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Chapter 1

European Moral Geographies

On January 21, 2011, well into the fallout from the Greek debt crisis, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issued a judgment on MSS v. Belgium and Greece, a case brought by an Afghan asylum seeker, Mohamed Samir Samimi, against these two EU member states. According to the list of “facts” recorded in the court’s decision, “MSS” was apprehended by Greek police after his initial crossing via sea to Lesbos, just a few kilometers of sea from the Turkish coast. There, his fingerprints were taken, and after a week he was released and issued an order to leave the country.¹ He “transitioned” through France to Belgium, where he applied for asylum; he never applied for asylum in Greece. Under the auspices of the 2003 Dublin II Regulation, however, asylum seekers are obliged to apply for protection in the country where they first enter European territory, and if apprehended elsewhere in the EU, they are subject to removal to the country of entry. Thus, when Belgian authorities discovered MSS’s fingerprints registered in the Eurodac system, a trans-European database of biometric material, he was deported back to Greece, despite a number of attempts to contest his removal. Through a series of text messages to his lawyer in Belgium, he then documented in detail the squalid reception conditions he faced, the impossibility of finding housing and social support, his difficulty obtaining access to the asylum procedure, and his near expulsion back across the Turkish border by Greek authorities.²

The decision itself attests to the deeply creolized legal terrain that characterizes the case of just one asylum seeker. After this brief account of MSS movements in EU territory, the decision goes on to cite in detail “relevant” European and international law,³ then turns to “Relevant Law and Practice” in both Greece and Belgium. The section on Greece cites not just formal law but also references reports issued by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and various NGOs, which present the on-the-ground situation facing asylum seekers. The court ultimately indicts Greece for violating MSS’s rights on two counts: for failing to guarantee access to the asylum procedure (in violation of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms guaranteeing the right to life), and for exposing MSS to cruel and degrading treatment (in violation of Article 3). Belgium, meanwhile, is indicted for not providing the claimant with a way to contest the potential threat to his life and freedom in Greece (in violation of Article 13, which guarantees an “effective remedy before a national authority” to challenge rights violations). In its structure and content, the decision emphasizes the international and supranational legislative contexts of MSS’s case, yet in the end invokes member state obligations for upholding European rights-based legislation. Through its failure adequately to provide dignity and protection to MSS, Greece emerges as a kind of proxy for the challenges and failures entailed in safeguarding the rights of asylum seekers in the European Union.

I begin here with this ECHR decision, because it is emblematic of EU governance practices through which a particular EU member state, its government, and its citizens are held responsible for failures on a European scale. The EU relies on techniques of governance that keep unruly members states in line through legal, political, and—especially—moral forms of marginalization. The crisis of asylum in Greece—much like the current financial crisis—is not just a national predicament affecting a state on Europe’s geopolitical and economic peripheries; it is also seen to undermine the EU’s moral integrity as an area of “freedom, security, and justice.” Such narratives of crisis in turn grant moral legitimacy to Greece’s continued political, legal, and financial marginalization within Europe. The power of the ECHR decision lies perhaps even less in its material effects than in its articulation of a particular configuration of value on a European scale. Not only does the decision reassert the European commitment to safeguarding rights, but it also highlights how Greece deviates from and actively undermines these values.

In this chapter, I show that the very real shortcomings of the Greek asylum procedure must be understood within the broader context of European governance mechanisms, including legislative, policy, and advocacy trends; regional histories of displacement; and often more global forms of violence and inequality that have positioned Greece on the margins of Europe. I undertake my analysis through a kind of mapping, which underscores the relationship between EU moral logics of governance and a European spatial politics of marginality. When it comes to managing migration and asylum, Greece’s moral and political marginality in Europe is inextricable from its position on Europe’s land and sea borders. Concrete geographical and topographical factors play a crucial role in determining which member states become sites of crossing (Mitchell 1997), but these are reinforced and further complicated through EU legislation. Take, for instance, MSS’s story, rendered in chronological brevity in the court’s decision, which speaks to multiple scales of law, complex routes of migration, and various geopolitical and topographical boundaries, which intersect, collide, and are transgressed on Europe’s borders. Likewise, the overlapping enforcement measures that characterize the border regime in Greece, and the various sites where they are enacted, invoke EU, regional, and national territorialities. Policies and practices aimed toward safeguarding the EU as an area of “freedom, security, and justice” interact with internal Greek policing and legislative practices and migrants’ own routes of movement. The krisi of asylum in Greece reflects the entwinement of legal and moral geographies.

