© REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

It hasn’t been easy to follow German politics over the past two weeks. Angela Merkel’s CDU and its more conservative, Bavarian sister party, the CSU, have been holding “crisis meetings” nearly every day. Late Monday night, however, an agreement was reached that will stabilize the situation, at least temporarily, and prevent the collapse of the German government.

Here’s a shortish version: The ostensible core dispute was about how to handle “secondary migrants,” migrants who have already applied for asylum in another EU member-state, but who then make their way to Germany. (For context, fewer than 20,000 of these people have entered Germany so far this year; and from January to May 2018, 78,000 people applied for asylum in Germany, compared with 745,000 in the full year of 2016.) According to EU rules, the “Dublin regulation,” the first member-state an asylum-seeker enters is generally responsible for evaluating his or her asylum claim.

The CSU has always taken a harder line on refugees. Horst Seehofer, the party boss and, since April 2018, interior minister, wanted to turn away the secondary migrants at Germany’s border, rather than to try and often fail to return them once they were already in Germany, as is currently the case. Merkel rejected his plans, for fear that unilateral German action would push other member-states to tighten their borders too—the Schengen dominoes, as it were, would fall one by one. In mid-June she asked for more time to find a European solution. The CSU begrudgingly gave her two weeks, until the EU summit.

So Merkel went to an all-night European Council meeting on Thursday, and brought a “European solution” home to Berlin. The EU was to set up “controlled centers” inside the EU—it’s not clear where—to evaluate asylum-seekers claims; member-states would then take in migrants deserving of protection on a voluntary basis. The EU would “explore the concept” of closed camps in North Africa and the Balkans, and stump up more money for Libya and Turkey to deal with refugees themselves. Most relevantly for the spat with Seehofer, Merkel secured a number of bilateral deals with other member-states, including Spain and Greece, who agreed to take back secondary migrants from Germany, largely in return for financial support.

Can’t Get No Satisfaction

Was that enough to satisfy Seehofer? Were Merkel’s bilateral agreements wirkungsgleich (equivalent in effect) to Seehofer’s plans to simply turn away secondary migrants at the border? When the CSU leader threatened to resign on Sunday, it didn’t look like it. But another crisis meeting late Monday night brought about a fragile compromise between the two conservative sister parties, and Seehofer has decided to stay in office.

There are three points to the CDU-CSU deal. First, a new “border regime” on the German-Austrian border will prevent the arrival of refugees for whom “other member-states are responsible.” Second, there will be “transit centers” at the Germany border, where secondary migrants will be held, processed as if they never really entered Germany, and quickly deported to their member-state of arrival thanks to bilateral deals. Third, secondary migrants coming from member-states with whom Germany has no bilateral deal, such as Italy, will be turned away at the German-Austrian border under the terms of an agreement with Austria. Crucially, that deal has yet to be agreed upon.

A debate has exploded in Germany about the merits of the conservatives’ compromise. This is surely not the last time the CSU will challenge Merkel in order to score political points ahead of Bavarian state elections in October.

And will the plan work? Secondary migrants, some of whom risked their lives to cross the Mediterranean in a rickety smuggler’s boat, may not be deterred by spot checks on foreign-looking people at the German-Austrian border. They could cross another border into Germany, or sneak in through the forest, or allow themselves to be taken to a transit center only to disappear somewhere into the country. Transit centers are not prisons. If they were, Merkel’s coalition partner SPD wouldn’t accept them. As it is, Merkel’s grand coalition partner may have trouble accepting this tougher line on migration. Watch this space.

Consequences for the EU

What’s already clear is that the CDU-CSU compromise has consequences for the EU. Germany has no deal to return secondary migrations to Italy, the largest source of such migration. It is unlikely to get one, as Italy’s xenophobic interior minister, the far-right Lega leader Matteo Salvini, wants to stop migrants from entering Italy in the first place, not take more of them from Germany.

Nor is Austria eager to welcome the refugees Germany can’t return to Italy. The right-wing government of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has already issued a statement: “Should this agreement become the German government’s position, we see that as prompting us to take action to prevent negative consequences for Austria and its population. The Austrian government is therefore prepared to take measures for the protection of our southern border in particular.” Said plainly, that means Vienna is ready to turn back migrants on its borders to Italy and Slovenia—who, again, aren’t eager to be “waiting rooms” for migrants who want to move north.

