The Multilayered Migration Regime in Turkey: Contested Regionalization, Deceleration and Legal Precarization
Firat Genç, Gerda Heck and Sabine Hess
ABSTRACT
Against the background of the research project on "De-and Re-stabilizations of the European Border Regime", analyzing the recent political attempts by the EU and its member states to regain control over its borders and the movements of migration after the so-called "European refugee crisis" in 2015, this article discusses Turkey's role and position within international migration flows and the EU-driven border regime. Reflecting on the recent history of Turkey's migration and border politics, we argue that academic accounts, which tend to reduce Turkey's role to a simple extension of the EU border regime, are insufficient to explain the current state of affairs in Turkey. Rather, the article sheds light on the contested and multilayered nature of the Turkish migration regime, which can be partly read as reactions to the European Union, but also as an effect of its own foreign and national policy interests. The outcome is a highly hybrid political formation causing ambiguous legal, social, and political limitations for migrants and refugees, reflected in their journeys and in social and political realities, which are discussed as exemplified in the migratory stories of two migrants.
Introduction
Turkey, with a population of over three million refugees, the majority of them from Syria, has lately become focal in the so-called "European refugee crisis." The arrival of nearly 800,000 refugees, who crossed the Aegean Sea during the "summer of migration" of 2015, heading towards North Western European countries, has not only undermined the pillars of the border regime the European Union (EU) and its member states have long sought to construct. It has also opened up a space to reflect anew on Turkey's role and position within international migration flows and the EU-driven "border regime." By the term "border regime," we refer to the recent debate within border studies to conceptualize the border no longer as a line surrounding national territories but as a deterri torialized and ubiquitous "border scape" or assemblage of technologies, laws, institutions, representations, discourses and practices (cf. Balibar 2002). The Transit Migration Research group defines the "border regime" as a "more or less ordered ensemble of practices and knowledge-power-complexes" resulting in a space of heightened contestation and conflicts, whereas the movement of migration is one of its driving forces (Karakayali and Tsianos 2007, 3; Casas-Cortes et al. 2015). The changeable history of the Turkish border regime can be read as an exemplary case.
The debates on the so-called "EU-Turkey deal" of March 2016 (European Council 2016) have made obvious again that Turkey, from the standpoint of the European governments and international governance institutions, has gained an increasingly significant role in governing migration at international and regional scales. However, questions of controlling borders and migrants' mobilities already became, as early as the late 1990s, a matter of negotiations between the Turkish state and the EU (Ịçduygu and Kirişçi 2009; Özçürümez and Şeuses 2011). Since that time, migration, which formerly was neither regarded as a problem to be governed by the Turkish state nor a point for societal worries, has not only become a political issue, but in close relation to the political conceptualizations and problematizations, has also turned into a focus for increasing academic knowledge production (Hess and Karakayali 2007; Hess, Karakayali, and Tsianos 2009; Hess 2012). There has been evolving academic interest focusing on the impact of European externalization politics on Turkey, mainly spurred by the question of how the EU and international and intergovernmental organizations like the International Organization of Migration (IOM) or the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have been trying to bring the Turkish state to follow its rationale (Diivell, Wissink, and van Eerdewijk 2013; Hess and Karakayali 2007; Kirişçi 2007; Ịçduygu 2007, 2011, 2014; Hess 2010). Various articles focus on the juridical aspects of the developing Turkish migration and border regime, such as recently the implementation of the Law on Foreigners and International Protection (Soykan 2011, 2012; Kirişçi 2012). Beyond that, another expanding research approach emphasizes the social conditions and realities of migrants and refugees in Turkey (Şenses 2016; Baban, Ilcan, and Rygiel 2017; Düvell, Wissink, and van Eerdewijk 2013; Heck 2013; Ịçduygu 2015; Özden 2013). Still, many research projects rest on the paradigm of "externalization" as a more or less top-down, EU-driven process. They do so with regard to the "birth of the Turkish migration and border regime"1 in close relation to the growing concerns of the EU in respect to irregular migrants transiting through Turkey (as expressed by the British government at the 2002 Seville Summit2) and the formulation of a comprehensive EU-externalization policy3 (European Commission 2005; Home Office 2002).
