Philosophical Garden

The Other in the Future Society. Present Times

30 minutes

BOHM DIALOGUE Vol. 9 | July 24, 2022

Julia Ovcharenko, Chris Keulemans, Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski

Vienna—Amsterdam—Kyiv

Summary

Chris Keulemans describes his personal experience of being involved in humanitarian support for undocumented people in Amsterdam and contrasts the practical needs of the situation with the national migration policies. Causes of anti-Islamic bias are discussed. The treatment of Ukrainian refugees is contrasted with the response to the earlier refugee crisis in Belarus. Refugee treatment in the UK is discussed. Are Ukraine’s policies adequate for the multicultural future? Of every rule or agreement for future society one question can and should always be asked — how does this work for the Other: the stranger, the foreigner, the migrant? The power of stories to change societies is discussed.

Key words

Amsterdam Belarus Chechia European Union migration policy Poland society Syria The Netherlands refugees undocumented people UK Ukraine future

Timecode

15:17 Syrian refugees in Brno

29:17 the undocumented in the Netherlands

35:24 NGOs and the government

44:02 Dutch response to the undocumented

56:15 Poland and the Belarus refugee crisis

01:06:58 the UK response to migrants

01:19:00 perceptions of the vulnerable

1:31:10 the Other in the future society

1:38:53 the role of stories

Participants

C — Chris Keulemans
D — Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski
J — Julia Ovcharenko

THE DIALOGUE

D: Chris, what was the public reaction to the essay you sent us earlier?

J: Yes, Chris, I want to talk about your essay too, and the topic of accepting refugees in Europe.

C: This topic is very close to me. Julia, I think you’re seeing the phenomenon also in Vienna, of course. There must be similar discussions going on there.

J: We discussed this just recently with Lucie Rehorikova from Brno. She was the director of the Czech Center in Kyiv for six years. She supported a lot of initiatives to make an international and cultural house in Dnipro. For the last two years, she’s been in Brno, back to literature festival Authors’ Readings Month. She talked a lot about accepting Ukrainian migrants in Czechia, and it was really interesting for me to listen to another country’s experience. Many more people are coming there.

C: Of course. I just saw that almost 4 million Ukrainians have now been officially granted a temporary residence permit in the EU.

D: It’s only EU.

C: Our people are going to other countries as well.

J: Canada.

C: Georgia, Armenia.

J: Georgia is not able to accept any more Ukrainians, they are closing. About Azerbaijan or other East European countries I have no data. Canada stays very open and flexible towards Ukrainians.

D: The Ukrainian diaspora helps us. But my feeling is that people who are going to the USA or Canada are only going temporarily.

The USA is a difficult country for emigrants. In Armenia, Georgia and, for example, Moldova, we do not necessarily have good relations with Ukrainians because these countries have many russians as well.

J: Yes, they influence the situation there, they are decision-makers there. Let’s just talk about the EU, EU migrants now, because in this situation we can describe how European values improved. For example, Lucie says about Czech people that some of them like Ukrainians, help Ukrainians, but some are tired of them.

J: The first wave of welcoming people is maybe over, and now they are starting to see economic hardship as well. Prices are rising for the locals.

D: My question is how to help there, how to help ordinary people of the EU understand the whole of the situation, that the war is not only in Ukraine. And we have good news, we have some essays in public now. And my next question is maybe this: what is the relationship in Europe between ordinary people and writers, thinkers, scientists?

[15:17] Syrian refugees in Brno

J: It’s about perception. People see the consequences but don’t understand the decision-making that leads to them. For example, in Brno they had to gather the whole city council to decide about 22 Syrians to be accepted in the city. It was a big story about 22 people. This was back when there was an acute, really acute problem at the beginning of Syrian migration. And now thousands of, hundreds of thousands Ukrainians are coming, and they are easily accepted. People don’t understand why things became different, why the procedure is different now. And that is not explained. It is not grounded. It also brings up questions about inequality.

C: Same here. Though here from the very beginning, the general public never protested against the welcome of Ukrianians. Never, not at all. I mean all kinds of people were super-active, driving to the Polish border, picking up people, opening their houses, opening all kinds of spaces. I think my essay in the end is about the contrast.

Who decides who belongs, who decides who is welcome, on what basis? I can imagine from the perspective of Ukraine it’s a question that almost doesn’t play a role in the public debate. Because, of course, the priority is simply for people if they want to leave, how can they leave, where do they go and what is the immediate future. It’s the first urgent priority.

