Blocked at the border

Whether running or strolling, in their wandering these young Afghan migrants embody a new figure of the foreigner, zigzagging between prohibitions. For, if the policemen who watch them seem calm, this is because the port is surrounded by a complex system of very high fences, because the lorries are minutely inspected on the parking lot before embarkation, and because on arrival in Italy those who have succeeded in crossing will be seized and sent back on the return boat. They will find themselves back in the Patras encampment. So it is harder for them to cross than for the goods under which they try to conceal themselves – a fact that we already know, though in a rather abstract way, when we compare the free circulation of goods and capital with the much harder, and sometimes even impossible, circulation of persons.

In July 2012, two dead migrants were found at the port of Venice after a forty-hour crossing in a container lorry in the hold of a ship; they had died of asphyxiation after hiding their faces in plastic bags to conceal the traces of respiration that the police ‘see’ with the aid of breathing detectors.¹ Some crossings are successful, despite everything (a handful by sea, others by land routes that are longer and more exhausting), which sustains the desire and energy of those who remain blocked at the border. And for those who fail in the attempt, months and years can pass here, between the port, the encampment, the squats in the town and seasonal work in the region’s orange and olive groves. A whole life is organized in these border places, marked by the uncertainty of the moment and the immediate future, as well as the uncertainty of the gaze directed at them. When they run after the lorries they do not see the middle-class townsfolk watching them with indifference from their fitness centre, or else they make fun of them, as they laugh at the townsfolk who watch them walking along the pavement of the road alongside the port, and joke among themselves without embarrassment when a pretty girl crosses their path. They are easily recognizable by their bodies (tired, damaged, wounded), by their clothing (the impression of dirt encrusted on their clothes by time, by nights spent outdoors, by the smoke of braziers), by their manner of being (slow, almost nonchalant, with a gravity always tinged with humour) and by their odd everyday rhythms – a good deal of waiting and drowsiness until the moment comes to approach the frontier and the arriving lorries.

Indifference and solidarities

As the second actor on the stage we have those townsfolk who spend some leisure time in the fitness centre and while cycling on the spot watch the migrants running after the lorries – apparently embodying the politics of indifference. An indifference to the world that surrounds us and a loss from view of an ‘other’ about whom there seems to be nothing to think, no relationship to symbolize. This conception praises individualism, the defence of bodies, territories and private goods against a world suspected of being wretched and intrusive. The planet does not seem a common world. Most often present as a supposedly heard and shared ‘subtext’ in xenophobic and security discourse, this individual combat against a threatening world is sometimes expressed in the public and political domain in the form of cynical statements such as ‘Someone else’s place, not mine!’, or the famous ‘Not In My Back Yard’ that inspired the NIMBY urban privatization movement in Los Angeles.²

This posture harks back to the model of proprietorial politics, defined in the words of Carl Schmitt as the guarantor of delimitations and ‘spatial orders of the Earth’ along with the sovereignties associated with these: sovereignties and private territories thus found the confrontation between friend and enemy.³ In this conception, a threat is seen as coming from an ‘outside’ that is both absolute and empty, figured in the features of a shadow, that of an abstract ‘foreigner’, demographically surplus, supernumerary, and recognized only in the form of this excess. In every state, space and milieu of the planet that is relatively privileged, this politics of indifference backs up policies that protect privileged groups and dismiss this nameless ‘foreigner’. From this point of view, the same scene could have been described on the small tourist islands of Malta or Lampedusa in the Mediterranean, where welcome tourists cross paths with ‘clandestine’ immigrants, or in the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, or in the surroundings of Jerusalem, now walled in and entrenched from its immediate urban environment, or again somewhere close to the very long barrier between the United States and Mexico, in the towns of El Paso or Tijuana.

