The “Krisi” of Asylum
As I write in 2013, Greece is currently characterized as the lynchpin of a worldwide financial “crisis,” which has thrown into question the stability of European and global markets, the possibility of economic integration, and the futures of global economies. This small country on the periphery of Europe is thus at the center of deeply contested questions over sovereignty, financial viability, governance, and democracy. In 2004, however, when I first began my research in Athens, Greece was riding the dizzy wave of prosperity following its initial accession to the Euro and, perhaps even more important, the long-awaited “return” of the Olympic Games. With massive “cleanups,” infrastructural improvements, and sidewalks that had been polished slippery-smooth, Athens achieved some visibility as a renewed European capital worth visiting on the way to the islands. Yet overall, for international audiences, Greece continued to connote an entrenched quality of marginality, appearing largely as a benign, tourist friendly, and somewhat disorganized country on the Mediterranean peripheries of Europe and the West.
In the European context, however, in the early 2000s Greece was fast acquiring notoriety as a problem zone with regard to questions of immigration and asylum. This was largely owing to its geopolitical position on EU land and sea borders, changing patterns of violence and poverty (notably the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), and increasingly militarized policing measures in other regions of Europe’s Mediterranean coast. These multiple factors contributed to rapidly increasing numbers entering Greece’s own territorial borders, reconfiguring also the routes of smuggling through which people make their ways to Europe. Greece is often more accessible than other EU Mediterranean countries for persons coming from the Middle East, because of its proximity and its shared land and sea borders with Turkey. Most cross the river and mountain-drawn borders in the North. Others enter in rubber dinghies, crossing the short but dangerous distances from the Turkish coast to islands in the Aegean. Larger boats from North Africa often initially head for Italy (or passengers may be told that this is where they are bound), but many boats are redirected and abandoned in Greek territorial waters. In the current climate of economic instability, many migrants are returning voluntarily to home countries in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia; others, many of whom have lived in Greece for a number of years, have left for other locations in Europe. Since 2011 there has been an overall decrease in undocumented migration to Europe, owing largely to more militarized and rigorous policing measures on all external borders. Still, as of 2013, the Greek borders, and in particular, the Evros River between Greece and Turkey, are among the most trafficked borders of the European Union.2
A few years before the financial collapse, the Greek asylum process thus emerged as a growing area of “crisis” for the EU. Only a fraction of those who entered Greece applied for asylum, very often owing to difficulty accessing the asylum system, and just as often because many traveled elsewhere in Europe or remained undocumented. Beginning in 2004, however, Greece had one of the fastest rising rates of asylum application in Europe, combined with staggeringly low refugee recognition rates. According to official statistics compiled by the Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection (Ipouryio Dhimosias Taksis kai Prostasias tou Politi; Υπουργείο Δημόσιας Τάξης και Προστασίας του Πολίτη),3 the number of asylum applications in Greece grew by more than five times between 2004 and 2007, from 4,469 to 25,113 (see Table 1). Meanwhile, only a small fraction were recognized as refugees each year. In 2006, only 64 persons acquired refugee status; in 2007, 140.4 In 2008, there was an increase in the number of positive decisions to 415 but this number remained extremely low in comparison to other EU member states (see Table 2). Just as striking as the high number of rejections was the extraordinarily high number of cases that remained pending. In 2010, according to data released by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR 2010), Greece was globally the country with the fourth highest number of backlogged asylum cases (48,201), behind South Africa, the United States, and Ecuador. For European and international audiences, then, the “crisis” of asylum in Greece was not just a question of volume but lay also in the spheres of law and bureaucracy: in Greece’s incapacity to document, register, and process claims to protection. Moreover, given Greece’s status as a European external border, asylum in Greece also threw into crisis the EU capacity both to protect European territories and citizens from “alien” threats and to comply with international laws guaranteeing protection for persons fleeing violence and persecution.
Table 1: Number of Asylum Applications in Greece by Year, 2004–2010
| Year | Number of new applications |
| 2004 | 4,469 |
| 2005 | 19,884 |
| 2006 | 12,267 |
| 2007 | 25,113 |
| 2008 | 19,884 |
| 2009 | 15,928 |
| 2010 | 10,273 |
Source: Greek Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection.
Table 2: Comparative Table of EU Asylum Decisions, 2008 (EU countries issuing highest numbers of decisions)
| EU country | Total decisions issued | Positive decisions (refugee status) |
| France | 56,115 | 11,470 |
| Germany | 30,405 | 10,650 |
| Greece | 30,915 | 415 |
| Italy | 20,260 | 9,740 |
| Sweden | 31,220 | 8,670 |
| United Kingdom | 33,525 | 10,190 |
Source: Data provided by national authorities and by Eurostat (www.europa.eu); rounded to nearest 5.
Krisi [κρίση], in Greek, refers not just to “crisis” (its clear English equivalent) but also to the work of judgment in the context of law and, more loosely, in the sense of critique or criticism. This book examines a number of sites where judgment is carried out. Within the asylum procedure, and through detailed examinations of encounters between workers and aid candidates at an Athenian asylum aid NGO, I consider how processes of decision making give rise to prototypes (Coutin 2000: 107) of credible asylum cases, and accompanying figurations of which persons and lives are (or are not) eligible for protection. More broadly, however, “crisis” invokes a narrative of historical time punctuated by turning points and critical shifts (Redfield 2005). Such narratives also accomplish moral work, enacting forms of judgment by demarcating certain territories, persons, and moments as sites of potential danger. I thus explore how European and more global narratives of crisis reinscribe long-standing, even structurally entrenched histories of exclusion and marginality. These include both the marginalization of Greece in Europe and the ongoing exclusion of asylum seekers and refugees, who—in Greece, in the EU, and on a more global scale—are perpetually relegated to the edges of the body politic. I consider how crisis narratives both assert and legitimate structural violence, which in Greece plays out not only in the fraught arena of asylum, but in increasing poverty,