The Arab Spring and the Crisis of the European Border Regime: Manufacturing Emergency in the Lampedusa Crisis (original) (raw)
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European University Institute Working Papers
In the opening months of 2011 thousands of migrants arrived on the small Italian island of Lampedusa. In their responses, national governments in Europe appeared to self-interestedly close their national borders, rather than establish a common protection of the Mediterranean border to ‘Fortress Europe’. Different border controls appeared in Lampedusa, the Italian peninsula and the Franco-Italian border. This paper examines this case and asks why controls arose in different times and places in Southern Europe. The border is conceptualised as a process of differentiation tied to politically contingent decision making processes in which Italian, French and European actors attempted to define the nature of the flows and the responses to take within the structural framework of the EU’s border regime. The analysis illustrates the political dynamics by which migration through Europe’s Southern border can be regulated and controlled in contextually contingent locations.
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Mediterranean Politics
The current ‘migration crisis’ is framed as a moment of reckoning in the EU’s dealings with its Mediterranean neighbourhood. Yet to what extent is crisis the most useful tool to account for migration and European border control practices in the current context? An exclusive focus on crisis, we argue, is misleading. To a large extent, the current crisis management builds on pre-existing practices and enables their consolidation. For us this is an invitation to discuss the relation between crisis, routine and consolidation in Euro-Mediterranean migration policies and practices. This intervention shows how ‘crises’ are spatio-temporally limited and used to further pre-existing migration control practices and techniques of governing. As such we interrogate what it means to talk of crisis versus routine in the field of Mediterranean security practices.
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This chapter investigates the process of the so-called humanitarian securitization, focusing on dynamics between humanitarian and security-oriented rhetoric and policy actions embedded in the EU policy frames produced in response to the 2015 “migration crisis”. In doing so, it focuses on the nature of the humanitarian framing of the crisis within the EU policy discourse and its relation to the development of operational and militarized responses (i.e. EUNAVFOR Sophia, Frontex border operations) to increased migratory flows. The chapter centres predominantly on the Mediterranean border of the EU, which, given its dangerous nature of irregular border crossing and the number of fatalities, occupies the central role in conceptualization of the humanitarian features of the “migration crisis”. In this approach the chapter does not focus humanitarianism and security as opposite or mutually exclusive, but concentrates on the way these two logics coincide and intertwine in the framing process. In this respect, the chapter contributes to less-studied branch of securitization, showing how human referent object and the idea of humanitarianism have been utilized and gradually marginalized in the conceptualization of remedial actions towards the crisis, changing the nature of the EU’s operations in the Mediterranean from “search and rescue” to “seek and destroy”.
Framing emergency. Italian response to 2011 (forced) migrations from Tunisia and Libya
The Arab Spring has produced a number of consequences, including a massive migratory flow which involved - among others - also Italy in early 2011, when about 60,000 people landed on the southern coasts of the country and especially on the island of Lampedusa. Drawing on empirical material and on analysis of Italian political and normative documents, the paper questions the category of ‘emergency' almost a-critically applied to the management of forced migrations by institutional actors in the observed period of time. The different treatments accorded to Tunisian migrants compared with those (mainly Sub-Saharan Africans) arriving from Libya will help illustrate the use of the term ‘emergency' to frame politics and policies towards asylum seekers and other migrants in Italy. At a time of mixed migrations and the blurring of boundaries among different categories of protection, what kind of protection can be envisaged for those people who do not fulfill all the requirements for qualifying as refugees? The paper critically describes and interprets the consequences of two polarized practices, both founded on the political use of emergency: ‘protection without reception' and ‘reception without protection'.
