Responsibilization and counter-democracy: ‘active citizens’ transforming practices of reception and asylum

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‘ACTIVE CITIZENS’ TRANSFORMING PRACTICES OF

RECEPTION AND ASYLUM

‘ACTIVE CITIZENS’ TRANSFORMING PRACTICES OF

RECEPTION AND ASYLUM

Lieke van der Veer Philosophy University of Amsterdam Graduate School of Humanities

MA Thesis Supervisor: Dhr. Prof. Dr. H.O. Dijstelbloem Second reader: Mw. Dr. K.V.Q. Vintges August 9th, 2016 81 pages 24.760 words

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Jeroen Doomernik and John Grin, who offered generous help in exploring the social scientific dimension to this research. Also, I wish to thank Polly Pallister-Wilkins, for providing indispensable literature suggestions. A warm thanks to the organizers of the conference ‘Migration and mobilities in an urbanising world’ for the kind invitation to present parts of this research, and to the participants of this conference for their critical comments. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer of Krisis for the sharp questions and crucial suggestions - as the idea for this research grew out of an article written for this

journal. I am very grateful to Huub Dijstelbloem, who smoothly guided me through the research project, and to Karen Vintges, for her inspiring lectures on governmentality. Lastly, special gratitude to Dave de Bakker, for his high time style improvements, and to Femke van der Veer, for her artistic qualities.

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CHAPTER ONE – INTRODUCTION

In their attempts to install effective migration regimes, national governments increasingly shift responsibility to other levels of governance, as Lahav and Guiraudon (2000; 2006) show. The governing of migration is partly shifted to the EU (‘up’), to municipalities

(‘down’) and to non-state actors (‘out’). Concerning this outward delegation of liability, it is for example airline carriers, transport companies and employers that are charged with the implementation of migration policies (Lahav and Guiraudon 2000: 184-188). In addition to being included in implementation, these private, societal and business actors similarly provide input to policies that aim for somehow regulating migration (Lahav and Guiraudon 2006: 211). This multiplicity of state and non-state actors involved, is in line with Balibar’s famous assertion that “borders are no longer at the border” (Balibar 1998: 217) and Bigo’s adaptation of the concept ‛assemblage’ - originally introduced by Deleuze and Guattari - in relation to mobility regulation (Bigo 2015: 56): actors from different social universes that would otherwise be discrete come together in a dynamic whole that regulates practices of migration.

1.1. Setting the scene

What is missing in the existing literature, however, is that citizens are as well appealed to by governments in attempts to govern migration. Moreover, citizens increasingly respond to the greater visibility of migration by means of taking part in mobility regulation themselves. Walsh (2014) has documented and analysed several ways in which American citizens are voluntarily involved in migration control. They may call anonymous tip lines, report on suspect behaviour to be observed on live stream videos monitoring border areas, and join border vigilantes or immigration posses. As such, those living in the United States can and do contribute to the surveillance and detection of migrants, and to the enforcement of migration laws. Although in Europe such citizens’ initiatives have received little scholarly attention, in several Member States it does happen that citizens are invited to report on migrants.

To date in the UK, “if you think someone is living or working in the UK illegally, or is employing someone who isn’t allowed to work in the UK”, such an “immigration crime” can be reported through contacting the Home Office (Home Office 2015). In Hungary, the mayor of the village of Asotthalom in the Summer of 2015 has ordered village auxiliaries to trace and catch migrants and hand them over to the police (Toth 2015). In Bulgaria, an

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informal group called ‘Civil Squads for the Protection of Women and Faith’, hunts for migrants along the borders and pushes them back into Turkey (Germanova et al. 2016). In Sweden, 1999, the Migration Authority launched the project ‘Argus’, an initiative that invited citizens to inform the Authority of ‘dubious immigrants’ – i.e. those “suspected of fraud (housing, employment, and social allowance), and/or assuming a false identity, giving fake asylum claims, and bogus family affiliations” (Tesfahuney and Dahlstedt 2008: 187). To date in The Netherlands, both in parliament and on social media (#kominverzet), the foreman of the right-wing nationalist party Geert Wilders (PVV) makes a call to stand up and put up resistance against the arrival of migrants. He moreover has installed a hotline through which nuisances assumed to be caused by asylum seekers can be reported (‘Meldpunt Overlast Asielzoekers’).

Whereas citizens in these examples are called upon by the government authorities, there are also examples in which citizens seem to initiate restrictive actions themselves. In The Netherlands, 2015, a group of self-proclaimed “concerned citizens” launched the platform AZC-alert, an initiative that seeks to channel and use the will to protest against the realization of asylum seekers’ centres (AZC Alert 2015). In the same year, citizens in Oranje literally prevented busses with asylum seekers from reaching the reception centre in their town (NOS 2015c). In Germany, 2015, the group ‘Der Dritte Weg’ designed a virtual chart mapping asylum seekers’ centres - as an incentive for citizens to set them on fire - and in 2014 published a manual titled ‘How to keep asylum seekers out of my community’ (Lindhout 2015). To date, Soldiers of Odin, an international collective of anti-immigrant vigilantes, engages in surveillance in the streets of Finland, Norway, Estonia and Sweden. By July, this patrol group had established ‘chapters’ in the provinces Groningen, Drenthe,

Brabant, Limburg, Arnhem, Leiden and Utrecht (Van den Berg 2016). In March 2016, Dutch citizens from Oss wrote “we are coming Soldiers of Odin” on a banner hung on a house assigned to refugees (De Graaf 2016). In July 2016, this patrol group has beaten up an alleged asylum-seeker who was said annoy women (Van den Berg 2016).

Apart from initiatives demonstrating opposition towards the reception of asylum seekers and refugees, grassroots actions demonstrating support similarly entered the stage - through actions that may be either encouraged by state authorities or self-contained instead. In the Netherlands, Belgium and France, there are platforms that for example encourage citizens to accommodate refugees, to collect or deliver goods, send supportive post-cards, or to travel to the Greek islands to provide first aid (Ik wil iets doen voor een vluchteling 2015; Vluchtelingenwerk Vlaanderen 2015; Le Monde 2015). In Germany, the initiative

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‛Flüchtlinge Willkommen’ encourages fellow-citizens to rent out (parts of) their homes to refugees (De Zwaan 2015). Boat owners navigate to the Mediterranean Sea to set up rescue operations and encourage others to do so (VPRO Tegenlicht 2015c).

1.2. Research topic and objective

How do citizens’ initiatives - both restrictive and supportive towards the reception of asylum seekers – relate to practices of governance, and which transformations to sovereignty,

democracy, the political and the social may these initiatives effect? The exploration of a theoretical framework that answers this question is at the core of this research. To do so, two concepts will be analysed in comparison: responsibilization (Schinkel and Van Houdt 2010; Schinkel and Van Houdt 2013; Van Houdt 2013) and counter-democracy (Rosanvallon 2008).

