Introduction
To date, one of the most powerful images of the European refugee crisis is the picture of three-year-old Alan Kurdi (initially named as Aylan Kurdi), a Syrian boy of Kurdish ethnic background, who drowned off the coast of the Turkish town of Bodrum on 2 September 2015 together with his brother and mother during his family’s attempt to reach Europe. The picture of his lifeless body lying on the shore sparked a large outcry all over the world on the tragedy of Syrian refugees. It triggered a strong emotional response from media and public opinion, particularly in Europe, resulting in calls for more open borders and welcoming immigration policies. Shortly after Alan’s death, then UK Prime Minister David Cameron vowed that his country would ‘fulfil’ its ‘moral responsibilities’ by taking in 20,000 Syrian refugees over a period of five years directly from camps in Syria’s neighbouring countries.Footnote 1 Cameron explained that the refugees would be selected on the basis of need: ‘We will take the most vulnerable: … disabled children, … women who have been raped, … men who have suffered torture’.Footnote 2 This resolution was welcomed, but also criticised for comparing poorly with other European countries. Germany, in particular, had taken in 18,000 Syrian refugees in the single weekend prior to Cameron’s pledge, and, following Alan’s death, pledged to take up to 800,000 refugees a year for several years.
While the UK’s and Germany’s responses to the plight of Syrian refugees may be partially accounted for as governments bowing to public pressures, they also raise questions on their underlying governmental rationalities. In particular, why did the UK commit to taking only a small number of refugees and, most of all, only sick children, women who had been raped and men who had suffered torture, whereas Germany pledged to open its borders to millions of Syrians, irrespective of their gender, age, or physical condition? Are the British and the German cases expressions of different governmentalities or is it possible to discern in their contending responses similar governmental rationalities? Can these rationalities be considered an instantiation of what has recently been labelled ‘humanitarian government’, namely the simultaneous deployment of logics of ‘securitization and humanitarianism’Footnote 3 in the government of disenfranchised subjects such as refugees and undocumented or ‘irregular’ migrants’?Footnote 4 This article will strive to address these questions.
The notion of humanitarian government has been the object of growing scholarly attention. For Didier Fassin, this concept designates a mode of governing ‘precarious lives’ – such as ‘the lives of the unemployed and the asylum seekers, … of sick immigrants and people with Aids, … of disaster victims and victims of conflict’Footnote 5 – which does not exhaust itself in practices of care. Humanitarian government encompasses dynamics of depoliticisation, as the language of compassion and emotions turns ‘domination’ into ‘misfortune’, ‘injustice’ into ‘suffering’, and ‘violence’ into ‘trauma’;Footnote 6 practices of subjectification, with the construction of a ‘new humanity’ made of individuals who are legitimate as long as they are recognised as ‘suffering bodies’;Footnote 7 logics of securitisation of space, bodies, and populations, which have turned border crossing ‘into a matter of life and death’;Footnote 8 forms of autoimmunisation, namely targeting what is ostensibly being protected, as in the case of the ‘stop the boats’ policy in Australia, which claims to save lives by not saving lives in order to discourage ‘irregular’ migrants from undertaking dangerous sea voyages;Footnote 9 and practices of (re)bordering, resulting in new rationalities of inclusion/exclusion and in the progressive hardening of borders for ‘able-bodied migrants’.Footnote 10 Ultimately, humanitarian government entails an expansion and penetration of power as it ‘extends the reach of the state to govern more bodies (e.g., the sick and injured) and more spaces (e.g., hospitals)’.Footnote 11
Some of these dynamics may contribute to explaining British responses to the refugee crisis: caring for a small number of ‘sick bodies’ while hardening the borders for those ‘able-bodied migrants’ who take matters into their own hands by attempting to cross the Mediterranean. Similarly, the simultaneous deployment of logics of ‘securitization and humanitarianism’ could be observed in the UK decision to withdraw its support for search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean in October 2014. Turning the UK commitment from saving lives to border patrolling was presented as a strategy to discourage ‘irregular’ migrants from undertaking the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean and thus as a way of saving lives. Nonetheless, the concept of humanitarian government does not seem capable to account for the German openness, where the humanitarian logic may seem to have transcended the security component. Hence, should the British case be considered one of humanitarian government and the German case one of humanitarianism tout court? Or is it possible to advance a different interpretation of the British and German policies towards the refugee crisis beyond existing accounts of humanitarianism and humanitarian government?
This article embraces this latter perspective. It contends that the British and German different responses to Syrian refugees can be conceptualised as the expression of the same governmental rationality the focus of which has not been just the ‘precarious lives’ of undocumented migrants, but the lives of host populations. Accordingly, my argument is that humanitarian government does not solely entail the government and care of disenfranchised collectivities such as refugees, but also the government and care of host populations through the humanitarian government of refugees. From this perspective, I will argue that the British pledge to take in 20,000 Syrian refugees should be accounted for as a way of promoting a self-understanding of Britain as just, moral and compassionate, and therefore, as a biopolitical way of promoting and enhancing the emotional life of its population. For Germany, considerations of justice and compassion have contributed to reproduce a self-understanding of Germany as caring and committed, and have been accompanied by an appreciation of Syrian refugees as an overall young and skilled workforce that can support the German welfare system. Accordingly, the dissolution of German borders for hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees should be understood as a form of biopolitical care of both the emotional and material well-being of the German population.
This article aims to contribute to three interrelated fields of research: namely, humanitarian government, biopolitical governmentality, and responses to the European refugee crisis. In particular, it aims to broaden the meaning and scope of the notion of humanitarian government by theorising it as a Foucauldian biopolitical governmentality that has as its object host populations. With the term ‘biopolitical governmentality’, I understand a rationality of government that aims to biopolitically enhance the lives of the population under power’s control both in biological and emotional terms. Hence, my primary interest in this article is not in governmentality as the ‘conduct of conduct’Footnote 12 and the promotion of forms of self-government, but in governmentality as the power that ‘teaches the subjects in its care about what counts as real, and what they themselves really are, in order to better govern them by letting them govern themselves’.Footnote 13 My interest, in other words, is in governmentality as the promotion of positive forms of self-understanding and self-appreciation – through biological and emotional biopolitical rationalities of care – which are the condition of possibility for forms of self-government.Footnote 14 Humanitarian government makes the decision of which refugees need to be welcomed and which ones need to be rejected a function of the biopolitical care of the populations of the countries that accept them. This biopolitical governmentality, I will show, rests on a ‘differentialist’ understanding of racism that draws on, but partially transcends, traditional accounts of racism based on nationality, ethnicity, religion, colour, gender, and alleged intractable cultural differences. This biopolitical racism redraws the boundary between ‘valuable’ (to be included) and ‘not valuable’ lives (to be excluded) according to the refugees’ capacity to enhance the biological and emotional well-being of host populations.
