[...] we may ask why an influx of 1 million people trying to establish themselves in a population of 510 million should supposedly trigger such a crisis.

The reality is that there was no ‘refugee crisis’, but rather one of the repressive apparatus of Fortress Europe. It is this regime that, faced with a crisis such as that of the Greater Middle East, combined with the long-term consequences of neoliberal policies, climate change and chronic instability in large areas of Africa and Asia, produces the ‘refugee crisis’ for public opinion, creating the discourse that justifies the policy supposed to resolve it. What the term ‘refugee crisis’ transcodes, Nicholas De Genova has argued, is ‘a permanent epistemic instability within the government of transnational human migration, which itself relies upon the exercise of power over the classifying, naming and partitioning of “migrants”/“refugees”.’footnote18 Greece’s role in this new phase of Fortress Europe has been twofold. On the one hand, the country acts as the gendarme—or better, the warder—of Europe’s huge south-eastern flank whose border-post it is.