Reclaiming migration

Voices from Europe's 'migrant crisis'

Vicki Squire, Nina Perkowski, Dallal Stevens, Nick Vaughan-Williams

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526144843
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Reclaiming migration critically assesses the EU's migration policy by presenting the unheard voices of the so-called migrant crisis. It undertakes an extensive analysis of a counter-archive of migratory testimonies, co-produced with people on the move across the Mediterranean during 2015 and 2016, to document how EU policy developments create precarity on the part of those migrating under perilous conditions. The book draws attention to the flawed assumptions embedded within the policy agenda, while also exploring the claims and demands for justice that are advanced by people on the move. Written collectively by a team of esteemed scholars from across multiple disciplines, Reclaiming migration makes an important contribution to debates surrounding migration, borders, postcolonialism and the politics of knowledge production.

1
Narratives of ‘crisis’

Constantly, every time you open the news, the refugee crisis, the refugee crisis. The refugee crisis is in all the countries of the world whether they are European or Arab. We Syrians became the crisis of the world? Why are we a crisis?

(ATH2.24, man from Syria, Athens)

Introduction

This chapter undertakes a critical analysis of how the narrative of Europe's so-called migration crisis came to frame dominant understandings of and policy responses to increased arrivals and deaths at sea. As will be made clear, however, we do not posit a linear causal relationship between event and response in this context. The book as a whole argues that the narrative of ‘crisis’ has had a transformational effect on the social realities that it claims merely to describe. That is to say, the crisis narrative must be seen as a political intervention that actively came to shape – and not merely respond to – the course of events in 2015; its impact continues to set the context in which political and legal challenges associated with migration are framed in the EU. In this endeavour, we are guided by two broad conceptual and methodological orientations. First, the concept of narrative is central to our analysis. Far from neutral devices, narratives are always embedded within and serve to reinforce particular relations of power and knowledge. As White argues, social events do not present themselves in an unmediated way and are not imbued with meaning outside of their representation; the role of narratives, understood broadly as discursive attempts at producing an order of meaning, is to offer a plot, a sequence and a sense of coherence in the absence thereof (White 1987: 11). Because all narratives inescapably entail ‘ontological and epistemic choices with distinct ideological and … specifically political implications’, they performatively produce the reality that those using them often purport only to observe (White, 1987: ix). Second, there is a specificity to crisis narratives as a particular genre of political narrative, which take a given issue out of the normal realm of politics and relocate it with reference to the politics of emergency (Schmitt, 2005 [1922]). As such, narratives of crisis do not have ‘objective’ standing, but rather should be thought of as instruments that set up social reality in ways that enable non-routinised responses to a set of circumstances. On this twinned basis, any attempt to unpack the dominant framing of increased sea arrivals and deaths as a ‘crisis’ facing Europe needs to examine how this narrative has been propagated, by whom, on what basis and with what implications.

The following analysis begins by mapping how seemingly divergent narratives of Europe's ‘migration crisis’ have been mobilised by diverse governmental and non-governmental actors. Some politicians drew on the securitised language of crisis in order to argue for tougher deterrent measures, with reference to perceptions of the scale of new arrivals, loss of control over land and sea borders, and/or threats to European societal and economic security. Other interlocutors in public policy debates, particularly those representing non-governmental organisations (NGOs), harnessed the crisis narrative as a political strategy in order to draw public attention to increasing deaths at sea, make demands in support of the humanitarian needs of those on the move and critique what they saw as the failure of the international governmental response to provide adequate protection for them. At times these apparently contending narratives were mobilised simultaneously by the same governmental actors, thus creating a highly ambiguous and confusing policy-making environment. What unites these otherwise diverging narratives of crisis, which were often reproduced uncritically and with sensationalising effect in mainstream media sources, is that they tend to conflate a complex series of geographically and historically situated events, experiences and responses as if they were a singular and homogeneous ‘event’ across multiple contexts. Such simplification is not only empirically problematic; the decontextualisation involved in many crisis narratives also has significant political and ethical ramifications. In focusing on the ‘here and now’, narratives of Europe's ‘migration crisis’ produce subjectivities that are outside of history and politics, which enables interventions that focus narrowly on managing the lives of people on the move rather than recognising their life histories and responding to their political claims. The simple and yet profound question posed by the Syrian man interviewed in Athens and quoted above – ‘Why are we a crisis?’ – thus urgently requires unpacking. Another common denominator is that, in perpetuating the notion that the ‘crisis’ is geographically, historically and politically exogenous to Europe, many crisis narratives reproduce a Eurocentric and ultimately violent postcolonial imaginary of ‘us’ and ‘them’. In embracing the narrative of crisis uncritically, academic analysis also runs the risk of reproducing these problems and forestalling the effort to find alternative grounds for response. For this reason, we argue for the need to abandon the crisis frame and, in recovering the otherwise silenced voices of those on the move, adopt an explicitly ‘anti-crisis’ perspective (Roitman, 2014).