Of course, this depiction needs qualification. In actual fact, indifference is not automatically associated with the relatively privileged social and national place of those women and men whom policies of indifference towards displaced persons seek to enlist or claim to represent. Who exactly knows, around the port of Patras, what one of these fitness practitioners may do the next day, or even after going home the same day? In many countries over the last decade, increasingly visible solidarities have been displayed towards so-called ‘clandestine’ foreigners, either individually or by way of voluntary associations, in the form of efforts to help them, to see that they get their proper rights, and to ‘de-diabolize’ them simply by establishing contact with them. This attitude has been legitimized in terms of culture, particularly in the world of science and that of the arts (literature, theatre, cinema), where a number of new works over the last few years have aimed to understand and depict the subjectivity of undesirable foreigners.

This hospitable attitude, in a context that is globally hostile towards ‘foreigners’, is also expressed as a political alternative, even if it remains very much a minority position, in the form of activist mobilizations around asylum, the rights of foreigners, the free circulation of immigrants and their families. These are culturally heterogeneous milieus, whose motives, despite their contradictory character – more or less humanitarian or political, for example – do have effects from the point of view of the protection and integration of foreigners. It is thanks to local mobilization, moreover, and the support of a Greek association in defence of the rights of foreigners, that the Patras encampment has been able to exist for twelve years. Despite being precarious and always threatened with disappearance, its existence has been the result of a compromise negotiated between activists in voluntary associations (students and middle-class individuals from the town) and the municipality. Opened at the end of 1996, the encampment was destroyed by fire and police bulldozers in July 2009. It was like a refugee camp transplanted into the midst of the middle-class apartment blocks and houses of the European town close to the port. At certain times in its existence it sheltered up to 2,000 people, migrants who were not yet refugees (they had simply requested asylum) or were considered clandestine. This is where the young people lived who ran after the lorries every day. Others grew tired of this, and the encampment a few metres from the border became their new place of life.

Borders and walls

The police, then, the third actor on the Patras stage, are charged with technical and routine control of movements and the situation on the Greek border. They ‘do the job’ of the state that controls spaces, with an objective cruelty that comes from their role of patrolling and filtering at the borders. Elsewhere in Europe, between France and Spain for example, some police responsible for migrants even refer to themselves as ‘hunters’. More generally, control at the European borders is conducted by a European institution that functions well and has enjoyed a steady increase in its budget since its creation in 2005 – Frontex (officially, the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union).

In 2010, after Europe requested that Greece increase its surveillance of migration flows from Africa and the East, the country proposed constructing a wall on its border with Turkey. Ten kilometres of this were built on the land frontier in early 2012, while for the maritime border surveillance operations are planned, to be conducted from boats that would also act as detention centres on the high seas. In the United States, police border patrols have been under pressure since 2005 from ‘auxiliaries’ that spur them on; while claiming to fill the gaps left by an inadequate state, these stand watch and set up camp close to the thousand kilometres of wall that divides the United States from Mexico, monitoring and hunting ‘Latinos’ who manage to cross over or under this. Above all, these patrols develop an anti-immigrant propaganda that is very effective in the political and media sphere.⁴

What the situation at the port of Patras displays, like many other border places today, is a hardening of borders and, despite this, the stubbornness of migrants who seek to cross them, since this seems possible and legitimate to them even if it is not legal at the actual place of crossing. Opposing legitimacies confront one another, that of the open world and that of protection against the ‘misery of the world’, that of national sovereignty and that of cosmopolitism. It is this conflict that explains the transformation of borders into walls – more than 20,000 kilometres of these built or under construction in the world today. Despite appearances, we must try not to confuse the two things. I shall go on to show (particularly in chapters 1 and 2) that there is as much difference between a border, both boundary and passage, and a wall, synonymous with reciprocal enclosure, as between alterity and identity. What I am trying to understand is this double excess, an excess that moves from uncertain border to wall, from relationship to identity enclosure and finally the ‘disappearance’ of the other, that is, the disappearance of the alterity without which identities no longer have a social existence.

In order to avoid the trap of identity enclosure, we need to give a name to the foreigner, to discover by various examples the person I shall describe in what follows as the other-subject. The latter is a priori without identity, having lost this with their departure and exile, and is still in the process of seeking or rebuilding it. But he or she is also the person who appears ‘here and now’ at the border and disturbs the normal and routine order of things.

