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11
From Sangatte to ‘The Jungle’:
Europe’s Contested Borderlands
Helen Schwenken
In September 2009, after riot police destroyed ‘The Jungle’ – a settlement
of provisional tents of undocumented migrants in the forests around the
French harbour city of Calais – in a cloak-and-dagger operation, some dozen
Afghani men assembled in the morning. They were holding banners such
as ‘The jungle is our house. Plz. don’t destroy it. If you do so, where is
the place to go?’ (Calais Migrant Solidarity, 2009; BBC News, 22 September
2009).1The destruction of the informal settlements as well as the protests
by the migrants mark a decade of contestation and political mobilisation
in those borderlands. The dynamic can be summarised as follows: refugees
and migrants come to the Channel tunnel in order to reach the UK; police
and private security from transportation firms try to stop them; at the local
level, the population is split between those supporting the undocumented
migrants out of political or humanistic motivations and those fighting ‘ille-
gal migration’; and politicians and parties try to capitalise on the conflicts.
The Channel tunnel, Calais and the village Sangatte, where the Red Cross set
up a shelter for the migrants, have become a synonymous with this conflict.
As this case shows, conflicts on immigration take shape as conflicts in
borderlands. I define borderlands as the zones around borders in which
border, surveillance and migration regimes are important elements of gov-
ernance. One important characteristic of the Franco-British borderland is
that it not only separates two countries by a sea border, but that France
belongs to the Schengen area of the European Union (EU), while the UK has
decided to opt out. Therefore, persons need to have valid border crossing
papers. Borderlands are highly contested geographic spaces. Thus I suggest
looking at them also as geographies or terrains of resistance (Pile and Keith,
1997; Routledge, 1993). In these borderlands, interactions and negotiations
between governments, undocumented migrants and anti- as well as pro-
migrant forces take place. Issues at stake include entry, exit, citizenship and
identity.
171
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172 Citizenship Politics as Border Politics
In the decade under investigation – 1999–2009 – two principal mobili-
sation cycles can be identified. My hypothesis is that in both cycles the
relation to and the usage of space has played a decisive role for the
dynamics and outcomes. By doing so, I spell out what has been only implic-
itly assumed by existing analyses of the case (Millner, 2011; Rigby and
Schlembach, 2013; Rygiel, 2011a, 2012). In the first protest cycle (1999–
2002), migrants took advantage of divided government elites in the UK
and France and the obvious discrepancy of the declared official policies
and their outcome, the failure of control. The migrants managed to estab-
lish a practice and discourse of the ‘autonomy of migration’ which ran
counter to existing migration control policies. A second frame in their
protests was ‘refugee protection’. This frame gained in relevance in par-
allel to the increase of police violence against the refugees and migrants.
Comparing these two frames, I explain how the less universal one, the
autonomy of migration frame, used to have more success than the human
rights master frame. In the light of social movement studies in which uni-
versal master frames are considered the most powerful, this result may
surprise. I argue that the specific geographic location of these protests in
the borderlands between France and the UK turned this general wisdom
in social movement research around. In this case, space made a significant
difference. For the second protest cycle (2008–2009), immigration author-
ities applied more powerful spatial strategies and in combination with a
modified refugee protection frame – the one of identifying ‘real refugees’
in mixed migration flows – finally resulted in the demolishing of ‘The
Jungle’.
In the chapter I first briefly review some of the literature regarding the
mobilisations in the region of Calais, followed by the theoretical concept of
geographies and terrains of resistance. The next portion of the text outlines
the case study and the methodology. In the subsequent parts, the case is
analysed according to the main research questions and the hypothesis.
At the epistemic margin: Mobilisations in borderlands
The conflict in the borderlands around Calais and the Red Cross centre
in Sangatte has – until 2009 – rarely been analysed by academic scholars:
Smain Laacher carried out an important baseline study surveying the social
structure of the migrants in the Red Cross shelter (Laacher, 2002). He was
able to document that migrant flows went up and down along the lines
of the world’s conflicts. Thus, the migrants present in the region were rel-
atively homogeneous in terms of their ethnicity, class and gender – mainly
(young) middle-class men who were selected by their families in Afghanistan
or Iraq to move out of the war zones to then support their relatives from
abroad. Marc Thomson carried out a discourse analysis of the British policies
and the media representation of undocumented migrants, finding a widely
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Helen Schwenken 173
negative representation of the migrants (Thomson, 2003). Kartik Varada Raj
refers to Sangatte, but is in fact not interested in the specific dynamics, and
instead takes it up as a symbol to discuss the function of European bor-
ders from a Marxist-feminist perspective. She claims that migrants ‘become’
borders (Varada Raj, 2006). Architects and critical cartographers have dis-
sected the architecture and the organisation of daily life in Sangatte. They
show how these are embedded in and are part of the security-driven bor-
der regime and the borderland (An Architektur, 2003). Publications in local
and national media were mostly interested in the political struggles between
France and Britain and in the specific incidents in the borderland such as
police raids, destruction of border fences and reactions of local population
and truck drivers. What was often overlooked is that the migrants organised
themselves and tried to articulate and fight for their demands. They were an
important factor in the actual political struggles. In the media they mostly
appeared as an anonymous mass moving in the dark.
