After some years in which irregular migration took a backseat in policy and public debates in the European Union (EU), the surge in migrant arrivals is in the headlines once more. While irregular crossings are on the rise in Greece and Spain, too, it is Italy, which has received over 140,000 irregular arrivals in the first ten months of 2023 (in line with a trend that was already visible in mid-2022), that is seen as the epicentre of what is increasingly being labelled Europe’s new ‘migration crisis’. The last time Europe found itself in ‘crisis mode’ at the Central Mediterranean was in the mid-2010s, when similar episodes of relatively large-scale irregular arrivals took place, peaking in 2016 with over 180,000 arrivals in Italy. The main difference this time is that Tunisia has replaced Libya as the origin of the vast majority of sea departures. As a result, Tunisia has become a crucial partner, with Italy and the EU frantically seeking to intensify cooperation on migration with the North African State. The differences pretty much end there. In every other respect, the current situation reveals striking similarities to earlier episodes of ‘crisis’. The cameras are back at the disembarkation points, and all eyes are on arrivals by boat once again. European officials are once more stressing that “irregular migration is a European challenge” that “needs a European answer”, as European Commission President Von der Leyen did on her recent visit to Lampedusa together with Italian Prime Minister Meloni. Yet, once again, that answer seems to lie somewhere outside the EU, as fingers point primarily at responses in the ‘external dimension’. Member States and EU institutions agree that reducing spontaneous arrivals remains a key goal of European migration governance. They also concur that this is best done through minimising departures and onward movement by strengthening cooperation with countries along the migratory corridors connecting Asia and Africa to Europe. A wide range of policy actors repeat this mantra and point to comprehensive and mutually beneficial partnerships with countries of origin and transit as the way forward. The signing of the memorandum of understanding (MoU) on a “comprehensive partnership package” between the Commission and Tunisia on 16 July 2023 is the most recent example of Europe’s pursuit of this approach. The deal came after the channelling of significant political capital on the European side (and by Italy in particular), with numerous high-level visits to Tunis by a combination of member State and EU actors. Despite criticism from within the EU, the deal was celebrated by its main promoters, namely Italy, the Netherlands and the Commission, with the latter portraying it as a novel approach that could serve as a model for future deals in which cooperation on various dimensions of migration (e.g., from border control to legal migration) is embedded within a wider framework of strategic partnership spanning issue areas of interest to both sides, from energy to agriculture and trade. This continued—and arguably increased—emphasis on external migration cooperation, manifested most recently by the high priority given to striking a deal with Tunisia, should also be seen in the context of developments (or lack thereof) vis-à-vis the internal aspects of EU migration and asylum governance. Despite a reform process being ongoing since the Commission launched the New Pact on Migration and Asylum in 2020, the internal dimension does not really present a radically different picture, either. In the absence of any significant progress on the responsibility-solidarity conundrum, countries of first entry continue to principally seek ‘solutions’ beyond their (and the EU’s) borders. In fact, frontline States may be encouraged to push still harder for ‘deals’ with third countries to prevent departures, given that they will potentially have to shoulder a greater degree of responsibility following the introduction of mandatory border procedures, despite having failed to secure stronger assurances and predictable responsibility-sharing mechanisms on the solidarity front. Zooming in on the Italian context, Meloni openly refers to “work[ing] on the external dimension and stop[ping] the illegal departures of immigrants” as “the only way to seriously address the problem”. The Italian PM’s emphasis on the external dimension and on ‘stopping’ departures as (almost the only) way forward certainly relates to political messaging concerns both domestically (i.e., underlining her hardliner stance on migration), and in the context of intra-EU politics (i.e., showing that she is a reliable partner that helps advance plausible European solutions). However, her focus should also be viewed against the abovementioned policy conundrum, which has long marked intra-EU aspects of migration and asylum governance and largely conditioned the position of frontline States on migration.
