Dangerous Aliens, Crisis Constellations, and Information Gaps

Chapter 4 shifts the analytical focus from elite claims made in the name of ‘the people’ to EU citizens’ vernacular knowledge of migration. Particular emphasis is given to the vernacular knowledge and categories used by citizens to discuss the issue of migration as it is perceived to impact and disrupt their everyday lives, the underpinning assumptions about hierarchies of race and gender used to position citizens in relation to perceptions about different ‘types’ of people on the move, and citizens’ awareness of/support for dominant governmental and media representations of the issue of migration in Europe. As well as offering a map of these contours, the discussion identifies three overriding themes. First, vernacular conversations problematize the notion of a linear transmission between elite crisis narratives and their reception among diverse publics. Second, the claim that elite narratives merely ventriloquize what ‘the people’ think about and want in regard to about migration is challenged by the complexity and nuance of vernacular narratives. Third, EU citizens repeatedly spoke of what they perceived to be a series of ‘information gaps’, which led to a widespread distrust of mainstream politicians and media sources, anxieties about their individual and collective futures, and demands for more detailed, higher quality, and accessible knowledge about migration from the EU, national governments, media sources, and academics. By taking vernacular views and experiences of migration seriously we can better understand how the propagation of misinformation, confusion, and uncertainty among EU citizens set the scene for populist notions of ‘taking back control’ to thrive.

Populist and ‘Post-Truth’ Border Politics

Chapter 3 investigates the role of populist and ‘post-truth’ narratives of migration and border crises propagated by governmental and non-governmental elites in fuelling widespread notions of a ‘loss of control’, despite the intensification of walling and deterrent security measures. In order to contextualize findings in subsequent chapters, a significant proportion of the discussion is devoted to the five national political and cultural contexts in which focus groups were held (Germany, Greece, Hungary, Spain, United Kingdom). First, a close examination of the methodologies used to produce several prominent opinion poll findings on migration reveals that they were produced by surveys whose design often worked within and thereby reproduced the dominant securitizing frame. Second, with reference to populist discursive and visual representations of mobile populations and a loss of control over border security, it is shown how the rise of ‘post-truth’ communication over the same timeframe produced multiple competing realities of the situation in the EU, which simultaneously entrenched the crisis narrative and deprived audiences of detailed and reliable information. Third, it is demonstrated how leading opinion polls, used by governmental elites as ‘evidence’ of EU citizens’ pro-border and anti-immigration stance, were unable to grasp the performativity of their own role in perpetuating the dynamics of crisis that they purported merely to capture. Alternative modes of engaging with the politics of ‘public opinion’ are thus urgently required. A vernacular approach offers a series of disruptive counter-points to existing sources of elite knowledge and understanding about EU citizens’ views on migration and border security.

Exceptional Times, Emergency Borders

Chapter 2 examines the role of elite governmental actors in producing the narrative of the so-called 2015 ‘migration crisis’ and creating the conditions under which walling and deterrent border security policies flourished. The first part of the chapter draws on key press releases, speeches, and policy documents issued by the EU Commission and its agencies in order to map the emergence and trajectory of this elite ‘crisis’ narrative from the so-called ‘ghost ship’ arrivals to the height of ‘irregular’ arrivals that year. The second part shows how this ahistorical, Euro-centric, and (post)colonial governmental frame—with its reductionist depiction of mobile populations and sanitized one-sided view of border-related violence—has been problematized and disaggregated by research that documents the experiences of those seeking entry to the EU. The third part draws on theoretical literatures on the politics of crisis in order to argue that, irrespective of its empirical accuracy, the so-called ‘crisis’ narrative has enabled the intensification of deterrent border security measures on- and off-shore and the re-emergence of disciplinary walling techniques among EU Member States in ways that would be otherwise unpalatable in liberal democracies during ‘non-crisis’ times. But while extant work on crisis enables a critical analysis of the politics of ‘crisis bordering’ that is essential for any attempt to grapple with the book’s overarching puzzle, ultimately it falls short of explaining why populist calls to ‘take back control’ have been stoked rather than satiated by such bordering and therefore it is necessary to investigate those calls—and their reception—among diverse publics in closer detail.