Because my focus on this question doesn’t come out of nowhere. I’ve been, of course, a traveler myself. For about thirty years now I’ve been interested and active in the question of migrants and refugees in our city, country, and Europe. This has been maybe the most important theme I’ve written about. To give you just one example, sooner or later when you’re interested in migrants coming to your society and to your city, you see how badly organized the immigration service is. Then you discover that there is no accident, that it is the country’s policy to discourage people from coming here. The Netherlands has to show their face of civilized Western-European society.

J: They find more complicated ways to say “no”.

C: Exactly. But, basically, during the Yugoslavia wars, the immigration policy here was more or less like it is now to the Ukrainians.

Back then people were welcomed quite easily and they got more or less the reception that Ukrainians get now. And I know a lot of those people because during the 90’s I was the director of De Balie cultural center, and this was the place for the intellectuals, the artists, the thinkers of all kinds of groups. They knew De Balie was a good place, we got a lot of Bosnian, Kosovo people who came. And they were very active and very special, and that’s how I got involved.

But that atmosphere changed, basically, post 9/11. Suddenly the Muslims were perceived as dangerous, and that changed a lot: the atmosphere in the city and atmosphere in the Western world in general. And, of course, a lot of non-western migrants come from countries where Islam is the main religion. This changed a lot in the migration policy. In the past 20 years the right wing has become stronger, more vocal, more radical, and in a country like ours the entire migration rhetoric that used to be extreme right is now mainstream. Racism, discrimination, fear of Islam used to be sort of a fringe thing, but now it’s much more mainstream. And this discourse had consequences for the migration policy and migration service. A friend of mine, an academic, spent a year interviewing people at the migration service, and they told her that around 2010 their training changed in one super-concrete way. Before that time, if somebody came to the migration service, they would tell their story, and their story was accepted unless the migration service found proof that the story was not true. As in, I come, I say I’m from Afghanistan, I was tortured in prison, I had to escape. The migration service would accept that story and do their research, and if they found it was a lie, then they would disqualify me. Around 2010 people starting to work for the immigration service got a different rule for their work. The new rule was, everybody who comes to our service is a liar unless they can prove that their story is true. Now if I was tortured in Afghanistan and I come to the Netherlands, they will think I’m a liar. If you cannot prove this, we will not accept you. This is very difficult because if you’re in Afghanistan and you’re taken off the streets by the police for whatever reason and put in prison, and they tortured you, how do you prove that?

That was a fundamental change, and not just in the Netherlands, this is all over the Western Europe.

[29:17] the undocumented in the Netherlands

Because many people are now disqualified, they are here in the Netherlands, but without documents.

J: Illegally?

C: We don’t use the word “illegally” anymore because we say, nobody is illegal. Undocumented, let’s say.

J: Undocumented.

C: The number of undocumented people has been growing, and I became very active in that scene. Because, of course, many of those people come to Amsterdam because it’s the biggest city, and you can find people with the same roots from your community. If you’re from Ethiopia, you can find people from Ethiopia here. If you’re from Afghanistan, you’ll find Afghan people here. They come to Amsterdam and they have no residency permit, they have no right to work, to study, to go to the doctor. They don’t exist in the system.

D: Can’t they get a job?

C: No, they’re not allowed to work. I mean they find jobs but the jobs are not official.

D: It’s the way for entrepreneurships.

J: Are they allowed to open businesses? I think they don’t get the tax number.

C: No tax number. You cannot open a shop, you cannot start an NGO, you cannot — because then you will be visible and then you will be caught, and you will be simply put in prison.

What you can do is find a job, I don’t know, cleaning the kitchen in a restaurant or whatever.

J: And be paid in cash…

C: And you have no insurance, of course. If you break a leg, you have a problem. But now it becomes very Dutch and very Amsterdam, my story. Amsterdam, like many capital cities, is more liberal, more leftish than the rest of the country. And at a certain moment, 10 years ago or something, our mayor said, “In my city nobody will have to sleep in the streets. Amsterdam is a good city, it’s a rich city, in this city we don’t want people sleeping in the streets. It doesn’t matter if they have papers or no papers.”

Sounds good, and to a certain extent it works. The city of Amsterdam offers basic, very basic shelter to people without papers, not to everybody. But the problem is the national government is more right-wing. The city is fighting with the national government all the time. Still, the city government and many humanitarian NGOs in this city work together to take care of the people without papers. For 15 years or so, I was the chairman of the biggest NGO in Amsterdam doing this kind of work. We offer temporary living spaces, food, legal help, medical help, all for free, for people without papers. And this organization is being subsidized by the city of Amsterdam and by the national government to do what the national government doesn’t want them to do.

