Moving to Europe: Charting the Emergence of Exclusionary Asylum Discourse

Abstract

Chapter 1 charted various events and processes that serve as the conditions of emergence for the exclusionary politics of asylum. This chapter adds to this historical contextualisation of asylum discourse both by situating it within a longer history of exclusionary post-war immigration discourse, and also by further examining the exclusionary processes through which restrictive controls have been legitimised at the UK and EU levels. This dual focus on the exclusionary reverberations of domestic discourse and on the exclusionary commonalities of EU and domestic discourse is important for two reasons. First, it enables us to consider how exclusionary politics have a broader significance beyond our specific case study and, second, it allows us to explore how the exclusionary framing of asylum emerges even where ‘post-national’ or ‘post-statal’ citizenship potentially breaks with state governance and national belonging (Soysal, 1994; Weiner, 1998). Indeed, the analysis in this chapter suggests that it is precisely in a context whereby state governance and national belonging are subject to heightened dislocation that the exclusionary politics of asylum emerge.