Europe, your waters run red through the Mediterranean.

Written By Chris McFadyen

CW: death, blood, descriptions of dead bodies

“The more the sun rose, the more dead bodies we could see.”

On the 26th of February a boat off the coast of southern Italy carrying around 200 refugees collided with rocky reefs and broke apart while trying to land near Crotone. With at least 86 confirmed deaths, there are fears more than 100 people, including children, died in the incident, and so did their dreams for a better life. Just two weeks later on the 12th of March, another boat capsized in the Central Mediterranean, with 30 people still missing.

The centre to far-right, and even much of the European left, pin the blame on human smugglers, and the solution on punishing smuggling, further strengthening border controls, and increasing funding for national border agencies and the European Frontex - a solution that seems too straightforward and simple to be true. Because it is. 

And yet, on the 10th of February, the summit of the European Council, led by its Swedish presidency, concluded with concerning plans for tougher border controls, including increased funding for cameras, drones and watchtowers - and even the building of walls. The European Commission further reiterated similar plans just two days after the second incident, urging Member States to deport more migrants. 

Meanwhile, European governments further embraced such plans: on the day of the Italian boat incident, the Greek government reinforced border controls along its land and sea frontier and expanded its border agency to reportedly block refugees from the Turkish-Syrian earthquakes and has announced plans to expand its border walls regardless of EU funding. The Greek, Maltese, and Italian border agencies, alongside Frontex, have repeatedly been accused for practising non-response tactics, or worse, strategically and illegally pushing back migrants at the coastal border. The UK government on the 7th of March announced the ‘Stop the Boats’ Bill to further illegalise migrants and strip them of protections from detention and deportation.

This is merely a superficial stopgap on a deeper problem - the hierarchisation of human lives - and does little to tackle the root causes of such migratory corridors, pointing to three fundamental flaws in Europe’s narrow and inhumane conception of migration:

Firstly, the increasing illegalisation of migration and mobility and militarisation of borders does little to tackle the root causes, catalysts and aggravators of such migratory corridors: (global) inequalities and deprivations, global warming and inhabitability, states of instability, exploitation, violence and corruption, ethnic and cultural tensions, etc. (Attinà, 2018). Such superficial measures do little to reduce the actual need or desire of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees to migrate, therefore have little actual impact on the rate of migratory flows, but thus shifting legal flows to illegalised flows. Such measures thus result in categorical substitution effects, inadvertently serving to push migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees to more extreme measures to attain similar migratory outcomes, whereby, for example, unauthorised border crossings facilitated by human smugglers, are resorted to (De Haas et al., 2019; Brachet, 2018; Mbaye, 2014). 

Secondly, such measures fundamentally misunderstand the internal dynamics of migration processes. Migratory corridors form part of a larger migration system with endogenous and contextual dynamics that essentially result in the self-perpetuation of migration through the emergence of migrant networks, the flows and counter-flows of social, cultural, informational, and economic capital, and the consequent cumulative causation of impacts in sending and receiving contexts (See e.g. Mabogunje, 1970; Paredes-Orozco, 2019). Therefore, such measures serve to end the (legal) circulatory mobility of migrants, resulting in the unintended consequences of, for example, further illegalised settlement within border states due to a reduction in the rate of return migration (Massey et al., 2016; 2020) alongside aforementioned resulting substitution effects. 

Thirdly, such measures ignore Europe’s historical and contemporary culpability in the creation of such migratory corridors. Europe’s stratification of ethnic and cultural boundaries and aggravation of tensions in colonial statebuilding and border delineation (Attinà, 2018), Europe’s exploitation of resources and the consequent deprivation of regions through historical imperialism and contemporary neo-imperialism, and Europe’s prominent role in the destabilisation of regions through neoliberal interventionism, monetarily via international financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank (See e.g. Stein & Nissanke, 1999; Bradlow, 2001) and politically in its interventionism in the wars in Africa and Asia (See e.g. Mohamedou, 2018) have all contributed to the creation of contemporary migratory corridors. Furthermore, Europe’s external migration management and interventionist policies to limit or stop migratory corridors and combat smuggling have only further facilitated if not ‘manufactured’ actors in illegalised migration, i.e. smugglers, and resulted in increasingly exploitative and inhumane avenues of migration (Brachet, 2018).

The dogged pursuit of policies which, even by their own metrics, fail to ‘stop’ migration shows that rather than solving the underlying issues causing these humanitarian crises, governments and institutions across Europe choose to paint migrants as the problem for political gain. 

All this begs the question:

How red must the seas run before Europe cares?

The border between Europe and Africa is the deadliest in the world (Fargues, 2017), and yet the response of leaders of European governments like Italy’s Meloni, Greek’s Mitsotakis and the UK’s Sunak, and the European Union as a whole, is to make it even deadlier.

Fortress Europe is, simply put, justified racism, and is an utter abandonment of the European Union’s values of respect for human rights and dignity. The ever increasing illegalisation of migrants and militarisation of the border regime leads to the banalisation thereof and the racialisation and dehumanisation of migrants, entrenching a hierarchisation of human life where the White European stands superior. 

Fortress Europe strips migrants of their agency, yet shifts the responsibility and blame to migrants (See e.g. Bonjour & Duyvendak, 2018) or to third actors like smugglers. In so doing, Europe reduces migrants to helpless victims devoid of agency and ignores the transactional, symbiotic, nature of smuggling (Parreñas, 2006; Zhang et al., 2018). And yet,  it is this very process of illegalisation and removal of safe and legal routes that further pushes migrants to resort to smugglers, incentivising smuggling in increasingly inhumane or exploitative forms and further endangering or damaging the lives of migrants (Parreñas, 2006; Brachet, 2018).

It is easy to point to the smuggler when the blood of migrants overflows out of the hands of Europe’s past and present culpability in creating these migratory corridors and perpetuating its inhumanity. Europe needs to confront its racism, its Whiteness, and its hierarchisation of European lives over human lives. The first step lies in ending the further fortification and militarisation of Fortress Europe and externalisation of migration management as the European Union points its finger at everyone but itself. A Union based on human rights, dignity, and solidarity is but a lie when our waters run red through the Mediterranean.


Signed

Federation of Young European Greens

Giovani Europeisti Verdi 

Νέοι Πράσινοι

Young Greens of England & Wales

References:

Zhang, S. X., Sanchez, G. E., & Achilli, L. (2018). Crimes of solidarity in mobility: Alternative views on migrant smuggling. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 676(1), 6-15. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716217746908.

Chris McFadyen
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