ABSTRACT
Since the 1990s, European institutions and EU member states have made migration controls one of their top political priorities. This has led to the construction of increasingly restrictive migration policies and to the diffusion of multiple forms of border controls across and beyond state territories.
Against this security-driven agenda, social movements across Europe have organised transnational protests for the rights of migrants, and they have mobilised alternative visions of Europe. In this chapter, I discuss the competing and sometimes ambivalent visions of Europe on which these movements are based. I show how pro-migrants’ movements construct political imaginaries and forms of protest that concretely challenge the notion of ‘Fortress Europe’ through claims for inclusion as well as through their enactment of citizenship. I also show that these movements can sometimes reproduce exclusionary narratives, in particular when they endorse notions of ‘deservingness’. I analyse these visions of Europe prior to the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015 and their diffusion across society since 2015.
