Introduction

THE SPECTRE of dead refugees trying to reach European shores is haunting Europe. The tragic death of the three-year-old Aylan Kurdi in September 2015 signalled the beginning of what has come to be called the ‘refugee crisis’ in the media and public discourse. In March 2019, the European Commission declared this ‘crisis’ over, although there is evidence that suggests that Europe has merely externalised migration controls to non-EU countries, such as Turkey and Libya. Despite the rhetoric, Europe seems unwilling to address the rights of refugees and migrants. This may be in part because the European countries that signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and article 14 on the right to asylum, are no longer the same: the demands made by the millions of dead and displaced people were too loud to ignore in 1948, but seventy years later these voices appear too distant. But some ghosts might be more resistant than others: the past is still haunting the present, or at least invoked in order to do so. Interpretations and invocations of the past circulate, often resignified and given different meanings, looking to confront the present. Focusing on two European countries, Germany and Greece, this chapter seeks to examine the ways in which the historical past is mobilised in connection with the refugee issue. We understand the invocations of the historical past as a kind of debt that binds the past to the present.

The refugees and migrants coming to Europe ask for a new safe home; but in doing so, they also confront Europe with questions about borders crossed and to be crossed. These borders, political, cultural and geographical, bring to the fore questions of identity: what is Europe? Who belongs and who doesn’t? What is Europe's relationship to and responsibility towards the refugees and migrants? Crucially, what is to become of Europe depends on the answers given to these questions. In the much-quoted words of Angela Merkel, ‘If Europe fails on the question of refugees, then it won't be the Europe we wished for.’