To allow for a preliminary understanding of these concepts, responsibilization is “the broader process of making individuals, private sector and community responsible for public tasks” (Schinkel and Van Houdt 2010: 699). Through the “inculcation and shaping of

‛private’ responsibility”, this Foucauldian technology is a mechanism (Rose 1999: 75) that is part of a ‛liberal strategy of government’ (idem: 74) and assigns the community with a portion of the responsibility for resolving society’s needs for order, security, health and productivity (Rose 1999: 174). In the analysis, it will be explored how the mechanism of responsibilization may be an explanatory framework to understand citizens’ actions concerning issues of reception and asylum.

Counter-democracy, then, the second key concept that will be explored in relation to

citizens’ initiatives, is the whole of indirect powers that express and organize democratic distrust. To Rosanvallon, these powers should be treated as a true political form that complements electoral democracy, particularly through powers of oversight, forms of prevention, and the testing of judgments (Rosanvallon 2008: 8). In the analysis, it will be explored how this notion of counter-democracy may capture the critical stance, exhibited by citizens’ initiatives addressing issues of reception and asylum, towards the authorities. On the one hand, responsibilization and counter-democratic participation share similarities as to their organization. Both are to be conceptualized as a capillary power

network that sways throughout civil society. Concerning this ‘capillarity’, counter-democratic

powers are “disseminated throughout society” (Rosanvallon 2009: 8), and responsibilization reaches out to the capillaries of society to activate citizens. And concerning the

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characterization as ‘power network’, both responsibilization and counter-democratic participation require the capacity of citizens to politically act on the government outside of the procedures as established by representative democracy. The two concepts moreover supplement each other: to Dean (1999), “citizens are to become self-managing, to enter into political participation and to demand actions from governments” (Dean 1999: 170).

On the other hand, responsibilization and counter-democracy describe opposite directions of influence: whereas counter-democracy marks the power relation from civil society to democratic institutions - i.e. how do citizens exercise control over governments outside of the ballot box - responsibilization emphasizes the inverse - i.e. how do

governments exercise control over citizens outside of policies and legislations. The two analytic approaches moreover allow for an interesting paradox: what if responsibilized citizens turn against the state institutions that have contributed to the shaping citizens’ very sense of active citizenship (Schinkel and Van Houdt 2010: 697) in the first place? In the analysis therefore, the two concepts will be weighed and evaluated in comparison.

The aim of this project is to give insight into the interplay between responsibilization as practice of governance, and practices of freedom of the governed enacted by means of counter-democratic participation. It seeks to investigate how aspects of power, as they operate through responsibilization and counter-democratic participation, are mutually

transformative in their interaction. The research project examines how the citizens’ initiatives concerning questions of reception and asylum may negotiate the government practices. Emerging at the intersection of active citizenship and democratic distrust, this thesis explores these configurations of power in intertwinement and juxtaposition. It rearticulates counter-democratic participation through accepting responsibilization as condition under which such participation comes into being, and at the same time scrutinizes the assumptions that support responsibilization as mechanism by analysing how it works on practices of dissent.

Although empirical examples are drawn upon to substantiate the argument, the level of analysis is not social scientific - e.g. which actors are mobilized and whose needs are addressed - or culture-psychological - e.g. which motivations and emotions drive citizens’ actions. Rather, this thesis focuses on providing a redescription of practices of governance and its forms of thought, conduct and subjectivity. It surveys the theoretical notions of responsibilization and counter-democratic participation in terms of autonomy, sovereignty, democracy and (de)politicization.

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1.3. Research questions and chapter plan

Following the methodological framework to political philosophy elaborated by Tully (2002), responsibilization, understood as a form of government, should be analysed in terms of how governors and the governed recognize each other and negotiate their respective practices, the web of power relations in which they are embedded, and the subjectivities that emerge (Tully 2002: 539). Accordingly, chapter 2 explores responsibilization as practice of governance in the context of the citizens’ initiatives at focus. How can responsibilization theoretically be evaluated within a broader organization of governmental power and governance (section 2.1)? Which entities and activities does responsibilization draw upon in policy practice (section 2.2)? And furthermore, what subjectivities of citizens as well as of asylum seekers and refugees does responsibilization presuppose (section 2.3)? This chapter ends with a discussion on what responsibilization is a mechanistic explanation of - in the context of current citizens’ mobilizations concerning reception and asylum (section 2.4).

Thereafter, in chapter 3, citizens’ initiatives will be evaluated through the notion of counter-democratic participation, which is conceptualized as possibility through which citizens may act on their freedom (Tully 2002: 540) in the face of responsibilization. In the subsequent sections of this chapter, four related tensions between responsibilization and counter-democracy will be identified and explored. Given that the mechanism of

responsibilization capitalizes freedom and autonomy, how can this mechanism be articulated with practices of dissent (section 3.1)? When accepting that responsibilization, as a form of ‘governing at distance’, allows for the increase of state sovereignty, how may citizens’ initiatives reconfigure this notion of sovereignty as it undercuts responsibilization (section 3.2)? What transformations of democracy do responsibilization and counter-democracy in their intertwinement and juxtaposition effect, and how can the alleged democratizing potential of both responsibilization and counter-democracy be evaluated (section 3.3)? And moreover, how do responsibilization and counter-democracy negotiate what counts as politics and the political (section 3.4)? This chapter ends with a discussion on imaginaries of the social that inform both responsibilization and counter-democratic participation (section 3.5).

1.4. Scope of research and methodological reflection

In defining a justification of the scope of this research, several conceptual considerations arise. For instance, in focusing on citizens as initiators of grassroots action, asylum seekers

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themselves or for example undocumented migrants seem excluded. Moreover, the concept of citizen seems to foreground a national identity, and as such might suggest that citizens of a particular country criticize their ‘own’ national government, whereas protests aiming at international institutions or those addressing problems of representation and deficits of democracy are not limited to state borders. Especially when it concerns migration, the construction of problems and solutions transcends the nation state.

Citizens in the Netherlands

However, because responsibilization essentially is a technology of citizenship that targets citizens and prescribes citizenship morally, the current focus is on citizens and the ways they may act on laws, policies and practices concerning reception and asylum. What is referred to then are initiatives enacted by individual persons, neighbours, households, and grassroots movements – thereby excluding actions initiated by governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations and for-profit organizations. Such demarcations however are blurry. For example, although certain restrictive actions may not explicitly act on behalf of the anti-immigration party PVV, they may be shaped by the appeal made by the foreman of this party to put up resistance, allowing for governmental actions and citizens’ mobilizations to blur. As such, strictly separating governmental conduct from citizens’ actions is not straightforward. Alternatively, the premise of this research is that governmental conduct shapes citizens’ initiatives.

