Linköping university - Department of Culture and Society (IKOS) Master´s Thesis, 30 Credits – MA in Ethnic and Migration Studies (EMS) ISRN: LiU-IKOS/EMS-A--20/18--SE
Constructing European
Identities, Guarding Borders
– a discourse-ethnographic perspective on the EU’s
migration and border policy
Jiao Wang
ii Table of Contents
Abbreviations ... iv
Acknowledgements ... vi
Chapter 1 Introduction... 1
1.1 Inspiration for this research... 2
1.2 Aim of research and research questions... 3
1.3 A note on interdisciplinarity ... 3
Chapter 2 Interdisciplinary literature review and the state of the art ... 5
2.1 Historical division of labor in academia ... 5
2.2 “Cultural turn” in political science... 7
2.3 “Political turn” in anthropology ... 12
2.4 Current state of play on EU border management and European identities ... 16
Chapter 3 Theories and Methods ... 19
Theories... 19
3.1 Althusser: ideology, interpellation, subject ... 19
3.2 Foucault and Hall: disciplinary power, discourse, identity... 20
3.3 Shore and Wright: policy as discourse, cultural agent and political technology ... 22
3.4 Actor-network theory (ANT) ... 23
3.5 Critical border studies (CBS) ... 25
Methods... 26
3.5 The field and the work ... 26
3.6 “Ethnography as research practice” ... 27
3.7 A discourse-ethnographic approach... 29
Chapter 4 European identity in border control communities ... 33
4.1 Background ... 33
4.2 Frontex: organizational culture and policy actor ... 37
4.3 Policy communities: European Migration Network (EMN), and Metropolis International Conference ... 41
iii
4.4 Ephemeral venues: security fair and information technology (IT) event ... 44
Chapter 5 Inter-operability and identity ... 48
5.1 Inter-operability of EU-level networks ... 48
5.2 At Copenhagen (CPH) Airport ... 51
5. 3 On the Canary Islands ... 54
5.4 “The emperor is naked”: criticism from within ... 56
Chapter 6 Conclusion ... 60
iv Abbreviations
ABC Automated Border Control ANT actor-network theory BCP Border Crossing Point CBS critical border studies CDA critical discourse analysis
CEAS Common European Asylum System CEC Council of the European Communities
CETI Centro de Estancia Temporal de Inmigrantes
(temporary reception center for immigrants)
CIE centro de internamiento de extranjeros (foreigners’ detention center)
CPH Copenhagen
EASO European Asylum Support Office
EBCG European Border and Coast Guard (Frontex) EBF European Biometrics Forum
EC European Commission
ECRIS-TCN European Criminal Record Information System for third -country nationals EEC European Economic Community
EES Entry/Exit System
EIBM European integrated border management EMN European Migration Network
ENP European Neighborhood Policy
ETHOS European Typology on Homelessness and Housing Exclusion ETIAS European Travel Information and Authorization System
EU-LISA European Union Agency for the Operational Management of Large-Scale IT Systems in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice
v EURODAC European Dactyloscopy
EUROSUR European Border Surveillance System EUROPOL European Police Office
FRA European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights IATE Inter-Active Terminology for Europe
IBM integrated border management
ICAO International Civil Aviation Organization ILO International Labor Organization
INTERPOL International Criminal Police Organization IOM International Organization for migration ISA ideological State apparatuses
JHA Justice and Home Affairs IT information technology
MEP member of European Parliament MRTD Machine Readable Travel Document NCP national contact point
OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development RABIT rapid border intervention team
SCIFA Strategic Committee on Immigration, Frontiers and Asylum SEA Single European Act
SIC Schengen Implementation Convention SIS Schengen Information System
TCN third-country national
UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees VIS Visa Information System
vi Acknowledgements
I would first like to thank my supervisor, Peo Hansen, for his guidance through each stage of the thesis. Thank you for introducing me to an interesting body of literature, for your constructive feedback, and for giving me time to recover from my downs without losing faith in me.
I would like to acknowledge the course director, Stefan Jonsson, for the arrangement of the defense, and for the inspiration from all his courses.
I thank the LiU International Scholarship, without which it would have been more difficult for me to make it to Sweden. I thank the program of Ethnic and Migration Studies and the Erasmus Exchange experience for inspiring my interest in interdisciplinary research.
My gratitude also goes to Dr. Antonia-Maria Sarantaki, who has shared with me her PhD thesis, which otherwise would not be available because it is in preparation to be published in book form. I also thank the National Documentation Center (EKT) in Greece for their assistance in getting in touch with Dr. Sarantaki.
In addition, I would like to thank my parents for their unfailing support and trust. Finally, I could not have completed this thesis without the support of my friends, Qianru Zuo, Haiqiong Gou and Lu Zhang, whose friendship forms a support network that overcomes the time difference between China and Europe.
1 Chapter 1 Introduction
In November 2015, the EU presented a video entitled “Our bonds are our strength” made by EU-LISA, one of the nine Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) agencies, whose full name is quite long: the European Union Agency for the Operational Management of Large-Scale IT Systems in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (EU-LISA). The video lauds the JHA agencies’ collaborative work and has been shared by other agencies. The narration in a man’s voice goes, fulfilment in life “requires an environment that respects personal freedom, equal opportunities, and fundamental rights”, which “we” Europeans fortunately already have, where “we” are “free to seek our own version of happiness and love”, “free to communicate, travel and work together” (EU-LISA, 2015). It is these “intrinsically linked values” that offer us “a world of opportunities” (EU-LISA, 2015). These values, however, inevitably render borders susceptible to abuse by criminals who are constantly inventive. Dialectic questions are posed, and solution is given, “But how do we fight crime without compromising our values? How do we maintain our security while protecting our fundamental rights? In a common area, we need common answers. We find them in solidarity” (EU-LISA, 2015). After listing the joint work of nine agencies, the video ends with reassuring European citizens that “thanks to the agencies’ close collaboration (e.g. managing borders and migrant flows, and fighing cross-border crime), people in the EU will continue to find fulfilment in their fundamental rights together, feeling more secure in themselves and the Union in which they live” (EU-LISA, 2015).
In a time of so-called “refugee crisis”, the EU tried to evoke a strong collective identity in the public in the form of the first-person plural— “we”. In political discourse, the discursive construction of political subjects, either as “we” or “Europeans”, relies on its strong
mobilizing effect when some collective efforts are called for. For example, the European Integration. When the EU tried to deepen the integration process, it turned to the
construction of a collective European identity and associated it with a fixed range of supposedly shared values. Although the EU’s identity politics as well as its cultural politics has been extensively studied (Shore & Wright, 1997, 2011; Bellier & Wilson, 2000;
Fossum, 2001; Bellier 2000, 2005; Huysmans, 2006; Busby, 2013a, 2013b), e.g. in policy domains like citizenship and migration (Shore, 2000; Hansen, 2000; Hansen & Hager, 2010), its manifestations in the creation and control of the EU common border has remained understudied. Referring to Rieker (2004), Balzacq (2009) talked about relations between EU borders and identities, “although debates on identity are rarely explicit in EU policies, a
2 closer scrutiny of discursive practices seem to reveal that identity, in the sense of a
constitutive ‘we’, matters, more than is often thought” (p. 5). This thesis thus sets out to examine how such a collective “we” is expressed both in EU border control policies as well as how it is dealt with by people involved in the EU border control regime.