Much of the research in migration as well as in social movement studies is
characterised by immobility – which is astonishing given that migration as
such is in flow. There have been relatively few studies on the mobilisations
of undocumented migrants in the moment of border-crossing or in transit.
Many studies look at undocumented migrants already living in the receiv-
ing states and facing hardship due to their irregular status. Exceptions to the
tendency of immobility are those studies in anthropology on the making
of borderlands (e.g. Alvarez, 1995) and by some activist and artistic schol-
ars (e.g. Transit Migration, 2007). They stress that borderlands are always in
the making and contested, and that (undocumented) migrants thus must
be considered a constitutive force. However, most of these studies on Calais
do not provide a longer-term analysis of the dynamics; instead they pro-
vide a snapshot of a ‘no border camp’ in Calais in June 2009 (Rigby and
Schlembach, 2013; Millner, 2011; Rygiel, 2011a). This snapshot perspective
tends to overestimate the significance of the no-border activism as ‘[a] new
politics? A politics beyond citizenship?’ (Rigby and Schlembach, 2013: 169)
or a ‘solidarity ethos’ (Millner, 2011). These diagnoses might be the result
of a ‘hyper-theoretisation’ of the protest and of activist and migrant collab-
oration, which compared to other settings, has been extremely precarious
and not based on a continuous basis. Kim Rygiel (2011a) offers an implicit
explanation of this epistemic trend by reading the Calais case through two
competing theoretical perspectives popular among critical migration and
border regime scholars, which, however, both tend to simplify the complex
situation: Referring to Agamben’s notions of camps and a ‘logic of excep-
tion’ (cf. Rigby and Schlembach, 2013, on Calais), migrants in camps are
considered as being immobilised and excluded; on the other hand, analy-
ses through the ‘logic of (autonomous) migration’ consider the migrants as
political agents involved in claiming rights and the makeshift camps as a
resource for doing so.
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174 Citizenship Politics as Border Politics
With the following case study on mobilisations of undocumented
migrants in borderlands, I attempt to bring forward the field of political
mobilisations on migration issues. I show that borderlands are a reward-
ing location for study which offers insights differing from those analyses
stuck in ‘immobility’. My longer-term perspective enables us to see signifi-
cant changes that take place throughout the decade of mobilisations. These
changes can be best understood if the specific space and territorial strategies
are taken into account.
Theorising contestations in borderlands: Geographies
of resistance
My theoretical framework originates from two distinct scholarly traditions:
From social movement research I make use of the methodological and con-
ceptual approach of political opportunity structure and framing. In order to
theorise the significance of the borderland as a specific space of contestation,
I borrow the concept of terrains and geographies of resistance from political
geography. A key idea is that ‘geography makes possible or impossible cer-
tain forms of resistance’ and ‘resistance makes other spaces – or geographies –
possible or impossible’ (Pile, 1997: 2). In the case of the borderland and the
contestation on immigration, this double movement allows consideration of
even powerless actors such as undocumented migrants as significant. Their
activities are shaped by the socio-political conditions in the borderlands and
they themselves contribute in reifying the specific borderlands. This way
of thinking moves the sole focus of attention away from institutions such
as border patrols and border surveillance mechanisms. It also reminds us
that borders are not pre-given, but always contested and under construction
(cf. Anderson and O’Dowd, 1999).
Unauthorised border crossings and the mobilisation of migrants and their
opponents make borderlands geographies or terrains of resistence. This
concept has been developed prominently by the political geographer Paul
Routledge: ‘A terrain of resistance refers to a site of contestation and the mul-
tiplicity of [dialectic] relations between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic
powers and discourses, between forces and relations of domination, subjec-
tion, exploitation and resistance’ (Routledge, 1996: 516). Not every space is
a terrain of resistance, though in general space is a necessary condition for
political mobilisations. In the case of the borderlands around Calais, I argue
that the undocumented migrants were only able to individually and collec-
tively act relatively successfully during the first protest cycle, because the
conflict took place in a specific spatial context: a borderland. They trans-
formed this space into a terrain of resistance. For such a transformation,
mobilisation processes and communication were needed and the practices of
the migrants clearly are counter-hegemonic practices. In geographies of resis-
tance, behaviour which follows the rationale of consensus is not positively
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Helen Schwenken 175
sanctioned; instead, actors behave in a confrontational way. For other cases
like lobbying policies, it is the other way around: only actors following the
written and unwritten rules of lobbying are able to use the spatial and dis-
cursive opportunity structure. It can be concluded that the undocumented
migrants in the French borderlands were only able to organise themselves
because the space ‘borderland’ is a terrain of resistance and because the
mobilisations became a conflict over the space itself and its significance.
