Introduction

The so-called 2015 migration crisis has brought space and spatiality back to the political discourses of the EU and its member states. Across Europe, metaphors drawing on spatial concepts of governing human flows (e.g., corridors, hotspots, hubs, platforms, and regional routes) have flourished (Scott et al. 2019). Moreover, in the collective imaginary of citizens and policymakers, European and third-country nationals alike, EU and non-EU borders have moved closer or farther depending on the perceptions of threats and opportunities linked to the migration phenomenon.

In this context, the Southern Mediterranean appears to be one of the geopolitical spaces beyond the EU whose perception has probably changed the most. The deterioration of the Syrian and especially the Libyan contexts after 2011 has transformed the North African maritime border into “an open door to Europe” (2015), with EU commissioner for European neighborhood and enlargement negotiations Johannes Hahn changing the definition of the EU neighborhood from a “ring of friends” to a “ring of fire” (2015).

Academic debate on Europe and migration has attempted to capture these spatial phenomena (Garelli and Tazzioli 2016; Bigo 2014; Cuttita Page 118 →2014; Bialasiewicz 2012). In general, the processes of bordering, rebordering, or region building through EU policies are not new to political scientists, EU scholars, and political geographers, and many scholars acknowledge that the EU’s migration policy has always been key to understanding the “spatialities of Europeanization” (Di Peri and Donelli, 2021; Collyer 2016; Bialasiewicz et al. 2009). However, this is particularly true with respect to those countries close to the EU’s eastern and southern borders, where the EU’s externalization of border management has redesigned border spaces in different ways (Cuttita 2014; Côté-Boucher et al. 2014; Bialasiewicz 2012). Overall, there is common agreement among scholars that the proliferation of governance mechanisms and agreements between the EU and third countries has also multiplied the spatial representations of the Mediterranean region (Collyer 2016). This chapter extends this line of research by focusing on the space-making impact of migration policy instruments.

As den Hertog (2016) argues, one of the major (albeit underanalyzed) EU responses to the “refugee crisis” has been its financial response, which amounts to a partial reconfiguration of the EU funding landscape for migration, asylum, and border policies. Between 2011 and 2016, EU projects and programs for migration management not only impressively increased in number and size but also became more complex, involving more actors and targeting different territories and goals. In this context, several questions emerge, including these: what kind of understanding of the Southern Mediterranean space do EU-funded migration instruments reflect? And how do they contribute to redesigning this space? The perspective offered by the instrumentation literature opens up interesting avenues to address these questions. Policy instruments are not only signifiers of policy choices but also a “condensed form of knowledge about social control and ways of exercising it” (Lascoumes and Le Gales 2007, 4). They also produce specific effects as they structure the process and the results of the policy.

The instrument analyzed in this chapter is the EU Trust Fund (EUTF) for Africa, which was established in 2015. This trust fund was launched as an emergency instrument to coordinate and reorganize EU funds to pursue the priorities agreed upon during the La Valletta summit. Without mobilizing new sources of financing on the EU level, this instrument pooled existing amounts from the European Development Fund, the European Neighborhood Instrument (ENI), the Development Cooperation Instrument (DCI), and several others. Its geographic scope, which covers three “windows” (i.e.. Sahel and Lake Chad, the Horn of Africa, Page 119 →and North Africa) that have, thus far, been targeted by other EU funding tools, makes it a particularly suitable case to discuss its impact as a spatial practice. By definition, a spatial practice refers to any practice that challenges and alters existing configurations of space; a key assumption here is that space is a product shaped by conflicting forces that act upon it (Lefebvre 1991). To understand how and to what extent the EUTF is redesigning the Southern Mediterranean space, this chapter analyzes the spatial distribution of the funded programs and the interplay between territories and actors from the northern and southern rim of the Mediterranean that these programs generate, as well as their interaction with preexisting instruments, such as the European Neighborhood Policy and the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund.

