that ‘Islamism is the Nazism and Communism of our time’.

8

Against the backdrop of what happened in 1989, these none too novel examples of

inflammatory rhetoric, coupled with Tusk’s stark warning about the potential dangers

facing the EU as a political unit, dramatically underscore the inconvenient, and oft

ignored, truth that military assaults are far from the only way to undermine already fragile

political bargains and governance arrangements (or to make citizens feel endangered, afraid

and reactionary). Fears of irregular (mass) migration can also do so, and do so at great po-

tential cost to states’leaders and to the laws, values and human right norms they are (at least

ostensibly) committed to uphold.

3

‘Tusk gives the EU two months to “save Schengen”’,EuroNews, 19 January2016; available at http://www.

euronews.com/2016/01/19/tusk-gives-the-eu-two-months-to-save-schengen/.; ‘Schengento Fail in Months

if Migration Crisis not “Under Control”, says Tusk’,DW.com, 19 January 2016; available at http://www.

dw.com/en/schengen-to-fail-in-months-if-migration-crisis-not-under-control-says-tusk/a-18989697.

4

Somewhat ironically, it was German reunificationand the vibrant German economic engine that allowed the EU

to grow into the world’s largest economy and such an attractive destination inthe decades since reunification.

5

‘David Cameroninsists describingmigrants as a “swarm”Wasn’t“dehumanising”’,The Telegraph, 15 August

2015, available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/11804861/David-Cameron-

says-describing-migrants-as-a-swarm-wasnt-dehumanising.html.

6

‘Refugees “look like an army”, says Hungarian PM Viktor Orban’,The Guardian, 23 October 2015, available at

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/23/refugees-look-like-an-army-says-hungarian-pm-viktor-orban.

7

‘Right-wingPolish leader Kaczynski says migrantscarry diseases to Europe’,US Newsand World Report,15

October 2015, available at http://www.usnews.com/news/world/artic les/2015/10/14/right-wing-polish-

leader-migrants-carry-diseases-to-europe.

8

‘Anti-immigrant Sweden democrats now the biggestparty, according to poll’,TheTelegraph,20August2015,

available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/sweden/11814498/Anti-immigrant-Sweden-

Democrats-now-the-biggest-party-according-to-poll.html.

European Migration CrisisMay 2016

© 2016 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.318