The MSS judgment implies that the Greek state’s poor adherence to EU law at the level of individual asylum seekers undermines the EU as a territorial, legal, and moral entity. Recent ethnographic scholarship has shown how the formalities of legal processes reflect and reinstantiate notions of ethics and morality that operate simultaneously across multiple scales (Fassin and Rechtman 2010; Kelly 2011): individual, national, regional, transnational, global, and in this case, supranational. Such moral configurations are particularly powerful in the context of international human rights law, which, as Sassen (1996) has shown, can function to undermine, or even threaten, national sovereignties. Yet even in the EU, the success of international rights regimes depends on nation-states. In the domestic enactment of rights law, states find ways of simultaneously complying with and resisting such infringements on sovereignty, also through the regulation of moral and ethical life. For instance, Fassin and Rechtman’s (2010) work on asylum in France shows how the moral dispositions that greet asylum seekers at the tribunal, suspicion in particular, reinvigorate the French state’s restrictive approach toward offering protection as part of a broader, exclusionary, policy on immigration. Through the reinscription of rights in European Community law, the judgments that uphold them, and European instruments for safeguarding these values (in particular, the court), the moral power of rights becomes even more tightly wedded to supranational governing mechanisms which simultaneously reassert and challenge member state sovereignties.

Such forms of moral governance, and the tensions of sovereignty that they reflect, have long been endemic to the European management of immigration and asylum across more formal venues of law, zones of civil society advocacy, media accounts, and the multiple sites where such phenomena overlap. Arendt (1976 [1951]) shows how the post-World War I refugee crisis in Europe exposed a fundamental tension between international protection and the sovereignties of nation-states. In the supranational context, these dilemmas do not vanish but proliferate, particularly through the coupling of asylum processes to broader projects of EU migration management (Menz 2009). The EU is both a territorial polity with borders that must be regulated and a supranational zone formally devoted to freedom of movement, human rights, and humanitarian values. At the EU level, as the international obligation to offer protection has become entwined with the regulation and defense of European territory, a number of powerful tensions have emerged. These tensions are perhaps best exemplified in the twin, yet contradictory, EU policy goals of ensuring that Europe’s borders are both “secure” and “humanitarian.” Greece, as we have observed, is said to fail on both of these counts.

Given this set of tensions, EU asylum-related legislation is often deeply contradictory. The MSS decision betrays a juridical sleight of hand that invokes European sovereignty (and the EU’s capacity to indict, monitor, and discipline individual member states) while simultaneously reasserting member state responsibilities. Through Dublin II, Mediterranean member states must—owing to accidents of geopolitics—shoulder a greater responsibility for maintaining EU borders in the name of collectively sharing the “burden” of protection. Such contradictions have their uses, however: EU governance can draw selectively on EU and member state sovereignties and responsibilities to engage the tensions embedded in the collective management of migration and asylum. Yet such techniques of governance further inscribe the morally marginal, even dangerous, qualities associated with member states like Greece.

Marginalities

Unlike a number of more longstanding migration destinations in Europe, Greece does not have recent colonial ties with the home countries of those now seeking protection within its borders. France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and even Italy, with its brief foray into colonial projects in East Africa, all negotiate complex colonial histories and their legacies through immigration (Gilroy 2004; Hall 1990; Ticktin 2011), as well as ongoing forms of intercultural and linguistic exchange (Chakrabarty 2000; Cooper and Stoler 1997). Greece, in contrast, underwent its own, deeply fraught experience of Ottoman imperialism (Kostopoulou 2009), the after-math of which continues to shape Greece’s relationship with Islam (Antoniou 2005, 2010; Triandafyllidou and Gropas 2009), its immediate neighbors, and the “East.” Moreover, powerful symbolic and political tensions have long characterized Greece’s relationship with the European west and north. During the Greek bid for independence from the Ottoman Empire in the early 1800s, Greece was transformed into a kind of “Ur-Europa” (Herzfeld 1982), largely thanks to northern European intellectuals who revivified and mythologized its ancient history. Yet having been an Ottoman territory for centuries, Greece was also subject to Orientalizing tendencies. Thus, even as ancient Greece was framed as the font of European civilization, Modern Greece has often been characterized—even by Greeks themselves—as backward, bastardized, and corrupted by the influences of the East. Such tensions have combined to grant the Greek nation state a particularly marginal relationship with the European core, which in turn has been repeatedly invoked to legitimate the ongoing involvement of outside interests in Greece.

