Секьюритизация миграции в Европейском союзе после миграционного кризиса (2015-2016)

The main topic examined in the present research is the outcome of the 2015-2016 period that has been described as the “European migrant crisis”, which has dominated all formats of socio- political discourse in the European Union since its very beginning. The origins of this situation can be traced back to 2011 and the events which have become known under the name “Arab Spring,” when a series of demonstrations against political regimes occurred in the Middle East. One of these countries was Syria, where the aforementioned circumstances provoked a major civil war, resulting in the subsequent military involvement of foreign powers – such as the United States and Russia, and subsequently caused a wave of refugees towards neighbouring countries and Europe. According to official data, in 2015 and 2016 over 1,4 million refugees and migrants reached Europe, predominantly arriving from conflict-ridden countries – the Syrian Arab Republic, Afghanistan and Iraq.1 This migration wave was the biggest Europe had seen since World War II and it was decidedly unprepared to face the resulting situation.
Nowadays – five years since the “crisis” started, EU Member States and collective institutions are still struggling to deal with the issue of migration and it remains as one of the central topics in the European socio-political discourse. In recent years, several policies have been undertaken to improve the situation while upholding European values, but at the same time migration has become a point of disagreement between EU Member States and a major proponent of a populist wave, led by a securitisation rhetoric. This research will therefore examine the effects of the crisis on European policies and political discourse in the context of securitisation. More specifically, the overemphasis of European Union’s main political actors and institutions in the discourse will be looked into, as well as the dominant role it plays in the formation of public attitudes towards immigration and the subsequent official policies of the collective European institutions.
1 Europe – Refugee and Migrant arrivals summary data // Operational Portal: Refugee Situations. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 2019.
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Firstly, for the purpose of the research it is necessary to point out the distinction between the three widely used terms “migrant,” “refugee” and “asylum-seeker.” The difference between them is important, as it does not only define the official status of the people arriving in the European Union, but oftentimes directly affects the attitudes of politicians, media and individual citizens towards them. All three of the aforementioned terms are used for people who have fled their country of residence for various reasons and have crossed international borders seeking to settle someplace else. The most widely used term is “migrant,” which does not have an official international legal definition and is often applied as an umbrella term by different stakeholders. Thus, the wide use of this term may often include refugees and asylum seekers as well, as part of “mixed migration” – movements of people who cross international borders for different reasons. Traditionally, a migrant is someone who is moving outside their country of origin by choice, as opposed to forcefully, in order to reconnect with family or in search of a better life, among other reasons. A refugee is defined as “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion”.2 Whereas an asylum- seeker is someone who is seeking international protection under the 1951 UN Convention and has yet to be legally recognised as a refugee because they’re waiting for their asylum claim to be processed. UNHCR suggests that due to the necessity of the individuals belonging to the groups of refugees and asylum-seekers to receive international protection, that the use of the umbrella term “migrant” should be conducted carefully. Furthermore, the distinction between refugees and asylum-seekers on the one hand and economic migrants on the other hand is important for the perception of the persons holding the aforementioned statuses. For instance, many Europeans seem to be more accepting of refugees as persons fleeing life-threatening conditions than economic migrants, who are perceived to have a choice in whether to move out of their country. Nonetheless, the so-called European “migrant crisis” is often presented in a way that does not offer clear distinctions between the people entering the EU and they appear to represent a holistic concern for the political and public opinion.
Indeed, the issue of immigration has risen to the top of European concerns in recent years and has overtaken economic themes, which persistently topped the charts of the most important
2 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees // United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). – 2010. Article 1(A)(2). – P. 14.
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issues for Europeans after the 2007-08 world financial crisis. Latest data indicates that immigration is still the number one concern for European citizens, with 34% claiming it’s the most important issue facing the EU at the moment.3 Consequently, since the very beginning of the migration crisis, the security frame has been among the most widespread and arguably the one holding the most power to affect the public opinion.
