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Coherent Selves, Viable States: Eastern Europe and the “Migration/Refugee Crisis”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2017

Dace Dzenovska
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Abstract

This essay argues that what is at stake in debates about the difference between eastern and western Europe in the context of migration and asylum politics is the definition of a politically- and ethically-acceptable threshold of “too many,” which takes on concrete contours in relation to historically-formed understandings of coherent selves and viable polities. The argument derives from placing analysis of the alleged political and ethical failures of eastern Europe alongside those limits of refugee/migrant intake that are considered politically legitimate and ethically justifiable from the mainstream liberal democratic perspective. The essay proposes that in order to understand the European political landscape in relation to migration, it is necessary to undertake relational analysis of the different configurations of the Europe-wide tension between inclusion and exclusion, as well as analysis of the modes of power that differentiate between these configurations of inclusion and exclusion on moral grounds.

Information

Type
Critical Forum: The East European Response to the 2015 Migration Crisis
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 76 , Issue 2 , Summer 2017 , pp. 297 - 306
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2017 

Europe (Un)BoundFootnote 1

Migration, some argue, is today what social revolutions were during the nineteenth century.Footnote 2 Extractive or financial forms of capitalism and associated violence have displaced increasing numbers of people around the world. Saskia Sassen suggests, for example, that contemporary forms of capitalism work not through incorporation but through expulsion, namely more and more people are expelled from the labor market, citizenship, social security, or from their homes.Footnote 3 No longer surplus labor, these are now surplus people—not needed by capital and abandoned by the governmental state.Footnote 4 Many remain immobilized, while others set on the road, guided by imaginaries of places, such as Europe, where a decent life seems possible.Footnote 5 Looking from a Eurocentric perspective, this has created a widely-shared sense that the world has come unbound.

The world is neither bound nor unbound, however. It is unevenly bound and unbound, with different consequences for different people. One new inflection in the current dynamics of bounding and unbounding is that those who used to benefit from the world's unboundedness are beginning to feel disadvantaged by it. For example, there is a proliferation of subjects who both think of themselves as European and feel marginalized or threatened by the world's unboundedness and the associated movement of people. Some worry about culturally- and racially-defined communities and living spaces, while others are concerned about liberal freedoms, jobs, or public and private safety. Their grievances are difficult to reconcile with those of the people on the move. The “no borders” argument that has been previously used by leftist scholars and activists as a critical heuristic device for pointing to the ethical and political limits of bounded selves and polities seems to increasing numbers of Europeans, scholars, and laypersons alike to misunderstand the current historical moment, which many see as requiring more rather than less borders.Footnote 6

Many academics will agree that the uneven dynamics of boundedness and unboundedness are to be studied as relational, that is, as mutually constitutive, and historically situated.Footnote 7 But how are they to be engaged ethically and politically? Indeed, the relationship between boundedness and unboundedness is not just a matter of scholarly interest. In liberal democratic contexts, the ways in which people understand and relate to boundedness and unboundedness, openness and closure, inclusion and exclusion, have emerged as important markers of political and ethical dispositions of individuals and polities. This is especially so in Europe, where arguments about migration and asylum politics have drawn lines between a liberal and normative vision of Europe as a moral community that embraces the values of humanitarianism, human rights, inclusion, and solidarity and people and places that do not live up to this ideal. For example, due to the politicians’ and publics’ reluctance to accept refugees in the midst of “Europe's migrant/refugee crisis,” eastern Europe has once again emerged as an ideal typical not-yet-European and illiberal subject mired in racialized paranoia about foreigners, exaggerated concerns about self-determination and self-preservation, and timeworn claims of historical suffering.Footnote 8 In an Oxford seminar that I attended in the spring of 2016, one political scientist explained this by saying that after the collapse of socialism eastern Europe did not receive proper lessons in political liberalism, while another warned that dangerous east European nationalisms are now spreading all throughout Europe. These liberal intellectuals excluded eastern Europe from proper Europeanness in the name of the virtue of inclusion, as well as depicted eastern Europeans as home-grown barbarians threatening to contaminate the European moral community. Thus, despite complex and contentious debates on the ground, the politicized and moralized distinction between east and west that has long shaped perceptions about eastern Europe continues to be a convenient discursive tool for making sense of public and political reactions to the “refugee/migrant crisis” in east European member states of the European Union.Footnote 9 And despite the intensified contestation of political liberalism as the defining feature of European polities, Europe remains a normative—and perhaps wishful—trope that liberal intellectuals use to orient themselves in an unfolding situation.

