On freedom of movement & wings cut: Examples from the European genealogy.

Letting go of my tidal battles and climate change worries for the evening, on Wednesday 13 March 2019 I joined a panel discussion on the West’s physical and political responsibility for refugees, hosted by SolidariTee National and Students for Global Health in St Andrews. The audience’s feedback was moving, and it formed the following much-deserved blog post, diving deeper into our unfinished conversation (blame in on the clock).

Q1. Do you think that a meaningful response to refugees would require both broad and deep social and economic reforms within the UK and EU (such as monetary flows between countries and urban regeneration to combat segregation and ghettoisation)?

Q2. (cont) Do you think these reforms are realistic given the neoliberal nature of the EU and UK politics?

A1 & 2. The overall discussion about responsibility and response becomes much more immanent if you consider it through the lens of pre-existing policies.

According to historian Mark Mazower, modern cities had been historically dependent on refugees, as the latter continuously renewed the working force required and made up for the dying population. European cities would be giving them shelter, up to a very recent time in history, while also making sure that the management of the incoming population would satisfy their respective needs.

Let’s look at two examples from the past (20^th) century.

At the end of yet another war between Greece and Turkey, in 1923, the Greek residents of Asia Minor were forced to abandon their homes and properties and flee to Greece, as the east coast of the Aegean was being permanently annexed by Turkey, the winner of the war. The Greek residents were accepted in Greece as ‘refugees’ and had not been widely welcome by the local population for several years to follow. Yet, the state enabled them to settle down, giving them land to live on and from in specific areas. Many of these areas were the most remote of the known Greek state at that moment, the ones where the border was still being negotiated and, thus, where the Greek state had to prove its “Greekness”. It has been argued that the Greek nation-building project was the most successful in the Balkans, in the sense that it was the most complete one. No wonder why. And no wonder at what costs.

To turn to the second, and even more recent, example, consider the gastarbeiters (guest workers, i.e. economic immigrants) in West Germany from 1950s to 1970s. Most of the islanders from my research fieldsite, the island of Samothraki in Northern Greece, had migrated to Stuttgart in search for labour, and were welcome as such given the need for working hands back then. According to French social geographer’s, Emile Kolodny’s, study on the Samothracian population migrating to Stuttgart in specific¹, the immigrants would initially, and until they had raised enough money to resettle, stay in buildings of collective housing, usually being closed factories or old hotels with unacceptable hygienic living standards. The immigrant workers would not merge with the German population, but instead only with other gastarbeiters, coming from Italy, Turkey, Yugoslavia, etc. Following the economic crisis in 1967 and the recession of 1975, Germany started pushing its gastarbeiters away, preferably back to their homelands. They were no longer needed. It was a fortunate coincidence that most immigrants from Samothraki, unlike the majority of other gastarbeiters, had already repatriated themselves shortly before that. There is a saying I have come across a lot on Samothraki; that its islanders cannot stand being afar for too long.

But with the latter comes the freedom of choice, which is a luxury not everybody enjoys at all times. Taking the train from West Germany to Northern Greece was undoubtedly an expensive journey for a gastarbeiter. But then, just in 2016, to cross the Mediterranean, from the Turkish to the Greek coast, as a refugee on a much insecure boat, you had to pay a price of $3,000 per person.

The irony is, as Mazower points out, that the idea of the EU was initially conceived as a means to ensure peace post-WWII. But with peace comes prosperity, which for the European core was the case eventually. And thus, people started battling illnesses more successfully and ageing; European citizens nowadays die less and live longer. Both of these achievements require public money, as the notion of the welfare state, established during the Cold War in an attempt to adapt anything Soviet that was of worth to the competing West trying to prove its paramountcy, made sure to secure. In a nutshell, there is currently no shortage in working hands, no empty space to rush to prove its “ours” and these two have cost lots of public money, which is now seen much differently under the eyes of neoliberal, and no longer welfare, states (the Soviet Union fell in 1991 and so did its readapted ideas across the West, which found itself being the last one standing).

