english text 186 itself above the requirements of the rule-of-law state, i.e., above submission to the law, beginning with human rights. I must repeat that, in my view, the most serious thing is that this border policy is violence that violates and harms those who are most vulnerable in the eyes of the law, those who are not citizens, who are refugees, and thereby it violates the most elementary right, the right to have rights: asylum. Therefore, as shown by the existence of the immigration detention centres and especially the outsourced camps, and as accredited by the desire to do away with the right to asylum which is an obsession of many European governments, with the Rajoy government at the fore, the struggle for the law, for rights and for the rule-of-law state, is now a struggle against the use of borders as violence, a use that, well considered, is a perversion of Heraclitus’s fragment 44, which says: “The people must fight for its law as for its walls” (753 (22 B 44) D. L., IX 2). 1. This is proved by the report published in September 2014 by the International Organization for Migration (OIM), Fatal Journeys. Tracking Lives Lost during Migration. It can be downloaded from their website at http://publications.iom.int/system/ files/pdf/fataljourneys_countingtheuncounted. pdf. In June 2015, the Brussels-based Migration Policy Institute (MPI) published its report Before the Boat. Understanding the Migrant Journey. See http://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/boatunderstanding migrant-journey. That report, in turn, is part of the research project “EU Asylum: Towards 2020” being developed by the MPI and the Open Society Foundation in the framework of the Europe and International Migration Initiative, a project that is trying to further the work done in 2014 in the framework of the initiative “European Asylum Beyond 2014” and that is oriented towards the development of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). 2. Vom Mythos zum Logos, die Selbstentfaltung des griechischen Denkens von Homer bis auf die Sophistik und Sokrates. Alfred Kröner, 1940. 3. I am referring to his magnum opus Orientalism, published in 1978, although a reading of Culture and Imperialism (1993) is also recommended. 4. As China did, defining itself as such, zhong-guo, state or nation of the centre. 5. La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II. Armand Colin, 1949. 6. It is impossible not to mention here Luis Racionero and his Mediterráneo y los bárbaros del Norte. Plaza y Janés, 1996. 7. Saskia Sassen: Expulsions. Belknap, 2014. 8. In what follows, I summarise some of the reflections that I have tried to set out in more detail in the third chapter of the book Mediterráneo: el naufragio de Europa. Tirant lo Blanch, Valencia 2015. 9. For example, among others, in her book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010), recently published in Spanish as Estados amurallados, soberanía en declive (Herder, 2014), with a magnificent introductory essay by Étienne Balibar. 10. And the EU is not alone in maintaining the notion of a border that is not so much a police barrier as a military one. We have only to think of what is happening between Mexico and the USA, of the policy being practised by Australia or of what is being suffered by the Rohingyas, a (Muslim) ethnic and religious group of about a million people who live in Rakhine State in Myanmar, rejected by all the nations in southeast Asia.
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