



























CEY.4Escoto.EverythingisNewAgain


Everything Old is New Again  
Borders, Ritual, and the Return of History in Europe 

 
Rafi Escoto  
Emory University  

 
Abstract 
This paper argues that Green Border (2023), directed by Agnieszka Holland, transforms the 
Polish-Belarusian border into a site of moral ritual, where sacred violence replaces 
humanitarian law. Using Durkheim’s theories, Eastern European memory studies, and 
analyses of populism and asylum policy, the paper interprets the film as a historical 
recurrence rather than a modern crisis. Drawing on scholars like Törnquist-Plewa, Exeler, 
and Krastev, the analysis reveals how Europe’s border politics ritualize exclusion and revive 
authoritarian patterns under democratic guise. Methods include close film analysis and 
engagement with secondary literature on EU identity, populism, and the symbolic politics of 
migration.  
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Article 
 

In the autumn of 2021, a strip of dense forest between Poland and Belarus—long 
peripheral in the European imagination—abruptly became the epicenter of a manufactured 
humanitarian crisis. The Belarusian regime, seeking to retaliate against EU sanctions, 
engineered a migrant corridor by issuing visas to Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, and Congolese 
and transporting them to the edge of Europe.1 Poland responded with a state of emergency, 
the construction of an exclusion zone, and the legalization of summary pushbacks. 
Journalists and aid workers were barred; asylum procedures were suspended; and 
hundreds of people were trapped in a militarized limbo between two states intent on 
denying responsibility. What unfolded was not a border malfunction, but the deliberate 
creation of a political theater in which human bodies became instruments of geopolitical 
signaling.2 

To see this frontier only as a site of strategic confrontation, however, is to miss the 
deeper historical structure that gives it meaning. Borders in Europe have long been stages 
upon which states perform belonging, exclusion, and sovereignty. Migration 
specialists—from Hein de Haas to Michelle Lynn Kahn—remind us that mobility is not an 
aberration of later modernity but a constitutive feature of European history: cyclical, 
patterned, and profoundly ordinary. Yet the political class continues to describe migration 
as an existential rupture, a crisis to be managed rather than an ongoing human condition.3 
In this discursive alchemy, migrants become impurities threatening the moral coherence of 
the nation, and the border becomes a sacred line whose defense justifies exceptional 
measures.   

It is within this longer historical and sociological frame that Agnieszka Holland’s 
Green Border (2023) functions not as the center of analysis, but as a revealing fictionalized 
primary source—a cinematic document of a border transformed into ritual terrain. Shot in 
black and white, the film intentionally disorients temporality, echoing what Asli Yakali and 
Zahide Erdogan describe as a “cinematic history of the present.”4 Its aesthetic choices evoke 
earlier European catastrophes: zones of filtration, exclusion, and bureaucratic cruelty that 

4 Asli Yakali and Zahide Erdoğan, “Green Border: Cinematic Storytelling as History of the Present,” CINEJ Cinema 
Journal 12, no.2 (2024): 247.  

3 Hein de Haas, How Migration Really Works: The Facts About the Most Divisive Issue in Politics (London: Penguin 
Press, 2023), which argues that migration is structural, cyclical, and a normal feature of human societies; Michelle 
Lynn Kahn, Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish-German History (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 2024), which demonstrates the centrality of circular and return migration to European 
history via Turkish guest-workers in the Federal Republic of Germany.   

2 Human Rights Watch, “Die Here or Go to Poland”: Belarus and Poland’s Shared Responsibility for Border 
Abuses (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2021); Republic of Poland, Decree of the President No. 171/2021 
Declaring a State of Emergency in Parts of Podlaskie and Lubelskie Voivodeships, September 2, 2021; Helsinki 
Foundation for Human Rights, The Lawless Zone: Human Rights Violations in the Area of the State of Emergency 
(Warsaw: HFHR, 2021); AIDA (Asylum Information Database), Country Report: Poland—2021 Update (Brussels: 
European Council on Refugees and Exiles, 2022); Grupa Granica, Report on the Situation of People at the 
Poland-Belarus Border, October-December 2021.    