Herzfeld (2002a: 901) coins the term “crypto-colonialism” to describe “the curious alchemy whereby certain countries, buffer zones between the colonized lands and those yet untamed, were compelled to acquire their political independence at the expense of massive economic dependence.” This former territory of the Ottoman Empire has been subject to enormous outside economic and political involvement: first by the “philhellenes” of Britain, France, and Germany; later, by the warring powers of World War II; and finally, in the Cold War period, by the United States in its support of the Junta. With the twinning of geographical and political marginality embedded in crypto-colonialism, similar patterns are evident in Greece’s contemporary relationship with the European north, despite the EU’s formal commitment to transcending national and regional interests. Greece is now subject to intervention by EU governing bodies, individual EU member states, speculating investors, the IMF, and the World Bank. As the constantly unfolding news on the Greek financial crisis makes compellingly clear, “building Europe” (Shore 2000) has produced new systems of inclusion and exclusion and vast asymmetries of power between the European north and south. Through these ongoing crypto-colonial relationships, the contemporary Greek nation state acquires its status as a kind of political and moral “pariah” (19), an allegedly corrupt, undisciplined, and renegade member of the European Community that is transgressive and potentially dangerous.

In the debates surrounding the Greek asylum process, law and judgment work to invoke and reassert similar forms of marginalization. Just as the symbolic and political marginalization of Greece has been deeply grounded in its peripheral geographical position, the marginalizing effects of EU migration and asylum law are inextricable from Greece’s location on Europe’s borders. Étienne Balibar (2004: 5) suggests that patterns of inclusion/exclusion that have emerged as the EU was fashioned into being are most conspicuous at the borders. Likewise, the moral logics of European legislation and policy are embedded in a political geography concentrated primarily around the negotiation and management of external borders. Wallace (2000: 375) describes how the European continent has long been fraught with the tensions of managing “neighborness” through the regulation of borders, including both intra-European territorial zones and a variety of “near-abroads” by land and sea. With the shift in sovereignty from internal to external borders accompanying Europeanization, Greece—like other member states on Europe’s Mediterranean coast—has become a crucial site where the boundaries of Europe are persistently transgressed and redrawn. Yet through the intensified management of European territorial borders, the marginality of these border states is asserted even more powerfully.

Doorsteps

It was only 8 a.m., but it was already hot. I had recently stepped off the plane from Athens for the June 21, 2008, World Refugee Day celebration in Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos. I was sitting at a portside café across from Stefan, a refugee advocate, drinking a much-needed coffee. Stefan is the primary brains, imagination, and labor behind one of the more influential asylum advocacy NGOs in northern Europe. In collaboration with Greek lawyers, he had recently published a report on sea deaths in the Greek Aegean, one of the more powerful critiques of Greek asylum and border management, which just a few years later was to be cited in the MSS decision. He was also in the process of establishing a border project in Mytilene, in collaboration with local service providers, to improve reception conditions for the many who arrive there—most often in small, leaky rubber boats.

A tall, broad-shouldered man with piercing eyes, Stefan chain-smoked as he answered my question about why he had chosen to begin an advocacy project in Greece. After citing his love of the Aegean and dramatically closing his eyes and gesturing at his surroundings, he said: “I knew. It was not an exact calculation, it was not a master plan, but it was clear that if someone wanted to do a successful project, it would be Greece.” He went on, explaining that unlike Italy and Spain, which had more recently been in the spotlight, “everyone knew that Greece was a mess, but no one was talking about it.”

Greece, of course, is no longer a place no one talks about. Until relatively recently, Italy and Spain had indeed dominated the limelight as border areas of pan-European concern, as Lampedusa and the Canary Islands generated powerful and contradictory images of sun, sea, destitute bodies, and sunbathers giving water to washed-up migrants. Italy, Spain, and also Malta (DeBono 2011), remain sites of concern, not just owing to the displacements of people affected through the 2011 “Arab Spring” and its aftermath; in October 2013, over 300 people were estimated dead when a boat sank off the coast of Lampedusa. Greece, however, has emerged as an increasingly problematic border country at the center of controversies over the security, humanitarianism, and solvency of Europe (see Green 2010). Since my meeting with Stefan at the edge of the Aegean, the EU has produced increasingly powerful apparatuses of migration management (Feldman 2011), both in the sea and in Evros, in response to the continued spike in crossings on the Greek borders. In 2010, following a request from the Greek government, Frontex, the EU’s border management agency, deployed its first “RABITS” (Rapid Deployment Border Intervention Teams) to assist in deterring undocumented crossings along the Greek borders. On the face of it, Frontex signifies a powerful assertion of EU involvement in policing Greek borders, yet in practice it also bespeaks a more messy set of allegiances and sovereignties. Rather than staffing its own forces, so to speak, Frontex hires, retrains, and redeploys border guards from EU member countries; this also applies to the equipment and forms of transport employed in Frontex operations, which often bear the emblems of other European states.⁴ The former Papandreou government also initiated a plan to build a fence along the Evros border with EU funding; on a visit to Turkey in January 2011 to discuss the border fence, minister of citizen protection Christos Papoutsis, explicitly referenced the U.S./Mexico border as a model.

