Globalisation, Migration, and the Future of Europe

Insiders and Outsiders

Leila Simona Talani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136635359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Showcasing an original, interdisciplinary approach, this text examines the effect of migration on the domestic politics of individual states and how they are eroding the distinctions between the domestic and foreign policy, the 'inside' and 'outside' components of politics and law.

During the twentieth century the context in which migrants negotiate their integration within legal, social, cultural, economic and political spaces changed significantly. Drawing upon varied perspectives from the US, UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, Russia and Italy among others, this work develops a comprehensive understanding of the impact migratory networks are having on European societies. It investigates the strategies of integration or discrimination which are developed in Europe by state institutions, legal codes, political movements and even immigrant communities themselves, when confronted with the growing influence of migratory networks. The result is a highly topical exploration of the political and legal dimensions of migration in the EU, that develops new approaches to the issue of social integration and the exclusion of migrants and migrant communities.

Globalization, Migration, and the Future of Europe will be of interest to students and scholars of migration, European studies, globalization and International Law.

Part I

Globalisation, Islamic
migration and
anti-terrorism measures

1 Asylum and the European
‘security state’

The construction of the ‘global
outsider’

Fran Cetti

Introduction

The identity of ‘global outsider or ‘global alien’ that is currently assigned the forced migrant has come to the fore as an essential component of the ideological underpinning of a Europe-wide ‘security regime’. This regime manifests itself in, among other things, an increasingly repressive, centralised body of asylum and immigration legislation; the growth of a widespread and unaccountable surveillance system, targeted in the main at the trafficking/smuggling of ‘illegal aliens’; the fortification of European borders and the projection of border controls far beyond their geographical remit into Europe's neighbouring ‘gatekeeper’ countries and the so-called ‘migrant-producing’ regions; and the criminalisation and incarceration of what Bauman (2004) terms ‘disposable populations’, including the construction of a vast carceral estate (across the continent and within neighbouring regions) of centres for the mass detention of forced migrants.

The discourse underlying these repressive moves found enhanced justification with the adoption of a ‘global war on terror’. Although the term itself may have been disavowed, on both sides of the Atlantic, the thinking that lies behind the ‘war on terror’ still holds sway in policy and security circles and has become increasingly normalised – to the extent that it is currently available as a near-instinctive response to the effects of global financial and economic crisis.

This chapter sets out to investigate why the figure of the forced migrant as ‘global alien’ has become so ubiquitous and inflated in importance (compared with the physical reality of the relatively limited numbers of forced migrants seeking to cross into or already living within the core European states). It does so by charting the way these nation states attempt, as a regional bloc, to ideologically negotiate the contradictions and challenges they confront within an increasingly disordered global environment through the manipulation of deeply embedded nationalist narratives of inclusion/exclusion which endow the forced migrant with the novel identity of the ’global illegal’.

The contradictions of globalisation and the forced migrant

What Davis (2006) calls ‘the brutal tectonics of globalisation’ (174) – the ‘epochal transfer of power and resources’ (153) from the global South to the command centres of global capitalism – have propelled many millions into motion across the globe, turning individuals into what Ghosh (quoted in Marfleet 2006) terms ‘survival migrants’. Billions are forced to the very periphery of this world system; millions are forcibly displaced within their countries or regions;¹ and a further tiny percentage are driven to embark on arduous, dangerous, often fatal journeys² across deserts, oceans and fortified borders towards the richer, safer countries of the West.

There are in effect, as Bauman (1998) says, two worlds: the first is the one of the globally mobile, those with more privileged national identities; the second is the one of the locally tied, those who are banned from moving – for them, ‘real space is closing up’; they have to travel illegally, under threat of arrest and deportation (88). As Sassen (2003) says: ‘It is in this context ... that alternative circuits of survival emerge, and it is to these conditions that such circuits are articulated’ (265). Through the enforcement of this highly stratified access to global mobility, the ‘alternative circuits of survival’ forced migrants are compelled to use are, for the most part, criminalised and driven underground – and forced migrants themselves are transformed into global transgressors, whichever country they enter or attempt to enter.

