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Dan Bulley, Queen's University, Belfast

‘Europe's incoherent ethos: hospitality, hostility and the 'migrant' crisis’.

A lot rests on the ethos of Europe. Articulated in EU treaties as a list of values - freedom, justice, democracy, solidarity, human rights etc. - upon which it is 'founded', this ethos also defines its spatial limits and relations with its outside. This is in fact quite a recent invention and can be dated to the early 1990s as Europe recognised its need to respond to the newly-liberated Central and Eastern European (CEE) states on the one hand, and the pressures of irregular migration on the other. This paper critically examines the ethics and power relations of those reactions. Europe’s reply to CEE states was the policy of Enlargement, treating them as 'neighbours' on the 'road to the European home'. Europe designed that road as one that would guide and transform these states so that they could be hospitably welcomed into the European space once they had internalised its ethos through conditionality. Its response to migrants has, in contrast, been an area of emerging (in)competence. Most cooperation and supranationalism has been seen in border control and asylum policy. The latter is dominated not by a language of hospitality but 'protection'. Unlike hospitality, 'protection' can be delivered anywhere - it can be exported and outsourced through Regional Protection Programmes and development aid. The effect of this is to block the road to Europe, to divert it, criminalise further movement and contain it elsewhere. 'Protection' becomes hostility and it is no longer clear who is being protected. The current refugee crisis has revealed Europe’s incoherence in living up to its ethos, as well as the incoherence of that ethos itself. But perhaps the comparison with Enlargement 's hospitality can offer opportunities to think creatively beyond the present impasse.