If there is no explicit interaction on the silent stage of Patras, there certainly is an underlying and complex relationship between the three participating groups, one full of ambivalence and conflict. It resembles that created and replayed each day between each person on the planet and the ‘world around them’, whether this world is close (‘us’) or distant (‘others’), or again is ‘globalization’ in the sense of a global impersonal power, completely delocalized and ungraspable, which the word has acquired today. There are also many emotions and fears, expectations and a priori judgements, between the three groups present. The harshness of the situation does not facilitate contact, but the furtive exchange of glances speaks much about the shared awareness of a co-presence.

Borderlands and their inhabitants: a banal cosmopolitism

A long moment of uncertainty has settled on the world. Precarious life lasts longer and people grow used to it; emergency kits and, more generally, temporary and dismantleable arrangements have become pervasive in architecture, industry and art; mobility is ever more frequent and massive, crossing cities and the planet without a single or definitive direction. In the verses of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish that serve as an epigraph to this book, ‘the north in a foreign land’ is the direction to choose, but only the wind shows the direction. We have grown up in modernity asking ourselves in what direction the wind is going to turn. Today we discover that we are living ‘on the wind’, and have to know who we are without having a definite anchorage (‘neither there nor here’). Often we enter labyrinths in which we lose the sense of direction before learning to traverse them and then emerge from them.

We are all living the whole time with borders and thresholds, as soon as we move around to a minimum extent, and we never stop crossing these. The border is a place, a situation or a moment that ritualizes the relationship to the other, and in this sense we always need it; still more, its existence is a given fact. Besides, as we shall go on to see, the border always functions with mediations, such as tutelary and protective divinities, bearers or translators. The latter enable us to understand on the level of language or culture the relationships formed between two persons who do not know one another but meet in a border situation, initially uncertain.

One of the border situations most often recalled, but by no means the only one, is that separating nation-states. Unable either to enter a territory or return to their country of origin, some immigrants find themselves trapped in waiting zones, where the border expands in space as ever more of these zones are constructed, transit camps and encampments, and where time stretches as periods of indeterminate status are prolonged for ever more people. These zones create moments in which people no longer know at all clearly who they are or where they are, moments of social and identity potential.

Seen from the border, the world also looks different. The ‘margins’ of nation-states are the unthought in the theory of public-order policies, just as urban interstices or so-called informal economies remain unthought. Both things are always defined only in relief, in a residual way. Public order applies a management ideal nowadays called ‘governance’. This model, obsessed by the threat of the disorderly practice of politics by an undifferentiated demos (the political people), favours divisions and a system of worlds that are watertight, reduced, in which control and adherence to the system are exercised. In this system of fragmentation, each person is allotted an identity specific to them, essential and ‘true’ – whether this is national, racial, ethnic or religious. The most differentialist versions of these – current in the highest spheres of politics and the media – are caricatures, but none the less effective in their enterprise of separation and rejection. The same discourses, however, reject – and this is indeed their rhetorical trick – all those who, taking up and transforming the very languages that have confined them to the margins (‘Roma’, ‘black’, ‘refugee’, ‘stateless’, for example), claim or impose their ‘presence-in-the-world’, because this world is both more accessible and more closed than ever before.

I shall seek to show that an ordinary cosmopolitan condition is being formed beyond so-called ‘marginal’ lives, beyond the lives of those who at some point are here called ‘foreigners’. In a global and hybrid world, where experience of the unfamiliar and of uncertainty is practically everyday, this condition is born on the border, that is, in everything that makes for the border. This includes uncertain places, uncertain times, uncertain identities that are ambiguous, incomplete or optional, indeterminate or in-between situations, uncertain relationships. These are border landscapes, in which encounters and experiences bring into relation a here and an elsewhere, a same and an other, a ‘local’ fact and a ‘global’ context (simply meaning someone or something that comes from ‘outside’).

