Walls Also Change Those Who Build Them

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.

While this current form of border internalization is our starting point, the process itself can go in either direction. In our work, we examine how borders extend inwards – whether as institutions of understanding, as the EU’s internal borders from the European Coal and Steel Community and Customs Union to the Schengen Agreement were conceived, or as representatives of authoritarian hopes, such as the new walls. Although the latter stand for a deceptive sovereignty, they stage it in a striking and authoritarian way tied to sites of performed power and unilateral decision making, whereas democratic and constitutional sovereignty is spread across many places and decision-making processes.

The problem is that a substantial part of the population wants exactly that. An increasing share of the European electorate votes against liberal democracy and wants more freedom for repressive power exertion and hatred. Against “others”, of course. The most recent European elections have shown that parties can reliably generate votes on the issue of migration prevention without credible concepts for implementation and regardless of concerns over human rights, international law, and democracy. The normalization of these positions is taking place in particular in an increasingly brutalized discourse on migration and borders.

One example of this shift: while a few years ago, German politician’s Alexander Dobrind’s speak of an “aggressive anti-deportation industry” has received the infamous “award” as ugliest word of the year because lawyers and human rights activists were “deliberately sabotaging the efforts of the rule of law”, the new European asylum rules ultimately follow precisely this stigma. They rely on camps designed to hold people who are not legally described as detained but whose reality of life is precisely this, furthermore severely limiting if not depriving them of access to legal representation, while the media, NGOs, or research are kept  from observing these conditions.

This disenfranchises not only migrants, but also lawyers, welfare workers and academics. We hear many reports from Poland where border residents no longer know whether they are committing a criminal offense if they take a person freezing to death by the wayside in their car or not. Or on the route via Bulgaria, reports of untreated injuries and dog bites have been increasing for some time. Just lately we heard report of the Greek coast guard throwing helpless migrants over board in high waters. All this in order to make borders more effective. Migration and border research, on the other hand, is quite unanimous: the violence is real, the costs are high and the control effect is at best temporary. So far, this has not led to official reconsiderations whether the motive of securing borders through violence and defense is not a fundamentally wrong path. On the contrary, we see the constant intensification of these attempts. The European border regime is caught up in a spiral that produces disappointed expectations and the further brutalization of borders.

Have we taken a fundamentally wrong path? There has hardly been any thought given to this so far.

We have to keep reminding yourself of this: In the previous almost two centuries of modern statehood, state borders – in various shapes and forms – were supposed to secure peace as fortified bulwarks against what was behind them. The result, however, was not security nor peace, but aggression and fear. The founders of political Europe therefore relied on the revolutionary idea of securing peace by breaking down borders between former enemies. Competences, sovereignty, economy and experience had to be shared in order to achieve peace. This led to the Customs Union, the Common European Economic Space and, of course, the Schengen Agreement which gave the member states’ populations the right to no internal border controls. In effect, not only wars between the EU member states, which had shaped the continent for centuries, have become unthinkable but the states also agreed on the need for democratic statehood, the rule of law, and the common safeguarding of fundamental and human rights.

The only problem is that this was only half thought through. The revolutionary creativity relied on the goodwill of the participating states and focused on the internal European area, while the issues of the resulting external borders and the undermining of “European values” from within were treated with neglect. This was partly due to the fact that, at least to the East, the communist states used brutal methods to provide both a deterrent counter-example and migration regulation, and that the asylum system in Europe was only slowly developing – explicitly as part of a liberal human rights policy that was opposed to communist dictatorship.

Secondly, the design of the external borders remained without any vision. As if they would not affect Europe, political concepts on Europe’s external borders fell back on traditional ways of thinking – the raising of borders to defend against what was behind them, as was familiar from the old nation states, i.e., the very model that European unification wanted to overcome. Such borders, however, have always promised much and delivered little. But this lack of vision in shaping the external borders does not make them any less important because the right has recognized this and it is their lever. They have been using it against the European project for some time, whereas now, and especially after the generally acknowledged Brexit disaster, they are focusing on changing Europe from within. Here, the volatile European border and migration policy is the approach to gradually normalize identitarian concepts of belonging and legality. A successful pattern is the adoption of liberal terms and language and overlaying them with their concepts and ideas of fear. This taps into feelings and racist thought that exist in overall society, creating new alliances and political options for regressive projects. We have now arrived at a situation in which the moderate and liberal players are limiting themselves to defense by isolation, overlooking the fact that this opposes the norms and values of what should be defended.