The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows. First, I illustrate how scholars have discussed the spatial impact of the EU’s migration policies, particularly in countries of origin and transit. This is followed by a discussion of how a policy instrument approach contributes to advancing the debate. Third, the analytical part that maps and analyzes the distribution of all 36 projects—its actors, activities, and financial contributions funded through the EU Trust Fund “window C” targeting North African countries from its lunch until May 2020—relies on material that has never been published before. Finally, document analysis is triangulated with the elaboration of the EUTF data set of the European Commission and with the data obtained from about 20 ad hoc interviews conducted in Brussels and Vienna in 2019 with EU institutions and some member states that financially contribute to the fund, as well as the EUTF’s main implementing partners.

Space, Migration, and the Southern Mediterranean

Migration through the Mediterranean and the politics of making space has been studied as a corollary of broader research on the construction of “extra-European regions.” The Mediterranean region has a long history of colonial engagement from states that are now members of the EU (Giaccaria and Minca 2011). The density of networks around the Mediterranean Sea during precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial times has encouraged a common understanding of this area as a pregiven, “natural” territorial unit where the EU has a self-evident geostrategic interest (Collyer 2016). Accordingly, previous research has investigated the sources and nature of power in its creating and ordering old and new maps of the Mediterranean (Neep 2015; Pursley 2015; Kamel 2016), Page 120 →as well as the impact of these representations on both regional and local levels (İşleyen 2018; Di Peri and Giordana 2013). For instance, discursive analysis of these policy frameworks has revealed how the term “Mediterranean” was “toned down” and “increasingly replaced” with the term “Southern Neighborhood” and, later on in the Global Strategy, with the term “surrounding regions to the east and south” (Cebeci and Schumacher 2017, 5). The interests in creating a geopolitical space can be diverse, including the importance of certain regions for foreign policy (Svarin 2016), how certain regions are viewed as origins of threats or as a threat themselves or as entities representing certain values and political systems that have to be protected, as is the case with the EU (Lannon 2014). Importantly, in the process of imagining a geopolitical space, certain other geographic spaces can be either included in or excluded from it based on strategic and security criteria, such as the values they are seen to embody rather than their geographical location per se (Nitoiu and Sus 2019). This leads not only to the emergence of new maps and different spatial representations but also to the creation of new geopolitical rivalries and relations. For instance, the broader Mediterranean space1—as shaped through EU policies—has included countries like Turkey and the Balkan region or even stretched to the Middle East and the Caucasus.

Although not explicitly mentioned in EU strategic documents, at least until the implementation of the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), migration has always been a key variable affecting the conceptualization of space and has influenced the development of EU policies toward the Mediterranean region since the launch of the Global Mediterranean Policy in 1972 (Adler et al. 2006). The challenge of governing borders and the human flows associated with migration has contributed to the shift from the EU’s normative region-building approach of the Euro-Mediterranean policy to the “normative bilateralism” (Pace 2007) of the ENP and then to a pragmatic and more flexible approach of the revised ENP of 2015 that sought to manage “uncontrolled migration.” In recent years, in the context of growing concerns about migration to Europe from these regions, the EU has been thinking about “a new ‘arc of crisis and strategic challenges’ from the Sahel to Central Asia,” a “second ring” around the immediate neighbors of the EU, which represent its original “ring of friends” included in the ENP (Lannon 2014, 1). The extension of the EU’s geopolitical sphere of intervention was part of a mission to “counter the scourge of rising organized crime and militant fundamentalism” (O’Sullivan 2014, 23) in Libya, Mali, and the Sahel. Page 121 →Moreover, as part of the EU’s strategy to curtail and discourage migration, cross-regional cooperation between transit and third countries has been encouraged more and more, which, in turn, has produced new political challenges (Wolff 2015). In recent years, a vibrant critical literature has emerged on the processes of Europeanization, regionalization, and “Mediterraneanism” (Bialasiewicz et al. 2009; Haahr and Walters 2004), often with a specific concern about migration as a geostrategic justification for EU interest in areas beyond “Europe” (Carrera et al. 2012; Casas-Cortes et al. 2015). In these studies, which seek to describe the making of new spaces, many scholars have used the concepts of externalization and extraterritorialization when referring to how the borders are managed and migrants are processed (Casas-Cortes et al. 2016; Cuttita 2014; Bialasiewicz 2012). The EU’s and individual member states’ increasing cooperation with third countries on migration governance through bilateral agreements has backed research on borders and the spatial impact of migration control (Brachet 2016; Wolff 2015; Graee Gammeltoft-Hansen 2006). The spatial consequences of these EU policies include the construction of extraterritorial processing zones, “buffer zones” or “in-between border spaces” (Meier 2020), as well as detention camps in transit and origin countries (Gabrielli 2011; İçduygu 2015; Del Sarto 2016). All of these sites effectively “push the border south,” leading to new migration routes and, thus, additional European intervention in countries like Mauritania or Senegal. Furthermore, in the context of African migration to Europe and on a more local level, several scholars have looked at how trans-Saharan transit migrants create new urban and economic spaces or revitalize ancient routes and oases, which change in response to the EU’s changing policies and changing migratory routes, leading to new hostilities (Bredeloup and Pliez 2011; Côté-Boucher et al. 2014) and pointing to migrants’ space-making abilities. Other scholars have focused on the spatial impact of migration policies (mostly on border regions), showing how different uses of geographical scale can obscure or articulate the violence occurring in these borderlands (Mountz 2015), as well as how countermapping projects can show that spaces are “not stable, but open and unstabilized” (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015, 66).