This argument also aims to contribute to existing debates on biopolitics in international relations. Most of these debates have focused on ‘the emergence and governance of life in its biological existence’,Footnote 15 and on how biopolitics has contributed to bring ‘biological life (zoē) into the modalities of state power (bios)’.Footnote 16 While this focus on ‘biological being’,Footnote 17 ‘biological processes’,Footnote 18 and on ‘biological, corporeal, or even carnal regimes of power, rule, and force’Footnote 19 is certainly essential, it overlooks how emotional concerns have been an equally important dimension of biopolitical governmentalities. Hence, the approach advanced in this article maintains that existing responses to the European refugee crisis should not be explored solely as manifestations of humanitarian government of refugees,Footnote 20 ‘biological’ forms of biopolitics,Footnote 21 thanatopolitics (governing undocumented migrants through violence and death),Footnote 22 politics of indifference,Footnote 23 crisis of European migration policies,Footnote 24 crisis of liberal values in Europe,Footnote 25 crisis of solidarity,Footnote 26 and fear of Islam and terrorism,Footnote 27 but also as a product of biopolitical governmental rationalities of biological and emotional care of host populations enacted through the humanitarian government of refugees.
The article is organised in three sections. First, I consider how the existing literature has largely neglected the possibility that the humanitarian government of refugees and undocumented/‘irregular’ migrants may also be a way of governing host populations, and has generally deemed that biopolitics has partial or limited capacity to account for the phenomenon of humanitarian government. Second, I explore how the humanitarian government of refugees and undocumented/‘irregular’ migrants is a manifestation of a biopolitical governmentality that aims to maximise the biological and emotional life of the host population. To this end, I explore two largely neglected dimensions of biopolitics, namely, its underlying ‘differentialist’ understanding of race, and its concern with the emotional well-being of the population. Third, I discuss how this conceptual framework can advance our understanding of the European refugee crisis by analysing two key events: the UK decision to suspend search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean in 2014, and the different British and German responses to the plight of Syrian refugees following the death of Alan Kurdi.
I. Humanitarian government as the government of refugees
In this section, I highlight three main arguments of existing accounts of humanitarian government (which I will challenge in the next two sessions). First, humanitarian government concerns the government of disenfranchised subjects, such as refugees and undocumented/‘irregular’ migrants, through the simultaneous deployment of rationalities/practices of care and security; second, humanitarian government cannot be reduced to biopolitical governmentality and Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower only partially captures this phenomenon; third, humanitarian government entails a process of depoliticisation that obliterates the causes of suffering. Didier Fassin, whose research on humanitarianism has shaped current debates, defines humanitarian government ‘as the administration of human collectivities in the name of a higher moral principle which sees the preservation of life and the alleviation of suffering as the highest value of action’.Footnote 28 This seemingly benign principle encompasses a powerful depoliticising move. The grammar of emotions, suffering and trauma, while revealing and making visible the plight of the marginalised and disenfranchised, also establishes a new ‘language of compassion’ that conceals the causes of inequality, domination, and violence.Footnote 29 Humanitarian government encourages a focus on the ‘humanitarian present’Footnote 30 that privileges responding to the emotional emergency of suffering rather than targeting its root causes.
For this reason, Miriam Ticktin contends, humanitarian government is simultaneously a politics and an antipolitics.Footnote 31 In discussing the French ‘illness clause’, a humanitarian principle that grants residence to those already in the country who suffer from a life-threatening condition that would not be properly treated in their home country, she emphasises how humanitarian government politicises migration by establishing what constitutes legitimate suffering, and thus by turning the ‘suffering body’ into a ‘means to papers’.Footnote 32 At the same time, humanitarian government also depoliticises migration by constructing suffering bodies as ‘victim[s] without a perpetrator’, and individuals as objects of care and compassion rather than equal citizens.Footnote 33 This makes their condition all the more precarious, as the humanitarian exception that gave them protection may quickly revert to practices of security (should the ‘sick body’ no longer meet the criteria of what counts as legitimate suffering) turning the ‘endangered’ into the ‘dangerous’ and the ‘innocent’ into the ‘delinquent’.Footnote 34
This argument brings to the fore the centrality of the politics of life and the body to humanitarian government, thus suggesting an important conceptual affinity with the phenomenon famously described by Foucault as biopolitics. According to Foucault, biopolitics denotes a modern condition in which the life of individuals (their bodies) and the life of the population as a whole become the object of political strategies and interventions. At the heart of this condition is a transformation in the technology of power: from the sovereign power to take life to the biopolitical power to make live.Footnote 35 Unlike traditional forms of sovereign power which manifest themselves through mechanisms of deduction of wealth, labour, services, and ‘ultimately life itself’, biopower – which encompasses the discipline of the body (‘anatomo-politics’) and the regulation of the population (‘bio-politics’) – is primarily a power of care aimed at strengthening and enhancing life.Footnote 36
However, according to Fassin, although biopolitics and humanitarian government share an underlying politics of care and although humanitarian action employs biopolitical ‘techniques of management of populations’ – such as ‘setting up refugee camps, establishing protected aid corridors … conducting epidemiological studies of infectious diseases’ – they also have different goals.Footnote 37 Biopolitics is primarily concerned with caring for and maximising the life of the population as a whole. Humanitarian government, on the other hand, is a politics of individual life.Footnote 38 As such, it requires ‘selecting those that have priority for being saved (for example, when drug supplies are insufficient)’,Footnote 39 or in the case of the Mediterranean refugee crisis, deciding which ‘worthy lives’ must be saved (even risking other lives to this end) in the name of the humanitarian imperative, and which ‘unworthy lives’ can be left to drown in the name of security.Footnote 40 Hence, humanitarian government rests on the concurrent deployment of logics of ‘securitization and humanitarianism’ that highlight a ‘symbiotic relationship’ between ‘care and control’, that is, between ‘the humanitarian world (the hand that cares) and the police and military (the hand that strikes)’.Footnote 41
William Walters’ seminal reflections on the humanitarian border (the deployment of humanitarian government rationalities at borders, or, as he puts it, ‘the reinvention of the border as a space of humanitarian government’)Footnote 42 echo Fassin’s remarks. For Walters, humanitarian government represents a ‘minimalist’ or ‘significantly attenuated biopolitics’Footnote 43 whose task is, as Jill M. Williams explains, not to ‘optimize and foster life’, but ‘simply hold off death’, with the effect that ‘the life that is preserved is structurally marginalized and only maintained, not fostered’.Footnote 44 The encroachment of humanitarianism and security turns humanitarian government into ‘a site of ambivalence and undecideability’ characterised by acts of compassion and the deliberate infliction of suffering, neoliberal disciplining, practices of resistance, forms of counter-conduct, and the constant, mutual cooptation of humanitarianism by security and vice versa.Footnote 45 This complex field of interactions transcends mere processes of ‘biopolitical reproduction’, Walters contends, and calls for supplementing ‘Foucault’s toolbox’ with new concepts.Footnote 46
Taking up this challenge, Adrian Little and Nick Vaughan-Williams argue that, in order to grasp the ambivalence at the heart of humanitarian government, it is necessary to consider Roberto Esposito’s concept of (auto)immunity. This is the idea that the protection of life requires the incorporation (in small doses) of that which represents a threat to life in order to develop immunity against it.Footnote 47 For them, Foucauldian biopolitics primarily concerns the ‘positive’ goals of optimisation and maximisation of life, whereas humanitarian government as deployed in practices of ‘compassionate borderwork’ is neither a ‘straightforwardly “positive”’ nor simply a ‘“negative” or thanatopolitical’ ‘biopolitical technology of power’.Footnote 48 Accordingly, biopolitics is unable to account for the capacity of humanitarian government ‘to lead to “irregular” migrants’ and refugees’ dehumanisation and death’.Footnote 49 Conversely, Esposito’s concept of (auto)immunity explains how protection of life through the inoculation of threatening agents in excessive doses may result in ‘an autoimmune crisis’.Footnote 50 From this perspective, humanitarian government is informed by ‘an (auto)immunitary logic: the very lives that are identified as in need of protecting and saving can also become targeted by lethal apparatuses of security’.Footnote 51 This ambiguity is particularly evident in the Australian ‘stop the boats’ policy that claims, at once, to protect the migrants by abandoning them.Footnote 52
The partial or limited capacity of biopolitics to account for the phenomenon of humanitarian government can also be observed, more understatedly, in Ticktin’s account, when she discusses how humanitarianism produces a process of ‘biological involution’.Footnote 53 This is the production of disabled subjects who are ultimately more valued and mobile than their ‘able bodied’ counterparts because they can be made the object of a politics of compassion. In this regard, Ticktin recounts the story of several HIV+ patients who stopped taking their medication once they received their residence papers, fearful that an improvement in their condition could undermine their right to reside in the country.Footnote 54 Interestingly, although Ticktin argues that the ‘apolitical suffering body’ of humanitarianism lies ‘at the intersection of biopolitical modernity and global capital’,Footnote 55 she hardly analyses the relationship between humanitarianism and biopolitics, let alone explores how the process of ‘biological involution’ may be reconciled with biopolitics. From the perspective of Little and Vaughan-Williams’ argument, Ticktin’s neglect of biopolitics may be considered an indication of the ‘diagnostic limits’Footnote 56 of biopolitics vis-à-vis the phenomenon of humanitarian government.