It is a pernicious myth that Merkel believes in a Europe of uncontrolled migration, where refugees fleeing terror and economic migrants alike are free to go where they please. Nor did she “open Germany’s borders” in 2015. That September, with hundreds of thousands of people walking to Germany from Hungary, the decision she made was to keep the borders open, because Merkel believed in free movement within Europe and Germany’s humanitarian responsibility.

Since then, Merkel’s governments have cut deals abroad to reduce migration and tightened conditions for asylum-seekers in Germany. “Wir schaffen das” always meant “we can handle this”, not “we can do it!” It was less a progressive rallying cry than a determined appeal for calm and focus, and by and large, it worked.

Now, Merkel’s deals with both EU leaders and the CSU depend on voluntary support from member-states that don’t want to give it. Efforts to reform the Dublin regulation or distribute migrants across the EU are going nowhere. At the same time, the EU’s ramshackle migration infrastructure looks shakier than ever, despite irregular migration numbers falling.

Europe’s deals with third countries also raise troubling questions about how long people must stay in a camp, and under what conditions. And the talk of opening up legal immigration avenues for economic migrants is mostly just talk.

Merkel’s vague compromise with Seehofer is another step toward harder European borders, internal and external. That’s the trend in Europe these days.

The post Knock-On Effect appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

Almost a decade ago, when the euro crisis brought Europe to the brink, I asked a senior official working for German Chancellor Angela Merkel why Berlin was being so ruthlessly hardline and orthodox about imposing austerity measures on already struggling crisis countries. Surely it was possible to adopt a softer touch at least in public to avoid humiliation, I suggested, “because eventually Berlin will need a favor from these countries.”

Then, the Merkel official saw things differently, but he may have changed his mind by now. Last week I watched him follow the chancellor into an informal meeting in Brussels, the so-called mini summit on migration policy, which took place less than a week before the European Council’s end-of-June meeting. Officially, it was about creating an opportunity to sound out the appetite in Europe for closer cooperation on the continent’s unresolved refugee problem. In reality, it was about favors: Merkel was testing her partners’ readiness for an expedited deal to save her coalition government, the center-right political CDU/CSU alliance, and her chancellorship.

Three years after more than a million people arrived in Germany, the migration crisis is dominating headlines again. This time it’s not about numbers—most agree they have fallen significantly, in Germany and across the continent—but about a lingering grudge match between the chancellor and her conservative Bavarian allies, the Christian Social Union (CSU).

After swallowing their pride and following Merkel’s initial open door policy in 2015/2016, they worry that unresolved asylum tensions and public security concerns will see them fall short of an absolute majority in the Bavarian state election in October for the first time since World War II.

Alarmed, CSU leader and federal interior minister Horst Seehofer has threatened to close German borders to people already refused asylum, or to those who have already been registered as asylum-seekers elsewhere in the EU. He says he will do this unless Merkel can convince her EU allies to agree to measures achieving an equivalent end before July 1.

Merkel has warned that closing Germany’s borders could trigger the domino effect across Europe she tried to avoid in 2015 by keeping borders open. If Seehofer proceeds with the closure against her wishes, she has to fire him. His CSU would then pull out of government, and her fourth-term coalition, which marked 100 days in office at the end of June, would collapse.

A CSU Gun to the Chancellor’s Head

With a CSU gun to her head, Merkel has been forced into crisis diplomacy mode, attempting to pull off in days the kind of EU refugee deal that the continent has failed to secure in more than three years. Leaving the refugee issue unresolved has resulted in a very different political climate in Europe now as compared to 2015 (even with far fewer new arrivals) and emboldened populist and right-wing governments in Italy, Austria, Central Europe, and Scandinavia. As if on cue, ahead of the mini-summit of 17 European leaders in Brussels, Italy and Malta turned back a ship filled with 239 rescued asylum-seekers.

While Merkel demands a pan-European deal, CSU pressure has forced her into seeking bi- or trilateral deals, similar to that struck with Turkey in 2016, to stop large numbers of asylum-seekers from reaching Germany and Europe. But Italy, one of the countries she needs a deal with, has a new populist government demanding an overhaul of the EU’s so-called Dublin rules. These oblige member states to process asylum-seekers that first enter the EU across its borders. They place a heavy burden on Italy, Greece, and Spain.