It is a privilege to have a homeland to return to once you are “no longer needed”. Or, to borrow a phrase from Mazower; “It is a privilege not to have known war. It is also a kind of ignorance”.

Having ensured peace, or at least confining war at its margins (see the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s), EU has turned to cultural and historical oblivion. It was always at the crossroads of people’s movement(s), may them be refugees or merchants, and in such a “crisis” does not withstand its term. But the overpopulation of cities and neoliberalism’s aversion to the use of public funds, are now either locking people outside (or deep inside the sea) in the face of a crisis, or alienating them to the margins; leaving them to wait for legal recognition at the doorstep of Europe, temporarily resettling them in remote areas far from the public eye, even expelling them back to where they were trying to flee from in the first place (the basis for the EU-Turkey agreement, being active since 20 March 2016).

Urban regeneration is usually the aftermath of the settlement of refugees and other ‘foreign’ populations in a city; sometimes a new settlement can even give birth to a completely new city or town. But this is where, and when, cultures meet and governments lose the upper hand.

Q3. You've said that in some respects the work of volunteers in these camps contributes and feeds into the state's inaction- what do you think therefore would be the most fruitful and sustainable solution to these refugee settlements?

A3. It is understandable that volunteerism touches on the public feeling, the ability for others to feel empathy; and if they can feel empathy and get themselves in one’s position, then they will most probably try to assist the one in need. On a foundational basis, one can argue that this is human. And they would be right.

On a second level analysis, this appears to be the only alternative to an indifferent EU, merely trying to convince people to stay away.

On a third level analysis, volunteers play the EU’s game; if you are there spending your own resources to help, why should the states spend theirs (which in a way are still your resources, because you pay taxes, etc). Not to mention that the ‘kindness of strangers’ demonstrated by volunteers at times is mostly driven by their personal motives or values, and not taking into account the current needs of the refugees they are supposed to be assisting.

The answer is as self-evident as it sounds: the state has to care even if it cannot afford to. I will give two brief reasons for this.

First, no amount of part or full-time, yet untrained and often independent volunteers can manage logistically the numbers of refugees currently requiring help with anything from everyday meals to legal advice. It is also blatantly unfair to have NGOs carrying out their work by recruiting (unpaid) volunteers, while at the same time funding to deal with this situation flows from all possible directions. It is as simple and as perplexed as that: get the NGOs fully accountable to the state and hire the human resources required to achieve a well-planned and substantial response to refugees’ - very human, very much expected – needs.

Second, unless European states actually do care, they will get enclosed in themselves, which is only a short distance from xenophobia and racism. “Civilisation is a precarious achievement. This knowledge is only one of the gifts refugees bring those who give them shelter” Mazower reminds us. No community, town, city, nation ever thrived for being self-withdrawn and self-referential.

………………………………………..

It’s odd how one’s fieldsites clash sometimes. The most ambiguous moments when working at the makeshift camp at the port of Piraeus, was when I would come across the graffiti depicting the winged Victory (Niki) of Samothraki² on the wall of one of the port’s storehouses. The winged goddess stands firmly against the winds, ready to take off on her wings any minute now, once she has announced the good news she brings; news of victory, news to celebrate to.

There was no victory these four months of 2016 at the port. There was nowhere to fly to. And no strength to stand firmly against the winds, literally and metaphorically.

No matter the efforts of volunteers, good and bad, the border from Greece to Northern Macedonia (F.Y.R.O.M.) remained closed, people stuck, and hopes low.

In the evenings people would take strolls at the port; busy and energetic tourists would meddle in their way; and Niki would stand there, as captured in the image above, for once indecisive as to what news she could bring, when there was actually no news at all…

Notes

1. Kolodny E. (1982) Samothrace sur Neckar: des migrants Grecs dans l'agglomération de Stuttgart. Aix-en-Provence: Institut de Recherches Méditerranéennes, Centre d’Etudes de Géographie Méditerranéenne.

2. Niki was found headless buried under the ancient sanctuary town of Samothraki, in March 1863 by French amateur archaeologist Charles Champoiseau and was shipped to France soon afterwards. Since 1884, the statue is displayed at the central staircase of Louvre, France.