Once more, something extremely troubling is taking place at the heart of Europe. Unmistakably, an ever-increasing multitude of voices are making themselves heard. Spurred on by the strength of fellow living souls, human chains of solidarity are forming.
In the darkness of fear and denunciation, and faced with unrelenting waves of repression, compassionate men and women seek to awaken the sleeping fireflies of hospitality and solidarity.
In the midst of an otherwise troubling anaesthesia, an active minority is taking a stance. With renewed vigour they seek to denounce acts carried out in their name against the Other — who, it is claimed, is not one of us.
Forced from their homes, millions of desperate men, women and children have set out on paths of exodus. Another great cycle of repopulation is taking place in the world.
However, these people are not deserters. They are fugitives. Threatened by one calamity or another, they have escaped their places of birth and childhood — places where they lived, but which one day became uninhabitable, impossible abodes.
Propping up the fable of “foreign aid”, there are many who still believe in fairy tales. Despite the fact that, between 1980 and 2009, net transfers of financial resources from Africa to the rest of the world reached the threshold of approximately $1 400-billion, and illicit transfers totalled $1 350-billion, the belief somehow holds firm: the countries of the North subsidise those of the South.
Besides, it seems to count for little that the countries with weak or intermediate gross domestic product have welcomed more than 90% of the 65.6-million refugees currently displaced and uprooted in the world.
In this sector, as in others, an era of fantasy and closed-mindedness is upon us.
From the depths of the shadows, an old spectre returns to haunt people’s minds with invasions of hordes from overpopulated lands — countries “where women still give birth to seven or eight each”.
We must close the borders. Filter those who make it across them. Process them. Choose who we want to remain. Deport the rest. Sign contracts with corrupt elites from the countries of origin, transition countries.
They must be turned into the prison guards of the West, to whom the lucrative business of administering brutality can be subcontracted.
These states must become the protectorates of Europe — at once prisons for those seeking to leave, and dumping grounds for those it would be better to rid ourselves of. And above all, we must make Europeans want to have more children. This is the essence of the cornerstone of European migratory policy at the start of this century.
In truth, the problem is not the migrants, nor the refugees, nor the asylum seekers.
Borders. Everything begins with them, and all paths lead back to them.
They are no longer merely a line of demarcation separating distinct sovereign entities. Increasingly, they are the name used to describe the organised violence that underpins both contemporary capitalism and our world order in general — the women, the men and the unwanted children condemned to abandonment; the shipwrecks and drownings of hundreds, indeed thousands — weekly; the endless waiting and humiliation in consulates, in limbo; days of woe spent wandering in airports, in police stations, in parks, in stations, then down on to the city pavements, where as night falls, blankets and rags are snatched from people who have already been stripped and deprived of almost everything, bare bodies debased by a lack of water, hygiene and sleep.
In short, an image of humanity on a road to ruin.
In fact, everything leads back to borders — these dead spaces of nonconnection that deny the very idea of a shared humanity, of a planet — the only one we have, that we share together, and to which we are linked by the ephemerality of our common condition. But perhaps, to be completely exact, we should speak not of borders but instead of “borderisation”.
What then is this borderisation, if not the process by which world powers permanently transform certain spaces into places impassable for certain classes of populations? What is it about, if not the conscious multiplication of spaces of loss and mourning, where the lives of a multitude of people judged to be undesirable come to be shattered?
What is it, if not a way of waging war against enemies whose means of existence and survival we have previously destroyed — with the use of uranium warheads and banned weapons such as white phosphorus, with high-altitude bombardment of basic infrastructures, with a cocktail of cancerous chemical substances deposited in the soil, which fill the air, the toxic dust in the ruins of towns razed to the ground, the pollution from burning hydrocarbons?
And what should we say about the bombs? In the last quarter of the 20th century, are there any types of bomb to which civilian populations have not been subjected?
Conventional blind bombs, reconverted with central inertial systems in the tail, cruise missiles with inbuilt infrared head-hunting systems, e-bombs destined to paralyse the enemy’s electronic nerve centres, bombs that explode in towns emitting rays of energy like lightning bolts, other e-bombs that, though not deadly, burn their victims and raise the temperature of their skin, thermobaric bombs that release walls of fire, absorbing all the oxygen from surrounding spaces, which kill with shockwaves, asphyxiating nearly everything that breathes, cluster bombs that devastate civilian populations as they break up in the air, dispersing mini-munitions designed to explode upon contact over vast areas, a plethora of bombs, absurd demonstrations of untold destructive power. In short, ecocide.
Under such conditions, is it at all surprising that those who can, the survivors of a living hell, take flight, and seek refuge in any corner of the world where their lives might be spared?
This kind of war of attrition — methodically calculated and programmed, and implemented with new methods — is a war against the very ideas of mobility, circulation and speed, and the age we live in is precisely one of velocity, acceleration, increasing abstraction and algorithms.
Moreover, the targets of this kind of warfare are not by any means singular bodies, but rather great swaths of humanity judged worthless and superfluous, whose every organ must be specifically incapacitated in a way that affects generations to come — eyes, noses, mouths, ears, tongues, skin, bones, lungs, intestines, blood, hands, legs, all these maimed people, paralytics and survivors, all these pulmonary diseases such as pneumoconiosis, all these traces of uranium in their hair, the thousands of cases of cancer, abortions, foetal malformations, birth defects, ruptured thoraxes, dysfunctions of the nervous system — all bear witness to a terrible devastation.
All of the above, it is worth repeating, belongs to the current practice of remote borderisation — carried out from afar, in the name of freedom and security. This battle, waged against certain undesirables, reducing them to mounds of human flesh, is rolled out on a global scale. It is on the verge of defining the times in which we live.
Often this battle either precedes, accompanies or completes the campaigns that take place among us, or at our doors — namely the tracking of those bodies who made the mistake of moving.
Movement, incidentally, is the very essence of human bodies, but these bodies are assumed to have illegally broken into certain spaces and places where they should never have been — places that they now pollute by their presence alone, and from which they must be expelled.
As the philosopher Elsa Dorlin has suggested in Se Defendre: Une Philosphie de la Violence (Self-Defence: A History of Violence), this form of violence sets its sights on a prey. It bears a likeness to the great hunts of yesteryear, to both fox hunting and trapping, and their respective techniques — research, pursuit, entrapment before driving the prey to the point where it is surrounded, captured or killed with the aid of foxhounds and bloodhounds.
But it also belongs to a long history of manhunts. Grégoire Chamayou has studied the modalities of these in his book Les Chasses à l’Homme (Manhunts). The targets are always roughly the same: maroon slaves, Red Indians, blacks, Jews, the stateless, the poor and, more recently, the homeless.
These hunts target animated, living bodies, bodies that are mobile, fugitive and endowed with a presence and intensity, yet that are marked and ostracised to the extent that they are no longer thought of as bodies of flesh and blood like our own.
What’s more, this hunt is rolled out at a moment in which the acceleration of technologies shows no sign of relenting, creating a segmented planet of multiple speeds.
The technological transformation of borders is in full swing. Physical and virtual barriers of separation, digitisation of databases, filing systems, the development of new tracking devices, sensors, drones, satellites and sentinel robots, infrared detectors and various other cameras, biometric controls, and new micro chips containing personal details, everything is put in place to transform the very nature of the border phenomenon, and to speed up the implementation of this new type of border — one that is mobile, portable and omnipresent.