Regional and national legislation also have an important role in shaping the Greek border context. A readmission agreement with Turkey (signed in 2001) has encouraged ad hoc expulsions, where migrants are often simply pushed back across the border without being returned to their home countries; this was the danger MSS faced on his return to Greece. The legality of this agreement is questionable, as the deportees include, almost always, “mixed flows” of migrants and asylum seekers (see Feldman 2012), and neither side does an effective job of identifying those wishing to apply for asylum.⁵ Greece is obliged under both international and EU law to hear the claims of applicants for protection. However, as reported by many asylum seekers and some local inhabitants in border regions, during the time I was in the field the Greek police allegedly undertook widespread deportations of “mixed” groups of migrants and asylum seekers to Turkey.⁶ For many deportees, however, such practices encourage new strategies of crossing: some enter Europe via new routes and others attempt successive crossings at the Greek borders. I met many during my fieldwork who underwent multiple entries and expulsions.

Borders are not just territorial, however; they are also manifested and negotiated in the domain of law, which produces its own spatial politics and geographies (see Coutin and Yngvesson 2006; Coutin 2007; Darian-Smith 1999, 2007; Rouse 1991; Volpp 2012; Zilberg 2011). Legalization processes are most often initiated in urban centers, primarily Athens and Thessaloniki, making entry into the legal territory of Greece often dependent on further internal movement and travel. Yet access to legalization processes—whether through the asylum procedure or through routes of economic migration—is itself circumscribed by aggressive forms of internal policing, which have only increased with the sociopolitical instabilities accompanying the Greek financial difficulties (Xenakis and Cheliotis 2012; Cheliotis 2013 in process). In Chapter 2, I highlight the police violence that, during the period of my research, impinged on access to asylum through an account of activities at “Allodhapon,” the Athens “Aliens Police,” at that time in charge of examining most first-instance asylum applications. The fact that the threshold of the asylum procedure was, quite literally, the doorstep of a tightly and often violently guarded police compound incited many would-be applicants to remain in spaces of legal limbo (Cabot 2012) or “nonexistence” (Coutin 2000), without the protection offered by papers. Increasingly powerful enforcement measures throughout the Athens city center target individuals through a clear reliance on racial profiling. In areas of the city known to have heavy foreign populations (Omonia Square and its environs, Attiki, and Exarcheia), it is common to find a gun-toting MAT (SWAT) officer stationed on street corners, while less visibly armed patrols accost persons of color and demand their papers. In the summer of 2009, for instance, I found a rather gregarious group of police playing cards outside an unlicensed Sudanese restaurant that asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, and smugglers alike were known to frequent. In response to this increasing militarization of the Athens city center, many asylum seekers and migrants look for work and refuge in the countryside (Lawrence 2007; Verinis 2011) and in the islands, even—interestingly—in border regions (Cabot and Lenz 2012), where policing is focused more on safeguarding the border from without than targeting threats from within. The asylum procedure is a particularly charged element of the Greek border scenario. The question of asylum inflects broader Greek and European anxieties over responses to immigration, humanitarianism, security, and Greece’s capacities to handle (or not) the movements across its borders.

Asylum in Greece

Despite its symbolic and legal significance, the MSS decision only emerged a number of years after the Greek asylum process began to raise red flags for European and international advocacy communities. It is difficult to account fully for the exclusionary and sluggish qualities of the Greek asylum system. With the bureaucratic inefficiencies that have plagued the Greek process (particularly evident in the overwhelming backlog of cases), rejections of asylum cases have also, perhaps inadvertently, provided ways of streamlining through “buck passing” via appeals and encouraging attrition among applicants. Though the appeals process was suspended between 2009 and 2010, during most of my research for this book the asylum process entailed two “instances” or vathmi (levels [βαθμοί]).⁷ Claimants lodged first-instance applications at a central police station (in most cases, in Athens, though also in Thessaloniki) and underwent asylum interviews there. Rejected cases could then be appealed to the second instance, involving a more detailed hearing in front of an advisory committee at the Ministry. Second-instance rejections could only be contested through an application to the Simvoulio tis Epikratias (Council of State [Συμβούλιο της Επικρατείας]), the highest court of administrative law in Greece, which ruled not on the substance of the asylum case but on the procedural integrity of the asylum hearing.⁸

