Migration, New Nationalisms and Populism

An Epistemological Perspective on the Closure of Rich Countries

Rada Ivekovic

• Publisher: Birkbeck Law Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000543988
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe de l'Est

This book examines the antagonistic relationship between new European nationalisms as these often go hand-in-hand with populism, and the phenomenon of migration.

Migration has become a significant issue both in Europe and the whole world. Although it has always existed, much of public opinion sees it now as a problem. The latter has been exaggerated through a crisis in hospitality exacerbated by the relatively recently constructed and misplaced feeling of a civilisational threat from islam. Migration is then countered by the escalation of new nationalisms, at least some of which are supported by populism. This book offers an understanding of this conjunction of migration and nationalism in the post-cold war European context. More specifically, the book takes up how the end of the simplified cold war cognitive binary means an unprecedented epistemological confusion and depoliticisation which takes migration as its target, but could resort to other targets too. Discussing the postcolonial background to the new migrations, the book also considers womens' rights, postsocialism and the relevance of the current pandemic, as the issue of migration is addressed in the context of the European crisis-ridden present.

This wide-ranging interrogation of how contemporary European migration is conceived and understood will appeal to students, academics, activists, policy makers, and others with interests in contemporary migration, new nationalisms, populism, feminism, colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial issues, as well as socialism and postsocialism.

Chapter 1 IntroductionBorders as a trap?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003254997-1

Hospitality and care

Petar Hektorović, alias Petrus Hectoreus (1487–1572), a knowledgeable Renaissance writer and architect who built a large patrician house, or a small castle called Tvrdalj with an original inner fish-pond in the small town of Stari Grad on the island of Hvar (Pharos) in the Adriatic Sea in the 16th century, had the idea of enjoying it and sharing it with friends, foreigners, passers-by, paupers, wanderers, and outsiders. He ornamented the mansion and the fish-pond, to which a garden was adjacent, with elegant inscriptions into the white building stones, and one of them read: PETRUS HECTOREUS MARINI FILIUS PROPRIO SUMPTU ET INDUSTRIA AD SUUM ET AMICORUM USUM CONSTRUXIT. (“Petrus Hectoreus, son of Marin, built [this] with his own money and labour, for himself and for friends”.) The idea of sharing and solidarity was the foundation of his philosophy. The contemporaneous modern European spreading over the globe through colonialism, servitude, and enslavement (to say nothing of the simultaneous witch-hunt and historic submission of women) had not yet become the modern capitalism it is today, and was still seen as curiosity for and openness to the other. There was as yet no definitive closure within national or state borders at that time, no rejecting of travellers or foreigners. In those times, people still travelled without passports, and hospitality, nowadays disregarded, was not a vain word. That ancient and almost universal tradition of welcoming visitors has been lost in many parts of the so-called developed world, and much beyond too, because of new living conditions and new economic and political circumstances, especially within absolute (or “disaster”) capitalism globalisation and prevailing individualism. In those times and throughout ancient and medieval history, travellers and strangers were welcome unless it was a time of war or plague. The latter figured as an exception, however. Towns closed due to epidemics would reopen soon thereafter, and life would go back to normal, although without those who paid the price with their lives and were mourned (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Stari Grad, Hvar (Jadran), Ribnjak Petra Hektorovic´a (Petrus Hectoreus) u Tvrdlju. [Stari Grad, Hvar (Adriatic Sea), Petar Hektorovic´’s fishpond in his house Tvrdalj, photo 2019.]

Migrants or new nomads,¹ strangers, callers are, in our 21st century, met with fear and rejection when not with outright violence.² The fear is oftentimes induced by politicians and spread through mainstream and social media. Before i enlarged it, this chapter was to be about Europe’s and, in particular, the European Union’s process of closure to immigration, according to part of the original subtitle (“The closure of Europe”). The EU, being in the first place a market, never meant to be a social club for welcoming foreigners unless they brought capital, although it always boasted of its theoretical universalist humanism and of its principled abstract hospitality. In the case of France, we see ourselves as a pays d’accueil, a country of reception. Yet those who would come to visit don’t get visas if they come from poorer countries.