1 European Commission, Statement by President von der Leyen on the Instrumentalisation of Migrants by the 
Belarus Regime, November 8, 2021; Amnesty International, Poland/Belarus: Caught in a Political Game (London: 
Amnesty International, 2021).  

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recur whenever states construct an “impure” category to be expelled. The soldiers and 
guards in the film do not behave spontaneously; they perform rehearsed gestures of 
exclusion that closely reflect the documented practices of Poland’s border services and the 
testimonies collected by Grupa Granica, Human Rights Watch, and the Helsinki Foundation 
for Human Rights.  

Durkheim’s theory of ritual offers a powerful lens through which to understand this 
convergence between cinematic representation and documented practice. For Durkheim, 
rituals reaffirm the moral community by distinguishing the sacred from the profane and by 
expelling the impure.5 At the Poland-Belarus border, the migrant is rendered not merely as 
an administrative problem but as a symbolic pollutant whose presence destabilizes 
national order. The violence that follows—pushbacks, exposure, abandonment—functions 
less as a security policy than as a purification rite. Once the border is sacralized in this way, 
its maintenance becomes a moral obligation immune to legal constraints, humanitarian 
norms, or empirical evidence about migration’s ordinariness.  

This essay argues that the Poland-Belarus frontier should be understood as 
precisely such a Durkheimian ritual site: a space where violence is performed to reaffirm 
the imagined integrity of the European community. By reading Green Border alongside legal 
documents, NGO reports, and contemporary scholarship on migration, populism, and 
memory politics, I show that Europe’s so-called postwar humanitarian order has not 
collapsed but has reverted to older patterns of sacralized exclusion. The border has become 
an altar on which liberal ideals are sacrificed, populist narratives sanctified, and human 
beings rendered symbolic offerings in a ritual of sovereignty. Though grounded in the 
specificities of Belarus and Poland, this paper speaks to Europe as a whole, for the 
dynamics that converge in the forests of Podlasie—ritualized security, selective 
compassion, and the moralization of borders—echo throughout the continent.  

Methodologically, this analysis does not rely on personal testimony or oral history; 
rather it draws on legal texts, policy decisions, civil-society documentation, and established 
historiography to illuminate how structures of power express themselves through 
language, bureaucracy, and space. In synthesizing these sources, I offer not a partisan 
argument but an applied historical commentary—one that seeks to interpret, rather than 
indict, and situate the present within a larger continuum of European political and moral 
practice. Ultimately, this is a study of how history moves through us: how what is old 
becomes new again, how inherited patterns reassert themselves in moments of crisis, and 
how the border, far from being a peripheral line, becomes a site where Europe’s deepest 
anxieties—and aspirations—are revealed.  

Sacred Boundaries: EU Memory Politics and the Making of a Ritualized Frontier 
 

The sacralization of the EU’s eastern frontier is not a rupture in Europe’s postwar 
trajectory but a revealing continuation of its unresolved moral architecture. As Ian Kershaw 

5 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 
pp. 38-39.  
 

82 



argues in The Global Age, the postwar European project emerged from a dual inheritance: a 
cosmopolitan ideal grounded in the memory of catastrophe, and a persistent pattern of 
selective remembrance that allowed national mythologies to endure beneath the veneer of 
integration.6 This duality deepened after the 2004 enlargement, when the European Union 
absorbed states whose memory culture diverged sharply from Western norms. As Barbara 
Törnquist-Plewa demonstrates, Western Europe had cultivated a “negative founding myth” 
centered on Holocaust remembrance and self-critique, whereas many Eastern European 
states retained narratives of national martyrdom that resisted cosmopolitanizing 
pressures.7 This mnemonic divide is not merely symbolic; it has real policy consequences. 
Poland’s conduct at the Belarus border—framed as the defense of “European civilization” 
yet executed through illegal pushbacks, emergency decrees, and obstruction of asylum 
procedures—embodies the tension between human rights as Europe’s universalist promise 
and sovereignty as its practiced theology.  