In this article, we argue that academic accounts, which tend to reduce Turkey's role to a simple extension of the EU border regime and a passive object of the EU's externalization politics, are insufficient to explain the current migration regime in Turkey. In the following, we elaborate on how the recent history of Turkey's migration and border regime has become entangled with multilayered dynamics that require a deconstruction of well-established conceptualizations like the notion of "externalization"4 in the field of migration and border studies. Even though the construction of Turkey's legal and institutional architecture takes place within the context of the membership negotiations with the EU, there has always been a certain autonomy and set of differing, endogenous geopolitical interests of the Turkish nation state in the process.
Within the scope of the research project on "The de- and re-stabilization of the European border regime"5, and as the research team for Turkey, we carried out ethnographic field research in spring and summer 2016 in Ankara, Istanbul, Izmir and Gaziantep. Besides participant observation at NGO-run centers and field trips to migrant settlements, we conducted over 30 ethnographic guided interviews as well as conversations with migrants, political activists with Turkish and Syrian background, international and Turkish NGOs, and government bodies. Our main research aim was to understand how the EU-Turkey deal has impacted on public policies, discourses, practices, and the realities of the migrants.6 Against the background of our recent findings and our yearlong analytical commitment to the construction of the migration and border regime in Turkey, we will discuss how Turkey's approach towards its border and migration policies is as closely related to the threats and possibilities of Turkish foreign policy on the one hand, and domestic biopolitical power games on the other, as it is to the policies and interests of the EU to produce buffer zones in front of its external borders (Wallace 2001; Duvell, Collier, and de Haas 2012). The border regime that is emerging in Turkey can best be labeled as a very hybrid formation in which the different layers, scales, interests and actors by intersecting with each other, do not produce a linear process but a highly contradictory one full of cracks and ruptures, leading to a specific securitarian-humanitarian dispositive.7 Drawing on Walters' call for a genealogical deconstruction and de-naturalization of the "border" (Walters 2002, 2012), in this article we will first elaborate on the genesis of the Turkish border and migration regime, following a central insight of border studies that the border has become one predominant technology for governing mobile populations and othering them as migrants (Walters 2002; Andreas and Snyder 2000). In doing so, we will shed light on the contested nature of the Turkish border/migration regime, the impact of the European Union, and also the aspirations of the Turkish nation state in regard to its foreign and national policies. Building on the insights of the ethnographic border regime approach—which not only follows the practice-turn in border studies reflected in notions like that of "border work" (Rumford 2008), but also stresses the impact of the movements of migration themselves, influencing, and in fact co-producing, the border regime (Kasparek and Hess 2015; Tsianos and Hess 2010; Hess, Karakayali, and Tsianos 2007)—we subsequently juxtapose these political developments with the migratory stories of two representative migrants who we met during our research in Izmir and at the deportation center of Kirklareli.8 As reflected by and exemplified in their journeys and social realities, we will demonstrate what ambiguities and limitations arise from this specific political and legal formation.
A Short Genealogy of the Turkish Migration Regime
Turkey since the 1980s has been an important bridge for migration movements from neighboring countries in the Middle East and from more distant countries in Asia and Africa towards Europe. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Özal governments, which adopted a pragmatic approach to foreign policy after the collapse of the Soviet state system, implemented a liberal visa regime for the citizens of Balkan, ex-Soviet and Middle Eastern countries to enhance cross border movements and steer trade (Kirişçi 2005, 351; Gene 2015, 535). However, the post-Cold War liberal approach to migratory flows that rested on the idea of the "trading state" (Kirişçi 2009) had limitations and contradictions in itself. The Turkish state's security concerns, especially in regard to its Kurdish population, had restrictive impacts on bordering processes that target certain groups and nationalities (Genç 2015). The AKP (Justice and Development Party) governments since 2002 have to a great extent inherited this liberal approach to migration, in accordance with their political, economic and geostrategic inclinations, in a context wherein the increasing numbers of irregular migrants in Turkey have become a major theme of the accession negotiations with the European Union (Kirişçci 2005; Özçürürumex and Yetkin 2014). Thereby the economic, political and geostrategic dynamics that have made Turkey both a transit and immigration country have also led towards a certain institutionalization of the migration and border regime in close interaction with the European Union since 2000.
