The Diplomat
The State Secretary for the EU, Juan González-Barba, has admitted that there are “many years of European integration” to go before reaching a consensus among the various EU countries on EU migration and asylum policy.
“For a European asylum and migration policy to be successful it has to have a European perspective” and, for this, it is necessary to reach the necessary consensus to achieve a “balanced” migration policy, said González-Barba last Tuesday during his participation in a colloquium on the new External Action Strategy 2021-24 held at the Diplomatic School and in which also participated the deputy director of the Royal University Institute of European Studies, Belén Becerril, and the director of Las Mañanas de RNE, Íñigo Alfonso.
“We still need possibly many years of European integration for a citizen living in the northern countries to feel challenged by the drama” of migratory flows, he admitted. “In any case, we have to act” and, for this, “the most important thing is to try to find the possible consensus at all times” to achieve a “balanced” policy, he continued.
In this sense, González-Barba highlighted the “exercise of realism” shown by the governments of Spain, France and Italy, among others, in their defense of a strategy of cooperation with the countries of origin and transit to facilitate an “orderly and legal” migration and regretted the “current gap” between the “responsibility” at the border assumed by the frontline countries and the lack of “solidarity” by other countries, which contributes to the current “unbalanced” migration policy.
