European governments are beginning to panic about migration again. So far this year there have been nearly 120,000 “irregular” arrivals. Most of these people travelled through Tunisia and Libya and on to Italy. It is the highest number since 2017, the year after the EU – fearing a populist backlash – did a morally questionable deal with Turkey, channelling €6bn to Ankara in exchange for Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s agreement to prevent 3.5 million refugees, most of them displaced by the war in Syria, from reaching EU territory.

This time, leaders in some countries, like Austria and Germany, fear another nationalist backlash. The far-right Freedom party is leading opinion polls in Austria and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland’s support has been buoyant in German local elections. Italy is already governed by the anti-immigrant hard right, although as the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who came to power last year promising to cut the migrant flow is finding, it is one thing to call for fanciful naval blockades when in opposition, another to manage the issue when in power.

Yet the European migration conundrum remains basically as stuck as it has been since the mid-2010s. Having failed to overcome their internal divisions and agree on a system that would balance humane border management with “relocation” of asylum seekers within the EU, governments are again seeking to offload the problem by outsourcing it to poorer countries in exchange for money.

Some would argue that contentious as it was, the Turkey approach has worked well. However, Turkey is the exception, not the rule. Not only was that deal in Erdoğan’s interest, both financially and politically – given Ankara’s support for the Syrian opposition – the Turkish state has the capacity to host millions of refugees. No other country of migrant transit or origin has the same capacity or will, nor has it been offered the same amount of cash.

Yet this reality doesn’t stop the EU from seeking to repeat the experiment with a number of countries in north and sub-Saharan Africa. Meloni, the outgoing Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, travelled to Tunis last month to sign a Turkey-style migration package with the Tunisian government. This is worth an immediate €255m for Tunisia (€105m for equipment and training and €150m in financial support) plus the carrot of a further €900m provided it reaches a deal with the IMF.

In some ways, this is the continuation of an existing EU policy of establishing security and military cooperation agreements with certain African countries in the hope that by supporting their capacity to deal with terrorism and strengthen their borders, they will also rein in migration. But this approach has rightly attracted the condemnation of civil society and human rights organisations, outraged at the torture and abuse suffered by migrants returned to or held in Libya in particular.

Tunisia, under president Kais Saied, has also recently sunk back into authoritarianism, disbanding parliament and cracking down on dissent. The regime has targeted migrants explicitly, in some cases pushing people back into the desert with no water or food. Saied, ironically, espouses the same ethnic replacement conspiracy theories about sub-Saharan African migrants as the hard-right in Europe and the US.

Yet, if the aim of Europe’s latest migration policy is the same as ever – to keep Europe’s borders closed – its framing is new. Well aware that doling out unconditional sums of money to a leader such as Saied raises eyebrows in Europe as well as the US, Brussels has switched the narrative away from curbing migration via border security measures to ostensibly one of tackling the economic problems which drive people to migrate in the first place.

But this is not about looking at how migration might contribute positively to the development of the poorest countries, or indeed how development aid spending influences which people migrate and how they try to do it. The EU’s development-migration nexus depressingly boils down to the tried-and-failed formula of sending funds to migrant origin countries in the hope that migration will stall as a result.

This was the thinking at the core of a conference in Rome hosted by Meloni and co-hosted by Saied, which included leaders from the Sahel, the Horn of Africaand the Gulf (expected to chip in with cash), as well as regional organisations, international financial institutions and EU institutions.

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The one-day gathering initiated a “Rome process” that extends beyond security cooperation to take in socioeconomic development, employment, education, the energy transition and climate adaptation. However, hardly anything was said of human rights or humanitarian law, let alone broader political rights and freedoms. The emphasis was rather on the sovereignty of participating states, implying that European governments have no reason – nor right – to poke their nose in to the internal affairs of their southern neighbours.

In a world in which authoritarian powers like China and Russia increasingly make their presence felt in Africa (and elsewhere), Europe has fretted for some time now about how it can continue to exert influence. Traditional policies that made EU aid to developing countries conditional on democracy and human rights reforms have lost traction as players such as China have stepped in to provide investment and assistance with no political strings attached. Driven by the fear of migration from Africa, European governments now tragically risk embracing the Chinese tactic: economic assistance detached from political and governance reforms. China, however, is geographically a lot less affected by political instability in African countries, which invariably erupts when rights are violated and repression boils over into protest. For Europe, giving up on rights, rules and the law to its south is not just unprincipled or, as some would say, immoral. It is not even pragmatic.

• Nathalie Tocci is director of the Italian Institute of International Affairs and an honorary professor at the University of Tübingen