Everyday Border Struggles

Segregation and Solidarity in the UK and Calais

Thom Tyerman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000375954
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines everyday borders in the UK and Calais as sites of ethical political struggle between segregation and solidarity.

In an age of mobility, borders appear to be everywhere. Encountered more and more in our everyday lives, borders locally enact global divisions and inequalities of power, wealth, and identity. Critically examining everyday borders in the UK and Calais, Tyerman shows them to be sites of ethical political struggle. From the Calais 'jungle' to the UK's 'hostile environment', it shows how borders are carried out through practices of everyday segregation that make life for some but not others unliveable. At the same time, it reveals the practices of everyday solidarity with which people on the move confront these segregating borders. This book sheds light on the complex ways borders entrench themselves in our lives, the complicity of ordinary people in their enactment, and the seductive power they continue to assert over our political imaginations.

Of general interest to scholars and students working on issues of migration, borders, citizenship, and security in international politics, sociology, and philosophy this book will also appeal to practitioners in areas of migrant rights, asylum advocacy, anti-detention or deportation campaigning, human rights, direct democracy, and community organising.

1

European border apartheid

Crisis, racism, and segregation

In this chapter, I first contextualise this book within a broader context of the so-called European ‘migration crisis’ and dominant responses to it. Second, I argue we should situate these responses, and Europe’s borders generally, within a longer post/colonial¹ history of racialised divisions of humanity, segregation, and mobility control which form the basis for a world order today characterised as ‘global apartheid’. Finally, I go on to introduce my focus on the everyday enactment of borders through segregation in order to explain how this global apartheid, and the inheritances of empire it upholds, is reproduced and resisted.

European Union migration crisis

The development of a hostile environment in the United Kingdom (UK), and the events in Calais discussed in this book, did not occur in a vacuum and cannot be understood in isolation. On 30 December 2015, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported over 1 million people had entered the European Union (EU) irregularly by sea that year, the majority (84%) coming from the highest refugee-producing countries including Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, and Eritrea (Clayton & Holland, 2015). Marking a fivefold increase on 2014, uniquely 80% of crossings occurred between Turkey and Greece rather than between North Africa and Italy. In the final week of October 2015 alone, 56,000 people arrived on the Greek islands (WatchTheMed Alarm Phone, 2017; 57). A further estimated 34,000 people had crossed by land from Turkey to Greece and Bulgaria that year.

This unexpected increase in unauthorised migration and refugee arrivals into Europe was partly the result of a rise in forcibly displaced people to 63.5 million worldwide, the highest levels since the Second World War (UNHCR, 2015; 5²). It was also a reaction by people on the move to changes in European border control policy. The decision to end Frontex³ search and rescue operation Mare Nostrum in October 2014 and replace it with limited operations Triton and Poseidon resulted in making the central Mediterranean route from Libya to Italy even more life-threatening. On 10 February 2015, 300 people drowned in the central Mediterranean. On 13 April 400, people died, and less than a week later on 19 April 800, people drowned when their boat sank off the coast of Libya, among them young children (Bonomolo & Kirchgaessner, 2015; The Migrant Files, 2016).

These events were quickly interpreted in terms of ‘crisis’ by European media and governmental institutions (New Keywords Collective, 2016): as a crisis of European security/governance and a crisis of European humanitarianism. I suggest we also must understand this as a crisis of European racism. In doing so, I resist naturalising the dominant narrative that the movement of people is inherently problematic and instead trace how Europe’s borders are implicated in a wider racialised politics of segregation which has a long history.

Crisis of security/governance

From the start, EU authorities’ response to the twin ‘crises’ presented by the drowned bodies of migrants in the Mediterranean revolved around ‘saving lives and securing external borders’ (European Commission, 2015; 10). The European Migration plan released on 13 May 2015 proposed: strengthening Frontex search and rescue efforts in the Mediterranean; increasing anti-smuggling operations in North Africa; developing a Europe-wide scheme for relocation and resettlement of refugees; coordinating with states such as Libya, Niger, and Turkey to ‘tackle migration upstream’; and establishing ‘hotspots’ for containing migrants, taking fingerprints and other biometric details for EU-wide databases, processing asylum claims, and facilitating their relocation or deportation. Collaboration on border policing was to be combined with shared responsibility for refugee relocation between EU countries.

However, this collaboration was quickly challenged by nationalist governments in Europe. On 19 May in a speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán decried the European relocation scheme for refugees as ‘absurd’, ‘insane’, and ‘crazy’, arguing it was each nation-state’s right to decide how to enforce their own borders (2015b). For Orbán, any relocation only confirmed his fascistic paranoia that migration to Europe is ‘a planned, orchestrated campaign, a mass of people directed towards us’ implemented from Brussels ‘to redraw the religious and cultural map of Europe and to reconfigure its ethnic foundations, thereby eliminating nation-states’ and paving the way for a liberal internationalist order (Orbán, 2015a). In July 2015, the Hungarian government introduced severe restrictions on asylum seekers as it began constructing a 110-mile-long 4-metre-high fence to block refugee movements from Greece along the ‘Western Balkans route’ into central Europe. Over the next few months, further national legislation was introduced criminalising irregular border crossing and allowing military force to be used against migrants. Across Eastern Europe, new fences were erected on the Hungarian–Croatian border, the Macedonian–Greek border, and extended on the Bulgarian–Turkish border. While these ‘external’ borders were securitised and militarised, EU member states including Austria, Germany, Slovenia, and France reintroduced ‘internal’ border controls, effectively suspending operation of the Schengen zone of free movement in Europe.⁴

These border security responses to the migration ‘crisis’ were in turn perceived as throwing EU institutions and principles into ‘crisis’. In September 2015, Speaker for the European Parliament Martin Schulz warned ‘the Schengen treaty is under threat, that’s absolutely clear’ and a ‘deeper split of the union is a risk’ (Schulz in Traynor, 2015). In January 2016, EU President Donald Tusk described the ‘migration and refugee crisis’ as ‘an existential challenge for the EU’, linking it to terrorism, Brexit, and the resilience of the single market (Tusk, 2016a). The migration ‘crisis’ was seen as a problem of governance, the proposed solution to which was European collective management to regain control of migration and secure the functioning of the Union.

