Introduction

The current refugee crisis reminds us of the unpredictability inherent in action. No one can at this moment predict the outcome of hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants coming to Europe. We are unable to foresee the magnitude of this event, the extent to which it is changing our world.

It is just too early to come up with final answers. Some see the crisis as a challenge to our self-understanding. They observe that “we are writing history right now” and ask: “[…] do we want to be remembered […] as xenophobic, rich cowards hiding behind fences?” (KARRER, 2015). Others think that Angela Merkel's “open-door” policy is deepening the refugee crisis in Europe (PATERSON, 2015). They fear the undermining of our legal and political institutions.

True, we cannot predict the outcome of the current challenges; however, human beings need to understand what is happening. The article tries to make a contribution to this process of understanding. Underlying it are two presumptions: first, it is important how we think about questions related to refugees and migration, second, our thinking has to start from and stay related to experience.

How we think depends on the special nature of our subject. If one wants to understand what is happening one cannot write in an “objective” manner because one then has renounced the human faculty to respond to what is actually happening. In other words, “the question of style is bound up with the problem of understanding” (ARENDT, 1994a, p. 404), as Hannah Arendt declared. She was convinced that “understanding is closely related to that faculty of imagination which Kant called “Einbildungskraft”. Imagination might prove to be the foundation of everything.

Additionally, understanding is, if we follow Arendt, closely related to the reflection on experiences. Understanding is based on knowledge, true under- standing transcends knowledge and thus makes it meaningful. True understanding, we may say, is a mode of thinking that “always returns to the judgments and prejudices which preceded and guided the strictly scientific inquiry” (ARENDT, 1994b, p. 311). During a conversation with friends Arendt asked: “What is the object of our thinking?” she answered as follows: “Experience! Nothing else than experience!” (ARENDT, 1979, p. 308).

Of course, we all are able to follow the news on the Syrian refugee crisis. But we not only wish to know but also to understand; we not only wish to know what happens or has happened, but also why it happens or has happened. We ask for the meaning of the events. These events take place in the world we share and have in common. According to Hannah Arendt the world discloses its variety in all its aspects only insofar as it is talked over in the presence of others, and so put into the public light. We need to hear the opinions of others because “no one can adequately grasp the objective world in its full reality all on his own, because the world always shows and reveals itself to him from only one perspective, which corresponds to his standpoint in the world and is determined by it” (ARENDT, 2005, p. 128). Additionally, the current migrant and refugee crisis is developing with such rapidity, that it is difficult to make lasting judgments. In late August 2015 Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, made the important statement that the refugee crisis tests Europe's core ideals. Since then things have developed their own dynamic. In the beginning of September the Swedish Prime Minister met Mrs. Merkel in Berlin and his message was clear: Europe is able to take more refugees and Europe has a moral responsibility to do so (VESTBAKKE, 2015). Merkel is right about Europeans’ moral obligations, but not about their attitude: a poll in October 2014noted that “Europeans feel a duty to help refugees – but not in their own country” (NARDELLI, 2015).

What does it mean to be a refugee?

Hannah Arendt can help to answer this question, since she by way of her own personal experience of being a refugee, began with an article entitled “We Refugees”, published in 1943 in the Menorah Journal, “her life-long meditation on the problems of human rights and statelessness” (PAREKH, 2008, p. 8). The article mirrors her experiences of being stateless, of being a refugee, a victim, a foreigner and “an enemy alien” (ARENDT, 2007, p. 266). It is written in an ironic and bitter tone; ironic in her “cartoonlike description of the refugees’ eager efforts to assimilate, to become indistinguishable, to forget the past and solve everything individually” (HEUER, 2007, p. 1164). The following passage speaks for itself: “We did the best to prove to other people that we were just ordinary immigrants. We declared that we had departed of our own free will to countries of our choice, and we denied that our situation had anything to do with ‘so-called Jewish problems” (ARENDT, 2007, p. 264).

Bitter is the tone because Arendt herself belonged to the “we”, to these refugees who lost their “home, which means the familiarity of daily life”, their “occupation, which means the confidence that [they] are of some use in this world”, their “language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings”; they left their “relatives in the Polish ghettos and [their] best friends [who] have been killed in concentration camps” (ARENDT, 2007, p. 264).

If this were not enough, the refugees feel “humiliated when they are rescued” and degraded when they are helped. They “fight like madmen for private existences with individual destinies”. “To give their new insecure existence some form of stability they refer to the marvelous existence they once had and lost” (HEUER, 2007, p. 1165).

