A graduate in history and political science, Max-Erwann Gastineau is an essayist. He published
The New Eastern Trial
(Éditions du Cerf, 2019).
FIGAROVOX. - The Polish Parliament on Friday gave its final green light to the government's plan to build a wall on the border with Belarus to prevent migrants and refugees from crossing into Poland. Is this the only solution for this member country of the European Union?
Max-Erwann GASTINEAU. -
On 7th October last, the Interior Ministers of twelve member countries, including Poland, Austria, Denmark and Greece, called on the European Union to radically change its philosophy on migration. Appeal addressed, under a double security prism (cultural and border security), to Commissioners Margaritis Schinas, responsible for the Promotion of our European way of life, and Ylva Johansson, responsible for Home Affairs. In June 2020, the Swedish Commissioner described as
"crucial to open as many legal migration channels as possible"
, not only for humanitarian reasons, in order to counter the development of smuggling networks, but also for economic reasons.in order to respond to the aging of the European population:
“every year
, she said in an interview with the newspaper
La Croix
,
more than two million migrants join the EU legally.
It works very well, and I would like to see this share increase.”
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Cultural and security prism on one side;
humanitarian and economic prism of the other... We could not better summarize the ideological nature of the wall of misunderstandings which, for years, has divided Europe and subjected its governing bodies to the weight of a "total humanitarianism", according to the expression here formulated by Donald Tusk, former President of the European Council from 2014 to 2019.
Warsaw's decision to build a wall on its eastern border, a few months after the start of the Belarusian crisis, is a response to this ideological wall, witness to our collective impotence.
It reveals a terrible failure;
that of the European Union to realize the promise induced by the creation of the Schengen area in 1997: to replace the internal borders of Europe with the establishment and defense of external borders “common” to the Member States.
Behind the construction of the Polish wall, it is the future and the meaning of European construction that are at stake.
Max-Erwann Gastineau
If the European Union has shown itself incapable of defending its borders and of providing material aid to Poland, which since August has been alerting us to the migratory situation on its eastern border, it is not because of a lack of skills or even means (Frontex's budget has gone from 114 million euros in 2015 to 460 million in 2020 and 544 million in 2021), although these can still be considered insufficient. But due to a lack of ends, agreement and clarity on the aims of the European project.
What ends does the European Union pursue? Does it see itself as a political entity in the making, capable of acting as a complement, or even in addition to States, to the point of assuming the corollary of this claim: the use of coercion to defend its borders? Or is it condemned to be only the last face of a utopia born after the fall of the Berlin wall, indifferent to history and geography, purely procedural, antipolitical, self-regulated by legal and technical devices, such as than those called upon to speed up the standardization of national asylum rules or the implementation of mechanisms for the automatic distribution of refugees? Behind the construction of the Polish wall, it is the future and the meaning of European construction that are at stake.
Will this wall help solve the migration crisis? Is it viable?
This wall cannot, on its own, respond to the migration challenge, which moreover concerns the south much more - from the Spanish Mediterranean coasts to the maritime gateways of the Balkans - than the Polish eastern border.
However, it sends a clear message to the European authorities and to the Western States, reminding them that they can no longer reprove the consequences of their apathy.
By putting the EU up against the wall, the Polish wall could, moreover, open up a space conducive to the advancement of the European “migration” agenda.
We see it with Emmanuel Macron who, after meeting the Hungarian head of government and Poland's best ally, Viktor Orban, announced that he wanted to take advantage of the French presidency of the EU to organize
"a coherent policy of control of our external borders »
.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has said the Union will not fund the construction of barriers at EU borders. Do you understand the status quo of the European Union on this subject?
In the Europe of human rights, the border is not a norm but an anomaly, a sort of concession made to the reality hated by nations. The dismissal opposed by Ursula von der Leyen to Poland is a powerful reminder of this: the EU is less concerned with protecting its borders than with reducing passion on the issue, by implementing a better distribution of migratory load. As if the question was first of all to manage to contain the anger of the people and not to slow down its cause: the intensity of the migratory flows and the existential anguish that it nourishes, inspired by an observation that Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy were able to ask in 2010, failing to ward off the effects:
“the failure of multiculturalism”
.
