The New Pact on Migration and Asylum and African-European migration diplomacy, by MPC Director Andrew Geddes and Professor Mehari Maru

While labelled as a New Pact on Migration and Asylum, there is much within the European Commission’s proposals as they relate to the ‘external’ dimension of migration and asylum policy that continues to be consistent with a direction of travel established during the 1990s when the EU looked towards closer cooperation with non-member states. This external dimension has become particularly relevant in relation to migration from African countries and an explicit recognition that the attainment of EU objectives requires working closely with African governments and African regional organisations.

In this contribution we draw from a recent working paper that we co-authored for the Migration Policy Centre at the European University Institute to consider the implications of the Pact for ‘migration diplomacy’ as it relates to migration relations between African and European governments and regional organisations (Geddes and Maru 2020). We also change the focus from the EU perspective and consider the views of African governments and regional organisations in the context of ‘migration diplomacy’ and the associated transnational dynamics.

These considerations are urgent not only in the context of the Pact but also in relation to ongoing challenges (displacement from Ethiopia being the most recent) and also the underlying assumptions that inform EU thinking more generally on migration. There is a long-standing tendency for the EU and its members to view Africa as a potential source of large-scale migration to the EU where relative inequalities of income and wealth, the effects of conflict between and within states and demographic changes are compounded by the consequences of the climate crisis and are then seen as sources of migration pressures on the EU (de Haas 2007). This baseline assumption is important because it has played a substantial role in driving EU actions to tighten external border controls and to develop agreements with non-EU countries with the purpose of reducing flows towards the EU or dealing with ‘root causes’ (Geddes 2021).

This is a part of a forum by Andrew Geddes and Mehari Taddele Maru.