The vast majority of cases were rejected at first instance, almost as a matter of routine. The appeals process, which would usually take months or even years, entailed a high level of attrition: some asylum seekers left Greece for elsewhere in the EU, while others may never have received notifications of their hearings; even then, there were often problems of language and literacy. The second-instance examination committees consisted of six individuals: a chairperson of the committee, who was from the Legal Council of the State (Nomiko Simvoulio tou Ktratous [Νομικό Συμβούλιο του Κράτους]); one representative from the Aliens Department (Dhiefthinsi Allodhapon [Διεύθηνση Αλλοδαπών]) of the Ministry of Public Order; two representatives from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; one from the UNHCR; and one from the Athens Bar Association. While a greater number of positive decisions were issued at second instance, overall rejection rates remained high. During my primary field research, when the asylum process corresponded to that outlined in Presidential Decree 61/1999, the opinions issued by the committee were advisory, not decisive. Each member would make a recommendation, but final plenary power was accorded to the minister; in a number of cases I read rejections that were issued despite positive recommendations by the majority of the appeals committee. However, ministerial decisions alone do not account for the high number of rejections. Committee recommendations were, by in large, stringent, reflecting also an entrenched culture of suspicion, doubt, and mistrust toward asylum seekers (Daniel and Knudson 1995; Fassin and Rechtman 2010). Following the various changes to the asylum law instantiated in 2008, 2009, and 2010, committee decisions became binding (see Presidential Decrees 90/2008, 81/2009, and 144/2010).

For refugee-related NGOs in Greece and elsewhere in the EU, the problems in the Greek asylum process have also made it a powerful advocacy tool. In language that invoked, almost uncannily, the logics of moral governance I have been outlining here, Stefan laughed: “We use and abuse Greece.” He explained that by targeting the problems evident in Greece, asylum advocates can encourage broader changes in Europe, with more widespread effects. In contrast to the MSS judgment, which bears the disciplined language appropriate to a formal court decision, many NGO and media reports have characterized Greece as backward and disorganized, with corrupt, arcane bureaucracies and violent police. As a result of pan-European advocacy efforts, culminating in the MSS judgment, EU member states have suspended the return of asylum seekers to Greece demanded by the Dublin II Regulation. Partly in response to this growing culture of critique led by Greek and European NGOs (as well as the, then pending, MSS decision), a presidential decree issued in 2010 (114/2010) established a variety of measures meant to make the Greek asylum procedure more efficient and transparent. In January 2011, the Greek government produced a new asylum law (law 3907/2011), which has initiated the process of radically revamping the asylum procedure. Though the law is currently still in the process of implementation, the changes taking place include the formation of a new, semi-independent authority for the processing of asylum claims (based in Athens) and regional offices for the acceptance of applications and the reception of claimants (currently operating in Alexandroupoli, Thessaloniki, and Oresteiada). The new asylum authority began processing applications as of June 2013.⁹

However well intended, successful, accurate, or inaccurate, the many critiques of Greece’s “crisis” of asylum—many of which, significantly, come from outside Greece—also reinscribe Greece’s position on the margins of Europe and the power asymmetries embedded in that relationship. The conservative Karamanlis government did not do much to shake this image, blaming a lack of infrastructure, organization, capital, and the intrinsic pressures of its geographical position for Greece’s difficulty in managing its borders. Later, in the midst of the financial crisis, Papandreou advocated for increased transparency and oversight in Greece’s asylum process, called for EU assistance in tightening its border enforcement regime, and promised a Greek political will to meet its responsibilities as an EU member state. Both diplomatic tactics, however, reified Greece’s marginality, framing it as an impediment to rectifying the problems of the asylum process.

In addition to their marginalizing effects, the recent characterizations of the Greek asylum procedure as an area of crisis run the risk of mistaking immigration and refugees as entirely new phenomena in Greece. Despite new patterns of displacement and migration, Greece has long been entangled in Balkan, Mediterranean, and more global mobilities. Greece is known primarily as a country of emigration, with large diasporic communities throughout the U.S. (Laliotou 2004), Europe, and Australia, as well as other perhaps less obvious locations such as Sudan, Egypt, Denmark (Christou 2009), and Ethiopia. Greece has also functioned for years as a migration destination, with mass arrivals from the former Soviet bloc and the Middle East and Africa in the late eighties and early nineties. Greece only began offering protection to refugees within its own territory in 1991, with the issuance of Presidential Decree 1975/1991,¹⁰ which formally established a foundational legal framework for multiple forms of migration to Greece, but it engaged in resettlement projects before that. In addition to large communities of Albanian migrants, there are also significant, and relatively established, communities of first-and second-generation migrants from countries such as Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Bulgaria, Eritrea (Petronati 2000), Romania, and the Philippines.