Rome is pushing to scrap the Dublin regulation and create offshore migrant screening centers in Africa. But, as the EU Commission has noted, no African country has come forward to host such “regional disembarkation centers,” as they’re being called. French President Emmanuel Macron, who earlier agreed to take back from Germany asylum-seekers already registered in France, criticized member states who benefit from EU solidarity yet “voice massive national selfishness when it comes to migrant issues.” New Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez agreed there is still much work to do, but that a clear, common understanding is emerging of a need for a European vision to deal with the challenge.

Not everyone is that optimistic. Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio attacked Paris for “pushing back people” over their shared border and warned on Facebook that France could be “Italy’s No. 1 enemy on this emergency.” In Brussels, Italy’s partners remain unsure about who speaks for the new government in Rome: Di Maio, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, or Interior Minister Matteo Salvini of the far-right League.

In addition, Berlin officials close to Merkel—aware that they are on the back foot—are alert for horse-trading approaches from countries like Italy and Greece, on banking and sovereign debt respectively, that would be political dynamite back in Germany.

Other EU countries are clearly less interested in extracting favors from Merkel. They sense a golden opportunity to weaken or even topple the German leader. Since 2015, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic have refused to accept mandatory quotas to redistribute accepted asylum-seekers across the bloc. They stayed away from the weekend gathering, with Polish Prime Minister Matteusz Morawiecki speaking for all them in dismissing “warmed-up” quota proposals “we’ve already rejected.”

Shuttling Diplomacy

Shuttling between the various camps is a relatively new leader on the European stage: Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (see also our Close-Up in this issue). From July 1, Merkel’s day of reckoning, the head of Vienna’s anti-immigration populist coalition is also the head of the EU’s rotating presidency.

As foreign minister in 2015, Kurz faced down Merkel by closing the so-called Balkan route without consulting Berlin. He then told the German tabloid Bild that it was “good and necessary” that she, “like most in Europe, changed her migration path massively.” The Austrian leader, who leads a coalition government with the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), is pushing for ironclad border controls around Europe. Crisscrossing Europe in recent days, he has picked up an impressive list of like-minded allies.

Top of the class is Bavarian state premier Markus Söder, reportedly the driving force behind the CSU push against Merkel. But for all their concern over asylum ahead of October’s state election, three quarters of Bavarians told the Forsa polling agency that they see other pressing problems that are “just as or even more important” than migration. And more than two thirds of Bavarians—68 percent—actually back Angela Merkel’s efforts to seek agreement at EU level over following a CSU national strategy.

Still, as the clock ticks down for Angela Merkel, even breaking the refugee deadlock is not certain to save her. Her Bavarian frenemies insist they will have the last word on whether any new EU measures obviate the need for national measures. They need credible proposals to rescue their looming election and save face in Berlin.

Offering them a way out of the political corner they have painted themselves into in Bavaria, and avoiding political tremors in Germany and across Europe, will require a soft, but firm diplomatic touch in Berlin—now more than ever.

The post Crunch Time for Merkel appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© Artwork: Arnaud Dechiron

