Coastguard teams of the Tunisian National Guard conduct an operation against migrants who want to reach Europe illegally via the Mediterranean Sea, off the city of Sfax in Tunisia on August 12, 2023. Yassine Gaidi/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
EU officials signaled another 900 million euros would be provided if Tunisia took a loan from the International Monetary Fund.
CNN’s coverage of the deal clumsily wove together a mythology of a democratic Europe unwillingly or unwittingly empowering “Tunisian dictatorship” by not sufficiently upholding its own democratic values—calling the deal “a major boost for Tunisia’s President Kais Saied.”[1] The report went on to describe President Saied as “an increasingly authoritarian leader who has spent the past few years dismantling the country’s democracy” and implied that feckless European prime ministers and EU leaders had been hoodwinked into an unequal agreement in favor of Tunisian interests at the expense of European ones. That the EU signed it anyway was “a testament to how desperate some European leaders have become to curb migration.”[2]
In CNN’s framing, the 27-country EU bloc—which represents the world’s second largest economy and boasts an average per capita GDP over $40,000—is “desperate.” Tunisia, on the other hand—with a per capita GDP of less than $4,000, deeply indebted and suffering frequent food shortages due largely to austerity conditions imposed by European and US-dominated creditor institutions—holds enough power to coerce Europeans into forsaking their values. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy struck a similar note, claiming that that President Saied’s “mistreatment of sub-Saharan” Africans is something that Europeans had to “overlook” before signing the deal, rather than a prerequisite political orientation to qualify for the deal and carry out Europe’s anti-migrant policies. [3]
In these readings, it is not the content of the deal, or the role of European governments in apparently systematically killing desperate migrants at sea, that undermines Europe’s supposed democratic values. Rather, the problem is President Saied’s “anti-democratic” and “authoritarian” policies. But authoritarian is an adjective more appropriately applied to the European governments that have assumed authority over the very right to African migrants’ lives and their freedom of movement.
The deal with Tunisia externalizes that violent use of authority, moving it further south onto North African shores of departure.
The ‘Garden’ and the ‘Jungle’
Nine months before the EU signed the migrant deal with Tunisia, in October of 2022, its foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, gave a speech that seemed to unintentionally explain the logic behind externalizing Europe’s border security.
“Europe is a garden,” Borrell said. “It’s the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity, and social cohesion that humankind has been able to build…Most of the rest of the world is a jungle and the jungle could invade the garden.”[4] He went on to say that no wall could be high enough to protect the garden from the jungle’s rapid growth. In order to protect it, the gardeners (Europeans) would “have to go to the jungle.”
In an indication that Borrell had momentarily been overtaken by uncommon candidness, he immediately asked the audience whether his comments would be posted on the internet. Responding to nods, he continued, “So let’s take care because there are things that can be said [behind] closed doors…Let’s stay in the garden but be aware that the jungle is listening to us.”
Following public outcry over these comments, Borell issued a statement to clarify that he had used the word “jungle” to mean places where the “law of the jungle”—which he defined as an “international order…based on the will of the strongest”—prevailed.[5] In contrast, Europe had “succeeded by supplanting power calculations with legal procedures.”[6]
To many in Africa, it might seem the opposite is true. The international order is dominated by Europe and the United States due to their geopolitical strength. The real “law of the jungle” operates on a global scale to the advantage and will of the global North.
The World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank construct and reinforce unequal trade relations through financial, judicial and sometimes extrajudicial mechanisms. European countries impose multilateral and bilateral trade tariffs and quotas that clip southern development. At the same time, states like Britain and France provide tax havens for private African wealth and even passports for compliant and useful African leaders.
To control migration and borders, the United States and Europe incorporate African security forces into their globe-spanning security architecture. What appears external is in fact deeply integrated.
From Neo-liberalization to Irregular Migration
The violence required to produce or reproduce Europe’s borders—or, in the case of Ukraine, to extend them—has always had an element of externalizing internal conflicts, sometimes with an explicit goal of reducing domestic tensions.
The 2023 immigration deal had its roots in the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the hegemony of a unipolar world system seemingly left southern countries with no viable alternative to Western-led globalization. This period saw the launch of the Barcelona Process in 1995, also known as the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP). The EMP only addressed mitigating migration to Europe in a passing manner due to push back from Arab countries. Indeed, it has been interpreted as more significant for its (failed) effort to normalize relations between Israel and Arab countries building off the 1991 Madrid conference and the 1993 Oslo accords.[7] Yet today, despite popular perceptions of declining Western hegemony since the early 2000s, Europeans have seen more success in achieving their objectives of compelling Arab states to mitigate immigration and to normalize relations with Israel than in the 1990s.
Nevertheless, the EMP set the framework for opening North Africa’s markets to Europe in a way that exacerbated inequality between the two shores.
