On the Franco-British border: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose?
On 27 November 2021, twenty-seven lives were abandoned to the English Channel by the French and British states, as fifteen calls in distress went unanswered. A year later, Le Monde exposed the exchanges between those on board the small boat and the regional maritime rescue and surveillance centre in the Pas-de-Calais, exchanges which the French state initially denied had taken place. ‘Tu seras pas sauvé… je t’ai pas demandé de partir’, rang the voice of one operator to the call of distress at sea: ‘You will not be saved… I did not ask you to leave [France]’.
This loss of life at sea, while the worst incident in thirty years in the Channel, in fact fits within a historical continuity of the last twenty years of violent and reactive Franco-British border politics. In this history, the agency of those who have decided to make this perilous journey is deeply constrained: what does choice look like when there is simply ‘no other option’? These considerations encourage us to think beyond liberal accounts of agentic action and to ‘read mobility against the grain’ within cramped spaces. Yet there is also another history to be told here through solidarity and remembrance. The one year anniversary of this concerted abandonment of life was marked by public mobilisations and vigils from Westminster to Paris. Standing-side-by-side and drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of ‘being with’, histories of solidarity come to the fore that centre mutual engagement and work to disrupt traditional aid binaries.
As Yasmin Ibrahim and Anita Howarth have argued, the bottleneck situation and configuration of Calais as a gateway to Britain is not new. It can be traced to the seventeenth century and the expulsion from France of the Huguenots, who sought sanctuary from religious persecution in Britain. What has changed are the methods of crossing the Dover Strait. Since the opening of the Channel Tunnel in 1994, the primary route at the end of the twentieth century and early 2000s was by lorry and heavy goods vehicle. This involved hiding above or underneath the vehicle in confined spaces, or within refrigerated spaces in the hope of avoiding detection at increasingly policed and securitised checkpoints along the northern French coast. Others sought to cross the Tunnel by foot, leading to several deaths by electrocution. What is more recent is the shift towards small inflatable boats used to reach British shores, as well as a shift in the points of departure along the French coastline. Nodal points around Dunkerque, Grande-Synthe and Boulogne have eased pressures on Calais, but they are also a response to the fortification of the port of Calais with barbed wire, 2.8m high fences and heavy police presence. The arrival to, and indeed expulsion from, the UK is not novel: Jews fleeing persecution arrived by boat in 1938, and much like today were met with expulsion and prosecution. But the frequency of boat crossings today does reflect a shift in the method of reaching British waters in the absence of legal routes.
Where we can locate greater points of continuity, however, are in reactive governmental responses in which political spin works to give the illusion of a state in control. This was nowhere more evident than in the recent UK-French accord that the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, presented as a historic deal that would stem the journeys of people on the move and dismantle supposedly evil smuggling networks that coerce innocent people into crossing. The presentation of refugees through the lens of victimhood is rooted within the very conception of humanitarianism as a historically religious project (Catholic origins in the French context), that infused logics of care with imperatives of discipline. This humanitarian façade reflects what Didier Fassin calls compassionate repression: in Sangatte in 2003 this was reflected by the reception centre flanked by the flag of the Red Cross on one side and encircled by CRS (French riot police) vehicles on the other. The focus on smuggling and criminality permits the French and British state to realise a two-fold objective: first, to appeal to anti-immigrant sentiments by pandering to the notion of taking control of nation-state borders and criminalising those who seek to breach them; and second, perpetuating the myth of rescue that posits France as a benevolent land of enlightenment and the UK as upholding a self-proclaimed tradition of welcome.
These pantomime politics recycle the same discourses from the signing of the Le Touquet agreement between Blair and Chirac in 2003 that established juxtaposed controls and brought the UK border to the point of departure of refugees. Far from a historic new deal, the latest accord reiterates much the same promises of the last three bilateral agreements over the past four years. As blame traverses the Channel in a game of ping-pong between the French and British governments, this deal is merely old wine in new bottles. Rather than a state in control, both governments are in reactive mode, cemented to the notion of surveillance and policing budgets that aim to turn the Northern French coastline into an inhospitable land. In doing so, they fail to realise that in making the beaches and camps unliveable, they drive people to the water, into confined spaces, which paradoxically becomes a space of limited sanctuary. Here, the law of the sea is premised on rescue and a duty to assist, until the cliffs of Dover come into view and deportation and confinement re-enter the frame.