However, despite a burgeoning debate, most previous studies on migration and the Mediterranean space have paid little attention to not only the variety of instruments aimed at implementing the EU’s migration policy but also their spatial impact (for a few relevant exceptions, see Wolff 2015; Collyer 2016; Nitoiu and Sus, 2019, and Trauner Page 122 →and Deimel 2013). In other words, most previous studies have tended to choose a macro level of analysis to consider how policies and bilateral agreements—rather than projects and programs on the ground—have defined some spaces as sources of threats, challenges, and opportunities. For instance, the analysis of changing legal frameworks in EU-third country relations (e.g., mobility partnerships, migration compacts, and readmission agreements) has revealed how different tools drive forward different representations of migration (El Qadim 2018) and different kinds of spatial imagery related to migration (Scott et al. 2019). While improving the conceptualization of the Mediterranean space and acknowledging the relevance of policy instruments in this process, these contributions do not trace the implemented activities and the networks established through them. As pointed out by Smith and Katz (1993, 75), metaphors become problematic “insofar as they presume that space is not,” and they might hide the complex nature of the Southern Mediterranean as the target of EU policies. By contrast, prior studies attempting to capture the processes of making space by locating and placing the EU’s activities have mainly focused on border regions (Collyer and King 2015; Triandafyllidou and Maroukis 2012) and do not always capture the spatial impact on the national and regional level.

Filling this research gap involves focusing on those EU migration policy instruments that have been underexplored (e.g., the operational cooperation between the EU and third countries) and mapping the dynamics generated by those tools.

Policy Instruments as Spatial Practices

Governments have several tools at their disposal to achieve their goals. Policy instruments—collectively referred to as governing instruments or tools of government (Howlett 1991)—can include taxes, legal agreements, benefits, or political dialogue. Referring to EU migration policy, Trauner and Wolff (2014) adapt the categories used in the public policy literature to suggest a typology of EU migration policy instruments that distinguishes between incentive-based instruments, operational and practical support, and international law and norms development. Previous research on policy instruments has expanded the knowledge of public policies (Trauner and Wolff 2014; Menon and Sedelmeier 2010; Palier 2007), improved our understanding of the link between policy formulation and policy implementation, and helped to assess the policy impact. Specifically, the political sociology approach to policy instrumentsPage 123 → has demonstrated the extent to which each of these instruments is “a device that is both technical and social, that organizes specific social relations between the state and those it is addressed to, according to the representations and meanings it carries” (Lascoumes and Le Gales 2007, 4). Instruments are institutions that can “eventually privilege certain actors and interests and exclude others, constrain the actors while offering them possibilities, drive forward a certain representation of problems” (Lascoumes and Le Gales 2007, 9). In part, instruments determine which resources can be used and by whom. Like institutions, instruments stabilize forms of collective action, thereby making the actors’ behavior more predictable and probably more visible. Using the concept of a public policy instrument allows us to move beyond functionalist approaches and to explore public policy from the angle of instruments that structure policies. It involves deconstruction through instruments: trying to see how the instrumentation approach allows us to address the dimensions of public policy that would otherwise not be very visible. Moreover, public policy instruments are not equally available tools with perfect axiological neutrality. Rather, they are bearers of values and fueled by one interpretation of the social and precise notions of the planned mode of regulation.

