Provincializing Fortress Europe? The Relationship Between Internal Opening and External Closure in Regional Mobility Regimes – Evidence from Mercosur and ECOWAS

The metaphor of the EU as “Fortress Europe”, which emphasizes the violent fortification of external borders in exchange for unrestricted mobility of EU citizens has become ubiquitous in migration studies. This framing positions external closure as a prerequisite for internal openness in regional mobility regimes, suggesting a blueprint for other regional integration processes. However, the applicability of this model beyond the EU remains unexplored. Addressing this gap, the paper investigates the dynamics between internal openness and external closure for human mobility beyond the EU by comparing the regional migration and free movement frameworks in ECOWAS (West Africa) and Mercosur (South America). The study presents a rich empirical analysis, ranging from quantitative evidence on border infrastructure to a qualitative analysis based on interviews with 58 government and civil society representatives and a review of migration laws and policies. The findings show that ECOWAS and Mercosur are not closing external borders or excluding extra-regional migration as a trade-off for internal openness. Instead, policy discourses around migration, bordering processes, and the construction of a common identity blur the lines between regional and extra-regional migration. By disrupting the methodological EU-centrism in regional migration literature, this paper argues that the model of “Fortress Europe” is an outlier rather than the standard, highlighting the need for comparative research that accounts for diverse processes of inclusion and exclusion in regional mobility regimes across the globe.