Border Anxieties

Chapter 5 focuses on EU citizens’ border anxieties and vernacular narratives of ontological (in)security; it argues that such narratives offer insights into the everyday politics of desire for border security predicated upon fantasies of control. Analysis of group discussions centres on how citizens conceptualized ‘the border’, what they understood by ‘tougher’ borders, and why they found bordering practices—including walling—appealing as a policy paradigm for responding to migration in the contemporary EU context. The discussion engages critically with interdisciplinary debates about psycho-social approaches to bordering and the politics of ‘ontological security’. Work orientated by the dominant Laing–Giddens paradigm offers a conceptualization of the relationship between macro-level and micro-level bordering practices, notions of home and belonging, and the illusion of the bounded nation-state as the origin of a pure and stable identity, but it presumes that ‘more bordering’ equates to ‘greater security’. By contrast, Brown’s (2010) psychoanalytical approach to walling offers tools for understanding the counter-intuitive process whereby excessive bordering practices may result from and further stimulate the repression of anxieties, which leads to an obsessive drive that produces the very dangers it seeks to negate. But while Brown’s view helps in part to address the puzzle posed by the contemporary EU context, it ultimately leaves no possibility of escape, no potential for change, and no recognition of actually existing alternatives to ever more bordered states and lives, and yet these counter-narratives are also rendered visible by a vernacular approach to European border security.

Desecuritizing Strangeness

Chapter 6 recovers vernacular counter-narratives of the border and alternative border imaginaries at work in citizens’ conversations. Beyond dominant narratives of crisis, securitization, abjection, and control, the analysis shows how some vernacular accounts mobilized border logics that questioned portrayals of obsessive walling practices as immutable and inevitable and thus disrupted elite scripts of the ‘crisis’. It is argued that another reason why populist calls to ‘take back control’ flourished despite augmented border security is that actually existing alternative imaginaries among citizens were subjugated in wider public discourse. The discussion begins by recalling the ‘affective atmospheres of welcoming’ that swept across the EU during the summer of 2015. While some vernacular narratives arguably perpetuated a problematic politics of pity akin to many elite governmental narratives of humanitarian crisis, others made arguments about EU citizens’ duties to new arrivals based on a politics of equality and/or of an awareness of the legacies of European colonialism. From here, the analysis considers a range of vernacular narratives that in various ways challenged the notion that there is ‘no alternative’ to tougher deterrent border security and walling. Finally, the chapter mines citizens’ vernacular narratives that do not start with abstract arguments about ‘borders’ at all. In such narratives we find glimpses of what Kristeva (1991) refers to as an ‘ethics of strangeness’: refusals of sovereign mastery of control, the fantasy of ontological security, and the desire to be ‘bordered’. This disrupts the grip of the dominant elite ‘crisis’ narrative and offers new grounds to engage the challenges wrought by increased arrivals and deaths at sea.

Towards a Vernacular Study of Border Security

This introductory chapter sets out the puzzle posed by the intensification of walling and deterrent security on the one hand and the proliferation of populist calls for tougher borders on the other. It argues that in order to address this puzzle it is necessary not only to consider the roles of governmental actors, media sources, and people on the move in the performance of Europe’s so-called ‘migration crisis’, but also the views, experiences, and political agency of EU citizens in whose name tougher border security is ultimately legitimized. While the nationalist populist mantra of ‘taking back control’ of borders and sovereignty claims to speak for large numbers of EU citizens, relatively little is known about how citizens conceptualize, understand, and talk about the ‘crisis’—and the twinned issues of migration and border security—in the context of their everyday lives. The discussion engages with theoretical and methodological debates about the status of the vernacular as a distinctive approach in the social sciences. It builds on existing interdisciplinary literature in order to develop a vernacular study of border security, which draws on positioning theory in order to understand subject formation in, and the wider political significance of, social conversations. It outlines how this vernacular approach was applied in the ‘Border Narratives’ project, the findings of which form the underpinning research for the book as a whole. Finally, it provides a map of the key arguments, summarizes main contributions, and explains how each chapter addresses a different facet of the above puzzle.