1.1 Inspiration for this research
The inspiration for this research derives from a small ethnographic project I did in Copenhagen in 2019. It was about the people who collected cans and plastic bottles on streets. They are an observably diverse group. However, despite my intention to destigmatize Eastern Europeans (e.g. Romanians), I ended up with doing participant observation with a Romanian woman, and the data gathered from her serves as the main corpus of my paper. The reason for it is that I found them more accessible than the autochthonal group, who were more likely to turn me down. This easier accessibility is also reflected in the abundant data about the homeless who are usually concentrated in shelters, churches, and streets, which makes them easy to reach and count . Bottle collecting was less of a phenomenon to generate data than homelessness. The former is considered to be simply the subsistence means of the latter. Therefore, under the category of homelessness, the observed local bottle collectors are invisible.
As my project proceeded, it was striking to find out how broadly “homelessness” and “migrants” are defined in a Danish context. Based on an “adapted Danish version” of European Typology on Homelessness and Housing Exclusion (ETHOS) classification, migrants are defined as those
without Danish citizenship or permanent residence permits; and the homeless are those who have no residence, or “live in insecure and/or insufficient housing” (UDENFOR Foundation, 2012, p. 4), including rough sleepers, those who stay in hostels and care homes, and those who live with family or friends, etc. but with the exemption of short-term backpack tourists. Along with the definitions, migrants are considered more likely to be homeless and to “have more serious social problems which, to a broad extent, resemble those that are seen with traditional Danish homeless people and where the solution to the problem, therefore, is more complex” (UDENFOR Foundation, 2012, p. 5). If the available data is derivative of policies and is premised on the assumption that migrant is a problem who has no influence on the assumption, to what degree will researchers be conditioned to, and further, to be able to challenge the data? It is with these questions in mind that this research is conceived, designed, and written.
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1.2 Aim of research and research questions
The aim of this research is to look at “us”: how European identities are articulated , embodied, and performed in the domain of the EU border control. Personally, I do not identify myself as one of “us”, but for reading ease I will continue using it. On the one hand, it will examine how a European identity (or identities), as part of the EU’s more implicit identity politics, informs policy documents regarding border control; on the other hand, it is interested in finding out how the people involved identify their work and their role in relation to the EU border control regime. Moreover, it tries to reveal how the identities on the ground relate to the ones expressed in discourse. To achieve the goals, I will use a discourse-ethnographic method, which is an interdisciplinary tool to incorporate discourse and ethnographic accounts. Without carrying out fieldwork myself, the ethnographic dimension of this thesis means incorporation of existent ethnographies that can shed light on European identities in the sphere of border control (see more in Chapter 3). Accordingly, the research questions I ask are as follows:
-what are the daily practices of border control officials? How do they perceive their work? How do they justify what they do?
-who are influencing EU border policy? What are the policy communities?
-what kind of European identities are created in policy discourse? How are they accepted, contested, and rejected by “us”?
1.3 A note on interdisciplinarity
When I decided to analyze both policy documents and ethnographies, which are traditionally
subject matters of political science and anthropology respectively, I was faced with challenges from the two disciplines. Pessimism and optimism dominated the writing alternately before I finally decided on the theories and method s that make this thesis workable.
The pessimism comes from adherents of methodological orthodoxy from both disciplines. The primary tenet is that methodologies and the theories from which they originate from should not be separated or grafted but should always be adopted along one another. For example, in the words of Jørgensen and Phillips (2002), the approach to discourse analysis needs to be a “complete package” that contains both theory and method, and “researchers must accept the basic philosophical
premises in order to use discourse analysis as their method of empirical study” (p. 4). Further, they claim that it is the guarantee of epistemological credibility by emphasizing that that “it is the stringent application of theory and method that legitimizes scientifically produced knowledge” (Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002, p. 22). Similarly, complaints can be heard from anthropologists in
4 multidisciplinary projects where anthropology was reduced to simply research techniques and methods, compromising “its disciplinary core”, or “its central questions and ways of answering them” (Donnan & McFarlane, 1997, p. 262). In addittion, they complained how theoretical concepts, like “culture”, has been misused by other disciplinary practitioners (Donnan & McFarlane, 1997).
At other times, optimism dawned because of those who advocate methodological bricolage. Torfing (1999) argues that “discourse theorists must remain methodological bricoleurs and refrain from developing an all-purpose technique for discourse analysis” (in Hansen, 2000, p. 30). In the same vein, Cerwonka (2007) borrows Levi-Strauss’s bricolage of mythic narratives to relate to the improvisational nature of ethnography and argues that bricolage should treated as a general
approach to knowledge production. Other anthropologists, like Shore (2000), Feldman (2012) (their work and methods will be discussed in following chapters), deconstruct the conventional
anthropological methods and innovate them. As a result, I constantly switched between the dismay that “nothing will work” and the hope that “anything might go”. This “nervous condition” of doing interdisciplinary research is noted by Cerwonka (2007) who believes that it comes from the
researcher’s feeling “like a dilettante, rather than a ‘real’ scholar who has confined herself to the scholarly literature and methodology of a single discipline (and, thereby, gone ‘deeper’)” (p. 8). I would like to argue that the freedom of bricolage is not only possible but productive, under the condition that one is familiar with theoretical concepts and methods from each discipline s/he plans to draw. This influences how the following chapters are structured. Chapter 2 presents literature reviews that trace how the two disciplines affect each other and how a converging space opens up; Chapter 3 includes theoretical inspiration regarding ideology, identity, policy, etc., and a discussion on the discourse-ethnographic method; Chapter 4 and 5 forms the analysis of the thesis, with a focus on identity in community and identity and interoperability, respectively; and finally, Chapter 6 concludes the thesis with a brief discussion of the analysis as well as reflections on the overall interdisciplinary project.
5 Chapter 2 Interdisciplinary literature review and the state of the art
In this chapter I will examine the academic intersection of two broad disciplines—political science and anthropology—to provide contextualization of the intellectual basis of this thesis. The first section will look at the historical origin of division of labor in the academia, that is, how more specific disciplines emerged and multiplicated from traditionally more general ones. Despite their focus on distinct aspects of the world, a tendency to cross the disciplinary boundaries has been witnessed in the past decades: the cultural turn in political science and the political turn in
anthropology, which inform the following two sections. The last section introduces the current state of play in the intersection with a focus on European identities and the EU border control.
