Migrants clash with riot police, close to Horgos, 2015. Demotix/Art Widak. All rights reserved.On 16 September, Hungarian law enforcement officials deployed tear gas against refugees (men, women but also children) who were trying to enter the country, close to the Serbian border village of Horgos. A police statement justified the decision to attack refugees, to “[protect] the border of Hungary and the EU while respecting the law and the principle of proportionality.”
This is a telling statement. It exemplifies an increasingly observable tendency among Hungarian law enforcement officers who have come to identify themselves as the disciplinary guardians acting on behalf of the European Union. Hungarian police (and possibly soon also the army) are installed and equipped to protect the territory not of a nation state, but of an institution which has come to characterise itself not by an actual geography or a set of ideals, but by its violent and pervasive bordering apparatus.
Border ignorance
Migrants clash with riot police, close to Horgos, 2015. Demotix/Art Widak. All rights reserved.Where the European Union is, is an entirely different question from asking where Europe is. The former is an institution which constantly includes and excludes. Some states are Schengen members, while others are not; some have the Euro as a currency, others do not, and so on. Europe is a historically fluid geographic entity. As Balibar notes in an earlier contribution to openDemocracy, “Europe cannot be defined on the basis of a territory, except in a reductionist and contradictory way”, and yet this is exactly what is happening with the EU’s violent border practices targeted against refugees.
