Migrants clash with riot police, close to Horgos, 2015. Demotix/Art Widak. All rights reserved.On 16
September, Hungarian law enforcement officials deployed tear gas against
refugees (men, women but also children) who were trying to enter the country,
close to the Serbian border village of Horgos. A police statement justified the
decision to attack refugees, to “[protect]
the border of Hungary and the EU while respecting the law and the principle of
proportionality.”

This is a
telling statement. It exemplifies an increasingly observable tendency among
Hungarian law enforcement officers who have come to identify themselves as the
disciplinary guardians acting on behalf of the European Union. Hungarian police
(and possibly
soon also the army) are installed and equipped to protect the territory not of
a nation state, but of an institution which has come to characterise itself not
by an actual geography or a set of ideals, but by its violent and pervasive
bordering apparatus.

Border ignorance

Migrants clash with riot police, close to Horgos, 2015. Demotix/Art Widak. All rights reserved.Where the
European Union is, is an entirely different question from asking where Europe
is. The former is an institution which constantly includes and excludes. Some
states are Schengen members, while others are not; some have the Euro as a
currency, others do not, and so on. Europe is a historically fluid geographic
entity. As Balibar
notes in an earlier contribution to openDemocracy, “Europe
cannot be defined on the basis of a territory, except in a reductionist and
contradictory way”, and yet this is exactly what is happening with the EU’s violent
border practices targeted against refugees.

A recent
Iraqi refugee, unaware of the geographic complexity of the difference
between the European space and the Hungarian imagination of an EU territory,
was evicted yesterday by a Hungarian court. The judge responded to the
refugee’s defence of unawareness of the EU’s borders by stating that territorial
ignorance is not an excuse. Judge Krisztian Kemenes expressed his hope that the
court’s verdict would set a precedent for those thinking of committing similar
‘crimes’.

Some 367 refugees
have since been arrested for crossing the ‘border of Europe’. These refugees should
have known that the geographic question of where the territory of the EU starts
cannot be answered by looking at a map, but can only be found by feeling where ‘legal’ and ‘appropriate’ violence
commences.

A gaseous border

Migrants clash with riot police, close to Horgos, 2015. Demotix/Art Widak. All rights reserved.The violence
of the Hungarian border (or is it really the EU’s border?), is not only
materially visible in the barbed wire fences along the 167km-long barrier, but has
also been inhaled through the medium of the air. Gas is as such becoming the
aerial extension of the razor sharp terrestrial barrier, attacking the body no longer only physically, but now also
physiologically. The EU’s attack on the body of the refugee has become total in
the sense that every possible means is used to protect its imagined territory
from the ‘waves’ of unwanted ‘migrants’.

The
EU’s attack on the body of the refugee has become total.

The chloropicrin agent used as a popular
pesticide belongs historically to the same family of toxic irritants
used in tear gas attacks against refugees. This is not an innocent coincidence. In
both western and eastern media and policy rhetoric, the thousands of refugees
trying to find a place of shelter have consistently and repeatedly been
portrayed as a "swarm
of people coming across the Mediterranean", a "tsunami"
that could "swamp Europe" and even “cockroaches”. Such language has a
performative function at the place of the EU’s imagined Hungarian border, where
its territory is gassed and cleansed from parasitic benefit-seekers and dangerous
ISIS informants.

Not at the border

Migrants clash with riot police, close to Horgos, 2015. Demotix/Art Widak. All rights reserved.Attacks
against refugees do not only occur at the EU’s territorial border. It would be
unfair to solely blame the terrorism of Viktor Orbán as the sole reason for the
relentless violence against human beings from beyond the imagined frontier. Only
a few days ago, the German government decided to close its border with Austria,
thereby not only putting into motion the auto-destruction of the EU’s proud principle
of freedom of movement, but also triggering a sequence of border closures of
yet unknown magnitude.

This is not an innocent coincidence.

Austria
soon followed with a decision to close its border with Hungary, Slovakia
introduced spot-checks while in Bulgaria, developments push ahead for the already
80km-long fence across the border with Turkey. The political climate against
refugees in northern countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands, where
right-wing populism has had a long time to become institutionally instilled, is
not much better. Neither should we forget the still unresolved crisis at Calais
which exposed the level of border brutality that both the French and the British
state is capable of.

The refugee
crisis not merely exposes the false myth of a supposedly enlightened Europe but
reveals how violent and lethal the EU’s experimental geography actually has
become. In the midst of the ongoing Greek hostage situation and the equally
dehumanising refugee disaster, few would dare to continue to uphold the idea
that the EU symbolises a place of the classical ideals of ‘liberté, égalité,
fraternité’. Its all-pervasive border practices have instead become
representative of what the Italian thinker Agamben has called a ‘permanent state
of emergency’, in which these long-deceased enlightenment values are
constantly suspended in the violent treatment of refugees.

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