Within Europe, the figure of the forced migrant as a ubiquitous global threat is fashioned by a security discourse that provides the rationale for an increasingly integrated asylum and immigration regime. This elite professional discourse is woven into the everyday social context of the core nation-states and has become implicit in the explanatory narratives that help form both a ‘com-monsense’ perception of the world and the actions that flow from this. It is through such discursive practices that the very real insecurities and anxieties manufactured by the market are partially transmuted into fears over ‘threats’ to national identity, cultural coherence, economic wellbeing and personal security, and focused on the figure of the ‘illegal alien’.

However, the constructed image of the forced migrant, far from resolving the ideological crisis that a deeply unequal globalisation and economic instability could potentially unleash, carries within it contradictions that threaten to reveal the fractures and conflicts lying at the heart of Europe itself (which in turn compels a heightened emphasis on this figure's ‘alien’ nature and yet further draconian measures). Indeed, in its constant process of restructuring, the global system that provides the compulsion towards European integration continues to release forces that undermine its account of the world. The uneven processes of globalisation have begun to erode the distinction between the domestic and the global market: nation-state allegiances with sources of transnational capital are not without historical precedent but the trend strengthening these complex global relationships has been accelerated dramatically over the past thirty years by the neoliberal policies of liberalisation and deregulation. Multiple global actors – intergovernmental institutions, credit rating agencies, international financial markets, currency speculators and transnational industries – employ ‘great powers of discipline’ within and upon individual nation-states and regional blocs of states (McNevin 2006). The necessity for the core nation-states – the base for local/regional but globally operative capitals – to accommodate the demands of such extra-territorial forces, while at the same time striving to maintain internal social and political stability through securing the allegiance of their national populations, requires a unifying ideological narrative.

Promoting and privileging the idea of an unproblematic global mobility and the international economic and cultural opportunities that globalisation holds, however, while issuing warnings of a dark ‘underside’ of organised crime, trafficking/‘people smuggling’, international terrorism and the threat posed by the ‘illegal alien’ to the essential integrity of embattled national cultures, produces an underlying mismatch between both popular and policy discourses and actual practice. The reality of these contradictions can be encountered at any significant European port. Nordstrom (2007) describes, for example, how the flow of international trade and the immense profits it represents can in no way afford to be disrupted by systematic checks, systematically enforced regulations or wholly effective barriers to smuggling and/or ‘illegal migration’.³ The complex meshing of the ‘illegal’ with the legal economy is therefore accepted, if not openly acknowledged, as the essence of a system of global trade and financial transactions and transfers.⁴ Only when the illegal element of the ‘legal’ economy threatens to subvert the system from within⁵ and precipitate financial and economic crisis is the spectral ‘underside’ fleetingly glimpsed as an integral part, even a true reflection, of the system as a whole.

Meanwhile, due to such economic pressures, the global inequalities that during past centuries were kept at arm's length from the central core of imperial-ist states, behind the ‘militarised borders’ of the ‘vast de facto prison labour camps’ that were the colonies (de Genova and Peutz 2010), now ‘confront one another on an unprecedented scale . . . within the same spaces of practical everyday life’ (Balibar 1991: 44). Identities are leaking: as the ‘global’ cities of the European continent spread, sucking in millions of workers from within and beyond regional borders, they are not only becoming increasingly racially, culturally and linguistically diverse, but are also the sites of an increasingly ubiquitous experience of exploitation and inequality, potentially undermining a coherent narrative naturalising and anchoring exploitation and inequality in the day-to-day running of the system.

In the attempt to negate the vision of a complex, contradictory and crisis-ridden system, focused primarily on competition and profit, by singling out for censure ‘rogue’ financial elements and so-called global terrorist and criminal forces, the vulnerable figure of the forced migrant stands ready primed as the paradigmatic ‘global illegal’/‘global alien’, the representative of globalisation's ‘dark underside’. The ‘global alien’ is available for deployment as an essential resource in the attempted stabilisation of the ideological system in its local European form. Thus ‘illegal’ forced migrants (or ‘irregular’ migrants) are policed as dangerous ‘outsiders’ before they reach the borders, through a process of interdiction, incarceration and deportation, and once within Europe itself are characterised as ‘illegally’ present, even when they are economically incorporated through its informal labour markets.

