Greece’s border, Europe’s shield: the racial border in Evros between Europeanisation and re-nationalisation

The Evros land border between Greece and Turkey, simultaneously a section of the European Union’s external border, is a site of pushbacks and collective expulsions for many decades. Pushbacks based on racial profiling are the standard mode of border control, in direct contravention of international law and European legislation. The prevalence of these practices, despite the communitarisation of border and migration policies after the Treaty of Amsterdam, highlights the tension within the European migration and border regime between European border management rationalities on the one hand and national-sovereign logics of border control on the other. The contribution analyses sovereign infrastructures of pushbacks at the Evros border, the failed attempts to Europeanise the Evros border, and the longer history of racist policing of migration in Greece. Through this case study, it is argued that after the failure of the European mode of border management to contain the migrations of 2015/16, the European migration and border regime is defaulting back to national-sovereign modes of border control.