Welcome! The EU-Turkey agreement reached last year helped stem the flow of refugees arriving in Europe through Greece. Now, however, attention is shifting to Italy, where people – both refugees and economic migrants – are still arriving in unsustainable numbers, straining local and European capacities. What should be done to address this new crisis?
Gerald Knaus: It’s a great pleasure to be here to talk about the issue with people from think tanks, as well as members of parliament. I know Italy has a lot of experience in dealing with the issue, and it’s very good at implementing what politicians decide when it comes to reception permissions and implementing new ideas of asylum. The key problem in a lot of debates of practical policy issues is that they become overly ideological rather than practical. Of course, ideology and laws matter – but we run into problems if we can’t implement what we discuss.
A few numbers regarding this EU-Turkey agreement might be helpful. For the five months this year up to May, fewer than fifty people per day came from Turkey to Greece. If this trend continues, this year will see the fewest people going from Turkey to Greece in the past ten years. And it will also mean that this year will have the lowest number of people drowning. There are many things to criticize, but it’s still a big accomplishment. The outlying year of 2015 had more than 880,000 people arriving from Turkey; this year it dropped to 18,000.
Italy also has strong fluctuations, but there’s been a steady rise from high levels in 2014. This year will be a record year. Last year it had 181,000, and the first months of this year have already seen more people than the two previous years. So we have now a completely reversed situation: a sharp decline in the Aegean and big rise in the central Mediterranean.
Every day, twelve people drown in the central Mediterranean, and this trend is continuing. In contrast, the 434 deaths in 2016 in the Aegean were almost all within the first three months before the Turkey deal. People have to be saved from drowning at sea and be brought to Italy.
There also different groups coming to Greece and Italy. In Italy there are almost no Syrians, but rather Africans, the vast majority West Africans. This is interesting, because the recognition rates for Africans are very low. Most of them are not refugees. There are some refugees from Nigeria and Congo, but they are not the ones who come to Italy. The vast majority of them do not get protection – the recognition rate is between 1 to 3 percent.
The problem is that even when they’re rejected, they never return. Once they’re in Europe, they will stay for years regardless of what happens in their application procedure. This is not a problem for Italy only, but also for many other European countries including France and Germany, the Baltic countries, and Sweden. Sweden had 180,000 people arrive in 2015.
In order to return people quickly we need two things: we need fast and accurate asylum recognition and application procedures, and we need the countries’ willingness to take people back. This leads to what we call Day X for return. And this was the secret of the Turkey agreement. The Turkish parties came to Chancellor Merkel and promised to take care of everyone who arrived in Greece after March 18, 2016. Those who arrived before, Germany would take. That’s the key point. We should not underestimate the fact that the financial crisis, poverty, and the extreme challenge of taking in so many refugees created uncertainty and fear. Of course, some politicians take advantage of these feelings and if we try to explain this passion, I’m not sure it is passion for Brexit or for these politics themselves – I think it is a more instinctive reaction to the fear they feel, to the easy promises they’re hearing. It is a movement against a system that does not seem to function as it once did; it cannot fulfill the promises it has made. And we should also talk about why the existing system – at least in the Western world – does not function for people anymore.
Andreas Nick: I agree, the EU-Turkey deal has been successful. It rests on three pillars: better border protection, financial support for Turkey, and legal assistance for Syrians upon reception. A lot of these mechanisms also translate to other situations. Going to countries of origin to forge agreements is very important.
There are three key elements: The first is to differentiate between asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants who come in search of better economic opportunities. The fact that so many asylum seekers remain in Europe is an enormous pull factor for many others who come despite the horrible dangers of such a undertaking. That should be ended, for humanitarian reasons. The second element is good decision making for migrants that have arrived. The third element is incentive structures for all relevant countries, on a national as well as regional basis. A strong message should be sent that if you’re returned after applying for asylum, you’re not eligible to apply as an “economic migrant” to any other EU country.
There are many differences between Turkey and Italy. Refugees from the Syrian civil war just want to get away from the war and usually intend to return. Therefore, we have to deal with a temporary phenomenon. When it comes to migrants from Africa via the Mediterranean we have to deal with a long-term issue that cannot be solved within a short period of time.
The long-term rescue missions in the Mediterranean need to be combined with quick decision-making once people arrive, along with working with governments of their countries of origin. If the message is that once you make it to Sicily or Malta you are safe to stay, the problem will never be solved.

