The Interests of States and Afghan Migration

The withdrawal of US and NATO troops from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s growing power in the region are forcing even those Afghan citizens to migrate who, despite the insecurity and poverty in their country, had so far not left it and were trying to hold on to life. But the humanitarian suffering caused by this forced migration is being ignored on the international stage and, in a sense, the responsibility to meet the Afghans’ needs for asylum and protection is being evaded,  while what is debated is the security problem the situation will create or the need to bring this migration under control. Yes, states regarding this forced migration as a danger, whether out of concern to protect their own citizens and sustain their lives and productivity, or to prevent threats that may come from outside in order to implement their own state policies, makes the Afghans’ struggle for life even harder.

We can begin by grounding the current governing policies of Western states in the French thinker Michel Foucault’s approach of “Governmentality and Biopolitics”. According to Foucault’s politics of governmentality, in order to secure the continuity of its own existence or to protect its own borders, the state must also secure the continued productivity of its population. This is possible by meeting their needs for health, life, security and welfare. For this reason the state keeps its population under control through hospitals, prisons, schools and police stations, and aims to secure its institutional survival.

Another theoretical approach that must be mentioned here is “the securitisation of migration”.  The concept of the securitisation of migration is a process that covers the stages in which migration is discussed as a threat in the rhetoric of politicians and state officials,  and in which control mechanisms and laws aimed at bringing this threat under control are produced. In this process, influential officials and politicians constantly keeping the issue on the agenda in a way that leads society to accept it as a threat lays the ground for the measures to be taken and makes it easier to control both society and migration.  Returning to Foucault’s approach: When we intersect his approach of ‘governmentality’ with the management and control of migration, we can interpret with what concerns the concept of “the securitisation of migration” emerged in theory. The aim is both to keep one’s own citizens under control and to keep under control the migrants who arrive from outside in an unplanned way and are perceived as a threat.

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Yes, Western states want to bring migration under control in order to protect their own citizens, ensure their peace and prosperity and thus sustain the productivity of the population. To this end they steer migration policy, pass laws and take steps to protect their borders. They even conclude agreements with third countries so that the wave of migration can be stopped before it reaches their borders. Indeed, the European Union failed the test it faced during the Syrian migrant crisis in the summer of 2015 and saw that the migration policy it had pursued until then did not work as it did in theory.

Although this problem has still not been solved,

• the European Union Migration Pact published in September 2020,
• the activities of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (FRONTEX) off the Mediterranean and on the Turkey-Greece land and sea borders,
• Greece’s efforts to increase security on its land border with Turkey (building a 5-metre-high steel wall, strengthening technological equipment) and
• the agreement signed between the EU and Turkey in 2016, whose continuation has been secured through further negotiations,

are the results of the inadequate efforts of the EU’s attempt to solve the migration problem out of concern for its own future and security.

The European countries’ approach to Afghan migration is along the same lines. That is, it prioritises their concern to sustain their own citizens’ prosperity. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s statement, ‘If people have to flee, I definitely see neighbouring countries such as Turkey, or the safe regions of Afghanistan, as the right place, rather than everyone coming to Austria, Germany or Sweden’, makes this plain. Likewise, despite the Taliban increasing its effectiveness and its pressure on the people of the region, European countries did not stop deporting Afghan nationals whose asylum applications had previously been rejected.

The German Federal Government, forced to take the situation seriously under pressure from civil society organisations, abandoned this policy only on 11 August. Immediately afterwards the Netherlands and France also abandoned their return policies for Afghans. In other words, until that date EU countries, ignoring the events in the region, regarded Afghanistan as a “safe country”. At this point we can summarise the EU countries’ migration policy as “keeping one’s own citizens alive for the survival of the state while caring little for the right to life of foreigners seen as a threat”.

Let us take up Turkey’s role and approach in these waves of migration in the next article.