The Desecuritisation of Illegal Migration:

The Case for a European Belonging Without Community

Paper prepared for the PhD-seminar/EUROPA workshop,

Department of Political Science and Public Management,
University of Southern Denmark,
Odense, 26 October 2004

Rens van Munster

PhD-student
University of Southern Denmark
Dpt. of Political Science and Public Management
Campusvej 55
5230 Odense M
Email: rvm@sam.sdu.dk
 There is a certain joy in listening to [security] stories. But what

is joy on closer reflection than our hidden sorrow unmasked.

Perhaps we listen, read, and believe security stories only to

alleviate a deeper pain … managing somehow to live

meaningfully, more comfortably, and even with a smile, within

our boundaries of violence

Costas Constantinou

What we need more is a certain violence against ourselves

Slavoj Žižek

1 Introduction

Since the introduction of the internal market and, more recently, the establishment of the EU as an

area of freedom, security and justice the topic of illegal migration is increasingly interpreted as a

security problem.1 Over the last two decades the issue of illegal has been gradually but consistently

uncoupled from humanitarian and economic frames and has instead been re-inscribed as a stake in

the administrative field of security.2 In this latter field the phenomenon of illegal migration is not

first and foremost considered in the utilitarian terms of economics or in the cosmopolitan terms of

humanitarianism but as a highly charged socio-political risk to the functioning of the EU and its

member states. Conceptually as well as institutionally, the issue of illegal migration is now viewed

as a risk on a European security continuum that also includes transversal issues such as organised

1
See for instance Bigo (1994), den Boer (1995), Huysmans (2000b), Albrecht (2002), Green and Grewcock (2002),
Berman (2003) and Geddes (2003).
2
See Bigo (1996), Carr (1996) and Benyon (1996).

1
crime, terrorism, drugs trade and human trafficking. Moreover, the issue of illegal migration has

started to function as the point of convergence or the common currency with which politicians,

policy-makers, security professionals and the (sensational) press communicate their misgivings and

fears to each other and the wider public.3 As a consequence, the view of illegal migrants as a threat

to security is now largely taken for granted and security measures taken by the EU to control the

inflow of illegal migrants are considered to be neutral policy responses to this objective threat. If

one accepts such a view, the obvious research question for security analysts is a problem-solving or

instrumental one: how best secure or defend the EU against the inflow of migrants? This paper

resists such a problem-solving perspective, however. It is not so much interested in the instrumental

question of how best to manage illegal migration. Instead, it focuses on the more explicit ethico-

political question of the ways in which the securitisation of illegal migration organises and

structures the ways in which the EU relates to itself and to outsiders. In doing so, this paper hooks

up with the linguistic turn in social theory in general and IR-theory more specifically. Departing

from the by now well-known insight that language is not merely a neutral medium that mirrors an

extra-discursive realm but also has a constitutive bearing upon that reality, this paper claims that the

enunciation of ‘security’ mediates a specific form of belonging that constructs the antagonistic

identities of ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’.4 In this view, the enunciation of illegal migration as a security

problem is a practice that seeks to settle the question of belonging and inclusion and exclusion.

In addressing the securitisation of illegal migration, the purpose of this paper is to show that

security is not a necessary response to the question of illegal migration but a particular way of

organising belonging that integrates society around the construction of a dangerous other. In an

attempt to move away from a politics of belonging that functions by turning the other into a threat,

3
As a result, illegal migration is increasingly made visible in public discourses as the cause for all social anxieties such
as unemployment, the deterioration of the quality of life in urban areas, petty crime, prostitution and concerns about
national and cultural identities – images which often rely on shaky but nevertheless popular and ‘sticky’ presumptions.
See Wacquant (1999), Bigo (2002), Ceyhan and Tsoukala (2002), Albrecht (2002), Bigo (2002), Ceyhan and Tsoukala
(2002) and Pickering (2004).
4
See, inter alia, Wæver (1995), Campbell (1998b) and Weldes et al. (1999).

2
this paper seeks to open up for alternative ways of politicising illegal migration and the question of

belonging in the emerging European polity. That is, it seeks to ‘undo’ the representation of illegal

migration as a threat against which the emerging EU community should be defended.5 In an attempt

to outline a strategy of desecuritisation, this paper turns to deconstruction. Whereas the realm of

security is essentially a conservative discourse that seeks to defend the status quo through control

and policing, deconstruction has always been explicitly concerned with opening up what is

generally taken for given in an attempt to bring marginalised and excluded voices into the picture.

Insofar as desecuritisation is about the ‘unmaking of security’ by re-imagining the question of

illegal migration, there is indeed a close resemblance in the objectives of deconstruction and

desecuritisation.6 Critically evaluating the deconstructivist strategy of desecuritisation (section 3),

this paper moves on to formulate a strategy of desecuritisation that rethinks the boundaries of

belonging from the point of the securitised other as most excluded (section 4). In the more concrete

context of the securitisation of illegal migration in the EU, this requires a restructuring of belonging

on behalf of the illegal migrants as the abject of the emerging European polity (section 5). What this

may entail more concretely will be illustrated by referring to the sans-papiers struggle for the

regularisation of all undocumented migrants in Europe. However, before inquiring deeper into the

possibilities of a desecuritisation of social relations and what such a desecuritisation might entail for

5
From a constructivist perspective, this begs the obvious but essential question whether one in criticising the
securitisation of illegal migration does not implicitly contribute to these securitising processes. The reason behind this is
that referring to the issue of illegal migration in terms of security (even critically!) re-enforces and re-inforces the social
perception of the latter as a security issue (cf. Constantinou, 2000; Wæver, 1999). For instance, Guiraudon (1998) has
warned that it can be difficult to untie the migrant from its strong negative connotations and, hence, trying to do so
would only help sustaining the social image of migrants as a force corroding the social edifice. But if speaking is a
problem, silence is not an option either once confronted with an issue that is already heavily securitised. Although the
normative dilemma of writing security seems inescapable, Huysmans (2002) has argued that it nevertheless can be
mitigated if one focuses on the governing work on security and its structuring effects on social relations. While this
does not solve the dilemma, it at least opens up the possibility for ‘unmaking security’ by pointing out the political work
that security performs.
6
On the connection between deconstruction and desecuritisation, see also Huysmans (1995) and Hansen (1997: 377).

