Governing Potential: Biopolitical Incorporation and the German “Open-Door” Refugee and Migration Policy

Abstract

Many scholars of International Political Sociology have turned to biopolitics in their attempts to understand the 'European migration/refugee crisis' which has unfolded in and around the Mediterranean Sea in the last several years. This article makes an intervention into this debate by suggesting a new means of understanding the biopolitics of migration and refugee management, based on a detailed consideration of the role of potentiality in biopolitical governance. After first discussing current understandings of potentiality within biopolitical literatures, and the analyses of migration and refugee governance they suggest, the article engages in a reading of Agamben's recent work The Use of Bodies in order to develop a new understanding of life's potential within biopolitical logics as potential towards the 'correct use' of bodies. This allows for a focus on biopolitical practices of incorporation and inclusion which goes beyond analyses of the acts of securitisation, exclusion or abandonment that only partially characterise reactions to the movement of people across the Mediterranean Sea. This understanding is then employed to provide fresh insights into the defining response to the 'European migration/refugee crisis': the 'open-door' migration and refugee policy pursued by the German government under Chancellor Angela Merkel from the summer of 2015 onwards.

The Politicization of the European Union

“…However, future research is needed to investigate the exact emotional consequences of EU politicization for German society, as this lies outside the scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, it is possible to speak of an 'affective wave' within the German government that opened a unique 'window of opportunity' (Hall and Ross, 2015) through which Germany's government adopted a so-called 'open door policy' (Pinkerton, 2019) and made the unprecedented decision to temporarily suspend the Schengen agreement.…”

Stimmung and ontological security: anxiety, euphoria, and emerging political subjectivities during the 2015 ‘border opening’ in Germany

“…This does not negate the importance of other explanatory factors but rather indicates that public moods influence which one of those are perceived as salient and how (critical) situations are experienced as relating to them. In the case of the 'border opening', other research has emphasised how, amongst other things, national self-identity conceptions (Dingott Alkopher 2018), collective memory (Bachleitner 2021, Schuette 2018, the German population's emotional needs (Mavelli 2017), migrants' potential to contribute to Germany's economy and welfare system (Pinkerton 2019), and more generally, elite, public, and media representations and perceptions of asylum-seekers (Lemay 2021) have shaped political and popular responses to the crisis. However, public moods as immediate affective experiences influenced subjects' sense of and search for ontological security and thus ultimately guided these mediated responses.…”

Agency within Mobility: Conceptualising the Geopolitics of Migration Management

“…Firstly, we can identify a process of 'governing through potential' when we move away from a predominant focus on biopolitics as a set of exclusionary or dehumanising practices, and place attention instead on the political practices which act on persons seen as capable of incorporation into a population. This allows an understanding of biopolitical governance as that which seeks to draw out the potential 'correct use' of bodies targeted by an inclusionary biopolitics, and suggesting a focus on the privileged migrants or refugees who are legally resident in a new country (Pinkerton 2019a). Secondly, we can identify a process of 'governing through mobility' when we view mobility as something that is also produced by the biopolitical governance of migrants, rather than an external factor which is subjected to biopolitical security mechanisms, or an embodied resource of agency utilised by mobile individuals to escape management or control.…”