The current terrain of refugee protection in Greece is also overlaid upon Greece’s involvement in forced population movements in the early and mid-twentieth centuries. The Treaty of Lausanne and the 1923 “population exchange” following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, in which some two million ethnic Greeks and Turks were (in many cases, forcibly) relocated to their ancestral homelands as refugees, has been characterized as one of the first implementations of Modern European refugee law. In what is often denoted as the “Greek Catastrophe,” ethnic Greeks were displaced from Asia Minor, particularly from areas near the eastern Aegean and Black Sea coasts, including Constantinople and Smyrna—the khamenes patridhes [χάμενες πατρίδες]) (lost homelands) (see Hirschon 2003, 1989; Papailias 2004). This territory was once the center of the Greco-Byzantine Empire, but long after it came under Ottoman, then Turkish, rule, it remained central to the imagined, irredentist vision of the Modern Greek nation state. While Lausanne initiated the first and perhaps most violent of these refugee movements, it was followed by various waves of “return” migrations of Black Sea Greeks from the former Soviet bloc (Ascherson 1995; Tsimouris 2001, 2007; Voutira 2003) and, just as controversially, a series of expulsions and eventual repatriations following the Greek Civil War (see Danforth and van Boeschoten 2011). These diverse groups of refugees, across disparate experiences of displacement and return, often found themselves at the social and economic margins of the Greek national body, thus challenging dominant notions of Greek identity (Christou 2006; Hirschon 1989; Karakasidou 1997). The figure of the “refugee” (prosfighas [πρόσφυγας]) has thus come to hold powerful and fraught connotations that are eminently and specifically Greek (Cowan 2008; Voutira 2003). Yet those now seeking refuge in Greece are perhaps even more marginalized, juxtaposed against the increasingly longstanding and accepted presence of refugees who lay claim to Greek heritage.

Since 2010 there have, according to many of my long-term interlocutors, been significant increases in efficiency and recognition rates at all stages of the procedure, thanks largely to personnel and procedural shifts. The Presidential Decree of 2010 (114/2010) introduced more systematic trainings for police officers examining asylum cases, as well as the possibility for representatives from the UNHCR or collaborating NGOs to take an advisory role in first instance decisions. Experts in refugee law were appointed to second-instance committees meant to deal with the backlog of cases, which led to a notable increase in positive decisions. Until recently (June 2013), new applications still fell under the purview of the Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection and, thus, the police, though this is changing, as the asylum authority in Athens recently opened its doors. The outcomes of the new asylum process are still to be seen. A former ARS lawyer, who now assists decision makers at the new asylum authority, highlighted that she was deeply impressed by the quality of the employees and of the work that they were doing. However, another former ARS lawyer expressed concern that these decision makers’ lack of experience, and lack of familiarity with the problems embedded in the refugee status determination procedure, would translate to an overly stringent approach.

Despite skepticism about the new process among advocates, bureaucrats, and asylum seekers alike, I have also noticed a growing discourse among adjudicators and advocates regarding positive change, cooperation, and increased transparency. One UNHCR representative told me that the asylum process is “something in Greece that is actually improving,” though she lamented that with the financial crisis, this does not hold much significance among a wider public. In 2011, I spoke with police and UNHCR representatives alike who praised a more structured interview process at first instance, a greater sense of competency and efficiency among adjudicators, and more effective collaborations between the Ministry, the UNHCR, and civil society organizations. I also interviewed one of the workers who assisted in the training of police adjudicators, and he underscored that a core element of his approach had been to “treat all parties with respect.” He added that after the first day of training he had been thanked by a number of police officers, who explained that they had never received any formal education about asylum-related matters. Despite the evident disciplinary qualities and power asymmetries embedded in such rights-based trainings (Babül 2012), these reform measures seem to have provided substantive relief for those engaged in adjudication processes. The critiques and recent reforms surrounding the “crisis” of asylum are ultimately two-edged, vehicles for change as well as new forms of marginality.

Advocacy and the EU

As the oldest and largest asylum-related NGO in Greece, the Athens Refugee Service has participated in multiple phases of the establishment of the Greek asylum system and has witnessed the changing trends and demographics of asylum applications. This history can be traced through a cursory glance at old files in the storage room on the organization’s sixth floor. Files from the early 1990s attest to the many applicants from the then just-dissolved, former Soviet bloc: most were from Poland and Albania, interspersed with applicants from Iraq, Iran, Turkey (primarily Kurds), Somalia, Syria, and Palestine. During the period of my fieldwork, there were few applicants from Eastern Europe and the Balkans, but large numbers from the Middle East and Africa, and many more Iraqis and Afghans. There were also many from Southeast Asia, in particular Pakistan and Bangladesh, who in 2006 accounted for approximately 50 percent of asylum applications.

