Non-Europeans and ex-Europeans
Refractoriness
to migrants exasperates the consequences of the greatest migratory
pressure ever experienced
by the
European Union
Lucio Caracciolo
Migrants have exposed us. Foreigners landing on our shores are breaking the rhythm of everyday life. They are the illegals par excellence. That is why they oblige us to reflect upon the rules of our social and political life. They fling open uncharted abysses and light up the darkest corners. They dispute all that is unquestionable for us and expose us to the most radical of all questions; who are we? Rather than answer such a painful question, we often prefer to reject those who are different, and not just metaphorically. We remove them. Or at least restrict them to a ghetto where they become invisible to us. We also reduce them to the definition of a species the Moroccans, the Afghans, the Somalis thereby certifying that we are not faced with a person, with a life story, but a molecule of an inferior world we do not wish to know about. A race, not an individual. An object, not a human being, on which we impose a mask while they remove ours. Faced with a migrant we become foreign to ourselves. Alone with our cognitive hypocrisy, we are
indifferent about whether we recognise them or are in turn recognised, because foreigners are those whose eyes are unable to make us experience
shame (1).
Hence Europe, which yesterday wished to carry the torch of a civilising mission colonising the spaces and souls of those Africans and Asians whose great-grandchildren now inhabit those lands, seems incapable of coming to terms with the pressure of supposed aliens fleeing our former colonies. If a few hundred thousand people yes people wreak havoc with the mental and social order of a continent of over half a billion souls (souls?), something essential is not working in the cradle of civilisation. If instead 38% of Italians link migrants to terrorists (2) and the absolute majority (51%) calls for them to be rejected (3), it means that here in our own country we are governed by panic. We are certainly not governed by politics, which seems hypnotised by this fear, so much so that it is ruled by it. Addressing a perturbing issue from an analytical distance, avoiding humanitarian rhetoric (and its attached industry) and security short-cuts speculating on the fear of others, may seem unrealistic. And yet it is an effort we owe ourselves, after our mask has been removed by foreigners fleeing many souths reduced to extreme poverty or in flames, overlooking what was once mare nostrum.
This because we do have one certainty, European order no longer exists. Nor will we be able to restore it. Current migrations and above all the manner in which we portray them, added to the long economic crisis that appears to have resulted in structural stagnation and the decomposition of the geopolitical and institutional framework, accelerated by the never-ending Greek tragedy, have marked the end of the idea of Europe. Not only of the European Union as a (non)-geopolitical player a subject about which Limes readers have been informed ad nauseam but of the awareness of being Europeans, without which it is pointless to envisage any project involving a common home. We have not survived the migrant test. Under the mask torn off by foreigners, we have discovered a thousand identities, ranging from national to local ones, conveniently inflated by fear of those who are different. So many faces disfigured by fear. One is missing, the European one.
Non-Europeans have revealed us as ex-Europeans. In 1964, the German weekly Der Spiegel celebrated on its cover the one millionth Gastarbeiter, Armando Rodrguez, welcomed to the Federal Republic of Germany with an official ceremony in Cologne and presented with a motorbike as a gift (4). A sample of a species, that of the guest worker, whose prototype could be traced in the 1946 Italian-Belgian protocol sanctioning the exchange of thousands of Italian miners in the Walloon Region for train wagons filled with local coal for us. Nowadays no European head of state would dream of celebrating the arrival of a foreign immigrant. This because for some time now we have been faced with the problems we did not solve in the Fifties and Sixties, when the countryside in Europe was emptied and millions of labourers would go and serve industries and reconstruction services in the inebriating atmosphere of the economic miracle.
That dilemma was posed with vivid synthesis by the Zurich-based author Max Frisch only a year after the celebrations for Rodrguez: We were looking for extra hands; men came. (5). Frisch thereby openly stated the irreducible contrast between capitalism and nation. Between the more or less free flow of capital and people and nations need to identify themselves with a community of people, equipped with their own borders. A fence within which one can distinguish ones own people from aliens, while coexisting. It is just that in Europe, after World War II, we were the aliens.
The Portuguese, the Italians, the Greeks and the Spanish. While at the time, when arriving at a Swiss or a German restaurant one could come across signs forbidding dogs and Italians from entering the British would have added the Irish nowadays the same spirit and at times the same words are aimed at non-Europeans, who, in the eyes of xenophobes or those simply fearful, disturb the human panorama in our cities. According to the ethologists who postulate the genetic origins of the territorial imperative, the conflict between those within and foreigners cannot be eradicated, it is immune to history and the environment. Thus, together with Robert Ardrey, they have established that man is as much a territorial animal as is a mockingbird singing in the clear California night. And that If we defend the title to our land or the sovereignty of our country, we do it for reasons no different, no less innate, () than do lower animals. (6). Probably an excess of determinism.
The tragedy of migrants remains, as they suffer and incarnate the conflict between racist inclinations and the needs of wealthy European countries where they are called upon to fill the void arising from falling demographics and the unavailability of citizens of lineage to undertake tiring, dangerous and dirty work. The word racism may be upsetting and thus we tend to knowingly circumnavigate it, replacing it with the less difficult xenophobia or, unknowingly, speaking of multiculturalism (in Italian: each race in its place). However, after 9/11 and coinciding with jihadist attacks that continue to unsettle the continent and its peripheries, the avant-gardes of apartheid reap electoral and image successes in almost all European countries. They thereby decree the failure of integration and assimilation dreams that were an undercurrent in Western Europe in the days of the Cold War. Those were times when the idea of Europe, albeit vague or perhaps thanks to such vagueness, expressed itself freely, also thanks precisely to the western characteristics of this geopolitical formation. This cultural pigment has now been dispersed. We were the continent of the Wall, we are now the continent of physical and mental walls that divide this area composed of fifty or more states, mini-states and terrae nullius that Russian geographers were right to call Asia Anterior. And if before 1989 the origins of partition may have seemed ideological, the many current rifts arise from our fear of others. Of migrants.
The Review