Criticism of the conduct of east European polities was also embraced by the liberally inclined amidst the barbarians.Footnote 10 In the context of “Europe's refugee/migrant crisis,” many east European intellectuals tried to shame their compatriots into moral maturity and, by extension, agreeable politics. This suggests that eastern Europe did receive lessons in political liberalism, and that these lessons were powerful tools of subjectivation.Footnote 11 They produced individuals who sincerely live the values of openness and inclusion and who experience their compatriots’ striving for boundedness as politically maddening, personally painful, and all around embarrassing.

In what follows, I interrogate the limits of this moral stance—within and without eastern Europe—in relation to what I see as the constitutive tension of Europe, namely the need for bounded selves and polities, on the one hand, and the imperative to profess values of inclusion and openness, on the other.

Coherent Selves, Viable States

Eastern Europe has long occupied the position of Europe's internal other.Footnote 12 Orientalizing discourses are thus readily available to make sense of the conduct of east European politicians and people in relation to migrants and refugees. These discourses posit the east European present as Europe's past, namely as a striving for boundedness that the civilized Europe has overcome by embracing the values of inclusion and openness. However, such a morally-infused spatial mapping of social norms and political virtues overlooks the fact that being European means both to be bounded, that is, to have a coherent sense of self as distinct from others, and to continuously strive to overcome that boundedness and come to inhabit the ideal citizen-subject.Footnote 13

This foundational tension was built into eastern European polities, created after the crumbling of empires in the early 20th century. Culturally- and historically-defined peoples were assigned to territories, rendering some “state people” and others “national minorities,” while constructing the east European states themselves as “national states with minority problems” that required supervision from the League of Nations.Footnote 14 Simultaneously with creating the minority problem with which east European states would have to grapple for most of their existence, post-World War I statecraft also “condemned” east European states to a continuous struggle to ensure that they had nations to legitimate the states.Footnote 15

Thus, in east European political imaginary, a viable state requires the existence of a nation in the name of which the state is established. Moreover, the actual or perceived decline of the nation-state amounts to an existential threat to individuals who have come to see themselves as thoroughly national, that is, as individuals whose sense of self is fundamentally shaped by membership in a national collectivity. For example, as Vieda Skultāns has shown in the case of Latvia, many people's understandings of themselves as individuals are inseparable from their sense of membership in a culturally-defined nation.Footnote 16 Rather than being a feature of illiberal east European nationalisms, this is a result of European statecraft, which east European states and the international community only too readily reproduced after the collapse of socialism—for example, in the form of the Dayton agreement, or through handling of the “minority problem.”Footnote 17

The political juxtaposition between illiberal eastern Europe and liberal western Europe is also put forth as an analytical distinction, held up for some time following the collapse of socialism, but it is becoming impossible to maintain in the context of the shifting perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of migration. Today, it is not only illiberal individuals or polities that feel threatened, but also liberal individuals and polities whose tolerance and capacity to govern are thought to be running into limits. I suggest that a different analytical and political lens is therefore needed to understand the present. It is necessary to undertake relational analysis of the multiple configurations of the Europe-wide tension between inclusion and exclusion, the existential concerns that emerge in relation to this tension, and the ethical and political dilemmas they generate. There also needs to be sustained analysis of the modes of power that differentiate between multiple configurations of inclusion and exclusion on moral grounds.

The Problem of “Too Many”

To that end, I wish to turn our attention from the political and ethical failures of eastern Europe to the limits of refugee and/or migrant intake that are considered politically legitimate and ethically justifiable from the mainstream liberal democratic perspective. For example, after an initial period of processing a record number of asylum claims, Sweden announced that its ability to cope with refugees has reached a limit: there was lack of housing, and the system could not cope with processing so many refugees.Footnote 18 As a result, Sweden introduced temporary border controls with Denmark.Footnote 19 The Swedish limits were thought to be legitimate, because they were not ideological, but material. They were limits of infrastructure. The fact that the Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Åsa Romson cried when making the announcement boosted the legitimacy of the decision, suggesting that it was a pragmatic decision that went against the political virtues of Swedish society.Footnote 20 In other words, not only were the Swedish state's reasons for closing borders legitimate—the state ran out of capacity to govern, but one of its leaders also exhibited an ideal ethical disposition by experiencing affective unsettlement as a result of having to take such a decision. Sweden thus showed that the ideal European ethical subject prevails despite various indications that, as Allan Pred has noted, there is racism “even in Sweden.”Footnote 21

