Just as 2023 is drawing to a close, the Europeans have, perhaps, gifted themselves the biggest relief to an endemic problem in the bloc–a new pact that promises to handle the previously mismanaged migration menace. The New Pact on Migration and Asylum is being hailed as historic because it promises to invoke trust in European Union instruments at a time when almost nothing is going right for the bloc.
It has got the intent right indeed, but the mechanism itself is subject to factors that are asymmetric, to begin with, and warn of practical challenges ahead.
Context setting first
The EU, which is, by far, the most successful example of regional economic integration, wasn’t founded only on the principles of free trade. Entrenched into the very idea of a united Europe was an idyllic belief in human rights, democracy, and freedom. That was all interwoven with the smug and aesthetically appealing liberal vision, thriving through the decades of the peace dividend.
The bloc’s law on asylum seeking, called the Dublin Regulation, was grounded in the principle that it is a fundamental human right. It provided a rather basic framework for incorporating an asylum seeker fleeing the distraught realities of their home country – genocide, ethnic cleansing, or civil war – as a refugee in the affluent societies of Europe.
The modest mechanism of the Dublin Regulation that relied on Eurodac’s fingerprint database underwent several changes as frozen conflicts re-ignited at the end of the Cold War and as conflicts turned more intra-state in the last two decades. The Common Asylum Law was updated through a series of reforms – Dublin II and Dublin III – that ultimately collapsed in the face of an unprecedented influx of migrants during the 2015 migrant crisis.
The disproportionate burden on coastal states like Italy, Greece, or Cyprus, individual governments turning more anti-immigration, and, finally, the astounding rise of Right-wing populism in a liberal haven of Europe, necessitated the need to fundamentally reform the Common Asylum Law on the principle of solidarity.
Brussels’ bureaucrats realised that EU instruments had ended up pitting one government against the other as had unwittingly happened through the unsuccessful Dublin Regulation reforms.
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Will the ingenious push to solidarity work?
The new pact operates at two tangible planes making two distinct pitches. The first is a functional pitch at the ground level, where it comes with a legislative solution to tackle the governance issues around uncontrolled migration. The typical detail here is that these measures are made in good faith of member states’ common approach to solidarity, which is also provided for legally. In case there is a massive influx of migrants, the member states won’t act in isolation but in solidarity with each other to share the burden in the different ways laid out by the pact.
More concretely, the above will happen by four measures. One, reducing the burden on a single member state by limiting the number of migrants it is supposed to take in a year and distributing the numbers evenly across all member countries.
Two, the member states would have the liberty to opt out of taking in a migrant by paying €20,000 per head.
Three, it reduces the social unrest that stems from long and unequal waiting periods for asylum seekers. Until now, while all of them could not be assimilated, they could also not be deported because they would burn their papers and fingertips to erase all traces of their identity. The new pact talks of creating border detention centres so that the asylum seekers in waiting are not pushed to pitch tents along roads and clash with the local population, something that recently happened in Dublin and commonly occurs across Europe.
Finally, it also promises to accelerate the deportation of rejected asylum seekers, although it offers no solution so far to stop them from destroying all traces of their identity.
Responding to the Right-wing
The second plane is more political and makes an important political pitch in a wider vision for the EU. The new pact aims to respond to the self-proclaimed indispensability of the Right-wing populist parties that have made themselves the sole guardians of European culture and identity with their calls to close down borders.
The improving electoral base of the Right-wing has solely been ushered in by a lack of common legislative reforms of the asylum law, with the vacuum thus arising being filled with violent clashes, disorderliness and a threat to European identity. These issues have been the fulcrum of the European Right’s Euroscepticism – an idea diametrically opposed to the very foundation of the integrated European project.
The political pitch is evident in Centrist parties’ attempt to outdo their populist counterparts on their home turf. This sentiment was recently made explicit by French conservative leader Marine Le Pen, who called her political rival and French President Emmanuel Macron’s new immigration bill an “ideological victory” for the far Right. Perhaps Macron, like other European leaders, has realised that the only way to check the rise of the Right-wing is to checkmate them on what they champion – the rhetoric on uncontrolled migration. Even the far Right does not know how to substitute the workforce that migration brings with it.
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The many contradictions of Europe
Centrists’ response to Right-wing populists is on the right track, but it still does not offer a true reconciliation with mainstream conservative leaders, such as the popular and immensely capable Italian Prime Minister, Georgia Meloni.
Her recent and past statements show that she is not against migrants in general, but against Muslim migrants in particular. And she has really minced no words while asserting the incompatibility of Islam with European societies.
However, it is extremely important to note that reckless and emphatic political statements are the hallmark of populist politics, often until those leaders attain power themselves.
After becoming prime minister, Meloni has proved her leadership in myriad ways without crash landing on the slippery terrain of reckless populist statements. Italy, for the record, has one of the most unnervingly declining populations across Europe. Unless Europe fixes its demographic decline, migrants are needed to keep its society and economy going.
The assimilation of millions of Ukrainian refugees shows that European society can absorb migrants. The ponderable, however, is the wariness of being ethnically dominated by, sometimes loosely and sometimes pointedly defined, “other”.
The new pact on immigration promises a re-awakening of the European project to address its biggest internal malady. Various human rights groups have vehemently criticised the new document. Such backlash seems to emanate from a naiveté that Europe perhaps cannot afford right now. It remains to be seen whether the new pact will rise to the hype and determine the course of the White quest to reclaim their identity, especially when struggling with declining populations.
The writer is an Associate Fellow, Europe and Eurasia Center, at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. She tweets @swasrao. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)