For Little and Vaughan-Williams, these limits concern not just the incapacity of biopolitics to fully explain the simultaneous deployment of rationalities of care and security, but also its inability to account for what they regard as the ‘third dimension’ of humanitarian government, namely a process of displacement of responsibility for migrant deaths (such as those in the Mediterranean or on Australian coasts) ‘from both migrants and refugees and restrictive border security and migration management’ to human traffickers and smugglers.Footnote 57 This argument further reinforces Fassin’s and Ticktin’s views that humanitarian government depoliticises the suffering of vulnerable subjects by suggesting that depoliticisation takes place through a process of displacement of responsibility to criminal networks. Yet, as Jill Williams – drawing on Roxanne Lynn DotyFootnote 58 – suggests, not just individuals and groups, but also natural environments, such as the harsh landscape that surrounds the US-Mexico border, can become the target of strategies of displacement of responsibility. Doty talks of ‘spaces of moral alibi’ where ‘the state abdicates responsibility for migrant deaths by pointing to the harsh terrain (and individual migrant decisions) as the cause of deaths’.Footnote 59
This brief overview suggests that: (1) humanitarian government concerns the government of disenfranchised subjects, such as refugees and undocumented/‘irregular’ migrants through the simultaneous deployment of rationalities/practices of care and security; (2) these rationalities/practices are only partially captured by a biopolitical lens; and (3) the deployment of humanitarian government entails a process of depoliticisation and displacement of the causes of suffering. In the remainder of this article I want to challenge the first two arguments (Section II) and explore in greater depth the third one (Section III). The first two arguments, I will argue, while very insightful, suffer from a fundamental ‘diagnostic limit’ (to borrow Little and Vaughan-Williams' expression) they consider that the referent object of humanitarian government is disenfranchised ‘others’. My contention is that humanitarian government is also a biopolitical governmentality targeting host populations, whose aim is to maximise their biological and emotional well-being through the selective inclusion/exclusion of refugees. In order to advance this argument, in the next section I will explore how this process of inclusion/exclusion rests on a ‘differentialist’ understanding of racism and how biopower targets not just biological, but emotional life. These arguments will be instrumental to explore, in the third section, how caring for the emotional well-being of populations requires not just depoliticising the suffering of migrants, but blaming them for their own suffering.
II. Humanitarian government as the biopolitical government of host populations
The perspectives discussed in the previous section tend to reduce biopolitics to a politics of care and maximisation of life, and overlook how the biopolitical ‘power to make live’ is not an unqualified attempt to promote all forms of life, but only the life of the race/population cared for. For Foucault, the key dimensions of biopolitics (‘love and care’)Footnote 60 encompass and indeed are advanced through the ‘negative’ biopolitical power to ‘let die’ and the traditional sovereign ‘right to take life’.Footnote 61 As Foucault explains, with the emergence of biopolitical governmentality ‘the problem of sovereignty is not eliminated; on the contrary it is made more acute than ever’.Footnote 62 The reason is that the power ‘to kill’, ‘take life’, or ‘let die’ is essential to make life live by marginalising, segregating, or eliminating those internal deviant elements and external threatening ‘others’ which may put at risk the survival, flourishing, and well-being of the population. Particularly with respect to the latter, biopolitical governmentality requires the active deployment of what Foucault describes as state or biopolitical racism in order to discriminate between ‘threatening’ and ‘non-threatening’ others.
For Foucault, biopolitical racism ‘is an expression of a schism within society that is provoked by the idea of an ongoing and always incomplete cleansing of the social body’,Footnote 63 which acts as a governmental rationality insofar as it breaks the biological continuum of life by dividing it into ‘superior/good’ and ‘inferior/bad races’, and establishes a relationship whereby the ‘the death of the bad race, of the inferior race … is something that will make life in general healthier’.Footnote 64 It follows that modern biopolitical racism is not exclusively and primarily ‘an irrational prejudice, a form of socio-political discrimination, or an ideological motive in a political doctrine; rather, it is a form of government that is designed to manage a population’Footnote 65 by raising the problem of ‘foreigners’ and ‘deviants’. Following Foucault, racism can be understood as a way to measure, assess, rank, intervene on, and distribute individuals in the domain of the living according to their endowment or absence of those biological qualities that can contribute to the well-being and flourishing of the population. Modern biopolitical racism is an essential component of biopower. It is ‘a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die’.Footnote 66
According to Foucault, biopolitical racism, while shaped by traditional forms of racism based on nationality, ethnicity, religion, colour, and gender, also partially transcends them. As Roxanne Doty has perceptively observed, Foucault’s approach to racism rests on a ‘differentialist’ perspective.Footnote 67 The latter deems ‘race’ a mobile category and a product of the underlying governmental rationality – racism – that constructs the category of race and endows it with meaning according to shifting and evolving (bio)political circumstances.Footnote 68 It follows that, from the perspective of biopolitical racism, the boundary that separates ‘superior’ and ‘inferior races’ is a tool of the biopolitical governmentality targeting the population rather than what delimitates its space of action. This means that the boundary between ‘superior’ and ‘inferior races’ – that is, the boundary between the population under power’s control and external ‘others’ – can be redrawn beyond traditional forms of racism (based on nationality, ethnicity, religion, colour, and gender) if members of the ‘inferior races’ are deemed instrumental to enhance the material and emotional life of the population. This suggests that practices of humanitarian government resulting in the acceptance of refugees may not have as their exclusive (or even primary) goal the care of ‘disenfranchised subjects’, but the care and well-being of host populations. Humanitarian government, in other words, may be a biopolitical governmentality targeting host populations aimed at enhancing their emotional and material well-being.