3
European belonging, it is first necessary to specify in some detail the ways in which security orders

belonging.

2. The EU and Illegal Migration: Security as a Politics of Belonging

Security is a specific way of politicising an issue: to put illegal migration on the security agenda

means that migrants become staged as actors in a security drama. Security politics does not simply

function by pointing out pre-existing threats. It is a performative activity that renders societal issues

such as illegal migration visible as a threat: “The process of securitization is what in language

theory is called a speech act. It is not interesting as a sign referring to something more real; it is the

utterance itself that is the act. By saying the words, something is done” (Buzan et al., 1998: 26). But

what does it mean more precisely to securitise issues such as illegal migration? What exactly is

done when issues are framed as security issues? And in which ways does a security drama differ

from other dramas?

Arguably, these questions have been addressed most explicitly in the research of Ole Wæver

and the Copenhagen school of security.7 In the view of the Copenhagen school, a security story

differs from other types of stories because it is structured by the logic of war, which Wæver views

through the lens of national security: “To the extent that we have an idea of a specific modality

labelled ‘security’ it is because we think of national security and its modifications and limitations,

and not because we think of the everyday word ‘security’” (Wæver, 1995: 48-9, emphasis in

original). Thus while the notion of war is generally restricted to the realm of national security,

Wæver proposes to study the ways in which the national security problematique is present outside

the immediate context of military conflict between states: “[T]he logic of war – of challenge-

7
One sympathetic critic of the Copenhagen school refers to their research as “possibly the most thorough and
continuous exploration of the significance and implications of a widening security agenda” (Huysmans, 1998b: 186).
Also, many of the current debates on the nature of the security drama are framed in relation to the Copenhagen school.
See for instance Huysmans (1998a; forthcoming), Doty (1998/99), McSweeney (1999), Hansen (2000), Aradau (2001),
Eriksson (2001) and Williams (2003).

4
resistance (defense)-escalation-recognition/defeat – could be replayed metaphorically and extended

to other sectors ... When this happens, however, the structure of the game is still derived from the

most classical of classical cases: war” (Wæver, 1995: 56). In accordance with the traditional

Clausewitzian view of war, then, security can be defined as the end point of politics. When normal

politics fail, it gives way to security politics, which inserts issues with a sense of priority and

urgency that legitimise politicians and policy-makers to take extraordinary measures to secure the

survival of a political community: “When a specific issue is turned into a test case, everything

becomes concentrated at one point, since the outcome of the test will frame all future questions”

(Wæver, 1995: 53). In the extreme case of war, a government is not longer bound by the rules that

govern normal social relations (e.g. political transparency, public decision-making and respect for

civil rights), but free to take the decisions that can guarantee the survival of the community (without

which there would be no politics).8

While there is little doubt that acts of securitisation can take the exceptional character of war,

the securitisation of societal issues in the EU and liberal democracies in general rarely (if ever)

takes such an extreme form. Although the EU considers illegal migration a threat to the internal

market, the securitising process to which illegal migrants are subjected is less intense than the

metaphor of war suggests. In fact, to focus too narrowly on securitisation as an act runs the risk of

ignoring processes of securitisation that stop short of this extreme point (Williams, 2003). For this

reason, Hansen suggests that one should not just focus on the exceptionality of a security discourse

but also on the ways in which these discourses inscribe subjectivity and identity: “‘Security’ is not

only a speech act, but embedded in the production of particular subjectivities which then form the

basis for what can be articulated as threat and threatened” (Hansen, 2000: 306). In a similar critique

Bigo has argued that it would be better not to distinguish too strictly between politics and security,

8
Hence the Copenhagen school argues that securitisation is an exceptional discourse in which an actor by means of an
argument about the urgency of an existential threat breaks free of the normal political procedures (Buzan et al., 1998:
26, 25; see also Wæver, 1995). Hence, various authors have observed that there are certain intellectual similarities
between the Copenhagen school of security on the one hand and Carl Schmitt’s work on the other. See Huysmans
(1998a), Williams (2003) and van Munster (2005).

5
normalcy and the exception. Rather, he points at the importance of determining the positions of

authority from which a security continuum of different risks and threats are constructed and, in

doing so, close off for alternative ways of framing the issue (Bigo, 2001).

Nevertheless, the metaphor of war can still function as a useful analogy even for less intense

forms of securitisation. For whether or not a securitising process reaches the limit point of war,

security always refers to a situation in which the existence of the self is politicised as being

dependent on the neutralisation of a dangerous other. Thus, while security need not always take the

extreme form of war, the ordering function security performs is still the sovereign power of

exclusion through which friends are delineated from enemies (even if their ‘dangerousness’ is a

matter of degree).9 Although the degree of exclusivity and the measures to counter societal dangers

thus may vary, security discourses are united insofar as they mediate a politics of belonging that

separate a sphere of trust between friends from the enemy who is thought to introduce fear, chaos

and instability into the social order.