Although acknowledging the transnational character of citizens’ initiatives, as well as migration and politics of migration, this research focuses on the national and local dimension of citizens’ initiatives. The Netherlands is the case at focus - for reasons of access to

empirical examples, familiarity with debates on issues of migration and citizenship, and personal research experience. In particular, initiatives concerning questions of reception of asylum seekers and refugees in the Netherlands in 2015 and 2016 are attended to.

Level of analysis

Citizens’ initiatives are then dealt with in interaction with government authorities, by using the notions of counter-democracy and responsibilization - notions that will at the same time be scrutinized over the course of the analysis. As these notions foreground certain dynamics between governments and citizens, other dynamics are instead backgrounded by virtue of

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choosing a particular analytic framework. Examples of what will be less attended to is that government conduct - that counter-democratic participation is critical of - is a reaction to societal events and debates in the first place. Being enmeshed in a continuous transformative interaction, action and reaction therefore are interwoven.

A related point is that established organizations may use citizens’ actions to make themselves known (Visser 2015a), and that emotions expressed in manifestations may be complex. As an example of this last point, a protestor told a journalist in retrospect that he intended only to say ‟boo” just once, that he in fact is not against the advent of reception centres at all, but that his anger culminated in a scream ‟against the municipality, against politics, against everything” (Visser 2015b). The current level of analysis may not allow for the inclusion of such processes.

Lastly, news outlets and press statements - about government conduct, citizens’ movements and migration dynamics - mediate what gets known and inform action, although the information presented may be inadequate. For example, the press statements issued by the Immigration and Naturalization Agency (‘IND’) are criticized, for the data models used are said to misrepresent actual practice (Van der Velden 2016b).1 Although these phenomena are part of the context in which citizens’ initiatives emerge, they are beyond the scope of this project.

Following Rosanvallon’s definition of counter-democracy

Following Rosanvallon’s definition of counter-democracy, what is included are

manifestations of distrust that involve the articulation of collective sentiments, the joining together in order to achieve a common world, and the undertaking of collective action to obtain a desired result (Rosanvallon 2008: 20). Although the notion of counter-democracy will itself be surveyed and critiqued in the analysis, its definition will be adopted in order to further delineate an empirical starting point. In doing so, the analysis sets out by focussing on initiatives that deliberatively articulate their dissatisfaction, joint expressions of willingness to act, and mobilizations that embody or enact a practice alternative to the government’s conduct.

1_{The uncovering of which itself is, interestingly, a form of counter-surveillance (Dijstelbloem 2015), as it is}

done by a retired government official who spends up to eight hours daily to collecting, analysing, and tweeting data on migration and asylum, thereby scrutinizing government reports.

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Initiatives do not have to eventually achieve the desired result to be considered counter-democratic participation; for example, in some towns, initiatives mobilizing against reception centres prevented such centres from actually being opened, whereas in other towns

governmental plans remained unchanged (RTL Nieuws 2015c). What matters is the attempt to obtain an intended outcome, not the effect.

To Rosanvallon, the Internet is key to counter-democratic participation, as it facilitates the building of communities in which everyone can participate and spontaneously adapts to the functions of counter-democracy (Rosanvallon 2008: 66-70). Digital mobilizations are therefore included. For example, this concerns petitions as well as several other mobilizations (e.g. Facebook 2015; VPRO Tegenlicht 2015a; Stichting Petities.nl 2016) that are initiated and coordinated online.

Rosanvallon’s definition of counter-democracy however does raise some questions concerning which mobilizations may be understood by his analytic framework. One issue concerns the qualification of collectivity, and the question whether or not actors that are spatially and temporarily distant are to be included - for example housing initiatives to be observed on different locations and moments (Brandpunt 2016; Stoffelen 2016; Omroep West 2015). Rosanvallon is not explicit on this point. However, because responsibilization - the concept that is evaluated in comparison with counter-democracy - specifically draws on images of both collectivity and individuality, individual actions as well as temporally and spatially distant phenomena will be attended to.

Also, Rosanvallon contrasts counter-democratic participation with what he considers radical and pathological forms of democracy, which he calls absolute counter-democracy (Rosanvallon 2008: 265). Although the empirical starting point of this research consists of initiatives that meet up to Rosanvallon’s definition of counter-democracy - and not to absolute counter-democracy - this distinction will not strictly be maintained. Because the division between these two concepts itself will be scrutinized over the course of the analysis, citizens’ actions that Rosanvallon would consider as absolute counter-democracy are drawn on intermittently - and introduced as such.

Unlawfulness

Furthermore, an important point of concern is that Rosanvallon is not explicit as whether or not unlawful actions can be understood as democratic (or absolute

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aim of effecting political change in laws, institutions, policies and practices, unlawfulness is certainly not definitive of counter-democracy - whereas unlawfulness is in fact definitive of civil disobedience according to most commentators (Brownlee 2013). However, hanging banners with slogans critical to reception centres along the highway (Omroep Gelderland 2016) and picking up refugees by car and driving them to a reception centre (RTV Utrecht 2015) seem to be fitting to the concept of counter-democracy, although both are unlawful.

Whether or not unlawful actions may be interpreted as counter-democratic (or absolute counter-democratic) activity, on the one hand raises normative questions that may not be addressed in any definitive definition of counter-democracy. On the other hand, Rosanvallon does elaborate on the intertwinement of the juridical and the political, when observing that citizens increasingly demand government accountability through court (Rosanvallon 2008: 227). When such juridicalization is accepted as relevant phenomenon in counter-democracy, an inverse line of argument can similarly be thought of: governments increasingly turning to penal instruments to correct unwanted behaviour. An example is the prosecution of citizens who transport refugees by car. To date in the Netherlands, article 197A of the Criminal Code - which among other offenses addresses those who provide assistance to others in accessing or passing through the Netherlands - is unprecedented in its application to citizens who transport migrants not-for-profit. However, recent prosecutions in Denmark prove the

contested and arguably contrived implementation of the law in similar cases (Van der Velden 2016a). Therefore, although it cannot be maintained that unlawful actions are included in counter-democratic actions per se, they can similarly not be excluded from the current focus, as the dynamics of penalization may point to a significant dimension of counter-democracy and responsibilization.

Violence

A last conceptual dilemma to be mentioned concerns actions in which violence is committed to property - by for example writing slogans and symbols on buildings (NOS 2015d) or throwing home made explosives and eggs (NOS 2015e) - to persons - for example uttering threats and verbal aggression to municipal authorities face to face, on social media,

telephone, e-mail or regular mail (ANP 2016) - or to animals - dropping pig’s carcasses accompanied with slogans against reception centres (NOS 2016; Bolle 2015; Back 2016). Normative considerations are again required to address this question in the context of counter-democracy - laying bare the need to offer a more systematic and detailed theory of

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counter-democracy. For pragmatic reasons, violent actions are not included, as this would raise a dozen of other questions concerning the definition of violence, the severity of harm inflicted by violent acts as opposed to non-violent acts, and the communicative quality of violence (Brownlee 2013) - which are important questions that require more attention than this thesis allows for.