As this chapter aims to provide a deeper understanding of the overlapping Mediterranean spaces drawn by the EU’s multilayered migration governance system, the instrumentation approach seems to be particularly appropriate and promising. Viewed from this perspective, EU migration policy instruments, insomuch as they can “alter the existing configurations of space, based on the assumption that space is a product shaped by conflicting forces that act upon it” (Lefebvre 1991, 11), can be considered spatial practices. A scrupulous tracing of the origins and development of specific policy instruments focused on the location of the programs, on actors involved in each of these programs, as well as on norms and criteria underlying actors’ choices and interventions, would allow us to map the transformation trajectories of the Southern Mediterranean space.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: North African Countries between the Mediterranean Fortress and the Expanding Sahel

The EUTF was originally designed to strengthen the governance of migration in EU-Africa relations at a time of perceived crises. Established following a considerable increase in migration flows after the 2011 Arab upheavals, the Strategic Orientation Document of the EUTF identifies the following four strategic lines of action to achieve the EUTF’s overall goal: (1) developing greater economic and employment opportunities; (2) strengthening the resilience of communities and, in particular, the most vulnerable, as well as refugees and displaced people; (3) improving migration management in countries of origin, transit, and destination; and (4) improving the governance, conflict prevention, and reduction of forced displacement and irregular migration. The instrument finances activities in three macroregions on the African continent: the Sahel and Lake Chad region, the Horn of Africa, and the North of Africa.

According to the EUTF’s official documents and websites, the North of Africa is “characterized as an area of origin, transit and final destination for mixed migration flows from sub-Saharan Africa, West Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Middle East, with some countries of these regions affected by on-going instability and conflict.”5 Since the launch of the EUTF, the governing board has approved a total of 223 projects amounting to €4.4 billion. These projects are distributed as follows: 101 worth €2.0 billion in the Sahel and Lake Chad; 87 worth €1.6 billion in the Horn of Africa; and 31 worth €807.0 million in the North of Africa. Four of these projects cross over regional boundaries and are referred to as “cross-window projects” whose transregional nature has recently been added to the geographic scope of the fund.

The first spatial impact demonstrated by the EUTF design and the projects’ distribution across the three windows, including the thematic dimension and involved actors, is the gradual redefinition of both the Southern Neighborhood as a geopolitically recognized region and its power positioning vis-à-vis the EU and the other African regions. Unlike Page 128 →previous EU migration strategies that assigned “priority to the immediate southern and eastern Neighborhood,”6 the EUTF considers North African countries primarily as part of a “geographic window” on the broader African continent. Neither the EUTF strategic documents, such as the Strategic Orientation Document or the annexes to the La Valletta action plan, nor the project documents (the fiches d’action) use the term “Southern Neighborhood” or mention its central position on the list of priorities for the EU and its member states. Interestingly, the EUTF’s Sixth Board Meeting held in June 2019 pointed to the North of Africa window as the only one that, in 2020, will experience a lack of resources, Page 129 →due to the limited cofunding by the EU member states (European Commission 2019). These dynamics of a Southern Neighborhood fading into the broader African space also becomes explicit when we consider the number of projects approved in window A (the Sahel and Lake Chad; 36 percent, excluding projects under the cross-regional window) and its aggregated budget, which amounts to €1.648 billion. While the strategic relevance of Sahel countries is not new and became more official with the launch of the EU Strategy for Security and Development in the Sahel (Mattelaer 2014), the salience of migration management on the EU agenda is redirecting the EU’s attention even further toward the region, whose borders are “expanding [n]orth.” Within the EUTF, the balance among thematic dimensions (see   ) shows not only that this area is targeted by more projects, which is the result of the number of countries included in window A, but also that the EU is applying the most comprehensive approach to migration there.

