Europe as a whole needs to move. Member states must share responsibility for asylum-seeking refugees...If we don't arrive at a fair distribution then the issue of Schengen will arise - we do not want that...We stand before a huge national challenge. It will be a central challenge not only for days or months but for a long period of time.--Angela Merkel, quoted in The Telegraph. [Emphases added.--ES]
Today, my dad, a retired businessman (including a stint as fashion designer), was interviewed by a Dutch TV program for a special on refugees then and now. (It will be aired on October 6.) His two qualifications for this spot are, first, that he was a child-refugee (1938-40) once, and, second, having survived Nazi occupation of Holland, he is still around to tell his family's story (recall here and here). My dad shares their story (and his friends's) regularly because he is part of an educational program that sends volunteers to schools around the Netherlands, especially during the Spring (when the Dutch commemorate The War). During the last decade, with a growing public acceptance of xenophobia in Dutch political and public discourse, he increasingly introduces topical allusions about refugees into his narrative. A key feature of his narrative is to confront the present generation of Dutch children with the lack of support for-- and often inhumane treatment of -- refugees before the war [my late, maternal grandfather often spoke of his dreadful experience in Dutch prisons as a non-legal refugee] and the indifference if not hostility toward the remaining Holocaust survivors after the war.
After fleeing Germany, my dad's family eventually found their way to a newly built refugee camp, Westerbork, in 1939. The Dutch version of the camp's official website notes that it wasn't the national government, but the (Amsterdam) Jewish community that was forced to pay for its construction and maintenance. The English version fails to note this, but does remark on the reserved attitude of the Westerbork locals about having a refugee camp nearby; plus ça change...
European integration is often compared to riding a bike (attributed to Walter Hallstein)--in order not to fall you got to keep moving forward. This affirms the fundamentally teleological dimension of the European Union which has been inscribed ("an ever closer union") into the project from the start (recall here and here). Without such motion, there is a risk not just of stagnation, but of failure, even collapse. One under-appreciated feature of this understanding of the EU is that it is very difficult to learn from, and undo, serious policy-mistakes without risking looking like one is moving backwards (and, hence, undermine the whole project). As an aside, this stance undermines the central epistemic virtue of democracies, which are sometimes said to learn from their mistakes, too. Crucially, then, the European Union exhibits a spirit of progress.
The moving forward metaphor also means that when any national government deviates from the purported policy consensus (i.e., the directionality of motion), she is likely to be scapegoated as the cause of failure and, thus, resisted. No politician wants to be thought the source of failure, and, crucially, to be alone in this failure (beloved or not by one's national electorates). Absent European politicians beholden to European-wide electorates (recall), this entails (a) that even Merkel has to talk of a "national challenge" (rather than a European one) and (b) that unless a policy-decision can be re-framed as the shared path forward, policy changes are status quo preserving (over and above the other sources of status quo bias). This is one reason why the richer European states are doubling down on keeping the Eurozone in tact (to revive an older Meme, no domino is allowed to fall).
The free movement of citizens ("Schengen") within the European Union is not just an economic issue. This is why the comments by Angela Merkel, who almost alone among major European politicians has shown moral courage and decency toward refugees and immigrants, are so significant. Her comments about "Schengen" have to be put alongside her first-hand experienced of how the migration of East German "tourists" through Hungary and Austria facilitated the collapse of the Berlin Wall and, ultimately, East Germany as a distinct state. The stream of refugees (and economic immigrants) is not just putting pressure on the European border states (Greece, Italy), but, with increasingly restless local populations, also on the viability of freedom of movement. Sadly, the inhumane policies that generate the plight, even by now countless deaths, of refugees in transit is not setting the policy agenda. After all non-citizens, dead or alive, don't vote and have few resources to lobby.
A few days ago the leading Flemish politician (that's in Belgium) suggested on TV that it may be time to renegotiate and weaken the Geneva convention that governs the status of refugees. If one looks at the political landscape of the EU member states, it is clear that this is not just a fringe policy-balloon, but a potential new consensus-in-the-making, especially because there are already de facto violation of it in the EU through the imposition of hardships and disincentives that pretty much amount to punishment of refugees, and there is a known desire to reform it in Australia. (My new colleague, Luara Ferracioli, has done important work on this issue.) There is, thus, a visible crumbling of minimal, but basic norms of civilization that were established within Europe in the re-founding of Europe in the post 1945 era. It corrodes one's moral sensibility; I regularly catch myself policing myself when I forgo confrontations with those in my expanded circle of intellectual friends who express (well argued, articulate, and learned) xenophobic sympathies in the media or on Facebook.
During the years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, my private, youthful optimism about the political was, despite a period of prosperity, dashed by the Rwandan genocide and, closer to home, the Crotian & Bosnian wars. Because my family history inclines me toward a misanthropic view of human and political affairs that can often slide into a kind of reactionary sympathies, I try to guard against these by noting and, when I can, quietly cheering on non-trivial events of public, moral progress; I am happy when firm, 'not-in-my-life-time' expectations (a Black President, gay-marriage Stateside, EU membership of former 'Eastern Bloc', a peaceful democratic transition in Nigeria, a free and fair election in Egypt, etc.) are violated. One reason why I love teaching is that among students there are always a few, energetic and humane agents for change; their public spirit helps me combat my despair and I embrace my (rather minimal) role in facilitating their future projects.
Over the week-end, my wife asked me if we could give away our extra shoes piling up under the stairs "to Calais." When I expressed puzzlement, she explained that they were intended for the immigrants and refugees stuck at the border. I was about to ask how my shoes would get there, and then bit my tongue. Sure, I said. The smallness of my sacrifice embarrassed me. I should have asked her how long she had been mulling helping the refugees, and what else she was already doing, but I got distracted wondering if anybody had sent my dad childrens' shoes in 1939 or 1946.
Eric
thanks for the thoughtful post. With winter coming, Shoes for Calais would I'm sure be welcome. I'm going to see if my sister can start something through her church in Paris (they are already doing lunches). There is also a cookbook, Soup for Syria, that makes a small but real difference
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Soup-for-Syria/257405764424766
Posted by: Jackie Taylor | 09/02/2015 at 07:34 PM