1 Stefano Bianchini, Liquid Nationalism and State Partitions in Europe, London and New York, Edward Elgar Publishing 2017, talks of new nomads. 2 Marie-Claire Caloz-Tschopp, L’évidence de l’asile. Essai de philosophie dys-topique du mouvement, Paris, L’Harmattan 2016; La liberté politique de se mouvoir. Desexil et création: philosophie du droit de fuite, Paris, Kimé 2019.

But something radically changed before this essay was finished.

Covid-19 and (missed) opportunities

Most of the present book was written in the form of lectures before the outbreak of the coronavirus covid-19 pandemic, about which i have subsequently added a paragraph or two towards the end. The pandemic has revealed many social and political ailments in states and societies and has become a complex multifaceted crisis quite beyond the sanitary one. Although the closure and retraction of the west from its duty of solidarity and from its historic responsibility (due to its hegemony) to once colonised continents and other countries was evident, the 2020 pandemic produced overnight a much worse and desperate closure of cities, countries, borders, and minds. The shutting to the virus (pandemic nationalism) was translated into an even harder shutting to immigrants, and the latter were immediately seen as viruses themselves. Closing and hostility to immigrants became pervasive in richer countries, with people hopelessly stuck at the borders. The lockdown became as global as the pandemic in the first wave. Transportation stopped, industries shut down, and, in the west, those who had homes stayed at home. Skies became clear for a short while, the air became breathable again as economies were ruined and the political future became fuzzy. We have been depriving ourselves for quite some time already of a readable and imaginable future, through depoliticisation, the desemanticisation of our languages, post-truth tropes, and the proliferation of, as well as the belief in, fake news. The virus only enhanced it more. Younger generations today don’t know what is in store for them and they don’t expect to live better than their parents, as was once the general case. Migrants, who have no other option but to get away, still hope they can find a future elsewhere, before discovering that it is not a spatial matter. Fear of the virus instantly woke up exclusion, nationalism, racism, casteism, class, and ethnic and gender discrimination of the worst kind. Since the epidemic is global (a first such absolute pandemic in history it seems), there is no going back to “normal” any more. The pandemic is normalcy now, and it means cessation of contacts.³

3 Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, “Nationaux-Républicains: le grand retour?”, Médiapart, https://blogs.mediapart.fr/olivier-le-cour-grandmaison/blog/260420/nationaux-republicains-le-grand-retour. See the Ranabir Samaddar, “Introduction”, in Borders of an Epidemic, edited by MCRG, http://www.mcrg.ac.in/RLS_Migration_2020/COVID-19.pdf

While the essay was going to critique, the “normal” closing to others due to a colonial and imperial history of violence and the change of paradigm after the cold war, we have stepped into another type of much worse retraction brought about by the malady being global and thus being “normal” in a new sense. Exception became the rule. Not that history had not been pushing us in that direction, not that we didn’t expect it to happen soon. Borders were already starting to close (both state borders and lesser inner borders) in the wake of new nationalisms and a sort of renationalisation with nativism. They come in a package, with globalisation as part of it. But we didn’t think we were already there. Yet we are. After the sanitary crisis itself, and within the climate and ecological crises, the economic, social, and political crises await everyone. Violence has increased, especially violence to women and violence to undocumented persons. It will be much worse for the global south. Within Europe and actually Eurasia, it has been much worse in the east, in many ways, if not in the first, then in the second wave. And it is clear that the nation-state cannot deal alone with such crises as climate change or ecology. We shall have to reinvent a political future for the planet because the present (and western, but violently universalised) modern paradigm has brought us to where we stand now—to the edge of an abyss. Meanwhile, the danger of permanent stigmatisation of local or trans-border migrants, minorities, and refugees is growing around the world as borders are closing to them under the cover of “covid-19 protection”. They are labelled as virus carriers and possible terrorists; the trans-border ones are even locked down in a number of European countries under various pretexts. The condition of confinement on the pretext of the pandemic, although temporarily necessary for medical reasons, threatens to become a rather permanent and clearly political feature.