Thus, following the classical work of Henri Lefebvre, ‘it is only in space
that such conflicts come effectively into play, and in doing so they become
contradictions of space’ (Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]: 365).
The case study: The borderlands around Calais
As in other borderlands, it is not an uncommon situation that hundreds of
migrants constantly stroll around. The transit population around Calais is
composed of persons coming from the hot spots of civil and international
war: in the mid- and late 1990s they came from Kosovo, then Chechnya,
followed in the new millennium by people from the Kurdish parts of Iraq
and from Afghanistan; in 2009 the border region had increasingly become
a destination for Eritrean and Somali refugees. The large majority were male
and rather well-educated (cf. Laacher, 2002). They have then tried to cross
the Channel to the UK, which can take from days to months. In the high-
peak phase between 2000 and 2003, about 80,000 persons, mostly from
Iraq and Afghanistan, managed to cross the Channel in a clandestine way,
either on ships, trucks or freight trains (ibid.). Some migrants get discouraged
and return ‘voluntarily’ as promoted by the International Organization for
Migration (IOM), which has an office in Calais; other migrants get arrested
and deported; some migrants die while attempting to cross; and only an
evanescent small minority decides to apply for asylum in France. The rea-
sons for the small number of asylum applications lies in the logic of EU
asylum procedures, according to which most asylum applicants would be
returned to countries such as Italy or Greece, where they stepped on EU soil
for the first time; besides that, the likelihood of being granted asylum in
France is very small.
In order to deal with the challenges of the large and permanently changing
transit population, in September 1999 the French Red Cross established a
camp for irregular migrants in Sangatte. Sangatte is a small village within
walking distance of the Channel tunnel. The Red Cross provided food and
shelter, partly paid for by the French state; local charity organisations took
care of the children and provided medical and legal assistance.
The large number of irregular border crossings and the existence of the
Red Cross shelter led to diplomatic disputes between France and Britain at
the turn of the millennium. The British government blamed the French
government for tolerating and actively promoting the migrants’ passage;
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176 Citizenship Politics as Border Politics
British politicians alleged that France aimed to get rid of the unwanted
migrants. During the 2002 preliminary and run-off elections for the French
presidency, the issue was one of the most important and controversial cam-
paigning issues in France. The centre-conservative party RPR (Rassemblement
pour la République) mobilised against the Red Cross Centre. After they
won the elections in 2002, everything changed quickly: It became a top-
priority issue for the newly elected centre-right French Minister of Home
Affairs, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Britain and France agreed on the closure of
the centre. The centre was closed down at the beginning of December
2002, despite a series of mass protests by the migrants and anti-racism
organisations.
However, the closure of the centre did not stop migrants from cross-
ing the border. They occupied warehouses and other buildings in Calais,
and set up camps in the outskirts of Calais. These camps were called ‘The
Jungle’ by the media and the police, as well as by the migrants them-
selves. The squats and the jungle camps were arranged and governed
according to national and ethno-religious groups. The Pashtun Afghans
even set up infrastructure, like a grocery store and a mosque. In spring
2009, the situation again escalated (cf. Calais Migrant Solidarity, 2009).
The French Minister of Immigration, Integration and National Identity,
Éric Besson, and the Mayor of Calais, Natacha Bouchard, stated that they
intended to make Calais and the borderlands ‘migrant free’. The chasing
of migrants and refugees by riot control police, the CRS, increased; police
frequently destroyed their overnight refuges, sprayed tear gas, confiscated
and destroyed sleeping bags and regularly arrested migrants. Charity organi-
sations complained that police even arrested migrants at the places where
they provided food, first aid and showers. In September 2009, national
and local authorities announced the definitive closure of ‘The Jungle’.
On 22 September, the shelters were destroyed and 278 Pashtun Afghans,
among half of them minors, were arrested and brought to a detention centre
in Coquelles or to the south of France (adults) and a holding centre in
Vitry-sur-Orne in Moselle (minors) (La Voix du Nord, 22 September 2009;
BBC News, 22 September 2009). More than 1000 persons were thought
to have already left before the demolition (ibid.). ‘The Jungle’ was burned
down and other potential places for setting up new temporary housing
were fenced off and heavily controlled. After the closure of ‘The Jungle’,
protests against the procedure were voiced by a broad range of local and
national pro-migrant, human rights and charity organisations (La Belle
Etoile et al., 2009). A group of Afghan refugees started a week-long hunger
strike on 30 September. On 22 October a joint British–French deportation
charter flight brought Afghan refugees to Kabul, one of them from the
Calais ‘Jungle’. It had been the first deportation flight to Afghanistan since
2005, which drew a lot of criticism from French civil society (Radio France,
2009) and among members of the European Parliament, who called upon
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Helen Schwenken 177
France to suspend the application of the Dublin II regulation (Hautala et al.,
2009). In the following, I will shed some light on these political mobili-
sations. The conflict will appear in a different light than in most media,
as the range of actors and their capabilities is much wider than usually
assumed.
