Mobile and Fatal: The EU Borders

Abstract

The tragedy of October 3, 2013, off the coast of Lampedusa (Italy), in which 306 men, women and children died while fleeing countries devastated by war or dictatorships (Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia, among others) in search of a better life, reminds us of the cruel fate that has confronted tens of thousands of migrants each year — for the past two decades — in the Mediterranean region. However, few can remember the case of the 19-year-old Afghan migrant found dead on August 13, 2012, on the banks of the Evros (the river on the border between Greece and Turkey) in the region of Marasia,¹ or the 22 Africans who fell overboard from their boat during heavy winds off the coast of Almeria² in the south of Spain. The European Union and its member states with their warmongering practices are among those who are primarily responsible for such disasters that have led to the deaths of thousands of people in the Mediterranean Sea. However, in the Mediterranean region and beyond, the violence in a majority of cases leads to deaths, without there being any contact between the respective authorities responsible for border controls and their victims. Far from being a linear border that would separate an inside from an outside, this ‘migratory border’ is, by contrast, vague, mobile, reticular and asymmetrical. This is far more than an institutional separation between sovereign territories: what is under construction here is an intrinsically (geo)political border marked by the dominant relations between states and imposed by the EU on its neighbors.