Omar Khan*

 

 

 

 

 

While many Europeans have felt growing humanitarian concern on being confronted with images of desperation among refugees seeking entry, across the continent a large minority have suggested any sympathy is misplaced.

Some arguments about the refugee crisis focus more on practical concerns – that encouraging people to come to Europe will lead to greater danger, or that we cannot afford to take more than a few hundred or thousand. These concerns don’t really respond to the horrible conditions and even poorer economies of Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey where most refugees are currently living in camps, but they at least recognise shared humanity and European values.

Questioning their humanity

Some rejectionist responses, however, question the humanity of the refugees or our (Europe’s) obligation to do anything to help them. These rejections flirt to variously open degrees with two sorts of claims. First is the denial that all human beings have equal moral worth. In discussions of racial discrimination the focus is often on the labour market or criminal justice system, and on the socially unequal outcomes that Black and minority ethnic people experience across Europe. Such evidence should be more widely understood and directly combated, but the basic denial of our shared humanity is arguably the foundational harm of racism. Our continued inability to address historic violence and racism is so damaging not only because it leaves us ignorant of our own history, but also because it fails to recognise the deep pain and indignity suffered by millions of people, an indignity that apparently is still happily flouted by some of Europe’s leaders and publics.

A second claim is less overtly racist, but more widely affirmed, namely that there is (or should be) an ethno-religious account of who counts as ‘European’. Democracy, equality, liberty, fraternity, humanitarianism: all these are nice values, the thought goes, but what really counts is if you’re a white Christian. A more sophisticated version of this claim might be that Christian Europeans are uniquely suited to or committed to values of tolerance, humanitarianism and democracy, but proponents obviously don’t think undemocratic or intolerant white Christian people should be expelled from or denied citizenship by Europe’s different nation-states. However this sort of view is expressed, the key point for us is that Syrians or Eritreans could never become British or Hungarian even if they are the most committed democrats.

Vocal politicians

Central European politicians are most vocal and also publicly criticised for such views. But it’s not only the Hungarian Prime Minister who thinks that ethnicity and religion matter more than values. A significant proportion of Europeans now vote for far-right parties and so fail to affirm ‘European values’. This isn’t simply an ‘Eastern’ problem; when asked to imagine a prototypical Norwegian or Dane, it’s not only nationalists who will conjure up a blonde-haired blue-eyed individual. And despite the undoubted progress we’ve made in Britain, there’s a sense in which thugs from the English Defence League are more ‘English’ than a London-born Black person.

Continue reading “Migration Pulse: What the refugee crisis says about race in Europe”