In order to better understand this argument, it is necessary to consider how European anxieties about refugees have been exacerbated by the predominantly Muslim identity of those seeking refuge. The widespread European perception of Islam as a backward, irrational, violent-prone religion that promotes terrorism and gender inequality, unable to distinguish between facts and beliefs, and unwilling to accept the separation between religion and politicsFootnote 69 has fuelled traditional manifestations of racism mostly in the form of anti-Muslimism or Islamophobia.Footnote 70 These manifestations have ranged from several European countries (including Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Cyprus) refusing to take in Muslim refugees or expressing strong preferences towards Christian refugees in order to preserve their Christian identity,Footnote 71 to media representations of Muslim refugees as ‘patriarchal, homophobic, violent threats to personal, national and international security’ as well as ‘“rapefugees” and innate sexual predators [as in the infamous Charlie Hebdo cartoon depicting a grown-up Alan Kurdi molesting women] following the attacks on European women in Cologne on New Years’ Eve’.Footnote 72 However, despite these traditional manifestations of racism grounded in a deep-seated mistrust and suspicion of Islam, a number of Muslim refugees have been portrayed as ‘good refugees’ who should be welcomed.
As Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh explains, Syrian refugees as a whole have been initially framed as ‘good refugees’, that is, as ‘both legitimate and priority “candidates” for international protection’ to the effect that they have been ‘fast- tracked’ and given precedence over Iraqis and Afghans, who have been treated as ‘second-tier refugees’.Footnote 73 However, with the intensification of the crisis, the binary clichéd representation of ‘good/deserving/real refugees’ versus ‘bad/undeserving/bogus refugees’ has also begun to apply to Syrian asylum seekers. In particular, the figure of the ‘good/deserving/real refugee’ has been employed to describe ‘women, children and male victims of violence who patiently wait in refugee camps to be rescued by British/European/Western saviours’.Footnote 74 Conversely, bad refugees are those who exercise agency by taking matters in their own hands and initiate the dangerous journey across sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean to seek refuge in Europe. They ‘challenge the script “refugee=victim” thus becoming a “swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean”’Footnote 75 (as UK Prime Minister David Cameron infamously stated), ‘“queue jumpers” and “bogus asylum seekers”’ who are jeopardising the protection claims made by ‘real’ (that is, ‘good’) refugees,Footnote 76 economic migrants and potential terrorists who put at risk the survival of the nation. The ‘good refugee’, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh remarks, is epitomised by the hybrid figure of the weakened and dependent ‘womanandchild’, as per Cynthia Enloe’s definition.Footnote 77 This figure of defenceless, apolitical and innocent victimhood, highly valued in ‘the global meritocracy of suffering’,Footnote 78 has more recently also been extended to vulnerable male figures, such as Laith Majid, a Syrian refugee who was pictured ‘weeping in relief as he reaches the island of Kos holding his 7-year-old daughter in his arms and hugging his 9-year-old son’ and was subsequently dubbed by the BBC as one of the ‘faces of the migration crisis’.Footnote 79
Undoubtedly, the ‘good refugee’ discourse draws on a series of racial and gender stereotypes: the defenceless Muslim woman (doubly victim of Islamic patriarchy and war), the innocent child (not yet corrupted by the ideology of Islam), and the desexualised and even feminised, and for this very reason, non-threatening Muslim man (the negation of the hypersexualised, violent, and fanatic Muslim). Similarly, the figure of the ‘good refugee’ rests on a paternalistic racism that reinforces notions of racial superiority, magnanimity, and moral righteousness. This paternalistic racism crystallises the inequality and power imbalance between ‘white’ and ‘brown’ lives and, as Mahmood Mamdani observes, constructs Muslims as ‘petrified into a lifeless custom … incapable of transforming their culture’ with the effect that their ‘salvation lies, as always, in philanthropy, in being saved from the outside’.Footnote 80 However, I want to argue, the identification of certain Muslim groups as ‘good refugees’ who deserve protection and inclusion also signals a very partial suspension and re-elaboration of racist prejudices about Islam. What makes this possible?
Humanitarian government scholars would argue that it is the representation and construction of certain Muslims as ‘womenandchildren’ or ‘menandchildren’ in need that prompts the humanitarian response and an equally important exacerbation of racial prejudices and securitisation towards those Muslims – male, single, healthy, and young who have already crossed or attempt to cross the Mediterranean – who escape the status of victims to be rescued and are perceived as economic migrants, sexual predators, and potential terrorists. While agreeing with this argument, the biopolitical perspective advanced in this article emphasises that the deflation of racism towards ‘womenandchildren’ and ‘menandchildren’ Muslim refugees and its exasperation towards other Muslim refugees represents an instantion of biopolitical racism that redraws the line between ‘superior’ and ‘inferior races’. As it was suggested, biopolitical racism may re-elaborate traditional forms of racism if some members of the ‘inferior races’ are deemed instrumental to enhance the life of the host population. Accordingly, the humanitarian government of a few Syrian refugees victims of violence and abuse and/or whose suffering has been caught on camera and ‘gone viral’ may be primarily a biopolitical governmentality that has the host population as its object. This biopolitical outlook, however, raises a series of questions: What makes these ‘sick’ and ‘feminised’ refugees ‘valuable’ from a biopolitical perspective? How can they maximise the life of the populations hosting them?
Numerous scholars have argued that, from the perspective of biopolitical governmentality, ‘valuable lives’ may be considered those that can be inscribed into neoliberal logics of entrepreneurship and resilience, responsibility and self-governance, security and risk, competition and inequality, consumption and accumulation, circulation and dispossession.Footnote 81 This view finds resonance in Foucault’s understanding of biopower as an ‘indispensable element’ in the development of neoliberal capitalism, which would not have been possible ‘without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production’, ‘the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes’, and the development of ‘methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general’.Footnote 82 This argument rests on a widespread ‘biological’ understanding of biopolitics, what Vivienne Jabri has perceptively described as ‘the biologization of power’,Footnote 83 namely, the fact that, with biopolitics, ‘the basic biological features of the human species’ become ‘the object of political strategisation’.Footnote 84 Life understood in its material, biological, and molecular dimensions becomes the object of a complex assemblage of biopolitical interventions aimed at its regulation, evaluation, hierarchisation, entrepreneurialisation, commodification, securitisation and, overall, neoliberal subjectification for the purpose of enhancing its strength, value, productive, and reproductive capacity. From this perspective, ‘valuable lives’ in biopolitical terms are those that can be transformed ‘into value, in the form of commodity and capital’,Footnote 85 and can adapt and contribute to the reproduction of the neoliberal biopolitical order, thus generating surplus life that may strengthen the life of the population.Footnote 86
From this perspective, sick ‘womenandchildren’ refugees – such as those that the UK has pledged to take in directly from camps in Syria’s neighbouring countries – can hardly be considered ‘valuable’ in biopolitical terms. The decision to care for a small number of ‘sick bodies’ that would be a burden for the welfare state, could not generate biological surplus-life, could not be integrated into neoliberal mechanisms of economic control, and would not contribute to strengthening and maximising the biological life of the British population, would indeed appear to be a case of humanitarian government. It entails: focusing on a small number of individual lives rather than a population as a whole, as Fassin would suggest; providing a ‘temporary and ad hoc intervention’, as Walters would remark;Footnote 87 concentrating on the ‘politics of compassion’ of the ‘humanitarian present’ at the expense of long term solutions, as Weizman would argue; welcoming refugees as objects of care and compassion rather than equal citizens, as Ticktin would observe; and hardening the borders for those ‘able-bodied migrants’ who would attempt to find refuge in Europe, thus deploying humanitarianism as part of an autoimmune securitising logic, as Little and Vaughan-Williams would emphasise.
