The fragility of EU border and migration politics

In mid-November, with thousands of migrants effectively trapped in miserable, inhumane and even life-threatening conditions at the Belarusian–Polish border, Germany’s foreign minister Heiko Maas labelled Belarussian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko the “head of a state smuggling ring“, and Chancellor Angela Merkel accused him of a “hybrid attack” on the EU.

Since the fall of Kabul in August 2021, European leaders have been united in stressing the priority of securing EU borders. These statements can be partially interpreted as reflecting a desire to avoid any repetition of the 2015 ‘migration crisis’, in which over a million refugees entered Europe. More fundamentally they reveal an EU-wide political consensus on border security that has been three decades in the making, reinforced by the political shockwaves following 2015, but that has at its core a growing reliance on non-EU states, such as Belarus, Libya and Turkey, that threatens to be its undoing.

Exaggerated threat perceptions

The Taliban’s seizure of power in Afghanistan in August 2021 led one European diplomat to declare that another crisis on Europe’s borders was ‘inevitable‘. Yet, despite these initial and Eurocentric comparisons with Syrian arrivals in 2015, Afghanistan’s context and broader changes over the last six years have made a carbon-copy repeat highly unlikely. Greater geographical distance, the end of hostilities in Afghanistan, border closures in Iran and Turkey’s partially EU-funded construction of extensive border walls – motivated by an anti-immigration public backlash following the inflow of over five million Syrians – make just getting to Europe much more difficult. The basic fact remains that the vast majority of the world’s displaced people  – 85 per cent according to the most recent UNHCR data – live in the developing world, notwithstanding the approximately 3,000 mostly Afghans, Syrians and Iraqi Kurds brought to the Belarusian–Polish border.

This is a part of a blog post by James Dennison and Andrew Geddes.