The same year as the Barcelona Declaration, Tunisia signed an association agreement with the EU, which gradually removed all tariffs for trade in industrial products and opened trade in some agricultural products. This agreement led to the decimation of Tunisia’s industrial base. A familiar story: The so-called freeing of trade—on the neoliberal premise of improving “resource allocation” or promoting countries’ “comparative advantage”—resulted in the gradual displacement of Tunisian farmers and manufacturing workers, particularly those in interior regions of the country. The agreement built upon the previous decades’ counterrevolutionary trend, which had reversed the early post-colonial nationalization and industrialization efforts: economic liberalization of national markets (infitah) in the 1970s, the debt crisis of the 1980s and western-imposed structural adjustment programs of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Tunisia, like other Global South countries, was pushed into a race-to-the-bottom competition in the export of raw materials and light manufacturing—what international financial institutions call low-value-added sectors. In the case of Tunisia, components were manufactured for French, German and Italian cars, cables and airplanes. The export-led strategy deflated prices of southern commodities and labor while cutting off possibilities for integration among different productive sectors within southern countries domestically or regionally. Many African states became increasingly dependent on exports to earn foreign currency and pay down spiraling foreign debts. This system reinforced the problem of endemic underemployment, which further pushed down wages for workers selling their labor to the European manufacturers that had offshored component manufacturing.
The World Bank and the IMF—organizations that have long touted the positive effects of neoliberal strategies—worked hand-in-hand with European officials in brokering the association agreement with Tunisia.[8] For example, they assured Tunisia that worker displacement could be counteracted with aid and that these arrangements would improve Tunisia’s trade balance, thereby generating surpluses that could be directed toward productive public spending or job creation in previously undeveloped sectors. But trade flows did not improve; they deteriorated. Tunisian deficits increased after the first round of liberalization in the early 1970s and accelerated drastically in the late 1990s after signing the EU association agreement. Increased imports from Europe without significantly increased exports to Europe combined with a loss of tariff revenues to push the Tunisian state toward more foreign borrowing.
Libya was excluded from the EMP on the insistence of the United States. An ostensibly European-led NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 effectively shattered state institutions and produced conditions of civil war that have continued to this today. This intervention also increased migration flows. It did so directly in the form of turning Africans who previously depended on Libya for remittances into migrants. But it also worked indirectly by empowering competing militia groups with new incentives: profits from facilitating irregular migration and/or imprisoning migrants on Libyan shores. These two businesses are lucrative because Europe criminalizes irregular migration. The level of state destruction in Libya explains why the latest intensification of the project to externalize Europe’s borders found fertile ground for Frontex to build a “shadow immigration system” in 2015 with Libyan militias that run detention centers rife with torture.
In 2013, prominent Tunisian civil society organizations denounced an EU-Tunisian ”Mobility partnership” for its externalization “in disguise” and human rights violations.[10] Despite the opposition, it was signed in 2014. In 2017, Tunisia’s then-prime minister, Youssef Chahed publicly rejected the idea of setting up asylum centers in Tunisia to process migrants bound for Europe. But in 2020, the EU launched the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, which called for “embedding migration in international partnerships” with the goal of “preventing irregular departures.”[11] In 2021 and 2022, it offered funding of up to 100 million euros through the EU’s Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, which essentially paid Tunisia to manage Europe-bound immigration within its own borders.
These initiatives form the framework in which the EU’s July 2023 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Tunisia was birthed. The MoU allocated an additional 100 million euros for “border management” cooperation, in addition to other financial commitments. As a result, in 2024, instead of the formal asylum centers suggested in 2017, there are makeshift, de facto prison camps for migrants in the olive groves outside of Sfax. The camp conditions are desperate, and Tunisian security forces regularly visit upon them the violence of European-made buckshot and tear gas. Some analyses and reporting have characterized the deal as an Italian initiative, but Italy may only be the public face of a broader EU initiative. Notably, conservatives in the United States have cheered Italy’s recent “crucial leadership in the Mediterranean” acting on behalf of EU and US interests.[12]
Exporting Security, Importing Racism
Mitigating migration flows to Europe is a process that requires violence—one that Tunisia carries out at the behest of European leaders using European-made armaments.
European and US actors have a long history of furnishing weapons, equipment and training to Tunisia’s security forces, dating back at least to French support for President Habib Bourguiba (1957–1987)’s violent repression of his more radically anti-colonial opposition. Within Tunisia, there is speculation that coastguard units have adopted some of the lethal techniques used on migrants at sea by European coastguard units.