Mediating belonging through practices of security thus impinges upon how a community

acts towards itself and outsiders. Two things stand out. First, security radicalises the opposition

between self and other by transforming this relation into a dialectics between friend and enemy.

Although it is true that different group can exist alongside each other and interact in a meaningful

way, the drama of security turns the other party into a threat or enemy with which there is no shared

understanding or common symbolic ground. Indeed, when viewed through the lens of security, the

relation between self and other looses its multiple dimensions and is reduced to an antagonistic

relationship of enmity. The transformation of the self/other relation into the friend/enemy relation

turns the discursive space into two camps in which interaction turns into a zero-sum struggle for the

good life (cf. Wæver, 1995). To a large degree, this dynamic also underpins the EU’s relationship to

9
This is also illustrated by the war-related metaphors – ‘invasion of migrants’, ‘Fortress Europe’, ‘flanking measures’,
‘war or fight against illegal migration’ – that are often deployed. Also, metaphorical links to other wars (e.g. Cold War
and Trojan War) are replayed in public discourses on illegal migration. For instance, migrants have been called a ‘fifth
colon’ and a ‘Trojan horse’.

6
illegal migration since the abolishment of internal borders and the development of the EU as an area

of freedom, security and justice (see, amongst others, Huysmans, 2000b; Geddes, 2003; Boswell,

2003). Here, illegal migration is mainly portrayed in negative terms as something that disrupts the

proper conduct of freedom within the EU and, for that reason, needs to be restricted, controlled and

deterred.10 This is well-captured in article 2 of the EU-treaty which defines that one of the core

objective of the EU is ‘to maintain and develop the Union as an area of freedom, security and

justice, in which the free movement of persons is assured in conjunction with appropriate measures

with respect to external border controls, asylum, immigration and the prevention and combating of

crime.’

Secondly, framing migration in the negative terms of security increases the distance between

self and other to the point where the very visibility of the other is enough to trigger a security

response from the community that feels insecure. As Huysmans observes: “Since the migrant is a

threat because he/she is an alien, increasing the visibility of his or her alienness increases the

presence of the threat” (Huysmans, 1995: 64). Framing migration as a security problem thus risks

becoming a self-sustaining dynamic in the sense that the production of security knowledge about

migration renders the latter more visible, which means that new security measures are needed,

which in turn will increase the visibility of the threat – and so on. Looking at the EU, the framing of

migration as a security problem seems indeed to have become something of a self-sustaining

dynamic where the visibility of a threat triggers new security measures that in turn make the threat

more visible. For instance, Boswell argues that “despite more intensive attempts to control external

borders, the problem of illegal entry is in many ways far more of a popular concern in many EU

countries than it was in the first half of the 1990s, before EU and Schengen cooperation had really

gained momentum” (Boswell, 2003: 102). Also, the continuous decrease in immigration since the

10
Also, representing migrants as an urgent problem to the proper functioning of the internal market and the stability of
the EU-polity more generally indirectly sustains the more openly xenophobic discourses on the far right (cf. Huysmans,
2000b). While the European Union actively fights racism and xenophobia, the casting of migrants as a security problem
can have the opposite effect, as it adds to the radicalisation of the self/other relationship.

7
1990s has not led to less control. To the contrary, at recent meetings in Tampere, Laeken and

Seville the EU and its member states agreed to step up the fight against illegal migration, amongst

others by making the question of illegal migration a key policy issue in the Union’s external

relations with non-member states.11

Generally, these security policies are not articulated as a choice but as a necessary and

inevitable response to the abolishment of internal borders. In this view, cooperation on migration

and border control “was born out of necessity, as what one could term a ‘spillover’ from another

area of EC cooperation: the Single European Act (SEA) of 1986, which set the goal of achieving the

freedom of movement of goods, capital and workers between EC states by 1992” (Boswell, 2003:

100). However, what at first sight may seem a question of security and necessity is in the end also a

political question of who is allowed access to the social fabric of society and how society should be

structured (Huysmans, 1998a: 570). To speak of migration in security terms is also to articulate a

particular politics of belonging that risks imposing an organic conception of society in which there

is no place for difference and alternative ways of imagining the ‘good life’. As a way of mediating

belonging, security measures are by definition reactionary and conservative insofar as they always

seek to restore the ‘normal’ order of things. However, to ‘bring things back to normal’ implies that

political imagination is confined to the status quo as the benchmark against which other forms of

political identification are judged deviant or even subversive. Security mediates belonging by

distributing trust within society, but it does so at the expense of difference and ambiguity. As

Constantinou argues:

Securitization as a discursive practice works by synchronizing security, safety, and certitude. It

depicts all three as co-temporal occurrences. To be secure is to be safe is to be sure. To secure is to

protect from danger is to know the danger and how to go about doing the protection. This

constitutes the security problematique automatically and exclusively a question of providing safety

11
For example through readmission agreements, liaisons officers, VISA policy and the introduction of transit camps at
the outer borders of the EU.

8
 and producing knowledge. Thus [security] experts are able to continue with these totalizations,

identifying threats in uncertainty, and confidently naming the enemy, assuming the endangered,

and prescribing the deterrence (Constantinou, 2000: 288).

