This is my contribution to a forum hosted earlier this week at 3 Quarks Daily.
One of the memes circling around the French Internet shows the mayor of the town of Roanne telling a huddled group of refugees that they cannot stay, since they are not Christian. "Neither are you," is the reply. The crisis has in fact starkly drawn out the two primary senses in which this label is used today: the one, understood by the mayor, which is identitarian, political, and intent on boundaries; and the other, which is cosmopolitan, effectively anarchist, and contemptuous of boundaries. It is good, at least, to see these two senses in such clear relief, as it is to see so many Europeans, likely the majority of whom are secular-identified, spontaneously manifesting the charity (another translation of which is 'love') to the refugees that those with proper training in scriptural matters (presumably the mayor of Roanne?) are supposed to have learned. The popular wave of European citizens declaring 'Refugees Welcome Here', a slogan that has appeared everywhere from Twitter hashtags to football banners, was a heartening reminder that sometimes masses of people can act directly, and circumvent the ideological opposition and bumbling incompetence of state agencies and officials.
There are times when the recitation of facts can seem mendacious, as when charitable Europeans attempt to convince others that refugees should be accommodated, since, after all, many of them are themselves Christian. We can understand the pragmatic need to deploy this true, and perhaps compelling, point as one of many in an arsenal of arguments meant to change minds, yet we must also deplore its necessity. It is an attempted --and failed-- synthesis of the cosmopolitan and the identitarian conceptions of Christianity: extending charity to those in need, but on the basis, in part, of sectarian considerations. Yes, some people are so ignorant as to believe that all Syrians are Muslims, but the most relevant clarification is not that some are not, but that that is irrelevant to the refugee crisis.
At the popular level in Europe, there is both dispiriting xenophobia and its opposite, a seemingly unprecedented preparedness to welcome the refugees and to take responsibility for their well-being. State officials have so far tended to play to the interests of the xenophobes, mostly not by expressing outward xenophobia (with plenty of exceptions of course, as with the mayor of Roanne, or with Hungarian president Viktor Orbán), but by classic buck-passing, insisting that the crisis is someone else's problem. This is particularly the case for the poorer countries of the EU to its south and east, which are of course also the countries that are so placed as to first receive the refugees travelling by land (and, more perilously, by water). The absence of any obvious authority, either at the union-wide level or in each individual member state, reveals, like no other situation has since the EU's expansion to include former Soviet Bloc states, that transnational body's utter impotence and irrelevance. If Orbán can seriously propose to build a wall around his country's national borders, in order to keep out undesirable migrants, minorities, and refugees, and the EU can do nothing in response to stress or to enforce Hungary's shared responsibilities within the union, in what sense, then, is EU membership anything more than a formality?
Hungary complains that the poorer countries should bear less responsibility for the refugees than the richer ones. This might seem like a reasonable position, yet it is important to recall that at the global scale the burden of accommodating refugees generally falls to countries that are perhaps somewhat more stable politically than the refugees' country of origin, but generally not much more economically prosperous. Thus Pakistan and Ethiopia come out, both in absolute numbers and per capita, far ahead of Germany or Sweden in their welcoming of refugees. No one flees to Ethiopia because they are seeking to achieve 'the Ethiopian dream', let alone to live high off the largesse of the Ethiopian welfare state, or to nefariously transform that country's ethnic landscape and chip away at traditional forms of life. The difference between migrants and refugees, much contested in recent weeks, might be identified as precisely this: that migrants have a strong and vivid conception of their destination, which pulls them toward it as a sort of 'final cause', while refugees are simply fleeing, anywhere. The masses of Syrians flooding into Europe are in this sense refugees, and if they find themselves in Macedonia, say, this is certainly not because they have spent much time analysing the comparative politics and economics of this continent's many societies and regions.
American liberals and progressives love to fawn over the great liberal democracies of northern Europe with their advanced welfare states and their commitment to fair distribution of resources to all citizens. Yet as long as these societies continue to adhere to a sharp political and moral distinction between citizens and outsiders, between those who are in the system and those who are outside of it, what they have accomplished is scarcely any more worthy of praise than the sort of 'socialism' we see practiced within major corporations. European social democracies that extend medical care and education to everyone who has their papers in order, while expelling irregular migrants in nighttime raids and strong-armed police operations, are not truly egalitarian societies, but protection rackets. The extent that European citizens are today, en masse, resisting this arbitrary distinction between citizen and non-citizen, in order to come to the direct aid of the Syrian refugees, is precisely the extent to which Europe is living up to its claim to be Christian.
Comments