The framework of the “global war on terror” has also helped facilitate Tunisia’s “incorporation into an expansive imperial security architecture,” as documented by Corinna Mullin and Brahim Rouabah.[13] For example, the last decade has seen an increase in Tunisia’s arms purchases from the United States, the deployment of a US drone base in Tunisia and Tunisia’s further integration within NATO as a ”major non-NATO ally.” The full extent of this incorporation remains unclear as many security arrangements are clandestine. A lack of transparency also characterizes the EU’s latest migration deals across Africa.
Regardless of its extent, this security incorporation helps ensure that the priorities of Tunisia’s security forces align with their direct benefactors in Europe and the United States, hence their focus on migration, narrowly-defined terrorism and protecting capital flows to Europe by repressing labor movements or securitizing oil resources. Indeed, there is a perverse incentive for Tunisia playing the role of Europe’s security guard, keeping migrants out of Europe by detaining them in Tunisia. Tunisia is one of the cheapest prisons Europe can buy: The cost to Frontex of deporting migrants to Tunisia is lower than almost any other country. But the flow of aid earmarked for the so-called migration crisis only continues as long as the crisis does. Tunisian authorities occasionally expel or release migrants temporarily, either to siphon off social tensions or consolidate leverage vis-à-vis Europe.
As the EU moves its border policing operations, limiting the free movement of African peoples further south from the Mediterranean to inland Africa, the violence entailed through spatial imprisonment operations increasingly produces social tensions expressed through racism.
What power do ordinary Tunisians have to reorient their own security forces toward a sovereign security project? Seemingly very little at the moment, and moments of apparent powerlessness often lead to the proliferation of reactionary politics against minorities, in Tunisia’s case toward Black migrants. Even in very recent history, however, the flare up of racist violence in Tunisia against Blacks stands in marked contrast to the antiracist activism by fishermen of Zarzis who have been saving Black migrants at sea, giving them proper burials and fighting European fascist vessels—including the private vigilante vessels like the C-Star that have sunk migrant boats.
Black migrants are not the only population bearing the costs of Europe’s migration policy. Poor Tunisians families have lost their children to the dangerous Mediterranean crossing after European authorities denied them visas multiple times. The families of these lost souls regularly mobilize demonstrations calling for justice. Meanwhile, Europe continues to extract Tunisia’s educated and professional elites due to unequal economic relations and austerity conditions that render a decent living inside Tunisia elusive.
One of the important factors behind the EU’s cohesion is that it allows both the free movement for capital but also, albeit to a lesser degree, the free movement for labor. In contrast, Tunisia remains on Europe’s periphery and thus outside of its “garden,” condemned to the exploitative terms of “association.” It is excluded from the benefits of the EU’s free movement of labor while, since the 1990s, growing increasingly integrated into the EU’s free movement of capital—on unequal terms. This unequal relationship between the “garden” and the “jungle” continues in the interlocking fields of security and migration. Tunisia’s security apparatus serves prison guard duty for Europe while the social costs are externalized onto migrants’ bodies and Tunisian society.
[Fadil Aliriza is a journalist, teacher and the founder and editor-in-chief of Meshkal.org.]
This issue of Middle East Report, Carceral Realities and Freedom Dreams, has been produced in partnership with the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Security in Context.
Endnotes
[1] Ivana Kottasová, “Tunisia’s president is accused of racism and dictatorship. He’s now getting a billion euros from Europe,” CNN, July 19, 2023.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Sabina Henneberg and Ben Fishman, “Did the EU Bail Out Tunisia’s Kais Saied?,” The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, July 26, 2023.
[4] “European Diplomatic Academy: Opening remarks by High Representative Josep Borrell at the inauguration of the pilot programme,” The Diplomatic Service of the European Union, October 13, 2022.
[5] Josep Borrell, “On metaphors and geo-politics,” The Diplomatic Service of the European Union, October 18, 2022.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ricardo Gomez, Negotiating the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership: Strategic Action in EU Foreign Policy? (Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003), pp. 69, 70.
[8] See Fadil Aliriza, “Perpetual Periphery: IFIs and the reproduction of Tunisia’s Economic Dependence” in The Impact and Influence of International Financial Institutions on the Middle East and North Africa (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2020), edited by Tarek Radwan, 32.
[9] “Mixed Migration Flows in the Mediterranean: Compilation of Available Data and Information” International Organization for Migration (IOM), December 2019, 9.
[10] Press Release, “EU-Tunisia Mobility Partnership: Externalisation policy in disguise,” International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), December 3, 2013.
[11] “Pact on Migration and Asylum,” European Commission, May 21, 2024.
[12] Kiron Skinner, Marco Dreosto and Marco Gombacci, “Italy’s Crucial Leadership in the Mediterranean,” The Heritage Foundation, February 27, 2023.
[13] Corinna Mullin and Brahim Rouabah, “Decolonizing Tunisia’s Border Violence: Moving Beyond Imperial Structures and Imaginaries,” February 1, 2018.