However, unlike in pre-modern times ‘the endangered’ can no longer be ‘assumed’. In the words of

Rawls: “We must abandon the hope of a political community if by such a community we mean a

political society united in affirming a general and comprehensive doctrine” (quoted in Mouffe,

1993: 64). The Dutch political theorists Herman van Gunsteren speaks in this context of a

‘community of fate’, meaning that different groups with different historical, religious, cultural and

political backgrounds have no choice but to live together and negotiate in a pragmatic sense the

practical terms of their coexistence (van Gunsteren, 1998). This, however, presupposes a common

ground between different groups and it is exactly this ground that the exclusionary logic of security

denies to the other. Instead, security starts from the assumption that a harmonious society can be

created if threats are hold at bay: “The discourse reproduces the political myth that a homogenous

national community or western civilization existed in the past and can be re-established today

through the exclusion of those migrants who are identified as cultural aliens” (Huysmans, 2000b:

758). If one agrees, then, that securitisation is undesirable because it is a violent ordering practice

that integrates a community through staging an existential threat, the question becomes one of how

to challenge, re-order or simply desecuritise a society premised upon the exclusionary logic of

security.

3. Deconstruction and the Impossible Ideal of Desecuritisation

Deconstructivists generally analyse security practices not as managerial responses to threats but as

core practices through which units construct their identity. Insofar as desecuritisation seeks to

unmake the security representations and the forms of belonging they give birth to, its objective is

similar to that of deconstructivism, which is concerned with articulations of belonging that express

9
responsibility towards otherness. Therefore, from a deconstructivist perspective securitisation is

considered an undesirable way of mediating belonging, because it contributes to the closure and

naturalisation of a community at the expense of plurality and difference. The starting point of a

deconstructivist strategy of desecuritisation would therefore be to argue for ways of identity

formation that do not turn other human beings into a threat. In doing so, deconstructivists usually

proceed from the assumption that binary divides such as friend/enemy, inside/outside,

native/migrant, trust/fear, and Europeans/non-Europeans that structure Western metaphysical

thought are not so much oppositions as hierarchies in which the first term is privileged over the

second. The critical move of deconstructivism exists in taking sides with the marginalised side of

the opposition in an attempt to overturn and transgress these hierarchies. It is important to notice

that deconstructivists do not simply seek to reverse the hierarchy (as this would just lead to a new

hierarchical relationship) but want to point out that the first term of the hierarchy can only exist and

is always already contaminated by the presence of the second term. In other words, they seek to lay

bare that the existence of the self depends on the negating presence of the other.

The deconstructivist insight that identity requires difference has enabled them to expose an

important paradox of security policy, namely that security policy seeks to secure the survival of a

community by eliminating the dangerous other upon which the very identity of that community

depends. In an oft-quoted passage Campbell eloquently expresses this paradox: “[T]he inability of

the state project of security to succeed is the guarantor of the state’s continued success as an

impelling identity. The constant articulation of danger through foreign policy is thus not a threat to

a state’s identity or existence: it is its condition of possibility” (Campbell, 1998b: 12-3). Because of

this paradox inherent to security policy, transcending a security problem cannot happen through

framing the issue in terms of security. Both security and insecurity share the same logic and are cast

in terms of the threat-defence sequence. As Wæver remarks: “‘Security’ signifies a situation marked

by the presence of a security problem and some measure taken in response. Insecurity is a situation

with a security problem and no response. Both conditions share the security problematique. There

10
are obviously situations other than these, characterized by ‘a-security’ or ‘non-insecurity’” (Wæver,

1995: 56, emphasis in original).12 By pointing out that security politics cannot be the answer to a

security problem, deconstructivists have sought to show that the critical task of security analysts it

point out, in concrete situations, that only if it is recognised that security cannot be the answer to

insecurity it will be possible to imagine less exclusive ways of mediating belonging.

There is one crucial problem with the deconstructivist position, however. For while

deconstructivism embraces the objective of desecuritisation, its theoretical maxim that identity is

always constituted in the dialectics between two opposing terms which function as each other’s

negation hampers them in reaching this goal. For if one accepts, if only tacitly, that identity is

always constituted through an antagonistic relationship with the other, it becomes unclear how one

can envisage desecuritised ways of mediating belonging between self and other (cf. Fierke, 2001;

Hansen, 1997).13 Indeed, the theoretical maxim that identity always requires a constitutive outside

logically entails that only the particular contents of a specific friend/enemy figuration can be

questioned, but never the antagonistic logic itself (see e.g. Norval, 2000). If identity presupposes

otherness, then every positive articulation of identity will automatically lead to the

institutionalisation of a new, yet equally absolute, difference. Thus although deconstructivists are

right to stress the principle openness of all articulations of belonging, they have so far not

adequately theorised the reverse move from deconstruction to the decision as an ethical act. But

without a theory of how to break free from the us/them dichotomy, there is nothing to guarantee that

the deconstruction of a security story will contribute to political forms of identification that are less

12
In his excellent 1985 novel The New York Trilogy. City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room, Paul Auster makes a
similar comment with regard to food (security) and eating (insecurity): “Quinn learned that eating did not necessarily
solve the problem of food. A meal was no more than a fragile defence against the inevitability of the next meal. Food
itself could never answer the question of food: it only delayed the moment when the question had to be asked in
earnest.”
13
Ole Wæver (1996: 122; cited in Fierke, 2001: 119) observes in this context that “[m]any [poststructuralist] authors –
including Campbell – balance between, on the one hand, (formally) saying that identity does not demand an Other, does
not demand antagonism, only difference(s) that can be non-antagonistic and, on the other, actually assuming that
identity is always based on an antagonistic relationship to an other, is always constituted as an absolute difference.”