Methodology: Event analysis and frame analysis
The analysis was carried out with the help of protest event analysis and
frame analysis. As the conflicts in the borderlands around Calais have
not yet been researched systematically, no chronicle existed on which
the analysis could build. I thus reconstructed the events from primary
sources: local and national media articles in France and Britain, leaflets,
speeches, emails, photographs, web blogs and other sources. The central
unit of the sources which were taken into consideration was ‘political
mobilisation’. For the first conflict and protest cycle (1999–2002) I anal-
ysed 336 newspaper articles, from one local paper (La Voix du Nord)and
one major national French paper (Le Monde); all articles during the course
of the conflict were analysed. Articles from a number of other papers,
including British newspapers, were included when important events took
place.
A reconstruction of events which is based only on media coverage tends
to over-represent spectacular or violent events, focus on speakers of a move-
ment, complex issues are simplified and events are isolated. Thus I included
other kinds of sources: more than 100 grey documents and publications of
social movement organisations, over 150 documents by the government,
parliament and parties of France and the UK, and another 30 documents by
other European actors. In total the case study ‘Sangatte’ for the first protest
cycle is based upon 600 documents. For the second protest cycle (2008–
2009), about 100 documents from the same type of sources as during the
first protest cycle were taken into account.
For the analysis, events were identified (more than 400 in total), infor-
mation from the sources was summarised, coded and stored in a database,
and the documents were archived. The analysis of frames allows us to iden-
tify the actors’ competing argumentative pattern – their ‘set of beliefs and
meanings that inspire and legitimate the activities and campaigns of a social
movement organization’ (Benford and Snow, 2000: 614). These frames can
be located within political opportunity structures. Hence there are frames
which are closer to hegemonic argumentative structures and others which
remain at the discursive margins. For actors to mobilise successfully, social
movement scholars have detected certain patterns; for example, different
elements of a frame need to fit together well and not contradict each
other. As I will show, this has not been the case in the borderlands around
Calais.
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178 Citizenship Politics as Border Politics
Framing unauthorised border crossings as legitimate
actions in the first protest cycle
Analysing the empirical material of the first protest cycle (1999–2002), the
‘Sangatte phase’, two main frames by the undocumented migrants and
refugees in Sangatte can be identified: I call the first one autonomy of
migration and the second one refugee protection frame.
The first framing: ‘Autonomy of migration’
The name of this frame is borrowed from a discussion which has mainly
developed and been discussed among French intellectuals and antiracism
activists since the 1990s (Moulier Boutang, 1993; Karakayali and Tsianos,
2005; Rygiel, in this volume). A starting point of the concept is the existing
reality of undocumented migration, and it diagnoses the failure of migra-
tion control, while highlighting the agency of the migrants. We can identify
the frame of autonomy of migration mainly in the actions performed by
the undocumented migrants in Sangatte. The frame is seldom articulated
discursively or discussed in a strategic way. On various occasions, a few hun-
dred migrants penetrated the fenced territory of the Channel tunnel and
entered the tunnel itself.2These mass invasions can be regarded as political
actions for two reasons. The migrants are not so naïve as to hope to reach the
other side of the tunnel without being caught. The second indicator are the
chosen dates such as Christmas Day 2001, when public attention was quite
high for the situation of despairing refugees (La Voix du Nord, 27 December
2001; Le Monde, 27 December 2001). On another occasion they invaded the
tunnel when the French border control police was reorganised due to the
change of government in spring 2002 (BBC, 17 May 2002). Each time that
large numbers of migrants entered the tunnel, the media coverage was quite
impressive.
At a demonstration in October 2001, the undocumented migrants
demanded that the borders be opened within and into the EU (Réfugiés
Afghans du camp, 2001; Réfugiés Afghans and Herin, 2001). This was one of
the few occasions the frame ‘autonomy of migration’ was verbally expressed.
Another example happened during the hot phase of the closure of Sangatte.
When no further migrants were accepted to Sangatte, the migrants and their
French supporters occupied a gym and a church (Le Monde, 10 November
2002). The migrants, most of them Iraqi Kurds, demanded a transit permit
with a one-month validity period (Le Monde, 12 November 2002) in order to
have enough time and the possibility to reach Great Britain without getting
into trouble with the border police all the time.
These examples show the relevance of the ‘autonomy of migration’ frame
for the political activities of undocumented migrants in Sangatte. Indeed,
the refugees and migrants possessed authority (Pile, 1997: 15): they force
others – politicians, the media and the border police – to play their game,
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Helen Schwenken 179
although not only according to their rules, but also to the rules of the state.