In this context it is difficult to speak of agency, particularly when the notion of the agentic refugee is rendered criminal. For example, individuals who steer the boats, who often have little choice, have been prosecuted in UK courts. One must therefore never be too active, too politicised or show too much intent in one’s actions as a refugee. Here narratives of victimhood and innocence work to further fuel the salvation narratives to attest to the Franco-British states’ self-celebratory record on upholding the right to asylum.
Agency is constrained in another sense: ‘we have no choice’; ‘what alternative is there?’ are common refrains from those living in the borderland of Northern France. As one Afghan man explained to me, with freezing temperatures and living under thin plastic sheets, death is a slow certainty, and while the sea is no more tempting, it offers a glimmer of hope that the prefecture is purposefully extinguishing in the camps of Grande-Synthe. What does choice look like in this context? One way to unpick this is to revise liberal accounts of agentic action to consider that in confined and cramped spaces, survival and presence are forms of self-assertion in their own right. William Walters and Barbara Luthi call for a reading of mobility ‘against the grain’ that is attentive to creative means of overcoming (deliberate) obstacles in order to ‘reverse, reroute or change cramped conditions’.
There exists another history that is less concerned with optics and media posturing, and is instead grounded in a desire to connect in which refugees and grassroots organisations stand side-by-side. Vigils held on 24 November 2022 illustrate this explicitly: a form of mutual engagement where dialogue is multi-directional, and an ethic of mutuality and reciprocity is foregrounded. They also show how vigils as a form of remembrance and commemoration are a powerful assertion that refugee lives are ‘grievable’, to insist upon the agency of and solidarity with those who lost their lives. In this light, the seemingly simple premise of ‘being with’ one another is a useful lens that highlights how the traditional donor-recipient binaries of humanitarianism are being actively reworked. Moreover, such practices build on a constellation of histories of non-state actors across France that have reimagined humanitarianism from a unilateral relationship towards less rigid and vertical forms of mutual care. For example, in Bordeaux during the 1970s with the arrival of Vietnamese refugees in France, Vietnamese teachers met weekly with locals to teach Vietnamese classes. In this setting, French residents ‘were welcomed as friends’. The language of donors and recipients was upended for one of amity. The possibility of circumventing the hierarchies of humanitarianism merits further attention.
Ultimately, the notion that plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose feels particularly pertinent to the UK-France deal on Channel crossings. In the absence of legal routes to the UK, lives continue to be abandoned on both sides of the Channel. While political posturing and the concerted distraction of ‘tackling smuggling networks’ pervades, people will continue to occupy confined spaces in which constrained agency takes the form of survival and resolve. What histories of mutual assistance reveal too, is quite simply, that it does not have to be this way.
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Against the violent erasure of Franco-British border policies, those who lost their lives in the Channel were not anonymous bodies. In the words of their families and organisations: ‘we do not forgive, and we do not forget.’
Bryar Hamad Abdulrahman, age 23 - Mhabad Ahmad Ali, age 32 - Mohamed Hassan Elsaey Mohamed Ali - Sirwan Alipour, age 23 - Maryam Nuri Mohamed Amin, age 24 - Mohammed Qadir Aulla, age 21 - Bilind Shukir Baker, age 20 - Ahmad Didar, age 27 - Pshtiwan Rasul Farka, age 18 - Meron Hailu Gebrehiwot, age 22 - Shikh Halima, age 23 - Muslim Ismael Hamad, age 19 - Rezhwan Yasin Hassan, age 19 - Tahna Husain, age 24 - Hasti Rzgar Hussein, age 7 - Mubin Rzgar Hussein, age 16 - Hadiya Rzgar Hussein, age 22 - Kazhal Ahmed Khidir, age 46 - Shawali Kochy, age 26 - Zanyar Mina, age 20 - Deniz Afrasia Ahmed Mohammed, age 27 - Mohammed Hussein Mohammed, age 19 - Twana Mamand Mohammed, age 18 - Hassan Muhammed, age 37 - Harem Serkaut Perot Muhammad, age 28 - Gomaa Gaber Mohamed Ahmed Nada - Mayar Muhammad Naeem, age 46 - Shakar Ali Pirot, age 30 - Fikiru Shiferaw, age 46 - Niyat Ferede Yeshiwendm, age 22 - An anonymous man.
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With thanks and in solidarity to all those who shared their time, personal histories, and the sentiment of ‘you help us, we help you’, and to the organisation Utopia 56 which has become something of a family. Written from Dunkirk, France.
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The header image shows a nautical map of the Straits of Dover, including marine traffic (on the evening of Thu 12 Jan 2023). Source: https://map.openseamap.org/ – this data can be used freely under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
