Lilliputian Power? Malta’s ‘Crisis’

The fifth chapter analyses how in the EU context Malta constructed a crisis around the issue of migration, and how the small state exploited the crisis to secure more EU funds and support. It thus focuses on how member states on the periphery respond to the new responsibility they face as EU migration gatekeepers. In this way, the chapter continues to explore the theme of power at the margins but moves away from the migrant experience to that of a small state at the edge of Europe. The chapter analyses Malta’s strategies at the EU level and its lobbying around particular policies between 2008 and 2016, including (1) the European Pact on Immigration and Asylum, (2) the Schengen Borders Code, (3) the Dublin Regulation, and (4) the Long-Term Residents Directive. The research demonstrates how Malta exerted an unexpected level of influence on EU migration governance by adopting a number of strategies, including emphasizing its small state status, its gatekeeper role, and the ‘crisis’. The most significant success was the expansion of the concept of solidarity within the EU to not only include financial transfers but also the relocation of people. However, this success has come at a price: Malta’s construction and exploitation of a migration crisis reinforces the very emphasis on migration control at the external border that it has resisted. Indeed, the EU framework now shapes Malta’s interests and strategies, encouraging the construction of migration crisis in the Mediterranean and the reduction of migrants to symbols of suffering and disorder.

The Future of Europe

The concluding chapter returns to the main themes explored and arguments made in the book, examining the contestation over borders, migration controls, and mobility at the edge of Europe. It looks especially at the continued intertwining of humanitarian and enforcement logics in the Mediterranean and how migrants are reduced to symbols at sea, their lives shipwrecked, and thus easily transformed into a threat. In particular, the chapter explores the contested role of non-governmental organizations that took to the sea after 2014 to carry out search and rescue operations and highlight EU inaction. The chapter considers the future of Europe and the European Union, its border controls in the Mediterranean, resistance to them, and practical alternative policy choices. While state policies erode spaces of asylum, undermining refugee protection and access to global mobility, inequality is on the rise and migrants and refugees continue to cross borders, often at great risk.

At Europe’s Edge

The fourth chapter turns to the policies and practices that migrants encounter once they arrive in Malta and on EU territory. After a review of the history of migration to the island state and the contemporary migration situation, it traces migrant journeys from the detention centres that await them upon arrival to possible deportation. By examining the sites and processes where migrants continue to be securitized within the border, the chapter argues that even when rescued from the sea, migrants do not escape political, social, and economic marginalization. The securitization of migration contributes to the construction of crisis and fuels racism and xenophobia within the host population. Moreover, this ‘othering’ occurs before migrants arrive on EU territory and is fundamentally related to discourse, policies, and practices at sea. The language of rescue strips migrants at sea of agency, reduces them to victims, and in turn allows for their continued marginalization once they arrive on EU territory. Yet, migrants resist this marginalization. Throughout the chapter, migrant accounts of experiences within host states demonstrate their agency and the narrow room for manoeuvre they are sometimes able to exploit. Ignoring this agency reifies the power of the state to ‘secure’ borders and control migration, and conceals the contested politics of mobility and security. Such encounters question traditional conceptualizations of sovereignty, security, and citizenship as they illustrate alternative modes of seeking security that move beyond the state and citizenship.

Limits of Migration Management

This chapter traces migrant journeys to the edge of Europe and analyses the politics of rescue in the Mediterranean to reveal how the EU contributes to deaths at sea and simultaneously points to these deaths and broader migration flows as a crisis. Following migrant journeys into Europe demonstrates how migrants negotiate passage and challenge sovereignty—a reality often obscured in state narratives. Indeed, through alternating politics of neglect, security, and humanitarianism, southern EU member states have constructed a migration ‘crisis’, depicting long-standing migration flows across the Mediterranean as chaotic and unprecedented. Key to the crisis narrative is the portrayal of migrants either as victims with no agency or as villains endowed with a dangerous, Herculean form of agency. In contrast, migrant accounts reveal a longer journey that begins before the Mediterranean shores and the room for manoeuvre that migrants find and exploit that renders the EU more sieve than fortress. Their experiences illustrate how borders are contested spaces, but also how state inaction contributes to deaths at sea. This chapter contributes to the literature on spectacle by illustrating how both humanitarian and enforcement performances reify state power and construct ‘Europe’ as a discrete unit, a benevolent actor in control of its borders. In doing so, the spectacles cast the Mediterranean as an empty, marginal space and migrants as objects to be governed, as symbols of disorder and chaos. Significantly, the spectacles at sea brand migrants as ‘others’, which allows for their continued marginalization in Europe.

Constructing Crises to Manage

This chapter sets out the conceptual building blocks for the book and develops the idea of migrant agency, situating it within the relevant literature. I argue that power, politics, and people are significant and often neglected elements of migration governance processes. Ignoring their role in migration governance contributes to the unremitting promotion of the migration management paradigm. In contrast, this book examines the interplay of actors, practices, and discourses within the realm of migration governance. Here, political power is often drawn from constructed crises based on a discourse of exceptionalism and sovereignty. Migrants are framed as symptomatic of globalization’s attack on state sovereignty and constructed as victims or villains. The chapter argues that the managed migration paradigm depends on the construction of a migration crisis to which the policy ostensibly responds. Such migration ‘crises’ obscure the complicity of the state in the production of vulnerability, marginalization, violence, and death through its border regimes, and reify the power of the state to control migration, despite paradoxically being promoted based on imagery of the state as overwhelmed. To complete this sleight of hand, policy discussions on migration governance ignore the role of migrants themselves, reinforcing the orientalist logic and assumptions that migrants are objects to be governed, not subjects who engage in decision-making, resist, and ultimately constitute international relations. Within the context of Europe, the chapter demonstrates how the emphasis on migration control at the EU’s external border results from constructed crises in the Mediterranean.

Notes from the Mediterranean

The introductory chapter first examines how and why EU migration policies have focused on control at the external border. The following section looks at how these policies encourage dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean and result in an increasing number of migrant deaths at the edge of Europe. In this context, shipwrecks play an important role in the politics of migration and are alternately cast as a humanitarian crisis and an enforcement problem, with migrants reduced to symbols of suffering or criminality and disorder. The Mediterranean space is reduced to an empty space, a mare nullius that allows for the projection of a unified, cohesive ‘Europe’ and provides a moral alibi for deaths at sea. Next, the chapter introduces the central case study of Malta, which EU policies place in the crosshairs of migration flows and migration control. It is from here, the EU’s smallest and most southern member state, that the book examines migrant experiences as well as Malta’s response to its new role as a migration gatekeeper within the EU. Finally, the chapter describes the methods and methodology employed before mapping the subsequent chapters of the book. In the book, ethnographic methods are combined with macro-level analyses in order to examine the relationships between local, national, and regional levels.