This contradiction becomes most visible in the legal and bureaucratic structures 
that govern Europe’s periphery. Maciej Grześkowiak’s analysis of the 2021 crisis shows that 
the European Commission, long styled as the “guardian of the treaties,” failed to enforce EU 
asylum standards when confronted with member states operating under the logic of 
exception.8 On paper, the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) guarantees access to 
procedure, non-refoulement, and individual assessment. But as documented in AIDA’s 
2021-22 Country Report: Poland, these rights evaporated at the border zone, where 
Poland’s October 2021 amendment to the Act on Foreigners enabled summary expulsions 
and effectively neutralized asylum claims.9 Grupa Granica’s field reports corroborate this 
legal landscape, describing a cycle in which migrants were repeatedly pushed back and 
forth between Polish and Belarusian forces—“ping-pong” expulsions that left families 
stranded for days in freezing forests without food, shelter, or medical care.10 The “paper 
rights” of CEAS thus reveal their fragility; bureaucratic humanitarianism becomes a ritual of 
self-legitimation rather than a functional system of protection.  

The performative power of border enforcement is not uniquely European, but part 
of a broader pattern in which contemporary states use borders as stages for projecting 
sovereignty. Comparative migration historians such as Leo Lucassen and Tara Zahra remind 
us that public narratives of crisis often diverge sharply from empirical realities of mobility. 
Migration, they argue, has always been a normal and recurring feature of modern societies, 
yet governments repeatedly transform it into a symbolic battleground on which national 
identity is defended.11 This helps explain why states across ideological contexts—European, 

11 Leo Lucassen, “Peeling an Onion: The ‘Refugee Crisis’ from a Historical Perspective,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 
41, no. 3 (2018): 383-410; Tara Zahra, Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World 
Wars (New York: W.W. Norton, 2023).  

10 Grupa Granica, Report on the Situation of People at the Poland–Belarus Border, October–December 2021 
(Warsaw: Grupa Granica, 2021), 30.  

9 AIDA (Asylum Information Database), Country Report: Poland—2021 Update (Brussels: European Council on 
Refugees and Exiles, 2022).  

8 Maciej Grześkowiak, “The ‘Guardian of the Treaties’ Is No More? The European Commission and the 2021 
Humanitarian Crisis on the Poland–Belarus Border,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 42, no. 1 (2023): 83-84.  

7 Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, “After All These Years, Still Divided by Memories? The European Union and Eastern 
Europe,” East European Politics and Societies 38, no. 4 (2024): 1080.  

6 Ian Kershaw, The Global Age: Europe, 1950-2017 (New York: Viking, 2020).  

83 



American, or otherwise—invest borders with outsized political meaning. When the United 
States expanded detention facilities at its southern frontier or debated offshore processing 
arrangements, these were less policies of material necessity than gestures aimed at 
reassuring an anxious nation that the border still “holds.” The point is not that the 
American and Polish contexts are equivalent—each is historically distinct—but that both 
reflect a broader logic in which states ritualize control by transforming vulnerable migrants 
into embodiments of disorder.  

Recognizing this pattern requires acknowledging the explanatory limits of both 
anti-migrant populism and uncritical pro-migrant idealism. As Hein de Haas argues, 
migration is neither the solution to all socioeconomic problems nor the existential threat 
portrayed by its opponents; it is a structural feature of human societies shaped by 
development, demographic change, and global inequality.12 Michelle Kahn’s work on 
Turkish guest-workers and their return migration similarly disrupts simplified narratives 
by showing how migration flows are often circular, reversible, and deeply intertwined with 
national histories.13 Migrants are not invading forces nor passive victims but actors 
embedded in long-standing global patterns. By situating the Poland-Belarus crisis within 
this broader scholarly landscape, the historical question becomes not whether migration is 
“good” or “bad,” but how and why states transform ordinary mobility into a site of moral 
panic and ritualized violence.  

