Migration cause puts France-UK relations back on track
France and the UK stitch up the wound opened by Brexit. French President Emmanuel Macron received British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the Elysée last week in the first official visit to Paris by a tenant of 10 Downing Street since Boris Johnson last visited in 2019. The leaders staged a reunion between the two countries five years after the referendum that triggered the UK's traumatic exit from the European Union.
Tensions have been a constant in the post-Brexit era. The bilateral crisis came to a head in September 2021 following the announcement of the Aukus, the military agreement signed this week, which was conceived in péctore by the Anglosphere to provide Australia with nuclear submarines to counter China's growing military presence in the Indo-Pacific. Friction surfaced because France had already positioned itself as Australia's arms supplier, but the appearance on the scene of the United States and the United Kingdom removed the Elysée from the equation. The signed contracts remained a dead letter.
The submarines will not be ready for another two decades, but the mere signing of the agreement was a setback for France's aspirations in the Indo-Pacific, a region in which it has seen its influence lost in one fell swoop to its own allies. Aware of the grievance, US President Joe Biden had a telephone conversation with Macron hours before publicly presenting the project to keep him in the loop. The apparent harmony on both sides of the Atlantic has served to partially redirect the situation, but the Elysée has not forgotten the gesture, nor does it ignore the role played by the UK at the time.
The Aukus has not been the only front on which their interests have collided. Channel fishing rights have also poisoned Franco-British relations over the past five years. Tensions reached a climax in 2021, when the French and British navies deployed warships in Jersey during an attempted clash between fishing boats. The matter did not escalate.
However, the migration crisis is perhaps the issue that most distances their agendas. The British government has allocated some €130 million to the Elysée since 2015 to strengthen controls in the Channel, but the number of migrants leaving the French coast to reach the UK has only increased. Fewer than 300 undocumented people arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel in 2018. In just five years, the volume arriving on British shores has grown exponentially. In 2022, there were more than 45,000 people, according to official data.
"If we are honest, the relationship between our countries has had its difficulties in recent years," Sunak acknowledged at a press conference following the meeting with Macron. "Today's meeting marks a new beginning." The French president took up the gauntlet: "We have to sort out the consequences of Brexit. Some of those consequences were probably underestimated, but we have to fix them."
The statistics show that the Conservative Party, in government since the agonising victory of the 'Yes' vote in the Brexit referendum, has been in the ascendancy. The Tories made border control one of their main arguments for leaving. But they are far from fulfilling their promises. Among other things, because leaving the EU left the UK without a legal framework for managing migration. Time is running out for Sunak, who is obliged to solve the problem if he wants to survive after the 2024 elections.
His harmony with Macron was evident during their tête à tête at the Elysée. Both are unusually young for their position (Macron is 44; Sunak, 42), stand out for their strong neoliberal profile and share a successful career in the finance sector. Both worked as investment bankers, and went on to amass a large fortune in the private sector, before making the leap into the political arena. They also both govern two countries that are currently experiencing massive strikes and strong social upheavals. They speak the same language, they understand each other.
A new beginning ????? pic.twitter.com/8UlUy2NWrs
— Rishi Sunak (@RishiSunak) March 10, 2023
Nothing to do with the bitter relationship that Macron and Boris Johnson once had. They despised each other. The short-lived Liz Truss did not even have enough time to get to know Macron in depth, although she said of him that she did not know whether he was "friend" or "foe". With Sunak it is different.
So, it came as no surprise that they reached a battery of agreements on migration. They agreed on the construction of a new migrant detention centre in the Dunkirk area, a new command centre with teams concentrated in the same area, a reinforcement of 500 agents to patrol the beaches and more drones and surveillance technology. The funding will be provided by the UK, which will contribute more than 540 million euros to France over the next three years. But Macron did not give the green light for British asylum seekers to be returned to French soil, as Sunak demanded. For the Elysée it is a red line. The French president made it clear that this issue would have to be decided in a negotiation in which the rest of the EU members have a say.
Beyond the migration dossier, another major reason that has facilitated bilateral rapprochement is their status as Western allies, reinforced after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Although British military aid to Kiev is much higher than French aid, Macron has written off the window of dialogue with Putin and diplomatic concessions to Russia. In addition, France and the UK are the only two nuclear powers in Europe with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
The UK's rapprochement with France was interpreted as a rapprochement with the EU-27. Macron congratulated Sunak on the "new beginning" brokered by the so-called Windsor framework agreement, signed a fortnight ago with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, which ended a bitter dispute between London and Brussels over post-Brexit trade rules in Northern Ireland.