2.1 Historical division of labor in academia
When disciplinary boundaries are encountered as counter-productive hurdles, one cannot help inquiring how they were established in the first place. In his proposal for a shift from social science disciplines to holistic historical social science, Wallerstein (2004) reflected on such inceptive division and called for intellectual efforts that transcend the split to gain better insight into the changed social realities. Tracing the genealogy of knowledge structures in history which led up to modern disciplines in social sciences, Wallerstein (2004) identifies two major separations in truth claims that were triggered by two critical world events—the development of capitalism and the French revolution. In the mid-eighteenth century, following two centuries’ capitalist accumulation, there was a felt need to enquire ways of knowing, or how we know what we claim to know. The result is the separation of philosophical ways of knowing from the theologian way. Philosophers argued that “human beings could obtain knowledge by using their minds in some way, as opposed to receiving revealed truth through some religious authority or script” (Wallerstein, 2004, p. 2). The second separation took place in the late eighteenth century. When philosophical knowledge was mostly unitary in enquiring “the true, the good, and the beautiful” (Wallerstein, 2004, p. 3), some scholars, who were later referred to as scientists, had started to separate their empirical way of deduction and knowing from the allegedly arbitrary philosophical insights. Wallerstein (2004) refers to the second separation as “the ‘divorce’ between philosophy and science” (p. 2).
Starting from the late eighteenth century, the emergence and development of modern universities consolidated this split by institutionalizing knowledges in “departments”, each of which claims to house a “discipline” (Wallerstein, 2004). The disciplines can be mainly classified into two
categories—sciences and humanities, with the former taking the task to search for truth and leaving the latter to account for the good and the beautiful. Wallerstein (2004) holds that it is the normalized
6 status of revolution and the concept of “people”—brought up by the French revolution—that
generate the need to study the social reality, and consequently serves as the social origin of social sciences. There are mainly six disciplines: history, economics, political science, sociology,
anthropology, and the study of the oriental. The first four were assigned with the task to study social reality in western societies (mainly the UK, France, Germany, the US, and Italy). Anthropology was engaged with the study of “primitive” peoples in backward societies that correlate to colonies of western countries; Orientalists were dedicated to the previous “high civilizations” (China, India, Persia and Arab world) that have fallen behind in terms of modernity (Wallerstein, 2004). This division, according to Wallerstein, reflects and responds to the thought (and need) on how social realities were assumed to be best studied from the late eighteenth century until the 1940s. Starting from the 1940s, however, a series of world changes render it necessary to fuse strengths across disciplines. They include the United States rising as one of the superpowers, the former colonial order breaking down, and the countries from the Third World achieving self-assertion etc. The following decades witnessed the need to rethink the disciplinary division. For example, out of political and strategic needs, historians, economists, political scientists, and sociologists were concentrated to study societies or areas outside the West. Orientalism as a discipline gradually died down with experts in the field becoming historians; and as the concept of “primitive” became inapplicable, the traditional anthropologists started to study the societies from which they come (Wallerstein, 2004). It is against this backdrop Wallerstein (2004) defines the third feature of world-system analysis as “its lack of deference to the traditional boundaries of the social sciences” (p. 19). It is rather unidisciplinary than multidisciplinary. This notion of unidisciplinary resonates in
Cerwonka’s (2007) words, “we ought to think about interdisciplinarity as a knowledge-production process that flexibly adopts approaches and tools as a consequence of the questions being asked, not as a consequence of the methodological constraints dictated by the history or current hegemony within a given discipline” (p. 14).
This thesis mainly draws inspiration and literature from anthropology and political science in their broad sense as academic disciplines. By broad sense it means that no attention will be paid to the contestation over further sub-division of knowledge within them. Conventionally, political science takes the state as its central study subject, while anthropology takes interest in studying culture or identity formation. In the past decades, nevertheless, out of insufficiency to account for certain political processes and phenomena, political science started to incorporate concepts as “culture” and methodology like ethnography to explain social realities. In a similar vein, out of intense reflexivity,
7 the analytical focus of anthropology first experienced a shift away from the political and politics, and then a recent shift back to the political.
2.2 “Cultural turn” in political science
The “cultural turn” is both an epistemological and historical shift of paradigm in humanities and social sciences that started in the 1970s, suggesting that culture should be treated as the primarily relevant analytical lens in research (Nash, 2001). Influenced by postmodernism, a broader
movement that started in mid-20th century, it criticizes the positivist way to perceive and research
the world that has its origin in Enlightenment rationality. Here I adopt the term from Cris Shore (2012) when he canvassed qualitative methods (e.g. ethnography) as alternative perspectives to conventional positivist methods in policy studies (p. 91). The call for a “cultural turn” in policy studies can also be heard from political scientists. In their argument for a more incorporative
attitude towards interpretive approaches from political science, Rhodes, Hart & Noordegraaf (2007) note that “interpretive approaches persist to this day on the fringes of political science” and “the most productive area for ethnographic approaches in political science in recent times has been policy studies”, but “interpretive approaches and their ethnographic methods are a minority pursuit” (p. 4).
Traditionally, “culture” is not the subject matter of political science, but the task of anthropologists. Margaret R. Somers’s (1995) oft-quoted, succinct summary can be used as a guideline to trace the ascendance and decline of the concept of political culture, which
first dominated the conceptual horizon of political science and political sociology in the late 1950s and 1960s in the context of a flourishing postwar political sociology focused on replicating the conditions of Western democratization. Now that democratization again dominates the world agenda, the concept has been revived by political scientist and sociologists in the late 1980s and 1990s (p. 114).
In its first life, the significant work is The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (1963), co-authored by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba. It adopts methods of poll and survey to find out which peoples are “active, articulate and ‘responsive’”, and which are “passive, inarticulate and unconcerned” in five full-suffrage nations—the US, Germany, Mexico, Italy, and the UK (Rokkan, 1964, p. 676). In the book, Almond and Verba (1963) classify culture into three types—foregrounding the third type—civic culture, defined as “a pluralistic culture based on
communication and persuasion, a culture of consensus and diversity, a culture that permitted change but moderated it” (p. 6). Their treatment of culture and methodology has drawn a wide range of
8 criticism. Zaiotti (2011) refers to their way of treating culture as “wooliness”—by using culture as too broad a term, as determinism, and as functionalism (p. 21). Cerwonka (2007) objects to their perception of individuals as unit of analysis, that is, culture has been regarded as “all politically relevant orientations of all members of a political system” (Verba 1965, in Cerwonka, 2007, p. 11), so that culture can be quantitatively measured by statistical methods.
