Matthew Carr, Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a Gated Continent, Hurst & Company, London, 2012, 295 pages, £20.00 hardback, ISBN 978-1-59558-685-8.

“European governments have reinforced their borders … in the most sustained and extensive border enforcement programme in history.  This massive deployment of technology and personnel is not a response to a military threat … their overriding objective is the prevention of illegal immigration, primarily from the global South” (page 7).

With this observation acting as his premise, author and journalist Matthew Carr sets out to recount a personal adventure, describing his encounters with migrants and embellishing each chapter with scenic details of Europe’s different borderscapes. Fortress Europe is not an academic undertaking but a timely product of investigative journalism, rich in empirical material. Carr’s methodology would qualify as auto-ethnographic with a twist, much resembling what psychogeographers have called “footage for footage” (Macfarlane, 2005), walking as a means of data collection. As it were, Fortress Europe reads like the journal of a traveler with a gruesome preference for landscapes of violence and human horror stories. Its most penetrative effect is that it shuffles our views of the EU’s border politics and re-focuses our gaze on the individuals who have become victims of border policies.

There are twelve chapters that belong to either of two parts, "Hard Borders" and "Border Crossings." These themes are presented as complementary and exhaustive of the book’s scope. All together, they contribute to create a subfield through and for the analysis of the notorious spaces and acts that make for the EU’s deadliest border sites. It is not quite clear however where and how the two parts differ and while it is obvious that leaving out the oppressive politics of "regular" border crossings is a judgement call, no explanation is offered as to what this decision was based on. Within this scope, the category of a lethal border is helpfully widened and a number of ways in which borders cost lives are flagged up. For example, the author speaks of the deaths caused by drug addiction in migrant reception centers, of the operations of criminal gangs around border zones, and makes observations such as that “between 1998 and 2008, 150 people killed themselves in Germany because they were to be deported” (page 5).

Even though this is a work that is territorially grounded, in the sense that it visits borders as barriers at the edge of sovereign entities, the analysis seems to echo the more recent, less conventional strands of border scholarship. In the introduction we find a passage that speaks of borders as those “legally ambiguous spaces where abuses of state power are removed from democratic scrutiny” (page 5). Such spaces Carr describes as home to undocumented migrants who are reduced “to the status of dangerous and dehumanized invaders massing outside the nation’s borders” (page 120), in other words Agambenian bare lives who are barely living. Focusing on the borders’ capacity to generate particular subjectivities and also on their character as "provisional and transitional" (page 25) re-opens questions of “what and where borders are and how they function in different settings” (Parker and Vaughan-Williams, 2012). However, this is not the only theoretical understanding that is employed. When writing on the border around the Spanish enclave of Melilla, and the cooperation between Spanish and Moroccan authorities, Carr remarks on the similarities with “colonial hierarchies of the past” (page 53). Moreover, "threat and survival" narratives make several appearances in the text, showing how particular discursive depictions of migrants as a “mortal threat to European civilization” (page 222) have played an important part in the development of anti-immigration policies, a silent nod to securitization theory and the role of "speech acts" (Buzan et al. 1998).

Matthew Carr is clever to avoid having any theoretical loyalties to honor, so that he can present in a lucid way a wider range of stories; stories that belong to contradicting narratives but are equally real in their effects. For instance, the chapter Difficult Journeys discusses the untold aspects of the "smuggling business," showing that the migrant is not always a naive victim of false promises whilst the traffickers can sometimes also have more than just "evil" motives since “altruism and profit making are not mutually exclusive activities” (page 172). In a nutshell, while a number of theoretical underpinnings casually come about in his writing, Carr refuses to stand by any conceptual commitment explicitly. However, the commendable amount of historical and contextual detail that he provides reveals his epistemological assumptions; it is suggested that bordering practices are best understood when seen as rooted in local specificity rather than directed by global or EU-wide processes of de-bordering and re-bordering. From this position, Carr reminds readers that the phenomenon of irregular migration is not just about the irregular crossings but also about the irregularities of border guarding, the “random and arbitrary” procedures behind which no overarching logic can be detected (page 53).

Empirically sound, the text bears the impressive signs of wear and tear that thorough fieldwork imposes upon clean prose and it is making so its claims boldly, speaking of migrants as “casualties of the border”, victims in a "war" against illegal immigration. Unsurprisingly, Carr is far from covert in assuming a normative position. He underlines that the violent interactions that are fleshed out in border zones can be indicative of the "brand" of Europe that is “presently under construction” (page 7). Admittedly, one can easily follow the text to this conclusion, but does so in an intuitive way and not as a result of structured argumentation. The book is not about developing a nuanced conceptualization of what borders are becoming in the context of Europe’s "gated community" and neither should a reader expect one. What this book provides is an unsettling reality check and a troubling sense of relief the next time readers find themselves crossing a border post, relatively un-hassled. 

References

Buzan B, Wæver O and J de Wilde (1998) Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Macfarlane R (2005) A Road of One's Own: Past and Present Artists of the Randomly Motivated Walk. Times Literary Supplement, 7 October.

Parker N and Vaughan-Williams N (2012) Critical Border Studies: Broadening and Deepening the ‘Lines in the Sand’ Agenda. Geopolitics 17(4): 727-33.