From securitization of migration to the dehumanization of refugees: A threat to liberal democracy

The European Studies Centre (ESC) held a seminar on the securitisation of migration, the dehumanisation of refugees, and its impact on the liberal democracy. The seminar was held on 31 October 2023 and was chaired by ESC director Othon Anastasakis. The main speakers were Franck Düvell – Senior Researcher and Coordinator of the Forced Migration and Refugee Research consortium at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at Osnabrück University, Germany – and Başak Kale – Associate Professor at the Middle East Technical Institute, Türkyie. The speaks were joined by Catherine Briddick - Andrew W Mellon Associate Professor of International Human Rights and Refugee Law and a fellow of St Antony's College – as a discussant.

The main speakers presented their work on the dehumanisation of refugees (Düvell) and the securitisation of migration (Kale). Düvell had started to think about the dehumanisation of refugees after having visited the migration centres in 2013. He began writing in 2015 after conducting fieldwork in the Greek islands and the Aegean coast of Türkyie. To understand the hostile responses to migration after the 2015 crisis, Düvell compares the response of the European Union (EU) to this crisis with the response of European countries to the migration of Eastern European Jews during the 1920s. He argued that there are important parallels between the policies of the EU after the 2015 crisis with those of the European countries in the 1920s, as well as between the narratives of refugees that were constructed in both cases. In both cases, the Jewish refugees Jews in the 1920s and those coming to Europe from Syria and other Middle Eastern and African countries were considered as invaders and were confined to camps. Refugees described their experiences in both cases in similar ways. They emphasised hunger, lack of medical treatment, poor sheltering conditions, and mistreatment by the police or the army upon their reception. Alongside these policies, in both cases there was a dehumanisation process at play, whereby a boundary marked the “in-group” and the “out-group”. The refugees – the outsiders – were stigmatised as a threat to the “in-group”. They were thus considered as subhuman to enable the indifference to their suffering and the denial of their rights. Düvell argues that this process is part of a deterrent policy to stem the flow of refugees and represents a new typology of evil.

Heirs of the Greek catastrophe: The social life of Asia Minor refugees in Piraeus

The European Studies Centre (ESC) in collaboration with Southeast European Studies Centre at Oxford (SEESOX) held a book discussion on the experiences of the Greek population of Asia Minor who settled in Greece after the population exchange agreement through the 1923 Lausanne Convention. Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus, written by Professor Renée Hirschon, was first published in 1989, whilst its third edition was published to commemorate the centenary of the Lausanne Convention.

The discussion was held on 25 October 2023, and it was chaired by Michael Llewellyn Smith, Fellow at St. Antony’s College. Renée Hirschon – Senior Research Fellow at St. Peter’s College, Oxford – presented the third edition of the book, while Robin Cohen – Emeritus Professor at Kellogg College, Oxford – and Başak Kale – Associate Professor at the Middle East Technical Institute – discussed the contributions of the book to the research on the topic and more broadly concerning questions of identity, belonging, nationalism, migration, and memory.

During the presentation of the book, Professor Hirschon provided some historical context to her research approach, discussed the key objective of the research, and presented some of the key themes. She first underlined some changes in the names of the locations where the field work had been conducted due to confidentiality concerns. The reader of the third edition should be aware that in the third edition “Nea Ephsus” is used instead of “Kokkinia” and/or “Nikaia”, while “Yerania” has replaced “Germanika”. The author then underscored that the research she was conducting in the 1970s was not part of what we may call today “refugee studies” or “migration studies”. The field did not exist at the time and in 1972, when Hirschon was conducting the research, the worldwide population of forcibly displaced persons was approximately 3.2 million. The purpose of the research conducted in the 1970s was to understand the interaction between the use of space and cultural values. But given the exponential growth of the worldwide number of forcibly displaced persons, she revisits her work and seeks to determine whether “we can learn something from the experience of people who were forcibly displaced in the early 1920s and whether that experience is relevant for us today”.

ESC Annual Lecture - Beyond Civil Society: Renewing the traditions of reform in Europe

On the 30th of May 2023, the European Studies Centre hosted its Annual Lecture. This year’s speaker was Charles S. Maier, the Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History at Harvard University. Maier studied at St Antony’s from 1960-61 between his bachelor’s and PhD at Harvard. He had published a number of influential books, including Recasting Bourgeois Europe (1975), Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (1997), and the Project State and its Rivals (2023). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations and has received the Commander’s Cross of the German Federal Republic and the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and the Arts. The ESC’s director, Othon Anastasakis (St Antony’s College, Oxford), chaired the event.

Maier’s lecture was entitled “Beyond Civil Society: Renewing the traditions of reform in Europe.” Interrogating the historical record, he argued that the fashionable slogans of governance and civil society need to be rebalanced by a renewed agenda for state/EU political institutions.

Maier began his lecture by reflecting on the political changes that have taken place in Europe and around the world since 1989. Transformations of political language, he said, provide a good window into analysing how politics have changed. The key concept in the Europe of 1989 was “civil society.” The term denoted a far more intense engagement with democracy than, for example, the phrase “parliamentary democracy.” Václav Havel famously said that traditional parliamentary democracy could not protect freedom without the help of a thriving civil society.

The impact of the new geopolitical context on European trade policy

On May 19th, The European Studies Centre welcomed Ignacio Garcia-Bercero to deliver a speech entitled “The impact of the new geopolitical context on European trade policy.” Garcia-Bercero is the Director in charge of Multilateral Affairs, Strategy, Analysis and Evaluation at the Directorate-General for Trade in the European Commission. Active within the European Commission since 1987, he participated in the Uruguay Round negotiations and was the Chief Negotiator for the EU-Korea and EU-India Free Trade Agreements.