1.5. Relevance of research and positioning in literature

Research on what so far is termed citizens’ initiatives or citizens’ actions in relation to government agendas is not new. With their edited volume De Affectieve Burger (i.e. ‘the affective citizen’), Kampen et al. (2013a) present several chapters with social scientific research on the ideal of citizens providing health care among each other, encouraged to do so by the government. Schinkel and Van Houdt (2010) draw on the idea of ‘active citizenship’, as a moral take on what a good citizen should be like, similarly evoked by the government. In his policy analysis commissioned by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (‛Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving’), Hajer (2011) coins the term of ‘vigorous society’ (‛energieke samenleving’), referring to the ‘societal energies’ that the government can respond to and capitalize. Schneider and Ingram (1997) analyse citizen participation in terms of ‘empowerment’; how can public policies ‘advance’ citizenship?

Little research however has investigated the ways through which the (intended) public of responsibilization may enter into alternative practices exhibiting dissent to the ideal of citizenship as evoked, and the transformations such extra-electoral participation triggers. My position is that simply accepting the pervasiveness of ‘communitarian neoliberalism’ as ideological force exercised over citizens is not the whole story, and that the possibility of practices of freedom as well as its potential to work on sovereignty, democracy and politicization should be taken into consideration.

Moreover, the state-supported ideal of the affective, vigilant, active, energetic or participating citizen that this literature draws on, has not widely been analysed in relation to the reception and asylum of asylum seekers and refugees. Schinkel and Van Houdt (2010; 2013) and Van Houdt (2014) incidentally touch upon mobility regulation, but either remain within their theoretical focus on integration (Schinkel and Van Houdt 2010) or go into the historical development of neoliberal communitarianism as a style of government with Dutch political programs and techniques in crime and safety politics as research object (Schinkel and Van Houdt 2013; Van Houdt 2014). For this current research, however, a historical

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analysis of migration policies is less relevant, although the insights on how technologies of power problematize objects in the field of crime and safety can in fact be used for the current purposes - because of the migration-security nexus (Walters 2008, 2010a, 2010b; Huysmans 2000; Dijstelbloem, Meijer and Besters 2011).

This research furthermore moves beyond the interaction between civil society and state, by including the dynamics within civil society itself. This position differs from that of Schinkel and Van Houdt (2013), who justify their aim to provide a reconstruction of

“government’s consciousness of itself” and not a “description of an actual practice” (Schinkel and Van Houdt 2013: 3) by referring to (their interpretation of) the Foucauldian approach as developed in The Birth of Biopolitics. The authors say to “deliberately forego questions of effectiveness of and resistance to governmental practices, as they fall beyond the scope both of this analysis and of Foucault’s own ambitions in deploying the concept of

governmentality” (Schinkel and Van Houdt 2013: 3). Although their reconstruction of the ways in which the government reflects on itself and legitimizes its own conduct is insightful in assessing what is considered a ‛normal’ state of affairs by policy makers, I would oppose the interpretation of governmentality simply as ‘mentality’ of government (Schinkel and Van Houdt 2013: 2) that by definition leaves out contestation. My critique to their position is that the possibility of dissent in the face of responsibilization should not be rejected in advance. Responsibilization may provoke the emergence of publics against the associate policies - a dynamic this research aims to capture with the concept of counter-democracy.

Another less studied phenomenon this research seeks to address is the entwinement of care and control in relation to responsibilization. Current studies on responsibilization largely deal with either safety and criminality (Garland 2001; O’Malley 1992; O’Malley and Palmer 1996; Schinkel and Van Houdt 2010; Schinkel and Van Houdt 2013; Van Houdt 2013) or healthcare and social services (Cruikshank 1999; Tonkens and Newman 2011; Muehleback 2012). Interestingly, both strands of literature are materialized in the citizens’ initiatives - that restrict and support migration. My position is that dynamics of care and control cannot be analysed in isolation; rather, what should be attended to is how they are intertwined and influence each other. First, care and control in the migration discourse seem to be two sides of the same coin. Aradau (2004) for example explains that humanitarianism and

securitization, “two apparently incompatible discursive regimes are entwined and feed upon each other” (Aradau 2004: 252). By analysing both movements through the theoretic

frameworks of counter-democracy and responsibilization, the dynamics between initiatives of care and control will be articulated.

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Second, taking up politics of care and control in their mutual interaction, in my view, weakens the risk of slipping into a research focus reflecting ones own political preferences. For example, Rosanvallon asserts that counter-democracy keeps pressure on the government to serve ‘the common good’ (Rosanvallon 2008: 8) – thereby overpassing that the question of what this common good is, how to get to know it, and how to achieve it, is far from

straightforward. Put differently, Rosanvallon seems to have organized his conceptual

framework in such a way that counter-democracy refers to those actions he applauds, and that less favourable movements are considered absolute counter-democracy - the distinguishing criterion being vague. In an attempt to not uphold a romanticized caricature of grassroots participation, both actions that are restrictive and supportive towards asylum seekers and refugees in the Netherlands are incorporated.

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CHAPTER TWO – RESPONSIBILIZATION AND

COUNTER-DEMOCRACY

This chapter aims to provide an understanding of responsibilization and counter-democracy. It will start by offering a more substantive analysis of responsibilization, and gradually moves towards the notion of counter-democracy. Because the mechanism of responsibilization has emerged in an analytic context of governmentality, it will be explored in connection with Foucault’s work on biopolitics (section 2.1). Then, responsibilization will further be investigated, specifically through analysing the configuration of freedom and autonomy it presupposes (section 2.2). Thereafter, the understanding of freedom and autonomy as

assumed by responsibilization will be evaluated in terms of dependency versus independency, as this dichotomy is relevant to articulating the intertwinement of care and control (section 2.3). The last section of this chapter discusses what responsibilization is explanatory of - in the context of citizens’ mobilizations concerning questions of asylum and reception - and connects responsibilization with the notion of counter-democracy (section 2.4).

2.1. The capillarity of governance: the individual and the mass

So far, responsibilization has been characterized as mechanism, following Rose (1999). In order to be considered a social scientific mechanism, what should be identified are the phenomena that responsibilization is a mechanistic explanation for, the entities and activities that are involved, and the organization in which they are embedded (Illari and Williamson 2012). The phenomena concerned here are citizens that engage in actions that are either supportive or restrictive towards migration. What, then, are the entities and activities at stake, and what is the organization in which these are embedded? And, taken together, what is responsibilization as explanatory mechanism? In answering these questions, it seems admissible to start off in the context of Foucault's original works on governmentality.

