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Borders’ Diffusion as a Response to the “Humanist Crisis”: Towards a Military-Humanitarian Nexus

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Borders, Bodies and Narratives of Crisis in Europe

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the current rhetoric regarding borders and the European migration policy that are built on two complementary foundations. On the one hand, migrants are represented as a multiform “threat” that violently invades the European territory and, on the other hand, as a helpless “victim” revealing a deep “humanist crisis”. Our purpose is to study this humanitarian-military nexus of European migration politics that is based upon “states of emergency”, such as in Lampedusa and Idomeni, leading to borders’ constant transformation and diffusion.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    However, in contrast to the dominant portraiture about “slave traders”, systematically constructed by politicians and the media, the reality is far different. As Khosravi emphatically underlines through his personal experience, “[h]uman smuggling is recurrently misrepresented by the media and politicians as an entirely ‘mafia’-controlled criminality, but this is not the case” (2010: 21).

  2. 2.

    Characteristically, see European Commission (2011); European Commission (2013).

  3. 3.

    According to International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), at least 10,000 died in the Mediterranean in their attempt to cross the European borders in the decade 1993–2003. Accordingly, UNITED for Intercultural Action, an international NGO , estimates that the total number of people who lost their lives during their attempt to cross Europe’s southern borders is about 14,600 for the period 1993–November 2012, while, according to Fortress Europe , that number rises to 14,757 deaths for the period 1988–end of June 2014. More generally, International Organization of Migration (IOM) estimates that between January and September 2014, at least 4,077 migrants died in their attempt to reach various destinations around the world, whereas since 2000, it is estimated that at least 40,000 migrants have died. To these numbers, there are not included those who are still missing and may never be found (Grant 2011; Last and Spijkerboer 2014).

  4. 4.

    He wrote: “Lord, have mercy! Too often we are blinded by our comfortable lives, and refuse to see those dying at our doorstep” (Pope Francis 2013).

  5. 5.

    However, as it becomes manifest through migrants’ personal stories and daily struggles, the status of the victim does not imply an irrevocable passivity and the absence of any kind of agency; “[a] victim image opens up possibilities not only for partaking in lucrative emergency aid projects but also for the creation of compassionate bonds with important social actors […]” (Utas 2005: 409).

  6. 6.

    Historically, the whole culture of humanitarianism has been built upon the notions of “crisis ” and “emergency”. For some interesting examples, see Pandolfi (2003, 2010).

  7. 7.

    EUROSUR was approved by 479 votes to 101, with 20 abstentions (European Parliament 2013a).

  8. 8.

    Just a few months after the tragedy of Lampedusa , 11 Afghani people, including eight children, lost their lives, when their boat sank near the small Greek island of Farmakonisi, in the Aegean Sea, on 20 January 2014. People who survived claimed that they were towed at great speed by the Greek coastguard back towards Turkey (Amnesty International 2015).

  9. 9.

    Quite characteristically, Apostolos Tzitzikostas, governor of the Greek region of Central Macedonia, stated at The Guardian: “It’s a huge humanitarian crisis. I have [asked] the government to declare a state of emergency in the area” (cited in Smith 2016; emphasis added).

  10. 10.

    See, http://webtv.ert.gr/ert1/eidiseis/07mar2016-2100-deltio-idiseon/.

  11. 11.

    See, http://webtv.ert.gr/category/ert1/eidiseis/news-prosfyges/. To this direction, the Greek Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, commented on Twitter: “We are greeting the initiative by ERT and ANA-MPA [Athens News Agency – Macedonian Press Agency] to broadcast valid information for refugees in their language” (2016).

  12. 12.

    For a recent article on the conditions on the island of Samos, published at The Guardian in November 2017, see Christides and Stefatou (2017). More generally, on migrants’ ill-treatment in Greece , see also Sitaropoulos (2017).

  13. 13.

    Within this context, the “Updated Schengen Rules” were published in September 2017 (European Commission 2017).

  14. 14.

    On SIS, SIRENE, EURODAC and VIS, see Broeders (2007, 2011); Mathiesen (1999).

  15. 15.

    By combining the term “Ban” by Jean-Luc Nancy, as it was reformulated by Giorgio Agamben , and the “Panopticon” by Michel Foucault , Didier Bigo introduced the concept of “Ban-opticon” to describe the situation in Western societies, as it has been consolidated after 9/11. For Bigo, the “Ban-opticon” is characterised “by the exceptionalism of power (rules of emergency and their tendency to become permanent), by the way it excludes certain groups in the name of their future potential behaviour (profiling) and by the way it normalizes the non-excluded through its production of normative imperatives, the most important of which is free movement (the so-called four freedoms of circulation of the EU : concerning goods, capital , information, services and persons)” (2008: 32). Accordingly, Bigo claims that the detention camp for migrants is within the frame of the Banopticon the equivalent of what the prison is within the frame of the Foucauldian Panopticon (2007).

  16. 16.

    According to Clarke’s definition, “[d]ataveillance is the systematic use of personal data systems in the investigation or monitoring of the actions or communications of one or more persons” (1988: 499; emphasis in the original). On the concept of “dataveillance”, see Clarke (1988); Levi and Wall (2004); Amoore and De Goede (2005).

  17. 17.

    Quite indicative of the exploitation of these tragedies is that even in the case of Alan Kurdi, for whom so many tears were spilt, so many declarations were made, so many pieces of art were created, the boy’s name remained wrongly known as “Aylan”, as it had been initially transmitted, and no one felt the need to correct this mistake. As Butler is wondering: “Will we feel compelled to learn how to say these names and to remember them?” (2004: 37).

  18. 18.

    As it is rightly asserted, “‘[i]nside’ and ‘outside’ are not clearly demarcated; the inside relies on the outside for its coherence and for the cognition of its limits” (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2004: 34).

  19. 19.

    According to Pijpers and van Houtum, “[g]ated communities express a clear-cut form of socio-spatial insolidarity, of the purification of space, by shutting the gates for the ‘outside’ world under the flag of privacy, comfort and security. […]. The gates of the gated community are not only a result of the desire to produce a space for the outsider, the stranger, but even more so, a purified space for the insider” (2005). In other words, the term describes this situation of “walls within walls” (Brown 2010) that we are witnessing at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Thanasis Lagios & Grigoris Panoutsopoulos

  2. Hellenic Open University, Patras, Greece

    Vasia Lekka

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  1. Thanasis Lagios
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  2. Vasia Lekka
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  3. Grigoris Panoutsopoulos
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Lagios, T., Lekka, V., Panoutsopoulos, G. (2018). Borders’ Diffusion as a Response to the “Humanist Crisis”: Towards a Military-Humanitarian Nexus. In: Borders, Bodies and Narratives of Crisis in Europe. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75586-1_4

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