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During my interview with two officials working on the EUTF for the European Commission, they argued: “Challenges and opportunities in the Sahel are clear, and our networks with actors on the ground are settled; this makes it easier to plan and implement projects.”7 Unlike the Sahel and Lake Chad, the North of Africa geographic window is covered only by the thematic dimension of “migration management.” According to the Strategic Orientation Document, this objective involves activities aimed at promoting rights-based migration governance, advancing mutually beneficial legal migration and mobility, ensuring protection for those in need, and addressing the key drivers of irregular migration while also promoting voluntary return and reintegration and improving information and the protection of vulnerable migrants along migratory routes (European Commission 2015). Yet, the analysis of the projects reveals that controlling migratory routes to contain migration and facilitating return are prioritized to the detriment of supporting legal mobility and addressing the root causes of migration. From this perspective, the EUTF appears to consolidate the representation of this geopolitical space as mainly that of transit and departure rather than destination and origin. According to several of the practitioners I contacted, this narrow conceptualization of the North African space constrains both economic development and South-South cooperation dynamics. According to one UNHCR representative whom I interviewed, this view not only limits “the impact of the EU migration policy within the countries by addressing only part of the problem”8 but also delays “much-needed cooperation” on the continental level. The EUTF’s cross-window projects were introducedPage 131 → in 2017 to address cross-border challenges. However, their potential to foster South-South cross-border activities and, to some extent, push the North African borders toward the “Southernmost Neighborhood” (Mattelaer 2014, 46) remains very limited. Among the four cross-window projects that have received funding to date, two support research and learning activities and do not involve beneficiaries from Southern Mediterranean countries, one aims to improve the management and evaluation of the EUTF itself, and the fourth mainly engages the target countries to cooperate on the protection and return of migrants along the Mediterranean route. From this perspective, despite the ongoing reconfiguration of regional spaces and blurred regional boundaries, the EUTF still upholds existing “cartographic traps” (Garelli and Tazzioli 2016) by fixing the North of Africa as a space of transit in Europe’s collective imaginary.

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The second spatial impact of the EUTF on the Southern Mediterranean space concerns intraregional dynamics. The amounts allocated to each North African country, as well as the location and the nature of the funded activities and the countries’ relevance in the EUTF strategic documents, show the extent to which Libya has attracted Europe’s attention and has been altering the spatial representation of the Southern Mediterranean. As can be seen in Figure 5, Libya receives the greatest share of EUTF funds (48 percent), followed by Morocco (12 percent), which also receives additional regional border management programs that boost the country’s allocation. Egypt and Tunisia follow in terms of EUTF funds (10 percent and 2 percent, respectively). Interestingly, while the projects funded in Libya are time-specific and context-specific (i.e., they deal with the increased number of refugees and displaced people in some areas of the country as a result of the wars in Syria and Libya), most of the programs targeting the rest of the countries in North Africa draw on preexisting activities funded through the ENP and other EU sources and involve the development and implementation of long-term national migration strategies. Among other programs, this is the case of the program funded in Tunisia, which is divided into four components and aims at implementing the National Migration Strategy developed within the framework of the EU-Tunisia Mobility Partnership of 2014.

These findings are in stark contrast with the representation of the North of Africa as a “space of crisis” depicted by the EUTF strategic documents. In particular, the decision establishing the fund states that all countries covered by it “are considered to be in a crisis situation” (European Commission 2015, 2), emerging from “armed conflicts, as Page 132 →well as social and political upheavals in the Neighborhood region (and beyond), causing ever-increasing forced displacement of people and humanitarian consequences of enormous proportions” (European Commission 2015, 2). The Libyan situation has been used to drive the process of “crisisification” (Rhinard 2019) of the EU–Southern Mediterranean space. Obviously, this process is not without consequences: While new spatial representations are created, other spaces are included or excluded, leading to new relations and rivalries among actors and territories (Kamel 2016). Several interviews that I conducted with experts and project managers involved in EUTF projects9 and recent reports by NGOs highlight the dynamics of spatial inclusion and exclusion among countries and territories within the national borders (Concord 2018; Oxfam 2020). This is the case, for instance, of small Libyan municipalities that are either minor “areas of origin” or peripheral “cities of transit” and have been targeted by EUTF projects to a very limited extent. The position of potential beneficiaries along the migration route and the proximity with border crossing areas are key criteria guiding the location of EUTF activities. Accordingly, this convergence of interventions creates new centers and peripheries that, as argued by an interviewee working for an implementing organization, “sometimes contradict the goal of addressing the root causes of migration.”10