Nadan, you’ve had quite a lot of experience with how Italy deals with this issue. Can a distinction be made between refugees and migrants?
Nadan Petrovic: Theoretically there are refugees as defined in the Geneva Convention. And there are economic migrants. But now the situation is more complicated as we have encountered unforeseen situations. For example, we’ve had unaccompanied minors from Somalia being sent by the government, which is a very unique phenomenon. The government knows that they will not be rejected, so these young boys and girls go on an often month-long journey across the desert until often after encountering horrible violence they finally arrive in Europe. What are we to do with a group like that?
As different as the nationalities of the migrants are, these states share common characteristics: They are all inherently unstable. Some of them are failed states, like Libya; some of them are precarious states; and some of them are very authoritarian states like Egypt. And most of them have very weak or opaque government structures. In terms of speaking with countries of origin for example, Libya – who do you talk to? The question is how to strengthen the structures of those states to make sure people can be sent back to them. With the Turkey deal, nothing changed in Syria – the causes have not been addressed. But Turkey can take back people. Can we see this in Africa?
Knaus: I think it’s very important to recognize that the number of people who arrived over the past four or five years is exceptionally high. This is because the route has been developed, and there are hundreds of millions of euros being earned. And if you look at Nigeria, most migrants come from southern Nigeria, from peaceful cities – and most of them are women who are trafficked to Italy as prostitutes with huge profits for the traffickers.
We can thus recognize 1 percent of these migrants. If people are arriving in an orderly way and know where they are, the situation will be better. But now, people are dying on the way in the desert, at sea, and they arrive without any status. Then they stay for years, exploitable underground. In Italy there’s a campaign now to regularize the 500,000 people that are already in the country who will not leave but have no status. Politically, regularizing them is the only rational thing to do.

Andreas, even with some kind of Marshall Plan to develop the countries of origin, people will come anyway. Don’t we have to communicate to their countries of origin – as well into some of Europe’s more conservative parties, including your own – that we need to have a proper immigration law? That we need to take people in, in an orderly way, in order to get irregular migration under control?
Nick: I do think these things are interrelated. Both to communicate to a broader electorate and also to make it vertically possible to negotiate. Creating a very strong disincentive for people to come to Europe, for example, is a consensus among both the center left and center right.
Knaus: Just one more point on the importance of having a controled process: If you want to be politically successful, looking at Sweden and Germany, you need to really help refugees. There are massive networks of NGOs, civil society organizations, and help organizations, and you need to mobilize them. What people will not accept is a sense of loss of control. And loss of control means you do not know who is coming in. If one in a million commits an act of terror, people suddenly think the others could do it too.
Another point is that it’s not really fair. So Italy will need to reduce crime and also educate people about the need to accept migrants. Europe will have to stand up for resettlement. I’ve had three years of debate all around Europe about this. If we want to create an open Europe that accepts refugees as well as economic migrants, we must have control of our borders. And the only way to do so, and amazingly it’s lacking today, is to take countries we need to cooperate with seriously, and think in terms of their interests. In the case of Turkey, it sees that it can benefit from the deal: It can get financial support, and will need fewer border controls because the flow of people will decrease.
This discussion is never public. We talk about financial aid and legal access, but never in specifics. We need to work on a single-page statement with the same format with Senegal and other African countries, which has four commitments: First, that we [the African countries] take back our citizens and help take back our citizens from day X. Second, the EU commits for the next five years to take 10,000 or 15,000 refugees from Nigeria and 10,000 people from Senegal every year. Third, we provide support in those countries to help refugees, and fourth, we do receptions through UNHCR. Everybody can see if each side has done its part and lived up to its commitments.
If we keep having incomprehensible conferences and compacts and summits, this situation will continue and people will keep drowning.

You’re talking about a pretty dramatic shift in attitudes here: no more summits, no more thousand-page-agreements, etc. In a situation like this where we want to keep migration, how likely is it that the EU can consolidate in a straightforward way – or is it more likely that we will see a coalition of the willing? 
Nick: Looking at the debate over the past few years, we see there are many differences among countries. But we have also seen cooperation, for example, in the development fund. If the crisis in Italy continues, it will reach a different dimension. This is not only German policy and Merkel’s migration policy. Right now is the time for countries to cooperate to strengthen the single market and jointly manage the common border. This is a crisis that can affect our common economic success and welfare. If we get that message across, hopefully we can better solve the problem.

Nadan, do you want to comment on this? What should be done to help those countries that need to change?
Petrovic: My impression, at least from my experiences in Italy, is that political elites are not very clear who is who. But I want to explain very clearly that refugees also have full rights. There’s a need to separate different kinds of migrants. When states have the capacity to decide whether or not they need migrants, most of them decide that they do need them. But the reality is that they don’t want to say it clearly, and now people are coming in without invitation. I want to insist that a well-functioning migration policy is better than a refugee policy. In the Italian example, there is a temporary permission status for migrants from Bosnia, Kosovo, or Moldova. They have temporary permission to stay, and then have the opportunity to turn that into work permission or asylum status. Very few of them apply for asylum because they’re okay with temporary permission and labor status. For a long while, we’ve underestimated the problem.