At the end of her article she described Mr. Cohn “who had always been a 150 percent German”, who in “1933 […] found refuge in Prague and very quickly became a convinced Czech patriot” (ARENDT, 2007, p. 271), who then, in 1937 went to Vienna where “a definite Austrian patriotism was required”, who was forced “out of that country” by the German invasion and who “arrived in Paris”, where he, “seriously convinced that he would spend his future life in France […] prepared his adjustment to the French nation” (ARENDT, 2007, p. 271), however, he “must bitterly realize in the end that ‘on ne parvient pas deux fois’” (ARENDT, 2007, p. 274; AGAMBEN, 2000, p. 161).

What are we going to make of this? Refugees today have not lost all rights, so why should we turn to the experience described in 1943? There is good reason, I think, because Arendt turned the condition of homeless refugee – a condition that was her own – “upside down in order to present it as a paradigm of a new historical consciousness” (AGAMBEN, 2000, p. 161). The refugees who lost everything and who “no longer want to be assimilated at all cost to a new national identity” (AGAMBEN, 2000, p. 166) received a new insight which Arendt expresses in the following way:

History is no longer a closed book to them and politics is no longer the privilege of Gentiles. They know that the outlawing of the Jewish people of Europe has been followed closely by the outlawing of most European nations. Refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples – if they keep their identity (ARENDT, 2007, p. 274; AGAMBEN, 2000, p. 166).

Seventy years later this analysis has not lost its relevance. However, there are profound differences. First of all, now the refugees “come from countries outside Europe. It is no longer an inner-European but a global phenomenon” (HEUER, 2007, p. 1169). Second, and possibly more relevant, contrary to the specific situation after World War I, the member states of the European Union “are aware of the importance of the right to have rights” (HEUER, 2007, p. 1161). Our contemporary experience is that sovereign power within liberal democracies is limited: “[…] liberal states are in fact constrained in their dealings with irregular migrants by constitutional law, international human rights treaties, and the political bargaining processes that unfold as states attempt to share the burden of migration and border control” (FRENCH, 2015, p. 356). In other words, the situation in Europe today differs from the situation after World War I when the “exclusively stateless people were declared ‘undesirable’” (HEUER, 2007, p. 1162).

Today member states of the EU cannot act without assuming that refugees have rights. But this does not necessarily mean that states act according to legal obligations. Craig French for instance detects a violation of human rights in “the detention and deportation system” (FRENCH, 2015, p. 352). She argues these centers inflict harm on the asylum seekers and refugees. According to her, psychological and existential aspects of detention are neglected. To make visible “what kind of injustice” is done, she reconstructs Martin Heidegger's thoughts on “the spatiality of being” (FRENCH, 2015, p. 356). Heidegger thought “that the prospects of successful being in the world depended, in important ways, on the proper constitution of the spaces and places in which individuals dwell” (FRENCH, 2015, p. 356). “If the place of being should collapse or be destroyed”, French argues, “[…] then the individual is thrown into a highly deficient mode of being that in Heideggerian terms we might characterize as anxiety, caused by the deprivation of a home in the world” (FRENCH, 2015, p. 356).

In 1951 Heidegger presented to the Darmstadt Symposium on Man and Space the lecture “Building Dwelling Thinking”. Here he developed the relation of “building” to “dwelling” and the way of thinking that derives from this relation. He recovered from “The Old High German word for building, buan” (HEIDEGGER, 2011, p. 244; FRENCH, 2015, p. 362) the original meaning of building is dwelling: “Where the word bauen still speaks in its original sense it also says how far the essence of dwelling reaches. That is bauen, buan, bhu, beo are our word bin in the versions: ich bin, I am, du bist, you are, the imperative form bis, be” (HEIDEGGER, 2011, p. 245). Heidegger explained: “The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is buan, dwelling. To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell” (HEIDEGGER, 2011, p. 245). True, “we do not merely dwell – that would be virtual inactivity – we practice a profession, we do business, we travel and find shelter on the way, now here, now there”, true, building can take on different forms, the form of constructing or the form of cultivating, but what we tend to forget is that the original meaning of the word building is dwelling. Dwelling, Heidegger argues, “remains for man's everyday experience that which is from the outset ‘habitual’ – we inhabit it, as our language says so beautifully: it is the Gewohnte” (HEIDEGGER, 2011, p. 245).

“If we listen to what language says in the word bauen,” Heidegger argues, “we hear three things: 1. Building is really dwelling. 2. Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the earth. 3. Building as dwelling unfolds into the building that cultivates growing things and the building that erects buildings” (HEIDEGGER, 2011, p. 245). Heidegger goes on, “To say that mortals are is to say that in dwelling they persist through spaces by virtue of their stay among things and locales” (HEIDEGGER, 2011, p. 251). The word Raum, space by its ancient meaning is “place that is freed for settlement and lodging. A space is something that has been made room for, something that has been freed; […] space is in essence that for which room has been made, […] that is gathered by virtue of a locale” (HEIDEGGER, 2011, p. 250). Such a locale is for instance the bridge, “[…] the bridge contains many places variously near or far from the bridge” (HEIDEGGER, 2011, p. 250). Consequently, “spaces, and with them space as such – ‘space – are always provided for already within the stay of mortals. Spaces open up by the fact that they are let into the dwelling of man” (HEIDEGGER, 2011, p. 251). For Heidegger Dasein is existential spatial; accordingly,