Seen through this wider lens, the Poland-Belarus border emerges as a microcosm of 
Europe’s unresolved struggle to reconcile universal rights with national belonging. The 
exclusionary practices documented by Human Rights Watch and the Helsinki Foundation 
for Human Rights—pushbacks, denial of aid, and obstruction of asylum access—are not 
aberrations but logical outcomes of a system that sacralizes territorial integrity while 
delegating humanitarian responsibility outward.14 Green Border captures this with eerie 
accuracy: its monochrome palette mirrors the stark moral binaries imposed by the state, 
while its depiction of border guards performing routine expulsions aligns with both legal 
records and NGO testimonies. The ritualization of violence at the frontier thus reflects not 
only Poland’s illiberal turn but a deeper European ambivalence about the very foundations 
of its postwar identity—an identity suspended between cosmopolitan aspiration and the 
enduring power of the border as a sacred line.  

Filtration, Frontiers, and the Return of History  
 

The bureaucratized violence unfolding on the Poland-Belarus border resonates with 
a much older repertoire of governance in Eastern Europe: the selective sorting, disciplining, 
and abandonment of human beings under the guise of security. As Stephen Kotkin observes 

14 Human Rights Watch, “Die Here or Go to Poland”: Belarus and Poland’s Shared Responsibility for Border 
Abuses (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2021); Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, The Lawless Zone: 
Human Rights Violations in the Area of the State of Emergency (Warsaw: HFHR, 2021). 

13 Michelle Lynn Kahn, Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish-German History 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2024).   

12 Hein de Haas, How Migration Really Works: The Facts About the Most Divisive Issue in Politics (London: 
Penguin Press, 2023).  

84 



of Stalinist rule, citizens “were compelled to endure enervating bureaucratic indifference 
and arbitrary repression” despite the state’s frequent rationalizations for their policies and 
practices.15 This paradox continues to echo in contemporary border regimes. Franziska 
Exceler’s recent study of Russian filtration camps during the invasion of Ukraine reveals a 
chilling continuity with their Soviet predecessors. The camps, she writes, are used “to 
register, screen, and detain Ukrainian civilians in areas that have come under Russian 
occupation.” Moreover, she notes that “structural similarities exist between the different 
filtration camp systems (Soviet and Russian), above all in terms of the administrative 
design of the filtration process.”16 Taken together, these continuities show that filtration is 
not merely a neutral procedure of screening, but an administrative technology that decides 
whose lives are to be monitored, constrained, or removed.  

The same logic—innocuous administrative language masking state 
violence—structures the Poland-Belarus frontier today. Poland’s 2021 emergency zone 
decree invoked “public order” and “state security,” while its October 2021 pushback 
amendment legalized summary expulsions of migrants deemed to lack “legitimate grounds” 
for entry.17 Bureaucratic euphemism once again enables human disposability.  

The forested borderlands between Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine have borne these 
experiments in statecraft for more than a century, making the present crisis not an anomaly 
but a reactivation of an older logic. Kate Brown’s A Biography of No Place demonstrates how 
these lands were repeatedly transformed by imperial projects that sought to refashion 
diverse populations into idealized national subjects; in these efforts, states reorganized 
people with the same zeal with which they reorganized territory. Crucially, Brown insists 
that in borderlands, ideology always lands hardest on the bodies of ordinary people, who 
become the medium through which states assert control.18 This insight illuminates the 
human cost of the Poland-Belarus standoff. Belarusian officials funnelling migrants to the 
EU frontier as instruments of geopolitical leverage; Polish authorities responding with 
pushbacks, exclusion zones, and legal fictions of “non-entry”; and caught between these 
competing sovereignties were the stateless, the undocumented, and the 
unprotected—those upon whose bodies the border’s power is enacted.  

