Zombies. Flickr/Lindsey Turner. Some rights reserved.In his book Zombie
Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism[1] the
US American public intellectual Henry Giroux examines the emergence of the culture
of sadism, cruelty, disposability, and death in America. His metaphor, the
Zombie, is a pertinent one: dead but not quite, the Zombie does not make
autonomous decisions but is driven by higher powers. He or she nevertheless
wreaks considerable havoc, kills, terrorises and disposes of bodies with ease.
The Zombie derives its power from the anxieties of the common man and woman.
A Zombie deal
At first sight, the 'refugee deal' between Turkey seems to
have little in common with Zombies. The Zombie derives its power from the anxieties of the common man and woman. The ostensible intentions of its authors (the
initial 'Merkel Samsom' plan, which formed the basis of the deal reached was
authored by the European
Stability Initiative) are commendable and simple: to stop the suffering of
Syrian refugees. The plan promises a win-win for all parties involved: the EU
will be able to revive Schengen and resettle refugees in an orderly manner.
Turkey's burden in hosting refugees will be eased and its citizens will benefit
from visa-free travel to the European Union. And the refugees will be spared
the terrors of crossing the Aegean in unseaworthy plastic boats and facing
death. To achieve this, all refugees crossing from Turkey to the Greek islands
will be returned after a three-day process to Turkey, which is now declared a
safe country. In exchange for the refugee returned, another refugee who has not
attempted the crossing will be accepted into a willing European host country.
Straightforward as this deal sounds, it is a fantasy
scenario. There is no institutional capacity on the Greek islands that could
process refugees' applications in such a short time, while keeping within the
confines of international refugee law. There are no willing European host
countries apart, maybe, from Germany. And finally, Turkey is not a safe third
country. It is a country deeply implicated in the Syrian War and it wages a
campaign of extermination against Kurdish separatists that has led to the death
of several hundred civilians and the forced displacement of tens of thousands
in only a few months. There are no willing European host
countries apart, maybe, from Germany. And Turkey is not a safe third
country.
It is now a country that is not able to ensure the right to
physical integrity of its citizens, let alone of refugees. It goes without
saying that the promised visa liberalisation for Turkish citizens is a charade.
To be realised, it needs Turkish compliance on basic fundamental rights, which
are not forthcoming. There will be no long-term visa-free travel for Turks in
any case, since it is not possible legally, but also because there are a
sufficient number of EU member state governments to ensure that visa liberalisation
does not happen. Once the visa deal falters, the Turkish President Erdoğan can only benefit politically by accusing the
EU of double standards. And for very good reasons indeed.
On the level of principles, such horse-trading is unethical,
as Iverna McGowan of Amnesty
International posits: " The idea of bartering refugees for refugees is
not only dangerously dehumanising, but also offers no sustainable long term
solution to the ongoing humanitarian crisis". On the level of the empirical
realities of migration and refugeehood, we know that desperate people cannot be
stopped. They will simply resort to new
routes that will be more dangerous, more lethal and more expensive, whether
it is the land borders between Turkey and Bulgaria, the boat journey from Libya
to Italy or a new trajectory through Ukraine and Eastern Europe. But if the
deal is so dehumanising and cynical, and ultimately offers no sustainable
solutions to the refugee challenge, then why have the EU and Turkey been so upbeat
about it? But if the
deal is so dehumanising and cynical, and ultimately offers no sustainable
solutions to the refugee challenge, then why have the EU and Turkey been so upbeat
about it?
European Zombies
Before the European debt crisis, the austerity regimes in
Ireland, Spain and Portugal and the meltdown of Greece, large parts of the European
Union almost felt like the self-ascribed identity discourse of an enlightened,
liberal, tolerant polity cognizant of its own dark pasts and its current diversity.
Today, we are facing a very different continent. Right-wing populist, neo-fascist
and racist parties have moved from the margins into the centre of politics, and
so have their ideas.
Understandable but diffuse anxieties over globalisation,
competition over social services and perceived cultural distance to immigrants have
solidified into Islamophobic resentment and racialised ideologies of European
supremacy.
Racist populist parties shape political discourses from the
most advanced Scandinavian democracies to the illiberal polities of Hungary or
Slovakia. Recently, a member of the European Parliament of the neo-fascist
Golden Dawn spoke
of Turks as "dirty and polluted … wild dogs" in a plenary
session. The President, Martin Schulz, immediately understood the strategy
behind the diatribe, i.e. to push the boundaries of acceptable discourse in the
European Parliament. He expelled the MEP. His deliberate action, however, only
reinforces the tragic state of affairs. One has to be courageous and resolute
to stand up to an ideology which has been invented in Europe, destroyed much of
it and is now being legally represented in one of the centres of European
power. One has to be courageous and resolute
to stand up to an ideology which has been invented in Europe, and destroyed much of
it.
