Borders are the New Black
- By Pedja Jurišić
In 2015, more than one million refugees and migrants made the perilous trip to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea. In October alone, to beat the onset of winter and closing European borders, their number rose to nearly a quarter million, a record, and more than the total for all of 2014, as per UNHCR figures. No coherent European policy has emerged to deal with the crisis and there is little hope that one will develop. To fill this void, nations have mostly sought to ensure that the refugees are someone else's problem, providing safe passage north, to Germany and Sweden, or barring entrance entirely. No land, it seems, wants to be the last to shut its doors.
The immigrants’ religious and cultural background, as well as their sheer number, are said to be unassimilable into European society. Their values are said to be contrary to European values which, after decades of being put forth as universal, are suddenly being regarded as both culturally specific and very, very fragile—a precious vase, handle with care. But contrary to popular misconceptions, European nation-states have not been historically homogeneous. In fact, long distance migration within the continent has been an important component of European life since at least the seventeenth century.
From early modern times, immigrants played a significant if overlooked role in European industrialization and nation-building. At the same time as European powers established rapacious colonial regimes throughout the world, Europe was experiencing massive population flows internally. Seeking economic opportunity, Europeans from the periphery moved to the rapidly industrializing west. Stephen Castles and Mark Miller note that there were over 700,000 Irish in Britain following the famines in the mid-nineteenth century, and nearly a million foreign workers in the German Reich at the turn of the twentieth: one out of every three miners in the Ruhr region was a Pole. In the course of a mere thirty years in the late nineteenth century, the number of foreigners in France nearly tripled, from 381,000 to one million, and some seven million Italians left home to seek opportunities in Western Europe. A number of diasporas grew, in the Balkans and Eastern Europe especially, and the 1918 Minority Treaties that acknowledged the basic rights of minorities grew from established diplomatic precedent.
It is an anachronism to think that these earlier migrants shared, or understood themselves to share, the common political values and characteristics that we ascribe to the continent today. In much of Europe, nationalism itself was still nascent. The Habsburg and Ottoman empires presided over central and southeastern Europe. Italy and Germany were only recently unified. The consensus of European political culture is a modern phenomenon, emergent from the relatively recent collapse of empires, the existential struggles against Nazism, fascism, and totalitarian communism and an apocalyptic thirty-year war that eviscerated old Europe.
If Europe was never homogeneous, it was considerably more diverse in the late nineteenth century than in the mid-twentieth. As Tony Judt argues in his magisterial account of postwar Europe, World War II was novel in its civilian experience of mass murder and revolutionary population transfers. In addition to 36.5 million European deaths (19 million of which were civilian), Nazi and Soviet forces expelled or otherwise transferred some 30 million people by 1943 alone, and this was prior to the whirlwind of ethnic cleansings and population transfers that occurred in the final stages of the war and its aftermath.
Put simply, World War II created the ethnically homogeneous nation-states that today seem natural and ancient. It also supplied the moral and political imperative to curb the catastrophic potential of nationalism. The tension within this dual legacy—between a radical homogenization of national demographics and an impetus toward common European values and identity—is revealed by the current crisis.
In the wake of the war, an urgent problem was the management of displaced persons and refugees. In just the first two years after the war, the predecessors to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) set up more than 750 centers for displaced persons and spent more than $10 billion on the care and resettlement of displaced Europeans. At the height of the crisis, more than seven million persons were under the protection of these international agencies, roughly seven million more were under Soviet authority, and these numbers omit countless displaced citizens of Axis countries. The screening and processing of displaced persons posed an enormous challenge as did the fact that many of these individuals, for religious or political reasons, did not necessarily wish to return to their home countries. Many states, including Western European ones, were happy to receive the labor of able-bodied young men, whatever their war record, while refugees were seen as an undesirable burden.
Almost immediately, the post-war recovery ushered in new waves of economic migration. Through sanctioned temporary worker programs or otherwise, Europeans from the periphery of the continent supplied manual labor to the industrial West. By the early 1970s, Castles and Miller note that more than two million foreign workers had arrived in France; four out of five did so by irregular means. Over two and a half million guest-workers labored in West Germany. A third of the Swiss industrial workforce was foreign-born. Britain and France and other old colonial powers also received significant immigration flows from former colonies. The new migrants helped build back these lands, brought over their families, and slowly formed ethnic minorities in their new countries of residence. Waves of mass legalizations regularized their status.
In contrast to these economically motivated migrations, the numbers of refugees seeking asylum in Europe have varied greatly, although they appear as a steady feature of European immigration since the early 1990s. Popular anxieties and hysterical media coverage make it easy to forget that the vast majority of refugees remain local to the regions they are fleeing. According to UNHCR, there are currently 59.5 million displaced people worldwide. Of some 14.4 million refugees, nearly 60% of this number is hosted by ten countries, led by Turkey, Pakistan and Lebanon, and without a European nation among them. By any measure—total or comparative, relative to national population or GDP—the European burden remains disproportionately low. And until the drastic spike of the ongoing crisis, family reunification has remained the largest source of immigration to Europe. According to Eurostat, there are about 20 million non-EU nationals residing in Europe today, and more than 33 million foreign born immigrants. These numbers constitute respectively 4% and 7% of the total EU population; in Lebanon, nearly one out of four people is a Syrian refugee.
