Syrian Mass Migration in the 2015 EU Refugee Crisis: A Hybrid Threat or Chance for Implementing Migration Diplomacy?

• Author: Irdem, Ibrahim
• Position: ARTICLE

Introduction

The European Union (EU) is no stranger to migration inflows. The 2015 migration crisis is probably the most serious challenge facing Europe, which, after World War 11 became a dream destination for millions from the developing world. Nowadays, it still remains "the continent of international migration, with a tenth of the world's people and a third of the world's international migrants." (1)

In recent decades, migrations from Africa and Asia made the regulation of inflows much more difficult for the EU. In searching for a solution, the EU chose to rely on external players--in exchange for some concessions and support-including governments that did not share its values; such as the government of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. This in turn gave these players the opportunity to use migration as a weapon against the EU. Kelley Greenfield calls it coercive engineered migration, (2) defining it as "cross-border population movements that are deliberately created or manipulated in order to induce (involuntary) political, military, and/or economic concessions from a target state or states." (3)

The events in the Middle East in 2010 gave new impetus to migration, exacerbating processes that have been initiated years before. Corruption, high unemployment rates, bad governance, constant violation of human rights, and political repression against the opposition, practiced by secular authoritarian regimes, increased social tensions in Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Yemen, Egypt, and elsewhere. Brought under the common denominator of the Arab Spring, they followed different directions and had different consequences. In Syria, the Arab Spring was much more than a battle between supporters and enemies of Bashar al-Assad. The Sunni Muslim majority, the president's Shia Alawite sect, Syrian Kurds, and terrorist organizations such as ISIS, were among the main stakeholders in the national political arena, each with its own agenda and ideas about the future of the country. With Iran and Russia supporting the government, and Turkey, the Western powers and some Gulf states underpinning the opposition, the political landscape became even more complex-international players pursued their own divergent interests that on several occasions had little to do with the aspirations of the local population for peace and the cessation of hostilities. The U.S. actively intervened from September 2014 to September 2015 by supporting the opposition and targeting ISIS militants; (4) it armed, trained, and provided military air cover to the anti-government, anti-terrorist opposition. With 2,000 military personnel, (5) Russia became involved in September 2015 at the request of the Syrian government, within the framework of long-term cooperation and solidarity with Syria. Despite the fact that the main actors responsible for the conflict are the Syrian government and ISIS, several researchers argue that what was witnessed there was "a proxy war among such contestants as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Turkey, the U.S., Russia, and others." (6)

The first signs of the Syrian migration crisis appeared in 2013 and 2014. (7) The crisis peaked in 2015 when 1,255,640 first-time asylum applicants crossed EU borders, (8) illustrating again "the potential power of unregulated migration to make people and governments feel insecure and under threat." (9) As the EU established firm security measures to thwart migration, this number dropped dramatically afterward. According to data collected by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the total number of immigrants and asylum-seekers seeking entry to the EU in 2019 was 123,920. (10) Migrants arrived not only from the battlefields of Syria but also from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Nigeria, and elsewhere. (11)

Methodological and Conceptual Framework

This paper addresses the following research questions: could coercive engineered migration be used as a hybrid threat? Could a state that is not a source of migration use it as such a threat? If so, which kind of state can do this, and under what conditions is this possible?

We argue that coercive engineered migration can be used as a hybrid threat by a state, even when it is not the source of outflows; that it is possible under conditions of an internal or external conflict in the sending state; that a state-challenger would most probably be an authoritarian state supporting the government of the emigration state. The authors argue that the sound action for Turkey and the EU in the conditions of a crisis like that of 2015, would be to develop a migration diplomacy initiative that could contribute not only to a deal but to a sustainable, mutually beneficial solution for both parties.

Before going further, and with the purpose to shed more light on the views expressed, the main terms implemented--hybridity, hybrid threat, and hybrid war- will be introduced. They are part of the new discourse of war composed of categories as fourth generation warfare, (12) network war, (13) compound war, (14) new war, (15) etc.

In conceptualizing the terms, we apply Ludwig Wittgensteins approach of family resemblance, as opposed to the necessary and sufficient condition approach, where a given feature cannot be substituted by another. Wittgenstein illustrates his view with the games, asking the question what is the common between board-games, card-games, ball games, Olympic Games, and so on, and answering that similarity exists in relationships, procedures, etc.; this kind of similarity he calls 'family resemblances.' (16) Applied to the current research, this would mean that there is no necessary and sufficient condition for some phenomenon to be conceptualized as 'hybrid.' It is enough to identify at least two components enlaced by family resemblance as for example military operations and information operations; cyberattacks understood as a malicious and deliberate attempt by an individual or organization to breach the information system of another individual or organization in order to benefit from disrupting the victim's network and coercive migration; (17) economic pressure, and trolling. Combinations can vary. In the military field, hybridity is not a simple sum of several unconventional factors, but much more than that since they support and enhance each other.

If there is a relative consensus in the international academic debate about the nature of hybridity, there is no consent on the character of its components. Militaries grasp the participation of regular armed forces as a needed condition for hybridity, while civil institutions and researchers do not. This disparity is due to the fact that "hybridity" has evolved in two different contexts--military science and political science. (18) EU documents, for example, view hybrid threats--one of the terms of the cluster that appeared around 'hybridity'- "as a mixture of coercive and subversive activities, conventional and unconventional methods (i.e. diplomatic, military, economic, technological), that can be used in a coordinated manner by state or non-state actors to achieve specific objectives while remaining below the threshold of formally declared warfare." (19)

On a more practical level, hybrid threats can range from cyberattacks on critical information systems and the disruption of critical services such as energy supplies or financial services, to the undermining of public trust in government institutions or the deepening of social divisions. According to Pawlak, hybrid threats arising from the articulation of different elements include various actions, conditions and events perceived by states or non-state actors as dangerous in terms of their needs, values and projects. (20)

Some emphasize its multifaceted nature, which transforms quickly to adapt to the changing environment. (21) Others call attention to the fact that hybrid threat is always "custom-tailored" and serves the needs of a certain actor in a certain situation, giving Russia an example. (22) Hybrid threats aim to weaken a defender's power, position, influence, or will, rather than to strengthen those attributes for the attacker. (23) They are not designed to cause direct harm to people, but rather to destabilize the target. (24) Through a wide range of means, hybrid threats can target the systemic vulnerabilities of democratic states and institutions, the will of the people, and the decision-making ability at a state or international level. (25) From this point of view, hybrid threats have to do with Sun Tzu's view that "to subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill." (26) Sadowski and Becker point out the agents of hybrid threats defining them as "entities or movements that continually scan the environment for opportunities and threaten to or apply violence to affect the will and psyche of others to achieve their political objectives." (27)

For the purposes of this study, we conceptualize hybrid threats as situations or activities that could lead to coercion, where a military component is not necessarily presented and where a flexible exercise of different capabilities, forms, and strategies of a vague and blurred nature might contribute to the success of the challenger. As hybrid threats remain in a gray zone between war and peace, the identification of the challenger is extremely difficult. Thus we do not speak about Violence,' understood as the use of physical force to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy. (28) Neither do we mean behaviors involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or destroy something. (29) We relate hybrid threat with 'coercion,' defined as the "ability to get an actor--a state, the leader of a state, a terrorist group, a transnational or international organization, a private actor- to do something it/he/she does not want to do." (30)

Without entering into details about the hybrid war, another term that appeared as a part of the cluster around hybridity, and will be in use here, it is...