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of communication and discussion on migration between EU and non-EU
states. They also seek to extend what are called ‘mobility partnerships’ to
MENA countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Morocco that link the
facilitation of some migration to the EU with stricter controls on irregular
migration. By 2012, the EU had agreed mobility partnerships with only four
countries: Cape Verde, the Republic of Moldova, Georgia and Armenia (CEC
2009). None of these four is a particularly large origin country for migrants
to the EU. The development of mobility partnerships for MENA countries
can be understood as an example of the EU trying to deal with the ‘risk’
of migration by forms of political engagement that are to be managed.
However, it is still unclear within these arrangements what ‘mobility’ actu-
ally means. The EU seems interested in only very circumscribed forms of
mobility such as, for example, that of the highly skilled, while also keeping a
strong focus on border controls and security. This focus on ‘immobility f irst’,
as it could be put, through measures to increase border-control capacity,
was very evident in the response by EU member states to migration f lows
from MENA countries in the wake of the Arab uprisings.
The analysis is divided into f ive sections. The next section explores the EU
as a political system in its own right and some of the key features of region-
alised, supranational governance in the EU. This is followed by a section that
specif ies the conceptual foundations of the EU’s international-migration
relations. A subsequent section then outlines the development of this ap-
proach and some of its key features. Following this, the chapter assesses
issue linkages between migration and other policy areas that fall under the
broad heading of ‘migration and development’. Finally, the chapter draws
conclusions about the emergence of new forms of international-migration
relations centred on the EU and their implications for conceptualisations
of migration as a danger and migration as a risk.
4.2 The EU as a political system
The purpose of this chapter is not to provide a detailed discussion of the EU’s
political system or the development of its external-relations policy. Rather,
it is to assess the ways in which an ‘internal’ issue such as immigration has
now become a component of the external dimension of the EU. The chapter
shows that the debate about ‘the migration state’, within which analysts such
as Hollif ield (2004) have seen debates about immigration and integration un-
folding, now has a signif icant supranational EU-level dimension. There are,
of course, long-standing interdependencies between European states, made