The EU is changing its course of African irregular migration management from control measures to ‘addressing the root causes.’ In 2015, during the EU-Africa Valetta Summit on irregular migration control, the EU took an unprecedented migration management course: it established the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (ETFA), with a specific aim to address the root causes of migration in Africa. The move signified a reenergized effort by both the African and European partners to reconstruct and redefine African irregular migration (Castillejo, 2016, 2017; McKeon, 2018; Parshotam, 2017). First, the EU-Africa partnership agreement signed at the Valletta summit acknowledged the root causes of irregular migration in African countries.
1 European Commission (2015g);Grand Dutchy of Luxembourg (2015).
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Secondly, it recognized that the right approach to managing African irregular migration flows is addressing those root causes (European Commission, 2015f; European Commission, 2020).
Such a policy shift appears to run against the conventional knowledge in migration studies, that since the 1990s, when the process of integrating migration and asylum issues at the EU level begun, the EU had always capitalized on border protection and migration control measures (Celata and Coletti, 2016; Chou, 2012; Guiraudon, 2000; Guild, 2006; Huysmans, 2006; Guild and Bigo, 2010; Lavenex, 2001; Parkes, 2017; Van Criekinge, 2008). It hence remains puzzling as to why and how the EU took such an unprecedented policy shift to tackle the root causes of African irregular migration.
Even though the EU had always engaged African countries in irregular migration management, the concept of the root causes (and the need for addressing the root causes) remained entirely absent in the EU policy documents in the 2000s. Throughout this period, there lacked a concrete policy on irregular migration management that could be connected to addressing the root causes (Castles and Van Hear, 2011; Carling and Talleraas, 2016). Moreover, during this time,
“migration policy-making was packaged into the ‘technocratic’ language of ‘policy transfer’
and ‘adaptation’ to existing norms, specifically in the area of human rights and humanitarian migration” (Weinar et al., 2018:2). Unlike in the scholarship in the 2000s, in recent years, and most significantly since the 2015 Valletta Summit, there has been an invigorated focus on addressing the root causes of African irregular migration (see Castillejo, 2016; Crawley and Skleparis, 2017; Fulvio, 2016; McKeon, 2018; Trauner, 2016; Parshotam, 2017; Vătăman, 2016). Even then, a few scholars, such as Guiraudon (2018) and Scipioni (2017), suggest there was no major turning point in EU policy development in 2015. While these scholars criticize the EU's actions of empowering external border control in maintaining fortress Europe, they remain silent on the unprecedented policy shift that resulted from the 2015 Valletta Summit.
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However, Carling (2017) terms the move to address root causes of African irregular migration as intuitive but problematic and misleading.
Some studies have suggested that the 2015 migration crisis triggered the EU policy change (Baldwin-Edwards et al., 2019; Falkner, 2016; Paul and Roos, 2019). They hold this argument since the EU-Africa Valletta Summit (where the EU policy migration change was initialized) was held when the European migration crisis peaked. However, I argue contrary to what these studies suggest: that the 2015 migration crisis on its own was not a trigger for the EU policy change. First, the crisis did not offer a policy direction. The EU had the option to empower its existing structures of irregular migration control or would have taken any other alternative rather than taking a new policy shift. As explained by Nohrstedt and Weible, “even if many crises are followed by struggles over the dominant interpretation of causes and implications, the proximity of crises in relation to policy subsystems (in terms of policy and geographical distance) remains critical in order to clarify the nature, evolvement, and effects on policy debates” (Nohrstedt and Weible, 2010:3; see also, Weible at al., 2012). I advance my argument that the process of influencing the EU actors to refocus on addressing the root causes of African irregular migration started as early as 2008, but the policy shift was actualized through the 2015 EU-Africa Valletta Summit. The 2015 migration crisis, therefore, can only be understood as a catalyst for policy change (see the conceptual framework and operationalization of variables in the theory chapter for a detailed analysis).
The concept of the root causes of African irregular migration was not new and did not emerge with the 2015 migration crisis. It was first mentioned in the 1999 Tampere Convention but ever since, it was not embraced into the EU migration policy (Boswell, 2002, Lindstrøm, 2005).
“By the 2000s, the root-causes doctrine had become engrained in European policy thinking about migration and development. It has partly been a dormant idea, however, and re-emerged in an unprecedented way with the establishment of the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa in
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2015” (Carling and Talleraas, 2016:6; Carling 2017:20). The intensification of the need to address the root causes of migration originated from the debates between the European and the African partners that, first, the causes of African irregular migration ought to be understood from a historical perspective (Andersson, 2015; Baldwin-Edwards, 2009; Eskinazi, 2011; De Haas, 2014; Ogu, 2017; McKeon, 2018). Secondly, the root causes were structural and systematic (Boswell, 2002; Crush, 2015; Carling and Talleraas, 2016; Docquier et al., 2014;
McKeon, 2018; Mwangi & Cirella, 2020). In these international debates, particularly within the EU-Africa partnership, Africa was viewed as an actor in a continuous struggle for decolonization and one which advocated for a change of norms of engagement with the EU actors (Staeger, 2016).
This idea of root causes did not only pull attention to the role of ‘norms as structures’ but also the behavior of both the African and European partners in irregular migration governance.
“Exploring the construction and change of norms within their socio-cultural contexts conveys one part of the story, while studying the role of norms as causing rule-following behavior conveys the other” (Wiener, 2007:51, see also Wiener, 2004). The persistent tension in irregular migration management between European and African partners indicated conflicting interests and partners’ attempts to reposition themselves to pursue their preferences by framing and counter-framing irregular migration management norms. The struggle over the norms of irregular migration management provided a platform where interventions and investigations met. As a result, the EU-Africa partnership almost drastically established a new form of legitimacy relating to addressing the root causes of African irregular migration. As Bano argues, “as new norms emerge through competition, decisions taken at the point of contention may appear to contradict or deviate from the prevailing interests and the previous known normative framework” (Bano, 2015:9). I, therefore, argue that interaction between European
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and African partners was a manifestation of a new norm formation process that established the 2015 migration policy shift.
Emerging migration studies suggest that the EU migration policy shift to address the root causes of African migration was influenced by African partner countries (Andersson, 2016;
Fulvio, 2016). “Further, the export of a security model [by the EU actors] has given more powerful ‘partner’ states a perfect bargaining chip” in irregular migration control (Andersson, 2016: 1063; see also Andersson, 2014:274ff). Additionally, it is suggested that African partner countries were the ‘exogenous agents’, and the root causes of irregular migration were the
‘exogenous issue’ that influenced the EU to change its irregular migration management approach (Fulvio, 2016). But how?
It is on this background that this study presents the question; how did the African partner countries participate in influencing the EU’s change of migration approach from purely control mechanisms to addressing the root causes of African irregular migration?