The ARS was born as a collaborator of the UNHCR. This formal affiliation has since waned, but its traces continue to structure many elements of the ARS. These include the importance of English in many of the official forms and documents, and the interview procedures through which client eligibility is determined, modeled explicitly on UNHCR refugee status determination procedures (discussed in detail in Chapters 3 and 4). Before the 1991 establishment of a nationalized process for accepting refugees, the UNHCR adjudicated asylum applications in Greece, resettling those it recognized as refugees. The ARS assisted applicants with their claims, providing legal support and advice. As the Greek state itself began to process applications, the ARS maintained its role of providing legal support for asylum seekers. Now there is a social service department at the ARS and an entire floor devoted to educational materials, particularly for children. Yet with its strong tradition of providing legal support and casework, the ARS legal service (nomiki ipiresia [νομική υπηρεσία]) fills an important gap in the panorama of legal assistance available to asylum seekers.

While the ARS is devoted primarily to providing support for individual clients, it also engages in what might be called policy advocacy. It is a member of trans-European networks of asylum advocacy NGOs, and among its stated goals, it strives to share experience and know-how for the configuration of better policy internationally. The ARS has also historically tried to maintain a relatively cooperative relationship not just with the UNHCR but with the agencies of the Greek state that come into contact with asylum seekers (the Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection, the Athens police, and police in border areas). ARS workers have explained to me that this more cordial relationship with state agencies is necessary for furthering the cases they take on, but it can also translate directly to an engagement in policy making and implementation. Recently, ARS workers gave their input in the formation of the new asylum system, and former staff members have taking on important positions as overseers and asylum adjudicators, working for both the UNHCR and agencies of the state. This close entwinement of the ARS with more governmental roles, particularly through the social networks of current and former workers, is aptly illustrated through the fieldwork that I conducted in 2011 in the asylum department of the Athens police. I acquired access largely through the assistance of former ARS workers, who were employed by the UNHCR to provide advisory opinions at first-instance adjudications. Yet while formally positioned as advisors, this meant that they were ostensibly working alongside the police. My friends and acquaintances in these positions, most from NGO backgrounds, spoke of the new insight this gave into both the asylum process and the psyches of their former “enemies,” so to speak (the police adjudicators). Yet as one of them explained, this “intimacy” can also be troubling, bespeaking a potential conflation of police, NGO, and international human rights interests through the socialities of everyday practice. This ambivalent relationship between NGO and state responsibilities appears throughout this book as a fundamental dilemma of work and life at the ARS.

In the past, I have heard Greek activists and members of migrant and refugee community groups in Athens describe the ARS as somewhat conservative, explicitly referencing the close relationship between the ARS and the state. Some advocates from other European NGOs described the ARS to me as not vocal, active, or activist enough. One advocate from northern Europe explained that he sometimes finds it hard to work with members of the ARS: “They have all of the cases, they know everything,” but, he lamented, “they don’t write about it.” However, as the asylum process has become an object of active reform, the ARS has also become increasingly visible and vocal, collaborating with other Greek and European organizations in exposing and critiquing practices that continue to be problematic, such as the detention of children and poor reception conditions. With the increased incidences of race-related violence that have accompanied the financial crisis, which I address in Chapters 6 and 7, the ARS has also become more active in anti-racism activities and actions.

Some ARS workers, however, have explained that they simply have too many cases to engage deeply in the more political work necessary for changing policy, which is such an important goal for many asylum related NGOs elsewhere in Europe. During an evening gathering at a 2008 NGO conference in Brussels, I asked Nikos, an ARS delegate, how he felt about the policy focus of many of the other NGOs and if he thought the ARS was engaged in “advocacy,” which had been a buzzword at the conference. He paused for a minute as he thought, then answered rhetorically: “What is ‘advocacy’? I don’t think we do ‘advocacy’ ” (Τι είναι advocacy [Δεν νομίζω ότι κάνουμε advocacy]).¹¹ As one of the more experienced lawyers, with fluent knowledge of English and French, Nikos often represented the ARS at such meetings, collaborating with other NGOs and the UNHCR to lobby government representatives in Greece and elsewhere in Europe. In his own commentary, however, he adamantly resisted the project of policy advocacy, despite his evident engagement in this area. Certainly, with the increasing involvement of the NGO sector in the current reform of the Greek asylum system, such attitudes may be changing. Yet Nikos’s response attests to the central, even entrenched, role of individual casework at the ARS over and against policy advocacy.

At this same Brussels conference, a Dutch advocate, trained as a lawyer, commented astutely on the distinction between casework and policy advocacy: “There are two kinds of workers [in asylum-related NGOs] and they operate in two different time zones. You have policy advocates—lobbyists, but we don’t use that word—who are always focused on the future, who are always trying to change policy. Then you have legal advisors, who are focused on the present, the way the law is now. And it is really hard for these to combine.” Such differences between ARS workers and many of their European counterparts reflect fundamentally differing institutional ethics, varying individual approaches toward law and labor, as well as the specific habitus (Bourdieu 1977) in which this labor unfolds—the anxieties, passions, pressures, and routines that shape workers’ everyday lives.