But covid-19, being a threshold or a portal,⁴ a fissure when things can happen, its worldwide psychodrama is also an opportunity for women (among others) to reinvent themselves and society, while welfare and care are reorganised. Such occasions to fight systemic patriarchy and other social injustices don’t happen every day and, most important, they don’t last. Incidentally, the same is also a possible chance for migrant populations to remake themselves in a new society, and to reinvent that society with their hosts. Migrants were, by definition, ready to recast themselves. Wanting to refashion themselves in a new life is the elementary condition that allows calling someone a migrant at all. There is a conjuncture here of elements that amount to the refiguring of oneself, to relinquishing allegation or outgrown identities, to a metamorphosis.

4 Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic Is a Portal”, The Financial Times, April 3, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca

Different countries adopted different attitudes to the 2020 virus. In developed Asian countries where the pandemic took a milder form, governments and public health were prepared, and confinement of the whole population was not applied. Massive tests were performed on as many people as possible, and only individuals with coronavirus were isolated, their contacts traced and secluded too. But Europe, the USA, Latin America, and India were not prepared. Some of these countries proceeded, and with much delay, to an official lockdown of the whole population, with a disastrous and completely disproportionate toll in deaths. According to some reports, the east Asian medical policies worked better though diversely (Taiwan, South Korea, China, Singapore, Japan). In many places, racial and other prejudices, as well as general unpreparedness, led to a great number of avoidable deaths.⁵

5 Jean Dominique Michel, “Anatomie d’un désastre”, April 27, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afbeFoi679I&feature=youtu.be; Samaddar, “Introduction”, in Borders of an Epidemic, op. cit., Le Cour Grandmaison, “Nationaux-Républicains: le grand retour?”, op. cit.

We shall unfortunately be able to address the virus effects again only superficially at the end of the essay. In a way, present history with the virus accelerated what had already been in view in the way of transmogrifying and adapting capitalism, and we can now clearly see the end of our world at the horizon, with climate change and ecological devastation, as well as the possible or probable end of the planet and humankind in a less distant future. As a system, historic capitalism came to be as a violent reaction to recurrent peasants’ riots, artisans’ rebellions, displaced peoples’ mutinies, local revolts, and women’s hunger insurgencies in medieval Europe. It is not necessarily to be seen as a progressive development, but rather as the crushing of social forms of existence through as many counterrevolutions.⁶ What was to be destroyed were manners of living as well as modes of production and reproduction. The separation of the two latter was forcefully introduced with conceptual and factual priority given to production as the basis of capitalism. For a while, capitalism continued while comprehending or even reproducing various other now subaltern modes of production such as serfdom and slavery. Today, in this phase of neoliberalism, as Branko Milanovic shows, these other subservient, complementary, competing, and contesting local modes of production have practically disappeared at least in their previous form. In the meantime, capitalism has become the dominant mode and takes ever new forms.⁷

6 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Brooklyn, NY, Autonomedia 2004. 7 Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, Cambridge, MA, Harvard UP 2016 (reprint).

Although nomadism had been a way of life of early human societies and migrations are an age-old feature of sedentary societies, they have now proliferated in new conditions (globalisation), escorted by a disquieting rise in toxic neo-nationalisms since 1989. A conservative revolution has happened in the west and was globalised, although unequally. That conservative revolution has been followed by an on-going attempt at restoration. Restorations usually lead to disaster, and are usually failed. What is being “restored” is, as a rule, some idea, rife with symbolic pretence, of a former golden age projected into the future (with a rear-view), while the just immediate past is being removed if not forbidden: this has been the experience, among others, of postsocialism, busy restoring an imaginary pre-socialist capitalism it sometimes never even had. Such restoration requires the hammering of new “old values”. At this time (2020), the restoration applied is the post-covid-19 one. Instead of a change to the economic and political order globally, governments seem only to want to propose restoration of the conditions known before the epidemic.⁸ Even that restoration has proved an illusion, due to the damage produced by the...