Local and provincial communities are showing the chief internationalist value of empathy in the face of the refugee crisis

The Greek Island of Lesbos, where locals have voluntarily rescued and cared for refugees. Photograph: Mytilene, Lesvos Island by Anna Apostolidou (License) (Cropped)

The past decade has seen the rise of two forms of nationalism in Europe. One is a vaguely Left-leaning provincial separatism and the other is a Right-wing nation-state sovereigntism. Both of them have found support expressed both at elections and in popular protest.

For internationalists, who have struggled for fifty years to open up Europe and break down its borders, the return of nationalism - of any stripe - has been seen, and treated, as a threat. In that mindset, no differentiation has been made between these different kinds of nationalism.

This isn't particularly surprising. To an internationalist, a return to nationalism represents a retreat into a closed-minded, closed society. The fear is that such a closed state would only further the alienation of people from others living elsewhere in Europe and so result in a substantial decrease in common understanding and empathy.

In light of the Eurozone's imperious attitude towards Syriza and Greece, it isn't hard to see why internationalism has struggled to make its case. The European Union, the great internationalist project, has been hijacked by national conservatism as a means to spread and enforce its social and economic beliefs. But, more than any other factor, it is migration that has exposed the tensions that Right-wing nationalism feeds upon: the fear of the other, the anxiety of difference.

Those anxieties have found particular expression in the UK, where the Foreign Secretary and even the Prime Minister have made dangerous and dehumanising references to migrants - humans travelling to escape poverty and war - as 'marauding' 'swarms' (Perraudin, 2015; Elgot & Taylor, 2015). It is the pinnacle of internationalist fears that people who are safe in settled stable societies, though scared and rattled by an ongoing financial slump, could show such a lack of empathy for the plight of those whose lives and homes are torn apart by violence, terrorism, war and poverty.

From refugees to migrant workers, exploited for everything from farming to prostitution (Lawrence, 2015; Harper, 2015), there is a painful tendency to blame these victims rather than those exploiting their desperation.

In the UK, part of that comes in a gross overstatement of the scale of the 'threat' posed by migration. Contrary to the opinion of UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, the overwhelming majority of migrants are not 'economic', but refugees fleeing from dangerous situations (Kingsley, 2015).

With a continental population of 750 million, and a European Union population of 500 million, it is unsurprising that a United Nations expert - Francois Crepeau, UN special rapporteur on the humans rights of migrants - believes it would be not only feasible but practical and desirable to offer resettlement of one million Syrian refugees, across the continent, over a period of five years (Jackson, 2015; Jackson, 2015{2}), as a way to end the present humanitarian catastrophe.

However, his recommendations seem as if they'll fall on deaf ears as national governments, retreating deep into sovereigntist nationalism in the face of the financial crisis, aggressively reaffirm national borders and national control over decision-making.

And yet, even as governments, like that of Greece, have struggled under the weight of debt and austerity and have been stretched to breaking in managing the refugee crisis (Kingsley & Henley, 2015), or have turned inwards to exploit anger and mistrust, there are still beacons of hope for those who champion commonality beyond borders.

Where governments are failing, volunteers, local activists and communities have taken up the responsibility. On Greek islands, even in the midst of their own crisis, locals have saved refugees from their stranded boats, taken them in, fed them and provided them with supplies and shelter (Kingsley, 2015{2}; McVeigh, 2015).

In such actions, in their wilful choice of empathy in defiance of the establishment, there is hope for internationalism. What there is for the internationalists still to see, however, is how to comprehend that this empathy, this pursuit of self-determination and anti-establishment opposition to hegemony, has also been at the root of the Left-leaning separatist 'nationalism'.

These ideals are what have differentiated the Left-leaning separatism from the Right-leaning sovereigntist nationalism. The open, reformist, pro-European attitudes, so deeply connected to internationalism, can be seen in the motivations of voters electing separatists - particularly in Scotland where the SNP want to break away from the UK, which is itself rapidly turning inwards, in order to remain an integrated part of a wider Europe.

That pattern has been repeated from Catalunya to Greece to the Green Party in the UK, where Caroline Lucas had called for reform of the old establishment - nationally and continentally - in pursuit of Europe's founding principles of co-ordination, co-operation and solidarity (Lucas, 2015).

The current crisis has internationalists, like the Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron, calling for more compassion and more positive action to alleviate suffering during this crisis (Leftly, 2015).

But in order to address the crisis in full, the difference between nationalists, retreating in fear to the shelter of the old institutions, and the separatists who want self-determination, reform and progress, has to be comprehended. In the one, nationalism, is national, social and fiscal conservatism that is driving a wedge between people. In the other, separatism, there are radical and democratic ideas to which internationalists are instinctively drawn.

To build a comprehensive movement that supports internationalism and human rights, across borders, with a broad empathy, means understanding all of the different strains of local, provincial and international activism that are so closely interlinked in their values. With such an alliance, in the spirit of the solidarity that has been seen in the anti-austerity movement, the compassionate empathy of Greek Islanders could be turned into a general, political and even economic campaign for human dignity and the common good.

References

Frances Perraudin's ''Marauding' migrants threaten standard of living, says foreign secretary'; in The Guardian; 9 August 2015.

Jessica Elgot & Matthew Taylor's 'Calais crisis: Cameron condemned for 'dehumanising' description of migrants'; in The Guardian; 30 July 2015.

Felicity Lawrence's 'Lithuanian migrants trafficked to UK egg farms sue 'worst gangmaster ever''; in The Guardian; 10 August 2015.

Lee Harper's 'Syrian women in Jordan at risk of sexual exploitation at refugee camps'; in The Guardian; 24 January 2014.

Patrick Kingsley's 'Philip Hammond grossly overstates the problem of 'marauding' migrants'; in The Guardian; 10 August 2015.

Gabrielle Jackson's 'UN's François Crépeau on the refugee crisis: 'Instead of resisting migration, let's organise it''; in The Guardian; 22 April 2015.

Gabrielle Jackson's 'UN expert: rich countries must take in 1 million refugees to stop boat deaths'; in The Guardian; 22 April 2015{2}.

Patrick Kingsley & Jon Henley's 'Migrants locked in stadium overnight on Greek island of Kos'; in The Guardian; 12 August 2015.

Patrick Kingsley's 'Greek island refugee crisis: local people and tourists rally round migrants'; in The Guardian; 8 July 2015{2}.

Tracy McVeigh's 'Sympathy and solidarity for migrants on Kos beaches as two worlds collide'; in The Guardian; 6 June 2015.

Caroline Lucas' 'Greece made me think twice. But I’ll campaign for progressive EU reform'; in The Guardian; 16 July 2015.

Mark Leftly's 'Calais migrant crisis: We should pull our weight to deal with this crisis, Tim Farron tells PM'; in The Independent; 1 August 2015.