This paradigmatic figure of ‘illegality’, however, carries with it further contradictory consequences. Once mobilised, it calls into being the rhetoric, policies, administrative structures, technologies, personnel and powerful industrial interests that cohere around ‘internal security’ and border control: the cluster of personnel, practices and technologies that help articulate and disseminate the everyday discourse of forced migration/security. This discourse must operate alongside a less visible appetite for ‘irregular migrants’ as an essential (and desirable because disposable) economic resource for the service, catering, agriculture and food-processing sectors in the core European states. To be economically viable, the ‘illegal migrant’ has to be kept in a state of ‘deportability’ (de Genova and Peutz 2010) through the rhetoric of security and the selective use of draconian asylum and immigration policies, whose application drive many forced migrants into the black economy. To this extent, the operation of the ‘security state's’ immigration and asylum measures will at times work in tandem with certain sectors of its economy, but as national employers must also be able access this resource, the border controls of the ‘migration management’ regime must also be permeable, allowing for the ‘circulation’ of a certain amount of so-called ‘illegal migrants’. In this way, the European nation-state continually risks ideological contradiction: its security measures can never be wholly effective, yet governments must live up to their rhetoric and be seen to constantly ‘tighten up’ the managerial processes of ‘border protection’ against an ever-present ‘alien threat’.

Securing the border: nationalism and the forced migrant

The survival of locally or regionally based capitals in an internationally hybrid world of regional conflicts and economic instability therefore demands an inherently ideological operation. Of course, as Harvey (2005) points out, the current neoliberal policies and ideology can only, in the final analysis, be maintained through the resort to increasingly authoritarian measures – even more so as crisis begins to undermine the narrative of a self-equilibrating free market and its promises of economic stability and growth. The imbalances and contradictions of the capitalist system continually lead to crises, which in a globalised economic environment carry with them the seeds of a contagion that could generate a far wider and deeper structural crisis, threatening to destabilise the whole system and its ideological buttressing. Harvey maintains ‘the only way the liberal utopian image is sustained is by force’ (37). Thus we see the current trend towards intense social control through mass surveillance and the increasing criminalisation and incarceration of ‘disposable populations’ (Bauman 2004; Giroux 2004). But such authoritarian impulses are integrated with, and rely for their acceptance on, more subtle cultural and social means of ensuring consent, not least through the reproduction of ideological narratives of national and cultural belonging, with their (implicitly racialised) definitions of inclusion and exclusion. In essence, the idea that the nation-state represents a unified set of interests that flow naturally from its unique cultural and historical make-up can help displace inevitable social antagonisms and secure its legitimacy.

Such discourses of national belonging, however, have to be continually reconstructed and refashioned to meet the centrifugal challenges thrown up by their global context. As national identities are a ‘historically specific form of consciousness’ (Billig 1995: 19) the fashioning of identity is itself an ongoing socio-historical process, but one that is routine and invisible, creating – for the most part below the conscious radar – a complex pattern of discourse. National ‘culture’, as a cognitive structure, is embedded in the everyday narrative of social life and takes on a quasi-biological cast: people appear to be born to an ‘identity’ that comes custom-packaged with specific cultural and social overtones. This suppresses the reality of the complexities of social being through an essentialised understanding of ‘identity’, formed in opposition to the essential-ised characteristics of those who fall outside the national frame. National citizens, the ‘we’ of ‘banal’ day-to-day discourse, are encouraged to see themselves in a rhetorical mirror through the manufacture of stereotypes; national identity becomes a ‘routine ... form of life which habitually closes the front door, and seals the border’ (Billig 1995: 109) against the perceived ‘alien’.

Although construed as marginal, the figure of the forced migrant is a vital component in this process of inclusion and exclusion – that is, in the practice of making and remaking the nation-state and the national citizen. Bhabha (1990) speaks of the process of ‘people production’ through ‘narrating the nation’: the citizen is not a natural or even self-evident presence but must be repeatedly produced. The presence of the forced migrant is problematised to privilege the national citizen and thus the identity and very ‘reality’ of the nation-state itself. And equally, as citizenship is ‘an easy shorthand for legitimacy’ (Dau...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Globalisation, Migration, and the Future of Europe
• Routledge research on the global politics of migration
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I Globalisation, Islamic migration and anti-terrorism measures
• PART II Who is an insider and who is an outsider?
• PART III Migration and the construction of identity
• PART IV European citizenship and the future of Europe
• Conclusion: where is EU citizenship going? The fraudulent Dr. Rottmann and the state of the union in Europe
• Index