Following the EU's Schengen trajectories of establishing external borders in return for lifting the internal ones, externalization soon became a central political paradigm guiding the EU's border regime construction, as Lahav and Guiraudon (2000) state in their seminal work. Already in 1991, the European Commission advocated integrating migration issues into the EU's external policy, and the Edinburgh European Council in December 1992 determined that governance in the areas of foreign policy, economic cooperation, immigration and asylum policy should make a significant contribution regarding the control of migratory movements (Boswell 2003, 621). Accordingly, at the beginning of the millennium, Turkey had become a target for EU-migration control, as was observable in the context of the 2002 Seville Summit (Hess and Karakayali 2007; Ịçduygu and Kirişçi 2009). The accession negotiations for full membership with the EU since 1999 represent the institutional context of this new phase as the EU demands as a requirement for accession the adoption of the so-called Schengen acquis as part of the acquis communautaire regarding visa policy and practice, asylum, border protection, law enforcement, anti-trafficking politics and the introduction of a new migration law (Kirişçci 2007, 8). However, from the very beginning, this institutional and political process has intrinsically been accompanied by contradictions, obstacles and delays (Özçürümez and Yetkin 2014, 448).
On the one hand, Turkey has fulfilled crucial demands of the EU and introduced a series of new laws in recent years (Tolay 2012, 40); it has renewed its laws on work permits and naturalization, adopted the so-called Palermo protocols regarding human trafficking, extended deportation facilities with the financial support of the EU, and intensified the "protection" of Turkish borders in 2006 within the scope of the National Action Plan for the Implementation of Turkey's Integrated Border Management (IBM) Strategy (Haase and Obergfell 2013, 35). In order to create an effective coordination and collaboration in accordance with IMB, the Ministry of Interior established the Directorate of Project Implementation on Integrated Border Management in 2004. This unit, responsible for planning, preparing and administering EU projects on IBM was replaced by the Bureau for Border Management in 2012 (Sert 2013, 177). Finally, the visa regulations have been reformed in accordance with the visa allocation policies of the EU (Tolay 2012, 45).
On the other hand, geopolitical and economic interests within the context of Turkish Middle East- and Africa-politics led in 2005 to the revision of the restrictive visa policy (Gene 2015, 536). This turn was driven by Turkey's new foreign policy orientation that aims to intensify trade and investment opportunities, and to play a greater role in regional and international affairs, with increasing efforts to align with non-Western states (Açikgöz 2015, 102; Börzel and Soyaltin 2012, 14). Accordingly, Turkey began to establish and intensify economic relations towards various African states, and as part of this endeavor, lifted visa restrictions.9 In a similar vein, in 2009 Turkey and Syria introduced a visa exemption agreement for both states, including the formulated aim to create a Schengen -type of joint visa policy together with Iran and Iraq, which would be called "Şamgen" (Gökalp Aras and Mencutek 2015, 199; Özler 2013, 52). The fact that Turkey maintained visa agreements with a series of third countries, listed on the negative list of the EU, has caused lasting resentment on the part of the EU authorities (Haase and Obergfell 2013, 6).10
The Turkish state's refugee and asylum policy has been another element generating constant tension with the EU. Turkey is a signatory to the UN's 1951 Geneva Convention and the 1967 Protocol, but it maintains the geographical limitation clause of the Convention and theref...