At every step of European integration, from the establishment of free movement of workers within the European Community countries in 1968 to the collapse of socialism, the re-unification of Germany, and with each expansion of the European Union, familiar concerns were expressed about the threats posed by new migrants. The same rhetoric that greeted Portuguese and Spanish economic migrants and refugees from the Balkans later met Polish and Ukrainian workers and today meets desperate Syrians and Afghans.
This very brief overview of the European experience with migration suggests that many of the concerns about the burden imposed by refugees and migrants are overblown. Studies show that immigrants provide a clear economic benefit to receiving countries, and Europe, with its low birth rates and aging populations, stands to benefit from an influx of labor in the medium- and long-term. And recent experience with large numbers of refugees, such as those fleeing the break-up of Yugoslavia, indicates that it is middle-class people who have the education, imagination, and means to make the journey abroad in search of a fresh start. These people contribute overwhelmingly to their new societies and, in any case, significant numbers of refugees return home, whenever it is safe and possible to do so.
Harder to refute is the imperiled European imagination, the popular anxiety over Muslims and Islam, and the palatable sense of fear and insecurity hovering over the continent. For this reason, we should not exaggerate the relevance of historical precedent. Unlike previous waves of immigration, the current situation is a European, not a national problem, with all the thorny implications for sovereignty and democratic rule. The unprecedented scale of the migrations and the security threat posed by certain segments of Muslim minorities, however small by proportion, only exacerbates these issues. In this sense, the past is no road map forward.
But the link between immigration and crime is tenuous at best. In fact, first generation immigrants commit crimes (including acts of terrorism) at lesser rates than nationals. It is only a small proportion of second and third generation immigrants or, more precisely, born and raised Europeans, who turn to radical ideologies in search of affirmation and meaning. A fair portion of the responsibility for this state of affairs must sit with the host countries where ethnic origin, and not democratic citizenship, is too often the mark of belonging.
The integration of minorities is a problem at the heart of modern Europe; the level of hysteria painting Islam as an existential threat to European civilization is both hyperbolic and revealing—primarily of how little meaningful interaction most Europeans have with the Muslims in their midst. In many corners of Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris and other urban centers, a darker complexion or a headscarf suggests a vague but intimate threat, an alien, insurgent element that is a social blind spot. This state of affairs will not go away on its own, nor will it be resolved by turning away refugees.
It is worth asking: what is Europe, if it is more than a mere constellation of individual nation-states? And what is significant about the European project that it should be preserved? The historical reply, simply ensuring European peace and stability, is no longer sufficient. The ambition of the European project has long surpassed this goal, developing over the years into a postulation of a certain set of values, norms, and customs, a grand social experiment that professes its commitment to human rights, to the cultivation of open, tolerant societies, and to equality of access to health, education, and opportunity. In less fraught times, Europe presented itself (and was often seen as) a model of a dignified human existence, someday available to all.
It is too easy to scoff at these notions today, to deconstruct the European project down to its shortcomings and downright failures, the drive of anti-democratic self-interested elites, and the abundant contradictions at the heart of the effort. Such critiques are indispensable and yet, in so far as the European project endures, it does so through the appeal of this unfulfilled promise and the wish for its realization. Surely nothing demonstrates its vitality so much as the refugees themselves who, in their naked desperation, have streamed to Europe in such numbers.
The values above are justly cherished and must be secured. How best to do so? The answer must lie in the continued affirmation and commitment to their truth and supremacy to illiberal alternatives. As Hannah Arendt famously wrote in the wake of the Holocaust,
“(T)he incredible plight of an ever-growing group of innocent people was like a practical demonstration. . .that no such thing as inalienable human rights existed and that the affirmations of the democracies to the contrary were mere prejudice, hypocrisy, and cowardice in the face of the cruel majesty of a new world. The very phrase ‘human rights’ became for all concerned—victims, persecutors, and onlookers alike—evidence of a hopeless idealism or fumbling feeble-minded hypocrisy.”
What vision is a viable alternative to a Europe that recognizes and abides by its human rights obligations and remains committed to an open, liberal project? Implicit in the position of the most committed opponents of the asylum seekers, like Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, is the notion that Europe can remain recognizably European only by abandoning its ideals. Unfortunately, this view seems to be becoming only more prevalent among European peoples. But Europe can’t be saved by a combination of walls, detention camps, and living conditions that are designed to be insufferable—all representations of the inhumanity against which the idea of Europe developed. The very idea is a moral horror, an abdication of legal responsibility, and an abandonment of any meaningful concept of European identity. The cognitive dissonance can only go on for so long: if Europe gives up the principle of universal rights, what value system will take its place? And what will be the source of its authority?
The rejection of migrants generally and asylum seekers in particular constitutes a retreat from Europe, a retreat from European values and commitments, a return back to the comforts of little Denmark, little Hungary, little Poland. This is no European project, but an old, nationalist one. Its proponents are not preserving Europe. They are deserting it.
Much more than a migrant crisis, then, Europe is facing an identity crisis. The self-assurance of conviction has gone, intolerance is ascendant, and mosques and asylum centers are being defiled and torched. At the very least, European countries should accept the refugees streaming their way, and not only because granting asylum is the compassionate, responsible and ethical thing to do, as well as a legal obligation. European countries should accept refugees to affirm their own values and, in so doing, to reassert the vitality of Europe itself.
Pedja Jurišić lives in Copenhagen. His critique of Téa Obreht's award-winning novel The Tiger's Wife can also be found on the MR blog.
