German Chancellor Angela Merkel greets Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurtz upon his arrival at the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany on January 17, 2018. NurPhoto/Press Associations. All rights reserved.From integration policies to electoral politics, migration is often discussed as a domestic policy issue. Yet rarely does its possible connection with foreign policy attract attention (see a few exceptions).
One recent example is Megan Barlow’s latest openDemocracy article where she argues that the Turkish government employs refugees not only as political tools for foreign ambitions, but also for reinforcing a conservative and Islamist ideology. My argument follows the same line of thought by situating Turkey’s instrumentalization of refugees in the context of its co-operation with the EU over migration.
Hosting the highest number of refugees from Syria, around 3.5 million, Turkey’s refugee and foreign policy have been increasingly intertwined in recent years, especially since 2015 which was a year of crisis for both the EU and Turkey. By providing a chronology of the domestic and regional events occurring since then, I suggest that the EU-Turkey Statement on refugees, and the preceding Joint Action Plan unintentionally but inextricably intertwined Turkey’s national security concerns on its Syrian border with EU border control management policies.