My approach is that of an anthropologist. On the basis of my fieldwork I have come to understand that the border is continuously both remade and challenged. I have thus discovered, by way of this ethnographic ‘bias’ and bit by bit, on the one hand what one can call the centrality of the border. This point is essential, and I shall return to it on different occasions (particularly in chapter 3): by expanding in time and space, the borderland becomes a pole of reference for persons in movement who do not find a natural place within the societies or cities that they wish to reach. But in order to grasp this new centrality of the border, it is necessary to redefine anthropological ‘decentring’: not an exotic ‘detour’ into distant countries that are supposed to be radically other, but the study of what makes the border of everything, and thus denotes, for concrete experience, the possibility of an alterity (chapter 4). I have discovered, on the other hand, a terrain of exchange and discussion with certain philosophical writings that have taken borderlands and cosmopolitism as an object of reflection. A common perspective is sketched here: the ordinary cosmopolitism of situations, spaces and people of the borderlands that I have studied on the ground intersects and interpellates the debate on cosmopolitism and cosmopolitics.

The contribution of anthropology to this debate is a double one, bearing on questions of cosmopolitism and on the subject or ‘subjectification’. It draws on different figures of a ‘borderland man’ (a generic term to denote those men and women who arrive and ‘settle’ at the border). To recognize and understand the condition that they embody is one of the major issues of our time. It is by way of what happens in the borderlands that we are in the world and of the world, cosmopolitans de facto, without either having intended or conceived this. This is an ordinary or ‘banal’ cosmopolitism, and it is increasingly shared in a growing number of situations of everyday life. In order to recognize its existence, to understand its meaning for oneself and for others, it is only necessary to extract oneself from the identity-based beliefs and utopias that separate an absolute and intrinsic ‘within’, symbolically or materially walled in, from an ‘outside’ that is nameless and voiceless, generating all the more fear in that it is reduced to silence and dismissed. We come back therefore to the centrality of the borderland, both as epistemological operation (that of decentring) and as political issue. Focusing attention on the borderland makes it possible to think the question of the subject as other-subject, or decentred subject (as will be done in chapter 6): this subject embodies a word, a creation or a political action that emerge at the border and become a factor of disturbance for an existing sedentary order. The borderland as conceived in the present study, as a prolonged time and a border space, in which people learn the ways of the world and of other people, is thus the place where a new cosmopolitan subject is emerging.

To rethink and reconstruct decentring as the foundation of this anthropological project is the epistemological proposal that runs right through this book. Is it still possible, as anthropology claims, to understand the world that surrounds us and the place or engagement of each person in this world, without inquiring as to the effects of today’s ‘global’ reality on local fields of investigation, and thus on the methods and reasonings of anthropologists? I shall take examples of borderlands, places and communities ‘in the process of making’, in a situation of mobility, displacement and migration, while freeing this research from the identity obsession that often seizes political leaders, commentators on current affairs, and sometimes even researchers in social sciences themselves. For anthropology, which has always interested itself both in man and in societies, does not set out in my view to present and augment the difference of ‘others’ as pure and homogeneous cultural totalities, radically different. It can on the contrary reduce distance from practices and situations still ignored, describe these and think with them (which is the meaning I give to empathy as an intellectual disposition), and so make them less foreign. As we shall go on to see, the place where the other – the other-subject – is to be found is always closer than people believe: it is in a borderland. This will be viewed here as a place, a moment and, in an expanded conception used in this essay, a border situation, in which each person has their own experience of the world and of others.