The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was, of course, the exact opposite. Not only did he exhibit the wrong kind of arguments and conduct, namely advocating for exclusionary politics based on racialized notions of Europeanness and exhibiting solidarity with co-nationals rather than the suffering humanity or other European Union member states, but he also did not seem to be ethically conflicted about it. Whereas Orbán focused on the content of the nation in his justification of the closure of borders, Romson focused on infrastructure. Romson exhibited commitment to humanism and universal citizenship, but was forced to recognize the limits of a territorially delimited governing entity's capacity to govern. Of course, Orbán's and Romson's public speeches and ethical performances may not necessarily correspond to the effects produced by the various micro-practices through which both the Swedish and the Hungarian states govern. When analyzed more closely, those might actually produce similar effects, such as denial of entry and/or refugee status to the same racialized subjects. As many scholars have shown, categories or logics of exclusion come to be mapped onto each other, reference each other and, in practice, tend to produce the same effects.Footnote 22

I have used Orbán's and Romson's public conduct here to illustrate two ideal-typical cases. Many other variations exist—for example, UKIP's pro-Brexit poster suggesting that the United Kingdom has reached a “breaking point,” or the more-subtle arguments that have appeared in German public discourse about Angela Merkel having single-handedly taken in too many migrants and refugees.Footnote 23 Moreover, within the differentiated space of Europe, it is not only Syrian refugees or migrants from sub-Sharan Africa that present the threat of “too many,” but also eastern Europeans. For example, a local man in Boston, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom told me that he had nothing against post-EU accession migrants from eastern Europe, but that “there were simply too many of them.”Footnote 24 For him, it was not necessarily about infrastructure, though I did hear concerns about lack of doctors and nurses in Boston's medical establishments, but rather about daily life. He said that he could no longer go to the shop in the morning, greet someone by saying “Good morning!,” and expect to be greeted back in English. I heard a resonant argument from a Latvian woman living in Boston who was concerned about tensions between locals and newcomers: “There are too many of us,” she said. On the basis of this perception of “too many,” Boston's residents overwhelmingly voted to leave the European Union in the referendum held on June 23, 2016.

The argument of “too many” assumes that a baseline form of life or quality of life must be retained, whether for locals, incomers, or both. Some “too many” arguments can and do get easily dismissed as reactionary from within the liberal political frame. More often than not, those are the ones articulated through the trope of the cultural nation or put forth by local communities, for they are thought to be manifestations of fear, prejudice, and a closed view of the world. The kinds of “too many” arguments that are taken seriously by mainstream liberal politics pertain to the state's capacity to govern, such as the lack of infrastructure faced by Sweden. But, once again, the juxtaposition between content and infrastructure as the basis for determining the threshold of “too many” overlooks that both are linked with substantive understandings of coherent selves and viable polities that come into focus through arguments about conduct.

Conduct and the Threshold of “Too Many”

On the day after the Brexit referendum, I was talking to two Latvian women on the street in Boston, Lincolnshire, trying to get their reactions to the results, when we were startled by a loud reproach in Latvian: “Why are you standing here like this, as if you have just come out of a swamp? Don't you know how to behave?” After being momentarily immobilized by the sweet sense of home, I caught up with the woman who had reprimanded us and apologized to her for blocking the way. She eventually overcame her discontent and kindly explained to me: “this is why the locals don't like us, we don't know how to behave.”

