ANGELIKI DIMITRIADI European Asylum System (CEAS) and the Schengen Acquis, both intrinsically pivoted around the idea that the free movement within the EU requires strong external borders to survive. Since the 1990s, the European framework sought to enhance the mobility of EU citizens while restricting the arrival of third country nationals (Kostakopoulou, 2000). Multiple border zones are meant to ensure the protection of the Schengen area, pushing as further outwards as possible the management of mobility. The «gatekeepers» are the frontline states, and specifically Greece, Italy and, although to a much lesser extent, Spain. Their geographical location determines that they receive the overwhelming majority of irregular arrivals and that they act as buffers to the rest of the EU. The past two years were unique on many levels. The de facto opening of the Western Balkan route, and the speed with which migrants moved towards destinations such as Germany and Sweden, caught the Member States and the policy makers unprepared. Greece’s acknowledgement that it had failed to register on EURODAC a significant number of arrivals3, coupled with the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 2015, rendered any previous discussion around sharing the burden between Member States irrelevant. The focus shifted quickly to border control, as the last line of defence of Schengen. Vacillating between humanitarianism and deterrence, a toolbox emerged with policy suggestions ranging form the closure of the Balkan corridor, through the temporary reintroduction of border controls between Germany, Austria, Sweden, Denmark and Norway4, to the EU-Turkey Statement of March 2016 and the application of the hotspot approach in Greece5. The term «hotspot» is a curious concept because it has neither positive nor negative connotations unless associated with a specific subject. In the field of politics and international relations, it is often used with negative connotations to designate an area, a region or a place where instability, potential danger or even violence are emerging or are expected to emerge. However, in its original format, described in the European Agenda on Migration, the hotspot approach had neither positive nor negative connotation; it was simply a migration management tool to ensure that those who reached the EU external borders were registered and identified before processing their asylum claims. In the EU Agenda, the «hotspots» are thus those borders facing «disproportionate pressure» where migration management policy is to be implemented. The hotspot approach describes the policy envisaged and implemented on those sites (see x 3 The Commission initiated infringement procedures against Croatia, Greece, and Italy for not registering migrants in the EURODAC upon arrival to the continent. The Commission noted that in Greece, 492,000 arrivals were registered and only 121,000 fingerprinted of the estimated 890,000 that crossed (Zalan, Eszter, EU launches migration cases against Croatia, Greece, Hungary, and Italy, 10 December 2015, available at https://euobserver.com/migration/131479. 4 See Commission’s update on the «Temporary Reintroduction of Border Control», available at https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/borders-and-visas/schengen/ reintroduction-border-control_en. 5 The hotspot approach was originally proposed in the European Agenda on Migration in May of 2015 but put into practice in late 2015. Information on the Eu Agenda available at https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/european-agenda-migration_en. – 76 –