The geography itself retains the memory of these violences. Timothy Snyder’s 
account of the borderlands captures the region’s long history of state interventions that 
reorder populations by identifying and eliminating categories of unwanted people.19 Green 
Border’s monochrome cinematography captures this moral geography: the forest appears 
as a space where law, sovereignty, and abandonment overlap. Granica documented cases in 

19 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), vii-xix.  

18 Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 
University Press, 2004), 1-17.   

17 Republic of Poland, Decree of the President No. 171/2021 Declaring a State of Emergency in Parts of Podlaskie 
and Lubelskie Voivodeships, September 2, 2021; Act of 14 October 2021 Amending the Act on Foreigners, Journal 
of Laws 2021, item 1918. 

16 Franziska, Exeler, “Filtration Camps, Past and Present, and Russia’s War Against Ukraine,” Journal of Genocide 
Research 25, nos. 2-3 (2023): 426, 444.  

15 Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California PRess, 
1995), 389.  

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which migrants were forced back and forth for days, left between the border lines without 
food or shelter, trapped in a no-man’s land where both states denied responsibility.20 The 
forest becomes an archive of unacknowledged lives—a place where Europe’s humanitarian 
vocabulary dissolves into the logistical management of suffering.  

The Russo-Ukrainian War intensified this moral geography by revealing striking 
asymmetries in Europe’s politics of compassion. In 2022, while Russian forces resurrected 
filtration tactics designed to intimidate, monitor, and detain Ukrainian civilians, the 
European Union activated the Temporary Protection Directive and opened its borders to 
millions of Ukrainians. As Exeler notes, Russian filtration operated as tools for surveillance 
and intimidation, not merely processing.21 Yet at the Poland-Belarus frontier, Syrians, 
Afghans, Yemenis, and Congolese were denied the very protections extended to Ukrainians. 
This divergence exposes what Didier Fassin calls the “moral economy, centered on 
humanitarianism,” where compassion is selectively allocated according to geopolitical 
narrative rather than universal principles.22 A 35-year-old Congolese man, interviewed by 
Human Rights Watch, distilled this double standard succinctly:  

[They said], ‘There’s no asylum, there’s nothing [here], go back to where you came 
from!’ They [took us by vans] and made us go back to Belarus, to the neutral zone.23  

Green Border echoes this sentiment powerfully as its characters confront the silence 
surrounding non-European refugees—a silence that speaks louder than any declaration of 
values.  

Yet this asymmetry cannot be explained solely through compassion; it is rooted in 
competing visions of belonging that divide Europe internally. As Paul Kubicek has argued, 
the rise of illiberal nationalism in Poland and Hungary reflects a backlash against 
cosmopolitan liberalism, which is framed by populist leaders as elitist, foreign, and 
corrosive to national cohesion.24 Ivan Krastev similarly observes that the 2015 refugee 
crisis produced the return of the East-West divide, as Eastern European governments 
rejected Brussels’ universalism in favor of narratives of cultural defense.25 Holland displays 
this dynamic on screen through the suspicion directed at those who aid 
migrants—acitivists, psychologists, even border guards who show empathy. They become 
transgressors of the moral order, punished not for illegality but for violating the ritual 
boundaries of national solidarity.  

25 Ivan Krastev, “The Refugee Crisis and the Return of the East-West Divide in Europe,” Slavic Review 76, no. 2 
(2017): 292.  

24 Paul Kubicek, “Illiberal Nationalism and the Backlash Against Liberal Cosmopolitanism in Post-Communist 
Europe,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 28, no. 3 (2022): 331–49. 

23 Human Rights Watch, “Die Here or Go to Poland”: Belarus and Poland’s Shared Responsibility for Border 
Abuses (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2021).  

22 Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 
2012), 7.   

