Wither Europe?: Immigration and the Meaning of Union

By Ian Storey

“In the first place, we don't like to be called ‘refugees.’ We ourselves call each other ‘newcomers’ or ‘immigrants.’ Our newspapers are papers for ‘Americans of German language’; and, as far as I know, there is not and never was any club founded by Hitler-persecuted people whose name indicated that its members were refugees.”

– Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees”

Few outside of Europe follow the European Union’s presidential State of the Union address. For that matter, not that many in Europe follow the European State of the Union address. But therein may lie the problem. This year’s address was interesting: Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, who was not exactly chosen for his rhetorical brilliance, gave an uncharacteristically eloquent response to the ongoing refugee crisis in the European Union and began it with this surprisingly piercing flourish:

“There is not enough Europe in this Union. And there is not enough Union in this Union.”

[caption id="attachment_16612" align="alignleft" width="300"] Source: International Brecht Society[/caption]

Bertolt Brecht, in a passage that Hannah Arendt loved and called “ingenious, more than ingenious”, coined the term she calls the “precise, more than precise” definition of the refugee: “Ein Bote des Unglücks”, the bearer of ill-tidings. The massive influx of refugees into the European Union over the last few months has certainly shown some of that. The question for Juncker, though, as it is for all nations--whether they are in principle welcoming, as the EU has traditionally been, or occasionally decisively unwelcoming, as the United States has sometimes been, at least since the rise of Nativism--is whether they receive not just the bearer but the ill-tidings. Juncker’s speech was an excellent and impassioned plea for acceptance of the bearers, and it even understood that this moment represents a deep challenge to the Union as a political body in a way that many politicians, who have by necessity been focused on the practicalities of infrastructure and city capacities, have not. But what makes his striking opening quote sublime is that it also captures exactly what he did not articulate in his speech: the deeper tidings themselves being brought through Hungary and Italy and a thousand other “points of light”.

Whether or not it was intended, Juncker’s phrase encapsulates a dilemma at this historical moment in every nation-state--the United States, or Japan, or Argentina--that concerns itself with immigration as a political problem. The passage bears the contradiction at the heart of Europe’s response to its “refugee crisis”. It is worth putting that phrase in scare-quotes, for in point of fact, this is an issue that has been building for decades and which became an acute problem well before this moment of “crisis”. Europe’s deeper struggle is not merely infrastructural, as the German government in particular is fond of couching the problem. The deeper struggle is that the states of Europe can no longer decide how European they are, and the rise of anti-immigration sentiments on both the Right and Left is symptomatic of a deeper rot in the heart of the Union.

At first glance, the difficulty is that those states that have agreed to accept immigrants--particularly the UK, which is the embodiment of the ongoing, strangely Disney question, “Are you in or out?”--are not European, per se, and that their politically active populations only partially politically self-identify as “European”. This observation is partly right. But the more difficult question, the one the Juncker struggles to address even as he labors through his answer, is that there are many who would take the first part of his passage--“There is not enough Europe in this Union”--as the watchword of anti-immigrationism, which makes the second phrase--“there is not enough Union in this Union”--self-evident for those ideologues in the opposite way Juncker intends. Juncker wants to call upon a certain historical narrative of a “European tradition” of being open and welcoming to immigrants, as do many American politicians. But the institutional framework in which he is trapped has already stacked the deck against the argument. The difficulty is more syntactically clear than his labored solution: he must, in the span of a few paragraphs, defend why there not being “enough Europe in the Union” is reason to welcome those he has already defined as non-European. That is a rhetorical problem of his construction, but as Juncker himself notes, it is a problem built into the fabric of the European Union, not to mention its predecessor institutions, since its inception.

[caption id="attachment_16613" align="aligncenter" width="530"] Juncker and Donald Tusk, president of the EU Council, at an early morning presser in June, 2015 (Source: EurActiv.com)[/caption]

In a sense, if we want to call the migration wave the Second Eurozone Crisis, then the First Eurozone Crisis--the crisis within the monetary union that remains ongoing with the problem of Greece--merely reveals what has been tacitly accepted by the structure of the monetary union itself: the structural financial dominance of Germany and, to a lesser extent, France. The Second Crisis, though, like the earlier failure of constitutional referendums, points to the heart of Europe itself. What is the European Union a union of exactly? That question, although a good one, is no longer being asked at the strata at which it is being leveled; it is a question being asked at the level of the individual states, and states within states, and local communities. Ultimately, as Arendt pointed out three-quarters of a century before, in the wave of the stateless of which she was a part, you cannot answer the questions of migration if they are not being asked at the same level they are expected to be answered. Assimilation or non-assimilation, multicultural understanding, and yes, with a nod to Germany, infrastructural capacity, are questions that we can no longer afford to ask of the Union if they are simultaneously expected to be answered by, at the largest political union, the individual member-states. It is that division which Europe’s several migration “crises” have pried apart and which subsequently caused Juncker’s eloquent plea to ring hollow. He was calling, in the name of a political body he acknowledges is fractured, for a unity he is powerless to generate, in a situation in which it is most needed.

(Featured image sourced from Voice of America)