The design of Europe’s external borders remains visionless

This brings to the fore a second topic that flits through our minds and corridors like an invisible ghost: the colonial past. We tend to forget that the early Europe (also I praised just a few paragraphs above) was also shaped by active colonial powers. Belgium and France were still trying to maintain their possession with blunt force, as was the United Kingdom, which soon joined. They saw their empires crumble and tried to hold on to them while the former colonial powers such as Germany and Italy avoided dealing with their own colonial past and with the current colonial subjects of their European partner states. This is addressed in a number of joint projects in our research group and in the book Volker Heins’ and my book in particular by looking at the case of Algeria.

In effect, the unifying Europe drew a new hard border across the Mediterranean, a region which Fernand Braudel in his masterpiece had just described through its legacy as a intertwined cultural, social, and economic area. Initially, this border not even correspond with internal state organization as large parts of Algeria were officially not a colony but departments and thus integral parts of the French Republic. However, this territorial affiliation did not mean equal rights for the people living there. Rule remained colonially organized which did not change in the course of European unification but rather was incorporated into it. Political Europe invented itself as a white project that excluded Muslims in particular.

If we want to rethink Europe, this also means critically reflecting on this colonial legacy not only of individual member states but also of the common European project. This counts for both concrete policy and overtly or covertly inherited ideas about power and people. And we must take a critical look at EU foreign policy which is increasingly cooperating with dictators and autocracies by tying economic aid to “migration agreements” for instance. In what African observers often describe as colonial behavior such policies do not aim to direct migration as they publicly claim. In line with European interests, African states are supposed to prevent migration within Africa. As many of these states also produce refugees, such agreements particularly call into question the human right to leave one’s own country – a human right which is so important in contemporary German history. Accordingly, we must ask why this is becoming publicly acceptable. What does this unresolved colonial past of the European project mean for our concept of humans and rights? To what extent is the so-called new start in terms of migration based on a process pouring the old wine of civilization, cultural compatibility and the value of people into new wineskins that are no longer labeled by “race” but by “culture”? What does it mean for Europe as a political project that the world’s deadliest border has been erected on the Southern border. And what does it mean for our concepts of norms and values, that this is apparently tolerable for large parts of the European population?

A divided concept of humanity

When Europe simultaneously celebrates itself as a human rights project and criminalizes sea rescue, a divided concept of humanity seems to come into play. The crux of the matter is the portrayal of migration as a problem. This obscures the fact that migration is not a “crisis” but the “normal state” of modern societies. And it suggests that a “solution” can and must be found. This hope for “solutions” goes hand in hand with the acceptance of tougher measures. And that is quite understandable because sometimes you have to be a little tougher if the problem really is solved.

But if flight and migration are the normal state of affairs, as migration researchers such as Klaus Jürgen Bade have been emphasizing for decades, then they cannot be “solved”. That means rethinking. If we want sustainable migration policy in the long term, it can only be negotiated politically and democratically with the involvement of all stakeholders, instead of handing it over to non-transparent apparatuses known for their lax approach to fundamental and human rights, such as Frontex or camp administrations – not to mention third countries.

We should think of borders and migration as integral elements of our society and not as the other, the outside. Migration is not something that arrives at our shores from afar, it is permanently present basic structure and as a term an expression of how we perceive and organize mobility. Borders are not external frames around state and society but elements of our social order. Every breach of the law at the borders is an offense against the European legal order. An EU that normalizes these breaches of the law by failing to impose sanctions is therefore ultimately calling itself into question. In addition, the search for ways to shape migration cannot be limited to borders. What is needed is a more considered discussion of migration, reporting that does not reproduce the political slogans of “problem” and “crisis” and thus suggest the existence of a “solution”. Instead of resolving a “crisis”, we need to ask why we think of it as such – and what that says about our own society.

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