Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
It is clear that in the discriminative biopolitical and geopolitical border regime of the
EU there is no outside; the globe is the playing field of the EU's border regime. The EU
border decides what and especially who is to be included and excluded, what the territ-
orial grouping and the discipline of the EU will look like, and what the global border
wishestocommunicate.TheEUregulateswhoisconsideredlegalinputandwhoiscon-
sideredunwantedinput—athreattothesystem,henceredundantanddeportablepeople,
or in the words of Bauman (2004) ''wasted lives”—to the border machine.
What is telling when analysing the negative list is that there are a significantly high
numberofMuslimstateslisted.Anotherimportantportionofcountriesthatarelistedare
developing countries. Hence, there is an implicit and strong inclination to use this list
not only as a tool to guarantee security in physical terms or in terms of Western identity
protection but also as a means of keeping the world's poorest out. The scapegoating is
done on the valuation of the Other's god and economy. So, again, to put it sharply, as in
former colonial times, it is the EU that selects people on the basis of their imagined ad-
ded value for the EU and their imagined potential (security) risk for the EU. Alongside
theexecutionofthisnewexternalborderpolicythatisimplicitinthisnegativelist,there
is a growing anxiety about people coming from these countries. Some literally fear an
invasion of poor or Muslim migrants, who en masse threaten to flood “our” territory. A
Dutch extreme right-wing politician, Geert Wilders, often even speaks of a ''tsunami''
ofMuslimmigrants inthisrespect, asifthemobility ofsomepeoplecouldbecompared
to a natural disaster. The discriminatory place on this list for non-EU people is not a
self-chosenoption.Everysocietycreatesitsownstrangers,andsodoesthepoliticalpar-
ticularity of the EU. It is the inequality of a politics of difference of which the migrants
are victim. The migrants are pushed in the non-self-chosen category of the immigrant
with no legal name and seen as a “burden” that needs to be shared among the various
statesoftheEU.Ithasreachedapointthatadecreaseinthenumbersof(undocumented)
asylum seekers is now viewed as a success. The consequences of this production of the
eternally desired “We” and the eternally undesired “They” is a vicious circle between
the self-produced increase of irregular travellers, as the regular routes of the citizens of
the black-list countries are foreclosed, and the increase of moral panic about precisely
that, the increase of irregular migrants, which nationalistic politicians thankfully seize
upon in their competition for more votes.
Invasion Maps
One of the most important and striking representations of this moral panic is seen in the
construction and use of maps. On many of the dominant and often used “official” maps,
stemmingfrommediaaswellaspoliticalinstitutions,thickarrows,lines,anddotsindic-
ate the routes and main hubs of the trajectories of undocumented migrants. These lines
