In the words of David Harvey, “The state functions more clearly now as an executive committee of capitalist class interests than at any other time in history.”

In the neoliberal era, as corporate interests gain unprecedented influence in international affairs, a thorough understanding of global political systems requires a thorough understanding of the economic activity driving those systems. Accordingly, political economic theory seeks to “[study] how political forces shape global economic interactions” and vice versa. This article explores: what can a political economy analysis reveal about the role of surveillance in European migration policy?

In Europe, few cases are as emblematic of the interrelation between politics and economics as the so-called “migrant crisis,” a term that has permeated discussions of European border and migration policy since the 2015 Syrian refugee upsurge. Ever since, the European Union (EU) has faced widespread criticism for its unethical attempts to reduce migration flows from Africa and the Middle East, including the development of highly “securitized” external borders fueled by enormous funding into air and naval patrolling units via an “unregulated web” of private companies. Mainstream narratives attribute this securitization to the particularities of the post-9/11 era, which require states to externalize their “first lines of defense” through counterterrorist peacekeeping missions, “robust intervention” programs, and heavily militarized and surveilled external borders.

But the true origins of Europe’s draconian migration policy lie at least a decade prior to the collapse of the World Trade Center.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, European countries underwent a rapid demilitarization process, forcing private defense industries to grapple with the sudden absence of a stable economic market in which to grow. To make matters worse, the United States’ post-war protectionist policies restricted trade with Europe, insulating domestic defense firms from foreign competition. European defense industries eventually realized that they, like their American counterparts, required a single buyer to stabilize demand. Thus, defense firms turned to the European Commission (the EU’s executive branch) and began lobbying in Brussels to “aggregate national defense associations into transnational European institutions” with legal prerogatives to engage in defense-related policy. The strategy was a success and European security and defense industries saw considerable economic growth by the early 2000s, just in time to exploit the emerging conventional wisdom that twenty-first century problems (namely, terrorism) required twenty-first century solutions (namely, supranational EU defense/security policy).

But the story doesn’t end there. Institutions quickly realized that opportunities for even greater profit lay in blurring defense and security domains, i.e., consolidating civilian and military markets. Eventually, informal EU networks between defense and security actors that had mobilized in the face of economic hardship decades earlier (i.e., before both 9/11 and the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis) solidified into formal defense-security institutions. Thus emerged the military-industrialized border security system the EU employs to handle migration from outside the continent. In summation, mainstream political conjecture alone cannot explain the securitization of Europe’s migration policy. Instead, a political economy analysis reveals motivations fueled by corporate interests and industry adaptability to unfavorable market conditions in the post-Cold War order.

Today, individual European states have increasingly sought to bypass first-country asylum laws by preventing extra-continental refugees from reaching Europe in the first place.

Such strategies include Italy funding Tunisian forced detention centers in exchange for permission to send migrants back to Africa upon reaching Europe; France joining Italy in a similar agreement with Tunisia during the Arab Spring protests in 2011; the EU providing financial support to various military bases in Niger tasked with detaining asylum seekers; and a $3 billion agreement in 2016 granting Greece (an EU member state) the authority to return new Syrian migrants to Turkey, and in doing so, transforming the Greek-Turkish border into a safeguard for the European Union. Once again, conventional wisdom has backed these “border externalization” measures with the belief that effective counterterrorism strategy requires intervention, prevention, and vigilant surveillance along Europe’s frontiers.

However, a political economy analysis tells a different story, one that portrays European migration policy as a “war against migrants” riddled with corporate incentives to militarize and surveil its borders.

In recent years, the EU coast guard agency Frontex has strengthened its relations with private companies, working to increase surveillance along Europe’s external borders via a “common European border surveillance system (otherwise known as EUROSUR)” and maritime surveillance technology. More than once, Frontex itself has announced its commitment to “steer the research and development of surveillance technologies” in Europe, not only to improve border management, but also — and perhaps most importantly — to generate profit. The latter goal is achieved by Frontex declaring itself the “central buyer in the European security market.” As such, in 2017, Frontex awarded Italian arms firm Leonardo a €67 million contract with the European Maritime Safety Agency to supply drones for EU coast guards. This past year, Frontext spent €84 million in aerial surveillance contracts with firms in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Austria. The bottom line is: we mustn’t interpret these public-private partnerships as merely well-intentioned attempts to improve migration policy. Ultimately, Europe’s border surveillance makes Europe money.

That being said, I argue Europe’s border externalization measures have stretched beyond the continent’s frontiers, permeating the domestic markets of nations considered unsavory for migration into Europe. Specifically, European firms boast a strong tradition of selling surveillance technology to authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa. In 2011, Italian company Area SpA was caught aiding Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s violent crackdown on protests by monitoring citizens’ emails, Web use, and electronic contacts. German firms have made significant contributions to Iran’s highly sophisticated surveillance sector. France and the UK comprise two other European states in which surveillance companies operating in the Middle East are headquartered. Once again, a political economy analysis reveals the hidden motive behind the trade of surveillance tech from Europe to the Middle East: analogous to funding coast guards in the Mediterranean in order to prevent migrants from ever touching base in Europe, European states invest in surveillance and social control mechanisms abroad in order to prevent migrants from leaving their country of origin in the first place.

Ultimately, a political economy approach to the role of surveillance in Europe’s migration policy exposes a contradiction in European states and the EU’s rhetoric towards instability in the Global South. Quite frankly, the “European liberal order” narrative does not hold up to thorough interrogation. In reality, Europe’s strategic impulse to contain instability abroad has manifested along neo-colonial ties, where countries like Italy and France are indirectly supporting repressive regimes in Libya and Egypt to contain would-be migrants within their borders. In turn, Europe’s border externalization policies have rendered migrants both necessary for, and victims of, European firms’ economic incentives to keep migrants out of the continent.

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