With the behavioral revolution, culture as an analytical tool has been marginalized until in the 1990s when interest in culture to explain political phenomenon was rekindled following the major political events (e.g. end of the Cold War) as well as the transformations in political science as a discipline (Zaiotti, 2011, p. 21-22). In its so-called second life, culture has been more associated with the collective and the more ideational as opposition to the “materialist and individualist bias charactering the mainstream of the discipline” (Zaiotti, 2011, p. 22). Moreover, to conceive of culture merely as an outcome of materialistic determinism, its “autonomous impact (be it constitutive, causal or both) on actors’ identities and social outcomes” has been asserted; nevertheless, Zaiotti delivers his criticism that most of such scholars still fail to give balanced weight to the two aspects of mutual construction. More weight is often given to the former aspect. If we bear in mind the academic division of labor mentioned before, “culture” was deemed as something that belonged to the primitive societies, mostly colonies of the West. The perception, however, has been challenged, revised, and developed within the discipline. One of the pitfalls of borrowing analytical concepts across disciplines is that the borrower is likely to lose track of the evolvement of such concepts in the original discipline. Lisa Wedeen (2002) makes a detailed analysis of the usage of the term “culture” in political science, arguing that it has been adopted to look at the “policy initiatives intended to reproduce the conditions of Western democratization abroad” with notable manifestations from Sherry Ortner’s definition as “a deeply sedimented essence attaching to, or inhering in particular groups” and Verba’s defining political culture as “orientations toward the political system” (p. 713). Influenced by Max Weber’s association of the rise of capitalism and the work ethic of Protestants, interest from political science in culture lies in how “cultural attitudes and beliefs either hindered or enabled” the progress of the society (Wedeen, 2002, p. 713). Cerwonka (2007) argues similarly,
[In the 1950s] To the extent to which political scientists have been concerned to explain the influence of culture, it has been to gauge the likelihood of a polity to support democratic institutions and other structures associated with modernization. Or it has been concerned to explain seemingly irrational political behavior such as ethnic hatred or terrorism (p. 11; see also Cyrenne, 2006; Zaiotti, 2011).
9 The essentializing tendency in the general paradigm, according to Wedeen, is attributed to the fact that the concept of “culture” at issue is closely linked to the one brought up by a well-known anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, who defines “culture” as “system of symbols”, “thick descriptions” (Geertz, 1973), and “culture as texts” (Geertz, 1972) in different texts. As these definitions started to influence political science, they have been criticized and challenged in anthropology. For example, William Roseberry (1982) argues Geertz’s definition of culture as “ensemble of texts” is reductionist in the sense that though he states that culture is “socially constituted and socially
constituting” (p. 1016), he did not pay enough attention to the latter aspect. Treating culture as static and ready-made text in his classic account regarding Balinese cockfights, Geertz ignores the process of writing and “remove[s] culture from the process of its creation” (Roseberry, 1982, p. 1022). Meanwhile, political scientists keep a deliberate distance from developing the concept of “culture” after Geertz, because they are reluctant to accept the “disavowal of modernization theory”, the called-for “self-reflexive work on knowledge production”, the “complicated, messy narratives of anthropological inquiry” (over “conceptual parsimony” lauded within the political science) as much as in anthropology, and “attacks on positivist social science” from poststructuralism (Wedeen, 2002, p. 719). In post-millennium years, there seems to be a rekindled interest in cultural
explanations in political science, as can be seen in Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz’s Culture Troubles: Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning (2006), where Geertz’s “thick description” is championed again as remedy to the positivist deficiency in comparative politics. Chad Cyrenne’s (2006) tirade-like review of the book is representative of criticisms from the camp of firm
empiricists, “[thick descriptions] are not only impossible to achieve, unnecessary in our explanations, and undesirable after generating hypotheses, but, if carried too far, they can be
positively pernicious in our research” (p. 536). For him, ethnographic accounts are to be best placed in the background or contextualization part of research, so that comparable, testable, falsifiable, in a word, explanator—more “scientific”—research could be conducted.
The efforts at combining anthropological concepts that derive from interpretivist tradition in search for truth and empiricist traditions without addressing their underlying epistemological differences are, in accordance with Wedeen (2002), untenable. This touches upon the long-term divergence between social sciences which endeavored to develop methodologies more like those in natural sciences, and the interpretive methods in anthropology. While social scientists tend to find out the universal laws of societies, anthropology searches for the meaning. As Clifford Geertz’s famous saying goes, “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance
10 he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (1973, p.5). Along with the behaviorist revolution in the 1950s, quantitative empirical approaches gradually gained the dominant position in political science, including statistical methods and rational-choice models, however, it provides “few” models for examining the process of identity production and the complex relationship between the agency of individuals and the social structures that shaped and were shaped by them (Cerwonka, 2007, p. 10-11). Wedeen (2002) refers to the combination between rational choice theory and culture studies as “fruitful collaboration” by connotating “culture” as “common knowledge”, arguing that the conversion of concept helps to “solves games in which preferences and capabilities generate ‘multiple equilibria’—stable outcomes from which a rational actor has no incentive to deviate” (p. 718; see also Wendt’s “socially shared knowledge”, 1999).
A notable example of the application is Ruben Zaiotti’s Cultures of Border Control: Schengen & the Evolution of European Frontiers (2011), in which he puts forward the concept of “culture of border control”. It means “a relatively stable constellation of background assumptions and
corresponding practices shared by a border control community in a given period and geographical location” (Zaiotti, 2011, p. 23, emphasis original). He also indicates that “common sense is, in fact, the status achieved by a mature culture among policy community members and part of their
everyday routines” (Zaiotti, 2011, p. 14). It is based on his definition of culture as not only “a set of collective ideas shared by a group of actors, but also a more concrete social dimension constituted by this group’s activities” (Zaiotti, 2011, p. 22, emphasis mine). Here a shift of focus can be noticed that culture does not refer to the “irrational” aspects in non-Western societies but refers to the very rational choice in Western societies. Wedeen (2002) criticizes this definition for being a prerequisite condition and failing to account for its origin or subsequent changes; in addition it is difficult to prove the commonality of certain knowledges, to regard the people outside common knowledge as without culture, and to explain deliberate resistance and transgression. To sustain her theoretical framework, Zaiotti (2011) borrows the idea of evolution and argues that,
Being continuously produced and reproduced, a culture of border control is always evolving, even if its core features remain the same. Under certain circumstances, however, a culture may undergo fundamental transformations that lead to its demise and subst itution with an alternative culture. In the political field, this process is typically not “revolutionary” in the sense Kuhn (1962) uses the term (i.e., sudden and erratic). The transition from one culture of
11 border control to anther should instead be understood as an instance of cultural evolution (p. 27).