Exporting Europe’s borders

Facing resistance to refugee relocation schemes within Europe, efforts focused on devising bilateral and multilateral agreements with neighbouring non-EU governments for externalising EU border security. Under the Khartoum and Rabat Processes, the Valletta Summit in November 2015 saw EU and African states agree to cooperate on preventing irregular migration and dismantling smuggling networks in return for EU development funding (European Council, 2015).⁵ Evoking racialised rhetoric of ‘floods’ of migrants from the global South, EU policy aims to ‘intervene upstream in regions of origin and of transit’ to prevent their appearance on Europe’s shores in the first place (EU Commission, 2015; 5). Through numerous ‘partnerships’ with third country governments, security forces, and regional actors (including in Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Mali, and Niger), the EU sought to export the enforcement of its borders and the pre-emptive management of ‘displaced’ persons in return for financial investments towards development, state-building, training police and defence forces, enhancing border capabilities, relocation schemes between third countries, and job creation (European Commission, 2018; 11–15). Furthermore, the EU has expedited deportations by agreeing ‘return and readmission’ schemes with third countries in exchange for investment in ‘reintegration’ programmes and visa liberalisation (ibid; 15–16). This trade-off is also envisaged as a disciplining mechanism with the EU proposing ‘stricter’ visa conditions on ‘nationals of non-EU countries that do not cooperate satisfactorily on return and readmission’ (ibid; 17).

Similar initiatives formed the basis of a deal between the EU and Turkey finalised in March 2016 (European Council, 2016a). The EU–Turkey ‘Statement’ established the return of all ‘irregular’ migrants crossing from Turkey to Greece, committed Turkey to internally policing its borders and preventing the emergence of new routes into the EU, and implemented a ‘one in one out’ resettlement programme for Syrian refugees between the EU and Turkey. In return, the EU provided financial assistance to Syrian refugees residing in Turkey and promised to accelerate the process of visa liberalisation for Turkish nationals. Prior to the statement’s publication Donald Tusk declared ‘the days of irregular migration to the European Union are over’ (2016b).

Further summits in 2017 at Malta and 2019 at Sharm El-Sheikh saw European collusion in strengthening the security apparatuses of neighbouring authoritarian regimes. In Sudan, European funds went to the paramilitary Rapid Security Force, responsible for ethnic cleansing in Darfur but now rebranded as the primary border control authority (Baldo, 2017). In 2017, Italy and Libya agreed a bilateral ‘Memorandum’ establishing close cooperation on border security, including Italian funding and ‘support to security and military institutions in order to stem the illegal migrants’ fluxes’ (Odysseus Network, 2017). The result is armed groups and militias within the civil war, with variable affiliation to the Government of National Accord, now play a primary role in border security and migration control in the Central Mediterranean. These groups, many participating in the smuggling networks they are funded to dismantle, intercept migrants leaving Libya and return them to detention centres they control, where human rights abuses including torture and extortion of migrants are widely reported (Human Rights Watch, 2019).

Crisis of humanitarianism

While the EU–Turkey agreement seemingly resolved the EU’s border security/governance ‘crisis’, it exacerbated another ‘crisis’ concerning Europe’s humanitarian identity. Politicians ranging from German Chancellor Angela Merkel (2015) to European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (2015) frequently appealed for a response to refugee arrivals based on European ‘values’ of humanity and historic empathy with those displaced by war. On 31 August 2015, Merkel declared: ‘If Europe fails on the question of refugees, if this close connection is broken, then it won’t be the Europe we wished for’ (quoted in Eddy, 2015). After the shipwreck on 19 April, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi evoked the language of humanitarian intervention, comparing the disaster to the 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, saying ‘today it’s not possible to close our eyes again and only commemorate these events later’ (Bonomolo & Kirchgaessner, 2015). When images of a drowned Syrian child, Alan Kurdi, were published on 2 September, this was seen as producing a wave of humanitarian sentiment towards refugees, helping mobilise grassroots campaigns and protests as well as shifting state leaders’ positions on the ‘crisis’.⁶

Throughout 2015–2016, ordinary people, migrants, and EU citizens acting in solidarity organised autonomously to challenge the securitisation of Europe’s borders. For example, on 27 August 2015, after finding 71 refugees dead in a lorry in Vienna, the Austrian government reintroduced restrictive border controls with Hungary. When the Hungarian police intervened to prevent migrants boarding westbound trains at Budapest Keleti station, hundreds...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 European border apartheid: Crisis, racism, and segregation
• 2 Everyday border segregation in the UK: Creating a ‘hostile environment’
• 3 Everyday border segregation in Calais: Embodied encounters
• 4 The Calais ‘Jungle’ camp: Humanitarianism, biopolitics, and the politics of forgetting
• 5 Theorising everyday migrant politics: Struggles with the seduction of borders
• 6 Everyday solidarity: Relations of ‘common’ humanity
• Index