The Arab Spring and the Italian Response to Migration in 2011 - Beyond the Emergency
Journal of Comparative Migration Studies, 2014
This paper seeks to unpack and explain the relationship between the emergency rhetoric used by Italian politicians and the policies implemented in Italy in response to the influx of irregular migrants from North Africa during 2011. It analyses how the language relates to the policies adopted and considers the impact on relations between Italy and the European Union (EU) in the area of migration. Accordingly, I address two main questions. How can we understand the emergency lexicon in relation to the policies adopted by Italy in response to irregular arrivals from North Africa in 2011? Secondly, what are the implications for EU-Italian engagement? In other words, how has the vehement and popularized emergency-centred debate in Italy affected interaction between Italy and the EU? To tackle these questions, the analysis is divided into five sections. The first section introduces the academic discussion on migration in Italy and focuses on three themes central to this paper: emergency, ambiguities in migration policies, and the EU as vincolo esterno (external constraint). The second section illustrates briefly the methodology employed and explains the selection of the case-study. Thirdly, I outline and examine the policies implemented by Italy between January and December 2011 and investigate the shifting language along the crisis-normality continuum. The fourth section turns to the international level and chronicles the relations between Italy and the European Union concerning irregular arrivals from North Africa. With regard to the latter, attention is given to the implications of the agreement between Tunisia and Italy. The domestic and international strands are brought together in the fifth section, which probes the reliance on discourses of emergency in the way that migration and asylum policies are presented vis-à-vis the European Union. Fear, I argue, remains a key factor in the shaping of ideas and policies across COMPARATIVE MIGRATION STUDIES www.comparativemigrationstudies.org
2021
Political events following the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have contributed to a new conceptualisation (and management) of border issues. The tumultuous period had a dramatic effects on Europe and the southern Mediterranean countries. On the one hand, Europe is facing a continuous redefinition of its borders, especially in the southern neighbourhood but also in the eastern part of the continent. On the other hand, the MENA countries are part of a game in which the political elites deploy sectarian identity, narratives and symbols to neutralise dissent and (re-)assert control, even on borders, spaces and places. Notwithstanding the counterrevolutionary trend, the presence of ongoing civil conflicts, along with the escalation of regional competition over the past decade, has notably changed the political and social landscape in many countries. In this context, the Euro-Mediterranean space seems more and more unstable, and its margins porous. It has become...
The 'refugee crisis' in Italy as a crisis of legitimacy
The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ marks a crucial juncture in Italian politics. Tapping into the crisis of legitimacy of contemporary European politics, the controversy over migration has triggered discussion of socioeconomic, cultural and security issues. Pressured by public opinion, the EU and Italy have followed the logic of exceptionality, trying to put a halt to the inflow of asylumseekers rather than pursuing the logic of normalcy that must apply to migration at a global level. Institutional and mainstream actors have mirrored public anxieties and security concerns, endorsing emergency narratives, aggressive policing and militarised border control. Unable to engage with citizens’ concerns, they have helped to conflate migration with insecurity, creating a fertile breeding ground for xenophobic, populist reactions. The paper suggests that the refugee crisis is best understood in relation to other ongoing crises in the EU, and that the way it is handled will have significant consequences for future action, shaping the way European societies cope with forthcoming crises and transforming the relationship between states and citizens. Accordingly, it argues that the permanent state of emergency characterising governmental responses so far does not bode well for the future of liberal democracy in Europe.
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This chapter describes the evolution of the Italian maritime border control policies in the last twenty years, analyzing the process that has led to the creation of a complex and integrated border control apparatus. Integrated here refers to the facts that border control policies increasingly involve the action of many institutional actors and that the geopolitics of border control produces a wide frontier zone extending from third countries' territorial waters up to the archipelago of first reception and detention centres located on Italy's southern shores. The chapter starts with a preliminary examination of the wider context in which the control of irregular migration by sea takes place in the Mediterranean scenario, focusing then on the description of the Italian border control apparatus. In particular, it will describe the legal basis and the complex institutional framework that shaped maritime border surveillance policies in the last twenty years. These policies will be analysed by describing their evolution up to the latest operational activities launched in the Strait of Sicily with the aim to tackle the refugee crisis. The analysis will highlight the leading role played by Italy in the increasing militarization of border control policies taking place also at the EU level, by illustrating how this is due not so much to the humanitarian need to provide greater search and rescue capacity on the high sea, as to the political will to strengthen the external governance of internal security by using the fight against smuggling and trafficking in human beings as a cover for legitimizing an increased presence of EU security forces in crisis contexts.
Global Histories – A Student Journal, 2018
After the 2015 ‘Migration Crisis’ a focus on securitizing Schengen area borders and externalizing migration control has dominated deliberations between the countries of the European Union, as well as EU dealings with bordering nation states. Italy sits at the geographical and political crossroads of this situation, and its migration regime has gradually come to shape the EU’s handling of Mediterranean migration. Paradoxically, this regime entails a willingness to flout rule of law and human rights precedents upheld by European institutions themselves. This article brings together scholarly work from a variety of disciplines to historicize the prerequisites, development, and transfer of Italian migration management methods from national to supranational levels. The article traces increasing European integration and a hardening of external borders towards a Global South, through the aftermath of the 1973 ‘Oil Crisis’, the formation of the Schengen Area based on French and West German demands for a stricter migration policy, domestic Italian political developments in the 1990s, and an externalizing of border control in the 2000s. The study argues that these developments are a result of complex and sometimes circular situations of pressure and coercion but also surprising outcomes based on circumstances of immigration to Europe that no party had foreseen.