Greece's plan to build a fence along its Turkish border is a worrying turning point in its historic attitude to the 'other'
Packed in tiny city-states, surrounded by mostly barren, mountainous lands, the ancient Greeks spread out from Gibraltar to the Hindu Kush.
Marseille, Nice, Alexandria, Istanbul (Constantinople), Odessa and Sevastopol
are some of the dispersed Greek cities that survived the decline of Greek civilisation. Masters of the seas, exposed to many different laws, customs and morals, Greeks, like the British, were forced to transgress the particular and parochial in favour of the universal and the understanding of the "other". Asylum is a Greek word.
Xenophobia is another one. The well-known dichotomy "either Greek or barbarian" dominated the spirits of our ancestors, who bequeathed it to the Romans. Cicero distinguishes between homines humani, the educated Romans, and homines barbari, the bare, brutal barbarians. Originally, this kind of intellectual narcissism was of a rather defensive nature, triggered by the successive invasions of our lands by the mighty Persian empire, which brought plunder and devastation. Behind the notion of "Greeks against barbarians" there was the legend of Thermopylae – a small nation defending itself against vastly superior forces.
Something of this ambivalent tradition was revived in modern Greece. Scarcity of resources, underdevelopment and wars forced Greeks to emigrate in successive waves, mostly to the US, Europe and Australia. This made Greeks sensitive to the plight of foreign immigrants, contributing to the rather successful integration of the Albanian and other east European workers in the 90s, despite the original shock, when, all of a sudden, the flux was inverted and Greece, traditionally a country that exports migrants, had to accept them in proportionally huge numbers. On the other hand, the tutelage of the fragile Greek state by the great powers and the tendency of US administrations to treat Greece as a banana republic in the Mediterranean Sea, supporting brutal dictatorships and corrupt regimes, fomented a sort of leftist "anti-imperialist" patriotism.
"Greece belongs to the Greeks" was among the guiding principles of the late prime minister Andreas Papandreou, founder of the Greek socialist party, Pasok. Again, it was the collective image of David against Goliath, of a small nation generous to the needy and proud in front of the mighty.
Against this historical background, the recent decision of our government to build a 12.5km wall on the border with Turkey to deter illegal migrants and asylum seekers appears to be a turning point. The pattern is now reversed: arrogant towards the needy, submissive to the powerful. The government that unconditionally surrendered to the diktats of Germany and the IMF, imposing a draconian austerity of unprecedented scale to the Greek people, appears inhumanly brutal towards immigrants. The most remarkable part of the story is that all this is happening not under a government of the nationalist-populist right, but on the watch of George Papandreou, president of Socialist International and son of Pasok's charismatic founder.
Immigration is a real problem, as is hypocrisy: illegal immigrants are welcome when they cultivate strawberries under unspeakable circumstances in the Peloponnese; when they build bridges with low wages and no social security for the Olympic Games; or when they take care of the abandoned elderly of our middle class – but not when unscrupulous politicians speak to an outraged electorate in search of convenientscapegoats. Even the most naive politician cannot really believe that a 12.5km wall within the 200km-long land border with Turkey (or the far longer borders with Albania, Macedonia and Bulgaria, not to mention the sea borders, where the overwhelming majority of immigrants come from) will make a real difference.
So why do they do it?The answer is quite simple: To divert attention from explosive social problems, exacerbated by the IMF-EU dictated policies (pension and salary cuts, destruction of the public sector, etc) which are not only unacceptable, but doomed to fail. Seven months after the so-called rescue package was imposed, the Greek foreign debt has jumped to astronomical levels, and the interest rates of Greek bonds approach 13% – reasonable for Zimbabwe, not for an EU member. In the meantime, the social movement fights back with a wave of strikes that have already opened fissures in Pasok, and the polls indicate that the party's appeal is in freefall (the last one, which appeared in the leading pro-government newspaper, gives to Pasok only 22% of the vote, half its percentage in the previous general election).
In this context, George Papandreou hopes his government will gain some points by stealing the clothes of the xenophobic right. A prominent member of his government, vice-president Theodoros Pangalos, went so far as to praise LAOS, the closest Greek relation to Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National, as the only serious, reliable interlocutor of PASOK. A slippery road since, according to the old Chinese wisdom, the most difficult task is not to ride the tiger, but to dismount in safety.
guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/07/asylum-greece-border-fence