11
exclusive towards the other (Wyn Jones, 1999; Wæver, 2000). Thus while it is no doubt true that

the deconstruction of security stories is a necessary precondition for desecuritisation and the

repoliticising of belonging, it does not in itself provide a guarantee against totalising discourses of

closure. Hence Derrida’s claim that “deconstruction is, in itself, a positive response to an alterity

which necessarily calls, summons or motivates it” makes little sense as long as it is not

supplemented theoretically with an account of how to bridge the gap between undecidability on the

one hand and the actuality of a decision on the other (cited in Campbell, 1998a: 182). For without

such a theory, deconstructivism risks getting caught on the abstract level of meta-politics in which

its philosophical preferences for opening up and transgression are translated as something equally

desirable on the less abstract level of politics (see also Wæver, 2000: 283). Which is why Moran

rightly objects that “deconstruction runs the risk of appearing either as a critical Puritanism or as a

series of empty, if largely unobjectionable platitudes” (Moran, 2002: 125).

Hence the deconstructive emphasis on the importance of undecidability as the necessary

precondition for every decision needs itself to be supplemented with a theory of the decision if it is

not appear “either as substanceless cant or a new moral absolutism” (Moran, 2002: 129). For if

“without the radical structural undecidability that the deconstructive intervention brings about,

many strata of social relations appear as essentially linked by necessary logics”, Laclau correctly

observes that deconstruction in turn “requires hegemony, that is, a theory of the decision taken in an

undecidable terrain: without a theory of decision, that distance between structural undecidability

and actuality would remain untheorised” (Laclau, 1996: 59-60). In a similar critique, Critchley –

who agrees with Laclau that deconstruction is a necessary move against closure and for politics –

has pointed out that making politics possible is not the same as providing a politics. For him, the

gap between undecidability and actuality points to the limits of deconstructivism as a political

12
strategy: “Decisions have to be taken. But how? And in virtue of what? How does one make a

decision in an undecidable terrain?” (Critchley, 1992: 199).14

Prozorov comes to similar conclusions. For him, the idea that any decision presupposes

contingency and undecidability is not just “lamenting the obvious”; it is also problematic from an

ethical point of view. For if it is true that every decision requires undecidability,15 “all decisions are

responsible and hence ‘ethical’ in Derridean terms. Yet, since all decisions effect a closure of the

radical openness of the perhaps, they are all equally irresponsible and hence unethical.” As a result,

deconstructivism remains frustratingly caught above “the abyss of undecidability in the desire to

refrain from the closure that every decision inaugurates” (Prozorov, 2004: 13). What is needed,

therefore, is not only a position (i.e. deconstruction) that highlights the impossibility of a decision,

but also a theory that can affirm the decision as an ethical act in a radically undecidable terrain. In

other words, the problem is that deconstructivism pays too much attention to the substance of the

decision and less to the ethicality of deciding as such. Thus to move beyond deconstructivism, it is

necessary not focus too narrowly “on the impossible attempt to establish the fact of ethicality of

decision, but on affirming the decision itself as an ethical act, whose authenticity is conditioned by

‘going through’ both the traversal of undecidability and its closure. The ethical injunction …

concerns not the substance of the decision, but the responsibility for the decision as an act”

(Prozorov, 2004: 13). But what, more precisely, constitutes responsibility for desecuritisation as the

act? If nothing conclusive can be said about the substance of such an act, then what does such an act

look like? What form does it assume? In short, what does it mean to propose that a strategy of

14
It is important, though, not to confuse undecidability (the term used by Derrida) with indeterminacy. Whereas the
latter insinuates a relativist stance in which no decisions are taken at all, the former functions as the condition of
possibility for decisions. Thus, Moran’s (2002: 127) comment that Derrida “must constantly be amazed that anything at
all happens” is somewhat off the mark. It should however be emphasised that the value of deconstruction is located
mainly in its ability to intervene in decisions that are already taken (and which are of course taken all the time) in order
to interrupt attempts at totalisation and not in its ability to provide for an anti-foundational politics that does not need to
fall back on safe ontological and epistemological grounds for its ethicality.
15
According to Derrida {, #@}, “even if a decision seems to take only a second and not to be preceded by any
deliberation, it is structured by this experience and experiment of the undecidable.”

13
desecuritisation should not just mark undecidability but also affirm and embrace the decision as an

ethical act?

4. Supplementing Deconstructivism: Desecuritisation as an Ethical Act

In contrast to deconstructivist thought which explicitly separates the ethical (the unconditional

injunction of undecidability) from the domain of politics (the domain of practical interventions

which always fail to live up to this ethical injunction), the move towards desecuritisation as an act

requires that we accept the inherently political character of every ethical act. An essential step

towards a theory that can affirm the decision as an ethical act that nevertheless recognises the void

behind every decision requires, first of all, a move away from the deconstructivist view of

antagonisms as the concrete mediation between friend and enemy. The notion that there is a certain

‘nothingness’, ‘void’ or ‘undecidability’ that functions as the structural background for all decisions

suggests that there in fact is a more central antagonism – one that is not so much the result of some

blockage by the other but of a radical negativity that is at the heart of the social order as such. The

everyday security problem of mediating between friends and enemies masks the fact that real

security is always an illusion. Insecurity is not a temporarily blockage to be overcome but

constitutes the very core around which the symbolic order is structured (Edkins, 2003; cf.

