Abstract
Over the last few years, the so-called migrant crisis has been acquiring a growing relevance within the space of the political experience of the European Union and its generally out-of-synch member states. The contemporary debate on this issue also includes attempts to question the general reliability of this consolidated representation of the dynamics in progress, through a more or less successful effort to problematize the widely conditioning role that the “language of crisis” plays in the construction of our specific way of representing, interpreting and understanding contemporary migrations. This chapter aims at highlighting some of the main passages of this line of critical reflection, discussing the contribution it may give to a deeper understanding of the so-called populist turn of contemporary politics.
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Notes
- 1.
As Karolewski and Benedikter explain, “Eurostat points to 1,2 million asylum seekers that then came through Greece and Italy to Hungary, Austria, Germany, France and Sweden, Denmark and Norway, with Germany, Hungary, Sweden and Austria as countries with the most applications” (Karolewski & Benedikter, 2018, 99 ff.).
- 2.
As Bernd Kasparek points out, “the Dublin Convention (1997) laid down criteria to determine the state responsible for processing the application of an asylum seeker. While not spelled out explicitly neither in the Convention nor in its succeeding acts of law, the criteria establish a principle of causation, that is, the state that has ‘caused’ the entry of an asylum seeker is also responsible for processing the asylum claim. Causation may refer to insufficient policing of the border or the issuing of a visa. The principle of causation has until today remained the central rationale of the Dublin System, and the criteria are described as ‘objective, fair criteria both for the Member States and for the persons concerned’ (Council Regulation (EC) No. 343/2003; Regulation (EU) No. 604/2013)” (Kasparek, 2016, 62). For radical criticism of the “twofold falsehood” on which the Dublin Regulation rests, see Picozza (2017).
- 3.
Buonanno (2017, 102). The author refers to data produced by surveys carried out by the Council of the European Union and by Eurostat.
- 4.
Morsut and Kruke (2018). The authors apply the analysis model developed by Jan Koiman for the study of complex systems of governance, such as the one characterizing the EU.
- 5.
Nando Sigona, deputy director of the Institut for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS) at Birmingham University, expresses strong doubts with regard to this issue (Sigona, 2015).
- 6.
Stone here refers to UNHCR 2017 statistics. The correlation is even more overwhelming if one refers to the data released by the same organization for the year 2018. See UNHCR (2019).
- 7.
The “New Keywords Collective” is a collaborative project of collective writing emerged from a meeting on “The ‘European’ Question” in 2015 at King’s College London, whose aim is to re-evaluate critically current and past migration policies in Europe.
- 8.
Stierl et al. (2016, 22), where reference is explicitly made to a ‘spectacle of statistics’, ‘decisive for erasing the individuality and political subjectivity of people on the move as well as effacing their collective struggles and hardships, and thus for portraying “unauthorized” border crossers as a menace.’
- 9.
Ibidem. See also the recent report of the International Migration Institute network, “‘Counting migrants’ deaths at the border” (IMI, 2018).
- 10.
Tazzioli and De Genova (Tazzioli & De Genova, 2016, 2 ff.): ‘As a network of scholars in critical migration and borders studies, we have been particularly concerned to defy the intellectual and political ghettoization of these topics in relation to the ordinarily unquestioned manifold and transversal reality of the multiple “crises” that coexist alongside the purported “migration” or “refugee crisis” in (and of ) “Europe”.’
- 11.
According to the most radical critics of this line of the discourse, in fact, the semantics of crisis tends to ‘to conceal the violence and permanent exception that are the norm under global capitalism and our global geo-politics, and may serve to perpetuate the conditions that have led to the purported “emergency” in the first place.’ See Heller et al. (2016, 10).
- 12.
For a clear example of this position of complete closure, see Krzyzanowski et al. (2018, 2 ff). The authors, in fact, claim that ‘the discourse of the “Refugee Crisis” itself’ is ‘strongly ideologically charged’, conceptually ‘wrong’ and ‘purposefully’ based on ‘the notion of crisis which, as such, implies larger facets of, in most cases irrevocable, socio-political and politico-economic change’. In this regard, the position of De Genova, Garelli and Tazzioli (2018, 240), although radically critical, is decidedly more nuanced, its aim being to distinguish ‘hegemonic discursive formations of crisis’ from the ‘real crises for the preservation and social reproduction of human life’ which have ensued across the world as a more or less direct result of the ‘manifold states of exception’ unleashed by the former.
- 13.
According to Panizza (2005, 3), ‘populism is an anti-status quo discourse that simplifies the political space by symbolically dividing society between “the people” (as the “underdogs”) and its “other”. Needless to say, the identity of both ‘the people’ and ’the other’ is a political construct, symbolically constituted through the relation of antagonism, rather than sociological categories. (…) An anti-status quo dimension is essential to populism, as the full constitution of popular identities necessitates the political defeat of “the other” that is deemed to oppress or exploit the people and therefore to impede its full presence’.
- 14.
- 15.
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Scuccimarra, L. (2021). Migration Crisis and the Rise of Anti-humanitarian Populism in Europe. In: Cohen, R.A., Marci, T., Scuccimarra, L. (eds) The Politics of Humanity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75957-5_6
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