On the Doorstep of Europe. Heath Cabot

      Chapter 1

      European Moral Geographies

      On January 21, 2011, well into the fallout from the Greek debt crisis, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issued a judgment on MSS v. Belgium and Greece, a case brought by an Afghan asylum seeker, Mohamed Samir Samimi, against these two EU member states. According to the list of “facts” recorded in the court’s decision, “MSS” was apprehended by Greek police after his initial crossing via sea to Lesbos, just a few kilometers of sea from the Turkish coast. There, his fingerprints were taken, and after a week he was released and issued an order to leave the country.¹ He “transitioned” through France to Belgium, where he applied for asylum; he never applied for asylum in Greece. Under the auspices of the 2003 Dublin II Regulation, however, asylum seekers are obliged to apply for protection in the country where they first enter European territory, and if apprehended elsewhere in the EU, they are subject to removal to the country of entry. Thus, when Belgian authorities discovered MSS’s fingerprints registered in the Eurodac system, a trans-European database of biometric material, he was deported back to Greece, despite a number of attempts to contest his removal. Through a series of text messages to his lawyer in Belgium, he then documented in detail the squalid reception conditions he faced, the impossibility of finding housing and social support, his difficulty obtaining access to the asylum procedure, and his near expulsion back across the Turkish border by Greek authorities.²

      The decision itself attests to the deeply creolized legal terrain that characterizes the case of just one asylum seeker. After this brief account of MSS movements in EU territory, the decision goes on to cite in detail “relevant” European and international law,³ then turns to “Relevant Law and Practice” in both Greece and Belgium. The section on Greece cites not just formal law but also references reports issued by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and various NGOs, which present the on-the-ground situation facing asylum seekers. The court ultimately indicts Greece for violating MSS’s rights on two counts: for failing to guarantee access to the asylum procedure (in violation of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms guaranteeing the right to life), and for exposing MSS to cruel and degrading treatment (in violation of Article 3). Belgium, meanwhile, is indicted for not providing the claimant with a way to contest the potential threat to his life and freedom in Greece (in violation of Article 13, which guarantees an “effective remedy before a national authority” to challenge rights violations). In its structure and content, the decision emphasizes the international and supranational legislative contexts of MSS’s case, yet in the end invokes member state obligations for upholding European rights-based legislation. Through its failure adequately to provide dignity and protection to MSS, Greece emerges as a kind of proxy for the challenges and failures entailed in safeguarding the rights of asylum seekers in the European Union.

      I begin here with this ECHR decision, because it is emblematic of EU governance practices through which a particular EU member state, its government, and its citizens are held responsible for failures on a European scale. The EU relies on techniques of governance that keep unruly members states in line through legal, political, and—especially—moral forms of marginalization. The crisis of asylum in Greece—much like the current financial crisis—is not just a national predicament affecting a state on Europe’s geopolitical and economic peripheries; it is also seen to undermine the EU’s moral integrity as an area of “freedom, security, and justice.” Such narratives of crisis in turn grant moral legitimacy to Greece’s continued political, legal, and financial marginalization within Europe. The power of the ECHR decision lies perhaps even less in its material effects than in its articulation of a particular configuration of value on a European scale. Not only does the decision reassert the European commitment to safeguarding rights, but it also highlights how Greece deviates from and actively undermines these values.

      In this chapter, I show that the very real shortcomings of the Greek asylum procedure must be understood within the broader context of European governance mechanisms, including legislative, policy, and advocacy trends; regional histories of displacement; and often more global forms of violence and inequality that have positioned Greece on the margins of Europe. I undertake my analysis through a kind of mapping, which underscores the relationship between EU moral logics of governance and a European spatial politics of marginality. When it comes to managing migration and asylum, Greece’s moral and political marginality in Europe is inextricable from its position on Europe’s land and sea borders. Concrete geographical and topographical factors play a crucial role in determining which member states become sites of crossing (Mitchell 1997), but these are reinforced and further complicated through EU legislation. Take, for instance, MSS’s story, rendered in chronological brevity in the court’s decision, which speaks to multiple scales of law, complex routes of migration, and various geopolitical and topographical boundaries, which intersect, collide, and are transgressed on Europe’s borders. Likewise, the overlapping enforcement measures that characterize the border regime in Greece, and the various sites where they are enacted, invoke EU, regional, and national territorialities. Policies and practices aimed toward safeguarding the EU as an area of “freedom, security, and justice” interact with internal Greek policing and legislative practices and migrants’ own routes of movement. The krisi of asylum in Greece reflects the entwinement of legal and moral geographies.

      The MSS judgment implies that the Greek state’s poor adherence to EU law at the level of individual asylum seekers undermines the EU as a territorial, legal, and moral entity. Recent ethnographic scholarship has shown how the formalities of legal processes reflect and reinstantiate notions of ethics and morality that operate simultaneously across multiple scales (Fassin and Rechtman 2010; Kelly 2011): individual, national, regional, transnational, global, and in this case, supranational. Such moral configurations are particularly powerful in the context of international human rights law, which, as Sassen (1996) has shown, can function to undermine, or even threaten, national sovereignties. Yet even in the EU, the success of international rights regimes depends on nation-states. In the domestic enactment of rights law, states find ways of simultaneously complying with and resisting such infringements on sovereignty, also through the