This usage of the specific space is constitutive not only of dominating forces,
but also of resisting ones.
The second framing: ‘Refugee protection’
The ‘refugee protection’ frame refers to the responsibility of nation-states
and societies to provide safe havens for persecuted persons. It includes the
right of asylum and other protective measures with regard to the Geneva
Refugee Convention of 1951. This basis is shared by broader parts of politi-
cal and civil society. The ‘refugee protection’ frame is mainly articulated in
Sangatte by the undocumented migrants discursively via petitions and dec-
larations, and on banners and in slogans at demonstrations. On 2 August
2001, the migrants demanded the mediation of the United Nations (UN)
in their case (Libération, 3 August 2001; La Voix du Nord, 3 August 2001).
Two weeks later, they wrote a letter to the United Nations High Commis-
sioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in which they expressed their causes to flee,
among them war, persecution and poverty (Le Monde, 23 August 2001),
and they demanded fair asylum procedures. In a declaration by the Afghan
refugees after 11 September 2001, they condemned the terrorist attacks and
explained their experiences in Afghanistan during the Taliban regime as
their main reason to leave the country (Immigrés Afghans, 2001; Le Monde,
20 September 2001; La Voix du Nord, 19 September 2001). These examples
could be extended to every demonstration or to every petition delegations
of undocumented migrants from Sangatte passed on to politicians or official
representatives.
Confrontation wins over negotiation in borderlands
Both major frames during the first protest cycle refer directly or indirectly to
international norms. The ‘autonomy of migration’ frame alludes to a right
for everybody to choose his or her place to live and a right of free movement.
The ‘refugee protection’ frame argues within the existing norm of granting
asylum to persecuted persons. Although both frames are somehow rights-
based, the legitimacy is very different: The ‘autonomy of migration’ frame
can rarely build on cultural resonance and has a low degree of legitimacy
because of the widely-shared nation-states’ right to decide who is allowed
to enter the territory and who is not. Therefore this frame is not suitable to
mobilise broad support; it has a low degree of openness and elasticity. The
frame is bounded to persons without papers or antiracism activists. However,
the frame consistency and credibility of the ‘autonomy of migration’ frame
is high, because the principles of the frame and the actions fit well together.
The ‘refugee protection’ frame is a typical master frame due to its inclusive-
ness, openness, elasticity and its high cultural resonance. Master frames are
not necessarily bounded to a single social movement. As a result, human
rights organisations, NGOs, churches, welfare organisations and parts of the
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180 Citizenship Politics as Border Politics
public can in principle refer to the frame and join in activities. Despite
these potentials of a master frame, the case of Sangatte is characterised by
large frame inconsistencies. Contradictions between the discursive parts of
the framing and the actions can be analysed during the first protest cycle.
The undocumented migrants demanded fair asylum procedures, whereas
only very few migrants applied for asylum in France. Their actions fol-
low the logic of the frame labelled ‘autonomy of migration’. Furthermore,
the main protagonists of the undocumented migrants were considered to
lack credibility because they had been involved into the shadow migration
regime.
The conflict ended in December 2002 with a positive result for most of the
undocumented migrants, as they were allowed to legally enter the UK. They
were even granted a work visa for two years; the other migrants were allowed
to stay in France. How can this result be interpreted? If viewed from the per-
spective of the frame ‘autonomy of migration’, it means the realisation of
the interests of the migrants to reach Great Britain through uncontrollable
movements. The migrants used the specific terrain of the borderland for
their subversive tactics; they defeated attempts by the state to control space.
From the government’s perspective, the closure of Sangatte is interpreted in
a completely different way. It has nothing to do with the political mobil-
isations and border crossing tactics of the migrants or the various actors
from the civil society, but only with a mediation of interests between two
governments. From this perspective, space is not considered an issue which
has affected the results of the conflict; the legitimate terrain is a govern-
mental and parliamentarian one. These different views about the closure of
Sangatte show that success, and the interpretation of it, is always relative
and contested.
The second protest cycle: From the ‘Jungle’ to its demolition
After the Red Cross centre had been torn down, new refugees and migrants
came into the region. They occupied empty houses and set up informal
settlements in the forests around Calais. The intensity of the political mobil-
isations by the migrants decreased during this ‘Jungle phase’. Nonetheless,
local and national NGOs and charity organisations took care of the migrants’
most basic needs and critically commented on the policies and police prac-
tices in the region. Antiracism activists from France, Belgium and the UK
protested on various occasions against the situation in the borderland.
In June 2009, for example, they organised a no-border camp in Calais, where
hundreds of antiracism activists assembled for a week and organised political
manifestations and pro-migrant activities; some of them included migrants,
although their participation was hindered by local authorities and police,
who threatened the migrants with deportation (Noborder, 2009a, 2009b;
Rygiel, 2011a; Millner, 2011; Rigby and Schlembach, 2013).
