Macro-regional strategy for the Mediterranean: Political context

In recent years, the Mediterranean migration crisis has entered the European Union’s political agenda, compelling EU Member states to take common action to address the crisis. Since April 2015, when nearly one thousand migrants lost their lives in the Mediterranean Channel in just a few days, EU institutions and Member states have turned (again) their attention to migration, acknowledging that this problem could not be managed by Mediterranean states alone. On the one hand, the EU adopts measures aimed at protecting EU borders through EU relocation and resettlement quotas and the return of failed asylum seekers and undocumented migrants; on the other, Search and Rescue (SAR) operations are conducted in the Mediterranean to prevent loss of human lives at sea. The “border control” argument assumes border defence as the main objective to be achieved. The “duty to protect” discourse puts the humanitarian dimension at the centre of crisis management. These two distinct approaches seem to reflect a domestic EU split.

This paper analyses EU relations with Southern Mediterranean states as a specific attempt to construct a geopolitical region—the Euro-Mediterranean area—from and through migration management strategies. It concludes that the development of policy in this area results from a huge number of poorly focused and sometimes contradictory initiatives that collectively make up a far more haphazard approach than the common externalisation critique suggests. This haphazard approach helps to explain the range of unintended consequences of this policy but may also lead to its limited successes.

Under what conditions does the EU contribute to the prevention of governance breakdown and violent conflict in areas of limited statehood and contested orders by fostering societal resilience? This study seeks answers to this question by examining the EU's effectiveness in fostering societal resilience in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey while they have coped with risks emerging from cross-border mobility, mass influx, and prolonged stays of the forcibly displaced due to the Syrian crisis since 2011. The study argues that the EU has been constrained in building societal resilience.

The year 2015 is often labelled as the year of the Mediterranean migration crisis, with the Central Mediterranean route heavily weighting the humanitarian crisis in terms of victims. Migration and border control have then become a highly politicised issue both at European and national level entrapping the European Union in contradictory political strategies. On the one hand, the duty to protect people on the move puts the humanitarian dimension at the centre of the crisis management. On the other, the border control argument brought about by European leaders assumes defence of state frontiers as the main goal to be achieved, irrespective of individual needs [...] This article investigates the contradictions of the EU response to address migration in the Mediterranean and focuses on the burden-shifting of the Mediterranean migration management which involves non-EU actors as migration crisis managers to provide EU borders’ control.

Many names have been attached to regional spaces of migration around the edges of the European Union, including the Mediterranean, Africa-Europe, EU, and Schengen. These regional distinctions and the image of contiguous boundaries assume certain territorial stabilities that can be known, mapped, and policed: the African continent, the European Union, the Mediterranean and even the notion of territorial waters. Yet, territoriality itself is an unstable concept, and the many crises unfolding in the interstitial spaces in the Mediterranean signal precisely the fluidity of the region. Regional solutions are popular within the current panoply of enforcement strategies used to manage migration, but they function to reify and stabilize the concept of the region and obscure violence happening at other scales. In this paper we build on political geographers’ examinations of the social construction of scale to investigate the ways in which the region has been created through “migration management.”

Dealing with the current flow of migrants flocking to the shores of southern European countries remains high on the international agenda. At the end of 2016, 276,957 migrants were waiting in Libya to cross the sea. Many of them were subject to human rights violations and abuses such as arbitrary detention, torture, unlawful killings, sexual exploitation and even slavery (IOM, 2017). The international response has been, so far, insufficient and new ideas and practices are urgently needed. After providing an overview of the legal framework and of the efforts carried out by the relevant international and regional organizations, this article focuses on recent treaties concluded between Italy and Libya, and argues that the new bilateral agreements represent an example of how States are responding to this challenge in an attempt to strike a balance between the need to strengthen the protection of migrants’ rights and the necessity to guarantee the security of national borders.

This article aims at analyzing the relevance of Security Sector Reform (SSR) in the security relations between European Union and Mediterranean countries. In the first part, a definition of SSR will be developed. In the second part, the EU's definition of SSR will be stressed, and its links with the security concept as it has been developed in EU external action. In the third part, the EU missions in Mediterranean countries will be analyzed in order to verify if SSR is included in the aims of the missions.

Since 2007, the EU has developed a continental, and thus pan-African, approach, based on an Africa EU Strategic Partnership that also covers the African Mediterranean. The June 2016 EU Global Strategy for Foreign and Security Policy (EUGS) has also directly linked the Mediterranean to the Middle East and Africa, following the “Neighbours of the EU’s Neighbours” approach. It is therefore time to assess the potential implications of these progressive, strategic reorientations, as 2017 will also be remembered as the year Morocco returned to the African family through the African Union (AU).

NATO faces a problematic threat landscape in the Mediterranean. The Alliance has to deal with hot topics that range from Russia’s robust military posture and involvement in the Syrian Civil War to ISIS terrorism and the migrant crisis. To address all of these challenges, NATO should boost its engagement with partner nations, produce a new maritime security approach, and counterbalance Moscow’s strategic foothold in the eastern Mediterranean.