As did the rest of Europe.
Petrovic: Yes, for sure. But compared with other countries on the southern border such as Malta and Greece, Italy is a strange case.
I’ll tell you a personal story. When I was an adviser to the department of migration ten years ago, there was a possibility of reallocation proceedings within the European Refugee Fund. I asked them ten years ago, why shouldn’t we propose sending people from Italy elsewhere? They said that we’re Italy, a small country, sixty million people, how can we let the EU take some of our refugees? And now we’re asking for this.
The EU has given numerous rules on this issue, but its policy cannot be improved because one rule is more important than the others – the Dublin rule. All the other successes that have been achieved, the steps toward standardization, have not benefited us that much because the Dublin rule is more important than any other.

But how do you propose we skip Dublin and alleviate the situation for countries such as Italy?
Knaus: It all seems very complicated, but it’s actually very simple. In theory, everyone should apply for asylum when they cross the border. But in practice, for more than twenty years, it has never worked. Just last year, Germany requested tens of thousands of people be sent to other countries because it’s not a border country, so of course they entered from elsewhere, and Germany ended up sending 4,000 people over 2016 to other EU member states. Tens of thousands of asylum seekers, in comparison, have remained in Germany with their status unknown. It makes no sense. Germany only sent 4,000 people to other countries, but it received 20,000 from Sweden and other countries. So Germany didn’t benefit at all. But Italy didn’t benefit or pay a cost either. Italy received 2,000 people over the last year, and it also sent 2,000 people to other countries. So the net is zero.
But these are real people waiting. Civil servants are creating files. We have this bureaucratic monster which serves no purpose at all. So here is the problem. The governments cannot get up and say to the public that our system never worked, we could not afford it, we do nothing. We need to do something.
This is why I think the only way to get a system to work is to be honest. We do not know how to move around such large numbers of people between Italy and Switzerland, Sweden and Hungary, and between Europe and Nigeria. We need to minimize the movement of people as much as possible. The asylum application should be Europeanized. What Italy needs to do is to be able to present a proposal. What Italians need to say to the Germans, essentially, is that we want to have an asylum processing procedure in Italy as fast as the Dutch do. The Dutch resolved and closed cases in six weeks. And those cases have a high degree of quality because they have high quality legal aid, high quality translators, and decent country reports. Of course, Italians shouldn’t do this alone. So the ministers in Italy want this project in Sicily, agreements with Nigeria to take people back, European support for reception and asylum – and the vision is to replace Southern country borders with European borders. Relocation from there and return from there. It requires a lot of work, but it’s the only option – we need more Amsterdam in Sicily.
Today there is a debate about governance reform in Brussels. For the past two years it has been a complete disaster because nothing has been solved. And in the autumn, people will say the reform isn’t working and we are helpless.

Do you see a few countries taking the lead, or is it more of an EU cooperation?
Knaus: One thing is clear: The Turkey deal would never have come through if it had waited for the EU 28. It was essentially a coalition of the willing that consisted of two countries: the Netherlands and Germany. Now we need a few more countries: Italy, Germany, Sweden, and perhaps France – this crew, if they can negotiate together with Nigeria, if they can present this plan together of replacing Dublin. Germany make take the lead – but Italy still has to propose it.

The post European Encounters: “We Need More Amsterdam in Sicily” appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach

But before we get to the conclusion, we have to begin at the beginning.

Act One: A New Actor Debuts

For years, Germany was more or less absent on migration policy at the EU level. Berlin repeatedly blocked any meaningful reform of the Dublin system, which requires that asylum seekers make their claims in the first EU country they enter, placing most of the burden on border states. Shielded by a ring of buffer states, Germany quietly relaxed backstage while others, like Italy and Greece, were front and center, asking for support in managing increasing numbers of migrants and asylum seekers.

