European migration policies in the Mediterranean in a cultural perspective (original) (raw)
Related papers
One cannot understand contemporary Europe without taking its history of migration into account. Considered by many to have become the epicentre of global migration flows, this process has been - and is still today - fraught with tensions. The immediate postwar political and economic landscape greatly impacted the way migration to Europe developed, from labour recruitment programs and postcolonial migration to increased numbers of refugees and the harmonization of EU asylum policies. As such, this seminar aims to highlight the ideas, institutions, and actors that have influenced the evolution of migration in postwar Europe. The objective is to provide the student with the necessary theoretical and analytical tools to be able to grasp how migration has affected both Europe itself and those entering its borders. Due to the nature of the Seminar, students are expected to come to class prepared to engage in important discussions and debates concerning the main themes, ideas and arguments highlighted in the weekly readings.
Under Control? Or Border (as) Conflict: Reflections on the European Border Regime
The migrations of 2015 have led to a temporary destabilization of the European border and migration regime. In this contribution , we trace the process of destabilization to its various origins, which we locate around the year 2011, and offer a preliminary assessment of the attempts at re-stabilization. We employ the notion of " border (as) conflict " to emphasize that crisis and exception lies at the very core of the European border and migration regime and its four main dimensions of externalization, techno-scientific borders, an internal mobility regime for asylum seekers, and humanitarization.
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.
Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 41–65.
This chapter provides a brief overview of the EU’s Mediterranean policy, to demonstrate that it is too complex, haphazard and ineffective to be a real vehicle for controlling irregular migration in the region. The poor incentives offered to the partners make improvements on the ground difficult and the heavy reliance on conditionality is inexplicable in a situation where the ‘shared’ core values are a mere rhetorical statement, rather than an empirically-grounded observation. Conditionality and help with democracy, human rights protection and the rule of law naturally turn into unfriendly acts aiming at regime change in this context. Unable to affect the root-causes of migration, owing to misconceived value-laden assumptions and dysfunctional policy, the EU suffers from the fruits of its own incapacity and indecision: mare nostrum is a mass grave. Worse still, the EU’s own adherence to its stated values when dealing with irregular migrants is overwhelmingly problematic and is in need of profound reassessment.
Building Fortress Europe? Schengen and the Cases of Ceuta and Melilla
Centre for International Border Research , 2009
Melilla are the only places from which Africans can reach European soil without risking their lives in the Mediterranean. As a result, both enclaves are territories in which EU migration policies have a special significance. The fact that they were fenced off by the Spanish government 1 , has rendered the enclaves paradigmatic examples of various metaphors used to conceptualise the external EU border, Fortress Europe being the most successful among them. Apart from scrutinizing the concept and the policies which lie behind it, I claim that the 'gated community' metaphor, which is the lesser used, is more accurate on the basis that it takes into account cooperation and interaction between both sides of the border. In the case of the enclaves this interaction becomes evident in the selective permeability applied to the enclaves and their Moroccan hinterland.
The European Border Regime in Crisis. Theory, Methods and Analyses in Critical European Studies
Rosa Luxemburg Studien, 2017
Between 2009 and 2013, the research group known as ‘State Project Europe’ based at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and at Marburg University investigated the Europeanisation of migration policies.1 The inquiry focused on the Federal Republic of Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain as key examples of EU member states. The following paper summarises the central theoretical and methodological results of this study. The first section develops and unpacks the theoretical premises of a historical materialist theory of the state. The section that follows presents the historical materialist policy analysis (HMPA) approach which has been developed within this context and that allowed us to operationalise the theoretical premises for our empirical studies. The last section analyses the social forces at play in the field of European migration policy in order to show that the project of migration management became hegemonic in Europe and how, since late summer 2015, it has entered into a state of crisis. The study identifies five ‘hegemony projects’ that fought over the mode of European integration: a neoliberal, a conservative, two social projects and a left-liberal alternative one. In the field of migration policy, the conflicts between these projects condensed into the hegemonic political project of ‘migration management’. This project, driven by demands of corporations, certain capital fractions and neoliberal ‘experts’, aimed at making increased and flexible immigration of workers into and within the EU politically feasible by integrating certain migration policy demands from other hegemony projects – key among them were repressive border controls, protection of genuine refugees and national-social privileges. The concluding section analyses current dynamics. It focusses on Germany and Austria because these countries are at the forefront of a major conflict about the European migration regime, starting with the ‘Summer of Migration’ of 2015. As a result, the migration management project has entered a period of crisis and readjustment, leading, first, to a partial opening of European borders and then to a temporary renationalisation and extensive expansion of the repressive elements of the border regime. When the refugees had made it over the borders with self-confidence and found support from a large ‘welcome movement’, which can be attributed to a discursive alliance of the left-liberal alternative and the pro-European social hegemony project, it was possible to shift discourses and practices to the left. On the basis of decades of mobilisation and not least of self-organised refugee protests, these actors were able to strengthen their position in the migration-political relations of force in Germany and Austria, the main receiving countries in the Summer of Migration. This was ultimately also mirrored in the attitude of the German federal government. The latter can only be grasped in its complexity and inconsistency by concluding that the strategies of the progressive hegemony projects coincided with those of the neoliberal hegemony project: both strategies were linked. The Merkel government was able to rely on influential actors that can be seen as part of the neoliberal hegemony project, including economists, representatives of capital and the neoliberal press. The conservative and national-social hegemony project, on the other hand, fell behind. The temporary revocation of the asymmetrical compromise of ‘migration management’ by the actors associated with the progressive and neoliberal hegemony projects, triggered a major chauvinistic counter-movement, especially on the part of the racist (völkische) fraction of the conservative project. The growing influence of these forces intensified until March 2016, when the Aegean and Balkan routes were effectively closed and significant restrictions to asylum laws were introduced in Germany and Austria. The coming years will show whether neoliberal forces will succeed in overcoming their prevalent crisis of hegemony and can re-stabilise the project of migration management by pushing back racist (völkische) actors and by reintegrating other actors of the conservative project. Such integration efforts are already apparent, for example in the support neoliberal actors give to the externalisation of the European border regime. The further direction of European migration policy, however, very much depends on whether there are forces that are able to develop a counter-hegemonic project of transnational solidarity.