within the broader context of European governance mechanisms, including legislative, policy, and advocacy trends; regional histories of displacement; and often more global forms of violence and inequality that have positioned Greece on the margins of Europe. I undertake my analysis through a kind of mapping, which underscores the relationship between EU moral logics of governance and a European spatial politics of marginality. When it comes to managing migration and asylum, Greece’s moral and political marginality in Europe is inextricable from its position on Europe’s land and sea borders. Concrete geographical and topographical factors play a crucial role in determining which member states become sites of crossing (Mitchell 1997), but these are reinforced and further complicated through EU legislation. Take, for instance, MSS’s story, rendered in chronological brevity in the court’s decision, which speaks to multiple scales of law, complex routes of migration, and various geopolitical and topographical boundaries, which intersect, collide, and are transgressed on Europe’s borders. Likewise, the overlapping enforcement measures that characterize the border regime in Greece, and the various sites where they are enacted, invoke EU, regional, and national territorialities. Policies and practices aimed toward safeguarding the EU as an area of “freedom, security, and justice” interact with internal Greek policing and legislative practices and migrants’ own routes of movement. The krisi of asylum in Greece reflects the entwinement of legal and moral geographies.
The MSS judgment implies that the Greek state’s poor adherence to EU law at the level of individual asylum seekers undermines the EU as a territorial, legal, and moral entity. Recent ethnographic scholarship has shown how the formalities of legal processes reflect and reinstantiate notions of ethics and morality that operate simultaneously across multiple scales (Fassin and Rechtman 2010; Kelly 2011): individual, national, regional, transnational, global, and in this case, supranational. Such moral configurations are particularly powerful in the context of international human rights law, which, as Sassen (1996) has shown, can function to undermine, or even threaten, national sovereignties. Yet even in the EU, the success of international rights regimes depends on nation-states. In the domestic enactment of rights law, states find ways of simultaneously complying with and resisting such infringements on sovereignty, also through the regulation of moral and ethical life. For instance, Fassin and Rechtman’s (2010) work on asylum in France shows how the moral dispositions that greet asylum seekers at the tribunal, suspicion in particular, reinvigorate the French state’s restrictive approach toward offering protection as part of a broader, exclusionary, policy on immigration. Through the reinscription of rights in European Community law, the judgments that uphold them, and European instruments for safeguarding these values (in particular, the court), the moral power of rights becomes even more tightly wedded to supranational governing mechanisms which simultaneously reassert and challenge member state sovereignties.
Such forms of moral governance, and the tensions of sovereignty that they reflect, have long been endemic to the European management of immigration and asylum across more formal venues of law, zones of civil society advocacy, media accounts, and the multiple sites where such phenomena overlap. Arendt (1976 [1951]) shows how the post-World War I refugee crisis in Europe exposed a fundamental tension between international protection and the sovereignties of nation-states. In the supranational context, these dilemmas do not vanish but proliferate, particularly through the coupling of asylum processes to broader projects of EU migration management (Menz 2009). The EU is both a territorial polity with borders that must be regulated and a supranational zone formally devoted to freedom of movement, human rights, and humanitarian values. At the EU level, as the international obligation to offer protection has become entwined with the regulation and defense of European territory, a number of powerful tensions have emerged. These tensions are perhaps best exemplified in the twin, yet contradictory, EU policy goals of ensuring that Europe’s borders are both “secure” and “humanitarian.” Greece, as we have observed, is said to fail on both of these counts.
Given this set of tensions, EU asylum-related legislation is often deeply contradictory. The MSS decision betrays a juridical sleight of hand that invokes European sovereignty (and the EU’s capacity to indict, monitor, and discipline individual member states) while simultaneously reasserting member state responsibilities. Through Dublin II, Mediterranean member states must—owing to accidents of geopolitics—shoulder a greater responsibility for maintaining EU borders in the name of collectively sharing the “burden” of protection. Such contradictions have their uses, however: EU governance can draw selectively on EU and member state sovereignties and responsibilities to engage the tensions embedded in the collective management of migration and asylum. Yet such techniques of governance further inscribe the morally marginal, even dangerous, qualities associated with member states like Greece.
Marginalities
Unlike a number of more longstanding migration destinations in Europe, Greece does not have recent colonial ties with the home countries of those now seeking protection within its borders. France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and even Italy, with its brief foray into colonial projects in East Africa, all negotiate complex colonial histories and their legacies through immigration (Gilroy 2004; Hall 1990; Ticktin 2011), as well as ongoing forms of intercultural and linguistic exchange (Chakrabarty 2000; Cooper and Stoler 1997). Greece, in contrast, underwent its own, deeply fraught experience of Ottoman imperialism (Kostopoulou 2009), the after-math of which continues to shape Greece’s relationship with Islam (Antoniou 2005, 2010; Triandafyllidou and Gropas 2009), its immediate neighbors, and the “East.” Moreover, powerful symbolic and political tensions have long characterized Greece’s relationship with the European west and north. During the Greek bid for independence from the Ottoman Empire in the early 1800s, Greece was transformed into a kind of “Ur-Europa” (Herzfeld 1982), largely thanks to northern European intellectuals who revivified and mythologized its ancient history. Yet having been an Ottoman territory for centuries, Greece was also subject to Orientalizing tendencies. Thus, even as ancient Greece was framed as the font of European civilization, Modern Greece has often been characterized—even by Greeks themselves—as backward, bastardized, and corrupted by the influences of the East. Such tensions have combined to grant the Greek nation state a particularly marginal relationship with the European core, which in turn has been repeatedly invoked to legitimate the ongoing involvement of outside interests in Greece.
Herzfeld (2002a: 901) coins the term “crypto-colonialism” to describe “the curious alchemy whereby certain countries, buffer zones between the colonized lands and those yet untamed, were compelled to acquire their political independence at the expense of massive economic dependence.” This former territory of the Ottoman Empire has been subject to enormous outside economic and political involvement: first by the “philhellenes” of Britain, France, and Germany; later, by the warring powers of World War II; and finally, in the Cold War period, by the United States in its support of the Junta. With the twinning of geographical and political marginality embedded in crypto-colonialism, similar patterns are evident in Greece’s contemporary relationship with the European north, despite the EU’s formal commitment to transcending national and regional interests. Greece is now subject to intervention by EU governing bodies, individual EU member states, speculating investors, the IMF, and the World Bank. As the constantly unfolding news on the Greek financial crisis makes compellingly clear, “building Europe” (Shore 2000) has produced new systems of inclusion and exclusion and vast asymmetries of power between the European north and south. Through these ongoing crypto-colonial relationships, the contemporary Greek nation state acquires its status as a kind of political and moral “pariah” (19), an allegedly corrupt, undisciplined, and renegade member of the European Community that is transgressive and potentially dangerous.
In the debates surrounding the Greek asylum process, law and judgment work to invoke and reassert similar forms of marginalization. Just as the symbolic and political marginalization of Greece has been deeply grounded in its peripheral geographical position, the marginalizing effects of EU migration and asylum law are inextricable from Greece’s location on Europe’s borders. Étienne Balibar (2004: 5) suggests that patterns of inclusion/exclusion that have emerged as the EU was fashioned into being are most conspicuous at the borders. Likewise, the moral logics of