Governmental power: discipline and regulation

Governmentality, a concept to be positioned in the later work of Foucault (1976-1984), is both a historical notion that refers to the regime of power constitutive for the modern state (Foucault 2007: 108) and a term that refers to the “strategic field of power relations in their

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mobility, transformability and reversibility” (Foucault 2005: 252). Most relevant for the purposes of this research is the latter conceptualization: governmentality as a set of power relations that is characterized by its fluidity and strategically aimed at the population (Foucault 2007: 105).

Concerning the fluidity of power, it is relevant to introduce the concept of biopolitics. With this term, Foucault refers to regulation of ‘the people’ in terms of a mass. The power at work in biopolitics consists of a “multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate”, meaning that they are not some sort of an externality, but rather as inside the system itself, coming from ‘everywhere’ (Foucault 1990: 93).

The way in which the state relates to citizens, then, for Foucault is not limited to the former as static entity that hierarchically instructs the latter from above; rather, the whole of civil society itself has been ‛cut out’ as a specific domain of power relations (Senellart 2007: 502). As such, governmentality provides an ontological description of governmental power that describes the distribution and effects of power in relations between state and non-state actors.

Although the notions of governmentality and biopolitics were only introduced in Foucault's later work, they do not discard disciplinary power – the latter form of power being central to Foucault's middle work (1970-1976). Disciplinary power refers to a broad a set of techniques of surveillance (i.e. what Foucault coins the ‘microphysics’ of power), aimed at the normalization of individuals. Whereas biopolitical power targets the population as mass, disciplinary power targets the individual body (Foucault 2003: 249). By means of

surveillance, individuals are objectified through (permanent and invisible) registration. The crux of disciplinary power, then, is that the person it is practiced on internalizes the

discipline; as such, power automatically functions (Foucault 1973: 201). Disciplinary power is therefore individualizing: disciplinary power encapsulates and isolates individuals.

Although disciplinary power and biopolitical power as such do not operate at the same level and are historically established at different times (Foucault 2003: 249), “they are not mutually exclusive and can be articulated with each other” (idem: 250).

This compatibility of discipline and regulation is emphasized by Foucault's introduction of the concept of biopower as exactly a type of power that emerges at the intersection of the massifying effects of biopolitical power and the individualizing effects of disciplinary power (Rasmussen 2011: 36-37). This equivocality is relevant to understanding what Foucault refers to by using the terminology of ‘population’ as target of governmentality. On the one hand, the notion of ‛population’ points to the massifying effect on ‘the

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people’. The population is imagined as a unity, notwithstanding civil and political inequalities (Dean 1999: 53). On the other hand, individual citizens are created. ‛Created’, because what is a citizen is only given a posteriori; the power exercised on the population creates

citizenship as well as what is to be expected from good citizens. ‛Individual’, because in the organizational structure of governmentality, it is the so-called self-entrepreneur (Foucault 2008: 226) that, as will be shown in the next section, forms the ideal of citizenship - a neo-liberal norm put forward by the Chicago-School, emphasizing individual responsibility. This equivocality of the citizen as individual and the imagined social unity in which the citizen is embedded is important to understanding how - as will be shown later on - responsibilization appeals both to the citizen as self-entrepreneur and to the citizen as community-member.

Citizens as relays: reproducing governmental power

Given the nature of governmental power as explained in the preceding - power as set of multiple relations, both individualizing and massifying - what is crucial to understand is that citizens may exercise governmental power as well. For governmental power does not work only top-down from state to citizens; it is similarly passed on by citizens themselves. In

Society must be defended, Foucault clarifies this point by writing that “Power is exercised

through networks, and individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit to and exercise power. They are never the inert or consenting targets of power; they are always its relays” (Foucault 2003: 29). From “innumerable points, in the interplay of non-egalitarian and mobile relations. […] [p]ower comes from below” (Foucault 1990: 94).

As governmental power is thus ‘capillary’ (Walters 2012: 9), meaning that heterogeneous actors all may relay and as such exercise force, this research will not be limited to the ‘immediate’ actions of the state. Instead, it will trace how power branches and circulates throughout society - which then turns into a domain of analysis. Presupposing that the population belongs to a space of governance, the concept of governmentality then

establishes an ontological description of power that may reveal the ways in which it is located outside of institutional politics and may be actively reproduced by (non-state) actors.

The notion of governance, which is similarly used in approaching the topic,

incorporates such Foucauldian conceptualization of power. With the notion of ‛governance’ - as opposed to the static entity of government - the researcher may emphasize the network-character, complexity and absence of hierarchy (Rosanvallon 2008: 260-261). By using this

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notion, the hybridity of power relations as described by Foucault is accounted for. Accordingly, the analytic lens of governance and governmentality - the latter concept understood both as analytical framework and as organizational structure in which responsibilization is embedded - creates a focus on the power distribution and effects of responsibilization as governmental tactic (Schinkel and Van Houdt 2013: 11).

2.2. Active citizenship

As Brown (2003) notes, “the state is not without a project in the making of the neo-liberal subject. The state attempts to construct prudent subjects through policies that organize such prudence” (Brown 2003: 16). Among these attempts, in neoliberal policies in Western Welfare states, the ‟ethical principle” of ‟active citizenship” is seen as self-evident since the ’70s (Rose 2006: 159-160; Verhoeven and Tonkens 2013: 25). In the Netherlands, the move for an ‛activating welfare state’ can be traced back in the political discourse from this same period onwards (Kampen et al. 2013b).

In their edited volume, Kampen et al. (2013a) elaborate on the ways in which this government offensive is manifested in the health care sector. They specifically attend to the Social Support Act (‛Wet Maatschappelijke Ondersteuning’) that regulates the assistance to those who are not ‟self-reliant under their own steam” (Government of the Netherlands 2015). Van Houdt (2014) picks up on a similar task by demonstrating how, in crime and safety politics, the private sector is increasingly asked to get involved. Starting his analysis with the 1985 report Society and Crime, he shows how citizens are asked to contribute to ‟fighting the mass manifestation of crime” (House of Representatives 1985), how

cooperation between state and non-state actors is cultivated (House of Representatives 1990), how citizens’ participation and social controls are encouraged (Ministry of Justice and

Ministry of Interior and Kingdom Relations 2002) and how neighbourhoods and individual citizens are required to engage in ‛preventive partnerships’ (Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Interior and Kingdom Relations 2007).

