The Problem of “Europe”: Crisis, Resilience, and Conditional Welcome

The recent attention to and characterization of the movement of refugees and emigrants to Europe as “crisis” has spurred a powerful mobilization of European volunteers to counteract demonstrations by PEGIDA, neo-Nazi marches, as well as hate crimes and arson attacks on refugee encampments in Germany. Likewise, while categories such as “resilience” designate the emergent political challenges of social life in contemporary Europe, we would instead ask what a critique of such a language, which subtly reifies an imagined “Europe” at the expense of alternative experiences, might look like and make possible? In this paper, we examine the ways in which the language of welcome has been deployed and read, as well as the temporality of such gestures. We ask, what forms of forgetting enable the appropriation of a language of “crisis” to characterize the arrival of large numbers of individuals from the Middle East? Furthermore, what violence does such an elision entail? Lastly, how might Europe make a place for the Other as part of its existing structures while grasping at a particular “Europeanness” - one that has historically envisaged an embattled relationship to the Muslim Other? By problematizing the categories of “resilience” and “crisis” in light of what they may occlude, we argue that it is only a rejection of such a conception of Europe that will allow for a critical re-imagining of Europe’s future.