Is there anything new about all this? Italian and EU external engagement in the Central Mediterranean context
While the current Italian Government presents its approach—and focus on the external dimension—as completely novel, it is in fact more of a continuation than a rupture.[1] The two core pillars of Italian migration policy over the past two decades, and particularly since the mid-2010s, have been: 1) demanding greater solidarity internally; and 2) engaging countries south of the Mediterranean to reduce the number of unauthorised migrant landings on its shores through surveillance, control and development cooperation aimed at tackling the root causes. A similar claim to novelty in approach is also made at the EU level, most recently in reference to the ‘strategic partnership’ with Tunisia. However, as argued elsewhere, the “promises and dynamics around this ‘new’ strategic partnership are all but new” when compared to repeated European attempts at migration cooperation. Italy’s attention has traditionally been focused on countries in North Africa. Bilateral engagement with Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt in the 2000s was mainly focused on strengthening border-control capacities. As a transit country for Sub-Saharan African migrants, too, since the late 1990s, Libya has been a particularly important migration partner for Italy—and, by extension, for the EU. Bilateral cooperation between Italy and Libya has also constituted the cornerstone of EU-Libya relations on migration. In fact, the 2008 Friendship Agreement between Libya and Italy largely put in place the core logics and mechanisms that continue to govern the ‘external dimension’ to this day. First, it paved the way for quid pro quo deals, whereby the European side seeks to reduce migrant arrivals by externalising border control in exchange for providing its partners with a set of political and economic benefits. Second, and largely as an outcome of this sort of transactional logic and Europe’s vulnerability to irregular migration, it also turned into a first example of third countries exploiting migration control as geopolitical leverage over Europe (or, to apply the current terminology, of migration being ‘instrumentalised’ or ‘weaponised’); one need only recall the EU lifting its sanctions on Libya in 2004.[2] Third, what Italy sought through the 2008 deal (reducing irregular migration from Libya) and how its success was measured (the number of boat arrivals) was also emblematic of the key goals and success metrics that still define the European approach to migration cooperation. The post-2011 (and post-Gaddafi) context has changed the migration partnership landscape for both Italy and the EU. The political turmoil and conflicts following the Arab uprisings contributed to growing migratory movement across the Central Mediterranean—few remember today the arrival of 25,000 Tunisian migrants in Italy in the spring of 2011. Further, lacking counterparts in most of the North African ‘buffer’ countries due to the post-2011 institutional breakdown in the region (particularly in Libya), and in the face of growing migration from Sub-Saharan Africa in the 2014-2016 period, European migration engagement has expanded further south in search of new partners along the route. Against this background, Italy has channelled significant political and financial investment into the Sahel, building migration cooperation almost from scratch and paying particular attention to partnering with Niger, both bilaterally and within the framework of EU programmes, with a focus on mobility control, countering migrant smuggling and developmental support[3]. At the EU level, closer engagement in such an expanded partnership landscape has been sought inter alia through the Valletta Action Plan, the setting up of the European Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF), and the launch of the EU Migration Partnership Framework with a specific focus on countries in Western Africa and the Horn of Africa. When it comes to cooperation with Libya, faced with a context of fragmented authority in the post-2016 period, Italy led a largely informal and bilaterally curated strategy vis-à-vis Libya, juggling relations with a diverse range of state and non-state actors. The signing of the 2017 MoU between Italy and the Libyan Government of National Accord, which, on paper, had a dual focus on migration control and development support, but in practice largely concentrated on the former (and particularly on enhancing the border-control capacity of the Libyan Coast Guard), constituted the centrepiece of this strategy. While not directly party to it, the EU has supported and complemented the implementation of the MoU through political endorsement, as well as providing funding support thorough EUTF. As a sign of continuity in Italy’s external action on migration, the MoU was automatically renewed for the second time, for another three years, by the current government in February 2023. Despite repeated criticism from both international civil society and the UN due to the appalling human rights conditions migrants face in Libya, the MoU continues to serve as the basis for cooperation between two countries that remain largely focused on surveillance and border control, as well as on the interception and returning to Libya of migrants by Libyan authorities.
Fifty shades of assessing success: Are migration deals effective tools for EU migration governance?