Huysmans, 1998c). Hence, the absolute closure of social structures is impossible not because social

totalities are dependent upon the exclusion of the other but because of a central lack or void that

precedes every attempt at positive identification:

The big Other, the symbolic order itself, is … barré, crossed-out, by a fundamental impossibility,

structured … around a central lack. Without this lack in the Other, the Other would be a closed

structure and the only possibility open to the subject would be his radical alienation in the Other

… The thesis of Laclau and Mouffe that ‘Society doesn’t exist’, that the Social is always an

inconsistent field structured around a constitutive impossibility, traversed by a central

14
 ‘antagonism’ – this thesis implies that every process of identification conferring on us a fixed

socio-symbolic identity is ultimately doomed to fail (Žižek, 1989: 122, 126-127).16

If the void is the domain of the political (the constitutive exteriority of the social order), politics

consists of those discourses that compete with each other to hegemonise or fill this gap. Here

security enters the picture as a particular way of ‘filling the gap’. The way a politics of security

performs this function is through displacement. Security displaces the constitutive impossibility at

the heart of society upon something outside it. In other words, processes of securitisation turn the

original antagonism or void into a concrete antagonistic relationship between the sound social

texture on the one hand and the enemy as the force corroding it on the other. Or as Žižek puts it:

“[I]t is not the external enemy who keeps me from achieving identity with myself, but every

identity is already in itself blocked, marked by an impossibility, and the external enemy is simply

the small piece, the rest of reality upon which we ‘project’ or ‘externalize’ this intrinsic, immanent

impossibility” (Žižek, 1990: 251-2).17 As a consequence, the elimination of an enemy does not

bring about a more harmonious society free from the disturbing presence of the other. Rather, “it is

precisely in the moment when we achieve victory over the enemy in the antagonistic struggle in

social reality that we experience the antagonism in its most radical dimension, as a self-hindrance:

far from enabling us finally to achieve full identity with ourselves, the moment of victory is the

greatest loss” (Žižek, 1990: 252).

16
Lacan usefully likens society to a vase that by creating a hole also creates the possibility for filling the hole, for
making it whole: “it creates the void and thereby introduces the possibility of filling it … if the vase may be filled, it is
because in the first place in its essence it is empty” (quoted in Stavrakakis, 1999: 44). As any axiom, the notion that
society is constitutively lacking can of course not be proved in any positivist sense. On the usefulness of this axiom for
political theorising in general and critical theory more specifically, see Žižek (1989), Laclau (1990), Stavrakakis (1999)
and Glynos (2001).
17
The idea of an original antagonism also serves as the starting point for Žižek’s (1999a: 29) critique of Carl Schmitt’s
notion that the political is defined by the decision on the friend/enemy constellation: “Far from simply asserting the
proper dimension of the political, [Schmitt] adds the most cunning and radical version of the disavowal … The clearest
indication of this Schmittian disavowal of the political is the primacy of external politics (relations between sovereign
states) over internal politics (inner social antagonisms) on which he insists: is not the relationship to an external other as
the enemy a way of disavowing the internal struggle which traverses the social body?”

15
 The ethicality of an act of desecuritisation, then, consists of a double movement. First, and

this is the deconstructive moment present in the act, it requires that one comes to terms with the

original void at the heart of all societies, which means that we need to accept that we never had

what we were supposed to have lost. Hence we need to get to terms with the fact that the

securitisation of illegal migration

… is an ideological fantasy about a ‘society’ that still exists. Its logic is this: if ‘society’ were not

‘threatened’ or ‘destroyed’ by the mobile immigrant, we would have a consistent, cosy, and non-

antagonistic – one is tempted to say ‘happily fascist’ society. Is not this fantasy the kernel of the

whole immigration debate? I wonder what would be left in the immigration debate if this fantasy

were taken away. One is tempted to say: nothing! Though, if this fantasy is taken away, what is

left is of course a series of social problems (Diken, 2002: 9).

To face the nothingness behind every attempt to articulate a social order thus requires that one

abandons the idea that the abject other is the positive cause of all social problems. It is a radical act

in which one comes to acknowledge that there is nothing behind the ideology of security: security is

just a screen covering the void behind it.18 Instead, it entails one identifies with the abject as the

point of the political that reveals the truth about the social order. Rather than repressing the other as

the abject that makes society impossible, we should, in a desecuritising move, identify with the

abject. Or as Balibar puts it: “[W]e must attack the obsessive question of collective insecurity by

beginning precisely with the situation of the most ‘insecure’, the nomadic populations who are the

source of and target of the obsession with law and order that is so closely intertwined with the

obsession with identity” (Balibar, 2004: 177). A desecuritising act thus requires us to take sides

with the point of negativity and to recognise in this point the true, concrete embodiment of the

18
Hence Žižek argues that “[t]he duty of the critical intellectual … is precisely to occupy all the time, even when the
new order stabilizes itself and again renders invisible the hole as such, the place of this hole, i.e., to maintain a distance
toward every reigning Master-Signifier … The aim is precisely to ‘produce’ the Master Signifier, that is to say, to
render visible its ‘produced’, artificial, contingent character” (quoted in Edkins, 1999: 118).

16
universal. In other words, in the current European context illegal migrants should not be considered

a threat to be hold at bay but as “representatives, the stand-ins, for the Whole of Society, for the true

Universality (‘we – the ‘nothing’, not counted in the order – are the people, we are All against

others who stand only for their particular privileged interest’)” (Žižek, 1999b: 188). The true

measurement for the universality of a belonging lies thus not in an abstract ideal (a European

citizenship in the name of ‘freedom’, ‘security’ and ‘justice’) but in the way in which a community

relates to its lowest part, i.e. the illegal migrant which is securitised and excluded as something

abject. The only way to be effectively universal is not by imposing a Universal scheme, but by

taking sides, by locating a concrete universality at the level of the abject that represents the void that

subverts the positive social order.