However, if a strictly biological reading of biopolitics is abandoned, it is possible to consider how sick ‘womenandchildren’ refugees may be ‘valuable’ from a biopolitical perspective, that is, capable of enhancing and maximising the life of the populations hosting them. Ted Rutland, for instance, has argued that an exclusive biological outlook displays ‘an unduly narrow conception of biopolitics’.Footnote 88 It neglects how biopolitics transcends ‘the most basic biological or medical dimensions of existence’ such as ‘the health of the population; its longevity, growth, and decline; and its physical security’ and encompasses a specific concern with the affective and emotional life of the population,Footnote 89 which is not merely derivative of biological interventions.Footnote 90 Biopolitics, in other words, would not just focus on the material dispositions of the population in order to promote and advance its biological well-being, neither could it be reduced to the cultivation of feelings of uncertainty, fear, anxiety, and insecurity in order to fashion resilient subjects capable of withstanding and adapting to the shocks of the neoliberal economic order,Footnote 91 and in order to justify its power to kill or let die those members of the subspecies that represent a threat. Crucially, biopolitics would also entail caring for and, therefore, intervening on, the emotional life of the population. In order to appreciate this argument it is necessary to further excavate Foucault’s biopolitical account beyond its manifest concern with the biological and consider the role that pastoral power and the police have in the genealogy of biopolitics. The relevance of these two technologies of government in relation to the biopolitical preoccupation for the emotional well-being of the population has often been paid limited attention to or been neglected in international relations scholarship on biopolitics.Footnote 92
For Foucault, pastoral power and the police represent crucial dimensions in the genealogy of modern biopolitics.Footnote 93 While a full exploration of this genealogy would be beyond the scope of this article, for the purpose of my argument it is important to consider that pastoral power, with the metaphor of God as a shepherd, involved a fundamental focus on the ‘care of souls’.Footnote 94 It was exercised by the shepherd over a flock, and endowed the shepherd with the task ‘to provide continuous material and spiritual welfare for each and every member of the flock’.Footnote 95 Pastoral power was thus ‘a beneficent power’, a ‘power of care’,Footnote 96 concerned with ‘constantly ensur[ing], sustain[ing], and improve[ing] the lives of each and every one’,Footnote 97 and with providing ‘spiritual direction’.Footnote 98 Its ultimate task was the spiritual ‘salvation of the flock’ and of every single sheep in the flock, with the effect that pastoral power was both an individualising and massifying power.Footnote 99 According to Foucault, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a fundamental transformation in the logics and reach of the pastorate that ceased to be an exclusively religious phenomenon. It migrated to the political sphere and crucially shaped the first governmental rationality of the modern state, namely raison d'État (reason of state). The latter had as its goal the strengthening of the state through a technology of power focused on the unlimited regulation of its subjects, from their economic activity to their social behaviours through the ‘unlimited objectives’ of the ‘police’.Footnote 100
With this term, Foucault does not understand ‘exclusively the institution of police in the modern sense’, but also, and possibly more importantly, a regulatory type of power concerned with ‘the art of managing life and the well-being of populations’.Footnote 101 Police thus stands for policy or ‘science of policy’ and has as its main goals attending to the basic necessity of life of the population, providing its members with an education and an occupation, making possible their orderly circulation, and ensuring the growth of their wealth and the preservation of their health. All these goals are, of course, instrumental for augmenting and enhancing the state’s strength. However, Foucault continues, in order to achieve this task, the police cannot just attend to the biological well-being of the population, but must also focus on ‘individual felicity’, on the ‘well-being [of the population] beyond [mere biological] being’, by ‘procuring the happiness of its subjects’.Footnote 102 As Mika Ojakangas explains, even though the new rationality of government that underscores the biopolitical project relinquishes the goal of total control of raison d'État by introducing the principle of self-limitation of governmental reason, the concern with happiness and care for the emotional well-being of the population retains a central presence in the biopolitical episteme (with the effect that the ‘ideology of the police’ should be considered a crucial precursor of modern biopolitics).Footnote 103
Recent research in human geography and cultural studies has emphasised how ‘the affective life of individuals and collectives is an “object-target of” and “condition for” contemporary forms of biopower’.Footnote 104 Two main dynamics can be identified. First, ‘capital extracts value from affect – around consumer confidence, political fears, etc., such that the difference between commodification and labor, production and reproduction, are collapsed in the modulation of the capacity to circulate affect’.Footnote 105 Second, capital does not just extract value from affect. As part of the neoliberal process of economisation of society,Footnote 106 affect becomes itself a form of capital that is instrumental for governing the population. Promoting enjoyment, positive feelings, fulfilling emotions, and rewarding passions – in other words – caring for the emotional well-being of the population through the accumulation of constructive sentiments becomes a central biopolitical rationality of government.
This perspective raises a crucial question on the British policy towards Syrian refugees. Could it be understood as a case not just of humanitarian government of refugees, but also of biopolitical government of the British population through the humanitarian government of Syrian refugees? Could the Syrian sick children, women who had been raped and men who had suffered torture to whom the government promised sanctuary be considered biopolitically ‘valuable lives’ because instrumental to enticing positive feelings of compassion and moral righteousness in the British population? Could this be a case in which the ‘differentialist’ rationality of biopolitical racism redraws the line between who must live and who must die because the inclusion of Syrian ‘sick’ and ‘womenandchildren’ bodies in the population contributes to enhance and maximise the latter’s emotional well-being? In the next section, I will explore this argument by analysing the UK decision to suspend search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean in 2014, and by comparing the British and German different responses to the plight of Syrian refugees following the death of Alan Kurdi. My argument will be that these responses have been informed by both emotional and biological biopolitical rationalities of care of the British and German populations.
