“From an Uncertain Border”. Double, Existential and Discursive, European Crisis: Changes of Glance, Between Migrants Crisis and Climate Change

Abstract

The issue concerning Europe’s borders and identity involves both a geopolitical and legal assessment but also, and above all, a socio-cultural historical, and therefore socio-semiotic, change. In recent years, several events, on the one hand, the so-called, “migrant crisis” (2015, 2016, as regards the Balkans, as well as southern Europe) with tragedies in the Mediterranean sea and related events. On the other hand, another figure of the crisis has emerged, apparently more on the background but at the same time involved the transformation of political discursiveness and of the issues within the media: that of the Climate and of the Environment. And today, we may add, even, a third crisis, the pandemic which is linked to the environmental crisis. In any case, the first crisis situation has been defined by some scholars as a real “war on migrants” (see Bojadžijev and Mezzadra, 2015, “Refugee crisis” or crisis of European migration policies? Focaal Blog, November 12. https://www.focaalblog.com/2015/11/12/manuela-bojadzijev-and-sandro-mezzadra-refugee-crisis-or-crisis-of-european-migration-policies/. Accessed 4 June 2020). The purpose of this chapter is to study the intersections between those two types of discourse: that on migrants and that on climate, to see how the forms of European identity have changed starting from these narratives and rhetorics. How does this multiple crisis hold together its seemingly distant themes and narratives?