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Helen Schwenken 181
The state intensifies territorial strategies in the second protest cycle
During the second protest cycle under investigation (2008 to October 2009),
local and national state authorities intensified the repression against the
migrants and refugees in the borderlands around Calais. This resulted in
the demolition and burning of the tents and shelters in ‘The Jungle’ around
Calais and squatters’ housing in Calais at the end of September 2009. In com-
parison to the first protest cycle, the state authorities undertook more efforts
to narrow down the space of manoeuvre for the migrants. One important
precondition for the ‘success’ of the state this time was the dismantling
of the institution ‘Sangatte’ in 2002. This resulted in an informalisation of
migrants’ housing and migrant services by charity organisations. The Red
Cross centre in Sangatte functioned as a hub and safe haven for the migrants;
there they were also able to gather and plan political activities and decide
upon joint statements. After the September 2009 demolition of the infor-
mal jungle settlements of the refugees and migrants, the police immediately
fenced potential alternatives, such as roofed open spaces, bridges and alter-
native campsites (Calais Migrant Solidarity, 2009). In this cat-and-mouse
game, the migrants were confronted with an antagonist with much more
power and resources. While the migrants for a long time relied on their
ethnic networks, their border crossing tactics and their numbers, the police
presence got stronger and stronger, and civil society supporters were system-
atically frustrated by the police or tamed – as some activists critically noted –
by local authorities who introduced the instrument of round tables (Calais
Migrant Solidarity, 2009).
‘Law of the Jungle’ in the borderland
In the Calais conflict, an interesting discursive figure is the one of the jungle.
This term is full of associations, alluded to by the different protagonists in
the borderland (see also Rigby and Schlembach, 2013: 163). The migrants
protested against the demolition, claiming ‘The Jungle’ home and creating
banners stating, for example, ‘Destroying our homes will not make us dis-
appear’ (Calais Migrant Solidarity, 2009). They have developed a positive
relationship to ‘The Jungle’ – it enables them to hide, find shelter and be in
the companion of other migrants. France’s Minister of Immigration, Integra-
tion and National Identity, Éric Besson, scandalised the ‘law of the Jungle’
which threatened to make the borderlands an unruly space: ‘On the territory
of this nation, the law of the Jungle cannot endure’ (BBC News, 22 Septem-
ber 2009). By emphasising that in France the rule of law is standard, he
implicitly draws a line to states such as Italy or Greece which struggle in deal-
ing with their migrant and refugee population. Some local NGOs denounce
the fact that the police repression makes the migrants more vulnerable
to traffickers and smugglers, hence the ‘law of the mafias’ (La Belle Etoile
et al., 2009) rules in the borderlands; this was an argument shared by the
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182 Citizenship Politics as Border Politics
French Minister of Minister of Immigration, Integration and National Iden-
tity, stating that the camps were ‘a base for people traffickers’ (BBC News, 22
September 2009). The signatory organisations of the civil society declaration
‘Destroying the Jungle: a false solution’ also redefined what police and the
Calais mayor have called the ‘law of the jungle’ (La Belle Etoile et al., 2009).
In their understanding, the European asylum system has failed and has led
to an unlawful space where the ‘law of the jungle’ rules.
As shown, the term ‘jungle’ is interpreted in very different ways by the pro-
tagonists. Aside from the migrants, the other protagonists have criticised the
borderland as a space in which the rule of law is not working adequately –
either the laws to protect refugees or the ones to protect the border. In their
attempt to enforce laws in the borderland, these different actors meet in
the aim of recognising so-called well-founded refugees. The conflict in the
borderland around Calais has taken place during a time in which the discus-
sion on the challenges of ‘mixed migration flows’ is prevalent. I consider it a
powerful sub-frame of the ‘refugee protection’ frame. It also represents a gov-
ernmental technology to weaken the position of the refugees and migrants
actually present in the borderlands.
‘Mixed migration flows’ as a technology of splitting mobile
populations
During the ‘Sangatte phase’ of the conflict, the migrants and refugees used
the frame of ‘asylum and refugee protection’, but it did not have much cred-
ibility in the way they did it. This has changed in the late ‘Jungle phase’ in
light of Europe-wide discussions and controversies on the European asylum
system. Even the European Commissioner for Justice and Home Affairs at
that time, Jacques Barrot, commented on the Calais conflict. He said that
A relevant number of the undocumented migrants from the ‘jungle’ are
authentic asylum seekers who do not claim asylum due to their fear of
being sent back to the country through which they entered the European
Union. ...They arrived in Greece and they are afraid of being sent back
to this country where their demands have virtually no chance of being
heard.
