EUROPE AS HOST/HOSTAGE

Abstract

The legacies of European colonialism continue under the auspices of the European Union, as reflected in contemporary discriminatory policies towards immigrants from former colonies and Europe's postcommunist fringes. Across EU metropolises, the discourse of multiculturalism has become a damage-control mechanism for violence and disenfranchisement stemming from virtual political and economic apartheid. Contemporary cultural texts, including film and literature, offer productive critiques of official multicultural revisions of European national spaces, which often embrace a dehistoricized ‘unity in diversity’ slogan without comprehensively dealing with individual legacies of colonialism and neocolonial policies of the Union. Pushing liberal multiculturalism to its limits, Michael Haneke's Caché (2005) and Theo Angelopoulos's Eternity and a Day (1998) call for an ethics of hospitality to migrant ‘strangers’ which dismantles traditional European concepts of identity and political community based on filiative resemblance. Demanding a confrontation with the legacy of colonial strife as the only hope for a progressively multicultural EU, the films also explore the benefits as well as limitations of a Levinasian ethics of responsibility for an-other, which loves and gives in excess: prior to any discourses on national identity, historiography, or a remembered ill for which one must offer reparation.