Being-in-the-world means to live among things with which one is ordinarily and proximally familiar, to dwell in places that afford possibilities for being and involvement with others, to see one's self thrown and projected (a potentiality to be), and to stay in a place that one cultivates by making space for things, projects, and beings and safeguarding them or showing care toward them. These are the structural features of being-in-the-world in its average everydayness, that is, the conditions that are necessary for the enjoyment of being in the normal course of things (FRENCH, 2015, p. 364).

We find this idea of human being's spatial existence in Hannah Arendt's work. “Living beings, men and animals”, Arendt writes, “are not just in the world, they are of the world, and this is precisely because they are subjects and objects – perceiving and being perceived – at the same time” (ARENDT, 1981, p. 20).

Arendt appreciates Heidegger's definition of the human being as being-in-the-world, thus “giving philosophic significance to structures of everyday life that are completely incomprehensible if man is not primarily understood as being together with others” (ARENDT, 1994c, p. 443). But she doesn't share his view that “there is no escape […] from the ‘incomprehensible triviality’ of the common everyday world except by withdrawal from it into that solitude which philosophers since Parmenides and Plato have opposed to the political realm” (ARENDT, 1968). Despite this difference, both thinkers, Heidegger and Arendt, are aware of the essential loss once human beings lose the space they exist in. If we follow Heidegger it will be impossible for them to dwell in the sense that he indicates is centrally important to the human experience. This loss leads to “what Heidegger called anxiety”. Anxiety is a “pathological state”,

it is a state in which one can no longer see oneself as a being with a potentiality projected into the future. […] When daseinis consumed by anxiety, it is no longer at home in the world as it should be. The world has become strange, hostile, inhospitable, and alien, no longer able to offer a framework of intelligibility of the sort that previously made being possible (FRENCH, 2015, p. 365).

Heidegger's description of being's spatial existence and his description of anxiety caused by the loss of a guaranteed place reveals the undermining experience refugees and immigrants are exposed to. And so does Hannah Arendt. However, she puts the emphasis on the right to belong to a political community. True, spatial existence, is important, however, being deprived of one's place in the world includes losing “a framework where one is judged by one's actions and opinions” (ARENDT, [1951]/1994, p. 297). To be seen and heard by one's fellowmen presupposes a political community. No longer being member of a community, this “entails the loss of the relevance of speech” (ARENDT, [1951]/ 1994, p. 297). Since “man, since Aristotle, has been defined as a being commanding the power of speech and thought” (ARENDT, [1951]/1994, p. 297), the loss means that one loses “some of the most essential characteristics of human life” (ARENDT, [1951]/1994, p. 297).

At first sight the above presentation of Heidegger's emphasis of place for human beings and Arendt's emphasis on speech may give the impression that a dwelling place and language are separated. However, neither for Heidegger nor for Arendt is there such a gap. For Heidegger, every human dwelling space is always linguistically and intelligibly and so humanly charged. Every human situation, Dasein, is from childhood on a hermeneutic situation. Human life itself lays itself out (legtsichaus), interprets itself, articulates itself. For Arendt, the disclosure of the “who”, “the unique and distinct identity of the agent” (ARENDT, [1958]/1998, p. 180) through speech and action is possible only when he or she has a distinct place in the world.

The situation today: “Humanity washed ashore”?

Back in Arendt's time, refugees were deprived of rights. Their’ “freedom of movement”, Arendt wrote, “gives them no right to residence […], and their freedom of opinion is a fool's freedom, for nothing they think matters anyhow” (ARENDT, [1951]/1994, p. 296). It was her opinion that

something much more fundamental than freedom and justice, which are the rights of citizens, is at stake when belonging to the community into which one is born is no longer a matter of course and not belonging no longer a matter of choice. […] This extremity, and nothing else,” she stated, “is the situation of people deprived of human rights. They are deprived, not of the right to freedom, but of the right to action; not of the right to think whatever they please, but of the right to opinion (ARENDT, [1951]/1994, p. 296).

Following Aristotle, she argued that the loss of the relevance of speech and the loss of all human relationships is “the loss […] of some of the most essential characteristics of human life” (ARENDT, [1951]/1994, p. 297). Her conclusion therefore was that there is only one right, this is “a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one's actions and opinions) and the right to belong to some kind of organized community” (ARENDT, [1951]/1994, p. 296). Hannah Arendt anticipated that “refugees have become a major issue of our time – a test for the nation-states as well as for human rights” (FASSIN, 2011, p. 220).

