The year is 2015 and the European Union receives an increased number of individuals fleeing conflict zones. In their journeys, refugees and asylum seekers face unimaginable dangers to reach European shores and, hopefully, be granted asylum in one of the EU member-states. In the following year, the International Organization for Migration registers more than 5,000 migrant casualties in the Mediterranean. Those who escaped death and arrived in Europe face the challenges of unprepared asylum systems and become the center of a political debate regarding security and identity.

Against a failed common European asylum system, the EU seeks for alternatives to deal with the migration “problem”. Within a set of questionable solutions, the Union proposes a deal with Ankara whereby migrants crossing the border into Greece would be returned to Turkey and, for each Syrian refugee returned, the EU would resettle a Syrian refugee in one of its member-states.

Years later, on February 2020, President Erdogan opens Turkey’s land border with Greece, encouraging refugees and asylum seekers to cross into the EU. The following months are marked by violence against migrants at the Greek border, including several human rights violations, bringing the EU’s border regime under the spotlight once again.

What makes possible the need to protect borders against migration? What kind of danger do displaced individuals represent to European societies? What kind of threat do we need borders to protect us from? These are questions taking the starring role of the EU’s border policy since the establishment of the free movement zone that we call Schengen space.

Writing about the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe, Bauman suggested that the ‘strangers at our door’, bringing with them the unknown and the unpredictable, tend to cause anxiety in host societies. Described as an uneasy emotion, anxiety walks together with fear. In a psychological view, it serves as a warning sign arising in response to a threat or danger. Daniel and Jason Freeman make an interesting account on anxiety by relating it to the “mean reds” that Holly Golightly, the main character of Truman Capote’s novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s, understands as those moments where, suddenly, “you’re afraid and you don’t know what you’re afraid of”.

This comparison highlights an important aspect of anxiety: although associated with tangible dangers, anxiety can also be a product of imagined threats that are not grounded on external reality, meaning that individuals may experience anxiety even in the absence of a real danger.

The border policy designed by the EU since the implementation of the Schengen agreements into EU Law in the 1999 Treaty of Amsterdam had as a premise the notion that, by dissolving internal borders between countries, the strengthening of the EU external border was necessary to maintain security and peace within the Union. In this regard, despite the EU response to the 2015 refugee crisis be seen as a reaction to a specific event, the establishment of common organs for border management such as Frontex suggests that the EU border policy has followed a strong preventive logic, building solutions to potential threats even before the threat is materialized.

Terrorist attacks in the 2000’s such as the 9/11 and the bombings in London and Madrid transformed the whole of migration into a security issue. This was followed by the association of migrants, especially those from the Middle East and the north of Africa, with an imagery of unease in the West. This imagery induced the notion that the dangers of migration have a solid definition, which made subsequent developments for border policies be accepted with little or none questioning.

In security speeches, the threat may seem real enough through the political and mediatic fabrication of dangers.  One might think, even for a glimpse, that refugees increase terrorism, that migrants overload the capacities of the state and leave those who were originally ‘legitimate’ beneficiaries of its protection without it, or that migrants will change what citizens understand as their national identity.

The image of a state collapsing due to ‘floods’ of migration, often invoked by far right politicians, easily produces a sense of fear that is not limited to isolated events or individual experiences, but is rather a collective emotional response that spreads through social interactions, communication and shared perceptions. The problem is that a collective sense of fear can be a powerful catalyst for political responses that wouldn’t normally be possible.

In the Western neo-liberal universe, where societies face a constant feeling of uncertainty regarding the results that globalization might bring, politicians may try to transpose such feeling onto migrants in order to to attract supporters. The fear that one experiences regarding the uncertainties of tomorrow (an issue which politicians cannot resolve) thus acquires a face.

By playing with citizens’ emotions through discourses on security, politicians can direct fears and anxieties to specific subjects that originally did not pose a real threat to society.  When represented as a threat, however, the issue justifies extraordinary political responses that appear as solutions to societies’ unease. In the case of the 2015 migration crisis in the EU, the solution came in the form of stricter border controls and the criminalization of migrants.

In this regard, emotions have proven to be important elements in the construction and reinforcement of borders – we need borders because we fear external threats. However, we ought to question if such threat is real, perceived, or manipulated - constructed upon a set of beliefs that lack empirical explanations or even completely imagined.

Refugees in the 2015 crisis became the subjects of Europe’s imagined fears, resulting in a Fortress Europe that forgets its humanitarian discourse in order to protect its borders. However, years later when Russia invaded Ukraine and initiated a still ongoing conflict, the border games played by the EU were a lot different.

In 2022, Ukrainian refugees were framed as vulnerable subjects instead of a security problem, and their asylum in European member states was encouraged by the EU. Against that backdrop, the empathy and compassion towards Ukrainians had the power to create facilitated ways of entry and stay in the EU such as humanitarian corridors and the deployment of the temporary protection directive, allowing Ukrainians refugees to cross the EU border and receive international protection in a easier way when compared to the 2015 migration crisis.

The comparison between the two scenarios thus further illustrates how emotions are powerful elements in shaping borders: as fears and anxieties triggered by perceived threats result in the reinforcement of borders, empathy and compassion triggered by the vulnerability of migrants result in the softening of borders.

The question on whether the EU has learned from 2015 or if the different approach towards Ukrainians in 2022 represents a rather discriminatory treatment still remains, but the changes in the EU’s border management in both crisis illustrates how emotions have the power to make and unmake borders, to draw lines or erase them, to separate or to unite people. Conscious of the power of our emotions, therefore, we ought to question if they are the product of a real threat or of fabricated narratives. 

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Caio Levy: Graduate student following the Master’s degree in International Studies at ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon. Holds a Bachelor’s degree in European Studies from the University of Coimbra, has contributed to the Portuguese Refugee Council as well as to the Islamic World Observatory. Has his academic research focused on European borders, critical discourse analysis, and challenges faced by refugees and asylum seekers in Europe.