Sanctuary sans frontières: Social movements and solidarity in post-war Northern France

Calais has long been known as a ‘bottleneck’ within Europe, and as a site of conflicting conceptions of citizenship rights and claims. As the geographically most proximal point to the UK in mainland Europe, it had been the site of past migrations and anti-immigrant riots for centuries (Derville 1985). But as changing EU laws had made clandestine movement an almost necessary part of seeking asylum in Europe (Bolten 1991; Schuster 2005; Huysmans 2006), the presence of hundreds of migrants in the town, trying to cross the Channel, brought it to a new level of symbolic significance. This significance was amplified when the Red Cross built a humanitarian shelter, Sangatte, although it was closed in 2002 only eighteen months later (Laacher 2002; Fassin 2005). This materialisation of a literal ‘sanctuary’ in Northern France reflected the increasing displacement of religious, mission-based forms of sanctuary by secular, transnational associations, upholding internationally-sanctioned notions of human rights. Some argue this emergent production of spaces is part of a broader project of the extension of state sovereignty, which depends on the ability to ‘ban’ others from belonging for its very existence, and reproduces hierarchies of citizenship belonging (Agamben 1997; Fassin 2005; Darling 2009). However, this is not the only story that can be told of Sangatte, or of Calais and Northern France in the post-war period. The collaborations which formed to assert the rights of sans-papiers in the remaking of the French Republic, distinctive articulations of immigrants’ rights in the 1960s and 1970s, and new forms of organising that emerged as migrant squatter camps, or ‘jungles’, were destroyed in 2009, also reflect the influence of other social movements, newly linked within and across nation-states (Freedman 2008). While in Paris and in Calais, protesters frequently took refuge in churches and sacred social spaces, such acts also drew on other histories, including European Leftist, post-colonial, and migrant-led forms of organising. This chapter explores sanctuary practices enacted in Northern France as one form of ethical response to irregular migrants in the post-war period. However, highlighting the multiple influences on ethical subjectivity besides a history of state-making, I demonstrate how this notion has been transformed, and is being displaced, by notions of collective belonging that exceed and problematise citizenship. Most importantly in this context is the emergence of an ethos of ‘solidarity’: a platform of equality shared by different social movements, asserting the existence of a universal community of migrants prior to categories linked with the nationstate. As such, solidarity is a remaking of the idea of sanctuary, sans frontières. My analysis draws on my ethnographic work with social movements and humanitarian organisations in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, and on my archival work on social movements in Northern France in the post-war period. This work focused on non-governmental organising in Calais after the destruction of the jungles, specifically the construction and transformation of ethical responses to undocumented migrants in six humanitarian associations and the solidarity network ‘No Borders’. In pointing to the new kinds of ethical subjectification emerging among social movements we move from a negativist, to a positive style of critique (Foucault 1997: 315), problematising a narrative in recent scholarship which has construed sanctuary spaces in the EU as sites of biopolitical abjection. In recent years the ‘autonomy of migration’ perspective has sought to address a passive reading of space and subjectivity by phrasing migration as an active constitution of citizenship - an ‘act’ of citizenship (Isin and Nielson 2008; Isin 2009; see also Czajka, Chapter 3 in this volume). This chapter builds on this research, focusing on how the social movements, including migrants’ movements, have inflected particular conceptions of sanctuary, as part of an ongoing redefinition of ethical subjectivity.