The Undermining of Values at Europe’s Eastern Border

In 2012, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union, highlighting its role in “the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe”. In his speech presenting the EU with its award in Oslo, Committee Chairman Thorbjørn Jagland enthused: “Congratulations to Europe. In the end we decided to live together. May other continents follow.” Who or what he meant by “we” and “together” was not explicitly stated. 

Institutions and political leaders of all shades of opinion regularly invoke values and ideas associated with them. The EU references values and democracy throughout its external communications, in its laws, and in its policy documents, trumpeting itself “a society in which inclusion, tolerance, justice, solidarity and non-discrimination prevail”. The EU’s values, as it expresses them, are human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, rule of law, and human rights. Human dignity, in particular, is “inviolable”.   

Upholding values, in particular those values that an entity has itself identified and made prominent in its own rhetoric, requires more than simply producing a series of nicely worded statements. Writing in mid-2024 in a post for this blog, Adrià Rivera showed “the paradoxes of a value-based EU foreign policy”, pointing to the EU’s democracy and human rights initiatives abroad on the one hand, set against its own democratic shortcomings and its systematic curtailment of the human rights of migrants, on the other. As Magnus Killander wrote a few months later, also in this blog, “the EU and its member states are scorning the values they purport to stand for”. The uncountable death at Europe’s borders, Killander explains, is rooted in problems of the EU’s making, with Europe’s focus on migration control “an essential aspect of all association agreements with Southern Neighbourhood states” under which “Stability and migration prevention, not democracy, is the key word in the assistance packets generously provided by the EU”. This hypocrisy and contempt evident in how the EU treats those to the south is equally present in its approach to the east, where the gap between those who deserve dignified treatment and those who do not can be located at an exact point on a map. 

Unlike the southern EU border, where the Mediterranean Sea provides a formidable natural barrier for would-be migrants, the eastern border is primarily a land border, ranging from heavily populated areas to sparse,wild forests. Prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and notwithstanding for example the instrumentalised migration across the Belarus-Poland border, the eastern border has seen far fewer migrants attempting to cross without prior authorisation than in the south. This relative lack of migrant crossings consequently meant a lack of securitised border controls. This approach, however, shifted significantly in the context of the above-mentioned instrumentalised migration from Belarus to Poland beginning in 2021. Poland responded to the unprecedented influx of migrants with a range of security measures, including the construction of a 186km fence along part of its border with Belarus. Similar fence projects are now completed or underway along parts of the Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian and Finnish external EU borders with Belarus and Russia.  EU member states, faced with a potential influx of unwanted migrants across the eastern frontier,have  invested large sums of money to keep those migrants out – Poland’s fence was initially projected to cost at least 350 million euros, and the estimate for Finland’s proposed fence is a similar sum. There are also significant costs associated with maintaining and further strengthening such border infrastructure, such as Poland’s 2024 announcement of a further 2.55 billion euros investment in securing its eastern border.  

Poland’s portion of the EU’s eastern external border also includes a stretch along the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, where a fence has now been built. Just south of Belarus, it shares a border with Ukraine. At the Poland-Ukraine border there is no fencing or other heavy securitatisation infrastructure, and Ukrainians fleeing the war can freely enter the EU. 

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 the security dynamic in Europe shifted dramatically. One concrete result of the invasion was the largest movement of people into and out of Europe since the Second World War, with as many as eight million people fleeing Ukraine in the years that followed. Unlike unwanted migrants attempting to enter Europe across other frontiers -including those crossing just a few kilometres to the north from Belarus - Poland and the rest of Europe welcomed Ukrainians with a hospitality unseen in previous mass migration waves. 

In 2015 and 2016, EU member states greeted around two million mostly Middle Eastern and African migrants with suspicion and hostility, many were left to languish in detention centres, pushed back towards ports in North Africa, or left to drown at sea. Ukrainians, by contrast, were given access to temporary protection, health care, education, the right to work, and a range of other social supports that varied from country to country within the EU. Unlike the complicated and often difficult to access asylum procedures to which EU member states typically subject asylum seekers when entering Europe, for Ukrainians it is sufficient that they are fleeing the war with Russia and are unable to return to Ukraine. Protection is also available to non-Ukrainian family members of Ukrainian citizens, and to some non-EU nationals who were resident in Ukraine prior to the start of the war. The EU decision on temporary protection for those affected by the war in Ukraine took a matter of days, and while originally valid for only 12 months is now valid until at least March 2026. 

Some hopeful commentators cautiously identified this approach of the EU member states as a possible new way forward for international protection in Europe, while also questioning as to why previous crises had not spawned a similar response. The compassion, solidarity and sense of responsibility shown by many in Europe toward those fleeing Ukraine indeed reflects well the values that the Union purports to uphold and advance. Member state governments cut red tape and facilitated access to work, education and other essential services, and many citizens volunteered at support organisations and even opened up their homes to provide emergency shelter to those fleeing the war. This, presumably, is the Europe that the Nobel Committee was referring to when it awarded its coveted prize to the EU in 2012 for “the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe”.

Dr. Stephen Phillips is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Human Rights, Åbo Akademi University in Finland. His research focuses on state responses to forced migration, with particular attention to the prevention of asylum access. Notable projects include examining the EU's adoption of Australia's asylum-seeking policies and exploring the mental health impact of immigration detention on children within international human rights law. His work spans refugee law, international human rights, forced migration, child rights, and extraterritorial state obligations. Phillips also teaches on issues related to migration, vulnerability, and crisis, contributing significantly to the academic discourse on migration policy.

The opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of EU-VALUES Network.