Abstract
A higher level of mobility of people has marked the European Union (EU), with immigrants moving from one place to another, every year, looking for a better quality of life, often fleeing from war and poverty. In the wake of enlargement of the European Union, the United Kingdom (UK) experienced high inward migration. One of the main focuses of UK media coverage was immigration from Eastern European countries. The UK referendum on Brexit on 23 June 2016, was followed by an increase in hate crimes linked to migration issues and, subsequently, a media apparatus of toxic discourse and fear of the criminal ‘Other’. This paper aims to reveal how newspaper articles and personal comments written in response to these articles, represented creative and media-driven anxieties about ‘opening’ borders in the EU. The empirical sample builds on news media coverage of the ‘Euro-Ripper’ case, published in two UK newspapers—the Daily Mail and The Independent. Based on critical surveillance studies and cultural media studies, I elaborate on the notion of moral panic, dramatised by the media, which mobilises specific compositions of ‘otherness’ by constructing suspicion and criminalising inequality by particular social and ethnic groups and nationalities. I argue that the media portrays the dramatisation of transnational narratives of risk and (in)security, which redraws territorial borders and (re)define Britain’s global identity. The analysis shows how the news media in the Brexit vote continually raised and legitimised awareness related to the migration as a vehicle that enables the ‘folk-devil’ to cross borders. This context postulates an ideology that converges on a relationship of intransigence and criminal convictions, in the context of a politics of inclusion and exclusion. I conclude by emphasising how the media intersects different social and geographical spaces in which migration takes place. Media-constructed categories of suspicion targets have been previously created and ‘suspect communities’ have already been socially accepted, thereby confirming and reshaping understandings of their identities and communities.
Highlights
A broad level of mobility of people has marked the European Union (EU) with immigrants moving from one place to another, every year, looking for a better quality of life, driven primarily by economic factors, such as poverty and lack of employment, and to escape from war
Similar to other studies related to moral panic in an enlarging EU, the members of the public argue that only the reinstatement of borders can prevent these criminals from finding new victims
Concern is focused on the emergence of ‘open borders’ when the Schengen agreements and the Brexit vote context applied to the EU
Summary
A broad level of mobility of people has marked the European Union (EU) with immigrants moving from one place to another, every year, looking for a better quality of life, driven primarily by economic factors, such as poverty and lack of employment, and to escape from war. On May 21, 2015, the ‘Euro-Ripper’, named Dariusz Pawel Kotwica, a 29-year-old Polish citizen, brutally murdered an elderly couple in Vienna, Austria. This case had transnational dimensions: the investigations went beyond the crimes committed in Austria. It is suspected that he may have committed many crimes in the UK, where he lived for many years His use of the EU’s open borders became the focus of extreme and harrowing media narratives at the time of the Brexit referendum. My focus in this paper is to show how newspapers articles related to the ‘Euro-Ripper’ case, and personal text comments written in response to the articles, represented processes of belonging, (re)producing pre-existing inequalities and vulnerabilities about a sense of national community that incorporates British identity. The following section describes the data and methods analysed in function of the selected newspapers
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