The EU′s paper tiger
The EU claims that the migration pact with Africa is a completely new initiative. Rather than reshaping patterns of migration, however, Europe′s desperate politics of symbolism would merely seem to focus on stemming the flow. By Ludger Schadomsky
So now they're adopting a carrot-and-stick approach, or as the EU Commission formulated it rather more elegantly on Tuesday, "a mix of positive and negative incentives". The EU's foreign affairs and security policy representative, Federica Mogherini, even described the migration pact presented in Strasbourg as a "Copernican revolution" in the EU's refugee policy. It's also true that Copernicus' revolutionary ideas were only understood by others 200 years after his death.