21 Exeler, “Filtration Camps,” 429.   

20 Grupa Granica, Report on the Situation of People at the Poland–Belarus Border, October–December 2021 
(Warsaw: Grupa Granica, 2021), 8. 

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Green Border also indicts Western Europe, refusing a simplistic binary in which East 
equals cruelty and West equals universalism. Törnquist-Plewa notes that while Western 
Europe foregrounds Holocaust memory as its negative founding myth, it often deploys that 
memory selectively, instrumentalizing it to avoid confronting other historical traumas, 
especially those concerning colonial violence or the expulsions and displacements that 
reshaped Eastern Europe after 1945.26 Refugees at the Poland-Belarus border thus 
experience a double erasure: they are unwanted within Eastern nationalist mythologies and 
inconvenient to Western humanitarian self-presentation. The film’s searing line—“No one 
is coming”—captures this structural abandonment. It is not merely a narrative device; it 
reflects a political reality in which Europe’s commitments fracture at the border and the 
ideals proclaimed in Brussels evaporate among the birch trees of Podlasie.  

Taken together, the crisis at the Poland-Belarus frontier represents not a break with 
Europe’s past but its resurgence: a return of the border as a tool of moral sorting, 
bureaucratic domination, and selective compassion. In this sense, the contemporary border 
does not replicate the Stalinist camp or the Soviet filtration point, but it draws from the 
same repertoire of statecraft—one in which administrative categories organize human 
worth, and where frontier spaces become the experimental ground for political visions 
enacted upon vulnerable bodies. History, here, does not repeat itself. But as Exeler’s work, 
Brown’s borderlands scholarship, and Holland’s film collectively reveal, it returns with new 
instruments and with devastating clarity.  

Populism, Moral Community, and the Politics of Purification  
 

If the border is a Durkheimian stage on which Europe enacts the boundaries of 
moral community, populism provides the language through which the drama is narrated. 
Case Mudde famously defines populism as a thin-centered ideology built on a single 
Manichean division between “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite,” a worldview too 
narrow to stand alone but powerful enough to reshape whatever ideology it attaches itself 
to.27 This vision presupposes a unified and homogenous people whose supposed general 
will is both singular and morally infallible.28 Yet real societies are heterogeneous. To 
preserve the illusion of unity, populist movements must identify elements that threaten the 
imagined coherence of “the people.” In contemporary Europe, migrants—stateless, 
racialized, and symbolically malleable—have filled this role. They become the impurity 
whose expulsion affirms the purity of the national body .  

The migrant thus becomes indispensable to the populist narrative: not a person so 
much as a symbolic instrument that sustains the moral dichotomy populism requires. 
Jan-Werner Müller emphasizes that populists claim exclusive representation of the people; 
anyone who disagrees, whether migrant or citizen, becomes morally suspect.29 This 
explains why the Poland-Belarus border, although involving a relatively small number of 

29 Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 9. 

28 Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University 
Press, 2017), 6–9.  

27 Cas Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 23–24. 
26 Törnquist-Plewa, “After All These Years,” 1086.   

87 



asylum seekers, became a symbolic flashpoint. Stephen Gross notes that right-wing 
populism in Europe is rooted not simply in xenophobia but in a sense of cultural disruption, 
demographic anxiety, and disillusionment with neoliberal cosmopolitanism.30 The migrant 
therefore serves as a dual function: he or she personifies elite failure and provides the 
necessary scapegoat for populism’s moral universe. The border becomes the ritual site 
where the community purifies itself, enacting the Durkheimian expulsion of symbolic 
disorder.  

