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ABSTRACT
This article compares the Mediterranean and the Balkan routes of migration into the European Union, exploring the (in)visibility and (un)knowability of the management of European borderlands. It offers a historical overview of the hotspot approach in the Mediterranean, where securitarian concerns merged with humanitarian affects, making certain practices and subjectivities possible, but foreclosing others. Lampedusa, Italy, has been turned into a stage where “humanitarian theater” performed for European audiences has become a crucial aspect of border management. The strategy of EU border management has been different in the Balkans, where the use of violence has been concealed with a veil of official denial. Instead of a humanitarian theater, in the Balkans we can find stories of border terror, official denial of such violence, and competing claims to knowledge about it. This official denial has kept “Europe” as a political community simultaneously implicated in and innocent of the use of violence in border management. Despite their differences, the key functions of the EU border regime have been the same in these two regions. The comparative perspective illustrates the different strategies the European border regime uses to manage the perceived “crisis” of migration, while simultaneously keeping the liberal space of Europe “safe.”
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
This work was supported by Norges Forskningsr: [Grant Number FRIHUMSAM 288398].
Notes
1 Antonio De Lauri conducted field research in Lampedusa in 2019; Carna Brkovic conducted field research in Podgorica, Montenegro, in 2019. Both authors would like to thank the reviewers and the editors for constructive feedback on earlier versions of the manuscript. De Lauri acknowledges support from the Research Council of Norway (FRIHUMSAM 288398). Part of the material presented in this article was also included in De Lauri, A. (2023) “Humanitarian Lampedusa and the Theatralization of Crisis.” In Continental Encampement: Genealogies of Humanitarian Containment in the Middle East and Europe, edited by Are Knudsen and Kjersti Berg, 216–236. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
6 https://www.iom.int/key-migration-terms. Although widely used in both scholarly and public fora, the term “irregular migration” essentializes the status of migrants and consequently to some extent legitimizes states’ adoption of expulsion and detention measures as well as criminalization approaches. In the context of Italian law, a clandestino or “illegal migrant” is an individual who is present on Italian territory without the relevant travel documentation or a residence/work permit. The large majority of persons subject to removal are “irregular,” having overstayed valid residence permits (Coluccello and Massey Citation2007).
7 Nonrefoulement is a key principle of international law that forbids a country receiving asylum seekers from returning them to a country in which they are likely to be in danger. “The prohibition of refoulement under international human rights law applies to any form of removal or transfer of persons, regardless of their status, where there are substantial grounds for believing that the returnee would be at risk of irreparable harm upon return on account of torture, ill-treatment or other serious breaches of human rights obligations.” https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Migration/GlobalCompactMigration/ThePrincipleNon-RefoulementUnderInternationalHumanRightsLaw.pdf
12 This was recently the case with the attack that occurred in Nice on October 29, 2020, when three persons were killed by a 21-year-old Tunisian man. As political reactions in France and around Europe grew after what was described as another Islamist terrorist attack, the debate in Italy also pointed at the fact that the man had reached Europe via Lampedusa, then transferred to Bari; https://www.huffingtonpost.it/entry/il-terrorista-di-nizza-e-passato-da-lampedusa-salvini-lamorgese-si-dimetta_it_5f9af6fbc5b6aab57a104c9d
13 https://www.ildubbio.news/2019/08/17/alfonso-giordano-aiutare-i-migranti-a-casa-loro-basta-non-aiutare-i-dittatori/ ; https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/migranti-perche-retorica-bisogna-aiutarli-casa-loro-non-serve-contrastare-flussi-AEkyNCRF
14 For related discussions on the link between the idea of “deserving migrants” and media representation, see for example: Jones (Citation2017); Rosen and Crafter (Citation2018); Vollmer and Karakayali (Citation2018).
16 For more info see https://askavusa.wordpress.com/con-gli-oggetti/porto-m/; see also Kushner (Citation2016).
17 See, for example, the play Appunti per un naufragio (Notes for a Shipwreck) by Davide Enia, based on his book (Enia Citation2017). Some of these cultural productions reached large audiences, as was the case with Terraferma, a 2011 film directed by Emanuele Crialese that premiered at the 68th Venice International Film Festival (it won the Special Jury Prize), and the 2016 documentary Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea) directed by Gianfranco Rosi, which won the Golden Bear at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 89th Academy Awards.
18 See Ramsay (Citation2016) for a problematization of this aspect from the perspective of an artist.
19 Great fluctuations of the recorded number of crossings between 2015 and 2020 are likely the result of the closure of the Balkan Route and the fear caused by the illegal border violence. https://frontex.europa.eu/we-know/migratory-routes/western-balkan-route/
21 See, for instance https://ecre.org/balkan-route-route-shifts-but-pushbacks-continue-croatian-schengen-accession-approved-amid-mounting-reports-of-violations-and-confusion-over-independent-border-monitoring-report/, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/31/croatian-police-accused-of-robbing-and-pushing-back-to-bosnia-afghans
22 https://ecre.org/balkan-route-route-shifts-but-pushbacks-continue-croatian-schengen-accession-approved-amid-mounting-reports-of-violations-and-confusion-over-independent-border-monitoring-report/ ; See also https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/oct/23/croatia-denies-migrant-border-attacks-after-new-reports-of-brutal-pushbacks
25 Newspapers reports on Sebastian Kurz visiting in the second week of February 2016 Bosnia and Herzegovina: https://balkans.aljazeera.net/news/balkan/2016/2/8/kurz-austrija-podrzava-bih-na-putu-ka-eu, Serbia: https://www.trt.net.tr/srpski/region-1/2016/02/09/vucic-i-kurz-dogovorili-akcioni-plan-srbije-i-austrije-za-2016-od-regionalne-saradnje-do-borbe-protiv-terorizma-429519, Montenegro: http://www.rtcg.me/vijesti/politika/118705/moguce-da-cg-postane-dio-migrantske-rute.html, and Macedonia: https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/27548769.html
26 For a reflection on recent dynamics of local resentment in Lampedusa, see Franceschelli (Citation2019); see also Puggioni Citation2015.
28 With reference to the shipwreck of October 3, 2013, Horsti and Neumann (Citation2017) write: “The sinking of the boat near Lampedusa turned local people into eyewitnesses, and its mediatization created national, European, and global witnessing audiences. Media representations of death and survival prompted moral calls to respond. By positioning the Italian rescue agents at the center of the drama, the media invited Europeans to join the spectacle as humanitarians. However, the media’s interest in this particular incident waned quickly.”