On paper, Europe seeks and promotes comprehensive and multidimensional migration partnerships. Cooperation promises to span the entire spectrum of migration-governance issues (i.e., irregular migration, protection, legal migration, acting upon the migration-development nexus) and to pay fairly balanced attention to these different aspects while catering to the key priorities of both sides. This has been underlined repeatedly in past decades in various strategy documents at both the EU (e.g., from the 2005 Global Approach to Migration to the 2022 EU Action Plan for the Central Mediterranean) and the national level (e.g., Italy’s 2016 non-paper Migration Compact). It has also featured strongly in most partnership frameworks, including the recent MoU, and the 2014 Mobility Partnership with Tunisia. Europe has also increasingly resorted to the use of conditionality and issue-linking, both within the migration policy toolbox (e.g., linking visa policy to irregular migration control) and by embedding migration into broader EU foreign policy, using non-migration policy areas (e.g., trade, development, investment) as leverage to obtain migration cooperation from partners. Consequently, with the exception of arrangements that employ “small formats” in which cooperation is limited to a particular issue within the migration field, partnerships increasingly include several goals which bring different policy dimensions together. As a result, in theory at least, multiple dimensions must be taken into account when assessing the extent to which deals are actually doing what they promise. In practice, however, the success of a deal tends to be measured in a rather straightforward way, by focusing on a single dimension. Bluntly put, despite the risk of oversimplification, an immediate reduction in irregular arrivals is sufficient for a deal to be considered successful, and a partner country cooperative and effective. Thus, both the migration cooperation between Gaddafi and Berlusconi and the 2016 EU-Turkey Statement were regarded as success stories in EU policy circles, the latter almost exclusively because of the drop in arrivals to Greece, irrespective of the deal’s unfulfilled promises in both the migration field and non-migration policy areas, let alone the wider normative and foreign policy implications the cooperation arrangement generated. Leaving aside the problematic nature of using such a narrow definition to measure success and judging by this single benchmark, would it be possible say that migration deals have been effective in reducing spontaneous arrivals in the Central Mediterranean? Attempting to establish causation would require an entirely different level of analytical complexity, as the timing, direction and intensity of migratory movements are informed by an intricate web of factors. But can we at least observe some correlation between migration cooperation arrangements and a short-term reduction in numbers? The short answer is: it depends. The slightly longer answer is that results have been mixed at best, and expecting migration deals to keep numbers down in a sustained fashion—especially as they are being rolled out currently, with a disproportionate focus on control and with limited complementary action internally—would be rather unrealistic. And both answers should be followed up with another question: reduction of arrivals at what cost? For example, the 2008 cooperation agreement with Libya (under Gaddafi) seems to have delivered on its promise of reducing arrivals in Italy, albeit for a limited period; here, the decisive factors were the political will of the foreign partner—which fluctuates and is challenging and often costly to sustain, particularly in transactional arrangements—, plus the institutional capacity required to deliver on migration control. Similarly, the post-2016 engagement with a mixture of Libyan state and non-state actors, accompanied by control-oriented measures in the Sahel, appear to have played a role, among other factors, in the reduction in the number of irregular crossings across the Central Mediterranean from 2017 on, while simultaneously generating significant risks and negative consequences vis-à-vis the prospects of state-building and peace in Libya, for migrants and refugees, and for EU normative standards. Moreover, as both the post-2020 rise in numbers and the more recent shift in trajectories in the Central Mediterranean have shown, it has proved impossible to either sustain such a reduction or prevent route diversion. In terms of the impact which European engagement in the Sahel has had on northbound migration flows, available data demonstrate ambivalent results: research suggests that, even if there has been a reduction in both inbound and outbound transit movement through the Sahel and in landings to Europe, there was no similar drop in arrivals from the Sahel to Libya and Algeria (see here for further details). Nevertheless, despite these inconclusive results and their negative implications for the stability, livelihoods, and the human security of migrants, and State-society relations, European interventions in the Sahel, and particularly cooperation with Niger, has been deemed a “replicable success story”.
Rethinking effectiveness in the light of contradictions in the EU’s external action on and beyond migration
Beyond numbers, but still related to the question of whether migration deals, as currently structured and implemented, are an effective and viable way for the EU and Member States to manage migration, it is worth making a couple of additional points: The first relates to the question of unfulfilled promises. As mentioned above, partnerships are often framed multi-dimensionally within the migration domain and sometimes also extend to commitments which pertain to non-migration portfolios. Still, migration and border control almost always come to the fore at the expense of these other dimensions, or promised pillars of cooperation, when it comes to implementation and delivery at the EU end. This not only raises the question of whether the deals actually work as originally designed (i.e., effectiveness judged against the stated objectives), but it also leads to frustration with the EU and create credibility and trust issues. Lower-than-expected delivery by Europe on the promise of expanding legal migration pathways stands as a classic example. A more recent example is provided by Tunisia’s expression of discontent with the MoU, which seems to relate not only to the EU’s delay in disbursing the (newly-promised) funds, but also to what Tunis views as the narrow implementation focus on migration control, despite the comprehensive and multi-portfolio nature of the cooperation agreed upon in July. On the other hand, a low degree of delivery or non-delivery on the originally agreed commitments also cuts the other way, as demonstrated by the low level of cooperation by countries such as Nigeria and Ethiopia in the field of return. Perhaps the key lesson for Europe is: it is better to make a more modest but realistic set of promises than to promise actions you will be unable to deliver. The second point relates to the inconsistencies and contradictions between separate actions both within the migration field and across the policy areas which the EU is increasingly attempting to intertwine with the external dimension of migration. A case in point here is interventions within the migration domain, where Europe channels resources into solving a problem which its own actions aggravate. A clear example is supporting Libyan authorities so as to increase their capacity to intercept and return migrants to Libya (such returns are estimated to number in excess of 100,000 between 2017 and the end of 2022), while simultaneously being the main promoter and sponsor of the “Emergency Transit Mechanism” to evacuate asylum seekers from Libyan detention centres to Niger and Rwanda with a view to resettlement in a third country. The ways in which European trade policies contribute to the ‘root causes’ of migration in Tunisia (e.g., poor livelihoods, lack of job prospects, regional inequality) which the EU aims to address through its strategic partnership with Tunisia are another glaring example of cross-portfolio policy contradictions. These contradictions raise important questions about the definitions of policy success and effectiveness, and call for the EU and Member States to reflect on what could be called the dilemma of ‘giving with one hand and taking away with the other’.
