Читать книгу On the Doorstep of Europe - Heath Cabot - Страница 8
ОглавлениеPreface
This book is about the regime of political asylum in Greece and how asylum seekers, aid workers, and bureaucrats alike have sought to make sense of the dilemmas, often insurmountable, posed by both human rights law and European governance. It has been almost ten years since I first began research on this project. My first research trip to Athens was during the lead-up to the Olympics of 2004, when the city had been polished, cleaned, and marketed as a revived European capital. Athens now faces economic instability and increasing poverty, often brutal policing, and race-related violence. The story of asylum in Greece precedes the inception of the current Greek financial crisis, but many of the themes are similar, including Greece’s marginality in Europe, the disciplining forces of Europeanization, and the ways persons and communities navigate seemingly impossible situations. I believe there are important lessons to be learned through what I will later describe as the “tragedies” of asylum in Greece: about ethical life, the work of judgment, and new possibilities for belonging and citizenship in the wake of political violence. There is also something ineffable but equally crucial that may be found: the haunting, but often powerful ways in which people come together, perhaps only fleetingly, to create attachments, intimacies, and even justice.
Three particular dilemmas of writing deserve mention at the outset. The first is the problem of how to take appropriate account of the Greek sovereign debt crisis without making it the assumed telos of all the events I convey in this book. The institutional instabilities and sociopolitical ferments that have emerged in Greece since 2008 have demanded that Greek, European, and international publics rethink the impacts of Europeanization on both migration management and fiscal policies. Here I show that while the financial crisis was certainly not predictable, it invokes and even replicates longstanding discourses and patterns of governance, which have been similarly problematic in the arenas of immigration and asylum. I also hope that my analysis will show that there are other pasts and potential futures beneath the dominant one of crisis that are equally important to note. The “crisis” is certainly a crucial set of events at the present moment, and just as importantly, it is a powerful trope through which many have come to describe and apprehend their worlds. But the future is open: no one knows what will happen next—economically, socially, or politically—and chances are it will be something that none of us can imagine.
Second, I attempt to highlight the dramatic, even artistic components of ethnographic practice and writing without simply celebrating them. I seek to recount stories in a way that, like tragic drama, will bring the reader in, and spark active emotional and intellectual engagement. Biehl and Locke (2010: 336) liken ethnography to art in its capacity “to invoke neglected human potentials and to expand the limits of understanding and imagination.” Perhaps most importantly, they underscore (drawing on Deleuze 1998) how ethnography (like all art) must speak to an audience that has not yet emerged but which perhaps is emergent: “a people yet to come.” I do not hope to accomplish such a feat, yet I take this as an important reminder of what we are really doing here and why writing can be important. As Iain Chambers (2008:19) articulates, writing “seeks to open a fold in time to be invaded by other times, by others,” with the potential to create openings not just into overlapping and divergent histories but also into possible futures. I thus also draw on the potential of ethnography to chronicle worlds yet to come: thresholds into possible lives and futures, into larger sociopolitical transformations, which may have already begun to take shape through the seeds of a nascent critical consciousness (Gramsci 1992). These points of movement and opening may never materialize into “history,” or they may already be remaking the world in ways that are not yet visible. Either way, they matter deeply in the lives that Athenians have woven and continue to weave out of broken synapses of the polis.
Finally, this book is critical in that it is focused on analyzing and even exposing aspects of governance, rights discourse, and humanitarian practice that might otherwise remain uninterrogated. But it is not critique. Throughout, I speak to the powerful, but nondeterminative, force of structural violence in placing both asylum seekers and decision makers in profoundly difficult situations. This is not to disregard individual and collective agency; on the contrary, I will later suggest that agency can be found even in moments of hard silence and apparent immovability. But I do not spend a lot of time trying to highlight what my interlocutors have done wrong or could do better. The NGO workers who are such important figures throughout this book are well aware of most critiques that could be made of their own humanitarian practice—and indeed, could launch a few devastating critiques of their own. In my experience, aid workers and human rights professionals in Greece are deeply, even painfully, aware of everything wrong with the asylum process, asylum advocacy and aid work, and rights frameworks more broadly. What I seek to do here, then, is consider how these workers, and the asylum seekers whom they encounter, deal with a broken system without being swallowed whole; why they do it; and what their engagements might say regarding the possibilities and limits of asylum advocacy, aid, and rights-based protection.
Transliterating Greek is a complex matter, with a complex political history, particularly for an Anglophone like me. My goal in transliteration is to render Greek phrases legible to those who do not speak Greek. Rather than making use of the Modern Greek Studies Association transliteration guidelines, which are certainly useful but can be somewhat opaque for non-Greek speakers, I have chosen a style that is focused on phonetic consistence, so as to preserve the musicality of the speech. The downside to this approach is that it does not adequately convey the spelling of Greek words, which also has a complex history (some of which I discuss in Chapter 6), not to be dismissed. Thus, I have also often included the Greek characters, not simply for their elegance, but so as to engage both English and Greek-speaking audiences. Where I diverge from these transliteration norms is in regards to place names. For those places that have a recognizable rendering in the Latin alphabet, I have spelled them the way that is most legible for wider audiences (for example, Lesbos instead of Lesvos; Syntagma, instead of Sintagma).
A Greek friend of mine, on reading through a draft of the manuscript, commented that I should have done more to expose “the real bad guys.” He was referencing the deep patterns of violence and colonial speculation in the Balkans and Asian Minor, including not just Ottoman rule but its aftermath: the ongoing involvement of Northern European and U.S. powers in shaping the futures of the region. Others may object that I do not give significant attention to those in the Greek government, and others in the driver’s seats of the Euro-global “troika” (the European Commission, International Monetary Fund, and European Central Bank) that have contributed greatly to Greece’s marginalization and the exclusion of foreigners within Greece and Europe. This is not a book about them. What you will find here are all sorts of people, who defy easy classification as insider or outsider, “good” or “bad,” but who are seeking to live tolerable, even ethically engaged, lives in ways that are often undone through forces outside their control; in a city that traverses the mythic and the quotidian, the underworld and the world of the living, the laws of blood, the sovereign, and the gods. This is a book about citizens of Athens.