Images of good citizenship

It is not only in these domains of health care and crime and safety politics that the increasing appeal to citizens in the Netherlands is to be observed. Concerning the sector of work and employment, the tellingly named Participation Act (2015) limits the assistance to those

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requiring labour support. A government bill that assigns more responsibility to citizens in spatial planning - the Environmental Planning Act - has almost unanimously been adopted by the House of Representatives (Sommer 2016). Some years ago, the Ministry of Interior Affairs and Kingdom Relations spread a brochure titled Responsible Citizenship, articulating what is expected from citizens; the chapter titles ‟offering each other a helping hand”, ‟voluntary commitment”, and ‟participation” once again revealing active citizenship as ideal (Ministry of Interior and Kingdom Relations 2009). All together, the “new model of

responsibility as emerged” is recognized by the Social and Cultural Planning Agency (SCP 2012).

To Kampen et al. (2013b) as well as Schinkel and Van Houdt (2010; 2013) these developments share the appeal made to images of what is considered good citizenship. What is evaluated here thus is not citizenship as juridical status that defines membership on a territory, but rather a normative judgment concerning what citizenship should entail (Schinkel and Van Houdt 2010). As mentioned in the preceding section, the notion of

self-entrepreneurship is central to citizenship as moral status. Notably in what is considered as neoliberal rule, individual responsibility is emphasized. Concerning the nature of the responsibility as promoted here, a paradox has been noted (Dean 1999; Ostrom 2000; Muehleback 2007): the citizen, although encouraged to act as responsible self-entrepreneur, is here conceived of as acting in line with the ends of government. Freedom, then, is a means to ensuring these ends (Dean 1999: 15) and as such is instrumentalized. It is relevant to draw on what ‛freedom’ and ‘autonomy’ refer to in responsibilization, in order to understand what responsibilization expects from citizens, and what the alternatives are.

Freedom

The notion of freedom promoted through responsibilization, is the neoliberal ideal of

negative liberty as developed by Hayek (Dean 1999: 155). As a function of the total of

options, negative liberty holds that the more one can do, the more (negatively) free one is. This can be achieved by, in Hayek’s account, get rid of the ‛arbitrary will’ of another and become ‛free of coercion’ (Carter 2016). The ‘empowerment’ that is propagated by responsibilization, is exactly such liberation from another actor. In the case of

responsibilization, the very entity ‘we’ are required to be liberated from, is the government itself. By claiming a definite form of expertise (Dean 1999: 68) on what is good for ‘us’, responsibilization prescribes that ‘we’ should be liberated from government.

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Responsibilization as such inverts the long kept idea that it is the social environment that citizens should be liberated from, to be achieved through government provisions (Kampen et

al. 2013b: 14). Instead, responsibilization aims at freeing citizens from the excessive

interference (s)he is considered to have been subjected to. In its entirety being the object of responsibilization - i.e. everybody is sought to be empowered from government - society itself is a target group.

One of the dangers of promoting negative liberty along this path, however, is that it may encroach on the sphere of positive liberty - i.e. a function of the range of options being free to do. Following an argument made by Christman (1991), a desire - here: the desire to be a self-entrepreneur that is independent to others and capable of self-care - may have emerged because of indoctrination, manipulation or deceit (Carter 2016). This is so because the self-entrepreneurship as promoted in a neoliberal doctrine threatens with the devaluation of those who do not meet up to the ideal. As Nadesan (2006) shows in a study on neoliberal

education, dissent is marginalized and trivialized - i.e. what she calls a pathalogization of resistance. Through the employment of freedom as instrument of domination in neo-liberalist governance (Brown 2003: 17), one’s sphere of positive liberty is limited, which poses a tension to autonomy.

Autonomy

Paradoxically, the ideal of autonomy or self-realization - which often overlaps with the work on the nature of positive liberty (Carter 2016) is similarly upheld by the call for

responsibilization. That both negative and positive liberty are upheld in responsibilization in itself allows for an interesting situation, because as to Berlin, negative and positive liberty are rival and incompatible (Carter 2016). What gives substance to the ideal of autonomy in responsibilization, is the community. As Schinkel and Van Houdt have noted, apart from neoliberal elements, responsibilization also incorporates communitarian elements (Schinkel and Van Houdt 2013: 14). More precisely, following the logic of responsibilization, the citizen should turn to the community to regain the national culture and the fundamental ‘norms and values’ (Schinkel and Van Houdt 2010: 697). ‘Community’ here is thus assumed to be latently present but not fully actualized yet (Schinkel and Van Houdt 2010: 697). To achieve self-realization, then, we should embrace (our sense of) community and find what is essential to autonomy. Autonomy is then being measured by the capacity for self-care

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(Brown 2003: 15), which refers both to individuals being responsible for themselves and community resilience (Coaffee and Rogers 2009).

The danger of promoting autonomy substantiated as such, is the essentialism and paternalism that is present in the logic of ‘letting come out what you already are for your (and our) own good’ (Berlin 1969). Exactly these critiques, however, have been absorbed by neoliberal thought. Similar to the critiques of the welfare state as articulated in the 1960’s - i.e. the welfare state as a coercive mechanism of social control that reproduces paternalism, capitalism and gender inequality - it happens that critiques of the welfare state in the name of autonomy are adopted and appropriated by neoliberal forms of government - in order to legitimate their purposes and objectives (Dean 1999: 153-155). In the name of

non-interference, the neoliberal government can thus ward off charges of paternalism through its alleged mission of ‘liberating the citizens from the government.’

Responsibilization

Responsibilization, then, aims at the endorsement of being liberated from ‛excessive’ government, and being autonomous through engaging with community values. It is a particular style of government as well as a specific ‘social policy’, observed over the last decades, which produces ‘empowered’ subjects and turns community into a ‘neo-liberal social sphere’, through appealing to images of active citizenship in order to motivate citizens to engage in public tasks.

As such, this interpretation of responsibility does not include instances of ‘deputization’ in which citizens are contractually and legally bound to engage in institutionalized partnerships with government authorities (Walsh 2014: 6).

Responsibilization moreover is not limited to instances in which the government explicitly authorizes citizen participation through technical, logistical and financial support (idem). This latter definition of responsibilization is proposed by Walsh, who defines responsibilization rather narrowly in order to conceive of ‘autonomization’ as a distinct phenomenon that refers to citizen participation without governmental solicitation but aligned with the state’s

objectives (ibid.: 12). Although distinguishing the different degrees to which the state obliges or supports citizens’ engaging in migrant surveillance, detection and enforcement sheds light on some interesting cases of state power, it obscures the broader context of appeals to active citizenship that inform responsibilization in the first place. Moreover, Walsh’ account of responsibilization does not account for the possibility of reinterpreting of re-appropriating the

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image of active citizenship and enact it in a way that seeks to challenge policy goals. Therefore, an interpretation of responsibilization that refers to the trend in which

governments attempt - not necessarily succeeding - to engage community by promoting and activating - not necessarily materially supporting or obliging - citizens to carry out public tasks, is the one picked up on in the current analysis.

