Borders of Eurafrica

Since the ratification of Amsterdam Treaty in 1999, immigration is defined as a major threat to the security of the European Union that requires a common border policy developed by the member states as well as a joint immigration policy between the EU and the immigrant sending countries. Presented by Nicolas Sarkozy as the new Eurafrica and win-win globalization, a joint immigration policy between Europe and Africa was consolidated in the Global Approach to Migration (2005) and the ensuing Euro-African Conferences on Migration and Development. There is a growing literature that studies the implications of European border security and migration management policies with regards to the constitution of the ‘irregular immigrant’ subjectivity at the emerging sites including detention centers and refugee camps. Drawing largely on Foucauldian analysis of power and biopolitics, these works treat the immigrant populations as European immigration politics’ main object of government. Challenging this reading of Foucault by excavating an understanding of global governmentality in his oeuvre, I first suggest that the object of European global governmentality is primarily a Eurocentric world order. After this theoretical discussion I ask how the problematization of immigration and the mechanisms deployed to ‘solve’ it enables Europe to organize itself and its external relations to reproduce the long-established hierarchical colonial relations between Europe and Africa. I suggest that the discourses and mechanisms in which immigration is problematized and managed serves Europe to enact a neoliberal global governmental rationality with serious implications for the member states as well as the former colonies.