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 (20th)
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.
Really enjoyed the panel-- super insightful stuff!
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