Late summer 2015, the picture of the three year old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi who drowned in a failed attempt to sail to the Greek island of Kos, showed the tragic light of refugees. On September 2, a picture showed him wearing a red-T-shirt and shorts, washed up on a beach, lying face down in the surf not far from Turkey's fashionable resort town of Bodrum; a second image shows a policeman carrying the tiny body away. Within hours this picture became the top trending picture on Twitter under the headline: “Humanity washed ashore” (SMITH, 2015). The image of the drowned Aylan Kurdi, I think, re-humanized the refugee crisis by turning from sheer numbers and giving the general disaster a face. Across the world it initiated a shift in the countries’ response to the refugee crisis.

In her essay “On Humanity in Dark Times”, Hannah Arendt asks how humanity manifests itself. She argues that humanity manifests itself in brotherhood most frequently in “dark times”. She explains, “this kind of humanity actually becomes inevitable when the times become so extremely dark for certain groups of people that it is no longer up to them, their insight or choice, to withdraw from the world” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 13). In her view “modern times and antiquity agree on one point: both regard compassion as something totally natural, as inescapable to man as, say, fear” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 14). There is nothing wrong with compassion, but it is a kind of humaneness that, according to Arendt, is the great privilege of “pariah peoples, a privilege that is dearly bought (because) it is often accompanied by so radical a loss of the world […] that in extreme cases […] we can speak of real world lessness” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 13). There are limits of a natural creature affect when it comes to political action, because “compassion abolishes the distance, the worldly space between men where politics matters” (ARENDT, [1963]/1990, p. 86).

In Arendt's view, wherever “human beings come together” they generate “a space […] that simultaneously gathers them into it and separates them from one another” (ARENDT, 2005, p. 106). This space between men, which is the world, lies at the center of politics, and “it is within this world [of things] that human beings act and are themselves conditioned, and because they are conditioned by it, every catastrophe that occurs within it strikes back at them, affects them” (ARENDT, 2005, p. 107).

We might, therefore, assume compassion “as an ideal basis for a feeling that reaching out to all mankind would establish a society in which men might really become brothers” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 14). It is Arendt's opinion that “humanitarianism of brotherhood” is valuable since “it makes insult and injury endurable” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 16); however, “in political terms it is absolutely irrelevant” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 17). It is irrelevant because compassion cannot “reach out farther than what is suffered by one person and still remain what it is supposed to be, co-suffering” (ARENDT, [1963]/1990, p. 85); further more compassion politicized becomes the sentiment of pity, and pity may even “be the perversion of compassion” (ARENDT, [1963]/1990, p. 88).

The humaneness Arendt then has in mind is not the humanitarianism of the 18^th century, warmth of human relationships at the cost of the world that lies between them, but a humaneness that contains an “openness to others” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 15). This openness, the “willing to risk the disclosure” (ARENDT, [1958]/1998, p. 180), to reveal oneself in deed or word is only possible “where people are with others and neither for nor against them, that is in sheer human togetherness” (ARENDT, [1958]/1998, p. 180).

So far I have presented Arendt's description of what it means to be a refugee and her term of humaneness. In the following I view Angela Merkel's open-door-policy in the light of Arendt's humanitas. When the German chancellor decided on September 5, 2015 to accept thousands of refugees her decision was not as Judy Dempsey noticed,

based on tactics. […] It was not based on strategy. Germany was not prepared for such an influx and was not ready to integrate so many tens of thousands of newcomers. She did not inform her EU partners. It was as unilateral a decision as her move to phase out nuclear power. Why? (DEMPSEY, 2015).

There are different answers, one of them by Elmar Brok, a prominent Christian Democrat and chairman of the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee, who thought Merkel did it out of compassion. However, keeping in mind, that in Arendtian terms compassion is in political terms absolutely irrelevant, I would argue that Merkel acted not in accordance with humanitarianism or compassion but in accordance with an Arendtian notion of humaneness.

“The world”, Hannah Arendt reminds us, “is not humane just because it is made by human beings, and it does not become humane just because the human voice sounds in it, but only when it has become the object of discourse” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 24). She emphasized the importance of communication for the process of becoming human and added: “We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 25). She was convinced that “the openness to others […] is the precondition for ‘humanity’ in every sense of this word” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 15).

If we follow Hannah Arendt, then, humanness is achieved “in the discourse of friendship” because this discourse manifests “a readiness to share the world with other men” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 24). When friends “become equal partners,” they learn, “how and in what specific articulateness the common world appears to the other, who as a person is forever unequal or different” (ARENDT, 1990, p. 83). What friends exercise is “seeing the world […] from the other fellow's point of view”, at the same time they communicate “their opinions so that the common-ness of this world becomes apparent” (ARENDT, 1990, p. 84).

