Borders and migrants in Europe

It could be affirmed that with the fall of the Berlin Wall a new history of migration in Europe began, challenging previous models of interpretation of the phenomenon. I propose to observe and analyse the transformation on three different scales. The first one - that of the national state - regards the constellation of citizenship regimes and alteration of models of integration within Western European countries in the perspective of the ‘failure of multiculturalism’. The second - transnational internal European scale - concerns the dialectics between the EU citizens’ residence and labour mobility regime within the territory of the Union, and the persistent consideration of these people as ‘internal migrants’. The third one - the global scale - tackles the issue of ‘people on the move’ - regarding the constant waves of (forced) migration along Mediterranean and Balkan routes - that has been producing the ‘refugee crisis’ since 2015. Understanding the phenomenon and contrasting either scientifically or publicly the symbolic and effective violence and victims it has been producing, has became a challenge for the ‘public face of sociology’ and its aim of defending the interests of humanity (Burawoy 2005, XI Thesis: 24).