Two other persons are present on the stage at the Patras border. There is the lorry driver, annoyed perhaps by a situation over which he has no control, or even ‘playing’ with the young people whom he knows well and whom, a few kilometres back, he might have let climb up without saying anything if a trafficker introduced them to him and compensated him for the risks involved. Discourses of denunciation and moralization are useless, but they are none the less par for the course, constantly trapping the gaze and scarcely leaving room for a reflection both more precise and more political, thus more effective. As we know, moral denunciations about international migration focus unanimously on ‘traffickers’ and their supposedly ‘mafia-type networks’. But if these are still there, despite spectacular ‘dragnets’ and promises of eradication, it is because they play a role that is not moral but political, more or less equivalent to that of checkpoints: they allow a drip feed across the walls, they organize little escapes that make it possible to avoid the massive and brutal confrontation of persons in displacement against the existence of walls. They also play an economic role for the northern countries (Europe and the United States) by keeping a non-negligible part of the subaltern international labour force in a situation of illegality, and all the more fragile and exploitable as they know themselves to be socially undesirable.⁵

Finally, there is the person who observes and will tell this story. I found myself in Patras in 2009 to conduct a study on migrant encampments in European cities and close to the borders.⁶ The scene lasted only a short moment, but I ‘scanned’ it into my memory. And I have written it down here so that it does not disappear, but serves as an indicator for reflection on the state of the world and its violence, on borders and walls, and on the everyday cosmopolitism that is the perspective of this moment of history and gives it, I believe, its deepest and most lasting meaning.

In 2015, the whole world has been able to see how this scene has shifted and multiplied in tens or hundreds of places in Europe, with too these endlessly televised images of long lines of migrants blocked at the borders of Greece, Italy, Macedonia, Hungary and Austria. Near the port and border town of Calais, night-time attempts to board the Eurostar train at the entrance to the Channel tunnel or, as at Patras, people climbing on the back of trucks on the motorway leading to the port, have been an everyday occurrence. They have made the front pages of newspapers and led to at least eleven deaths in 2015 alone, according to organizations present on the ground, as well as a large number of wounded, who either fell off trains or were run over by vehicles. Between 2005 and 2015 several encampments and squats were established in the town of Calais, in which migrants found refuge thanks to the support of several voluntary organizations of local people. In April 2015, the state opened a resettlement camp seven kilometres outside the town, and organized the forced departure of migrants from the encampment and squats they had previously occupied to the new camp, characterized by the government as the only ‘tolerated’ settlement, and located a few metres from a reception centre offering food rations and a few showers. Soon known as a ‘state shanty-town’ or the ‘New Jungle’, the Calais camp would become the place of shelter for some 5,000 people in September 2015, mainly Syrians, Sudanese, Eritreans and Afghans trying in some cases to reach England, or in others seeking asylum in France. In the political and media context of the autumn 2015 ‘migration crisis’ in Europe, the occupants of the Calais camp became symbols of the desire of European governments to convey to the world the message that national borders had been closed. In the course of that month, the Calais camp became increasingly hard of access for voluntary organizations and citizens showing solidarity, mainly French and British. Given the impossibility of legally crossing the border to England, and facing every day the French and British police, the camp occupants began to demonstrate almost daily between the town and the port: they held up placards, shouted slogans and distributed open letters denouncing the inhumanity of French and British policy, demanding the opening of the border and respect for human rights. The governments of the countries concerned refused to acknowledge this, continuing to treat them as a security and possibly humanitarian problem, and the migrants thereby expressed a form of politics that placed the border and human mobility at the centre of the conflict, giving the idea of what a politics of the cosmopolitical subject might be. As a politics that gives a premonition of a world to come, this scene at Calais, with its street demonstrations of migrants blocked at the border, forms the counterpoint of the scene at Patras, at the other end of Europe.

The present essay is made up of two parts, closely linked. The first of these, ‘Decentring the World’, offers a reflection on the foundations and actuality of borderlands (spatial, temporal and social), on the crisis of representation of the world in the age of ‘globalization’, and on the formation of an ordinary cosmopolitan condition, perceptible on the basis of the experience of migrants but likely to become the most widespread social and cultural way of life in a near future already in the process of construction. The second part, ‘The Decentred Subject’, is a study of the transformation of cultures and identities in this context, and a reflection on the intellectual tools needed to grasp these. The question of the capacity of subjects to act on their destiny and on the world that surrounds them runs through the whole of this second part.