Then last year, the number of people making their way north from Italy and Greece – mostly undocumented – began to surge. While other countries were receiving more migrants and asylum seekers per capita, the increased number of people arriving in Germany put a considerable strain on unprepared German cities and communities. This strain ultimately pushed Merkel to step out of the background and onto the European stage as she realized that Germany could not manage the increasing numbers on its own and needed European and international actors to help. It was not solidarity with Italy or Greece, nor a historic obligation to offset the atrocities of World War II, nor any other higher motive that compelled the shift; it was simple self-interest, combined with the inconveniently late realization that the Dublin system really was in need of reform, and that the war in Syria was no closer to ending.

Thus it was Berlin’s turn to call for European solidarity, backing the Commission’s relocation plans, and pushing for a permanent quota among member states. At the same time, Germany was applauded internationally for taking up to 800,000 migrants and asylum seekers. Never mind that Germany did not want to take up all these people, and had simply corrected its estimates to pragmatically prepare for the increase – an image of Germany’s openness was born.

…

Read the complete article in the Berlin Policy Journal App – November/December 2015 issue.

The post Stage Fright appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

©REUTERS/Pascal Rossignol

President François Hollande has insistently reminded his people that offering asylum is an ancient French custom. At his semiannual press conference held in early September in the Elysée Palace, Hollande said, “The right of asylum is part of our soul.” Indeed, France has a long tradition of accepting refugees and threatened peoples. The Socialist president mentioned the Armenians who found safe harbor in France following the genocide in their homeland; the defenders of republican Spain during the Spanish Civil War who were welcomed with open arms; the defamed intellectuals and artists forced to leave Hitler’s Germany shortly thereafter; followed by the Jews who (albeit oft briefly) found reprieve from their persecution.

Yet the remembrance of this leftist tradition has not prevented the ruling Socialists from advancing a more restrictive interpretation of asylum law. More than ever, members of the government have repeated the words of former Prime Minister Michel Rocard, who warned before France’s National Assembly on June 6, 1989, of a banalization of asylum. “In the world today, drama, poverty, and hunger are too great for Europe and France to absorb everyone whose misery would drive them to us,” he said in his speech. “We cannot absorb all of the world’s misery,” a saying attributed to Rocard, has since become a political platitude. Rocard’s 1989 speech recalled the need “to withstand the constant refugee pressure.” …

Read the complete article in the Berlin Policy Journal App – November/December 2015 issue.

The post Absent Friend appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

(c) REUTERS/Antonio Parrinello

On May 13 the European Commission disclosed its new agenda on migration, which contains some innovative ideas, especially on how to reform the so far tragically ineffectual mix of control and protection policies at the EU’s maritime borders to manage the “mixed flows” of refugees and migrants desperately trying to reach the European continent. After months of tensions and tactical positioning, the agenda is certainly better than nothing. But for now it is just a set of coordinated proposals. They will have to be translated into detailed measures and will need to gain wide support from the EU member states and the European Parliament before a new European consensus can be built. Support, especially for refugee resettlement, is far from certain.

It is not the first time that the EU has tried to tackle the extremely sensitive and thorny issue of mixed flows migration at its highest institutional level. In December 2005, when the United Kingdom held the 6-month rotating EU presidency, the European Council launched a “Global approach to migration: Priority actions focusing on Africa and the Mediterranean” in response to some fatal attempts by Sub-Saharan migrants to jump border fences in Ceuta, a Spanish territory located on the African continent. And in the wake of numerous shipwrecks off Lampedusa, a Task Force for the Mediterranean was established in October 2013.

None of these moves have prevented new tragedies, instead death tolls have been climbing. So what is really new in this latest round of proposals, and what are chances of their successful implementation?

At the April 23 European Council meeting the only new commitment was to increase funding for Frontex operations in the Mediterranean. There was no substantial change in strategy. The statement said: “The European Union will mobilize all efforts at its disposal to prevent further loss of life at sea and to tackle the root causes of the human emergency that we face” (italics added). It would seem all efforts at the EU’s disposal stretch to €6 million more for Frontex and pledges of more staff, an unspecified number of places for asylum seekers and refugees (determined by the states), and a vague proposal to destroy traffickers’ boats. Is this really all the effort the European Union can muster?