Narrating Europe's ‘migrant crisis’

The first official use of the term ‘crisis’ by the European Commission to refer to events in 2015 came in April that year (see Introduction). Following a shipwreck on 18 April in which approximately 650 passengers were killed, then Vice-President Federica Mogherini and former Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos spoke of the emerging ‘crisis situation in the Mediterranean’ when outlining the ‘Ten-point action plan on migration’ (European Commission, 2015a). One month later, reflecting concerns about a rapid increase in sea arrivals and deaths, the European Commission announced a new framework for EU border security and migration management in the form of ‘A European Agenda on Migration’ (hereafter the ‘2015 Agenda’). On the one hand, unlike the more measured language of the 2011 ‘Global Approach to Migration and Mobility’ (GAMM) framework that it replaced, the 2015 Agenda was infused with the vocabulary of ‘emergency’, ‘urgency’, ‘pressure’, ‘influx’ and ‘exceptionalism’, and referred directly for the first time to ‘the migration crisis in the Mediterranean’ (European Commission, 2015b: 6). On the other hand, while the 2015 Agenda adopted this new ‘crisis’ footing, it also perpetuated the older dual narrative of both ‘securing borders’ and ‘saving lives’ that had already been established in the 2011 GAMM (European Commission, 2011). With its focus on deterring ‘would-be’ arrivals from leaving for the EU in order to reduce deaths at sea, this confusing blend of securitised-humanitarianism became the defining hallmark of the European Commission's narrated response to the ‘crisis’ (see Chapter 3). This was typified by Operation Sophia, part of the EUNAVFOR MED military task force which, from June 2015, was deployed in order to both ‘identify, capture, and dispose of vessels’ that are ‘used or suspected of being used by migrant smugglers or traffickers’ and ‘to prevent the further loss of life at sea’ (EUNAVFOR MED, 2019; see also Chapter 3). In its initial evaluation of how the 2015 Agenda had been implemented, the Commission praised Frontex for having already ‘saved over 122,000 lives’ while at the same time reaffirming its commitment to ‘strong border control’ in order to ‘support Member States managing exceptional numbers of refugees on their territory’ (European Commission, 2015f: 4). Thus, the European Commission's framing of increased arrivals and deaths combined two ostensibly divergent narratives of crisis that are discernible in wider public policy debates concerning the situation in the Mediterranean: a securitising narrative that sees those on the move as threats to European identities, economies and societies, and prioritises the interests of sovereign nation states and their citizens; and a humanitarian narrative that operates via a continuum that positions the same people as helpless victims in need of saving by Europe at one end and as the bearers of rights at the other (see Chapter 6).

Securitising narratives of crisis

Securitising narratives of crisis have been notably pursued in a number of EU-level policy responses. References to a ‘surge’ in human mobility (European Commission, 2016b) and ‘uncontrolled flows’ (European Council, 2016a) dramatically portrayed a loss of control of Europe's external borders. Frontex, latterly known as the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, enthusiastically embraced the ‘migration crisis’ narrative in its representation of events in 2015. Its 2016 Annual Risk Analysis Report revealed the Agency's working assumptions about the core features of Europe's so-called migration crisis: the cause was unambiguously framed in terms of transnational flows of people heading towards the European continent (Frontex, 2016: 6); the scale of arrivals was presented as ‘immense’ and historically unprecedented (Frontex, 2016: 4); people on the move were referred to in catch-all terms as ‘illegal’ and/or ‘irregular’ border-crossers and were assumed to be primarily ‘economic migrants’ (Frontex, 2016: 5); and their movement was framed as a direct threat not only to European economies, but also to public safety and security at large, with an explicit association made between migration and terrorism (Frontex, 2016: 8).

Many of these assumed characteristics of the ‘migration crisis’ – and the overarching claim that citizens, nations and Europe as a whole are threatened by external migration – were also to be found, albeit with varying emphases and degrees of intensity, in the narratives of anti-immigrant political movements, and indeed some governments across the continent. Right-wing and neo-Nazi groups – such as the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany or ‘AfD’), the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany or ‘NPD’) and the Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident or ‘PEGIDA’) in Germany, Golden Dawn in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary, the Five Star Movement in Italy and the English Defence League (EDL) in the UK, to name only a few – all sought to capitalise on the ‘migration crisis’ narrative in order to stoke anti-immigrant and pro-border sentiments among citizens who are typically deprived of clear and authoritative sources of information. These groups’ highly gendered and racialised mediations of the ‘crisis’ invariably presented new arrivals as terrorists, sexual predators and uncivilised barbarians in order to call for tougher immigration controls and deterrent border security measures on land and at sea. Such mediations pre-date 2015, of course, but population displacements that year offered unprecedented opportunities to bring them to the fore (Krzyzanowski et al., 2018). These securitising representations were not limited to the extreme fringes of the political spectrum, however, as governments, notably in Austria, Denmark, Hungary and the UK, adopted increasingly populist slogans to justify physical fence-building along land borders and/or more restrictive national immigration policies. Thus, in defending the construction of the 523 km long and 4 m high fence along Hungary's land borders with Serbia and Croatia, for example, Prime Minister Victor Orbán asserted in a 2015 interview that ‘the factual point is that all the terrorists are basically migrants’ and that the ‘number one job’ facing the EU, EU member states and NATO is ‘to defend the borders and to control who is coming in’ (Kaminski, 2015). There was an overtly religious dimension to Orbán's border rhetoric, in that he sought to position Hungary as a ‘civilisational border guard’, which had defended Europe's Christian borders for over a thousand years (Scott, 2020: 11). Taken as a whole, Bauman (2016: 1) sums up the securitising narrative of the ‘crisis’ as one whereby migration is presented as ‘ostensibly overwhelming Europe and portending the collapse and demise of the way of life we know, practice, and cherish’.

Humanitarian narratives of crisis

The mobilisation of a crisis narrative was not limited to securitising discourses in support of tougher deterrent border controls, however; it also framed interventions in public policy debates made by prominent humanitarian non-governmental organisations. In a report entitled The Mediterranean Migration Crisis: Why People Flee, What the EU Should Do, Human Rights Watch (2015: 22) located the ‘crisis situation in the Mediterranean’ in the wider context of ‘severe hum...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Reclaiming migration: voices from Europe's ‘migrant crisis’
• 1 Narratives of ‘crisis’
• 2 Reclaiming voice
• 3 Rejecting deterrence
• 4 Contesting protection
• 5 Questioning Europe
• 6 Demanding justice
• Conclusion: Precarity, justice, postcoloniality
• Bibliography
• Index