Populist and ‘Post-Truth’ Border Politics

Abstract

Chapter 3 investigates the role of populist and ‘post-truth’ narratives of migration and border crises propagated by governmental and non-governmental elites in fuelling widespread notions of a ‘loss of control’, despite the intensification of walling and deterrent security measures. In order to contextualize findings in subsequent chapters, a significant proportion of the discussion is devoted to the five national political and cultural contexts in which focus groups were held (Germany, Greece, Hungary, Spain, United Kingdom). First, a close examination of the methodologies used to produce several prominent opinion poll findings on migration reveals that they were produced by surveys whose design often worked within and thereby reproduced the dominant securitizing frame. Second, with reference to populist discursive and visual representations of mobile populations and a loss of control over border security, it is shown how the rise of ‘post-truth’ communication over the same timeframe produced multiple competing realities of the situation in the EU, which simultaneously entrenched the crisis narrative and deprived audiences of detailed and reliable information. Third, it is demonstrated how leading opinion polls, used by governmental elites as ‘evidence’ of EU citizens’ pro-border and anti-immigration stance, were unable to grasp the performativity of their own role in perpetuating the dynamics of crisis that they purported merely to capture. Alternative modes of engaging with the politics of ‘public opinion’ are thus urgently required. A vernacular approach offers a series of disruptive counter-points to existing sources of elite knowledge and understanding about EU citizens’ views on migration and border security.