Yet populism is not simply a politics of exclusion; it is a politics born from genuine 
anxieties about belonging, representation, and the perceived failure of liberal-democratic 
governance. Populist movements flourish, Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser argue, when 
mainstream elites appear distant, technocratic, or unresponsive to the social and cultural 
concerns of their constituents.31 The crisis at the Poland-Belarus frontier capitalizes on 
precisely these sentiments. Polish leaders frame their actions as defending sovereignty 
against a hostile autocrat in Belarus and an indifferent bureaucracy in Brussels. Their 
rhetoric resonates with citizens who feel marginalized by globalization and skeptical of 
cosmopolitan ideals—sentiments shared across European electorates from the 
Mediterranean to the North Sea.32  

Such grievances cannot be dismissed as irrational. They reflect what Müller sees as 
“democratic disappointment,” the widening gap between formal democratic rights and the 
lived sense of political agency.33 Populist leaders step into this gap by transforming complex 
structural problems—economic precarity, uneven development, post-communist 
uncertainty—into moral arguments about corruption, betrayal, and national decline. 
Migration becomes the visible proxy for broader fears.  

The border thus becomes the physical and symbolic terrain upon which this struggle 
for meaning is fought. Poland’s emergency-zone decree and 2021 pushback legislation 
were not merely administrative tools; they were performative gestures signalling the state’s 
capacity to protect the community.34 Their effects, as have been documented by Granica and 
the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, demonstrate how populist narratives translate 
into human consequences: migrants forced back and forth between state forces, denied 
food, shelter, and medical care, rendered invisible by legal fiction and political necessity.35 
The ritual of sovereignty is enacted through the suffering of those who fall outside the 
imagined community.  

35 Grupa Granica, Report on the Situation of People at the Poland–Belarus Border, October–December 2021 
(Warsaw: Grupa Granica, 2021), 7–11; Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, The Lawless Zone (Warsaw: HFHR, 
2021).  

34 Republic of Poland, Decree of the President No. 171/2021 Declaring a State of Emergency in Parts of Podlaskie 
and Lubelskie Voivodeships, September 2, 2021; Act of 14 October 2021 Amending the Act on Foreigners, Journal 
of Laws 2021, item 1918. 

33 Müller, What Is Populism?, 45–62. 

32 Larry M. Bartels, “The Populist Phantom: Threats to Democracy Start at the Top,” Foreign Affairs 102, no. 3 
(2023): 1–9. 

31 Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism, 13–21. 

30 Stephen G. Gross, “Understanding Europe’s Populist Right: The State of the Field,” Contemporary European 
History 32 (2023): 489–497.  

88 



But populism’s treatment of migrants cannot be understood in isolation from 
Europe’s own liberal contradictions. The warmth extended to Ukrainian refugees after the 
2022 invasion—justified and necessary as it was—exposed a selective humanitarianism 
conditioned by racial, cultural, and geopolitical affinities. Fassin’s concept of the moral 
economy of humanitarianism illuminates this asymmetry once more: not all suffering is 
recognized equally, and compassion is shaped by political narratives rather than 
universalist ethics.36 The contrast between Europe’s embrace of Ukrainians and its 
abandonment of Syrians, Afghans, and Yemenis in the forests of Podlasie underscores this 
tension. Populism exploits such inconsistencies, framing them as evidence of elite 
hypocrisy. Liberal democracy, in turn, struggles to reconcile its universalist aspirations with 
its uneven practices.  

In Holland’s Green Border, this tension is rendered in miniature. The film’s final 
moments—small acts of refusal by individuals within the state apparatus and quiet 
gestures of humanity from activists—reveal the fragility of the populist narrative. These 
ruptures echo Exeler’s observation that systems of domination, whether Soviet or 
contemporary, rely on compliance and silence; moments of hesitation expose their 
contingency.37 Green Border does not romanticize these acts, but it does suggest the 
border’s violence is not inevitable. It is constructed, maintained, and therefore capable of 
being unmade.  

Populism, in this sense, is neither an aberration nor a totalizing force. It is a 
symptom of unresolved tensions within European democracy and a warning about the 
fragility of pluralism. It challenges Europe to confront not only the dangers of 
majoritarianism but also the limits of its own cosmopolitan project. And at the 
Poland-Belarus frontier, where sovereignty, memory, and fear converge, populism reveals 
its deepest truth: that the battle for the border is always a battle over who counts as part of 
the moral community.  