In formulating his framework, Zaiotti tries to contest the popular intellectualistic trend that focuses on the cognitive by pulling the focus back to practices, or materiality. Departing from his criticisms of viewing culture as system as symbols, Wedeen suggests a way of including culture in political science by seeing it as meaning-making that can be probed through the notion of “intelligibility”. He states, “intelligibility does not presuppose grasping an inner essence of getting into the heads of informants who are captive minds of a system but, rather, centers on the ways in which people attempt to make apparent, observable sense of their worlds—to themselves and to each other—in emotional and cognitive terms” (Wedeen, 2002, p. 721). Therefore, the task of political scientists is not to “specify the relationships that govern this semiotic logic (structuralism), or to search for silently intended meanings (hermeneutics), but rather to identify the range of semiotic practices relevant to explanations of a given political phenomenon and explore how such semiotic practices work” (Wedeen, 2002, p. 722). In other words, analysts should skip the unending debate over which account carries more weight—what the informants claim they think, or what the researchers think their informants think—but rather, pay more attention to the practices that actually happen, followed by a range of possible explanations.
Wedeen (2002) refers his approach as “practice-oriented cultural approach” (p. 714), which finds resonance in Zaiotti’s “pragmaticist” approach, or “practical turn”, though he claims credit to different philosophical origin, with the aim to put practices at the core of culture analysis in contrast to other scholars who emphasize the ideational or cognitive dimension of culture. He insists, “a fundamental feature of practices is that they instantiate or ‘congeal’ the ideas shared by a group of individuals in their everyday life, rendering a culture ‘visible’ in spatial and historical terms. Inserting them into the analysis of culture adds the concrete dimension that is missing in current culturalist approaches” (Zaiotti, 2011, p. 23). The latest development of Zaiotti’s framework of “cultures of border control” can be found in Antonia-Maria Sarantaki’s (2019) work on Frontex’s border conducts, which will be discussed in the section of the current state of play.
To summarize, there have been attempts to deviate from the empiricist and quantitative orthodoxies in political science, to reach out to interpretive concepts and methods that characterize
anthropology, and to account for the phenomena that deem to be not quantifiable—be they
“rational” or “irrational”. Despite distinctions in epistemological and methodological terms, there is a felt need for interdisciplinary collaboration. Now I will turn to the other side of the story—the political turn in anthropology.
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2.3 “Political turn” in anthropology
Historically, anthropology is interdisciplinary by nature. If we refer back to Wallerstein’s account of the history of social sciences disciplines, it is worth noting that historians, anthropologists and orientalist scholars are supposed to engage in the (Western) past, the “primitive” societies, and the oriental world respectively. The subjects of study are all-encompassing in nature, without being classified into further specializations as have been done of disciplines studying Western societies. For example, there are no categories like “sociology in ‘primitive’ societies” or “politics in oriental world”, etc. Instead, scholars in these three disciplines who do have penchant for certain fields, are more likely to be referred to as economic anthropologist, political historian, and the like. To put it in Talal Asad’s words, while functional anthropology was in fact synonymous with African sociology in the colonial period in the 20th century (Asad, 1973b), “the distinction between a totalizing
method (in which the formation of parts is explained with reference to a developing structure of determinations) and ethnographic holism (in which the different ‘institutions’ of a society are all described and linked one to anther)” has never been sufficiently clarified (Asad, 1973a, p. 13). Despite the inclusiveness of the subject matter, it is usually thought that culture is what
anthropologists are interested in. It does not mean, however, anthropology has been removed from politics. As a discipline, it has complicated relations to western political authorities and has been instrumentalized to strengthen colonial rule and to serve the two world wars. I will delineate
anthropology’s relation to politics along two lines: 1) its interest in non-Western societies, and 2) its late interest in Western politics.
Anthropology is traditionally interested in non-Western societies (mostly western colonies), and the criticism of its relations to colonialism came surprisingly late. In the introduction to his book The Foundations of Social Anthropology published as recent as in the 1950s, Nadel (2004/1951) still refers to the study subject as “‘primitive’ communities, ‘simpler’ peoples, or ‘preliterate societies’” (p. 2). Although anthropologists did study the political in the “primitive” societies, they did not approach it as a distinct aspect, but rather, as a dimension subject to other more significant
concepts. As summarized by Seymour-Smith (1986),“it is true to say that while analysis of political dimension had formed an important part of the majority of anthropological studies, this dimension has usually been interpreted as an aspect of or as embedded in other domains such as kinship, religion, economy, and so on, and has been little analyzed for the features of political system per se” (p. 226). For example, Lewis Henry Morgan (1877) championed the Native American society’s system of communal property against the historical backdrop when capitalist expansion was in its heydays and the ownership of private property was held as “the primary agent of progress” (in
13 Vincent, 1990, p. 35). His thoughts were referred to as have been “absorbed into modern
anthropology…especially…in relation to politics”, because he treats kinship as “a primary medium of political articulation at the subsistence levels of hunting/gathering and horticulture,” and he recognized “the egalitarianism of primitive society and the lack of a concept of property” (Lewellen 1983, in Vincent, 1990, p. 37).
Anthropologist in the field used to be a lone and mystic figure to the public. Out of “implicit claim to fame”, they went to “far away, exotic, and potentially perilous” places because “in ‘the heart of darkness’ everything was possible, including the return to the enlightened West” (Hastrup & Olwig, 1997, p. 4). The reason that they only directed criticism against colonialism so late is that colonial rule is the very precondition for their inquiries, although they cannot be perceived as the willing assistant of colonialism. Victor Turner grumbled about how anthropologists, who used to be accused by white settlers for being “Reds”, “socialists” and “anarchists” because they tended to sympathize with and accept their informants’ perspectives and became their spokesmen, which hindered the colonial rule, had come to be regarded by African leaders as “‘apologists of
colonialism’ and subtle agents of colonial supremacy” (Turner, 1971, in Asad, 1973a, p. 15). Either way of perception, as Wendy James (1973) argues, is sufficient. She states,
As an individual, the anthropologist can often appear as a critic of colonial policy, of the philosophy of western superiority upon which it was based and in terms of which it was justified; and he was usually at odds with the various administrators, missionaries, and other local Europeans he had dealings with. He cannot often be seen unambiguously as a willing agent of colonialism. But he was nevertheless dependent upon colonial authorities for permission to carry out his studies, and sometimes for material support; and in the inter-war period at least, open political dissent was scarcely possible within colonial society. An anthropologist who turned to be anything more than a mild social embarrassment could scarcely have been tolerated; and thus, for anthropology to continue at all, appearances of co-operation had to be kept up (p. 42).
The reticent symbiotic relationship between anthropologists and colonial enterprise has reinforced a series of biases that are later subject to change and criticism. The cultural-relativism bias that culture has been reified to exist in a bounded geographical area, owned by a certain group of people. The bias that informants are sedentary, with mobility only enjoyed by the privileged researcher. Anthropology’s incapability of theorizing human mobility is well-reflected in Appadurai’s accusation of anthropologists of having “incarcerated natives ecologically and
14 intellectually in places, outside the Western metropolises, where their culture is regarded as closed adapted to their particular environment” (Hastrup & Olwig, 1997, p. 6-7).