The event was chaired by Othon Anastasakis (St Antony’s College, Oxford) and Jonathan Scheele (SEESOX) acted as a discussant. As the talk was convened jointly by the European Studies Centre and the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre, Roy Allison (St Antony’s College, Oxford) was also present to ask questions before the official Q&A session.

Garcia-Bercero began his presentation by outlining the connection between the global trading system and worsening geopolitical tensions. In 2021, he co-authored a document on the direction in which EU trade policy should develop in the context of worsening US-China relations. The paper made three important arguments. Firstly, the WTO needs to be reformed. Secondly, there ought to be a closer connection between EU trade policy and EU economic priorities. Thirdly, the EU must put together a toolbox for autonomous economic action that will enable the body to act more assertively when faced with pressure. These proposals combine openness, sustainability, and assertiveness as goals for European trade policy.

The European Parliament’s engagement in international human rights: Achievements, limitations and prospects

On February 21^st 2023, the European Studies Centre welcomed Dr Eamonn Noonan (EU Visiting Fellow, St Antony’s College, Oxford) to present the European Parliament’s role in promoting human rights internationally from the 1980s to the present. The presentation was chaired by Dr Hartmut Mayer (St Peter’s College, Oxford).

Using annual reports from the European Parliament, Noonan summarizes elements of continuity and change in the Parliament’s work through the decades. There is an interplay between three categories of human rights: (1) civil and political, (2) economic and social, and (3) solidarity and international cohesion. This division roughly corresponds to the slogan of the French Revolution: liberté, egalité, fraternité. In foreign policy, civil and political rights dominated in the 1980s. True, the European European Community from its foundation was engaged with social rights; the Treaty of Rome, for example, prohibited companies from cutting workers’ wages in certain circumstances. But these policies were not part of foreign policy. It was also true that the Council of Europe placed greater emphasis on political rights than social rights. The European Union ultimately developed its own Charter of Fundamental Rights, in 2000, and this included social rights.

The Lost Future and How to Reclaim It

On February 7th 2023, the European Studies Centre hosted Tony Barber (Financial Times), Gavin Jacobson (New Statesman), and Helen Margetts (Oxford Internet Institute) to launch Jan Zielonka’s new book The Lost Future and How to Reclaim It (Yale University Press, 2023). The panel was chaired by ESC Director Othon Anastasakis.

The panel started with Professor Zielonka, from our college, introducing his main argument: democracy is myopic, no matter who is in charge. In terms of space, democracy is myopic because it is confined to the borders of nation-states although most current problems are local or transnational. In terms of time, democracy is short-sighted because it is a prisoner of current voters and when tough decisions are to be made, the future is being sacrificed. The internet revolution plays an important role here because it changed dramatically the notion of time and space, but democracy hardly took notice. We need to empower public actors that benefited from the digital revolution most or else democracy will falter. In essence, we need to gradually move from the world of states to world of networks, local, national and transnational.

In Jacobson’s interpretation, the book’s argument can be read as a response to the unresolved problems of democracy from the 1990s. Of course, the question of how to solve the problem of time began in the second century at least. Polybius, for example, wrote that all governments seemed to collapse due to an eternal cycle of monarch, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, mob rule, Caeserism, and chaos. Then, during the French Revolution, the acceleration of industry, culture, and technology was recognized as the tool to stabilize society and prevent its collapse. Acceleration reached its climax in the 1990s during the Cold War because, here, change was the only part of politics that was permanent and certain. The era created circulations of capitalism, confining life to repetitions in the grocery store, at work, and in other everyday aspects of industrial privilege. Here, time and space conflated together because there was an eternal present moment with no “elsewhere” to seek.

Reparations and the search for justice

The European Studies Centre began the new year with a presentation by Jakob Zollmann (WZB, St Antony’s College, Oxford) with Patrick Cohrs (University of Florence; St Antony’s College, Oxford) acting as discussant and Paul Betts (St Antony’s College, Oxford) as chair. The event on 31st January 2023 was entitled “Reparations and the search for justice: International law and the Anglo-German and Polish-German mixed arbitral tribunals (1919–c.1932).” Zollmann’s insights into WWI reparations form part of a planned book on international law between 1648 and 1940.

The speaker began his presentation by introducing the material and legal impacts of the First World War. Millions of people lost property through both damage and requisitioning, the goods ranging from entire companies to hotel linens and towels. Germany’s case was particularly serious: 40% of the country’s income was generated abroad, and it lost three times as much money from confiscation by the Allied powers than vice versa, with the Allies appropriating two thirds of the country’s capital stock. On the other hand, the war largely took place on Allied territory, and so in its closing months, public pressure grew to make Germany pay.

Allied discourse framed reparations as the basis of a just post-war settlement, generating a novel idea: that wronged individuals should not be left defenceless before their own or another state. The idea completely changed old notions regarding international law. Private individuals could now bring their case before mixed arbitral tribunals, profoundly shocking German leaders and scholars.

Mixed arbitral tribunals (MATs) were set up by peace treaties to determine the sums to be paid out to claimants. A core provision in the peace treaties was that allied governments reserved the right to retain and liquidate rights and interests in their territory belonging to German nationals, claiming them as reparations for the war. At same time, Germany was forced to restore the confiscated property of Allied nationals – as well as its nationals – in its own territory.