2.3. The intertwinement of care and control

In responsibilization, society, imagined as ‘homogeneous blob’, has thus become the target group. Through everybody’s efforts to exercise freedom and responsibility (Dean 1999: 152), society as a bundle of social energies, liberated from government, can be contained. An important problem with this perception of society as imagined social unity, is that it obscures heterogeneity as well as inequality between people. Instead, the one dominant distinction the mechanism of responsibilization rests on, is between dependency and independency, i.e. ‘those mature enough to look after themselves and as such are truly autonomous’ and those who are not and have apparently ‘mismanaged’ their lives (Brown 2003: 15).

Dependency and independency

Following the ideal of self-reliancy and being empowered from the government, there is no such thing as good dependency (Dean 1999: 60). Towards those considered incapable of bearing the responsibilities and freedoms of good citizenship (Dean 1999: 146) - including the requirement of being an ‘active citizen’ - the qualification of being a ‛sponger’ is cultivated (Grin 2013: 238). In their empirical comparative research on the ways in which active citizenship is promoted, Verhoeven en Tonkens (2013) found that in the Netherlands, blaming ‘fellow citizens’ and holding them accountable for ‘the problem’ is presented as legitimate (Verhoeven and Tonkens 2013: 30-32). ‘The problem’, here, is ‟a climate in which people require the government to solve every problem for them and in which their creativity, engagement and solution focused thinking gets lost” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2011). In the face of this alleged problem, harbouring negative feelings of weariness (idem: 33) towards fellow citizens who do not fulfil their social duty (idem: 36) is being appealed to as proper. These images of moral citizenship, based on the differentiating criterion of active (good) versus passive (bad), are thus used in the management of populations (Schinkel and Van Houdt 2013: 13-14); they are invoked as to steer the formation of certain types of

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subjects that the government needs in order to achieve its purposes and objectives (Dean 1999: 155).

These normative distinctions between independency and dependency as well as between active and passive are also being deployed in evaluating asylum seekers and refugees. Because responsibilization is inextricably tied to images of moral citizenship - as opposed to juridical citizenship - it could similarly be deployed in addressing potential citizens-to-be. Moreover, as the asylum seekers and refugees in question are present on the national territory of a European member state, they are affected by (Benhabib 2002; 2004) and subjected to (Abizadeh 2008) the rule of a border regime and as such to practices of governance.

The deployment of the (in)dependency dichotomy on asylum seekers and refugees happens, I find, in two paradoxical ways. On the one hand, when differentiating among asylum seekers, there is a (contested) rhetorical distinction between refugees and ‘economic migrants’ (the former considered to be truly dependent, latter only illegitimately pretending dependency and in fact capable of self-reliancy). Both categories, as will be demonstrated, respectively reinforce actions of care and actions of control. On the other hand, when differentiating between asylum seekers and refugees on the one hand and citizens on the other, those considered a ‛genuine refugee’ and as such ‛worthy of pity’, appear as inherently dependent - i.e. portrayed as helpless victims reduced to a bundle of material needs (Nyers 2006) - which is inconsistent with the ideal of active citizenship. Moreover, (s)he is thought to carry a “permanent possible danger” (Aradau 2004: 269) that should be banned - a danger that, I found, reinforces the intertwinement of politics of care and control.

‘Real’ and ‘fake’: humanitarianism and securitization

First, concerning the differentiation among asylum-seekers and refugees in terms of

dependency and independency, it is relevant to draw on the administrative difference between

forced migration and voluntary migration (De Genova, Mezzadra, Pickles 2005: 17). The

first category comprises those that are considered refugee by the Convention, i.e. those forced to leave their country because they are politically forced to. The second category comprises those who do not meet up to the requirements set by the Convention, and that in everyday speech are called ‘economic migrants’. Importantly, the legitimacy of these categories is contested, both empirically and conceptually. Empirically, as “researchers have convincingly revealed this clear-cut distinction to be [..] untenable, as the motivations for movement are

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always mixed and in excess of such simple dichotomies” (De Genova, Mezzadra, Pickles 2005: 18). Conceptually, because concerning ‘refugees’, there is no basis on which political grounds ought to be given more moral weight than e.g. economic grounds (poverty, famine) or natural grounds (ecologic catastrophes) (Bader 2005; Carens 2013; Kukathas 2015). And concerning the category of ‛economic migrants’, this is not even a tenable legal category, but rather a buzzword used in everyday politics to refer to so-considered ‘illegal migrants’ that are ‘unwanted.’

Despite the empirical and conceptual untenability of the categories of ‘refugees’ and ‘economic migrants’, the migration regime rests on this binary logic as to who to take in and who to leave out. Moreover, as I would add in the context of citizens’ initiatives, they appeal to different assemblages of practices that are presumed to be rolled out respectively. For supposed forced migrants, framed as legitimately dependent on a receiving country, logically meet with humanitarianism: affective citizenship and caring communities. Voluntary

migrants instead, framed as illegally and illegitimately crossing borders and clogging the asylum procedures, meet with securitization and criminalization: risk management and crime control. These dynamics are why Bigo found that humanitarianism and securitization are interwoven (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013: 187): they are both prompted by each of the categories as produced by the contested distinction between ‘real’ asylum seekers and ‘fake’ ones.

This is certainly not to say that, in practice, citizens do not engage in acts of care towards those asylum seekers that administratively are considered ‛economic migrants’, and vice versa, that citizens do not engage in acts of control towards those asylum seekers that administratively are considered ‛refugees.’ In fact, this inescapably is part of the very practice of citizens’ initiatives. For example, among those picked up by Sea-Watch, there may very well be asylum seekers that later will be identified as ‛economic migrants’, and among those hindered from getting into Oranje, there may very well be asylum seekers who will be identified as ‛genuine’ refugees. Indeed, the observation in itself that citizens, regardless of the existing categories, claim a role in answering the question of who gets protection, and what this means to sovereignty, democracy, politics and the political, is of great relevance (chapter 3); the point here is merely the intertwinement of practices of care and control depending on the dependency-independency dichotomy as prompted by responsibilization.2

2_{It would be interesting, moreover, to see how the regime of care and control, in relation to dependence and}

independence, interacts with categories such as race, nationality, ethnicity, religion and gender. For example, it could be hypothesized that women are more likely to be regarded as worthy of care and/or dependent. In Oss,

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Inherently dependent and risky

Secondly, then, there is the differentiation between asylum seekers and refugees on the one hand, and citizens on the other. Considering those deemed ‘legitimately dependent’ and eligible to protection, it has been noted that they are thought of as universally suffering bodies in pain that are worthy of pity (Fassin 2001) deprived of political agency and reduced to their material needs (Nyers 2006). The obvious problem in the context of the appeal made to active citizenship, however, is that such seemingly inherent dependency in the figure of the refugee thus presented, is a fundamental threat to this ‘society of participation’ consisting of agentive actors capable of self-care. In the face of the ideal of citizenship that

responsibilization draws on, which applauds active self-entrepreneurs enacting individual responsibility, the abstraction from the autonomy of asylum seekers and refugees may invigorate the divide between responsibilized citizens on the one hand and asylum seekers and refugees on the other. As responsibilization rests on the differentiating criterion of agentive versus passive, the disregard to migrant agency inhibits a perception of them being agentive actors and as such allows the unwanted migrant to represent a threat to the ideal of the self-reliant and active responsibilized citizen.

