The Anthropology of Security

Perspectives from the Frontline of Policing, Counter-terrorism and Border Control

Mark Maguire, Catarina Frois, Nils Zurawski, Mark Maguire, Catarina Frois, Nils Zurawski

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783711635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Aus- & Einwanderung

In a post-Cold War world of political unease and economic crisis, processes of securitisation are transforming nation-states, their citizens and non-citizens in profound ways. The book shows how contemporary Europe is now home to a vast security industry which uses biometric identification systems, CCTV and quasi-military techniques to police migrants and disadvantaged neighbourhoods. This is the first collection of anthropological studies of security with a particular but not exclusive emphasis on Europe. The Anthropology of Security draws together studies on the lived experiences of security and policing from the perspective of those most affected in their everyday lives. The anthropological perspectives in this volume stretch from the frontlines of policing and counter-terrorism to border control.

1

Sarkozy and Roma: Performing Securitisation¹

Marion Demossier

‘Hey, Hey, Sarkozy, why don’t you like the gypsies?’ chanted the Romanian rock group Vama on YouTube in autumn, 2010.² The anthem was inspired by the waves of Roma deportations orchestrated by the French government earlier that year. Against the background of a no-man’s-land, the band performed its interpretation of the ‘essential crisis’ being played out by Sarkozy. At first glance, it seems like an imaginative denunciation of the French President’s Roma integration policies. However, a close ethnographic reading reveals a series of subtle divisions within the meanings located at the heart of the crisis – meanings that this chapter will scrutinise. Mocking the state as personified by Sarkozy (l’État, c’est moi!) rather than the French nation, presenting Gypsies as a nation-state issue, and playing on national/European cultural markers of belonging, the song crystallises some key performative features of the nation during an ‘essential crisis’. By ‘crisis’ I mean the construction of Roma as a security threat through media and journalistic narration. By constructing Roma as an internal security crisis through stylised and repetitive bodily acts of expulsions and through a language reaffirming their existence as an essential ontological actor, the French state performs through ‘the reiterative power of discourse the phenomena that it regulates and constrains’ (Butler 1993: 2). As a result, it creates its own existence in the context of wider economic, social and political configurations and at a time when its legitimacy is arguably waning. How the crisis has been framed, for whom, with what results and under what conditions are the key questions at the core of this chapter.

My anthropological investigation of the crisis relies on the study of texts, news reports, images, government documents, discourses, speeches and other forms of communication.³ I include analyses of websites as cultural products and as avenues into cultural understandings about migration and nation in European contexts. The primacy of the visual and speech acts in securitisation processes suggests the need for analysis of performance and audience. This is why they are at the core of my analysis of the construction of the crisis.

An ‘Essential Crisis’

The Roma crisis came to national prominence following the events of 16 July 2010 in Saint-Aignan (Loir et Cher département) when Luigi Duquenet, a French citizen, was killed by a gendarme while escaping from a road-block. The following weekend, the police station in Saint-Aignan, a bakery, several cars and traffic lights were damaged by approximately 40 gens du voyage.⁴ Several other incidents occurred at the same location that weekend. Thereafter, President Sarkozy announced a crisis meeting on ‘Roma and gens du voyage’ to address the ‘problem associated with some individuals belonging to the community’.⁵ Sarkozy’s speech on 30 July 2010 following agitation in the Villeneuve district near Grenoble – described by some commentators as the Grenoble speech – represents the first peak of the crisis. Emphasising authority, order and securitisation of immigration and crime, Sarkozy put the Roma issue on the national agenda by comparing the illegal camps of Roma and the gens du voyage as a ‘zone de non droit’ (lawless enclave).⁶ He pledged to dismantle camps that were not recognised legally, repeating a promise he made in October 2002 as the then Interior Minister.⁷ A series of orchestrated and publicised expulsions followed in different parts of France, including Marseille, Lyon, Lille and the suburbs of Paris. Drastic measures were also announced, such as possible suspension of child benefits and loss of French citizenship (Libération, 31 July 2010). Eric Fassin (2010b) and Alexandra Nacu (2011) argue that the Roma crisis emerges from contemporary French nationalist fears of the foreign rather than from the Roma. Yet the construction of Roma is characterised by distinct and complex political and cultural processes of ‘othering’ that I wish to explore here.

Another crucial dimension of the crisis is the battle between France and the European Union (EU) over the treatment of Roma who are legally European citizens entitled to freedom of movement following the 2007 accession of Romania and Bulgaria. Indeed, Viviane Reading, EU Justice Commissioner responsible for upholding these rights for EU citizens, fuelled a bitter row over the French deportation of Roma by comparing the policy to Nazi round-ups of Gypsies and Jews during the Second World War. The publication of a French ministerial circular openly targeting Roma as an ethnic group and subsequent public debates also illustrate the tensions between the EU and France over the implementation of European legislation.⁸ These events also raise underlying questions about the nature of sovereignty and political trust as EU officials were misled during formal meetings with Eric Besson (French Interior Minister) and Pierre Lellouche (France’s European Minister). Despite visible embarrassment, French politicians and European leaders brushed the Roma affair under the carpet.