When Arendt spoke of humaneness or humanity she didn't refer to its manifestation in humanitarianism or compassion but to the Roman understanding of humanitas. “In Rome,” she explained, “people of widely different ethnic origins and descent could acquire Roman citizenship and thus enter into the discourse among cultivated Romans, could discuss the world and life with them” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 25). It is this “readiness to share the world with other men” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 25) that is expressed in Angela Merkel's welcoming and open door policy. True, all started with citizens opening “the heart to the sufferings of others […]” (ARENDT, [1963]/1990, p. 81), however, it was Angela Merkel who turned the response to the refugee crisis into a political response in the best tradition of humaneness, a humaneness which the ancient Greeks called philantropia, ‘love of man’.

Politics and “mere life”

Legal obligations and the need for political solidarity between the European member states as well as among the EU and countries outside the EU are one side of political action to be taken. However, the refugee crisis confronts us with a further aspect, an aspect that Hannah Arendt characterized as “the dark background of mere givenness, the background formed by our unchangeable and unique nature […]” (ARENDT, [1951]/1994, p. 301). This dark background

breaks into the political scene as the alien which in its all too obvious difference reminds us of the limitations of human activity – which are identical with the limitations of human equality. […] The ‘alien’ is a frightening symbol of the fact of difference as such, of individuality as such, and indicates those realms in which man cannot change and cannot act and in which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy (ARENDT, [1951]/ 1994, p. 301).

A man “who by accidents of history is nothing but a man”, Arendt writes, “has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man”. She goes on:

The great danger arising from the existence of people forced to live outside the common world is that they are thrown back, in the midst of civilization, on their natural givenness, on their mere differentiation. They lack the tremendous equalizing of differences which comes from being citizens of some commonwealth and yet, since they are no longer allowed to partake in the human artifice, they begin to belong to the human race in much the same way as animals belong to a specific animal species. The paradox involved in the loss of human rights is that such a loss coincides with the instant when a person becomes a human being in general – without a profession, without a citizenship, without an opinion, without a deed by which to identify and specify himself – and different in general, representing nothing but his own absolutely unique individuality which, deprived of expression within and action upon a common world, loses all significance (ARENDT, [1951]/1994, p. 302).

Arendt detects a deep Western resentment of the given, of mere life, that is relegated to the private realm, the realm of need and necessity. When the media show the human beings in their status as a refugee, what becomes visible is “an ‘unqualified’ alien who is left with only her mere existence as a human being and who, as a consequence, must flee for her life” (BIRMINGHAM, 2006, p. 74). Angela Merkel, by taking the decision to welcome more refugees, expressed an understanding of the vulnerable ‘alien’ fleeing for her life.

Besides, Germany and all the European member states have a legal obligation to help the refugees. It started with signing the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees of 1951 into which the principle of “non-refoulement” has been incorporated, followed by the “first meaningful step towards integration […] in the early 1990s after the Maastricht Treaty established a legal basis for adopting common approaches on asylum and immigration” (BOSWELL, 2000, p. 542). In the year 2011 the Refugee convention celebrated its 60^th anniversary. True, its history is not one of linear progress; not only continue “‘physical insecurity, legal insecurity, socio-economic insecurity and environmental insecurity’ to be ‘commonplace’” (SYRING, 2012, p. 430), butthe Convention also has to be extended because there are persons such as “'internally displaced persons,’ ‘environmental refugees’,’ or other people forced to migrate” who are “currently not covered by the definition of the beneficiaries of that Convention” (SYRING, 2012, p. 429).

But, at least, the Convention contains the important principle of “non-refoulement” which “obliges signatory states not to forcibly return refugees and asylum seekers to their countries of origin if doing so would pose a clear danger to their lives and freedom” (BENHABIB, 2009, p. 34). In fact, this goes back to Immanuel Kant and his notion of “hospitality”. In the Third Article of perpetual peace, he notes that

hospitality is not to be understood as a virtue of sociability, as the kindness and generosity one may show to strangers who come to one's land or who become dependent upon one's act of kindness through circumstances of nature or history; hospitality is a “right” that belongs to all human beings insofar as we view them as potential participants in a world republic (BENHABIB, 2009, p. 33; KANT, 1975, p. 213; BAKER, 2011, p. 1424).

