Welcome to Greece (but Not to Europe)

Europe’s efforts to exclude Athens aren’t about migration or debt. They’re about the continent’s deep-seated racism toward its southern frontier state.

BY MICHAEL HERZFELD-FEBRUARY 25, 2016
Last month, Greece found itself once again facing expulsion from the club. Not, this time, from the single-currency eurozone and not (for the moment) from the European Union. This time it was from the club of Schengen countries, the nation states that once agreed to dissolve the internal boundaries that impeded mobility among them and at the same time constitute themselves as a gated community, built to exclude migrants and vagrants from distant lands. Even if, as it now seems likely, the move does not go through, the fact that it was even suggested shows the fragility of Greece’s hold on its European credentials: The country’s status as the spiritual ancestor of Europe has not protected it from accusations that it’s really just a misplaced remnant of “the orient.”

Schengen once seemed like a hermetic system: sealed, internally fluid, and unbreakable. But that was before the Syrian conflict sent a veritable flood of migrants in search of a haven into Europe. For many of the new arrivals, Greece was the first point of entry. For the second time in its history — the first was after the disastrous war Greece fought with Turkey between 1920 and 1922 — Greece faces a refugee flood that threatens to overwhelm its already strained resources. The previous wave, however, consisted of people who were considered ethnically Greek. True, some of them spoke not a word of Greek; under the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne, they were classified as Greek because they were Orthodox Christians. But they could all claim a legal and sentimental affinity with a land that welcomed them, albeit conditionally, as suffering brethren.

This time, circumstances are different. Greece, already dangerously at odds with its EU partners over the seemingly intractable debt crisis, is bearing the brunt of an influx of people with no such affective or ethnic claims to Europe. To the north, panic-stricken (and panic-inflaming) rightists are demanding walls — walls on the Greek border with Macedonia, walls on the border separating Hungary from Croatia, walls and guards wherever the porous European frontiers appear to be leaking. The EU, for its part, seems content to countenance Middle Eastern asylum-seekers’ presence in Greece, but only if they travel no further.

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