European colonial traditions define our migration policies

Fortress Europe builds on a European colonial tradition of making those it oppresses complicit in its structures of domination. It is a little known fact that the current Italy-Libya border externalisation agreement is based on the first successful case for reparations brought by a former European colony. Signed by Al-Qhadafi and Berlusconi in 2008, the Treaty of Friendship set reparations at US$5 billion with, however, a series of terms - chief among them Libya’s participation in stemming migration flows to Europe. This pioneering recognition of colonial atrocity was contingent, in other words, on Libya’s agreement to police and brutalise people from other European ex-colonies, on behalf of Europe.

A few weeks ago, as at least 37 asylum-seekers were slaughtered attempting the Melilla crossing, fresh reports surfaced that Europe has found a new proxy for the most brutal aspects of border control. On the Greco-Turkish border, police authorities are forcing refugees to beat, humiliate and illegally deport other refugees in exchange for a month’s permit to remain in Europe. While war in Ukraine continues to fuel the euphoric celebration of freedom, democracy and equality across Europe, the sadistic violence meted out to black and brown asylum seekers at the border exposes the rotten underbelly of those “European values.”

None of this is new. The European border regime itself is an architecture of proxies: the result of a balancing act between apparently contradictory interests: on the one hand, the imperative to preserve the liberal establishment’s ideological arsenal of “fundamental values” and, on the other, the interest in repelling those people seeking safety at its borders.

''By turning victims into perpetrators, the system robs those it oppresses even of their moral integrity, all the better to crush their political identity, membership and power of resistance. Behind those practices, too, lurks a European colonial pattern of dominating by humiliating.''

The European Union has typically dealt with the contradiction by bankrolling a network of third-party states such as Libya, Morocco and Turkey to torture, pull back or kill asylum seekers in order to keep them out of Europe. In order for Italy’s Mario Draghi to flaunt his country’s commitment to human rights, there must be a Libyan Coast Guard paid to puncture the boats of people attempting the crossing to Sicily.

Fortress Europe builds on a European colonial tradition of making those it oppresses complicit in its structures of domination. It is a little known fact that the current Italy-Libya border externalisation agreement is based on the first successful case for reparations brought by a former European colony. Signed by Al-Qhadafi and Berlusconi in 2008, the Treaty of Friendship set reparations at US$5 billion with, however, a series of terms - chief among them Libya’s participation in stemming migration flows to Europe. This pioneering recognition of colonial atrocity was contingent, in other words, on Libya’s agreement to police and brutalise people from other European ex-colonies, on behalf of Europe.

That network of border externalisation agreements is as unstable as it is cruel. Neighbouring states’ periodic defection from the role of border guards has delivered a crude reminder that Europe no longer commands their obedience, and has threatened to unmask the operational realities of “European values.” Unable to rely on their non-EU counterparts to pull refugees back, European border forces increasingly face the task themselves; in Greece, the systematic assault and extrajudicial deportation of asylum seekers by local police has quickly and quietly become the new normal.

Forcing asylum-seekers to beat, rob and deport other asylum seekers on the promise of a month’s stay in Greece is a wretched last ditch- effort to delegate Europe’s dirty work. But those measures are sadistic, more than they are effective methods of border control; they target the spirit of migrants more than their bodies.

By turning victims into perpetrators, the system robs those it oppresses even of their moral integrity, all the better to crush their political identity, membership and power of resistance. Behind those practices, too, lurks a European colonial pattern of dominating by humiliating.

With peculiar relish, Europe forces its victims to become like the power that oppresses them. The refugees who brutalise other refugees act out the most perverse impulses of the European border guards who command them. Accounts that a Syrian man forces refugees to hand over their gold jewellery before pushing them back across the border, evoke a particular horror. Then again, in 2016, a Danish Parliamentary majority passed a law allowing police to seize refugees’ money and jewellery to cover the social costs of their reception.

Whatever happened, then, to Europe’s vaunted “fundamental values”? Endlessly resilient, the continent’s place as a bastion of civilisation and freedom now, as in the past, survives even its most brazen atrocities. Having floundered at its maritime borders, “European values” are resurrected on the Eastern front.

As black asylum seekers are shot dead in Melilla, Ukrainian refugees fleeing a horrific war have been resettled with expedited visa processes under the protection of European leaders who want them to “live with us the European dream” and congratulate themselves on their humanity and compassion.

The contrast is nauseating. But make no mistake: those who have long observed Fortress Europe know that the European border regime has no real beneficiaries. Europe’s protection and humanity, if extended, is provisional, conditional and short-lived. And it always seeks an advantage.

A few years ago the Syrians and Afghans who today sleep in cages and are forced to beat, humiliate and deport other asylum seekers would have been featured as the poster children of “European values.” During the long summer of migration, it was for them that European leaders waxed poetic; they were the worthy recipients of European humanity. And there, too, the notion that these were “real refugees” helped justify the violence meted out to those others deemed “economic migrants.”

Today, calling out the flagrant racism and hypocrisy at the heart of “European values” embarrasses a liberal establishment struggling to contain its own contradictions; it offers a strategic pressure point on which to campaign for Europe to make good on its commitment to “equality” by extending to all refugees those protections currently afforded to people fleeing war in Ukraine.

But we should not delude ourselves; in the life of Fortress Europe, there have been many Ukrainians.

Until the war in Ukraine required them to become so, Ukrainians were not “white” but Slavs, long exploited as a source of cheap labour by Western Europe; racialised because they were poor, regarded with suspicion and ostracised because they were born in the Communist bloc. We should not be surprised when, after they have served their function as the mascot of Western liberal democracy, the criteria for determining which Ukrainians count as “real” refugees increasingly narrow, and they will be resented in the Europe the promised to protect them.

Meanwhile, those left in Ukraine may find, like other Eastern Europeans who dreamt of belonging to a Europe of values, that EU accession involves a brutal process of reforms and “liberalisation” far beyond what the EU’s rulers managed to impose on its Western populations.

People seeking entry to Europe from Ukraine, Libya, Turkey and Morocco face dramatically different conditions. But they do have something in common: they share a “European dream” and many are “ready to die” for it: in the Central Mediterranean Sea, at the Melilla border fence and under Russian shells. But where black and brown asylum seekers are all too familiar with the stuff of which “European values” are made, Ukrainians have yet to find out.

Chloe Haralambous is a member of Sea-Watch, coordinating maritime rescue missions in the Central Mediterranean migration corridor, and co-founder of the Mosaik Support Center for Refugees and Locals on the Greek island of Lesvos. She is also a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

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