primarily around the negotiation and management of external borders. Wallace (2000: 375) describes how the European continent has long been fraught with the tensions of managing “neighborness” through the regulation of borders, including both intra-European territorial zones and a variety of “near-abroads” by land and sea. With the shift in sovereignty from internal to external borders accompanying Europeanization, Greece—like other member states on Europe’s Mediterranean coast—has become a crucial site where the boundaries of Europe are persistently transgressed and redrawn. Yet through the intensified management of European territorial borders, the marginality of these border states is asserted even more powerfully.
Doorsteps
It was only 8 a.m., but it was already hot. I had recently stepped off the plane from Athens for the June 21, 2008, World Refugee Day celebration in Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos. I was sitting at a portside café across from Stefan, a refugee advocate, drinking a much-needed coffee. Stefan is the primary brains, imagination, and labor behind one of the more influential asylum advocacy NGOs in northern Europe. In collaboration with Greek lawyers, he had recently published a report on sea deaths in the Greek Aegean, one of the more powerful critiques of Greek asylum and border management, which just a few years later was to be cited in the MSS decision. He was also in the process of establishing a border project in Mytilene, in collaboration with local service providers, to improve reception conditions for the many who arrive there—most often in small, leaky rubber boats.
A tall, broad-shouldered man with piercing eyes, Stefan chain-smoked as he answered my question about why he had chosen to begin an advocacy project in Greece. After citing his love of the Aegean and dramatically closing his eyes and gesturing at his surroundings, he said: “I knew. It was not an exact calculation, it was not a master plan, but it was clear that if someone wanted to do a successful project, it would be Greece.” He went on, explaining that unlike Italy and Spain, which had more recently been in the spotlight, “everyone knew that Greece was a mess, but no one was talking about it.”
Greece, of course, is no longer a place no one talks about. Until relatively recently, Italy and Spain had indeed dominated the limelight as border areas of pan-European concern, as Lampedusa and the Canary Islands generated powerful and contradictory images of sun, sea, destitute bodies, and sunbathers giving water to washed-up migrants. Italy, Spain, and also Malta (DeBono 2011), remain sites of concern, not just owing to the displacements of people affected through the 2011 “Arab Spring” and its aftermath; in October 2013, over 300 people were estimated dead when a boat sank off the coast of Lampedusa. Greece, however, has emerged as an increasingly problematic border country at the center of controversies over the security, humanitarianism, and solvency of Europe (see Green 2010). Since my meeting with Stefan at the edge of the Aegean, the EU has produced increasingly powerful apparatuses of migration management (Feldman 2011), both in the sea and in Evros, in response to the continued spike in crossings on the Greek borders. In 2010, following a request from the Greek government, Frontex, the EU’s border management agency, deployed its first “RABITS” (Rapid Deployment Border Intervention Teams) to assist in deterring undocumented crossings along the Greek borders. On the face of it, Frontex signifies a powerful assertion of EU involvement in policing Greek borders, yet in practice it also bespeaks a more messy set of allegiances and sovereignties. Rather than staffing its own forces, so to speak, Frontex hires, retrains, and redeploys border guards from EU member countries; this also applies to the equipment and forms of transport employed in Frontex operations, which often bear the emblems of other European states.4 The former Papandreou government also initiated a plan to build a fence along the Evros border with EU funding; on a visit to Turkey in January 2011 to discuss the border fence, minister of citizen protection Christos Papoutsis, explicitly referenced the U.S./Mexico border as a model.
Regional and national legislation also have an important role in shaping the Greek border context. A readmission agreement with Turkey (signed in 2001) has encouraged ad hoc expulsions, where migrants are often simply pushed back across the border without being returned to their home countries; this was the danger MSS faced on his return to Greece. The legality of this agreement is questionable, as the deportees include, almost always, “mixed flows” of migrants and asylum seekers (see Feldman 2012), and neither side does an effective job of identifying those wishing to apply for asylum.5 Greece is obliged under both international and EU law to hear the claims of applicants for protection. However, as reported by many asylum seekers and some local inhabitants in border regions, during the time I was in the field the Greek police allegedly undertook widespread deportations of “mixed” groups of migrants and asylum seekers to Turkey.6 For many deportees, however, such practices encourage new strategies of crossing: some enter Europe via new routes and others attempt successive crossings at the Greek borders. I met many during my fieldwork who underwent multiple entries and expulsions.
Borders are not just territorial, however; they are also manifested and negotiated in the domain of law, which produces its own spatial politics and geographies (see Coutin and Yngvesson 2006; Coutin 2007; Darian-Smith 1999, 2007; Rouse 1991; Volpp 2012; Zilberg 2011). Legalization processes are most often initiated in urban centers, primarily Athens and Thessaloniki, making entry into the legal territory of Greece often dependent on further internal movement and travel. Yet access to legalization processes—whether through the asylum procedure or through routes of economic migration—is itself circumscribed by aggressive forms of internal policing, which have only increased with the sociopolitical instabilities accompanying the Greek financial difficulties (Xenakis and Cheliotis 2012; Cheliotis 2013 in process). In Chapter 2, I highlight the police violence that, during the period of my research, impinged on access to asylum through an account of activities at “Allodhapon,” the Athens “Aliens Police,” at that time in charge of examining most first-instance asylum applications. The fact that the threshold of the asylum procedure was, quite literally, the doorstep of a tightly and often violently guarded police compound incited many would-be applicants to remain in spaces of legal limbo (Cabot 2012) or “nonexistence” (Coutin 2000), without the protection offered by papers. Increasingly powerful enforcement measures throughout the Athens city center target individuals through a clear reliance on racial profiling. In areas of the city known to have heavy foreign populations (Omonia Square and its environs, Attiki, and Exarcheia), it is common to find a gun-toting MAT (SWAT) officer stationed on street corners, while less visibly armed patrols accost persons of color and demand their papers. In the summer of 2009, for instance, I found a rather gregarious group of police playing cards outside an unlicensed Sudanese restaurant that asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, and smugglers alike were known to frequent. In response to this increasing militarization of the Athens city center, many asylum seekers and migrants look for work and refuge in the countryside (Lawrence 2007; Verinis 2011) and in the islands, even—interestingly—in border regions (Cabot and Lenz 2012), where policing is focused more on safeguarding the border from without than targeting threats from within. The asylum procedure is a particularly charged element of the Greek border scenario. The question of asylum inflects broader Greek and European anxieties over responses to immigration, humanitarianism, security, and Greece’s capacities to handle (or not) the movements across its borders.
Asylum in Greece
Despite its symbolic and legal significance, the MSS decision only emerged a number of years after the Greek asylum process began to raise red flags for European and international advocacy communities. It is difficult to account fully for the exclusionary and sluggish qualities of the Greek asylum system. With the bureaucratic inefficiencies that have plagued the Greek process (particularly evident in the overwhelming backlog of cases), rejections of asylum cases have also, perhaps inadvertently, provided ways of streamlining through “buck passing” via appeals and encouraging attrition among applicants. Though the appeals process was suspended between 2009 and 2010, during most of my research for this book the asylum process entailed two “instances” or vathmi (levels [βαθμοί]).7 Claimants lodged first-instance applications at a central police station (in most cases, in
