‘Europe is finished’: migrants lives in Europe’s capital at times of crisis

ABSTRACT

Migration has become a key issue in the contemporary European context, with depictions of Europe as under ‘attack’ due to the mass movement of uprooted populations, especially from Africa and the Middle East. The current sentiment of Europe in crisis calls for a deeper understanding of how the idea of Europe is configured. This article focuses on the idea of ‘Europe’ as seen from the point of view of Nigerien men who are living in Brussels without residency permits. Their voices reveal some of the gaps in contemporary discourses concerning crises and Europe’s predicament, especially in terms of terror and refugees. Their narratives point to how current debates on migration and crisis tend to rely on an image of a disconnected world, which obfuscate Europe’s historical interconnections with those now seeking entrance into Europe. Muslim migrants, in particular, are regularly portrayed as being incompatible with modernity, reflecting the persistent refusal to acknowledge their coevalness in Fabian’s [2014. Time and the other: How anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University Press] sense, that is to say their coexistence in the same time and space. One aspect of shared coexistence is ‘digitalized connectivity’ where media representations of Europe in crisis are an integral part of the lives of these migrant men as others living in Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• crisis
• terrorism
• West African
• postcolonial Europe
• Niger

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Kristín Loftsdóttir http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3491-724X

Notes

1. http://www.brussels.info.

2. For some of Niger’s population, migration is integrated into their lifeways such as the nomadic population Tuaregs and WoDaaBe. After colonialization, Tuaregs’ land became divided between several states, which hindered people’s mobility. Reciting the importance of mobility for Niger’s populations shows the need to not fall into normalization of national boundaries, which Glick Schiller and Salazar (2013) have warned against (p. 184).

3. Similar to many of the world’s disadvantaged populations, life for undocumented migrants can, however, be understood as in a constant state of crisis, underscoring Vigh’s (2008) claim that for some people crisis is the pervasive context of everyday life. Vigh argues that instead of merely emphasizing the need to subsume crisis into context, as scholars we should acknowledge that crisis is what constitutes the context for many of the world’s disadvantaged population; they conduct their lives within a ‘crisis’ state instead of waiting for life to transition back towards what we would consider to be a normal state.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Iceland Research Fund for the project Cosmopolitan Migrant Subjects: Migration from Niger to Europe; and Icelandic Centre for Research (Rannís) [Grant number 163350-051].