Other Latvian citizens living in Boston also link the locals’ not liking them to public conduct. For example, Yuri, a Russian-speaking man living in Boston, Lincolnshire described himself and his mother's side of the family, who had arrived in Latvia from Belarus after World War II, as “migrants in two generations” for whom “migration is in the blood.” Yuri said that he sometimes feels negative attitudes from the English, but that he understands them. He, too, is annoyed seeing drunk migrants speaking Russian, spitting on the street, and disturbing life, which he called embarrassing. Once Yuri was sitting with his friend from Latvia in a bar and speaking English, because one of them spoke Russian poorly while the other spoke Latvian poorly. An English woman approached them and asked where they were from. Having found out that they were from Latvia, she was very pleased and commended them for speaking English, for integrating into the local community. Yuri recalls one thing in particular that the English woman said: “You can pick up and leave, go back to your country, if things here are not good, but we don't have anywhere else to go.” Yuri understands that. He thinks the incomers should abide by the local customs. It is noteworthy that in his story about proper migrant conduct, Yuri invoked his mother's generation, who are often conceived as migrants in Latvia precisely because of perceived failures of conduct, that is, lack of Latvian language skills.Footnote 25

Conduct is important not only for those concerned with language, but also for those concerned with liberal freedoms and human rights. This is evident from the case of the Danish cartoon scandal in 2005; the criticism of Syrian refugees on the Balkan route for refusing useless items, leaving behind litter and having IPhones; public outrage at the sexual assaults on women on New Year's eve in front of the Cologne train station; and concerns with the recent attacks in France and Germany.Footnote 26 While liberally inclined politicians and members of the media labor to argue that it is individuals rather than refugees or migrants at large that are to blame for these crimes and incidents, there nevertheless is a pervasive public sense that there are just “too many of them,” and that it is this substantive presence that creates the conditions for crimes and incidents.Footnote 27

At the foundation of these concerns—from those about language in the UK or Latvia to those about public conduct of refugees in Germany—is the tension between the value of openness and the need to maintain coherent selves and, by extension, viable polities. The question, therefore, is not who is compassionate and who is not, or who is tolerant and who is not, but rather what kinds of practices and attitudes are seen as consequential for particular understandings of the self and the polity and what kinds are not. Who gets to decide where the European threshold of tolerance lies? Must the self be radically reconfigured in the name of openness and inclusion or is it permissible to protect some constitutive elements of the self as an ethically, culturally, and historically-embedded being? Are all claims to an ethical or historical core politically and morally suspect? In liberal theories of tolerance, the right not to lose oneself is granted to those who inhabit the fundamental virtues of an open and tolerant society. Moreover, they are granted the right to not tolerate others who threaten this core by misbehaving or by openly contesting it.Footnote 28 From the liberal democratic perspective, the same right is not granted to a society that wishes to protect a core that is articulated as cultural and historical rather than liberal and therefore morally right.

I suggest that what is at stake in arguments about the difference between eastern and western Europe in the context of Europe's refugee/migrant crisis is the definition of a politically- and ethically-acceptable threshold of “too many,” which takes on concrete contours in relation to historically-formed understandings of coherent selves and viable polities. These, in turn, are variations of the constitutive tension of Europe, namely the tension between the need for existential and political boundedness, on the one hand, and the values of openness and inclusion, on the other.

Within that and for historical reasons, some polities are more concerned with their legitimacy than others. For east European peoples and states, the sense of coherent selves and viable polities is shaped by cultural understandings of the nation as a historical and linguistically-defined community. To be sure, there are many people within Latvia and other east European polities who contest the hegemony of bounded understandings of selves and polities and who criticize too close an identification between individuals, nations, and states. However, given the hegemony of nationalism and the small numbers of refugees and migrants in east European societies, these liberal or cosmopolitan eastern Europeans are not forced to define their own threshold of “too many.” Instead, they criticize and shame their compatriots, often comparing them unfavorably to Europe, where “goodness” resides.Footnote 29

Despite the fact that many east European liberals invoke western Europe as a model to be emulated, the juxtaposition between eastern and western Europe in the context of “refugee/migration crisis,” whereby one is exemplary of exclusionary ethics and politics and the other of inclusionary ethics and politics, is false and does not hold up. Moreover, it obscures the fact that all European states and societies are grappling with the threshold of “too many” in relation to historically constituted polities. That is, all European states are engaged in categorization of people for the purposes of including some and excluding the rest. It is this problem that, in my view, should be analyzed relationally, as well as engaged politically and ethically. It is much more difficult to passionately argue against a particular modality of exclusion when one realizes that the alternatives also demand establishing a boundary between inclusion and exclusion, as well as sorting people in ways that are not less, but rather differently violent.

