By Ala Sirriyeh (Sociology, Keele) and Simon Goodman (Centre for Research in Psychology, Behaviour and Achievement, University of Coventry)
In
the summer of 2015 the world’s attention was focused on Europe’s borders as thousands
of people seeking refuge arrived or perished on route. The now iconic and
tragic picture of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi lying face down
and still on a Turkish beach dominated news and social media coverage in
September 2015. This spectacle of a child’s death led to a
shift in the tone of media, political and public discourse on the ‘refugee
crisis’ which, for a time, became noticeably more compassionate.
We
have argued elsewhere that rather
than being presented as one continuing event the movement of people into Europe
has been configured as a number of different crises. Over the summer, as the events became framed as a
‘(European) refugee crisis’, debates ensued about how Europe could best
respond to this crisis and whether indeed part of the crisis was the nature of
the response itself. The perceived absence of compassion in driving the actions
of European governments has led many to argue that there is a crisis in the European
heart and subsequently the moral and political values that supposedly define
this region and its peoples- a #CompassionCrisis.
In connection with this it has also been perceived as a crisis in the project
of the European Union which originated in the aftermath of that earlier genocide
and mass displacement of peoples during the Second World War,
with some
making parallels with the treatment of the victims of the Holocaust.
Engaging with the idea of a crisis of compassion, in
June 2015 art activists from the Centre for Political Beauty in Berlin
announced plans to exhume the bodies of some of those people who had died
trying to reach Europe. They would exhume them from inhumane graves (or
storage) where they lay at Europe’s external borders and rebury them with
dignity in Berlin, at the heart of Europe. Using the hashtag #DieTotenKommen (The Dead Will Come),
the group claimed that this intervention aimed ‘to tear down the walls
surrounding Europe’s sense of compassion’.
Research
on emotion and immigration, especially on attitudes to immigration and
policy-making, have primarily focussed on hostile emotions – disgust, fear,
hate and so on (Ahmed 2004, Tyler 2013). There is a more limited critical
engagement with ‘humanising emotions’ (Berlant 2004) (including compassion)
beyond simply presenting these as a viable and necessary remedy to the
exclusion and harm caused by hostility.
As Nussbaum (1996, p.28) states, compassion
can be regarded as a basic social emotion bridging the individual and the
community through tying together the interests of others with our ‘own personal
goods’. It is refreshing to see a broader engagement with emotion in the attention
being given in public debates to the matter of compassion in the current
refugee crisis. Decision-making, whether considered ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’, draws on
both intellectual and emotional reason (Burkitt 2014). Emotions move people and
are the outcomes of being moved and emotional reason leads to certain kinds of
decisions being made. Compassion perhaps more so than other emotions makes a
clear link between the heart and the head; sentiment and action. However, questions
remains as to what shape compassionate responses should take and
what is the nature of justice that is envisioned as an outcome of such actions?
So while some respond in ways that attempt to alleviate suffering in the name
of compassion, problematic policies can also be justified on compassionate
grounds. There are several challenges that policy and practice informed by
compassion potentially present.
Compassion in the current
refugee crisis wavers between two different meanings of the term that imply
very different social relationships and outcomes. Between the fourteenth century and the
seventeenth century the term ‘compassion’ had two meanings. The first derived
from the Latin word com meaning
‘together’ and patri meaning ‘fellow
feeling’ was used to describe a sense of ‘suffering
together with one another’ (Garber 2004, p. 20). The second way in which
the term compassion was used was to describe compassion felt at a distance
rather than between equals – between the spectator and the sufferer. It was ‘shown
towards a person in distress by one who is free from it, who is, in this
respect, his superior’ (ibid). Garber (2004) writes that the first meaning of
the term fell out of use quickly while the second meaning is the one we now
most commonly ascribe to compassion. In this second meaning the sufferers must
perform a convincing suffering role and are reliant on the compassion shown by
others. A
genuine refugee deserving of our compassion is a refugee not a migrant, a child
not a single young man, a Syrian rather than an Afghan. This distance between
the spectator and the sufferer can also lead to a problematic disentanglement
of the interests of the different actors involved – or the interests of others
and our own personal goods (see Nussbaum above on compassion). As part of a
wider turn to ‘humanitarian government’ (Fassin 2012) compassionate policies
such as Cameron’s Syrian
Vulnerable Person Relocation Scheme are used to demonstrate and reinforce the
rhetoric of a benevolent UK state with a proud history of welcoming
refugees yet do little to address the
real scale or causes of the crisis.
This links to a further
challenge with the notion of compassion which is with the way in which cause,
outcome and response are interlinked and relate to a sense of responsibility
and obligation. Those who give compassion are free of blame or obligation.
Compassion is a gift rather than an obligation. The right to seek asylum as set
out in the 1951 UN Convention is just that: a right. There is a risk that a
language of compassion when used to demonstrate or ask for benevolence from the
state shifts focus away from legitimate demands for the recognition of rights
and demands for justice by those who are agentic human beings rather than
passive victims at the mercy of a benevolent state. The notion of compassion as
a gift from those who are blameless also severs any critical engagement with
Europe’s colonial history and relationships with other parts of the world.
On the part of governments,
a discourse of compassion has not only been used to showcase benevolence
but has also been used to justify repression – see for example attempts to
limit sea rescue missions to dissuade people from making treacherous see
journeys to seek refuge in Europe – which amounts to the terrible logic of saving
by drowning.
