On the Doorstep of Europe. Heath Cabot
in France shows how the moral dispositions that greet asylum seekers at the tribunal, suspicion in particular, reinvigorate the French state’s restrictive approach toward offering protection as part of a broader, exclusionary, policy on immigration. Through the reinscription of rights in European Community law, the judgments that uphold them, and European instruments for safeguarding these values (in particular, the court), the moral power of rights becomes even more tightly wedded to supranational governing mechanisms which simultaneously reassert and challenge member state sovereignties.
Such forms of moral governance, and the tensions of sovereignty that they reflect, have long been endemic to the European management of immigration and asylum across more formal venues of law, zones of civil society advocacy, media accounts, and the multiple sites where such phenomena overlap. Arendt (1976 [1951]) shows how the post-World War I refugee crisis in Europe exposed a fundamental tension between international protection and the sovereignties of nation-states. In the supranational context, these dilemmas do not vanish but proliferate, particularly through the coupling of asylum processes to broader projects of EU migration management (Menz 2009). The EU is both a territorial polity with borders that must be regulated and a supranational zone formally devoted to freedom of movement, human rights, and humanitarian values. At the EU level, as the international obligation to offer protection has become entwined with the regulation and defense of European territory, a number of powerful tensions have emerged. These tensions are perhaps best exemplified in the twin, yet contradictory, EU policy goals of ensuring that Europe’s borders are both “secure” and “humanitarian.” Greece, as we have observed, is said to fail on both of these counts.
Given this set of tensions, EU asylum-related legislation is often deeply contradictory. The MSS decision betrays a juridical sleight of hand that invokes European sovereignty (and the EU’s capacity to indict, monitor, and discipline individual member states) while simultaneously reasserting member state responsibilities. Through Dublin II, Mediterranean member states must—owing to accidents of geopolitics—shoulder a greater responsibility for maintaining EU borders in the name of collectively sharing the “burden” of protection. Such contradictions have their uses, however: EU governance can draw selectively on EU and member state sovereignties and responsibilities to engage the tensions embedded in the collective management of migration and asylum. Yet such techniques of governance further inscribe the morally marginal, even dangerous, qualities associated with member states like Greece.
Marginalities
Unlike a number of more longstanding migration destinations in Europe, Greece does not have recent colonial ties with the home countries of those now seeking protection within its borders. France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and even Italy, with its brief foray into colonial projects in East Africa, all negotiate complex colonial histories and their legacies through immigration (Gilroy 2004; Hall 1990; Ticktin 2011), as well as ongoing forms of intercultural and linguistic exchange (Chakrabarty 2000; Cooper and Stoler 1997). Greece, in contrast, underwent its own, deeply fraught experience of Ottoman imperialism (Kostopoulou 2009), the after-math of which continues to shape Greece’s relationship with Islam (Antoniou 2005, 2010; Triandafyllidou and Gropas 2009), its immediate neighbors, and the “East.” Moreover, powerful symbolic and political tensions have long characterized Greece’s relationship with the European west and north. During the Greek bid for independence from the Ottoman Empire in the early 1800s, Greece was transformed into a kind of “Ur-Europa” (Herzfeld 1982), largely thanks to northern European intellectuals who revivified and mythologized its ancient history. Yet having been an Ottoman territory for centuries, Greece was also subject to Orientalizing tendencies. Thus, even as ancient Greece was framed as the font of European civilization, Modern Greece has often been characterized—even by Greeks themselves—as backward, bastardized, and corrupted by the influences of the East. Such tensions have combined to grant the Greek nation state a particularly marginal relationship with the European core, which in turn has been repeatedly invoked to legitimate the ongoing involvement of outside interests in Greece.
Herzfeld (2002a: 901) coins the term “crypto-colonialism” to describe “the curious alchemy whereby certain countries, buffer zones between the colonized lands and those yet untamed, were compelled to acquire their political independence at the expense of massive economic dependence.” This former territory of the Ottoman Empire has been subject to enormous outside economic and political involvement: first by the “philhellenes” of Britain, France, and Germany; later, by the warring powers of World War II; and finally, in the Cold War period, by the United States in its support of the Junta. With the twinning of geographical and political marginality embedded in crypto-colonialism, similar patterns are evident in Greece’s contemporary relationship with the European north, despite the EU’s formal commitment to transcending national and regional interests. Greece is now subject to intervention by EU governing bodies, individual EU member states, speculating investors, the IMF, and the World Bank. As the constantly unfolding news on the Greek financial crisis makes compellingly clear, “building Europe” (Shore 2000) has produced new systems of inclusion and exclusion and vast asymmetries of power between the European north and south. Through these ongoing crypto-colonial relationships, the contemporary Greek nation state acquires its status as a kind of political and moral “pariah” (19), an allegedly corrupt, undisciplined, and renegade member of the European Community that is transgressive and potentially dangerous.
In the debates surrounding the Greek asylum process, law and judgment work to invoke and reassert similar forms of marginalization. Just as the symbolic and political marginalization of Greece has been deeply grounded in its peripheral geographical position, the marginalizing effects of EU migration and asylum law are inextricable from Greece’s location on Europe’s borders. Étienne Balibar (2004: 5) suggests that patterns of inclusion/exclusion that have emerged as the EU was fashioned into being are most conspicuous at the borders. Likewise, the moral logics of European legislation and policy are embedded in a political geography concentrated primarily around the negotiation and management of external borders. Wallace (2000: 375) describes how the European continent has long been fraught with the tensions of managing “neighborness” through the regulation of borders, including both intra-European territorial zones and a variety of “near-abroads” by land and sea. With the shift in sovereignty from internal to external borders accompanying Europeanization, Greece—like other member states on Europe’s Mediterranean coast—has become a crucial site where the boundaries of Europe are persistently transgressed and redrawn. Yet through the intensified management of European territorial borders, the marginality of these border states is asserted even more powerfully.
Doorsteps
It was only 8 a.m., but it was already hot. I had recently stepped off the plane from Athens for the June 21, 2008, World Refugee Day celebration in Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos. I was sitting at a portside café across from Stefan, a refugee advocate, drinking a much-needed coffee. Stefan is the primary brains, imagination, and labor behind one of the more influential asylum advocacy NGOs in northern Europe. In collaboration with Greek lawyers, he had recently published a report on sea deaths in the Greek Aegean, one of the more powerful critiques of Greek asylum and border management, which just a few years later was to be cited in the MSS decision. He was also in the process of establishing a border project in Mytilene, in collaboration with local service providers, to improve reception conditions for the many who arrive there—most often in small, leaky rubber boats.
A tall, broad-shouldered man with piercing eyes, Stefan chain-smoked as he answered my question about why he had chosen to begin an advocacy project in Greece. After citing his love of the Aegean and dramatically closing his eyes and gesturing at his surroundings, he said: “I knew. It was not an exact calculation, it was not a master plan, but it was clear that if someone wanted to do a successful project, it would be Greece.” He went on, explaining that unlike Italy and Spain, which had more recently been in the spotlight, “everyone knew that Greece was a mess, but no one was talking about it.”
Greece, of course, is no longer a place no one talks about. Until relatively recently, Italy and Spain had indeed dominated the limelight as border areas of pan-European concern, as Lampedusa and the Canary Islands generated powerful and contradictory images of sun, sea, destitute bodies, and sunbathers