Conclusion 
 

What unfolds at the Poland-Belarus border is not simply a regional dispute, nor the 
failure of a single asylum system, nor the cruelty of one illiberal government. It is a 
revelation of something older, deeper, and far more difficult to confront: the persistence of 
Europe’s unresolved moral architecture and the way borders continue to function as 
laboratories for political imagination. In this forested frontier—where migrants shiver 
between two unyielding states, where law dissolves into exception, and where compassion 
competes with fear—we see how history refuses to recede into the past. It returns, not as 
repetition, but as rhyme: familiar structures of domination, familiar rituals of exclusion, and 
familiar justifications dressed in new bureaucratic language.  

Yet history’s return is never merely magic. It is diagnostic. It exposes the fault lines 
of the present. The many scholars whose work has guided this analysis have illuminated 
how borders become mirrors: reflecting our anxieties, our myths, our hopes, and our 

37 Exeler, “Filtration Camps,” 432.  
36 Fassin, Humanitarian Reason, 1-17.    

89 



failures. But historiography has its own silences. For decades, migration scholarship 
wrestled with numbers, systems, and institutions, often missing the symbolic and ritual 
dimensions that give borders their emotional power. Conversely, moral and theoretical 
studies sometimes flattened the lived experiences of those who move through these spaces. 
Only by holding the empirical and the symbolic in tension—by reading legal decrees 
alongside cinematic testimony, NGO reports alongside Durkheimian theory—can we see the 
border not just as a line, but as a stage where the human condition is laid bare.  

Migration itself, as Hein de Haas and Michelle Kahn remind us, is not a crisis. It is a 
constitutive element of what it means to be human: movement, uncertainty, search for 
opportunity, escape from danger, and the hope for a life that might be lived differently. That 
fundamental truth is as old as civilization. What is newer—and perhaps more perilous—is 
the way politics increasingly distorts the truth, transforming ordinary movement into 
existential threat, turning fellow human beings into moral symbols, and converting borders 
into arenas of purification and fear. Populism feeds on that distortion, but it did not invent 
it. Liberalism struggles with it, but has not resolved it. Europe’s postwar project gestures 
toward universalism but falters at its frontiers.  

So the question that remains is not only political, but profoundly historical: What 
kind of community does Europe imagine itself to be, and at what cost? For if borders 
continue to serve as sites where solidarity ends, then the European project, like so many 
before it, risks becoming another chapter in the long history of civilizations unable to 
reconcile their ideals with their fears. If historians have any lesson to offer, it is that such 
contradictions do not remain abstract. They take shape in forests, in camps, in courtrooms, 
and in bodies.  

Green Border makes this visible—not as allegory, but as lived reality. Its silences, 
ruptures, and small acts of refusal reminds us that history is not an observer; it is a 
participant. It judges us by how we respond to the vulnerable, by what we choose to see, 
and by what we allow to be hidden. The past is not a distant archive but an active force, 
pressing against the present with the quiet insistence of memory. Those who claim 
indifference to history—whether populists or technocrats, citizens or elites—forget that 
history is never indifferent to them. It shapes borders, policies, identities, and the moral 
choices available to us. Everything old is indeed new again. But that is not a prophecy of 
inevitability. It is a call to clarity.  

Europe, and all who study it, must decide whether history’s return will be met with 
repetition or with recognition. Whether borders will continue to sanctify exclusion or 
become spaces of shared responsibility. Whether migration will remain a battleground of 
political theater or be understood, finally, as the universal human story it has always been. 
And whether we—scholars, citizens, policymakers—will confront the rituals of violence we 
inherit, or retreat behind the comforting fiction that history’s lessons belong to someone 
else. In the end, the forest between Poland and Belarus is not merely a site of suffering. It is 
a mirror. It reflects who we have been, who we are, and who we might yet become—if only 
we dare to look. 

 

90 



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