Here is not the place to look further into the debate about the term hospitality for international relations; I just want to mention Seyla Benhabib's view that “the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human rights and the succeeding era of international rights declarations reflect the learning experiences not only of western humanity but of humanity at large” (BENHABIB, 2009, p. 35). However, with Arendt's statement in mind, that “nobody can be a citizen of the world as he is the citizen of his country” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 81), I would like to invite the reader to keep two things in mind, first, according to Arendt, “rights are not in the first instance a matter of philosophical or moral ideals, state guarantees or legal declarations, but are created from the bottom up, through practices of communication and interaction” (INGRAM, 2008, p. 410), second, rights need to be guaranteed by the state (government). A state, according to Arendt, is “an open society, ruling over a territory where its power protects and makes the law”; it is “a legal institution” which recognizes “citizens no matter of what nationality; its legal order is open to all who happen to live on its territory” (ARENDT, [1946]/1994, 208). A “state”, she adds, “far from being identical with the nation, is the supreme protector of a law which guarantees man his rights as man, his rights as citizen and his rights as a national” (ARENDT, [1946]/1994, 210).

“Let's do it right”: Europe's capacity to respond to the refugee crisis

Refugees coming to Europe will hardly stop any time soon. Neither will immigrants. Consequently, we may ask, if neither refugees nor immigrants are a temporary phenomenon shouldn't we then accept them as a reality? The EU, despite the efforts it has undertaken, does not share a common answer. While Germany welcomes refugees, Hungary closed its borders with non-EU Serbia in mid-September 2015, with non-Schengen Croatia the week before and “is not going to open any corridor for asylum seekers to enter the Schengen zone from the south” (KAVIC, 2015). “Slovenia, with a population of just two million, has already received over 20,000 migrants since Saturday; the Slovenian government has plans to ask the EU for help in dealing with financial and security concerns” (KAVIC, 2015). Poland has agreed to accept 5,000 refugees in addition to the 2,000 it has already made allowances for (FOREST, 2015). In Central Europe, and in particular in Slovakia, solidarity in sharing the burden equally is weak. Moreover, and perhaps worse, is that “Slovakia will only accept ‘Christian refugees’. It says Muslims would not feel at home there” (HALL, 2015). But not every central European member state shares this attitude, for instance the Prime Minister from the Czech Republic Bohuslav Sobotka: “Even though I don't like the use of the quotas, I don't agree with them and we voted against them, Europe must not fall apart over solving the migrant crisis” (BBC NEWS, 2015).

In the face of an ongoing tragedy that has claimed 2,500 lives in 2015, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, put it bluntly: “If Europe fails on the question of refugees, its close connection with universal civil rights will be destroyed and it won't be the Europe we want” (MERKEL, 2015). In practice this meant that she revoked the return orders for Dublin transfers to other countries and changed the rule for Syrian refugees that asylum seekers must claim asylum in the first EU state they arrive in.

This step caused critical commentaries: For instance, Professor Anthony Glees, a prominent commentator on European affairs, described Germany as “a hippie state, being led by its emotions” (GLEES, 2015). In his view, “the most serious humanitarian crisis that Europe had to deal with since the end of World War II can only be dealt with by essential policy making and above all by sticking to the rules”, that is, refugees must be taken at the first port of entry into the European Union states.

The refugee crisis, globalization and the effect on political thinking

Merkel also said that the refugee crisis is going to change Germany. Underlying is the understanding that refugees are not a temporary phenomenon and that we in Europe cannot in a short time return to “business as usual. Globalization is not a one-way traffic, from Europe out into the world, but it works in the other direction too, i.e., from the world into Europe”. Since the end of the Cold War the world is in motion. Several states have been left to their own devices, and without strong governmental structures some of them have turned into so-called ‘failed states’, i.e., “a political body that has disintegrated to a point where basic conditions and responsibilities of a sovereign government no longer function properly” (WIKIPEDIA, FAILED STATE, 2017), suffering from the erosion of legitimate authority and unable to provide public services. States in the Middle East have ‘artificial’ colonial boundaries, “drawn by statesmen with rulers on maps – statesmen who were not Arab, not Persian, not Turkish, but British or French or occasionally Italian” (LEWIS, 2004, p. 334). No one would have expected people from this region could cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe in mass. These events are changing our reality, including our terms when orienting ourselves in the world, as for instance in how we use words such as “close” and “distant”. Syria is no longer distant, the Syrian refugees are no longer strangers but changing into our neighbors.

Half a century ago, Hannah Arendt reflected on the enormous difficulty which she related to the fact that we are living in One World, and this means, that

[…] for the first time in history all peoples on earth have a common present: No event of any importance in the history of one country can remain a marginal accident in the history of any other. Every country has become the almost immediate neighbor of every other country, and every man feels the shock of events which take place on the other side of the globe (ARENDT, 1968, p. 83).

The common factual present implies the task to guarantee every human being a place in the world. This is not at all an easy task, since, as Arendt remarked, our “common factual present is not based on a common past and does not in the least guarantee a common future” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 83). “Everything”, Arendt argues, “seems to depend upon the possibility of bringing the national pasts, in their original disparateness, into communication with each other” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 87).