Indeed, to identify with the securitised other means to “recognize in the ‘excesses’, in the

disruption of the ‘normal’ way of things, the key offering us access to its true functioning” (Žižek,

1989: 128). Whereas the objective of security is to establish a sense of immunity vis-à-vis the abject

and excluded other, a politics of desecuritisation takes instead point of departure in the abject as the

point from which to articulate new forms of community. Thus, in contrast to the security view of

migration as an emergency that requires extraordinary measures, desecuritisation conceptualises

migration as the advent or emergence of new political structures (cf. Edkins, 1999: 10). A politics

of desecuritisation views the symptom as the point where the truth of that particular order is located.

Hence the illegal migrant should not be understood as “responsible for all ills of the polis” or as the

“apocalypse on the move” but as a “symptom that precisely turns ‘we’ into a problem, perhaps

makes it impossible” (Kristeva, 1991: 1). By recognising that the securitised abject is the (w)hole

that subverts the frame that sustains our understanding of a particular society as a whole, a

desecuritising act is able to articulate new forms of belonging in an ethical way.

5. Desecuritising European Belonging: Undocumented Migrants as the Point of the Political

17
An act of desecuritisation in the context of the EU, then, entails the identification with the

securitised, undocumented migrant as the part that is considered to make the full constitution of a

society impossible. The desecuritising move exists in turning the excluded, securitised illegal

migrant to the place of the political figure per se, that is, as a constitutive force that can move the

institutional scheme of belonging beyond the status quo. The desecuritisation of illegal migration

does consequently not just address the particular demands of a group of people but concerns the

metaphorical universalisation of their particular interests: the restructuring of the emerging

European order itself. To desecuritise illegal migration is to link the question about the correct or

responsible treatment of illegal migrants to the broader question of the way in which EU-identity

and EU-belonging are constituted (cf. Huysmans, 2000a: 157). In contrast to discourses of security

which seek to define illegal migration mainly in terms of a managerial problem to the functioning of

the internal market, desecuritisation politicises illegal migration with the aim of renewing the

fundament on which political struggle unfolds in the European polity. It is a political activity that

seeks to constantly (re)articulate public space on behalf of the excluded.

The struggle of the sans-papiers movement can illustrate this. Originally started as a

particular French phenomenon, the sans-papiers movement took on a wider European dimension

when the movement started to demand the regularisation of all the sans-papiers in Europe (cf.

Hayter, 2004: 142-149). As Madgiguène Cissé, one of the leading delegates of the sans-papiers

movement argues: “We demand our regularisation. We are not in hiding. We have come out into the

daylight” (Cissé, 1997). Through identifying with their position as undocumented migrants, the

sans-papiers left behind their illegality to claim their place in the social order. In this sense, the

sans-papiers struggle is not just about the responsible treatment of illegal migrants, but seeks to re-

imagine the very foundations upon which European belonging is founded. For the political force of

the sans-papiers movement lays not so much in its demand for the legalisation of illegal migrants;

rather, the desecuritising force of the sans-papiers movement is located in their demands to be

granted those rights precisely as undocumented migrants. In contrast to usual forms of resistance

18
and protest that claim that ‘Nobody Is Illegal’,19 the sans-papiers explicitly identified with their

abject position (‘we, the illegal migrants, are the true point of universality!’). Thus Cissé argues that

“the struggle taught us first of all to be autonomous”:

There were organizations which came to support us and which were used to helping immigrants in

struggle. They were also used to acting as the relay between immigrants in struggle and the

authorities, and therefore more or less to manage the struggle. They would tell us, ‘Right, we the

organizations have made an appointment to explain this or that’; and we had to say, ‘But we can

explain it very well ourselves.’ … If we had not taken our autonomy, we would not be here today,

because there really have been many organizations telling us we could never win, that we could

not win over public opinion because people were not ready to hear what we had to say (Cissé,

1997).

Confronted with a strict policing of the boundaries of European belonging, the sans-papiers fought

thus not only for their inclusion, but also for their illegality to be embraced as “the point of inherent

exception/exclusion, the ‘abject’, of the concrete positive order, as the only point of true

universality” (Žižek, 1999b: 224, emphasis in original). In this sense, the struggle by the sans-

papiers provides an important counterweight to the current organisation of belonging within the

EU. Basically, the institutionalisation of European belonging is a top-down process in which

European citizenship is assigned from above “on the basis of belonging to one of the EU nations

and on the basis of belonging to the European culture under construction” (Martiniello, 1995: 46).

Explicitly distinguishing between EU nationals (citizens) and non-EU nationals (also referred to as

denizens or margizens), European citizenship contributes to the exclusion and securitisation of

19
See for example the ‘No One Is Illegal’ initiatives in the United Kingdom (www.noii.org.uk), Canada
(http://www.web.apc.org/~ara/OTP/OTP20/noii.htm, http://www.ocap.ca/immigration/legalaid.html) as well as the
‘Kein Mensch ist illegal’ initiative in Germany (http://www.kmii-tuebingen.de), the ‘geen mens is illegaal’ initiative in
the Netherlands (www.defabel.nl/gmii) and the ‘Żaden człowiek NIE jest nie legalny’ initiative in Poland
(http://www.zcnjn.bzzz.net).

