 Hello, Naval War College colleagues and welcome to this lecture of opportunity about the European Union in migration. My name is Commander Andrea Cameron, and I coordinate the Climate and Human Security Studies Group at the Naval War College. For those who don't know about the group, it is composed of faculty, staff and students interested in engaging in nontraditional and transnational security threats. In addition to climate security issues, we also look at human security topics like food insecurity, water insecurity, health insecurity, economic development, migration, and the resultant humanitarian crises. If you'd like to join the listserv, please put your email address in the chat or you can email me directly at andrea.camron at usnwc.edu. This lecture of opportunity continues a year of great lectures, courses and events. Today's presentation is timed with my current elective, Climate Security Around the World, where this week we talked about climate issues within the European continent, the EU, NATO, and European Commander Yukon. Also this week, our senior students looked at Europe and Russia. So we are incredibly fortunate to have our prestigious guest speaker to provide an overview of EU's progress on migration and its interconnection to security. Today we host Mr. Margaritas Chinas. And he is currently the European Commission Vice President for Promoting the European Way of Life. He started his career in the European Commission in 1990 and held various high level positions within the institution. He also served as a member of the European Parliament from 2007 until 2009. For more information about promoting the European Way of Life and Mr. Chinas's full biography, I will post a few of the links in the chat. For those watching, today's presentation is being recorded, but we will stop the recording at the end and open the floor for questions from the audience. Mr. Chinas, thank you so much for joining us today. I look forward to your presentation. Thank you. It's a pleasure and an honor to join you from Brussels for this lecture on European Union's approach to migration and its interconnection with security. I would like to thank Commander Cameron for her invitation to speak on such a hot topic, equally important and relevant, I would say, to both sides of the Atlantic, a subject which is often at the heart of today's human security challenges. Just a month ago, early December, I accompanied his Holiness Pope Francis to the island of Lesbos in Greece, which has been emblematic of the European migration crisis five years ago in 2015. The Pope, who holds the issue of migration close to his heart, strongly reminded us from Lesbos that migration is not just an issue for the Middle East, Africa or Europe, but for the whole world. He said that migration is a major issue that concerns everyone. And in some cases, migration is no longer only a humanitarian issue. It is very often instrumentalized as a political tool by dictators and leaders of autocratic regimes. Human lives are being weaponized by unscrupulous actors to destabilize those who represent ideas, values and principles that they cannot bear. And this is what we have been facing in Europe recently. These attempts to use human suffering, to use people as political pawns to serve political objectives. We saw this last year in the Greek-Turkish border on Evros. We saw it in the Spanish enclave in Northern Africa, the other few months ago. And for some time now, since July, we are experiencing it at our eastern external border between Belarus and Poland, Belarus and Lithuania and Belarus and Latvia. This is precisely the definition of what we call a hybrid attack and a prime, very telling example of the direct interconnection between migration and security. And let me be very clear here. Migration as such is not a security threat, much as in the United States, it has contributed significantly to shape the European Union as we know it today. But this is not a migratory issue. When human lives are instrumentalized by state actors who collude with international networks of smugglers, then this is a security issue and the major one. This threat is the very opposite of what the European Union stands for. It goes against the model of society we represent, against our values, those common values that unite the European Union and the United States. And we shall not allow it. This type of hybrid threats is now gaining prominence. And it's gaining prominence also on both sides of the Atlantic. The threats we are facing are increasingly complex, sophisticated, with malicious actors capitalizing on the blurring distinction between the physical and the digital world so that they can multiply the impact. For instance, during the pandemic, we saw that cyber attacks increased dramatically, especially on some critical infrastructures and systems and notably healthcare. The ransomware attack on the colonial pipeline in the United States demonstrated, however, relatively simply cyber threats can cripple critical supply chains, disrupt the economy, and put energy security into question. We here at the European Union, we are not immune to these threats either. And within our member states and in our immediate neighborhood, we have been witnessing different types of malicious influencing attempts. These include disinformation, fake news, attempts at electoral interference, cyber attacks, suspicious foreign investments. And as I was telling you a few minutes ago, the use of migratory flows as a tool for political pressure. Dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, professors or students, these hybrid threats are now becoming the biggest challenge for our systems and for our democracy. In a world where regional powers are pursuing their own strategic agenda in blatant disregard of agreed international rules and principles. We, democratic societies, we