Unlike the more recent rise of European racist parties, the
Freedom Party in Austria has been around for thirty years and is now about to
become the country's largest party. Like other populist parties, it has
carefully avoided public Anti-Semitism and replaced it with a narrative of European
regime failure and Islamophobia.[2] The
Freedom Party has succeeded in reframing political problems on all levels – from
the local to the national and European – through its hatred of Muslims and
particularly of Muslim refugees. They have done this to the point that a
majority of Austrians today see Muslims as a threat to Austrian culture. Based
on my work for the Yearbook of Muslims in Europe[3] and continuing
fieldwork, I can infer that for a significant part of Austrian society, a notion
of a shared humanity with the Muslims in their midst and those on their
doorsteps does not exist. The logical conclusion is that there is no obligation
towards Muslims and refugees – two terms that have come to signify the same anxiety
– and no obligation for care.[4]
I would have liked to suggest that the Austrian case should
serve as a wakeup call, as it is a prescription for the inevitable trajectory
of populism, dehumanisation and disregard of fellow human beings to the point
that these lives become disposable. But with the remarkable exception of
Germany for now, this is the point much of Europe has reached, and this also
explains German and maybe to a lesser extent, European eagerness to reach a
deal on the refugee challenge at almost any cost.
The populists have succeeded in framing the refugee issue through
the prism of 'Muslim demographics',[5] i.e.
the thesis that an aging European civilisation is about to be dealt its death
knell by mounting immigration from Muslim majority countries. And it is the
fear of these populists that most probably has forced Merkel's hand in pushing
the deal with Turkey. This is not about refugees. It is about saving Europe by
demonstrating that 'we are in control'. It is the desperate attempt to push
Europe's zombies back into the closet. This is not about refugees. It is about saving Europe by
demonstrating that 'we are in control'.
Zombies in Turkey
Quite a few zombies have left their closets in Turkey too.
In fact, Turkey is in the process of what an increasing
number of critical observers have likened to the fascist takeover in
inter-war Italy and also to Weimar Germany. For almost a decade, a more or less
benign government under the Justice and Development Party created global
enchantment with a Turkish model synthesising Islam, democracy and capitalism.[6]
Turkey was booming economically and culturally and inspiring many beyond
Turkey's borders. In tune with Turkey's – albeit always cumbersome and slightly
surreal – EU accession process, freedoms were expanding in some areas.
Crucially, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government seemed to be set
on achieving peace with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), thereby raising
hopes that the core conflict of the modern Turkish state might be coming to a
peaceful conclusion. The process achieved some
level of binding formality with a meeting between representatives of a
pro-Kurdish party and the government in February 2015. These were hopeful
moments.
The Turkey of such hopes does not exist any more. It began
to vanish much earlier of course, probably since the 2011 elections, when then
Prime Minister Erdoğan reshaped the AKP. If it was a broad coalition of
conservative, Islamist, entrepreneurial and liberal constituencies before, it
morphed into a vehicle for Erdoğan's bid to turn Turkey into a presidential
autocracy. It almost disappeared during the Gezi protests, when the young
people of Istanbul and those appalled by the city's complete sellout to neoliberal
interests were tear-gassed and baton-charged into submission and a series of
corruption cases, which exposed the current ruling elite as corrupt beyond
imagination. The Turkish Republic as we have come to know it, with its terrible
democratic deficiencies and ideological monstrosities yet also with hopeful
openings and potentialities is
indeed no more. Members of the public, who attempted
to express a position against these multiple escalations, are faced with the
full force of a security state gone out of control.
What we are witnessing at the moment in Turkey is not
business as usual in an incomplete democracy vying for eventual accession to
the European Union, but an escalation of illiberal governance that has no equal
in Turkey's violence-ridden recent history.
The acceleration of eroding freedoms has been widely
documented, whether in the almost complete erasure
of the freedom of speech through the government takeover of major
opposition newspapers or in the shelling of entire
neighbourhoods in the fight against the PKK. Members of the public, who attempted
to express a position against these multiple escalations, are faced with the
full force of a security state gone out of control. The case
of the 1128 academics, who signed a petition for peace and have been facing
harassment and persecution since has become a
cause célèbre for global liberal academia. Many academics have lost their
jobs, and three scholars are in jail for reading out the petition at a press
conference. They are being hounded on pro-government media, exposed with their
institutional affiliations and photographs so that they can be spotted on the
street.[7]
Has this all happened hidden away from the gaze of the European
Union and the think tanks and experts advising EU governments? Not really.
