From Sangatte to ‘The Jungle’: Europe’s Contested Borderlands

Abstract

In September 2009, after riot police destroyed ‘The Jungle’ — a settlement of provisional tents of undocumented migrants in the forests around the French harbour city of Calais — in a cloak-and-dagger operation, some dozen Afghani men assembled in the morning. They were holding banners such as ‘The jungle is our house. Plz. don’t destroy it. If you do so, where is the place to go?’ (Calais Migrant Solidarity, 2009; BBC News, 22 September 2009).¹ The destruction of the informal settlements as well as the protests by the migrants mark a decade of contestation and political mobilisation in those borderlands. The dynamic can be summarised as follows: refugees and migrants come to the Channel tunnel in order to reach the UK; police and private security from transportation firms try to stop them; at the local level, the population is split between those supporting the undocumented migrants out of political or humanistic motivations and those fighting ‘illegal migration’; and politicians and parties try to capitalise on the conflicts. The Channel tunnel, Calais and the village Sangatte, where the Red Cross set up a shelter for the migrants, have become a synonymous with this conflict.