The compelling phenomenon of a vast migration of refugees, from areas of unimaginable duress and danger towards perceived sites of sanctuary, has shown us one crucial thing. Distant outsiders do not notice or observe our own tribal borders, the ones we think ought to be obvious. Of course, sharp geographic boundaries—coastlines, mountain ranges, seas and large rivers—present clear difficulties as they become physical barriers. But the absence of unambiguous, site-specific social, cultural and political memories means that, as there’s no comprehension of these invisible histories, there’s also no apprehension of the significance of crossing these lines.
There is something quite comical about watching the vast colonial fortress walls start to crumble and vanish. The colonised are coming to head office and, as a former Yugoslav diplomat Boris Cizelj said to me, ‘the slaves are sending in their bill’ [1]. While thirty years ago, many at the far reaches of Europe’s imperial plunders found their voices and started to answer back, challenging the one-way rhetoric of colonial imbalance and oppression, now a new phase of post-colonialism is being enacted. But this new chapter is not being played out in the remote regions of Europe’s legacy, far from the delicate sensibilities of a modern, ‘enlightened’ Euro populace. The masses have been kept in their place by centuries of sophisticated spells and strategies, developed at home to create and maintain social hierarchies, and then easily adapted to orchestrate a global ecology of entitlements and dependencies, consumption and disenfranchisements. And we all know from our ‘deep’ understanding of The Wizard of Oz that remoteness guarantees and perpetuates mystique. An Emerald City, seen from afar, is demonstrably awe-inspiring and clearly must embody a powerful magic. However, as the remote and the colonised dare to make the risky and unsettling pilgrimage to the centres of power, the cobbled-together artifice is revealed as little more than an array of inglorious and tawdry theatrics. Only a thin curtain separates the many from the truth of the few—that the whole charade is kept going by a handful of diminutive and unremarkable people pulling on levers and barking orders through loudspeakers.
Is this perhaps the final and, probably unexpected, chapter in the story of capitalism and the inevitable postscript to its colonial enterprises? It would certainly appear that the game is up. The masses outside the walls have realised it, the masses inside the walls are starting to get the message, and it’s starting to dawn on the powerful elites that have profited from the conjuring trick for so long, that the spells have ceased to work. The World is waking up to the fact that limited global resources cannot continue to be in the hands of and under the control so few people, and the clear imbalance of numbers is about to change our social structures forever.
In Europe and across the globe, we are witnessing a number of different responses. In the most simplistic analysis, the drawbridge is either up or it’s down. But the drawbridge is only one of many obstacles to entry. As Homer, Bunyan and Joyce would all attest, no pilgrim can expect clear passage. It is the job of the pilgrim to suffer, whether they’re cloaked in righteousness or opportunism—all are in the same leaky boat, or stuffed into the same airless cargo container.
Behind the wire, Berlin refugee intake centre. (Shirrefs)
The trials and terrors of the journey don’t discriminate, but just as they think their suffering is over, the refugees find that the gatekeepers at the portal of paradise invariably do, and the extent of the discrimination and the motivations for granting or denying entry vary wildly across the European continent—or, in some cases, from week to week.
Fear and guilt are the most potent ingredients in determining a country’s attitude to these multitudes of unknowable grief units. Often the collective response is an odd combination of both, resulting in a very confused and confusing set of mixed messages regarding who is or isn’t entitled to enter. Guilt is usually a result of a long period of collective self-reflection, resulting in a culture where empathy may just trump self-interest. In the case of a country like Germany, the guilt is a mix of post-World War confessional, and a clear recognition that many of their own people within the past century were themselves granted safe passage to foreign lands. For some other countries who prefer to perpetuate a self-image as historical victims, there is a much more pronounced sense of entitlement to act out of a fear of being persecuted again. Many of these countries ought to share a level of guilt over historical acts. Is this one of the problems for the European Union? It’s clear that, in the context of the two World Wars, Germany was chosen as the whipping boy. In fact, in a toxic cloud of shame, guilt and humiliation, Germany seemed to be quite willing to don the cloak of blame, possibly because any other action or posture, especially one of denial, was palpably more corrosive and would have guaranteed that there would be no end to the horror of abrogated self-knowledge. Other Axis countries in Europe, including Germany’s major ally Italy, seemed perfectly happy to deflect blame back to Berlin. Countries like Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and many others that displayed major tendencies towards acquiescence and complicity, have instead managed to re-engineer their national stories to conjure up fantastical self-definitions as victims. In no way was Germany blameless, but they had willing accomplices, who behaved in the manner of petty thugs. The importance of this though, is how these two distinct positions of self-reflection and self-delusion manifest in a more contemporary test of borders.
One is a position of almost brutal self-honesty—not quite a self-loathing, but certainly a posture largely without pretence. This translates into a fierce determination (on the part of many Germans) toward exemplary behaviour on the world stage, especially when dealing with a monumental set of human crises. But that makes the German position sound cynical. The truth is that, amongst the many people I’ve spoken to, involved in policy-making, in volunteer work with refugees, in providing any number of services to the vast new migrant population, there is a deeply introspective element in their reaction to extraordinary events. For some it’s an expiation of guilt. For many others, it’s done out of a very real empathy, because they acknowledge that many Germans (often their own family) were shown inordinate kindness and given shelter in the aftermath of WWII.
The other state of mind, driving many countries to take a hard-line position on migration, is one of an entrenched sense of historical tribal victimisation, as well as a persistent belief that the European Union is, deep down, a proxy attack on national sovereignties. It’s a story that plays well to certain domestic audiences, especially those audiences populated by the parochially uncurious, or the vast swathes of European poor who could never take advantage of the benefits of freedoms on offer across Europe’s Schengen Zone. Often these two things go hand-in-hand. Parochialism is a version of insularity that feeds and perpetuates tribalism. It produces closed conversations that can inbreed to produce grotesque deformities of the truth about the world and the people beyond. Lack of curiosity is either due to limited access to education, a cultivated lack of ambition, or a deep fear of the unknown.
Many social groups are deeply risk averse and so generation after generation will reproduce itself in almost perfect replica, except for the fact that the subsequent generations are ever more distant from any real or imagined sources of fear about the world beyond. They receive the emotion and the reflex, without any cause or context. This is the passage of prejudice and racism. This is the way societies instinctively know who does and doesn’t belong. And it’s the way that borders are maintained and mapped. How can anyone from the outside know that they must contend with this, when they unwittingly stray into these tribal territories?
[1] Cizelj, Prof. Dr Boris, Crisis & Creativity, Episode 3, Earshot, ABC RN, August 2016