Abstract
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Ever since the post-Cold War era, the meaning of the word security has changed. Before, the narratives on security revolved around the security of the state, and the military capability to defend its borders. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the narratives on security have started to be increasingly focused on the people, both individuals and global entities. The more traditional, realist view of security has been explored further by the Copenhagen School, according to which non-issues become security issues when they are labelled as such, for they pose an existential threat to an actor. The concept of securitization, interconnected with the one of security, is defined by Wæver as an “act of speech”, that is, a discursive process. Securitization is the process of declaring something as a “security threat” by describing it as an issue of utmost importance and priority. Since 2015, the inflow of third-country nationals in the EU has been securitised and labelled as “migration crisis” owing to the huge number of people – 1.3 million asylum applications were received in 2015 – that crossed the EU border. However, the EU lacks a common, shared definition of migrant: in the Italian Testo Unico, the word migrant is rarely present, substituted by the words foreign/alien; in Germany, Migranten has only a socio-scientific connotation, and the words Zuwanderung (referring to unwanted, uncontrolled entries) and Einwanderung (referring to permanent establishment and social integration) are used instead; the Hungarian legal system uses the term illegal migrants, but never refers to legal migrants; in Sweden, migrants are referred as aliens in the Aliens Act of 2005. Moreover, as a result of the securitization process, eleven out of twenty-eight EU member states (Spain, Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria, Austria, Slovenia, Slovakia, the UK, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania) and Norway issued policies in order to build border walls to prevent third-country nationals to cross them. Borders have always symbolised the security physical boundary that could not be crossed. While Spain started to build its walls already in the 90s, and Greece completed its walls in 2012, it was 2015 that saw a dramatic increase in the construction of border walls: the number increased from 5 to 12. In 2016, the EU officialised one of its key policy measures concerning migration, the EU-Turkey Statement, according to which all new irregular migrants, including asylum-seekers, crossing from Turkey to the Greek islands must be returned to Turkey; for every Syrian being returned to Turkey from the Greek islands, another Syrian must be resettled to the EU. Not only the EU-Turkey Statement fails to guarantee the safety of the third-country nationals, but it shifts the problem outside the borders of the EU by blocking the migrants inside Turkey. As a consequence of these policies, the concept of security has gradually shifted from guaranteeing the security of the people seeking international protection to the one of guaranteeing the security of the citizens of the EU member states which have been gradually bordering themselves to keep the migrants out. The lack of a unified and coherent EU policy-making has led not only to the securitization of the migration flows at the EU level, which resulted in the EU-Turkey Statement, but also at the EU member states level, as their actions of building walls and increasing military security along the borders recall the idea of security of the post-Cold War era. So, whose security is the EU talking about?
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