Mobile Borders and Turbulent Mobilities: Mapping the Geopolitics of the Channel Tunnel

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the making and contestation of mobile borders around the Channel Tunnel, the fixed link connecting Britain and the European continent. It suggests that the bordering of the infrastructural and vehicular spaces is both an object of inquiry in its own right and a productive lens for reflecting on questions related to European Union (EU) territory, the heterogeneous nature of borders as well as the interplay between regimes of control and resistance. The article starts by reviewing the legal and institutional frameworks in which the Channel Tunnel area is governed and envisioned as an interstate and European/Schengen borderzone. It then examines the uncoordinated efforts of national, private and European authorities in managing the episodic migration controversies around this area, which bring together the interconnected rationales of security, economy and humanitarianism and expose the dissonance between and within them. Finally, the article considers how the acts of turbulent mobilities interact with this contingent assemblage of mobility governance and realise the radical potential of territorial borders.

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors of Geopolitics for their highly constructive criticisms and helpful suggestions. I would also like to thank members of the Centre for European Politics at the University of Copenhagen for their feedback on a previous version of this article.

Notes

^1. For research on the first two aspects see e.g. Darian-Smith (1999) and Sparke (2000).

^2. Conducted by YouGov, https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/08/09/calais-crisis-french-and-british-support-sending-a/.

^3. This is because the United Kingdom, although a member state of the EU at the time of writing, is not part of the Schengen Agreement that abolished internal border checks between its signatories. This makes the Channel Tunnel and the train stations in Brussels, Paris and Calais the external border-crossing points of the Schengen Area (see Section 2).

^4. France No. 1 (1986) Cmnd. 9745.

^5. Treaty Series No. 70 (1993) Cm2366.

^6. Hansard, March 16, 2001, Column 1125.

^7. Treaty Series No. 33 (2002) Cm5015. A tripartite agreement was signed with Belgium in 2004.

^8. Article 4(4) and Article 13(3), Cmnd. 9745; Clause 14.2, Cmnd. 9769.

^9. Clause 15.2, Cmnd. 9769.

^10. ‘The Channel tunnel … is nothing less than a revolution in habits and practices; … the whole of Community Europe will have one nervous system and no one country will be able indefinitely to run its economy and its society from the others’, quoted in (Darian-Smith 1999, 2).

^11. Thomas and O’Donoghue (2013). The geographers point out that the metropolitan centres have been the major beneficiary of the high-speed rail link, whereas its impact on the development of the periphery region has been limited. See also Sparke (2000).

^12. Document législatif n° 1–396/1, Sénat de Belgique.

^13. For example, on the official webpage introducing the Schengen area, it is stated that ‘the Schengen area represents a territory where the free movement of persons is guaranteed’. The Action Plan for the Stockholm Programme claims that ‘the Union will pursue an integrated approach to the control of access to its territory in an enlarged Schengen area’.

^14. According to the Schengen Border Code, the responsibility of reporting a list of these crossing points to the Commission rests with the Member State.

^15. For a detailed analysis of the case of the Øresund bridge in the context of European space-making, see Jensen and Richardson (2004).

^16. Hansard, February 4, 2002, Column 616.

^17. The Channel Tunnel Group ltd and France-Manche Sa v United Kingdom and France, partial award on Jurisdiction, decision of January 30, 2007.

^18. For example see the field report of Courau: ‘Many refugees who managed to climb onto the top of a carriage have been found dead in the Tunnel, electrocuted by the overhead cables. Others have been killed by a passing train or thrown down from the train they had managed to board. Some refugees came back to Sangatte seriously injured, their faces badly lacerated and bruised, their eyes swollen and their clothes covered with blood’. Courau (2003, 384).

^19. Question écrite n° 23707 de M. Jean-Claude Leroy, publiée dans le JO Sénat du 14/06/2012, p. 1358.

^20. Daily Mail was outraged by the fact that one can smuggle themselves into the UK in a ‘far more straightforward, and a lot cheaper’ way when it was first exposed in 2011. The right-wing tabloid has been so concerned about it that they published a ‘demo’ trip of a journalist using the ‘loophole’ to make it to the UK in 2017 (Keogh 2017).

^21. European Parliament resolution on the issue of refugees and obstruction of rail freight through the

Channel Tunnel, OJ C127 E/690, 29.5.2003.

^22. During a trip to Calais in February 2013, a local activist told the author that the average period for which migrants seeking to reach England through the tunnel or by ferries would stay in Calais at that time was around two months. They would then ‘try somewhere else, like Dunkirk, or they leave’.

^23. Under the EU’s Dublin Regulation, migrants are in principle required to apply for asylum in the first member state they arrive in. This also allows other member states to ‘transfer’ asylum seekers to the country where they had their fingerprints taken. Hearing my interest in Eurostar, an Afghani asylum seeker laughed and said: ‘I met a friend in Rome. He said he sit on top of the train and made it to England. But he was sent back to Italy after that. I never tried because it’s too dangerous.’ Interview in Calais, February 2013.

^24. As the Good Chance Theatre reveals, ‘good chance or no chance’ is a popular phrase among the residents of the Calais ‘Jungle’ to mean the likelihood of crossing the border ‘on a given night’, http://goodchance.org.uk/about/.