19
those who reside in the EU without documents.20 Indeed, insofar as European citizenship

contributes to confinement of (especially) illegal migrants in their cultural alterity, Martiniello

argues that “only a successful mobilization of the denizens and margizens, together with the full

citizens, that is a significant pressure ‘from below’ for a new European citizenship, could bring

about an extended breach in the nationalist logic and open the way towards post-nationalism in

Europe” (Martiniello, 1995: 49). A desecuritising act does exactly this: it seeks to create a space for

the unrepresentable within presentation through the admission of negativity into the field of

normality. To desecuritise illegal migration and to repoliticise European belonging does thus entails

that one starts from outside the community, i.e. from those whose interests are not accounted for:

Insofar as it expresses the movement of collective emancipation, the criterion of political

citizenship is the ability of a ‘polity’ to free itself from the forms of distribution and redistribution

(‘accounting’). It does not take as its objective the ‘balance of profit and losses’ among those who

already possess something … but the constitution of a ‘people’ (or dēmos) that begins as

nonexistent on account of the exclusion of those who are considered unworthy of the status of

citizen (depending on the epoch and the circumstances: slaves or servants, workers or paupers,

women, foreigners, and so on) (Balibar, 2004: 72).21

20
There is of course a close interplay between restrictive immigration laws, increased border control and other security

practices on the one hand and the illegal entry of migrants on the other. As Andreas (2000) shows in his empirical study

of the American-Mexican border, policing in fact helps to create the very conditions (organised crime and the drugs

trade, human smuggling, illegal immigration, etc.) it seeks to suppress.

21
In his book La mésentente, Rancière (1995) argues that the core of a democratic ethos is not just about the
development of democratic institutions and procedures but, perhaps even more crucially, the suspension and subversion
of these procedures on behalf of those who are not represented in the social order. According to him, the first true test
for democracy appeared in ancient Greece where members of the dēmos (those that fell outside the hierarchical matrix
of society) demanded as those who are part of no part to be regarded as the point in which ‘truth’ and ‘universality’
were located. Žižek refers to another example: in the demonstrations against the communist regime in East Germany
protestors shouted ‘Wir sind das Volk!’, “thereby performing the gesture of politicisation at its purest – they, the
excluded counter revolutionary ‘scum’ of the official Whole of the People … claimed to stand for the people, for ‘all’; a
couple of days later, however, the slogan changed into we are a/one people [‘Wir sind ein Volk!’], clearly signalling the
closure of the momentary authentic political opening” (Žižek, 1999b: 189). A last example – this time from popular
culture – can be found in the animation movie Antz about a colony of ants. Whereas normally every ant has its fixed

20
Balibar refers to such a citizenship as a citizenship without community, meaning a form of

citizenship that develops in conjunction with what is outside (‘with + out’) the community. As such,

the implications of the sans-papiers struggle have the potential to impinge upon the very

exclusionary foundations upon which the scheme of European belonging is constituted. Their claim

is not a claim for an extension of belonging by widening the circle of citizenship and the rights and

duties that follow from it; rather, it asks for a post-national form of citizenship that is not based on

the principle of nationality but on residence and the freedom of movement for all people: “We

struggle for freedom of movement in its most concrete meaning, such as the ability to travel and to

settle, wherever we wish to, without hindrance; because this struggle concerns also the refusal of

social control which afflicts us all; whether or not we have papers” (quoted in Hayter, 2004: 146).

In contrast to the idea of a ‘European citizenship’ as an abstract prerequisite for political

rights, desecuritisation thus refers to the process whereby belonging is mediated in a continuous

political process that recognises those who have been subjected to securitising processes as part of

the public sphere of existence. What starts out as a particular struggle for a particular group can,

through an act of desecuritisation, be politicised as a struggle about the future of Europe itself. For a

Europe that is still in the process of becoming, the identification of the people with illegal migrants

can radically redefine the ‘universal’ scheme of belonging from above in favour of mediating

belonging from below in the practical confrontation with the securitised other. It is to articulate a

space in which belonging is not passively imposed upon an already present population; rather,

belonging is negotiated in the concrete struggle for desecuritisation through which individuals

actively contribute to the constitution of a European public space.

6 Conclusion

place in a colony, the film ends with a successful uprising of the worker ants against the soldier ants, while the workers
exclaim: ‘We are the colony!’

21
This paper has sought to outline the contours of a strategy of desecuritisation within the context of

the emerging European order. Moving beyond the deconstructivist writings on security, it was

argued that the antagonistic relationship between friend and enemy is not so much an inescapable

result from processes of identity formation, but a secondary move in which the void at the heart of

society is displaced upon something outside it. Whereas security is by definition impossible due to

the inherent openness of all social structures, security politics was represented as a politics of

belonging that is structured around the fantasy that the other (the symptom of the symbolic order) is

responsible for the disharmony and anxiety experienced by members of that community. Arguing

that security is an undesirable form of mediating belonging, this paper has suggested a politics of

desecuritisation as identification with the symptom. Rather than viewing migrants as responsible for

all social ills, it was argued that they represent the point that gives body to the failures of the

symbolic order. Within the context of discussions about European belonging, this paper ended with

a plea for a European belonging without community, which implies to rethink the question of

belonging from the point of the most excluded, i.e. the abject of the social order who are denied the

status of citizenship. Because desecuritisation defined as identification with the symptom cannot be

legitimised by the rules of the social order itself, it is by necessary subversive and transgressive.

The point, however, was not so much to argue in favour of subversion and transgression for the

sake of revolution. Rather, the aim is to illustrate that a more ethical relation between self and other

can only come about if a community is able, from time to time, to incorporate the revolutionary

moment, to put itself at stake and rethink itself from the point of the abject. Whereas democratic

procedures are important, perhaps the true test for a democracy is its ability to question itself and

put itself at stake. Desecuritisation does exactly this and, at a very minimum, it makes us aware that

sometimes true change can only come about as the result of a shattering experience of self-denial.

22
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