For decades, the European border has been militarized in the face of human suffering, but paradoxically fades away in the face of the flow of wealth.
This drift towards authoritarianism can never be separated from the historical dynamics of economic globalization. European borders are becoming hermetic filters for human beings, yet remain porous for the flow of capital and raw materials. This structural contradiction is symptomatic of a persistent neocolonial paradigm. Europe is externalizing its borders, outsourcing state violence to third countries, and erecting insurmountable legal barriers. In doing so, it is locking itself into an aberrant defensive posture. This normative fortress, far from stabilizing the continent, is accelerating its moral and diplomatic decline. A rigorous examination of the mechanisms of this great lockdown, initiated at the Tampere European Council in October 1999, reveals the depth of a legislative cynicism that de facto threatens the very foundations of human rights.
Institutionalization of sorting and denial of asylum
Recent European migration reforms rest on a central pillar: mandatory border screening. This mechanism systematizes automatic detention upon entry into the EU. Asylum seekers are no longer considered subjects of law seeking protection but rather security risks requiring urgent assessment. The principle of non-refoulement, the cornerstone of the Geneva Convention of July 28, 1951, is rendered meaningless. Accelerated border procedures create a legal fiction where the foreigner is physically present on European soil but legally considered not to have entered. This extra-legal technique circumvents traditional procedural safeguards, depriving exiles of effective access to independent legal assistance.
This architecture also incorporates the highly questionable concept of a “safe third country.” By externalizing asylum responsibility to peripheral states, often characterized by alleged “major democratic failures,” the EU abdicates its ethical obligations. This transfer of skills is accompanied by cynical financial and diplomatic blackmail, illustrated by the EU-Turkey agreement of March 18, 2016, or the Tunisia-EU memorandum of understanding of July 16, 2023. Public development aid becomes a variable to be adjusted, contingent on the ability of Southern states to contain migration flows within their own borders. Europe no longer seeks to manage migration humanely; it seeks to render it invisible. This policy of concealment transforms the European periphery into a militarized buffer zone, where human violence is normalized in the name of border security.
Western privilege and the seclusion of the South
One of the most egregious aspects of this policy lies in the double standard of international mobility. While the European passport grants access to almost the entire globe, the African passport is systematically devalued. European citizens travel freely across the African continent, settling there as expatriates, investors, or tourists, without ever facing the suspicion associated with migrant status. This asymmetry is a direct legacy of imperial structures. Historically, at the Berlin Conference, which concluded on February 26, 1885, Europeans became the first mass migrants to the African continent, imposing their presence through colonization. Today, this domination continues in a subtle but equally relentless form: freedom of movement for the dominant, confinement to their homes for the dominated.
This confinement imposed on the Global South responds to specific economic imperatives. Western economies, driven by neoliberal doctrines theorized by the Washington Consensus, formalized de facto in November 1989, and promoted by US-based financial institutions, demand unlimited access to African natural resources. Oil, uranium, cobalt, and rare earth elements, essential for Europe’s digital transition, flow in torrents to the North, thus plundering the continent without interruption. In return, local populations suffer the environmental, political, and social consequences of this predatory extraction. European migration policy completes this system of exploitation: it keeps populations in areas of absolute precarity, while ensuring that the misery generated by the plundering of resources never crosses the Mediterranean.
Let them die in order to better plunder them
We must call things by their proper names. The European Union’s migration policy is a policy of brutality. It rests on an underlying racist logic that prioritizes the value of human lives. Letting thousands of human beings die in the Sahara Desert or the Mediterranean Sea is not a logistical failure; it is a deliberate political choice. Deterrence through death has become a tool for managing migration flows. Fortress Europe prefers to transform the Mediterranean into a vast ossuary rather than question its imperialist economic structures. This state violence, masked by technocratic rhetoric, amounts to an attempt to maintain the African continent in a state of permanent structural dependence and inferiority.
This ongoing economic exploitation generates migration, which Europe then punishes through detention and deportation. Asymmetrical Economic Partnership Agreements destroy local agricultural and industrial structures in Africa, forcing young people into exile. Once these young people reach Europe’s borders, they are treated as an existential threat. This vicious cycle reveals the perversity of the global system: to drain the resources of the Global South, impoverish its populations, and criminalize those who attempt to escape this programmed misery. The United States, an active accomplice in this global economic order through the imposition of its deregulatory dogmas, observes and supports this dynamic, which preserves Western hegemony at the expense of the most basic human dignity.
Europe’s historic backlash
This defensive and aggressive stance condemns Europe to an inevitable historical decline. By locking itself into a legal and military fortress, the European continent is isolating itself on the international stage. The emerging multipolar world will no longer tolerate this sovereign contempt. The resentment of the peoples of the Global South toward the hypocrisy of human rights applied selectively is a powerful geopolitical force. Strategic alliances are being reshaped, and Africa is now turning to partners who, while pragmatic, do not impose this level of migratory violence and political condescension. Europe is losing its moral credibility and diplomatic influence, weakening itself through its obsession with security.
From a demographic and economic standpoint, the strategy of the great lockdown is proving suicidal. Faced with an unprecedented aging population, the refusal of legal, orderly, and dignified immigration will paralyze European productive structures. Denying the reality of migration destroys innovation, drains social welfare systems, and condemns the continent to decline. While Europe barricades itself and suffers intellectual impoverishment, the United States profits from this crisis by attracting global elites through aggressively competitive, selective immigration mechanisms. The European Union, mired in its xenophobic obsessions, is becoming the useful idiot of global geopolitics, collapsing from within under the weight of its own regulatory paranoia.
In conclusion, the new EU migration laws are not a reflection of a strong Europe, but rather the swan song of a continent on its last legs, incapable of coming to terms with its colonial past and envisioning its future in a shared world. By choosing brutality over justice, plunder over co-development, and isolation over freedom, Europe is sealing its own fate. History will remember that the fortress has become a prison for its own inhabitants, suffocated by their ill-gotten wealth and their fear of the other. The closing of borders has only hastened the fall of a civilization that preferred to sacrifice its fundamental values on the altar of illusory security.
Clearly, the Syrians seem to have learned the lesson of the famous EU pact on migration and asylum, as car bombs explode in Macron’s footsteps in Damascus.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
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