Her reflections are part of her article “Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?” (1958). Here she made the statement that Karl Jaspers “agreed with the widespread feeling that our time somehow has come to an end” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 90). Arendt on her part joined in: “Our present is emphatically, and not merely logically, the suspense between a no-longer and a not-yet”. In Karl Jaspers’ words, “We live as though we stand knocking at doors which are still closed to us” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 90).

Today those doors are open and what becomes visible is that a guaranteed place for everyone in this world is more urgent than ever. True, “a framework of universal mutual agreements, which eventually would lead into a world-wide federated structure” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 90) is still ahead, but Europe needs to find human solutions of the refugee crisis. Nothing indicates it will be an easy way to go, but there is some hope since “both in their laws and their rhetoric, many European politicians are categorically against exclusiveness and discriminatory practices” (LALL, 2015). Furthermore, “Europe today can draw from this history positive effect in the recognition of human diversity, the tolerance for customs and opinions one does not share and the refusal to treat all differences in terms of “friends” or “enemies”, good or evil” (LALL, 2015).

Hospitality, terror, fear, and xenophobia

However, after the terror attacks in Nice that killed 86 people, including 10 children and teenagers, and led president Hollande to extend France's state of emergency, and a wave of terror in Germany, three in Bavaria and one in Baden-Wurttemberg, a specter of fear is haunting Europe. “What seems particularly unsettling with terrorism”, the Estonian philosopher Siobhan Kattago remarks, “is that we don't detect a clear and present danger. Rather we are caught within the inclination to danger and continual war. We are surrounded by mistrust” (KATTAGO, 2015). She goes on,

Terrorism seeks to destroy the social order. […] It is at this very moment when we feelthatour moral self is beginning to unravel, that the door is open to demagoguery, facile conflation of terrorist and refugee and the dangerous polarization of friend versus enemy, us versus them (KATTAGO, 2015).

This is precisely what we observed after the attacks in Germany. The fact that three of the attackers arrived as refugees further sharpened the criticism of the German Chancellor's politics. True, the authorities said the attacks in Bavaria and in Baden-Wuerttemberg were not linked; however the Isis-inspired killings fueled anti-migrant sentiment all over the country. Courageously, Chancellor Angela Merkel refused to change Germany's refugee policy. “The asylum seekers responsible for the deadly attacks in Ansbach and Reutlingen”, she said, “had ‘shamed the country that welcomed them’, but those fleeing persecution and war had a right to be protected” (DEARDEN, 2016).

But not everyone agrees with Merkel's view on refugee policy: “German far-right activists have amplified their protests against incoming refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan” (SCOTT, 2015). France struggles with xenophobia and we notice “xenophobic fears […] in the former-communist states – Slovakia, Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic”, not to mention the “Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán[who] has been particularly belligerent” (SCOTT, 2015).

After a huge number of refugees turned up on its borders in 2015, the Hungarians closed their borders in September 2015. Moreover, “the government refuses to participate in a binding EU agreement requiring member states to relocate asylum seekers equitably across the Union” (GALL, 2016). On October 2, 2016 Hungary called a national referendum. Hungarians were asked only one question: “Do you want the European Union to be entitled to prescribe the mandatory settlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary without the consent of parliament”? (BARDI, 2016).

In July the Hungarian government began a campaign of xenophobic disinformation “with messages including: ‘Did you know that since the beginning of the immigration crisis more than 300 people died as a result of terror attacks in Europe?’ and ‘Did you know that Brussels wants to settle a whole city's worth of illegal immigrants in Hungary?’” (GALL, 2016). This campaign linked migration to increased terrorism, calling “asylum seekers and refugees […] ‘intruders’, and ‘potential terrorists’, bent on destroying Western civilization and Christianity. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban himself in July referred to migration as ‘poison’” (GALL, 2016).

Sixty years ago, in 1956, hundreds of thousands of Hungarians fleeing their country got refuge in other parts of Europe and in the United States. Today Nearly 98% of those who voted said ‘no’ to the EU plan (ROTHWELL, 2016). True, only 40.4% voted, which makes Hungary's refugee referendum invalid. This might be a sign of hope, but the influence the government's ideological campaign had on people's minds is alarming.

Sharing responsibility

What, then, should a political response be? It needs to be a common response of European refugee policy shared by all EU member states. A first step in sharing the responsibility was made on September 23, 2015 when the EU leaders met in Brussels and agreed on a list of priorities which included to “assist Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and other countries in dealing with the Syrian refugee crisis”, to expand financial support for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the World Food program”, to gain Turkey's co-operation in stemming the flow of refugees, to “assist the countries of the Western Balkans in the management of refugee flows”, to increase funding to address the root causes of irregular migration and displaced persons in Africa”, to “tackle the dramatic situation at the EU external borders and strengthen their control“ and “assist frontline member states in the establishment of hotspots, to ensure a correct identification of migrants and at the same time ensure relocation and returns. They also called for renewed diplomatic efforts to solve the crisis in Syria and ensure the formation of a government of national unity in Libya” (EUROPEAN COUNCIL, 2015).