need to find the means at tools to face these threats. And transatlantic cooperation, the transatlantic bond that unites us will be a powerful tool to address these common challenges. At the European Union level, we are working for some time now on building a new security ecosystem, one that turns Europe from a demand of security to a provider of security and stability. This is a major effort which we have termed as the EU Security Union. Our aim is to change the angle from which we look at security policies and overcome the false dichotomy between offline and online, between digital and physical, and between internal and external security threats. Under the umbrella of our Security Union, we have adopted a whole series of specific concrete measures and initiatives to bring these ethos to life. Our citizens do not accept that they would be subject to these threats without having an ultimate guarantee at the European level that we are working to shield them against this multiple type of threats. Amongst our key proposals under our Security Union was, for instance, a new regulation on terrorist content online, which entered into force in June last year. This was an initiative that will ensure that online platforms play a more active role in detecting terrorist content online, and that such content is removed within a maximum of one hour. You do not need me to remind you of the Christchurch terrorist event where a terrorist has been shooting for an hour transmitting live through internet his despicable act. This is a very important element of our response of our fight against terrorism, which we developed also in the framework of a broader counterterrorism agenda. We want to strengthen our capacity to anticipate, prevent and protect from and respond to radicalization and terrorism. And we are convinced that we have to fight such threats at their source, and this is yet another area where cooperation between the EU and the US will be key. While we address these traditional threats, we should also in parallel tackle evolving and emerging ones, cybersecurity for instance. We want here in the EU to protect our networks and information systems much better. But at the same time, we also want to build collective capabilities of response to cyber attacks. This is why we launched again in June last year, a process towards establishing a joint cyber unit, ensuring a coordinated response to incidents and cyber enabled crisis across the European Union. We are following with interest similar developments in the United States, but it is clear, it is evident that we need to do more together. Cyber security is also a very promising field to seek and build synergies between security and defense. Because talking about security, homeland, according to your terminology, requires also talking about defense. We expect that these revamped EU-US security cooperation also takes place within the NATO framework to reinvigorate the EU-NATO strategic partnership. The two organizations are close collaborators and enhanced cooperation between them can act as a catalyst for worldwide security. And this is why we are now very actively working on a new EU-NATO joint declaration following the first one that we signed in Warsaw in 2016. However, we cannot limit ourselves to a strict vision of homeland security and defense, especially if we want to address properly and globally the threats that surround us. We need to approach human security in a genuine holistic way. Our management of the security crisis at our external border with Belarus is a vivid example of this point. Rather than responding to provocation and violence with a demonstration of brute force, we chose to act as one, as Team Europe, and mobilize all the instruments available across the board to tackle the crisis at our eastern external border. Together with my colleagues, we extensively reached out to the countries of origin and transit in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean, and we managed to stop transit flights to Minsk. We also set up in record time a new blacklisting mechanism for transport operators who collude with smugglers. We supported international organizations and UN agencies on the ground with over 700 million euros of humanitarian aid. We agreed a very aggressive, strong set of economic sanctions against the Belarus regime, and we provided fast and flexible frameworks for asylum procedures to allow our free member states concerned, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland to cope with this unprecedented pressure at their border. As you can see, in tackling this major hybrid attack, we have opted for a truly geopolitical 300-360 degree approach, and this in close cooperation with regional and international like-minded partners. Our President Ursula von der Leyen was in the Oval Office meeting President Biden, and this helped immensely our geopolitical efforts, and these efforts have paid off. With this holistic approach to security, migration, we have made a real effective difference on the ground. Coming back to the topic of our discussion today, this crisis, the Belarus crisis, exemplifies not only the interconnections between migration and security, but also of the need for the EU to continue our efforts to equip ourselves with a cohesive, comprehensive migration and asylum policy. In September 2020, I had the honor to present a package of proposals for a complete overhaul of our migration and asylum rules. This package is known as a new EU-packed on migration and asylum. These proposals present a single circuit type of system that connects the different stages of migration and asylum together from stepped-up partnerships with countries of origin and transit to stronger European borders to clear efficient and balanced procedures within our union. Adopting these proposals as soon as possible by our member states and our