The eu’s miGrATion relATions wiTh menA counTries 143
This is not to say that these states have disappeared or become redundant.
It is to say that the context within which they operate has changed.
When we apply this more specif ically to migration relations with MENA
states, what we f ind is that there are signif icant processes of what Purcell
and Nevins (2005) have called ‘boundary build-up’ at the EU’s territorial,
organisational and conceptual borders. Nevins analysed the US-Mexico
border, but his f indings have resonance for Europe and the EU, too. It
has been argued that ‘boundary build-up’ imparts a spatial dimension to
debates about borders and to the relationship between various types of f low
across those borders because concerns about the ‘thinning-out’ of place as
a result of global f lows have led to
[c]omplex interchanges between state actors and groups of citizens [and]
produced a set of deep concerns about the ethno-cultural, socioeco-
nomic, and bio-physical security of the nation, all of which are inher-
ently geographical given their inextricable relationship to a particular
territory. Boundary build-up is thus a territorial strategy to achieve that
security and assuage those concerns (Purcell & Nevins 2005: 213).When we move on to look in more detail at EU migration relations with
MENA states then what we f ind is that ‘boundary build-up’ can be equated
to migration as a politics of danger to be guarded against. For example, the
immediate reaction to the Arab uprisings was for countries such as Italy to
express concern about increased levels of immigration and for these to be
represented in overblown terms as potential ‘f loods’ of migrants.
A rationale for these processes of boundary build-up in Europe can be
found in a body of work on the ‘securitisation’ of migration within which
security is understood as
a practice, a specif ic way of framing an issue. Security discourse is
characterised by dramatizing an issue as having absolute priority [...].
‘Security’ is thus a self-referential practice, not a question of measuring
the seriousness of various threats and deciding when they ‘really’ are
dangerous to some object. [...]. It is self-referential because it is in this
practice that the issue becomes a security issue. What we can study is the
practice that makes this issue into a security issue (Wæver 1996: 106-107).The strong security rationale that underpins EU immigration and asylum
policy arose in part from established patterns of internal security coopera-
tion, such as the Trevi Group of EC interior ministers and off icials, set up