Keeping Immigrants Out Does Not Protect Democracy

Many citizens, scholars, and politicians have long lamented the democratic deficit within the European Union, so mentioning a new push for European democracy among the six priorities of the Commission is certainly politically important. In fact, one may wonder why democracy is listed as the last priority, at the risk of solidifying the lore about Europe as primarily an economic and cultural entity, rather than a political one. Equally important is the call for transparency and integrity of the legislative process and of a greater engagement of European citizens. But I want to focus on the small clause "protecting EU democracy from external interference." It is likely that the clause was prompted by the strong suspicions about Russian involvement in the elections of the United States and other European countries, and we have seen after the formulation of these priorities the extent to which indeed foreign powers allegedly bribed EU bureaucrats and representatives in order to obtain favorable treatment. My concern is that the clause may be used, in unfortunate connection with the other priority of "promoting our European way of life," as a way to exclude immigrants who may be perceived as posing a threat to European democratic institutions. Viktor Orbán raised the issue in 2015 with the unfolding of the Syrian exodus towards Europe to justify his building of a steel fence at the border of Hungary with Serbia and Croatia, talking about the threat they supposedly posed to Europe's Christian and democratic way of life. Orbán is notoriously considered the promoter of an illiberal form of democracy, one which invokes the will of the people's majority as paramount to trump the rights of minorities and human rights in general. With his pronouncements about the threat of immigrants to (his understanding of) democracy, he implicitly challenges Europe and Europeans to articulate the kind of democracy they want to push for: either one that is tied to fundamental rights, or one that relies on views of democracy grounded on ethnic homogeneity and therefore on exclusion.

In the early 1950s Hannah Arendt foresaw what is at stake in this choice. In a famous chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism she discussed the massive migration flows triggered by the redrawing of boundaries in Eastern Europe after the treaty of Versailles and the Russian revolution. She shows how putting ethnic homogeneity as a condition for the cohesion of states had the effect of severely infringing on the rights of non-homogeneous minorities. This allowed the emerging totalitarian governments to find in the situation proof that no inalienable human rights actually existed, and that self-proclaimed democracies affirming the contrary were simply being hypocritical. But that is not all. Arendt also noted that exclusion from integration and citizenship, besides creating incentives for the excluded to break the law, also jeopardizes democratic institutions and the rights of well-established citizens: the more the excluded, the larger the domain of people falling outside the rule of law, the greater the emancipation of police forces from law and government, and the greater the danger of a gradual transition to a police state. Today, too, these outsiders pushing at the borders seem to put the lie to Europe's proclamations about allegiance to democracy and human rights. Unlike the threat coming from powerful governments seeking to tamper with elections or policies in the European Union and its member states, however, these outsiders appear to be much less a threat than an opportunity for Europe. We teach our students that the modern state is based on the freedom to sign a social contract, so we may ask ourselves why we think it is right to prohibit outsiders from signing that contract. And if we do not think it is right, but just expedient, we might want to follow Arendt's advice and think of the democratic costs of exclusion in the long run.