Policing Mobility Regimes

Frontex and the Production of the European Borderscape

Giuseppe Campesi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000441659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politische Korruption & Fehlverhalten

More than 30 years after its birth, the Schengen area of free movement is under siege in Europe: new barriers are being erected along land borders, military assets are increasingly deployed to patrol the Mediterranean, while sophisticated surveillance tools are used to keep track of the flows of people crossing into European space.

Bringing together perspectives from political geography, critical criminology and legal theory, Policing Mobility Regimes offers a systematic analysis of the impact that Frontex is having on migration control strategies at the EU level and offers a detailed empirical description of the agency's organization and operational activities. In addition, this book explores the meaning behind the attempt at developing a post-national border control strategy and what effect this might have on the geopolitics of Europe's borders. It contributes to the wider theoretical debate on the relationships among migration, security and the transformation of borders in contemporary Europe.

An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to all those engaged with criminology, sociology, geography, politics and law as well as all those interested in learning about Europe's changing borders.

Chapter 1

Migration, security and borders

DOI: 10.4324/9780429291548-1

Our political imagination abounds of spatial metaphors, including that of the crucial internal–external dichotomy (Walker 1994; Galli 2001). The state is traditionally described as a ‘container’ that encloses a territorial area, insulating it from the external environment (Giddens 1983: 120; Kratochwil 1986; Taylor 1994). This idea has specific implications for the way the function of providing security (i.e., the task of ensuring order and protecting citizens from threats), which modern political philosophy traditionally ascribes to the state, is performed. This function is in fact often thought of by using the domestic metaphor and making reference to the idea of ‘homeland’ as a place of order and security protected from the uncertainty that reigns outside. From this perspective, the control of borders is one of the most important protective functions the state must perform (Escobar 1997). Borders epitomize the ‘threshold’ that clearly separates the inside from the outside, a social institution whose key function is to offer a precise spatial orientation to our conception of security. Inwardly, they define and identify a space of peace and order, in which domestic law is in force and conflicts are resolved by the state's monopoly over the legitimate use of coercive means. Outwardly, borders are essentially conceived of as military barriers protecting a state's legitimate sphere of autonomy (its domestic jurisdiction), distinguishing it from that of other states. Borders ultimately denote the spatial projection of the functions of ensuring internal peace and protecting national security, functions that traditionally are assigned to different branches of the state: the police apparatus in the former case and the diplomatic-military apparatus in the latter case (Foucault 2007).

This book analyses the redefinition of the European Union (EU) border regime and describes the emergence of a post-national border control model. I begin my analysis by discussing one of the most fundamental aspects of this process: namely the redefinition of the relationship between the two dimensions of security that traditionally have been articulated in terms of the internal–external dichotomy. The classic ‘Westphalian’ model of borders draws on a specific geopolitical vision of security, where security is ultimately understood bi-dimensionally as the protection of the internal peace and defence of the territorial integrity of the state from external threats¹. Over the past two decades, however, many have described a shift in security policies, with a decisive move in the direction of overcoming the traditional internal–external dichotomy (Anderson 1995; Bigo 2001; Lutterbeck 2005). This shift implies a loss of relevance for the traditional politico-military dimension of the border, and a corresponding elevation of the function of policing cross-border movements to the level of ‘high politics.’ The outcome of this process is that those Andreas (2003) has termed ‘clandestine transnational actors’ – that is, non-state actors who move in the transnational space trying to exploit the uncertainty of the regulatory framework and the partial lowering of border controls due to economic liberalization – have been increasingly redefined as new strategic threats. This new security discourse links completely different social issues – such as transnational crime, smuggling of goods and unauthorized migration – within a homogeneous epistemic framework, giving an unprecedented centrality in the field of strategic studies to phenomena traditionally of limited interest to security experts. This is especially true with regard to the control of unauthorized migration, which, for security experts, has come to encapsulate the dangers and threats associated with increasing uncontrolled cross-border movements.

The EU is a particularly interesting case. The evolution of migration policies that took place in the shadow of the Schengen regime has ended up making indisputable the role of security experts in the management and surveillance of human mobility across borders. The police thus have been given a role that exceeds their classic crime prevention function, while at the same time reinforcing the perception of migration as a security issue. As described by Carrera (2010: 10): ‘The linkage of border controls with “police” (understood as a law enforcement authority) has led to an underlying presumption that the movement of people is a suspicious activity potentially linked with criminality and organized crime. It has placed certain persons on the move, especially those labelled as “immigrants,” at the heart of insecurity discourses and practices.’ At the same time, other administrative agencies that historically have played a role in the management of human mobility across borders have been entrusted with increasingly extensive powers over migrants’ personal freedom and have ended up assuming a coercive function that has brought them very close to the role performed by classic criminal justice agencies (Stumpf 2006). This has led to the emergence of a migration control regime that lies somewhere between the spheres of criminal law and administrative law, in which the agents of control can encroach on migrants’ fundamental freedoms without being hampered by the legal and procedural constraints typical of the criminal justice system (Weber and Bowling 2004: 200).