The discipline, along with its relation to colonialism and other disciplines (e.g. politics/political science), however, was soon to face serious challenges. In 1940, anthropologists still claimed that “we have not found that the theories of political philosophers have helped us to understand the societies we have studied and we consider them of little scientific value” (Fortes & Evans-Pritchard, 1940, in Asad, 1973a, p. 12). But in 1966, they started to argue that “we consider that the time is ripe for a dialogue, if not for marriage between anthropology and the other disciplines concerned with comparative politics” (Swartz, Turner, & Tuden, 1968, in Asad, 1973a, p.12). As the two world wars ended, the old colonial system started to collapse, and the national liberation movement came to gain momentum. Anthropologists, as well as scholars from other disciplines whose origin relates to colonial world order (e.g. Indology/Sinology), increasingly found themselves “looked upon with political suspicion in the countries they had traditionally studied” (Wallerstein, 2004, p. 11), when political power there shifted from “tribal” leaders to the nationalistic bourgeoisie (Asad, 1973a, p. 13). Anthropology was faced with an identity crisis. Consequently, its practitioners “came home”, “beginning to study as well the countries from which the majority of them originated”, since “both the concept of the ‘primitive’ and the reality it was supposed to reflect were disappearing” (Wallerstein, 2004, p. 11).
When they were ready to “come home” from “colonial and otherwise exotic outposts”, they met with the doubt that they were not “suitable to the scientific study of their own society” (Kosuth 1991, in Kockel, Craith, & Frykman, 2012, p. 3). Back then indigenous cultures in Europe fell in the scope of enquiry of a discipline called European Ethnology, despite the fact that the various institutions operated on a very national (or nationalistic) basis (Kockel, Craith, & Frykman, 2012). Noting the changes, Asad (1973a) commented that “anthropology does not merely apprehend the world in which it is located, but that the world also determine how anthropology will apprehend it” (p. 12). When anthropologists first started to take Europe as object of study, they nearly
unexceptionally chose the isolated, far away villages in the Mediterranean region. The field-site choice reflects the “overt equivalence between African, Asian, and American ‘primitives’ on the one hand and southern European shepherds and peasants on the other” (Giordano, 2012, p. 14). Anthropology in the Mediterranean region not only indicates methodological changes, but also engenders an archive regarding the region as a cultural unit. One of the major themes is “patronage and political practices” (Giordano, 2012, p. 16), which signals anthropologists’ interest in western politics. From then on, especially as the European Integration intensifies, more anthropological
15 work on political culture and practices in Europe has been done. The ones relevant to the EU border management and European identities will be examined in next section. Before that, I want to
introduce another important strand of thought from the North American context.
In the US, anthropologists who conducted work in urban contexts usually studied the people in less advantaged social position. The traditional paradigm of “studying down” was so ossified that, as Nader (1972) noted, aspirational students could not study the “problems affecting the future of homo sapiens”, but can only study “problems about which they have no ‘feeling’”, because being detached was thought to be “the only appropriate stance for a science” (p. 2, emphasis original). Anthropology seems to be “phasing out, content to make a living for the most part by rediscovering what has been discovered or by selling our wares to other disciplines and professions” (Nader, 1972, p. 1). Against this backdrop, Nader (1972) put forward the concept of “studying up”, calling for studying those on the middle and upper end of the social power structure. She wrote,
If we look at the literature based on fieldwork in the United States, we find a relatively abundant literature on the poor, the ethnic groups, the disadvantaged; there is comparatively little field research on the middle class, and very little first hand work on the upper classes. Anthropologists might indeed ask themselves whether the entirety of fieldwork does not depend upon a certain power relationship in favor of the anthropologist, and whether indeed such dominant-subordinate relationships may not be affecting the kinds of theories that we are weaving. What if, in reinventing anthropology, anthropologists were to study the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather that the culture of poverty? (Nader, 1972, p. 5) By the powerful and the affluent she refers to a wide range of organizations, agencies, and institutions, including insurance companies, law firms, company towns, international industrial complex, bureaucratic organizations, government agencies, and the like (Nader, 1972). When questioning why anthropologists have more complaints as regards access to field when studying up than they did in any non-Western societies, she articulates a stinging observation, “we prefer the underdog” (1972, p. 19). Following Nader’s call for “studying up”, Reinhold (1994) brings up a complementary notion of “studying through” a policy, which is based on the critical acceptance of the former (in Wright & Reinhold, 2011). It is noted that Nader applied her theoretical concept through a strategy of cutting out a “vertical slice” of the “economic, administrative and political systems” that plays a role in certain practices (e.g. child rearing) (Nader, 1980, in Wright & Reinhold, 2011, p. 87). Wright and Reinhold (2011) acknowledge its strength but direct two criticisms against it,
16 First, it retained the notion of the vertical organization of government and power. True, instead of those at the top being given the power to define or frame an anthropological problem, Nader’s approach took a perspective from below. But this approach did not allow for the possibility of competing definitions being simultaneously contested from many different positions – up, down and across – a policy field or their contingent effects on each other. Second, the vertical slice also tended to be a slice in time. The issue under research was treated as static (p. 87).
Both “studying up” and “studying through” have theoretical and methodological implications. They offer tools to study proliferated and dispersed power structures and open up new spaces for
anthropological study. For example, they have an influence on Shore and Wright’s (1997) attempts to formalize public policies as a new field in anthropology (Chapter 3). In addition, more
anthropologists gained access to political institutions (e.g. the EC) which are conventionally not accessible for ethnographic research, which will be exemplified in the following section.
2.4 Current state of play on EU border management and European identities
Following the anthropology in Europe (starting from the Mediterranean region), Goddard, Llobera and Shore (1996/1994) suggest a paradigm shift from anthropology in Europe to anthropology of Europe (p. 1). The shift is closely related to, besides other factors (e.g. the mass media), the “increasing integration at a political level through agreements and treaties, and increasingly vigorous drives towards legislative and institutional standardization, particularly within the European Union (EU)”, an profound ongoing process that begs the question “will increased integration within the EU act as a catalyst to greater homogeneity within Europe or will it exacerbate differences between EU members and non-members” (Goddard, Llobera & Shore 1996/1994, p. 24). The “idea of Europe” not only serves as a “political ideal and mobilizing metaphor” but is increasingly adopted by “the European Community as a shorthand for itself” (Goddard, et al, 1996/1994, p. 26).
