Fortress Europe: Dispatches From A Gated Continent

Hurst & Co

For nearly thirty years the Berlin Wall was seen as an emblematic ‘wall of tyranny’ that symbolised a divided Europe. In the euphoric aftermath of the Cold War, the advent of a new ‘borderless’ world was hailed, one in which such barriers would become obsolete and the free flow of people and goods soon become commonplace.

Today these utopian predictions have yet to be realised. In the last two decades, European governments have enacted the most sustained and far-reaching border enforcement program in history, in an attempt to prevent migrants seeking work or asylum from crossing their borders.

Detention and deportation, physical and bureaucratic barriers, naval patrols on the high seas, satellite technologies: all these measures and procedures have formed part of the militarised response to immigration adopted by European governments, the human cost of which is often overlooked.

These efforts have generated a tragic confrontation between some of the richest countries in the world and a stateless population from some of the poorest – a clash that is taking place both inside Europe’s territorial frontiers and also far beyond them.

FORTRESS EUROPE is an investigation of that confrontation. In a series of searing dispatches from some of the places where Europe’s ‘hard borders’ are most visible, Matthew Carr speaks to border officers and police, government officials, migrants, asylum-seekers, and civil society activists involved in this immigration drama of huge proportions. The result is a unique and ground-breaking critique of Europe’s exclusionary borders, and an essential guide to the wider drama of migration that looks set to dominate politics for the foreseeable future.

‘In this exposé of European immigration policy and its devastating effects, British journalist Carr… travels to remote borderlands of Poland, Spain, Greece, and Malta… Turkey and Morocco… and the heart of western Europe and Britain… This disturbing but hopeful book humanizes the face of 21st-century immigration.’ -- Publishers Weekly