Poland wants to escape the multicultural destiny of the West, to remain a nation free to appreciate what distinguishes here from elsewhere.
How to reproach him, today, for drawing all the consequences of our past procrastination?
Max-Erwann Gastineau
The great American liberal philosopher Michael Waltzer, we warned:
"break down the walls of the
E
state (...) it does not create a world without walls, but rather create a thousand small fortresses."
Poland does not want to turn Europe into a fortress;
she wants to avoid multiplying them.
She wants to escape the multicultural destiny of the West, to remain a nation free to appreciate what distinguishes here from elsewhere.
How to reproach him, today, for drawing all the consequences of our past procrastination?
Instead of promoting new relocation mechanisms, the EU must create the possibility of returning illegal migrants to their points of departure and processing their asylum applications there.
The differentiation between migrants who really need international protection and economic migrants will be crucial, if we want to save the right to asylum from its perversion and to ensure that only those who really need protection enter the territory. European.
The United Nations has called for urgent action to save lives and avoid suffering at the EU-Belarus border after several asylum seekers died. Would EU intervention have prevented these tragedies?
It's hard to say, as the impotence of the EU is patent.
One thing is certain: to avoid new tragedies, we will have to change software.
In June 2018, an immigration agreement reached by heads of state and government backed the idea formulated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to create "disembarkation platforms" outside the EU.
A measure reminiscent of the "Operation Sovereign Border" program (Operation Sovereign Borders) launched by Australia in 2013. A program whose objective was to intercept migrant boats sailing at their peril, to lead them to transit centers set up on the neighboring islands of Papua New Guinea.
All in exchange for financial consideration, such as those today
By walking the talk, Australia has managed to preserve its borders and save lives.
Can the EU?
In judgments of May and December 2020, the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) condemned Hungary for calling into question the "return" directive, prohibiting the refoulement of migrants who have entered an irregular situation (so that they can their right to apply for asylum), and the establishment of transit zones in Serbia, making it impossible to effectively protect the EU's borders.
Will we still be able to prefer rights to walls for a long time without questioning the sclerosing effects of the continuous extension of the European jurisprudential straitjacket?
Max-Erwann Gastineau
The primacy of the rights of the individual over the imperatives of sovereignty and the safeguarding of the "right to national identity", which the Hungarian judge has recently tried to oppose to the European judge, is the product of a historical process foreign to Australian democracy… But will we be able to prefer rights to walls for much longer without questioning the sclerosing effects of the continuous extension of the European jurisprudential yoke?
Should NATO's presence in this part of Europe be strengthened?
If the European Union wants to exist on the international scene tomorrow, it will have to equip itself with its own geopolitical thinking.
No political independence without autonomy of thought.
But does she even aspire to it?
Let us never forget that States have the politics of their geography and that the fundamentally anarchic nature of the international system invites them, permanently, to maximize the conditions of their own security.
If Poland, like other Eastern nations, such as the Baltic nations, has no objective reason to deprive itself of the American protection provided to it by NATO, the question arises differently for France. .
Is NATO's ever-increasing presence in Eastern Europe likely to strengthen our collective security or, on the contrary, by dint of making our unavoidable Russian neighbor insecure, is it preparing for the advent future crises - energy, migration, even military?
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The EU must urgently rethink its relationship with NATO and draw all the consequences that its lack of autonomy has on its security and its external relations.
But as this "realistic" burst has, in reality, little chance of occurring, I would say that only the return of a strong France, capable of developing its own diplomacy, freed from the blinkers imposed on it by the ordinary Atlanticism of the European elites, will be able to lay down the terms of another path for Europe in the more serene relationship that it must now build with its eastern neighbours.
"The European continent will never be stable, will never be secure, if we do not pacify and clarify our relations with Russia"
, President Emmanuel Macron declared at the August 2019 Ambassadors' Conference.
It remains to move from words to deeds, as on immigration.