Chapter 2: Identity and Migration: From the ‘Refugee Crisis’ to a Crisis of European Identity

Migration has a strong political significance and a crucial constitutive role for identity. The liminal status and exclusion of migrants delimits the inside/outside of political communities and allows for the constitution and coherence of identity. Migration is also a challenge: while it is often presented as a managerial issue related to states’ economic and labour considerations, it essentially challenges and undermines their national and cultural self-image. Migration management also reflects the values and qualities communities identify in themselves; thus immigration policies put communities and states to the test for the way such values are upheld. This contribution explores migration’s constitutive role for European identity and the challenges it presents it with. Explaining the securitisation of migration management in Europe and its racial and dehumanising characteristics, it argues that the two-tier human rights system created in the European space affecting migrants undermines European identity value claims and threatens to undo them. It claims that the time has come to acknowledge European identity’s historical constitution in colonialism, and to envisage it as a fluid, open-ended project accommodating in earnest racial and cultural diversity, pluralism and difference.