The European Refugee Crisis and the Crisis of Democratic Values

In the early days of March I was watching from a distance the situation developing in Greece. A distance that was geographic, myself being away from the country, but also a distance that was emotional, resulting in a sort of incapacity to engage with and respond to the situation. How did all this come to be in the first place?

It started in the end of February, when the Greek government sent police to islands hosting so called ‘refugee hot spots’ in the Eastern Aegean Sea – thus close to the sea border with Turkey – to enforce the establishment of new ‘closed detention centres’ –  as opposed to the existing open accommodation facilities operating across the country. Watching video streams from my office in Scotland, I was surprised and worried to see leftist (being against the idea of detention) and rightist (being against refugees themselves) groups demonstrating together on the islands of Lésvos and Chios against the government’s plans and the deployment of police. Hours of livestreaming cut short, the police were eventually called back to the mainland by the government and the residents of each island saw this as a first victory of theirs. But inside me something felt fundamentally ‘wrong’ in the way that victory was achieved.

Only few days later Turkey, losing territory in Idlib and in an attempt to mount pressure in international relations, redirected refugees from its territory to crossing the country’s land and sea borders to Greece, thus breaking the already fragile deal between EU and Turkey that had been signed in 2016. Human flows of asylum seekers – which had never really stopped since the implementation of the deal on 20 March 2016, but at times would decrease – now intensified across the sea and land border.

Since then livestreams show overcrowded lifeboats being turned away or even being verbally assaulted on the same Greek islands that had claimed a victory against the police’s show of force. Images from the land border between Greece and Turkey are shared to prove the ‘battleground’ caused by the ‘invaders’ as well as the state authorities’ attempts to hold them back. But it is not just the authorities acting in these pictures… Astounded I come across on social media Greek citizens, rifles normally used for hunting firmly gripped in their hands, proudly announcing that they are protecting the Greek and European borders. Videos of refugee support centres being set on fire intentionally on the islands are also dominating the newsfeed. Testimonies of NGO workers who left their posts after having been attacked and threatened for their lives follow. And then there is the comments’ section…

It is this comments’ section I cannot get my head around. According to the previous experiences I have had on my newsfeed, whenever documentation of violent acts and hatred toward asylum seekers would show up, comments below would be – in their majority – condemning them. Now what I am reading as I am scrolling down is quite the opposite. Hatred intensifies word by word. What the islanders achieved the previous days proved to have been a pyrrhic victory.

Refuge is embedded in the history of the modern Greek state. In 2016 I worked for a short time in a makeshift refugee camp in Greece, one of those that were built in response to the increasing numbers of refugees trapped in-between the borders. My impression then, observing and interacting with refugees, volunteers and officials, was that we needed the refugees more than they needed us. The continuous support and offers from locals were accompanied at times with stories about their own family history, their (grand)parents having been “uprooted” from their home(lands) and having “arrived on boats” in the 1920s in the wake of the war between Greece and Turkey. They could empathise with contemporary refugees, they could see a side of themselves in their own misfortunes and traumas; they were reminded of who they are.

What happened, then, between 2016 and 2020 for there to be such a shift from a welcoming to an almost terrorising atmosphere against the refugees and the ones working for the latter’s benefit in the country? Discussions about the malfunctioning operation of NGOs as well as the problematic distribution of their resources have been taking place for a long while, but this is not an excuse for such actions of hatred. Islanders where ‘hot spots’ have been established since 2015-2016, have also been long complaining about the disproportionate share of responsibility, about feeling exhausted, accusing both the Greek state and the EU of negligence, for not resettling refugee populations elsewhere in Greece / Europe. Living conditions in these camps as well as in the surrounding areas where they have necessarily expanded, are beyond description. But it seems to me that a line has been drawn and people have crossed to the side of far-right nationalist acts.

While Greece has been tarnished for almost a decade with the uprising of far-right nationalism, the EU is currently seeing a shift to nationalist and / or populist politics by a number of its member-states. To paraphrase Marx, ‘a spectre is haunting Europe’… the spectre of far-right nationalism. The very expansion of social media – once championed for giving equal access to information to all – has actually provided a ground for propaganda, distributing falsified information through intensified emotional discourse to large masses. Facebook and Twitter posts now claim that “these people are not refugees”, that “they want to spread Islam across Europe”, and are usually followed by photos (of dubious origin) showing clashes between the moving population and (self-acclaimed) authorities across the border. I increasingly come across in the comments’ section ‘protectors’ of the country verbally attacking the ones supportive of asylum seekers and the staff working for them, by asking: “ARE YOU A GREEK YOURSELF? IF SO, WHY DON’T YOU PROTECT YOUR COUNTRY? YOU ARE NO GREEK!” (capitals used frequently). Other European citizens rush to congratulate the latter and to urge them to “keep our borders safe”. It is not about access to information then, but most importantly about access to education so that one can be critical and read between the lines. We need to ask, what does this response tell of Greek and European citizens and policies?

As historian Mark Mazower has argued, Europe has always been a passage for moving populations, so the experience of hosting ‘strangers’ is in itself no stranger to the continent – let alone Greece where in ancient times the very word ‘stranger’ was equivalent to the one of ‘guest’. Treating ‘strangers’ as ‘guests’ is telling of a culture’s values, above all to human life and dignity. What is (institutionally allowed to be) currently taking place on the Greek-Turkish, European border shows that we are dangerously approaching – if it is not too late already – the abasement of human life; and the  xenophobic reaction of  social media users is a characteristic harbinger of it. Turning away people in need – no matter whether they are to be defined as refugees or migrants – cannot be justified as maintaining a balance in international affairs; it is essentially giving in to the politics of fear and thus allowing populist and nationalist voices to rise across Europe (again).