(In)hospitality: Legitimacy Struggles in the Welcoming of Migrants and Refugees

Abstract

In February and March 2020, the Greek-Turkish border experienced a new crisis related to the reception of migrants and refugees seeking to reach the European territory. In public spaces, images of armed Greek coast guards shooting at shipwrecked boaters trying to reach the shore were circulating virally. At the same time, the world was facing a biological threat born in China and ignoring borders, in this case Covid-19. This threat seemed to exacerbate the social tensions linked to globalization and to these circulations, and the speeches and events linked to the fear of the pandemic were all the more associated with an external and internal enemy becoming, moreover, a potential vector. In this particular context, the antagonistic imaginaries, images and discourses promoting practices and policies of hospitality or, conversely, inhospitality are reconfigured.This chapter wishes to question how a bitter struggle for legitimacy around hospitality and inhospitality is being waged in public spaces. We will approach the claims of legitimacy in the sense of Hélène Hatzfeld, that is to say as principles in the name of which it is possible to live together. This angle seems to us particularly appropriate for interacting with what the concept of hospitality reveals about our societies, since it questions a relationship to the other that is itself at the heart of the definition of the city, as Boudou, but also Le Blanc and Brugère, emphasize.