Strengthening Frontex operations in the Mediterranean is a good step. But Frontex is explicitly restricted to controlling borders and cannot conduct proactive search-and-rescue operations (SAR). Many called for a European SAR operation – but the idea was not even on the table when leaders met. The problem? If you rescue people, you have to put them somewhere. If the EU takes responsibility for SAR (as indeed it should, in order to honor its own charter of fundamental rights) it will have to take responsibility for those it saves. That will necessitate some form of refugee redistribution, which is exactly what states have been resisting.

Ending the Impasse

The Council statement, and the declarations from EU leaders which followed, focused disproportionally on the concept of fighting human trafficking and smuggling as a way to reduce migration across the Mediterranean. This ignores the basic fact that smuggling does not cause migration, but meets a demand caused by the desperate wish of many to escape poverty and conflict in the face of shrinking channels of legal entry into the EU.

Establishing ways for migrants and asylum seekers to enter the EU legally would radically reduce the inducement to turn to smuggling operations and punch a hole in the trafficking business. Yet targeting smugglers the way the Council suggests risks making migration routes even more dangerous and expensive. This has happened before – when, for example, the Bulgarian-Turkish border was reinforced, shifting the migration route to the Aegean, and the islands there. The people who lose in this equation are those already most at risk – the migrants and refugees.

The idea of destroying smugglers’ boats, despite the severe legal and practical challenges, which were recently emphasized by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, is now firmly on the agenda. On May 11, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign and Security Affairs, Federica Mogherini, briefed the UN Security Council on Brussels’ intention to submit the draft for a “chapter 7” resolution with a few to gain authorization to “restore international peace and security.”

One should bear in mind, though, the way such a policy would be perceived on the Mediterranean’s southern shores. As one person we talked to in Tunisia recently put it:“They deny us visas and destroy boats. No wonder our youth are tempted by other destinations, equally dangerous but easier to reach, like battlefields in the Middle East.”

If the repressive strand of the EU’s response is fuzzy and on many levels questionable, the humanitarian strand is barely existent. There was no mention of a visa waiver or humanitarian visas for Syrians fleeing the bloodshed and destruction at home. And the crucial question of “burden sharing” – distributing the reception of asylum seekers and the processing of their applications – seemed too controversial to be even discussed by European leaders.

Even when the political discussion touches on resettlement and relocation, as it did at the European Council, member states resist committing themselves to taking a significant number of refugees. As long as these measures are presented as optional, member states will continue to ignore the problem. Even the ridiculously limited concept of resettling 5,000 people across the EU included in the first draft of the Council statement was absent from the final version. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said leaders could not agree on a number, but “felt that 5,000 would not be sufficient.” This resulted in a compromise of nothing at all and left resettlement, as usual, up to the goodwill – subject to domestic pressures – of each member state.

The May 13 agenda addressed this and included more courageous and forward-looking proposals, the most interesting of which is a mandatory scheme for redistributing asylum-seekers among all member states, based on a “redistribution key” taking parameters like the economic strength, population size, unemployment rate, and the numbers of previously accepted asylum-seekers into account. While this proposal was criticized even before it was tabled, with the United Kingdom and Hungary at the forefront, it outlines a way of softening the inner-EU frontline between the countries of first entry (especially Italy) and countries of destination (Germany and Sweden), which so far has caused a political impasse.

In the attempt to overcome resistance, the Commission has advanced a two-step solution. By the end of May, it will propose triggering the emergency response system envisaged by article 78(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, which stipulates: “In the event of one or more Member States being confronted by an emergency situation characterized by a sudden inflow of nationals of third countries, the Council, on a proposal from the Commission, may adopt provisional measures for the benefit of the Member State(s) concerned. It shall act after consulting the European Parliament.” The redistribution mechanism will mean that the country where the asylum-seeker is relocated to will be responsible for examining his or her asylum application. The proposal needs a qualified majority vote in the European Council to be adopted, though, which is far from certain. Hence, as a second step, the Commission plans to launch legislation by the end of 2015 to establish “a mandatory and automatically-triggered relocation system to distribute those in clear need of international protection within the EU,” substituting the emergency measures.

Clearly, this would still only be a provisional and partial solution to a problem which calls for sweeping and long-term responses. But it would represent a way around sticky sovereignty questions that so far have brought nothing but political and humanitarian failures.

Read more articles from the May/June 2015 issue FOR FREE in the Berlin Policy Journal App.

The post Death in the Mediterranean appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.