(La Voix du Nord, 18 September 2009, own translation)
Despite the widely accepted critique on the European asylum policies, the
British Immigration Minister at the time, Phil Woolas, insisted that the
majority of the 278 people arrested in Calais must be illegal migrants,
because otherwise they would have had claimed asylum in France or the
first country of the EU they had arrived in (The Guardian, 22 September
2009). The point the European Commissioner for Justice and Home Affairs
raised was a seriously discussed issue among the member states of the EU at
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Helen Schwenken 183
that time (Euronews, 21 September 2009). It has been widely considered a
problem that the asylum procedures in states such as Italy and Greece are
deficient and that other states in the centre of Europe, such as Germany,
receive fewer and fewer asylum seekers, while the exterior states have to
deal with an increase. Another problematic dimension of the joint EU asy-
lum policies that was identified was the different rates of recognition and
treatment of asylum seekers in the 27 member states. Greece, for exam-
ple, accepted less than 1 per cent of its asylum claims in 2008; Iraqi and
Afghans had a 0 per cent success rate (The Guardian, 22 September 2009;
Calais Migrant Solidarity, 2009). In the case of Calais, these problems of the
European asylum policies can be seen like under a burning glass (France
Terre d’Asile et al., 2009). One issue is the mixed composition of the flows,
which means that undocumented migrants, refugees and asylum seekers are
all coming together and in an irregular way (IOM, 2008: 2), as the lines are
blurry anyway. However, only very few asylum seekers and refugees actually
claim their rights, as mentioned before. The population of ‘The Jungle’ and
the informal settlements during the second protest cycle under investiga-
tion is characterised not only by Afghan people and Iraqi Kurds, but also by
Ethiopians and Somalis; these are migrant populations which are a typical
example of these mixed migration flows, ‘hoping to escape poverty, persecu-
tion and the never-ending violence raging in Mogadishu and South Central
Somalia’ (UNHCR, 2008: 1). Many of these ‘refugee-migrants’ had already
been living in shanties next to the port while they waited to cross the Gulf
of Aden towards Yemen (UNHCR, 2008: 2–4). Therefore it might not be a
completely unknown way of living-in-transit when they come to Calais and
its informal settlements at the Channel tunnel.
One technique to identify ‘real’ refugees in mixed migration flows is
screening and profiling (UNHCR, 2007b: 3, 10). In this process, it is decided
in a multi-step procedure whether newly arrived persons belong (a) to the
group of potential asylum seekers, (b) to the group of persons which cannot
be granted asylum, but which cannot be returned either, or (c) to the group
which is not eligible for protection and thus subject to voluntary or forced
return. This screening contributes, intended or not, to the re-emergence
of the discursive figures of the ‘bogus asylum seeker’ and the ‘economic
migrant’, as opposed to the ‘real’ refugee in need of protection. As studies on
discourse and racism have shown, these constructions, often media-driven,
have not been innocent in the emergence of racism against migrants and
refugees in everyday knowledge (Jäger, 1996). Further, it promotes a vic-
timising view of the refugees, often making invisible their own political
mobilisations and articulations.
In the conflict in the Calais borderlands, another dimension is relevant
when talking about mixed migration flows. Among the international organ-
isations there is a division of labour – and competition – about which
organisation deals with what category of migrants/refugees. The UNHCR and
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184 Citizenship Politics as Border Politics
the International Organization for Migration are the key antagonists in this
regard. In the conceptual approaches on mixed migration flows, this divi-
sion is bridged and collaboration among ‘key partners’ such as governments
and international organisations is an important issue (UNHCR, 2007b: 6).
The history of the conflict in the Calais borderlands has witnessed some of
these tensions as both organisations used to be present. The IOM was heavily
criticised by the Sangatte migrants themselves, who felt that the advertise-
ment for voluntary return options (for example to Afghanistan) was indeed
no option at all, and also applied unethical means (one of the criticised
documents: IOM, 2001). The UNHCR returned to Calais in 2009, a deci-
sion which has been applauded by many local protagonists. In the case of
Calais, the UNHCR spokesperson Andrej Mahecic criticised the situation,
noting that ‘[c]losing the so-called jungle camp does however not address
the phenomenon of mixed and irregular migration, nor does it solve the
problems of the people concerned, amongst whom there may be many with
protection needs’ (UNHCR, 2009a). In the case of Calais, the actual num-
ber of those claiming asylum has been very low. Until the demolition of
the informal settlements, only 170 persons showed interest in claiming asy-
lum and 50 in the end did so (BBC News, 22 September 2009). Nonetheless,
the migrants themselves displayed banners after the camps were destroyed
claiming ‘We want asylum in Europe where we can get our human rights,’
(Calais Migrant Solidarity, 2009). Given the situation of the European asy-
lum policies as described before, and given the previous mobilisations in
the first protest cycle, the migrants act within the same real-life and fram-
ing dilemmas: claiming rights which are not recognisable and refusing to
claim asylum with the knowledge that their claims are either turned down
due to procedural reasons (Dublin II regulations) or are rejected as not
well-founded.