Since the 1970s, the EU (then the EEC) started to promote a “Citizen’s Europe” and a “People’s Europe” as its future vision. Its attempt to create a European identity in a top-down manner started to attract attention of many scholars, among whom Cris Shore has been lauded as “one of the first and, without rival, the most productive scholar of the EU’s cultural politics” (Wilken, 2012, p. 129). In the article “Citizens’ Europe and the construction of European identity”, Shore and Black
(1996/1994) examined the “institutions of ‘European culture’” and “the ‘culture’ of those European institutions themselves” to find out the effectiveness of identity-formation in institutional settings
17 (p. 276). Later, as part of his efforts to theorize an anthropology of public policy, Shore (1997) looks at the role of the EU audiovisual policy in cultivating a collective European identity, arguing that it bears resemblance with nation-building strategies. In his monograph Building Europe: the Cultural Politics of European Integration (2000), which is based on fieldwork in Brussels in 1993 and 1996, Shore explores a wide range of EU cultural initiatives from the perspectives of the civil servants and politicians. With a shared interest in the EC, Irène Bellier (2000) investigated how the EU staff from member states negotiate their national identities with the newly promoted European identity (and its Europeanness) in the context of the European Commission.
Another work published in the same year is An Anthropology of the European Union: Building, Imagining and Experiencing the New Europe (2000), an anthology of extant anthropological articles on culture and identity within the EU. One of its primary aims is to explore “the role of EU institutions in the production and perception of common or shared European identity, both within and outside of the EU” (Bellier & Wilson, 2000, p. 3). Besides policy discourses, research themes also include the emergent European citizenship and how professionals, functionaries, and civil servants negotiated their national identities in the context of various supranational instit utions. Besides the EC, the so-called most self-conscious institution in creating a European identity, other less self-conscious venues have been successively accessed, including the European Space Agency (Zabusky, 2000), the European Parliament (Busby, 2013b), the translation department (Koskinen, 2008; Duflou, 2016), and others.
In Observing Government Elites: Up Close and Personal (2007), Rhodes, Hart and Noordegraaf (2007) gathered a range of ethnographies done on government elites, with the belief that such accounts in interpretive manner would complement the traditional methods in political science. The contributed articles mainly took government officials—at national level and at the EU level—as subject of study. A Companion to the Anthropology of Europe, published in 2012, mainly
investigated the frontiers of Europe (e.g. EU Enlargement) and anthropology’s relation to European ethnology. Though not involved in this work on editorial and contributive terms, Shore’s works informed many of the contributors’ theoretical and empirical inspiration.
Among the many sites of manifestation of European identities, be them at discursive level in certain policy domains or in various institutional settings, the EU border control regime has remained an under-researched field to investigate embodiments of a European identity. One reason for it, is because of its increasingly expansive scale and dispersed structure, which pose serious challenges to anthropological way of enquiry (Chapter 3). Despite the scarcity, some important progresses have been made. In The Migration Apparatus: Security, Labor, and Policymaking in the European Union
18 (2012), Gregory Feldman uses “nonlocal” ethnography to explore “bureaucratic indifference by asking what mediates the policy officials’ view of the migrants” (p. 5) and how “a dynamic living person is converted into a static policy object” (p. 6). Inspired by Feldman, Ruben Andersson uses “extended fieldwork” in his book Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe (2014) to reveal how the EU border control regime, or the “illegality industry” produce more “illegal immigration” that it claims to fight and how the production in turn justifies more investment in the regime. Based on multi-sited event ethnography, Theodore Baird (2017) provides an ethnographic account on how practitioncratic knowledge from the border control officials is circulated and consumed at security fairs. Perle Møhl’s (2019) fieldwork at Copenhagen Airport gives an instantiated case of how mixed security practices blurs at one site of the European border. Last but not the least, Antonia-Maria Sarantaki (2019) enriches Zaiotti’s framework by adding empirical materials gathered from fieldwork with Frontex, and developes it a step further. She argues that the EU border control culture has evolved from “Schengen border control culture” to “Warsaw border control culture” with Frontex as its major actor. This corpus of literature will be discussed further in the following chapters. What they have in common is that they provide a window to see how “we” think about the border control regime and “our” role in it, through which expressions of European identities in the domain of border control can be revealed.
To summarize, in this chapter I have introduced the historical origin of division of academic disciplines and delineated the intellectual turns from two academic disciplines—anthropology and political science—that gravitate toward each other, leading up to a converging ground for
interdisciplinary research. After that I presented a brief overview of the current state of play in the disciplinary intersection. In the following chapter, I will set out to present the theories that not only reveal the assumptions underlying the research questions but serve as analytical tools in the
subsequent analysis. In addition, I will address the methodological issues concerning the two disciplines.
19 Chapter 3 Theories and Methods
In this chapter I will start with describing the theoretical inspirations from which I have derived the research questions, and through which empirical materials will be analyzed later. One way to achieve interdisciplinary research, I believe, is to look beyond discipline-specific theories so that philosophical ideas—Foucault will object to the notion of “epistemology”—at a supra-disciplinary level can shed light on questions at issue. Not to mention Althusser, Foucault and Hall’s
philosophies have influenced a wide range of disciplines. Cris Shore’s three approaches towards public policy will be introduced as a critique of a more established sub-field in politic science— policy studies. After that, useful concepts from the actor-network theory (ANT) and critical border studies (CBS) will be elaborated. In the remaining part, I will discuss the methodological challenges this interdisciplinary research encountered with a focus on the notion of “the field” and
“ethnography”, and I will conclude this chapter by arguing for a discourse-ethnographic approach. Theories
3.1 Althusser: ideology, interpellation, subject
In his classic exposition on reproduction of labor power, Althusser (1971) draws attention to how the ruling ideology reproduces itself. He argues that it is achieved by recruiting individuals as compliant subjects through the process of interpellation. Before he elaborates on the mechanism, a distinction is made between two State Apparatuses—the (Repressive) State Apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). The former is known for its coercive force, including the courts, the police, the prisons, the army, etc.; while the latter is characterized by being subtle and less noticeable, including institutions like the family, the church, the school, and so on. He also noted that, in his time, the (Repressive) State Apparatus is often centralized and exert influence in the public sphere, but the ISAs are dispersed and “much the larger part” of them belong to the private domain (Althusser, 1971, p. 97). While he considered the “state” as the supreme source of repression, the recent decades has witnessed the rise of power centers in novel forms, e.g. the European Union as supranational organization. Moreover, the line between the public and the private, has become increasingly blurred . The proliferation of policies is a case in point. It has been observed that nearly all aspects of human life, from birth to death, is subject to intervention of policy—be it from the State, public institutions, private sector actors or international bodies (Shore 2012; Wedel et. al. 2005).
