By Frank Wolff
The interdisciplinary research group “Internalizing Borders: The Social and Normative Consequences of the European Border Regime” has been working at the ZiF since October 2023. Historian Frank Wolff (Osnabrück) heads the group together with political scientist Volker Heins (Essen) and anthropologist Sabine Hess (Göttingen). Together with Volker Heins, he wrote the book „Hinter Mauern: Geschlossene Grenzen als Gefahr für die offene Gesellschaft“ (Suhrkamp 2023). In his blog post, he explains what the researchers are working on and how borders have an impact on the society that erects them.
In recent years, national borders have once again become a central and controversial public and political issue. Free mobility within the EU and the stability of liberal states seem to presuppose the complete control of borders against unwanted migrants. The EU and many states are increasingly relying on not only restrictive, but also deadly border protection models. The new border walls are made of wire, steel or water and, in the form of increasingly restrictive rules, also of paper. They are not erected to facilitate dialog, to create something dynamic or to negotiate democratically. They are designed to instill fear and exercise unilateral power. In this way, walls not only have an outward effect, they also have a backward effect on the societies that build them.
Our research group is investigating this change. With a distinct interest in European border work, we deal with questions such as: How do hardened borders and border violence change the legal and moral fabric of democratic societies? How can we conceptualize and better understand the normative and social consequences of violent border practices? And what discursive or historical preconditions can we identify that help us to explain the increasing normalization of concepts of migration and its repression coming from the repertoire of right-wing or far-right parties? To this end, we have invited researchers from many countries and various disciplines, for example from law and history, migration research, anthropology, social work, and gender studies. In addition to several weekly working meetings at the ZiF the group also organizes workshops and conferences and the public lecture series “Border Talks”.
Design: C. Mehl/Büro Paschetag
The new walls are intended to curb so-called “illegal migration”. This is a euphemism because what is meant is preventing people from exercising their right to apply for asylum. They prevent the determination of whether the person crossing the border has a right to protection or not. According to the IOM’s rather conservative figures about 30,000 people have died on Europe’s southern borders alone since 2014 before they could even ask this question. In recent years, we have also seen a massive build-up at the EU’s eastern external borders where breaches of the law, injuries and deaths are on the rise despite government changes. This is not a natural disaster but the result of the policies of the EU and its member states. In contrast to the political language, these new walls around Europe do not prevent the breaching of laws by migrants, they fend off the arrival of unwanted people based on warped legislation and with forms of violence that would be unthinkable within society.
This is happening in an increasingly militarized form. Many observers are thus speaking of the EU’s external borders as lawless zones. But this is not correct. On the contrary, a great deal of new law is currently being introduced to safeguard this practice, which, however, undermines fundamental legal norms of democratic statehood. A very recent example would be the establishment of border protection zones up to 2 kilometers deep in Poland where basic rights and obligations – from freedom of assembly and freedom of the press to the obligation to provide emergency aid – are massively restricted. At the borders, Poland’s otherwise clearly more liberal government is not only continuing the old course. It is even tightening it. These changes will cause a great deal of suffering and create new areas of removed from public control as well as they generate massive costs. We firstly inquire how the aspired protection of the much-vaunted European values through systematic and institutionalized border violence undermines democratic procedures, state transparency, and the rule of law.
Secondly, we examine the legitimization of these changes, which we describe in the book as massive symbolic efforts. By this we mean observable and long-term discursive changes. This increasingly detaches asylum and migration from the context of the duty to protect and shifts it to a language of threat, if not war. This has repercussion for the role of human rights or the transparent control of democratically contained security apparatuses and rather emphasizes loss of an imagined control and the indispensability of state-sanctioned border violence. This discourse on borders imagines them as walls and if that was their “natural” function in the moment, this function is only invented and installed. Moral effects are not only the warping of language but also of the political orientation of wide streams of society, by normalizing anti-democratic tropes and far-right ideas, blended into an emotional mélange on borders, self-defense, fear of the “foreign” and the hope for “solutions” through the exercise of power “freed” form legal and democratic burdens.
“Moral effects are not only the warping of language but also of the political orientation of wide streams of society, by normalizing anti-democratic tropes and far-right ideas.”
In other words, the new border walls look in two directions: They make it possible to set up zones of systematized violence against unwanted arrivals – and by this we do not mean abstract forms of violence, but quite concretely dog bites, broken bones, being left to freeze and drown or the criminalization of relief. And they are directed at the wider population of the wall-building states, representing a state that, paradoxically, gets rid of the burdensome shackles of democracy in order to protect it. Unconsciously following a right-wing script, the idea of the “border” is increasingly being separated from democracy, staged external to it and shaped according to a simplified concept of sovereignty that corresponds more to the Schmittian dogma of decision-making power over the state of exception. Political scientist and fellow of our research group Nicholas de Genova describes it this way: Borders are reinterpreted by a performed border spectacle creating a permanent state of emergency that simultaneously enables and conceals shifts to the right within.
Continue reading “Walls Also Change Those Who Build Them”