Introduction: for a better understanding

On 24 October 2016, the evacuation of the Calais Jungle began. The relevant department of the French interior ministry and the police, along with members of various voluntary organizations, led the occupants of the shantytown camp to coaches that would take them to reception centres whose names and locations they did not know. In the first three days, a little more than 3,000 people were moved in this way. On the third day, the destruction of dwellings began, and also of the communal facilities built during the previous eighteen months of occupation and installation. At the end of the same week, the government authorities announced that the 'dismantling' was finished. In fact, the complete destruction would still take a few more days. Left until last were the containers that the government had decided to place in the middle of the Jungle nearly a year earlier. These were taken apart and removed a few weeks later.

The demolition of the Jungle was seen as a success. It took place at the start of a major election campaign in France (the presidential elections of April and May 2017), in which the existing government sought (without success) to win back an electorate that it had very largely lost. To this end it wanted to show signs of its 'firmness' and 'humanity', in the official 'elements of language'. Above all, the state sought to demonstrate its ability to suppress the public problem posed by the migrants, through the disappearance of the migrants themselves along with any trace of their local presence, their settlement on the ground. This would be the signal of a strong state, protecting the national territory against undesirable foreigners.

A longer history of the Jungle

And yet, only a few months later, at the end of January 2017, the national press as well as voluntary organizations acknowledged that migrants were still at Calais. Those who had been unwilling to take the coaches the previous October had dispersed in the region around the town and were now coming back, while others returned from further away, after realizing that the reception centres (Centres d'Accueil et d'Orientation [Reception and Orientation Centres], or CAOs) to which they had been taken when the Jungle was demolished were a dead end, since they neither resolved the administrative obstacles to their asylum requests nor succeeded in making them abandon the attempt to cross to Britain. Thus the history of the Calais migrants did not finish with the 'eviction' of October 2016 (studied in detail in chapter 5). The story that needs to be told is a much longer one - in its historical and geographical context, European and regional - just as we have to understand what happened in this shantytown - or rather a town and a community in the process of coming together - that the whole world called 'the Jungle', and where, at least at one point, 10,000 people lived. What crazy mechanisms enabled Europe, and in particular France and the United Kingdom, to 'invent' and 'manufacture', then destroy, this unnameable place? So unnameable that fear was further intensified by calling it a 'Jungle', taking up, distorting and above all re-signifying the Pashtun word djangal (which, in its original language, simply means a bit of forest) so as to Westernize it a bit, and thus designate it from this point of view, French and European, as a negatively exotic and disturbing place, more distant than it is in reality, and less human.

What the present book describes is the very opposite of this. Based on a chronological and monographic study conducted by a team that included researchers, students and members of voluntary organizations,1 it offers points of reference to help understand what has been happening at Calais for the last fifteen years and more - and has continued since the demolition of the camp and the dispersal of its occupants. Also the book describes and analyses what happened in the Jungle itself between April 2015 and October 2016, the respective dates of the opening of the encampment and of its destruction. The overall context of the Jungle is what has been called in Europe the 'migrant crisis'. But the causal connection between the formation and development of this site and the so-called migrant crisis is only very indirect. What is taking place on the Franco-British border has its origin in the 1990s. It is important to place this situation in an older local and regional context: that of Europe's external borders since 1995 and the establishment of the Schengen space (connected also with the borders at Ceuta, Melilla and Patras - see map 1). At the same time, to take Calais as a case study means describing an example of the European crisis in general.

Map 1. The Schengen area.

The closing of the Sangatte camp in 2002 (the emergency shelter and reception centre of the Red Cross, 1999-2002) was already supposed to mean, according to the French government of the time, that 'there will be no more crossing at Calais'. However, thousands of migrants of different generations and nationalities (Kosovars, Kurds, Afghans, Eritreans, Sudanese, Iraqis, Syrians, etc.) continued to wander in the region between Calais and Dunkirk. They tried to cross to the UK despite the Franco-British agreement on keeping migrants on French territory, made at Le Touquet in 2003. The formation of the Calais encampment - also called a 'state shantytown' or the 'New Jungle' when it was created in April 2015 - was just one episode in this long border history, and certainly a singular one, in the context of the exceptional arrival of a million migrants in Europe that year. From Lesbos to Calais, Idomeni to Ventimiglia, hundreds of encampments, reception and holding centres, 'hot spots' and other sites of confinement developed as never before around Europe's borders, in its margins and even at the heart of its cities.2

Europe and the migration question

The policy of removing undesirable immigrants began twenty-five years earlier, with the 'Schengen process', whose regulations centred on taking measures to prevent their entry into this territory. The European Council meeting held at Tampere in October 1999, which started the process of harmonizing policies in this field, saw the appearance of the concept of 'external action' or 'externalization', as well as 'partnership with the countries of origin', which would lead in the following years to a policy of subcontracting the management of migration and asylum to countries in Africa and the Middle East. The concept of externalization reappeared in the agenda of a meeting at The Hague in October 2004 (which set the programme and objectives for European asylum and immigration policy for the following five years), as well as in the proposal of Tony Blair's government that centres for sorting asylum requests should be set up in the countries around the European Union. The following years brought the question of control and criminalization of migrants to the heart of European policy, to the detriment of integration and reception. The March 2016 agreement between the EU and Turkey represents one of the latest examples of the drift in European policy, externalization of border control to third countries being a central pillar of this. Moreover, at the level of member states, emergency management not only substitutes for any real long-term planning, but also for genuine measures that would reduce deaths at sea, which are tragically rising every year.3

The year 2015 was marked by an increase in the number of refugees entering European territory. The figure reached over a million individuals. There then followed a brief period in which the determination of these refugees, combined with the interests of certain member states, made it possible to reverse the trend and create what would be known as the 'Balkan corridor', which offered a safe and rapid passage for refugees from Greece towards Austria and Germany. But this corridor began to close in November 2015, when at Idomeni, on the border between Macedonia and Greece, an arbitrary sorting of entries began, allowing only individuals of Syrian and Iraqi nationality to cross.

Early in 2016 this border closed completely, at the same time as did the entire Balkan corridor (the Greece-Macedonia-Serbia-Hungary (or Croatia/Slovenia)-Austria route). The refugees who continued to arrive in Greece, chiefly across the Aegean Sea, remained boxed in on Greek territory, in reception camps opened by the government under pressure from the EU ('hot spots'), where conditions were inhumane, or in makeshift camps around the borders, such as those that formed at Idomeni and Piraeus. The signing of the agreement between the EU and Turkey on 18 March 2016 went in the same direction of closure. In exchange for a faster process of visa issue for Turkish citizens, as well as ?6 billion, Turkey committed itself to controlling its borders and readmitting to its territory those asylum seekers on the Greek islands who were considered non-admissible. If arrivals on mainland Greece significantly diminished in the wake of this agreement, the Greek islands, and particularly Lesbos, were transformed into...