These disconnects can, however, also reproduce familiar patterns of marginalization. A European NGO conference was held in Greece (Delphi) in May 2007, marking the new centrality of Greece in pan-European asylum advocacy projects, I heard numerous delegates comment on the closed, disorganized nature of the ARS and how difficult they were to work with. “They are just different,” explained one delegate; another commented that in a role-play meant to illustrate the distinctions between state and NGO interests, ARS staff seemed to have confused the two. Such comments echo the moral critiques often lodged at Greece on a European scale, depicting the ARS as backward, even alien, in cahoots (though perhaps unknowingly) with the very corrupt state it “should” be trying to challenge.

Despite its own marginalizing tendencies, however, the MSS decision itself speaks to the surprisingly effective, hybridized advocacy projects that can sometimes emerge across such differences of approach and power and, in particular, the merging of casework with lobbying efforts. The story told in the MSS decision is uncannily reminiscent of the accounts of numerous asylum seekers with whom I spoke during my ethnographic research at the ARS, some of whom appear in this book. Such stories accumulated both in my notes and in the file cabinets of the ARS, as aid candidates chronicled their entries into the EU/Greece and their (at times successful, but often unsuccessful) attempts to travel to other European member states. Many also spoke of their expulsions back to Greece, a country where most claimed never to have intended to stay. ARS lawyers rarely challenged the EU and Greek legislative frameworks that made such stories possible. Rather, lawyers focused on the myriad procedural tangles in each client’s encounter with the Greek asylum system, whether this involved renewing a client’s identity card, lodging an asylum application, preparing for an asylum hearing, writing an appeal, getting someone out of detention, or reorienting “Dublin Returnees.”

MSS, however, was in touch with a savvy, highly motivated lawyer in Belgium, Zouhaier Chihaoui. Through contact initiated with the court even before MSS’s deportation to Greece, he and his lawyer were able to formulate an effective critique not just of Greece’s asylum procedure but also of EU legislation, in particular, the Dublin II Regulation. The decision also invokes various reports on asylum in Greece issued by EU governing bodies and NGOs (including both Stefan’s NGO and the ARS), as well as the opinions of experts that included former and current ARS workers. However obliquely, the decision served partially as a vehicle of collaboration, which drew, in a patchwork way, on a variety of NGO, governmental, and individual voices to legitimate the judgment. In this sense, the decision also enabled those caseworkers at the ARS to bring their specific, practice-oriented knowledge to a European public. The decision attests not just to the power of the human rights court to influence asylum policy at both supranational and member state levels (Joppke 1998), but also to the important role of NGO collaborations in managing asylum in the EU (Menz 2009:5). The capacity of NGOs (whether case based, lobbying focused, or both) to affect the implementation of law and policy is easy to discount, owing to what Menz has described as their unstable institutional characteristics and “feeble or non-existent links” with government ministries. However, through the very looseness of the networks that they comprise, NGOs often have a surprising—and powerful—flexibility. Moreover, as we see at the ARS, links to government bodies, while often informal, are not always so feeble. European asylum-related NGOs of all stripes take part in both ad hoc and more long-term collaborations with each other across member states and often engage directly in working with both national and supranational governance bodies. Such collaborations, however, are uneasy and uneven (Tsing 2005), and rarely undermine or contest power asymmetries. Rather, advocacy itself unfolds through and often reproduces the multiple forms of marginality constitutive of European governance and geopolitics.

Conclusions

EU and international discourses around the problem of asylum in Greece highlight Greece’s legal, bureaucratic, and moral failures in managing its borders in ways that fulfill EU prerogatives of security and humanitarianism. Yet such logics simultaneously elide and further perpetuate long-standing forms of marginality and asymmetry endemic to EU governance techniques. These moral geographies are instantiated across multiple scales of governance: national, regional, supranational, and international, and in various governmental venues, including legislative bodies and the courts. EU advocacy projects, themselves interlocking with more formal venues of governance, also reproduce these marginalizing tendencies, though often with surprisingly productive effects. The coupling of moral and geopolitical marginality in the management of EU borders is, in some ways, peculiar to the European context, but may also highlight the predicaments of border states more broadly (such as, for instance, in the case of Arizona). This is not to deny the many problems that have plagued the Greek asylum process; indeed, this book, in many respects, is a chronicle of these problems. I want to highlight at the outset of my analysis, however, that such failures are built into the framework of EU border management regimes: border states remain surrogates for systemic and structural problems, and meanwhile “crisis” persists on a European scale.