References

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8. It should be noted that the nature of the crisis has been highly contested. Some argue that it is a humanitarian crisis, others that it is a crisis of Europe. It is also politically consequential whether one uses the term “migrants” or “refugees,” for the European governments’ openness to accepting people crucially depends on a strict separation of deserving refugees from undeserving migrants. For interventions that emphasize eastern Europe's moral and political failures in the midst of crisis, see Rick Lyman, “Eastern Bloc's Resistance to Refugees Highlights Europe's Cultural and Political Divisions,” The New York Times. September 12, 2015, at www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/world/europe/eastern-europe-migrant-refugee-crisis.html (last accessed February 15, 2015); Jan Т. Gross, “Eastern Europe's Crisis of Shame,” Project Syndicate, September 13, 2015, at www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/eastern-europe-refugee-crisis-xenophobia-by-jan-gross-2015–09?barrier=true (last accessed February 16, 2017); Michal Simecka & Benjamin Tallis, “Fighting the Wrong Battle: A Crisis of Liberal Democracy, Not Migration,” Open Democracy, September 4, 2015, at www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/michal-simecka-benjamin-tallis/fighting-wrong-battle-central-europe%E2%80%99s-crisis-is-o (last accessed February 16, 2017); Jacques Rupnik, “The Other Europe,” Eurozine. September 11, 2015, at www.eurozine.com/articles/2015–09–11-rupnik-en.html (last accessed February 16, 2017); Ivan Krastev, “Eastern Europe's Compassion Deficit,” The New York Times, September 8, 2015, at www.nytimes.com/2015/09/09/opinion/eastern-europes-compassion-deficit-refugees-migrants.html?_r=1 (last accessed February 16, 2017); Rayyan Sabet-parry and Karl Ritter, “Scant Sympathy for Refugees in Europe's Ex-communist East,” The Business Insider, September 11, 2015, at www.businessinsider.com/ap-scant-sympathy-for-refugees-in-europes-ex-communist-east-2015-9?IR=T (last accessed February 16, 2017); Paul Hockenos, “The Stunning Hypocrisy of Mitteleuropa,” Foreign Policy, September 12, 2015, at http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/09/10/the-stunning-hypocrisy-of-mitteleuropa-refugees-poland-hungary-czech-republic/ (last accessed February 16, 2017); Gustav Gressel, “Understanding Eastern European Attitudes on Refugees,” European Council on Foreign Relations, September 11, 2015; at www.ecfr.eu/article/commentary_understanding_eastern_european_attitudes_on_refugees4019 (last accessed February 16, 2017); Gérard Roland, “Why the Rift between Eastern and Western Europe on the Refugee Crisis?,” The Berkeley Blog, September 9, 2015, http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2015/09/09/why-the-rift-between-eastern-and-western-europe-on-the-refugee-crisis-2/ (last accessed February 15, 2016).

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24. Following European Union enlargement in 2004, many citizens of the new member states moved to live and work in older member states, especially those, such as the United Kingdom, Ireland and Sweden, that did not institute a seven-year transitional ban on freedom of movement. Many UK citizens consider that the migration flow was too large.

25. Dzenovska, School of Europeanness.

26. In 2005, the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons about Muhammad under the title of “The Face of Muhammad.” This triggered protests among Denmark's Muslims, who considered the cartoons a blasphemy. The protests became international in 2006. The editor of the paper justified the decision to publish these cartoons by invoking the right to free speech, which, he thought, was becoming endangered. For analysis of the Danish cartoon scandal, see: Mahmood, Saba, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 836–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Keane, Webb, “Freedom and Blasphemy: On Indonesian Press Bans and Danish Cartoons,” Public Culture 21, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 47–76 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For criticism of migrant conduct on the Balkan route, see: “The Refugees Telling other Refugees to Stop Dropping Rubbish,” BBC, September 9, 2015, www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-34199602 (last accessed February 16, 2017). For a report on the cologne attacks, see: “Cologne Sex Attacks: Women Describe “Terrible” Assaults,” BBC, January 7, 2016, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35250903 (last accessed February 16, 2017).

27. For example, see: Laila Lalami, “Who is to blame for the Cologne sex attacks?,” The Nation, March 10, 2016, www.thenation.com/article/who-is-to-blame-for-the-cologne-sex-attacks/ (last accessed February 16, 2017); see also Žižek, Slavoj, Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with Neighbours (London, 2016)Google Scholar for an argument that these are ritualistic acts of violence by the dispossessed.

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