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Page 133 →Finally, a closer look at the actors in charge of the projects’ implementation suggests that the EUTF consolidates bilateral geopolitical spaces by strengthening relations between several EU member states and some Southern Mediterranean countries. This polarization of bilateral relations, which follows the bilateralization trend launched with the ENP, is the result of the EUTF’s governance structure, which gives significant leeway to the projects’ proponents and allows them to focus on those countries and territories that are more in line with their specific agenda (Carrera et al. 2018). As specified in the EUTF’s first progress report for the North of Africa window, the most common lead implementing partners after UN agencies, which collectively manage 28 percent of all projects, are EU member states’ aid agencies and government ministries (Berman et al. 2019). Together, they are responsible for 36 percent of all projects. In line with the European countries’ historical legacies and preferences, the geographic distribution of the actors reveals the leading role of Italy in Libya and of Spain in Morocco (and West Africa). Instead, UN agencies and international organizations lead the majority of regional projects in the Maghreb. While these dynamics are not new, their consolidation in a highly politicized policy area such as migration is more likely to create overlapping spatial representations. Indeed, as suggested by the instrumentation literature, the choice of policy tools is not neutral. Rather, this choice reflects the actors’ interpretation of problems, solutions, and their underlying values (Lascoumes and Le Gales 2007), all of which contribute to the heterogeneous patchwork of understandings of the Southern Mediterranean that the EU has been channeling through its multilevel and multitrack governance strategies.

Conclusion

As Collyer (2016) argues in his analysis of the EU region-building process in the Mediterranean, the European engagement with Southern Mediterranean countries is deliberately heterogeneous and results in an approximate set of outcomes that are much more difficult to control. The overlapping and, at times, contradicting representations of the Southern Mediterranean space emerging from the analysis of EUTF programs in the North of Africa confirm this finding. In this chapter, I explored the impact of the EU Emergency Trust Fund, which is one of the EU’s primary financial responses to the migration crisis in the Southern Mediterranean space. As a half-intergovernmental instrument (cofunded by the EU through existing sources and by some member Page 134 →states and bypassing the standard governance procedures of EU funding tools), the EUTF for Africa reveals how both the EU and its member states are redesigning the Southern Mediterranean space through migration governance projects.

The results of this study show that, first, the EUTF contributes to the gradual redefinition of the Southern Neighborhood as a geopolitically recognized region and its power positioning vis-à-vis the EU and the other African regions. However, regional borders remain far from settled. While pushing the North African borders toward the “Southernmost Neighborhoods,” the EUTF is strengthening the image of the region mainly as a space of transit, thereby preventing the development of cross-regional development strategies with other African countries. Second, while the design of the EUTF embraces different dimensions of international migration and seeks to deal with all of them, the focus on migration routes and border crossings to control human flows alters the relations among territories and countries, thus creating new inclusionary or exclusionary dynamics. To legitimize the new instrument, the EUTF’s strategic documents depict the entire Southern Mediterranean as a space of crisis. However, the analysis of the EUTF’s implementation demonstrates that Libya dominates the space-making process and, thus, skews the balance of power in the region. Third, by leaving sufficient room for the EU member states to pursue their interests through the fund, the EUTF fragments the map of the Southern Mediterranean even further.

These results support the argument that migration policy instruments are powerful spatial practices that shape the Southern Mediterranean space by either coordinating or scattering the various ways in which the EU and member states understand migration in relation to specific regions, countries, and territories. Their in-depth analysis can help to deconstruct the policy through its tools and “address dimensions of public policy that would otherwise not be very visible” (Lascoumes and Le Gales 2007, 9).