In recent years, right-wing and populist parties across Europe have used the migration issue as an opportunity for greater public exposure and a means to receive more votes, with many succeeding in this endeavour. Most notable examples to mention could be AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), which is now the biggest opposition party in Germany, the League party in Italy, with its leader Matteo Salvini becoming a key figure in nationalist movements in Europe, the rise of the Vox party in Spain, the Greek Solution and Golden Dawn parties in Greece, as well as Viktor Orban’s government in Hungary. These represent just some of the examples of a rising nationalist wave in Europe, fuelled primarily by their anti-immigration rhetoric. Indeed, in the recent European parliament elections, one in three respondents claimed that their primary reason for voting was the issue of immigration.4 The right-wing and nationalist parties also gained a significant number of seats in the European parliament after the latest elections of May 2019, attempting to increase their influence in Brussels. Soon after, a far-right political group – “Identity and Democracy,” was formed within the parliament with nine nationalist European parties as members, including the German AfD and the Italian League. The group overall holds 73 seats in the total of 751, which still does not account for the seats occupied by other nationalist parties belonging to another right-wing coalition formed within the parliament – the “European Conservatives and Reformists Group,” as well as parties which were not attached to any coalition after the election – such as the Greek far-right party Golden Dawn, which won 2 seats in the European parliament. Overall, the two conservative groups currently hold a total of 135 seats in the parliament, in addition to the 51 seats held by the Non-attached members, which are predominantly composed of nationalist and far-right parties.5 This means that approximately
3 Public Opinion in the European Union: Standard Eurobarometer 92 of November, 2019 // European Commission, 2019. – P. 15.
4 The 2019 Post-Electoral Survey: Have European Elections Entered a New Dimension? // Eurobarometer Survey 91.5 of the European Parliament: A Public Opinion Monitoring Study. European Parliament, 2019. – P. 51.
5 2019 European election results [Electronic resource] // European Parliament. URL: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/election-results-2019/en (accessed: 27.03.2020)
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one fourth of the European parliament is currently in favour of nationalist and anti-immigration policies, despite the fact that the numbers of arriving migrants and refugees have radically dropped since 2016.
Given this situation, migration does still represent a topic of urgency for the European Union and dominates the socio-political discourse. This was also comprehensively reflected by Stefan Lehne in 2018, indicating that the EU was still in shock mode despite the height of the crisis in numbers being in the past – “The EU received 43 percent fewer asylum applications in 2017 than it did in 2016. The mass reception centres have mostly emptied, and the school gyms and army barracks have reverted to their original functions. But while the acute crisis has ended, the situation has hardly normalised. The 2018 Italian elections demonstrate that concerns surrounding migration and asylum continue to dominate the public space and shape national and EU politics. Border controls at several internal Schengen borders are still in place, and migration remains the top concern of EU citizens.”.6
The motivation behind the research was thus an intention to examine how the recent discourse around the migrant crisis in the European Union has been shaping and influencing agendas of EU political institutions in a security context. While a lot of past research focused on the crisis itself and the subsequent “shock” the European Union faced due to the unprecedented numbers of arriving migrants and refugees, this research paper focuses primarily on the period after the crisis that took place in 2015-2016, with a deeper examination of the developments in the past five years. Latest data indicates that numbers of migrants and refugees who arrive in Europe have significantly dropped since 2016, with total arrivals decreasing from 1,032,408 in 2015, to 373,652 in 2016, and 185,139 in 2017.7 These statistics might lead to the false impression that the worst is over and the current numbers present a manageable task for Member States and European institutions. In fact, in March 2019 the European Commission released a factsheet debunking “myths” about migration, where it was stated that the EU was no longer in crisis
6 Lehne, S. The EU Remains Unprepared for the Next Migration Crisis [Electronic resource] / S. Lehne // Carnegie Europe. URL: https://carnegieeurope.eu/2018/04/03/eu-remains-unprepared-for-next-migration-crisis-pub-75965 (accessed: 13.04.2020)
7 Europe – Refugee and Migrant arrivals summary data // Operational Portal: Refugee Situations. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 2019.
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mode.8 Nonetheless, that is not precisely the truth. Firstly, the numbers of arrivals have not decreased significantly since 2017, with the arrivals in 2019 numbering 125,472.9 Secondly, the EU is still struggling with the implementation of a common immigration and asylum policy, which has led to major divisions within European institutions, as well as procedural delays due to ineffectiveness and high level of bureaucracy. It is thus necessary to point out that the relevance of the crisis is not only measured in numbers of the arriving refugees and migrants, but in the effectiveness and intensity of policies undertaken in order to face the issue, as well as the socio-political context in which it is being presented across Europe. The primary role in these conditions is occupied by the main EU institutions, which hold the sole decision-making power with regards to collective policies of the European Union and which are obligatory for the EU Member States.