Building Fortress Europe: The Polish-Ukrainian Frontier by Karolina S. Follis

Author:Karolina S. Follis [Follis, Karolina S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Globalization, Social Science, Political Science, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9780812206609
Google: Tp5XoyDMJYEC
Goodreads: 16387053
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2012-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 5. The ice castle. Author photo.

Exclusion as Externalization

“Orderly space is a rule-governed space, whereas the rule is a rule in as far as it forbids and excludes,” writes Bauman (2004: 31). For order to be achieved, and order is what the “area of freedom, security and justice” presumes, certain practices must be prohibited and certain people cannot be admitted. As this text has already shown, the area without internal borders was designed for Europeans. The people who are entitled to “freedom, security and justice” are primarily EU citizens. Some selected non-EU citizens are permitted to take advantage of some of its aspects as well—among them are visitors who have lawfully obtained Schengen visas, immigrants whose work permits have been secured by employers, and those who were able to take advantage of family reunification, repatriation, or other special programs, temporary or otherwise. A separate category, as discussed in the previous chapter, are asylum seekers. The 1951 Convention obliges EU states to accept refugees and forbids the practice of refoulement. But the Convention does not determine the particular mode of sifting “genuine refugees” from those who ask to be considered refugees. Hence, in the face of political and security pressures these criteria are becoming ever more strict, and the burden of proof—always on the petitioner herself or himself—ever more onerous. The numbers of refugees who are recognized, and thus accepted within the “area of freedom, security and justice” are dwindling EU-wide, from 49,500 in 2004 to 27,600 in 2009. On top of that, in 2004, 33,100 applicants received subsidiary protection; this number was 26,200 for 2009.9 The Schengen ideal of order requires that everyone else be excluded from Europe’s borderless area as an “undesirable migrant.”

For “undesirables” who are physically present within the EU, due to a nonenforcement or partial enforcement of laws, human trafficking, unlawful entry, or some other happenstance, this means a life organized by the logic of “the new European apartheid” (Balibar 2004), in the politically and socially peripheral “spaces of non-existence” (Coutin 2003: 29) always overshadowed by uncertainty and the threat of removal.10 There are also untold numbers of potential migrants who are repelled by the unattainable terms of entry, and who, despite the need or desire, never manage to arrive or lose their lives trying. Finally, for those who attempt to cross the EU borders but fail, the experience of exclusion in practice means removal, which can take the form of readmission, deportation, or so-called voluntary repatriation.11 This is the fate of those I call economic migrants beyond demand, the vastly heterogeneous category which includes, as I argued in the previous chapter, those who asked for refugee status but were not deemed to be genuine refugees, along with those who perhaps would have qualified but never asked, and those who neither asked, nor would have qualified.

The fact that such categories of noncitizens dwell at the gates and on the margins of Western societies of course predates EU integration and expansion, as well as the crystallization of Schengen.

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