Welcoming the stranger

Caldwell's 'Reflections on the Revolution in Europe', Part Two

Continued from last week

Hospitality is a sacred custom across cultures, enforced with the threat of curses or eternal damnation to those who mistreat the stranger. Paradoxically, though, hospitality is also a xenophobic idea, going hand in hand with a belief that the outsider must remain so.

It was the German author and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger who wrote that ‘In order to avoid constant bloodbaths and to make possible a bare minimum of exchange and commerce between various clans, families and tribes, ancient societies set up the taboos and rituals of hospitality. But these precautions do not eliminate the status of “outsider”. On the contrary, they set it in stone. The guest is sacred, but he may not tarry.’

This is one of the many essential points that Christopher Caldwell made in Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, his chronicle of the continent’s post-war transformation through immigration. The idea - and misunderstanding - of hospitality is central to this story.

‘Hospitality is meant to protect travellers in hostile territory,’ Caldwell wrote: ‘it is not meant to give large groups of visitors - who may include militants, freeloaders, and opportunists - the run of the place.’ Guests are to be welcomed and well treated but ‘a guest who tarries becomes an interloper’. Therefore ‘hospitality is related to xenophobia,’ he observed: ‘In fact, it is one of the faces of xenophobia’.

Caldwell cited the many historical examples of this distinction: when Gothic tribes made peace with the Romans in AD 382, they were given hospitalitas (billeting on profitable lands) but not connubium (the right to marry Romans), and the former was linked to the latter. Goths were welcome - but not like that.

The paradox of hospitality is what western travellers misunderstand when they contrast the warm reception they often receive on their travels to the Global South with their own culture’s often distant attitude to newcomers; they are lavished with hospitality because they are guests, and will never be accepted as anything more by cultures which have strongly defined in-groups. An immigrant, one seeking to join a new community and acquire the same rights, is something altogether different. This is also a distinction which European politicians and policymakers have failed to grapple with over the decades, confused both by ancient and modern taboos.

‘The cliché that it is backward-looking and traditionalist to hinder immigration, and modern and open-minded to welcome it, is a mistake’, Caldwell writes. Pro-immigration politics ‘always draw on deep cultural reflexes, not to mention the support of most official church groups’, while their opponents have to smash taboos and go against the grain.

The stranger is to be welcomed, as Christian leaders repeatedly tell us, but this ancient custom was never designed to entail acquired membership of the group in such numbers. Europeans are confused about how they are to treat newcomers, and this has not gone unnoticed by migrants themselves, for whom a sense of hospitality was given and then withdrawn, leaving many with feelings of rejection.

‘The difference between hospitality and a full and permanent welcome has been widely remarked by Muslims who arrived in Denmark in the 1970s,’ Caldwell wrote: ‘Whether well-disposed or ill disposed towards Danish culture, they tend to describe their reception back them as almost dreamlike in its generosity, at both the governmental and interpersonal level. But sometime in the 1990s, the climate changed with incredible suddenness to one of suspicion and even hostility.’

Liberals blamed the rise of the Right-wing Danish People’s Party for this change, ‘as if it were possible in a democracy to manufacture society-wide anti-immigrant discontent out of thin air’, but this type of phenomenon has been noted throughout history; as a group becomes aware that the guests are staying, and that they are keeping their culture and ways, the welcome evaporates.