III. Blame and emotional-biological care in the British and German responses to the refugee crisis
An important argument that emerged in the first section of this article is that humanitarian government entails a process of depoliticisation of suffering. The emotional language that frames this phenomenon obscures the causes of domination, injustice, and violence by replacing them with a grammar of solidarity and compassion. To reprise a previous quote by Ticktin, humanitarian government constructs suffering bodies as ‘victim[s] without a perpetrator’, and when it occasionally acknowledges the presence of a perpetrator, it eschews political responsibility by blaming ‘third parties’, such as criminal networks (as discussed by Little and Vaughan-Williams), or natural environments (as discussed by Williams and by Doty). However, from the perspective I advanced in the previous section – the humanitarian government of refugees as a biopolitical governmentality of the population aimed at enhancing its biological and emotional well-being – depoliticisation may not be a tenable rationality of government in the long run. How is it possible to care for the emotional well-being of the population when humanitarian practices towards a minority entail the securitisation of the majority of refugees, with the effect of letting many of them die, as in the 2014 British decision to stop search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean? If the death of undocumented migrants can be justified through biopolitical racism as a biological necessity in order to preserve the culture, wealth, and health of the population, how can the killing or letting die of refugees not result in feelings of guilt, sadness, remorse that run counter to the biopolitical goal of enhancing the emotional welfare of the population? My argument is that humanitarian government entails not just the depoliticisation of suffering – the construction of ‘victims without a perpetrator’ – but the identification of a perpetrator in the migrants themselves. It entails blaming refugees for their own suffering.Footnote 107 The UK decision to suspend search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean provides a remarkable illustration of this case.
In October 2014, the UK Government announced that it would no longer support search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean on the grounds that such operations are ‘an unintended “pull factor”, encouraging more migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing and thereby leading to more tragic and unnecessary deaths’ (then UK Foreign Office Minister Lady Anelay).Footnote 108 While this argument concealed the political causes of suffering – ‘push factors’ such as extreme poverty, persecution, war, famines, genocide, and European political responsibilities – it did not simply promote a process of depoliticisation, but one of blaming undocumented migrants for their own suffering. Undocumented migrants were portrayed – in a rather paternalistic and racist fashion – as fundamentally irresponsible, since they would choose to embark on a journey that has resulted in over 20,000 deaths over the last twenty years and 3,000 deaths between January and September 2015 (and over 5,000 deaths in 2016).Footnote 109 Hence, this biopolitics of blame enabled the UK to portray itself as a responsible ‘fatherly’ actor – whose responsibility would consist in letting the irresponsible migrants drown to prevent ‘unnecessary deaths’. This argument has acquired a prominent place in current public debates on migration. Looking at readers’ comments to online articles documenting recent tragedies in the Mediterranean, one easily encounters the following: ‘These People leave their countries at their own risk and peril and if they are so crazy to brave danger they should face the Music [sic] and if they at last find death, it is only their fault if they come to a bad end’; ‘If you feel that it’s your fault I and others certainly do not feel that it is ours. These irresponsible ILLEGAL immigrants know what dangers they will face so let them face the consequences’; ‘Honestly these people flee their own mess, their wars were to get rid of their dictatorship … sorry but it is NOT our fault.’Footnote 110
Blaming irregular migrants for their tragic destiny should be considered a form of biopolitical care for the emotional well-being of the British population: a way of exempting it from responsibility for the recurrent tragedies in the Mediterranean. This biopolitics of care has been supported by the deployment of biopolitical racism that has contributed to construct refugees as the embodiment of an ‘inferior race’ that threatens the British population. The nature of biopolitical racism in the British context needs to be understood with reference to the sociopolitical anxiety about Islam discussed in the previous section, and to long-standing fears about Britain being ‘swamped by people with a different culture’, as Margaret Thatcher infamously declared in 1978, stating that it was necessary to ‘allay people’s fear on numbers’.Footnote 111 These concerns have shaped a refugee policy that, across different Conservative and Labour prime ministers, has shown a central preoccupation with ‘bogus’ and ‘undeserving’ asylum seekers threatening the identity, culture, wealth, and health of the British population and undermining the protection that should be offered to ‘genuine refugees’.Footnote 112 It is revealing that a 2003 poll for The Times indicated the number of asylum seekers as ‘the most serious problem in Britain at present’, whereas a study published a year later by the Information Centre about Asylum and Refugees (ICAR) highlighted how some of the key terms and expressions used by the popular press to describe asylum seekers and refugees included ‘scrounger, sponger, fraudster, robbing the system’, ‘burden/strain on resources’, ‘illegal working, cheap labour’, ‘criminal, violent’, ‘mob, horde, riot, rampage, disorder’, and ‘a threat, a worry, to be feared’.Footnote 113
Back to the current crisis, the construction of refugees as potentially ‘bogus’, expression of an ‘inferior race’ (in Foucauldian biopolitical terms) and ultimately responsible for their destiny was not substantially undermined by the 19 April 2015 shipwreck, when a migrants’ boat capsized off the coast of Libya, killing an estimated 700 people in what Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat described as the ‘biggest human tragedy of the last few years’.Footnote 114 Following mounting public pressure, the UK government backtracked from its opposition to search-and-rescue operations. It admitted that the idea that they would be a ‘pull’ factor was based on ‘anecdotal’ evidence and that halting these operations had failed. While this prompted the British government to send a Royal Navy ship to the Mediterranean to resume search-and-rescue operations, thus implicitly acknowledging that there were legitimate ‘push’ factors behind the migrants’ decision to cross the Mediterranean, it continued to uphold that the ultimate responsibility for the migrants’ destiny lay with the migrants themselves. Accordingly, the public representation of refugees as an ‘inferior race’ that threatened the British way of life continued unabated. In July 2015, David Cameron spoke of ‘a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean, seeking a better life, wanting to come to Britain because Britain has got jobs, it’s got a growing economy, it’s an incredible place to live’.Footnote 115 A month later, he reinforced the classic refrain of economic migrants disguised as refugees coming to the UK to steal jobs and depress wages by portraying them as burglars trying to ‘break into Britain without permission’.Footnote 116
A more forceful challenge to the British refugee policy eventually came a few months later, in September 2015, with the death of three-year-old Alan Kurdi on the coast of the Turkish holiday resort of Bodrum. The picture of his dead body washed ashore prompted a strong sense of identification, with thousands of emotional comments inundating the media, such as: ‘My god, that could be my child, who has the same colour hair, the same chubby legs.’Footnote 117 The reason for this was that Alan represented the ‘ideal refugee’: a child, an innocent apolitical victim who would have deserved to be helped. Cameron was quick to embrace the emotional wave – ‘Anyone who saw those pictures overnight could not help but be moved and, as a father, I felt deeply moved by the sight of that young boy on a beach in Turkey’, he declaredFootnote 118 – and, following mounting public pressure for more open and welcoming immigration policies, vowed that the UK would ‘fulfil’ its ‘moral responsibilities’ towards Syrian refugees by taking 20,000 of them directly from camps neighbouring Syria over a period of five years. From a humanitarian government perspective, the decision to take only sick children, women who had been raped, and men who had suffered torture would be considered an instantiation of the simultaneous deployment of logics of care for a small group of ‘sick bodies’ that would be welcomed as objects of compassion, rather than equal citizens, and logics of security for the majority of refugees, for whom the borders would be further hardened; it would be considered a case of temporary and ad hoc intervention which privileges an immediate compassionate response that focuses on few individual lives and fails to address the underlying root causes of the problem, and which ultimately underscores autoimmune tendencies that negate the very lives that are claimed to be saved.