Apart from the alleged threat the figure of the ‘legitimately dependent’ asylum seeker or refugee poses to the ideal of active citizenship, there is yet another risk. Although being recognized as ‘at risk’, the figure of the asylum seeker and refugee at the same time embodies ‘high risk’ - what Aradau in her study on trafficked women calls the ‟symptomatic

subversion of pity into risk” (Aradau 2004: 254). In the Netherlands, this is manifested in a plethora of alleged risks uttered towards the arrival of asylum seekers and refugees. For example, claims that ‘they’ are predominantly male, might have war traumas, cannot start assimilating when staying in reception centres, might be affiliated to terrorist organizations, have incompatible beliefs and habits, suppress women, linger on the streets, steal jobs, et cetera, all become an indicator of future risks asylum seekers and refugees allegedly pose to the receiving state. As such, to Aradau, those who were ‟previously the object of pity

[become] [..] inherently and perpetually ‘risky’, thus subverting the emotional promise of the

citizens dissatisfied with the accommodation of recognized male refugees in a house reconstructed for purposes of reception, commented that instead of “a mother with three crying children” - an image they saw on a brochure distributed by the Refugee Council - “the house will be packed with men. We are being fooled” (De Graaf 2016). As this comment suggests that women, unlike men, would not have been the object of their protest, tracing the properties of dangerousness and safeness along diverse social categories would as such allow for further insights concerning care and control.

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politics of pity and turning it into an abstract suspicion of risk” (Aradau 2004: 275). Interestingly, through policies such as the so-called Declaration of Participation

(‘Participatieverklaring’) which in the Netherlands will be obligatory during procedures of integration (Visser 2015c), it is attempted discipline asylum seekers and refugees as to contain these future risks.

Citizens on the lookout

The alleged risks inherent to the figure of the asylum seeker and refugees have implications to ‘responsible’ citizens’ prescribed conduct. ‘Good’ citizens ought to be ‟constantly on the look-out for ‘suspicious’ or ‘risky’ subjects” (Vaughan-Williams 2009: 64). They are

encouraged to monitor and categorize people (Vaughan-Williams 2009: 68) in terms of their suspiciousness. As Coaffee and Rogers (2009) note, “increasing attention is now being paid to how individuals and a broad range of communities might become more responsible for their own risk management” (Coaffee and Rogers 2009: 102), a trend the authors relate to responsibilization (Coaffee and Rogers 2009: 113). In this sense - next to initiatives

restrictive towards the reception of asylum seekers motivated by the alleged risks posed by

asylum seekers and refugees - initiatives supportive towards the reception of asylum seekers could similarly be perceived of as containing future risks latently present in the figure of the asylum seeker. As such, care and control, looking after and looking over, are inherently intertwined in the figure of the asylum seeker, in relation to citizens’ actions as they are prescribed by responsibilization.

2.4. Explaining dissent

To sum up, the citizens’ initiatives of care and control manifest the ideal of active citizenship the Dutch government invested in over the last four decades. Citizens’ actions that (intend to) offer housing or bring food to asylum seekers, display the affectedness that requires

‘responsible citizens’ to help those who cannot help themselves. This principle was similarly drawn on in responsibilizing communities of care in the context of the WMO (Kampen et al 2013a). Moreover, it resonates with the discourse of humanitarianism - i.e. migration being a tragedy, migrants being helpless and needy. Alternately, citizens’ actions that (intend to) obstruct the opening of reception centres pointing at potential dangers concerning the reception of asylum seekers, display the vigilance and willingness to contribute to safe

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neighbourhoods. This principle was similarly drawn on in communities of control in the context of government policies that called upon ‘responsible citizens’ to engage in social controls and contribute to ‘fighting crime’. Moreover, it resonates with the discourse of securitization and criminalization - i.e. migration being part of a continuum of security and/or criminality. In both cases, the commitment of citizens to participate is drawn on by evoking images of what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizenship entail: active versus passive, independent versus dependent.

Responsibilization as mechanism thus may explain the willingness to help care and control. Indeed, this willingness was said to be overwhelming. In December 2015, the number of registered volunteers reached 47 000 (Van der Velden 2015). The online medium De Correspondent (Bregman 2015) reported that in the town Kapelle, a waiting list for volunteers had been set up; a few hours after the municipality announced that 200 Syrians would arrive, 150 citizens had signed in to help (Omroep Zeeland 2015). In September 2015, COA’s telephone operators did not have time to deal with all those making known their readiness to act, and requested citizens to register online (NOS 2015b). The same happened in Ootmarsum (Twente FM 2015) and Oud-Beijerland (Boerma 2015). In the latter town, the number of volunteers outreached the number of refugees. At the same time, in January 2016,

de Volkskrant reported 41 occasions of ‘resistance’ concerning reception and asylum: against

(intended) reception centres (12), against government officials or city halls (12), against asylum seekers (either accepted or awaiting their procedure) (8) or ‘other actions’ (9) (Singeling and Stoker 2016).3 Responsibilization can moreover account for the dynamics of care and control specifically - both ‛poles’ are characteristic to discourses of

responsibilization as they have been established in the Netherlands, and moreover resonates with humanitarianism and securitization as interactive and mutually establishing duality.

Contestation

The story however does not end here. Responsibilization requires citizens to act in line with what the government wants. For the theory to fit actual practice, citizens should be put in a position to serve the ends of government - or at least tried to be positioned as such - and have

3_{These figures, presented in the paper version of de Volkskrant, were provided in a chart mapping ‘resistance’}

in the Netherlands and includes violent actions. As violent actions do not fall under the scope of this research project, I asked de Volkskrant if more details were available. They however emailed that the ‟chart got lost by a major clean-up of the archive”. The chart moreover was not added to the online version of the article.

Responsibilization and counter-democracy: ‘active citizens’ transforming practices of reception and asylum

‘ACTIVE CITIZENS’ TRANSFORMING PRACTICES OF

RECEPTION AND ASYLUM

‘ACTIVE CITIZENS’ TRANSFORMING PRACTICES OF

RECEPTION AND ASYLUM

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE – INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER TWO – RESPONSIBILIZATION AND

COUNTER-DEMOCRACY