Concluding remarks
Only two months after the signing of the long-expected ‘strategic partnership’ with Tunisia, a certain degree of disappointment with its failure to reduce irregular arrival figures is already evident in European policy and public debates. Some, such as MEP Jeroen Lenaers of the European People’s Party, have openly denounced lagging results as “arrivals continue to increase” after the conclusion of the deal. Not as directly critical as the MEP, but reflecting similar expectations of migration deals, media accounts reported that “two months after” its signing “the deal is nowhere near to solving the migration problem”, then informing the readers that “more than 90,000 migrants arrived in Italy from Tunisia” in the first nine months of 2023. These narratives are telling in the light they shed on what a migration deal is supposed to achieve from a European perspective. They are indicative of the prevention-oriented, largely Eurocentric and short-term-focused approach to migration cooperation. They also illustrate how cross-Mediterranean migration is predominantly seen: as a problem that should and can be solved. The ‘migration problem’ is reduced to rising arrivals at the EU’s external borders, and the ‘solution’ is equated with lowering those figures, which should mainly be achieved by partners effectively preventing northbound movement. The fact that disappointment is building up after just two months shows that the deals are expected to deliver immediately, even in the case of a country like Tunisia which finds itself in the midst of a deepening economic crisis and growing political turmoil. All this calls for a rethinking of the success, failure, ‘problem-solving’ capacity, and viability of external migration cooperation arrangements. Looking forward, a reality check regarding expectations on what external migration cooperation can realistically achieve is needed, as is taking a more cautious approach to the tendency to ‘over-rationalise’ and ‘mechanise’ migration governance that is inherent in such expectations. When assessing the success and value added of ‘migration deals’, it would be useful to take into account criteria beyond their capacity to reduce irregular crossings in the short term. Inconsistencies and contradictions in EU migration policy and the way it interacts with the wider scope of initiatives in the external action toolbox also need to form part of future reflections, as thinking about effectiveness also requires us to think about policy objectives, externalities and coherence. Ultimately, migration governance is about managing interdependencies, which means that interstate cooperation is both inevitable and necessary. However, the European approach to the ‘external dimension’ as a panacea for the ‘migration problem’—which itself needs to be questioned—oversimplifies complexity, feeds into the pursuit of narrowly defined and at times unrealistic objectives, and relies on a difficult-to-sustain distribution of labour in which external cooperation replaces rather than complements internal measures. Looking forward, EU policy actors and observers both need to reflect more deeply on how to better align their words and deeds when it comes to a comprehensive, multidimensional and balanced approach to migration in both its internal and external dimensions, and its interplay with the wider scope of foreign policy.
[1] Luca Barana, “L’Italia e le migrazioni”, in Nelli Feroci, Ferdinando and Leo Goretti (eds). L’Italia dal governo Draghi al governo Meloni Rapporto sulla politica estera italiana, Edizione 2022, Istituto Affari Internazionali, 30 January 2023, https://www.iai.it/it/pubblicazioni/litalia-dal-governo-draghi-al-governo-meloni [2] Kelly M. Grenhill, Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. [3] The military coup in Niger on 26 July 2023 is already generating implications for European cooperation with Niger (on migration and beyond), while the entire range of its effects remain to be seen. The EU froze budgetary support and military cooperation with Niger immediately after the coup – which is likely to lead to a freezing of migration-linked initiatives in the wider security realm, while Italy, mainly with migration policy concerns in mind, seems to have been tilting towards what can be called a wait-and-see approach, trying to nudge Europe to remain open to seeking a diplomatic solution.