This led in March 2016 to the EU-Turkey Agreementaiming both at increasing the European Union's external border protection and at stemming the traffickers’ activities and save human lives. Yet, experts argue that insofar as the agreement “relates to protecting refugees’ rights and providing safe passage, the E.U.-Turkey deal is fundamentally flawed and is not ‘working.’ The refugees who are now in Greece are trapped in a dreadful limbo. It is true that the flow of arrivals to Greece has slowed – of course it has – there is little point in fleeing to Greece to end up trapped” (ALFRED, 2016).

After the axe attack on a train in Würzburg, a mass shooting in Munich, a machete attack in Reutlingen and a suicide bomb attack in Ansbach people are worried about their personal safety. Chancellor Merkel noted in July 2016, “we are doing everything humanly possible to ensure security in Germany,” but she added, “anxiety and fear cannot guide our political decisions” (KERN, 2016). Speaking at an annual summer conference in Berlin on July 28, she insisted that there would be no change to her open-door-policy and concluded “For me it is clear: we stick to our principles. We will give those who are politically persecuted refuge and protection under the Geneva Convention” (KERN, 2016).

Even after the evening of the 19^th of December, when a terrorist attack on a Christmas Market at the Breitscheidplatz in Berlin wounded multiple people and 12 people were killed, Merkel kept in her speech after the attack to her opinion that fear cannot guide political decisions. She called the attack a “very tough day”, she admitted that she did not have an easy answer to the question “how we can live with this”, and she insisted that we must not be “paralysed by fear”. Instead, she was convinced that “Germans will regain the strength to continue to live the life that we want in Germany: free, together, and open” (ROY VAN ZUIJDEWIJN, 2016). In her annual new year's speech Merkel expressed her belief that “Where… Europe is challenged as a whole, Europe must also find answers as a whole – irrespective of how tedious and tough it is” (SCHUSTER-CRAIG, 2017).

Hannah Arendt believed that human beings are able to build a world that will be humane for everybody. To approach this goal, a particular mode of thinking and acting would be needed. “Political philosophy”, she writes, “can hardly do more than describe and prescribe a new principle of political action” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 93). A new principle of political action would be one whose validity must comprehend the whole humanity. More than half a century ago, in 1958, Arendt remarked that “mankind […] has become something of an urgent reality” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 82). However, mankind has never really played a significant role in political thinking, and yet, we need to think mankind as a political notion if we want to make human rights real, that is, guarantee every single human being a place in this world (VOLK, 2009, p. 16). It seems, Angela Merkel has made an important move in this direction.

On the other hand, the German government's handling of the refugee crisis has spurred support for the anti-immigration rightwing populist party AfD. Angela Merkel's party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has with 19% votes in regional elections in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern” its all-time lowest result in the eastern state” (OLTERMANN, 2016). The right wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland got 20.9% of the votes in Merkel's home state, thus it is ahead of her center-right bloc. After the election Chancellor Angela Merkel defended her decision to abandon border controls a year ago. She “told the Bild newspaper, ‘it was not about opening the border for everyone – it was about not shutting it to those who had made their way to us from Hungary, on foot and in great need of help’” (SMALE, 2016).

Education's task

In Arendt's view the state is “a legal institution” which recognizes “citizens no matter of what nationality; its legal order is open to all who happen to live on its territory”. In Merkel's view, political decisions and actions are guided by principles, also in times when refugee crisis and terrorism are challenging democracy. She remains true to the political task of securing every human being a place in the world. Rights guaranteed by the state are essential for sharing responsibility for the world. But they are not sufficient. They have to be practiced by citizens coming together and actively engaging. Education's task is to prepare the young generation for being able to take the responsibility for the world.

The ancient Greeks had an understanding about the close connection between speech and politics; this is expressed in that they highly valued philia, i.e., “friendship among citizens” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 24). What, then, are the implications for education under the current refugee and migrant crisis? The answer can only be manifold and needs a further discussion. However, to indicate the direction in which the discussion might go, education should encourage young people to believe that they can make a change in the world. Therefore, it should strengthen students’ openness to different perspectives which reveal when friends talk together. Teachers should “engage students in understanding and taking into account the perspectives of others” (SCHUTZ & SANDY, 2015, p. 34), and this requires that we really listen to each other. Moreover, education should encourage and help students to “develop their own perspectives on the ‘world’” (SCHUTZ & SANDY, 2015, p. 34) and reveal it to others as in friendship. The opposite of this kind of communication is misanthropy, and “misanthropy means simply that the misanthrope finds no one with whom he cares to share the world, that he regards nobody as worthy of rejoicing with him in the world” (ARENDT, 1968, p. 25).

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