European Parliament is now urgent and imperative. It is imperative to ensure that we are never again faced with the tragic images of bodies washed ashore on the Mediterranean or capsized boats and overcrowded camps. It is imperative to finally break the business model of smugglers, those exploiting human misery for profits, and through it fueling other forms of organized crime. And it is imperative to put an end to the weaponization of people for political purposes. We in Europe have of course come a long way since the refugee crisis of 2015. A new European border and coastguard agency is able to rapidly deploy manpower to our external borders when we need them, as we were able to do both at the Greek-Turkish border in February 2020 and at our eastern external border in July. This is an agency that is very much modeled upon your own US coastguard, a successful model to imitate. The European Union has also equipped itself with a modern and future-looking budget that we are able to mobilize in support of our member states as well as of countries of origin who cooperate in our efforts. For instance, we have designated and designed comprehensive packets for Afghanistan's neighboring countries seeking to strengthen their refugee hosting capacities and migration management capabilities. This time we want to avoid the situation that we faced with the Syria crisis where we had to deal with the impact of the Syria crisis after people moved out of Syria. This time we need to work closer to Afghanistan with the neighboring countries and make sure that we can help people closer to their homes, closer to where they live. And this is precisely something that will be woven into this broader holistic new EU platform migration of asylum so that Europe can at last have something that makes sense and move from firefighting as we did in Belarus to construction work. Stop acting as firefighters but finally be architects of this new system. Because the lack of such a global legislative European agreement on migration is in itself the biggest pull factor for irregular migration. And this is something unacceptable. This is something we have to change. Dear participants, dear friends, let me conclude by saying that these were the key points I wanted to share with you on where we stand in the EU when it comes to migration, security and the interconnection. We need comprehensive global crisis management strategies. We need to move beyond silo based approaches to policies. We need to mobilize all instruments and tools available. We need design targeted response in close cooperation with like minded partners. You, as future leaders, you know that among all these tools is important not to forget the opportunity to build a positive agenda to leave space for constructive engagement and always avoid escalation of tensions. This aspect is crucial in certain travel parts of the world and our neighborhood, namely in the case of Eastern Mediterranean and in particular in our relations to Turkey. A lot has been achieved in our relations with Turkey since December 2020, since the incident in Evros in the Greek-Turkish border. We managed to turn our relations around. We have made important steps. I have been to Turkey twice. This is a good basis for reinforcing our cooperation with Turkey, which is very important on the issues we're discussing. But this current trend of the escalation is not given and we need to have continuous constructive engagement with our neighbors in advance. With these thoughts, which could somehow apply to other rather complex geographical settings, further to the East for instance, I'm looking forward to discussing these issues with you. I want to reiterate what a pleasure and what an honor it is for me to be able to address your college, your academy and being able to exchange with you. And I want this not to be a one-off opportunity. I hope that this can be the basis of a more systemic collaboration in the future. Thank you again for having me. Thank you so much, Mr. Shinus. Before closing the presentation, I would like to ask you one question. These students are our future leaders. Do you have any advice you would give them regarding how they think about migration in their future positions? This is a mega question, Commander. I think also as I was trying to argue in my presentation, I think for future leaders when discussing migration, there is scope for, how should I put this, detoxify the debate around migration. Migration is something that is of course very close to national sovereignty. It goes at the heart of national sovereignty. It shapes people's views. It has an impact on society. It's becoming in itself a political cleavage. And it often leads to rather tense toxic at times public debate. I think the role of a leader when dealing with migration policy is try. And I'm consciously using the word try, the very try, because this is not a given. Try to take some of this heat off the management of migration. Let me put it differently. Ideally, migration should become a normal policy area, a boring policy area. So it's not easy. I know I'm struggling with this for years now. This is something that I'm facing in my job on a daily basis. But this is precisely a call for future leaders to be able to deal with complex thorny issues by approaching them with a certain sense of positive engagement with the ability to combine different tools and methods and trying to take a distance from this toxicity that often contaminates the debate and prevents good policy. Because if we manage to somehow inject this common sense approach to migration, then I think developing migration policy becomes much easier, much simpler. Well, once again, on behalf of the Naval War College community, I would like to thank Mr. Margaritas Chinas so much for sharing your expertise with us today. This concludes the recorded portion of the lecture.