Conclusion
As shown, political protest against European migration policies and the
EU border regime emerge in borderlands, for example in places like Calais
where the border between the Schengen area and a non-Schengen country
is located and postcolonial and family ties make the UK a desired destination
for many refugee-migrants. As a result, the view of social movement scholars
who only locate European protest in the field of migration policy in Brussels
and at the nation-state level has to be corrected. Looking at the periph-
ery of the EU offers important insights into the political struggles in ‘hot
spots’ such as Calais, the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, the Greece–
Turkey border (see Rygiel, in this volume), the Greek Mediterranean islands,
Malta (see Klepp, in this volume) or the Italian Lampedusa. Despite the rel-
atively closed political opportunity structures and the almost non-existing
political participation possibilities for (undocumented) migrants, migrants
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Helen Schwenken 185
have developed a considerable level of agency and political mobilisations,
customised for the borderland space. This goes beyond simple uprisings, as
strategic suggestions like the framing of the activities are considered. How-
ever, it should not be forgotten that these political mobilisations are very
precarious and not comparable to a more stable social movement. Therefore
I would not speak of a social movement as such, but of political articula-
tion and mobilisation processes. Even prior to these political articulations,
transnational communities existed, particularly among Kurdish and Afghan
migrants in the Sangatte Centre and later in the informal settlements. What
can be clearly stated is that the refugee-migrants in Sangatte could not refer
to a European vocabulary of inclusion, as they were not welcomed. The anal-
ysis of the framing strategies, however, showed that the migrants did refer
to the universal norm of ‘refugee protection’. As the frame of ‘autonomy
of migration’ shows, they acted on the basis of their knowledge of their
numbers in the region; the mass invasions of the Channel tunnel were only
performable with hundreds of undocumented migrants.
The situation in the French northern borderlands has dramatically
changed over time: While in the ‘Sangatte phase’ (1999–2002) the state pro-
vided shelter for the undocumented refugees and migrants, they later had to
self-sustain and self-organise during the early jungle phase (2002 to autumn
2008). Although police frequently arrested migrants, they were de facto tol-
erated by the police and the public. This changed dramatically during the
late ‘jungle phase’ after autumn 2008 and the demolition of ‘The Jungle’ in
September 2009. In that period, migrants were systematically chased and
humiliated by riot control police. Recalling Pile’s statement that ‘geogra-
phy makes possible or impossible certain forms of resistance’ and ‘resistance
makes other spaces – or geographies – possible or impossible’ (Pile, 1997: 2),
the dynamics in the Calais borderland can be explained very well. The space
for clandestine border crossings has become narrow; the space for polit-
ical mobilisations has discursively been narrowed by the frame of mixed
migration flows and the question of which of the migrants could be consid-
ered legitimate refugees. The extreme forms of dispersal among the migrants
resulted in worse conditions for mobilisation and communication among
the migrants as compared to the ‘Sangatte phase’ during which the migrants
held plenary sessions on how to react to changing political environments.
For the ‘Sangatte phase’, I characterised the borderlands around Calais as an
enabling environment for the migrants; the migrants adapted to the con-
frontational logic within this space. During the ‘Jungle phase’ the political
mobilisations decreased, and the migrants were organising their precarious
lives and journeys. In the late ‘Jungle phase’ the situation escalated and the
state made use of its power. The spatial conditions no longer allowed the
migrants to act as before. Nonetheless, the situation in and around Calais
has not changed significantly since. Despite worse conditions, refugees and
migrants continue coming to Calais. They continue to set up new precarious
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186 Citizenship Politics as Border Politics
settlements such as the Africa House Squat (Calais Migrant Solidarity, 2010)
and new ‘Jungles’, such as the ones by Hazara Afghans (Quillet, 2010), or
by Syrian or Eritrean refugees. They have been confronted with ever more
strict surveillance mechanisms and regular arrests (Calais Migrant Solidarity,
2013). Calais Mayor Natacha Bouchart even called upon the local popula-
tion via Facebook to denounce any new migrant settlements and has hoped
that the Minister of the Interior installs a priority security zone, which would
bring even more police into the region (France 3, 3 November 2013). How-
ever, the migrants continue their attempts to cross the border and if the
conditions allow, some engage themselves culturally and politically, such as
Syrian refugees sending an ‘Open letter to Europe’, asking for a safe haven
(Syrians blocked in Calais, 2013).
Notes
1. As the research is based on media analysis, the media articles are not referenced.
2. Empirical evidence can be found, for example, in Home Office, 2001; Le Monde,
4 September 2001, 1 November 2001, 27 December 2001, 22 January 2002; La Voix
du Nord, 27 December 2001; BBC, 17 May 2002.