While the European Council President Donald Tusk was probing the waters for the
refugee deal in Ankara a few days ago, the government he was talking to took
into state administration the country's largest opposition newspaper. When the
deal was signed in Brussels on March 18, supporters of academic freedoms were
being tear-gassed in front of an Istanbul prison, where they were holding a
vigil for the release of the jailed academics. So many bombings and attacks
have happened in the last few months that the death toll has to be updated
almost daily. Has this all happened hidden away from the gaze of the European
Union? Not really. It has probably surpassed a thousand. President Erdoğan, stubbornly wedded to his survival
strategy of a regime change to presidential autocracy that will save him from
prosecution, has clearly outlined
the rules of the game in the new war on terror: "Nobody raises an eyebrow when France puts in place emergency measures after suffering a terror attack, but when we do it they preach freedom and democracy at us. These statements no longer have any value in Turkey." Freedom and democracy do not mean much any more in Turkey. This is a clear message that even the most deluded spin doctor
floating through the veins of power in Brussels should be able to comprehend.
After the disposable
human: is a post-Zombie Europe possible?
Zombies – racist, Islamophobic, neoliberal, authoritarian,
Islamist – have colluded to create a political space wherein refugees have
become bodies that can be disposed of in the waters of the Aegean, where
Kurdish civilians caught in the crossfire can be buried in basements and where
scholars can be jailed for supporting peace and criticising the killing of
civilians. Zombies – racist, Islamophobic, neoliberal, authoritarian,
Islamist – have colluded.
Turkey has moved several steps closer to violent
self-destruction, while the European Union has turned itself into a farce. Who
is going to think of the EU as a global actor with normative power – even on a
regional level – now that it finds itself in the role of rubberstamping and in
fact facilitating Turkey's slide into the abyss? That question, naturally, has
only a very limited life-span, since this is certainly not the first time the
EU leaves reformists, revolutionaries and liberals in the cold, whether in its
potential pre-accession neighbourhood in the Balkans or in the Middle East,
whose people only ever have been disposable entities.
So what do we learn from all this, apart from the unspectacular
revelation that a benign European teleology, with the holocaust as regrettable
aberration and colonialism as really not that important is but a fantasy? And that
the darkness in European history is much more salient than its discursive
negation.[8]
Certainly, that we are women and men in dark times, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt.
Maybe that we have to insist on the post-colonial, self-reflective and
emancipatory moment that we can also find in enlightenment thought if we look
for it closely enough. That we will have to continue the struggle to ensure
that the Zombies cannot dictate the rules of the game.
We also have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that
many more people will die. The most trying challenge will therefore be not to
turn into Zombies no matter how terrifying our immediate prospects are, but to
hang on to our common humanity. No, we are not Zombies, and no human being is
disposable.
[1] Henry A. Giroux, Zombie
Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, New York: Peter Lang,
2011.
[2] Matti Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Hatreds Old
and New in Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
[3]
Cf. Kerem Öktem, 'Austria',
Yearbook of Muslims in Europe, Volume 7, Leiden: Brill, 2015. Available here.
[4]
A recent video of PSV
Eindhoven supporters humiliating a group of Roma women strongly suggests that
this ejection of the other from the universe of mutual obligations is now a
universal reality among segments of European societies. I do not provide a link
to the video, as I find it grossly indecent and dehumanising. I would like to
add an anecdote though: I came across these terrifying scenes the day after I
attended a workshop at the Dutch Centre for Genocide Studies, where among many
great scholars, a respected Dutch genocide scholar spoke of the cultural
dispositions of Middle Eastern men, who are prone to violence and inhuman
behaviour.
[5]
There is a
wide range of videos with this title (often with add-ons like "The Tidal
Wave" of "The death of Europe"), translated into all major
languages available on Youtube.
[6] Yohanan Benhaim
and Kerem Öktem, 'The rise and
fall of Turkey’s soft power discourse. Discourse in foreign policy under
Davutoğlu and Erdoğan', European Journal
of Turkish Studies (21) 2015. Available here.
[7] This author is also one of the signatories to the petition,
'Academics for Peace'.
[8]
Mark
Mazower, Dark Continent. Europe's
Twentieth Century, New York: Random House, 1998.