Yet, from the complementary perspective that I have articulated in this article, it can be argued that this initiative was not just – and not primarily – aimed at governing Syrian refugees, but the emotional well-being of the British population. The flurry of calls urging the government to act, in fact, also raised a series of questions about British identity, the crisis of British value, and the extent to which Britain was failing the test of compassion. Harshly criticising ‘the UK’s dismal record on refugees’, well below that of comparable nations in the European Union, the Financial Times wrote that ‘there is a compassionate and humane streak in the British people that ought not to be underestimated. As Europe’s refugee crisis develops, it is not the defensive crouch of Mr Cameron that Britons may come to admire but the courage and principle of Ms Merkel’.Footnote 119 ‘British people are compassionate people who will want to play their part’ wrote two Labour MPs (Stephen Timms and Lyn Brown),Footnote 120 echoed by several Tory MPs who tweeted: ‘We r nothing without compassion. Pic should make us all ashamed. We have failed in Syria. I am sorry little angel, RIP’ (Nadhim Zahawi); ‘The UK I know has always shouldered its burden in the world. DfID is doing life-saving work abroad but we can – & must – do more at home’ (Ruth Davidson); ‘We cannot be the generation that fails this test of humanity. We must do all we can’ (Nicola Blackwood).Footnote 121 Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron labelled the government policy on refugee as ‘morally wrong’, while Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon urged to ‘do more’.Footnote 122 On traditional and social media the idea that ‘British values demand that we aid Syria refugees’Footnote 123 gained a remarkable momentum.
Undoubtedly, Cameron’s pledge to take in 20,000 Syrian refugees was a way of quelling public and political pressures, including from his own party. The focus on ‘womenandchildren’ refugees taken directly from Syrian camps drew on racial and gender stereotypes and displayed a paternalist racism that reproduced the refugees as helpless victims who should be rewarded for patiently waiting in camp, thus further condemning those who would decide to exercise agency by seeking refuge in Europe. Yet, Cameron’s pledge was also instrumental to re-establish the social imaginary of Britain ‘as a moral nation … fulfil[ling] … [its] moral responsibilities’,Footnote 124 hence instrumental to govern the emotional welfare of the British population, whose consciousness was no longer pacified by the ‘bogus’ refugee narrative and the idea that all undocumented migrants were victims of their own actions. Biopolitical rationalities and racism partially redrew the line between who must live and who should die by constructing Syrian sick children, women who had been raped, and men who had suffered torture as ‘valuable’ refugees who could enhance and maximise the emotional life of the country by restoring a self-understanding of Britain as compassionate, moral, and caring. Cameron’s humanitarian government of a tiny fraction of Syrian refugees was thus of a way of governing the emotional well-being of the British population and enhancing its sense of self-appreciation and self-worthiness. Yet, as I shall discuss in the remainder of this section, this limited act of humanitarianism also responded to biological governmental rationalities of care. In order to explore this argument, it is useful to compare the British response to Alan’s death to the German one.
Shortly after Alan’s tragic drowning, Germany decided to immediately allow in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees and vowed to welcome up to 800,000 refugees a year. Numerous explanations have been advanced for this landmark historical decision, including: Germans’ own experience as refugees in the aftermath of the Second World War, when 12 million German citizens and people of German ancestry were expelled from Eastern European countries; historical guilt for the devastations of Nazism and the Holocaust; a reaction against mounting xenophobia; Germany’s ‘controversial role in the Greek debt crisis’, and the desire of Chancellor Angela Merkel to display a humanity that had been perceived as missing in the German imposition of draconian austerity measures on Southern Europe and particularly Greece; Germany’s commitment to save Europe by preventing a humanitarian catastrophe that would most likely destabilise the countries along the Balkan refugee route; Merkel’s own experience of growing up in East Germany as captured by her rebuttal to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s hope that more fences be built across Europe: ‘I lived behind a fence for too long for me to now wish for those times to return’; and Merkel’s own vision of Christian justice, the result of her upbringing as the daughter of a socialist pastor, which requires caring for those in need of help and the strangers ‘standing in the rain before your door’, and summarised by her statement: ‘We hold speeches on Sundays and we talk about values. I am the chair of a Christian political party. And then people come to us from 2,000 kilometers away and … you can’t show a friendly face here anymore?’.Footnote 125
German openness to Syrian refugees should also be understood as part of a particularly welcoming refugee policy that, until 1992, was embedded in the constitution.Footnote 126 The subsequent restriction of this ‘previously unqualified right’,Footnote 127 did not prevent Germany from hosting ‘more than 2 million refugees from conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, as well Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia’.Footnote 128 The ‘compassionate pragmatism’ of German ‘Willkommenskultur’ (culture of welcome), also motivated by the desire to oppose the still glimmering embers of racism and xenophobia,Footnote 129 has contributed to establish a self-understanding of Germany as a moral leader, capable of expressing solidarity towards distant strangers in need and, in the words of German President Joachim Gauck, committed to ‘do more … better … in respect of … the rights we have and are committed to … [and] together [with other European countries], as Europeans’.Footnote 130 The Syrian refugee crisis has thus resulted in the emergence of a growing ‘emotional experience’ and ‘the formation of an affective block between refugees and large parts of the German population’.Footnote 131 This suggests that the dissolution of the German border for hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees may also be considered a form of biopolitical governmentality that has had as its target not only – and possibly not primarily – Syrian refugees, but the German population, its identity and self-understanding through the care of its emotional well-being.
This biopolitical care of emotions, however, would not be sufficient, alone, to explain the German ‘open-arms’ policy. Biopolitical questions concerning the biological well-being of the German population have been equally central. They encompass the idea, championed by Angela Merkel in her 2016 new year address, that ‘countries have always benefited from successful immigration, both economically and socially’,Footnote 132 and the view of the CEO of Daimler, a major German automotive corporation, that: ‘Most refugees are young, well-educated, and highly motivated – just the sort of people we are looking for’ (a view shared by numerous other large German companies).Footnote 133 These perspectives are the expression of a central biopolitical technology of government: managing and regulating the demographic trends of the population in order to ensure a constant homeostasis ‘between resources and inhabitants’.Footnote 134 From this perspective, it is essential to consider that Germany’s population is declining and ageing. Whereas the population of the UK is rising steeply (expected to rise from 64.1 to 80.1 million by 2060), Germany’s is falling (expected to shrink from 81.3 to 70.8 in 2060).Footnote 135 As a result, ‘the dependency ratio (the proportion of expensive older people in the population relative to able-bodied, tax-generating workers) is rising much quicker in Germany than in the UK’.Footnote 136
Hence, according to a report published by the Centre for European Economic Research, for Germany to be able to continue to provide support for non-working older people, it will need to have an annual net immigration of more than 200,000 skilled or semi-skilled people.Footnote 137 This is expected to result in a significant economic gain considering that, in 2012, the 6.6 million foreign residents living in Germany generated a surplus (more taxes paid than social transfers received) of 22 billion euros, which is expected to reach 147.9 billion euros over their remaining life cycle.Footnote 138 As German economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel stated, ‘If we manage to quickly train those that come to us and to get them into work, then we will solve one of our biggest problems for the economic future of our country’ and, German labour minister Andrea Nahles remarked, ‘We will profit from this, too.’Footnote 139 This argument has been explicitly couched in biological terms by finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, who warned that ‘[s]ealing ourselves off [from migrants] is what would ruin us, leaving us to degenerate through inbreeding’,Footnote 140 thus framing migration as an opportunity to strengthen the German ‘race’ (in biopolitical terms).
