Barely Alive? The Costs and Benefits of the EU-Turkey Statement on Irregular Migration

OpenAlex İngilizce

The EU-Turkey Statement of March 2016 - also known as the EU-Turkey deal or the refugee deal - had strong underlying motivations both for the European Union (EU) and Turkey. For the EU, the EU-Turkey Statement aimed to limit if not, end irregular migration from Turkey and its immediate neighbourhood. For Turkey, the Statement provided financial support and strategic diplomatic engagement, putting Turkey back on the EU’s political map. With Ankara frequently threatening to withdraw from the deal and with the EU institutions responsible for the deal having been criticized for not taking a “humane” stand toward migration management and for increasing the EU’s dependence on the Turkish government, it remains somewhat unclear why the EU-Turkey Statement still perseveres. Taking into consideration both parties’ rationalist calculations, this paper offers an analytical overview of the costs and benefits of the implementation of the deal from 2016 to 2024. The findings show that the advantages of the Statement for the EU (governments) and the Turkish government outweigh its costs. Unable to engage in concerted actions and to strengthen the internal dimension of its migration governance, the Statement helped the EU utilize Turkey both as a buffer zone between countries of origin and its member states and as a geopolitical space where the refugee Other can reside. The Statement also created a blueprint for similar arrangements of the EU with other neighbouring countries. As far as Turkey is concerned, the Statement specifically equipped the Turkish government with unparalleled leverage in its relations with the EU which remains incapable of instrumentalizing its normative conditionality vis-à-vis Turkey. Thus, at the intergovernmental level, the benefits of the Statement outweigh its costs. How much this satisfactory cost-benefit ratio translates into the public domain remains unclear and is subject to further scholarly investigation. Key words: EU-Turkey relations, EU-Turkey Statement, irregular migration, refugee deal, asylum policy, transactionalism