The role of the ISAs, according to Althusser, is to create the image of the ideal Subject (most compliant possible with the ruling ideology) and convert individuals into subjects (the closer forms
20 to the Subject). He describes it as “the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection ‘all by
himself’” (Althusser, 1971, p. 123, emphasis original). The notion of Subject is widely manifested in neoliberal ideologies, notably in how laws and policies define citizens and migrants (Hansen, 2000; Hansen & Hager, 2010; Anderson, 2015; Feldman, 2012), or in Althusserian terms, how they create the Citizen and the Migrant that are situated in an ideological center, interpellating concrete individuals into subjected citizens and migrants.
In the interpellating process, language plays a salient role. The examples he gave to account for the concept unexceptionally involves language, as carrier of ideological discourses, that will mold subjects’ consciousness, at the same time leaving them with the impression that they have freely chosen to believe certain ideas. When babies are born, Althusser asserts, they enter a pre-existing language structure that the ISAs have long been working on through the school and the family. So, the human is barely the creator of knowledge, but means of reproducing ideology. Although this ideological determinism has been criticized for being incapable of explaining political revolution and reducing individuals’ to simply “a function of the State” (Badiou, 2011/2005, p. 63), Althusser (1971) does point out that class struggle, between the exploiter and the exploited, can facilitate political change, because “ideologies are not ‘born’ in the ISAs but from the social classes at grips in the class struggle: from their conditions of existence, their experience of the struggle, etc.” (p. 126).
3.2 Foucault and Hall: disciplinary power, discourse, identity
With the observed shift from the conventional centralized power structure to a more horizontal power distribution, Foucault put forward the concept of disciplinary power in contrast to the repressive power. Unlike the repressive power, disciplinary power does not aim to reiterate the supreme sovereign power, but to turn individuals into self-regulating subjects. Disciplinary power is repressive and subjugating by nature, only in more subtle and less violent forms, encapsulated in the idea of Panopticon—the supposedly ideal prison that upcycles measures taken under circumstances like plagues and leper. The prominent features of this new power mechanism are its multiplication and productivity. By extending to the infinitely small social aspects can it maintain itself with least cost and resistance so that it does not impede progress but facilitate it. Foucault referred to it as “the infinitely small of political power” (1995, p. 214). Correspondingly, the disciplinary mechanisms began to become “deinstitutionalized”, “to emerge from the closed fortresses in which they once functioned and to circulate in a ‘free’ state; the massive, compact disciplines are broken down into
21 flexible methods of control, which may be transferred and adapted” (Foucault, 1995, p. 211). To make supervision at such level come to fruition, it needs not only state-controlled apparatuses like the police and the judicial but also more civic institutions, e.g. the family, yet eventually it needs to make people into “useful individuals” by equipping them with skills needed “in the most important, most central and most productive sectors of society”—“factory production, the transmission of knowledge, the diffusion of aptitudes and skills, the war-machine” (Foucault, 1995, p. 211). This is what Foucault means when he wrote, “the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a
productive body and a subjected body” (1995, p. 26).
The disciplinary measures, according to Foucault, are closely associated with establishing certain ideas as the ”truth”, or the authentic ”knowledge” that individuals must accept and internalize. For instance, the punishing practices of offenders do not exist alone, but exist together with ”a corpus of knowledge, techniques, ’scientific’ discourses” (Foucault, 1995, p. 23) regarding the offence, the offender and the law. The sacred status of truths and knowledges do not reflect the nature of the world, but is validated by power. Rejecting the individuals as creator of knowledge, Foucault (1995) states, ”it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of
knowledge” (p. 28). In the knowledge formation, Foucault (2002/1969) argues that discourse plays a significant role. The discourse consists of a group of statements that are in relation to each other, which means that ”one cannot say a sentence, one cannot transform it into a statement, unless a collateral space is brought into operation” (p. 109-110). Though the statements can be dispersed across many domains, the connections and relations among them make them fall into the same ”discursive formation” (Foucault, 2002/1969, p. 41). The influence it has on one’s subjectivity is quite dismaying, as Foucault (2002/1969) states that ”it establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of discourse, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks”, and that ”that differenc, far from being the forgotten and recovered origin, is this dispersion that we are and make” (p. 147-148). As will be exemplified in the analysis, the consolidation of a group of statements regarding asylum and migration (e.g. EU policies and European Migration Network Glossary) has effectively prevented people from thinking out of the discourse.
Based on Althusser’s and Foucault’s theories on ideology, power/knowledge, and subjectivity, Hall (1997, 2011) takes up the issue of subjects’ agency. Like them, Hall (1997) rejects an essentialist notion of “subject”, but he does not hold that the concept is no longer useful. Rather, he argues that it is inspiring to take the concept of “identification” into consideration, by which he means that
22 subjects identify with both discourses and inner psyche (Hall, 1997). Therefore, he uses “identity” “to refer to the meeting point, the point of suture, between on the one hand the discourse and practices which attempt to ‘interpellate’, speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects or particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be ‘spoken’” (Hall, 1997, p. 5-6, emphasis original). Identities mean “points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices contrast for us” (Hall, 1997, p. 6). In contrast to Althusser’s (1971) assertion that “the existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing” (p. 118), Hall (1997) insists that the occupation of subject positions does not automatically and simultaneously happen, and not all subject positions are taken, which results in “certain ‘empty’ discursive subject positions” (p. 10). It is just because of the subject position, or “place for the subject” that “it is not inevitable that all individuals in a particular period will become the subjects of a particular
discourse in this sense” (Hall, 2011, p. 56). Hall’s theoretical insights render subjects’ agency and resistance to discursive power possible. However, in a time when “those established forms of governance” of neoliberalism have become “more sophisticated and seemingly more contradictory” (Shore & Wright, 2011, p. 15), the resistance to the EU border control regime, both from within and without, is difficult, as the rest of the thesis will show.
3.3 Shore and Wright: policy as discourse, cultural agent and political technology
Anthropology of public policy, as a sub-field in anthropology, emerged as a critique against conventional policy studies with Cris Shore as one of the leading figures. It claims to problematize and critique policy both “as a concept, or idea-force, and as a set of related practices” (Shore, 2012, p. 90). The criticism against policy studies is mainly in two aspects: first, it accuses policy studies of treating policies as a “legal-rational” given; second, it criticizes the way of treating police-making process as a progressive, neat, linear process that is void of regression or contestation (Wedel et al., 2005, p. 37-39; see also Shore, 2012). The typical model in policy studies is that rationally-grounded policies are embedded in the linear “policy cycle”—consisting of identifying and analyzing the problem, selecting a rational response, implementing the chosen action, and evaluating the effect of the action (Shore & Wright, 2011, p. 4-5). The counterarguments are that policies are not necessarily rationally grounded despite their seemingly neutral and objective language; and policy-making and implementing are more of messy and contested processes with a view to the dispersed actors, their aim to exert influence, and the resistance they give rise to. Shore and Wright (1997) argue for a more constructive perspective towards policy and policy process. As the product of social processes and power relations, policies “encapsulate the entire