This biopolitical concern with the material well-being of the German population clearly illustrates the connections between neoliberal accumulation and biological reproduction – the inscription of bodies ‘into systems of efficient and economic controls’ described by Foucault – and how they are employed as a means to govern an ageing population and ensure its biological flourishing and well-being. This argument does not suggest that the biopolitical governmentality of emotions previously discussed is merely derivative of biological preoccupations, but rather that emotional and biological concerns should be considered mutually supporting and reinforcing forces at the heart of the biopolitical governmentality of populations. This does not mean that the result is a seamless biopolitical regime of government that eschews contradictions. Indeed, Merkel has been the object of growing internal criticism from multiple sectors of society which see the significant influx of refugees as a threat to German national identity, cohesion and well-being – that is, to use Foucault’s terminology, as a threat to the German ‘race’ – with the effect that support for the ‘open door’ policy has partially declined. Equally, some European countries have accused Germany’s open door policy of exacerbating the crisis by providing migrants with a further incentive to relocate to Europe, thus further endangering the European ‘race’. These tensions, however, have not undermined the biological and emotional rationalities of care at the heart of the humanitarian government of Syrian refugees. These rationalities have prompted the dissolution of borders for hundreds of thousands of them, and their reclassification from ‘undocumented migrants’ to ‘valuable’ members of society who will contribute to furthering Germany’s moral, emotional, and material well-being.
In the case of the UK, the humanitarian government of Syrian refugees has resulted in a much more limited reappraisal of the meaning and boundaries of biopolitical race. Their evaluation as valuable members of society who could positively contribute to the emotional well-being of the British population has been counterbalanced by their disqualification as valuable from a biological perspective in view of Britain’s different demographic trends. Accordingly, the combined emotional and biological biopolitical apparatus has redrawn the racial divide between who must live and who must die by excluding able-bodied migrants (deemed unnecessary to support the British economy and its welfare provisions), and by including a small number of extremely vulnerable subjects who look like Alan Kurdi and who could satisfy the British population’s emotional need of understanding itself as compassionate, capable of empathising with distant strangers, and capable of fulfilling its ‘moral responsibilities’, as David Cameron put it. As in the case of Germany, this biopolitical governmentality has not eschewed criticism. A vast array of internal and external voices has accused the UK of not fulfilling its moral obligations given its economic and political strength, which would enable it to accommodate a more substantial number of refugees. At the same time, the UK approach has also garnered appreciation for ‘disciplining’ refugees, by teaching them that they should patiently wait in camps to be rescued, and for seemingly discouraging migrants to come to Europe/the UK by eliminating supposedly ‘pull factors’.Footnote 141 This implicit validation of biopolitical racism, which enthrones the UK with the power to decide who must live and who must die, ultimately has had as its referent object the goal of enhancing the emotional and material well-being of the British population.
Conclusion
According to Foucault, pastoral power is both a massifying and an individualising power concerned with the well-being of the whole flock and of every individual sheep in the flock. The shepherd has to insure the material and spiritual well-being of the flock in order to guide every single one of them to salvation. This task, though, may require, ‘accepting the sacrifice of a sheep that could compromise the whole. The sheep that is a cause of scandal, or whose corruption is in danger of corrupting the whole flock, must be abandoned, possibly excluded, chased away, and so forth’.Footnote 142 The modern rendering of this rationality of government, biopower, suggests that biopolitics is not just concerned with the population as a whole – as Fassin argues – but also with individual lives. The UK decision to take in a small number of children, women who had been raped, and men who suffered tortured directly from Syrian camps displays a concern with individual lives and also suggests, beyond existing accounts of humanitarian government, that the primary target of this biopolitics of care has not been Syrian refugees, but the British population and its emotional well-being following the death of Alan Kurdi.
The complementary dimension of this biopolitical governmentality of care is biopolitical racism. The latter has been instrumental to account for the overwhelming majority of undocumented migrants not cared for or left to die as ‘bogus’ asylum seekers – true suffering refugees should patiently wait in camps to be rescued – and therefore as the embodiment of an ‘inferior race’ coming to Britain to steal jobs and undermine the social and cultural cohesion of the population, and as responsible for their own destiny. As in Foucault’s description of the logics of pastoral power, the unwanted migrants threaten to corrupt ‘the whole flock, [and therefore] must be abandoned, possibly excluded, [and] chased away’. Conversely, in the case of Germany, a different demographic trend combined with different historical circumstances has contributed to a biopolitical evaluation of Syrian refugees as ‘valuable lives’ that could contribute to the emotional and material well-being of the German population. In this case, caring for large numbers of migrants has emerged as instrumental to promote and maximize the life of the population as whole, both in biological and emotional terms.
Crucial for the development of these arguments has been a ‘differentialist’ understanding of biopolitical racism, which highlighted how the ‘border’ that separates ‘superior’ and ‘inferior races’ is a tool of the biopolitical governmentality of population, rather than what delimitates its space of action. This border can be redrawn to include ‘valuable’ lives, that is, lives deemed instrumental to promote and enhance the biological and emotional life of the population. Accordingly, this article has argued that humanitarian government should be understood not just as the government and care of disenfranchised collectivities such as refugees, but also, and possibly more importantly, as the biopolitical governmentality and care of host populations through the humanitarian government of refugees.
This argument suggests a number of possible avenues for future research. In particular, it calls for a deeper understanding of the complexities and multiple significations that characterise the concept of biopolitics, and for a deeper understanding of the role that the ‘care of souls’ and the mobilisation and government of emotions play in the biopolitical governmentality of populations. This perspective, in turn, invites us to reconsider the emphasis placed by existing scholarship on feelings of uncertainty, fear, contingency, anxiety, and insecurity. While the latter play a key role in the biopolitical (in)securitisation of lifeFootnote 143 and in the related construction of neoliberal subjects,Footnote 144 the promotion of enjoyment, of positive feelings, and of morally rewarding emotions aimed at enhancing the self-appreciation of the population is an equally central focus of the biopolitical governmentality of populations.
This approach raises new questions on the biopolitical governmentality of the European refugee crisis and on who is actually being saved. There is no doubt that the goal of humanitarian government is saving the lives of refugees and undocumented migrants and that, as existing scholarship has highlighted, this politics of life is riddled with tensions, contradictions, paradoxes, and autoimmune tendencies which ultimately reveal the limits of the humanitarian ethos and the thrust of securitising rationalities at the heart of existing policies. However, as I have argued in this article, the humanitarian government of refugees may not just be about saving some of them while securitising the rest, but also about ‘saving’ host populations; it may be a self-referential, self-centred – and, in different degrees, a self-absolutory – act of care. From this perspective, the tensions between care and security highlighted by existing scholarship should not be considered solely as the expression of a paradox or as the limit of the humanitarian ethos, but as the rational deployment of a technology of government that frames the life of disenfranchised refugees as valuable only to the extent that it can contribute to the emotional and biological life of the host population.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Review of International Studies editors, the two anonymous reviewers, and Harmonie Toros, Erin K. Wilson, and Rosemary Shinko for their insightful comments and valuable suggestions.
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