Eurocentricity and the Refugee Crisis

In 2015, the death of the Syrian refugee child Alan Kurdi triggered a wave of “compassion” in Europe. Nevertheless, the subsequent reaction of the EU did not result in a rights-based approach to the crisis but rather reinforced the politics of ‘management’ of refugees to ensure an ‘orderly and humane’ migration. In reality, the European response is all but ‘safe’ and ‘humane’ and rather focusses on Europe’s identity and security instead of on refugees themselves. The concept of ‘Eurocentricity’ created the subordinate identity of the ‘Refugee’; with the accompanying image of a ‘Crisis’. The EU’s response to such a ‘Crisis’ has in turn been completely inappropriate.

Gurminder Bhambra, an important decolonial theorist, argues that there is a binary created between the ‘citizen’ and the ‘refugee’, which entails subsequent binaries. In the EU’s ‘Refugee Crisis’, the most relevant binary is between those who have free movement - i.e. the EU citizen within the Union – and those whose movements are constrained. Refugees are made “sub-citizens” who neither belong nor have rights. Bhambra traces this dichotomy back to the decolonisation period and argues that the colonialist power relations are still present today.) Mainly Western European States have always depicted themselves as founding fathers of Human Rights and as exercising moral leadership throughout the world. As an example, the Valletta Summit in November 2015 aimed at establishing an EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa to promote development in exchange for help in reducing the migration flow to Europe. This shows a paternalistic and eurocentric approach, which places EU interests before refugee rights. Also, as Crawley argues, there are, at the summit basis, ‘flawed assumptions’ on the routes of refugees’ flight to Europe, since most refugees come in reality from Syria and other countries in the region.

Refugees suffer the process of ‘othering’. They are made undesirable abnormalities, or as Viktor Navorski is told in the movie The Terminal (2004), simply “unacceptable”. This vocabulary is at the core of the discourse behind EU migration ‘management’ policy. This discourse actually is a production of knowledge used to assert domination of the West over the East and prevent the ‘Other’ from exercising freedom of thoughts and actions. We can draw a parallel here with the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), the body of directives and regulations on migration developed by EU institutions since 1999. The CEAS treats refugees as passive objects that need to be ‘managed’, such as in the quota system of relocation of asylum seekers to other EU Member States. EU Member States do not take into account the needs and wants of asylum seekers, nor give them the power to oppose the decision, thereby rendering them completely passive. Another example of how asylum seekers have no choice but to comply is in Italy, where they can face detention if they refuse to let their fingerprints be registered. This practice is the result of the unsuitability of the Dublin Regulation III, which places a terrible burden on ‘countries of first entry’.

This identity of the Refugee, as shaped by the long-standing power relations between the West and the East, is nowadays automatically associated with the idea of ‘Crisis’, especially in the media and the political discourse. The ‘Crisis’ vocabulary implies certain dimensions such as instability, uncertainty, temporariness. As a result, there is an increasing unfounded fear of the ‘refugee’ who is seen as a cause of the ‘Crisis’, whereas he or she is just one of its victims. The ‘Eurocentricity’ of the crisis produces a shift. The EU citizen is displayed as the victim in need of protection through EU institutions and the Border Protection Agency, FRONTEX, while the refugee is represented as a threat to national security and sovereignty of European States and their citizens. This is why the EU places a major focus on ‘securing’ external borders and returning migrants.

These practices have been occuring at the domestic level throughout the EU. The Hungarian government has built barriers at its borders with Croatia and Serbia for instance. What for? “To keep people out”, as Crawley explains, objective at the basis of the Common European Asylum System. Furthemore, Belgium’s practice of “systematically detaining asylum seekers at its external border” was found not to be in breach of the right to liberty (art 5 ECHR) in the Thimothawes decision of the European Court of Human Rights in 2017. The Court has sanctioned the practice “as long as access to national courts for judicial review is guaranteed and [detention] duration stays reasonable”, explains Ruben Wissing. However, three judges issued dissenting opinions, arguing that the national asylum authorities should have carried out a more individualised assessment of Mr. Thimothawes in order to prevent arbitrariness of the detention. At the EU level, EU leaders took advantage of its political power relation with Turkey, which first applied for EU membership in 1987, to “keep refugees out”. In effect, negotiations led to the adoption of the EU-Turkey deal in 2016 on the relocation of Syrian refugees from EU to Turkey in exchange for political concessions to the Turkish government and more rights for Turkish citizens, making it easier for them to apply for an EU visa.

All of this shows to what extent the ‘migration management’ policy of the EU is driven by political and security concerns rather than interest in addressing the underlying factors of migration. In effect, there is not one ‘crisis’ but several ‘crises’ that are interlinked: armed conflicts, global economic inequalities, the “Crisis of Europe”. Besides, there is no long-term vision in addressing the ‘Refugee Crisis’ and the EU response is particularly inappropriate to attend the needs of refugees. As Charlesworth argues, the real victim of the crisis is erased and forgotten because “the part stands for the whole”. Only 6% of the global population of refugees is in Europe. It is high time we shifted our attention towards the real individuals behind the label of ‘Refugee’.