Fickle nationalism or international co-operation?

On the 23rd of September, two weeks after a fire leveled parts of the Lesvos refugee camp Moria, the EU commission proposed a new pact on migration and asylum. The pact offers, according to the commission, a more European, fairer approach to those seeking asylum. That evening, the European commissioner of home affairs Ylva Johansson said in a Dutch news broadcast that ‘Europe is not in a migration crisis, but some migrants are in crisis’, a conspicuous nod to those worried about the dire statuses of the various refugee camps. But whilst saying that Europe is not currently in a migration crisis might be considered naive or optimistic, it would at the very least only be realistic to say that the EU is surely facing one. Nations try too often to answer international issues on a national level, which undermines the EU’s purpose of international cooperation.

Frontex, the European border and coastguard agency, calculated that the number of ‘illegal’ border crossings is down by 64% as of August 2020 from January 2019, boastfully featuring the figures on the front page of their website. Also, the EU has taken various steps in securing itself against migrants by outsourcing its border protection, which includes a disputed deal with Turkey in 2017 that now seems in dire need of renegotiation. While Frontex cracks down on irregular border crossings, the situations these ‘legally-detained’ refugees end up in leave much to be desired. Most, if not all, of the EU’s so-called hotspots [pdf] currently have a 6-fold over-occupancy rate, with Samos even counting a population of 8000 whilst having capacity for some 650 as of 2019 – comparatively dwarfing the case of Moria which had a population of 12000 refugees whilst having the capacity for 3000 at the time of the fire which broke out on September 9th. Of course, the EU commission itself is partly to blame for these camps being so massively overcrowded. As many have noted, it took years for the EU to come up with a clear answer to the refugee crisis, if they have found one at all. And, foreseeing further escalation, Moria seems to be only the first domino to fall.

Why then, do national responses to the crisis in Moria seem anything but co-operational?

In the past few years, refugee policy has always concerned mobility. Detainment was favored over engagement. Now, the Greek government is planning to rehabilitate Moria by cleaning up the disaster site and to install tents, with Oxfam reporting that a similar temporary solution to those left without shelter after the fire leaves refugees in even less humane conditions than before. The Greek government has no intention of moving the refugees to the Greek mainland due to the fear of refugees spreading Covid-19. Of course, prior to the pandemic, they had no intention of doing this anyway, so the pandemic is merely a useful front to rationalize keeping refugees outside of the EU. Yet, most of all, the crisis in Moria has fueled protests throughout the EU where citizens demand from their own governments to take in refugees, with protesters often ignoring the fact that it is the EU not their own governments which might have to play a more central role in this crisis.

Banal and not so banal bellicose rhetoric have furthermore reinvigorated ethnic-nationalist sentiments throughout the member states during the Covid-19 pandemic. Migrants with a liminal identity; an identity that is, according to Victor Turner, “neither here nor there; they are betwixt the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony,” are increasingly vilified. “They temporarily live in the cracks or interstices of society”, as Robert Piazza and Charlotte Taylor write. There are even rumors that the Greek ministry for immigration and asylum is willing to revive the idea of turning the camps into open air prisons, whilst across the EU we see cries from citizens and activists alike to view the tragedy as a catalyst for reform. Such prisons would be a definitive answer to who the EU, and its member states, the Greek government in particular, regard these people to be. But surely it would be a very cruel answer. Not only does such a proposal fail to uphold human rights standards and thereby undermine the EU’s moral integrity, it also begs the question what other kind of answer the EU is morally obliged to give.

The pact proposed on the 23rd of September 2020 introduces something Johanson calls a mandatory solidarity mechanism. It is a system wherein European member states can diversify, meaning they can choose how they want to assist in the integration or expatriation of refugees. Although the new pact might show solidarity amongst the various member states – it promises not to enforce quotas unless the union declares a state of emergency – actual exercised policy has shown little concern to the experiences of the refugees themselves. In response to the Moria crisis, individual member states have either chosen to remain silent, fight amongst themselves, or exert political power gesturally – a sort of token politics (with Germany playing the role of the EU’s moral arbiter to a tee – Wir Schaffen Das is still very much a German, not a European, proverb). In their own way, all of these national strategies undermine both the EU’s purpose of mutual moral responsibility, and the collective faith in the EU as being able to carry that responsibility.

The crisis the EU is facing is not one limited to economic factors, nor one only of social and cultural integration. It is also a crisis of whether the EU is able to retain both its moral integrity and international accountability. As has been the case for years, thousands are stuck at the outer borders of Fortress Europe because the EU’s response has been anemic and nationalistic, reminding us that transnationally the EU has so far failed at establishing itself as a union for international security and human rights policy.

It seems unlikely that individual gestures of moral agency by the various nation states will add up to a comprehensive outcome in terms of retaining, or even regaining, the EU’s collaborative integrity when we consider the EU’s track record. And only the future can reveal whether Johanson’s mandatory solidarity mechanism will bear the fruits it promises. Calling on individual member states to dissolve their agency into a collective effort, if done well, can result in overcoming the polarizing effects of an increasing ethno-nationalism and rid the EU of the sentiment worded by Ivan Krastev in his book After Europe concerning the liminal migrant: “he is among us, but he is not of us.”