Another key feature of this new migration control regime is its distinctly transnational character. Increasingly, human mobility is governed by a complex of political and legal instruments that brought with it ‘a de-facto transnationalism in the handling of a growing number of immigration issues, both domestically and internationally’ (Sassen 1999: 178–179). Aimed at the control and surveillance of a population that explicitly challenges national borders with its mobility, the policing of migration is today one of the most obvious examples of the progressive erosion of the internal–external dichotomy that traditionally has characterized our geopolitical conception of security (Weber and Bowling 2004: 199; Bowling and Sheptycki 2012: 102). Again, the EU border regime is a particularly significant example in the increasing transnationalization of migration policing. With the creation of the Schengen area of free movement, old national borders in fact have been replaced by a transnational space of police cooperation on the joint management of the new common external border. Within this space, a narrative has developed which has increasingly framed unauthorized movements across borders as a new threat transcending the circumscribed dimension of domestic public order and security. The outcome of this process has been a substantial de-territorialization of the idea of security within the EU and, ultimately, it may result in a redefinition of the function borders perform as a protective apparatus.

The evolution of the EU border regime has stimulated the emergence of what Bigo has described as a ‘continuum’ between the previously distinct dimensions of external and internal security policies. This security continuum has created a specific field in which security experts ‘beyond the state’ are gaining increasingly prominent roles in the definition of risks and the production of knowledge on security, stimulating in this way the development of the institutions and technologies called upon to govern risks and insecurities on a scale that exceeds the geopolitical dimension of the nation state (Bigo 2000; 2006; Anderson and Bigo 2003; Sheptycki 2002). The emergence of this field of transnational security experts has not only strengthened the nexus between migration and security as perceived by EU policymakers but also has transformed the EU border regime into a complex transnational ‘security technology’ for governing human mobility across European space.

Migration securitization

The concept of ‘securitization’ has been employed by the so-called Copenhagen school of security studies to indicate the process by which the understanding of a particular political and social phenomenon comes to be viewed through a ‘security prism.’ The reference is to a process of social construction that pushes an ordinary sector of politics into the sphere of security policies, where this is done independently of the actual relevance of the supposed threat, with the aim of justifying the adoption of special measures contrary to the existing legal framework on the protection of individual fundamental freedoms or breaking with ordinary procedures for democratic policymaking. In particular, an issue becomes securitized thanks to the actions of political actors and security experts who manage to channel people's fears towards certain issues, thus gaining support for their intervention or the extension of their prerogatives. As suggested by Waever (1995: 65), ‘when a problem is “securitized”, the act tends to lead to specific ways of addressing it: Threat, defense, and often state-centered solutions.’

Traditionally, the study of security policies has been approached from two different disciplinary perspectives. On the one hand, in the field of international relations and strategic studies, the focus has been on threats to national security (Buzan and Hansen 2009); on the other hand, in the field of criminology, the focus has traditionally been on the issue of public order and internal security of the state (Zedner 2009). This ‘division of labour’ in the study of security policies has been called into question by the weakening of the internal–external dichotomy that traditionally has determined the parameters of these disciplines. In spite of this, the main referent object of security has remained the state, whereas the aim of security policies continues to be the protection of territorial integrity and internal order. An attempt to overcome this traditional state-centred notion of security has taken place with the emergence of the notion of ‘societal security,’ which, according to Waever (1993), refers to the ability of a society to maintain its essential characteristics even in the face of social change and under the pressure of potential threats. In particular, the idea of societal security entails an enlargement of the notion of ‘threat,’ given that, according to this perspective, security policies should address not just military or criminal threats, but every phenomenon capable of calling into question the fundamental identitarian, economic and social dimensions on which the survival of a community is supposed to depend. Although this paradigm is innovative with respect to the traditional state-centred notion of security, the societal security paradigm is nevertheless inextricably linked with a communitarian perspective, thus further reinforcing the traditional exclusionary logic of every discourse on security.

Things which threaten the presumed fixedness of the inside versus the outside of states and societies are sources of insecurity and this gives rise to the logic of the classical security problematique. The logic is one of exclusion which depends upon an understanding of self and other that is inextricably linked with territory. Solutions/policy prescriptions for addressing security threats will rely upon an exclusionary logic that seeks to determine the criteria for differentiation between self and other.

(Lynn Doty 1998: 80)

Over the past few decades, migration has gone through a process of intense securitization in spite of the fact that the nexus between migration and security is not obvious (Huysmans 2000, 2006; Bigo 2002; Ceyhan and Tsoukal 2002; Karyotis 2007; Guild 2009; Van Munster 2009). During the 19th century, migration policies were commonly considered to be a specific dimension of a state's foreign policy, and human mobility was assimilated with international trade. Later on, the main focus of m...