What is striking about the crisis is that the press and social commentators interpreted it as a performative act: a process by which group identity is essentialised, reinforced and communicated. Following Gregory Feldman’s (2005) approach to performativity, the crisis unfolded through repetitions (almost daily reference to the topic in French newspapers, especially during the summer), regular periods of expulsions, key speeches by the President and the Interior Minister, and practices of representation (pictures of expulsions in the press and the news), creating the reiterative power of discourse to produce the Roma crisis.⁹ This construction of Roma has produced its own economic, cultural and political imaginary landscape through specific relational practices embedded in institutional arrangements that construct essentialised subjects – Roma, securitisation and the French nation – in reference to each other. For Feldman (2005), threats identified in global processes serve as foils against which the nation-state constitutes itself, enabling it to assert its own ontological existence. Here Roma are constructed as ‘aliens’, a cause of economic and societal instability, displaced bodies without territorial roots who are denied their national, European and even human rights. At the same time, Roma are presented as a threat to both French cultural essentialism and republicanism with their territorial forms of belonging and citizenship (jus solis). We must note, to borrow from Didier Fassin in this volume, that security itself creates insecurity. According to Paloma Gay y Blasco (2008: 299):

The resilience and dominance of the image of the wandering Gypsy needs to be investigated and its effects closely examined, if only because today the majority of European Roma are not nomadic and because the Roma populations of many European countries have been sedentary for several centuries.

By coupling Roma with second- or third-generation migrants and gens du voyage, they become part of a wider threat to the fragile nation. As Gupta and Ferguson (1997: 4) argue, the Hobbesian idea of culture as orderly and set against the ever-present threat of chaos and anomie is a powerful and prevailing idea in Western thought and politics. Yet here it takes a new form: Roma are presented as being without a national territory, in constant transit and belonging to a different kind of repertoire; their social construction is constantly on the move, which resonates with the main features of economic globalisation and grates against French national ideology. These, to borrow from the Introduction to this volume, are some of the emergent material, historical and socio-economic conditions for the (in)securitisation of Roma.

Performing Securitisation and Reformulating French Republicanism

Drawing from Feldman (2005) and critical theories of French republicanism, this chapter engages critically with the politics of subjectification – the processes by which individuals are constituted as social beings within complex configurations of meaning and political strategies. I argue that the Roma example is more complex than a binary opposition between the French state and Roma. Rather, the process of subjectification and categorisation is inscribed onto complex political, social, ideological and cultural contexts. I suggest a more nuanced analysis of how politics and the nation have responded to global forces and especially to EU expansion. This new context requires a subtle analysis of political rationalities, one that must attend to the republican framework, its ongoing contestation and its actual realities.

The last decade has seen a lively scholarly debate about Europe, the nation-state and immigration policies. A broad interdisciplinary literature has mushroomed and a more comparative European framework has been adopted. Anthropologists who traditionally focused on language and culture as lenses onto reconfigurations of the nation-state now argue that neo-nationalism results in a redefinition of internal and external boundaries. For example, Steiner (2000: 9) notes that language is a powerful tool for setting the political agenda, and in order to understand politics we must attend to the actions of political actors and to their rhetoric. Equally, Gullestad (2002) analyses transformations in Norway where equality is configured as ‘imagined sameness’ underpinning a growing ethnicisation of national identity via immigration debates. Socio-political closures and discrimination become rationalised ideologically in an otherwise economically globalised world. As Gullestad (2002: 176) argues:

Cultural fundamentalism and the essentialism which goes hand in hand with it does reify culture, but it is, in reality, about relationships between cultures understood as bounded, internally homogenous, integrated and exclusive entities. As a result, forms of behaviour and meaning attached to the definition of the nation are thought to be inevitably threatened by foreigners who by definition have a different culture.

When these discursive and performative constructions circulate in the national imaginary, they are, in principle, debated, especially when transformed into visible policies. Yet, as powerful tropes of national reification they gather power in moments of confusion and chaos. As Feldman argues (2005: 218), by reconceptualising the relationship between the state and the immigrant minority as mutually constitutive the issue of whether or not the nation-state wanes in the face of globalisation becomes less relevant. The identification of nationals/non-nationals is essential to the state. Citizenship, minority rights and integration policy are fundamental to nation-state legitimacy and authority – an international cultural grammar of nationhood (Lofgren 1989). Much of the literature has focused on the construction of nation-state performances. In contrast, here I wish to explore the Roma crisis as a dynamic and complex site of engagement in which the securitisation agenda becomes ‘fashionable’ while being operational (see the Introduction to this volume).

According to Saskia Sassen (1996), nation-states try to rehabilitate their sovereignty by exercising power over immigrants and refugees. The Roma ‘essential crisis’ is a moment in which one sees the reification of the state against migrants. According to Jacobson (1996: 2–3), the state is becoming less of a sovereign agent in the face of an international and constitutional order based on human rights, yet this process is far from being straightforward and resistance is emerging from political actors and from the state. It therefore becomes clear why nations reify their citizenship discourse using it as a powerful instrument of social closure (Brubaker 1992). Post-national and nation-state membership should not be regarded as mutually exclusive (Nordberg 2004: 721); rather the Roma crisis emerges from an entangled and counterintuitive mix of motives (Steiner 2000: 17).

The French republican model, emphasising universalist ideals of integration and aiming to transform migrants into full citizens, has been described by political scientists as the antithesis of the British model, which configures integration as a matter of allowing ethnicity to mediate societal relations and public order (Favell 1998: 34). This is no longer a tenable position. It is undeniable that European integration has transformed debates about immigration and the nation-state, institutional order and policy-making. Jennings (2000) traces three types of responses in French intellectual circles. First, the traditionalist view rejects multiculturalism and reasserts the orthodox republican principles of the secular state. Second, modernising republicanism endorses elements of cultural pluralism while maintaining the validity ...