[35:24] NGOs and the government

I’m sure you have this paradox in many Western European countries. You have completely legal public NGOs doing humanitarian work, getting public funding to do what is against the policy of the government.

C: In Ukraine, I think you can see a similar situation in education or in arts and culture. Let’s say, a university will be funded by public funding and inside the university it is allowed to be critical of the state.

Same with art. You can get public funding for art centers or arts festivals and some of the artists will be very critical of the government, but still you get the public funding.

D: I have some questions. My first question is, Chris, why do you think these immigrants who sleep on the streets in the cities do not go to the countryside instead and find employment with farmers?

C: All right, it’s a good question. You need to know the country also.

This is different in every country. We have a lot of farmers. Now, imagine that you’re a young man from Iraq with a beard and you decide that you’re going to stay with these people because it may be safer than in the city and because you think, well, it’s a farm, there’s space, it’s quiet, maybe I can stay there.

Of course, you don’t look like them. If you want to live a secret life because you have no papers, it is very difficult in the countryside.

These people, these farmers are probably very friendly. They don’t speak English very well. They know nothing about the rest of the world. They don’t know anything about Islam. They see the news which says: oh my god, Arab guys with beards are dangerous. It’s more difficult. And another thing, again, very Dutch, we have a lot of farmers, but this is a super, super, super organized country. It’s very difficult to simply stay outside of the system because everybody knows everything.

D: This is a problem. There is no room for improvisation. Perhaps the reason lies in the economic roots of the European Union. When Julia and I read the Schuman Declaration it was a big surprise to discover that at the beginning was the economic union of steel and coal. It was not about moral values.

C: Right.

J: It’s really hard to imagine but I see, it was just the first step. And we can see the traces of that mindset now.

[44:02] Dutch response to the undocumented

C: Maybe I should continue with my own background here.

I’m describing the situation of undocumented people in this city, in this country. And this is a very Dutch style of approaching conflict. If we have a problem, the Dutch solution is to get everybody involved in a room and start talking. That’s how we save this country from the ocean: get everybody together, and someone will build the dike and someone else will move his farm a little bit, and someone will think about the water, et cetera. Of course, we have to add, someone else will take a ship to the other side of the world and steal valuable goods from the colonies to make us rich, so that we can build dikes etc.

Right now I’m the chairperson of a monthly meeting here in Amsterdam where the city of Amsterdam, the municipality of Amsterdam, and about 30 NGOs who work with undocumented people sit together, and we discuss how to create a kind of humane situation for the undocumented people.

The immigration services are there also. Everybody involved gets together and discusses things. Sometimes it’s exhausting, but in this case it’s not bad. Interesting note is that all these people — every time there’s about 50 people in the room—99 percent of these people are white. The undocumented people themselves are not represented in the room. That’s the next step.

This is just one part of how I am actively involved, and that is also how I understand the situation. When I went to the Polish border with Belarus, I could recognize the system of violence and racism there. It’s much more violent and explicit than what I see in my city, but it’s the same system. And I could also recognize the positive response to the migration from Ukraine. This difference, this contrast was clear. Because on the one hand, there’s a border where millions of people arrive, on the other hand there’s a border where a few thousand people arrive. And the small border is closed with violence while the big border is open with food and meals, and everything.

I wrote this essay, and I was not the first one, I was not the only one. It’s been translated into a few other languages, and it’s been discussed here in the Netherlands quite publicly. Now there is a campaign to say: “Listen, we see how the positive reception of the Ukrainians works, including giving them a tax number immediately, so that they can find a job, they can start a business, they can find a house, they can go to school, they can go to hospital, everything. We see how that creates very little friction in society. Maybe we can try to do the same thing for non-western, non-white people who are coming here”.

I don’t think it’s going to happen because, of course, racism is a fundamental thing. It’s not going to change tomorrow. But also because even though the reception of the Ukrainians has been very positive, as you say, Julia, all over Western Europe, there’s an economic crisis, the consequences of the war are here, too, in very basic ways. The energy prices are suddenly much higher. I pay three times as much for my energy now as six months ago, and it’s going to be more. And I can afford it, but there’s a lot of people who really get into trouble. And the other thing is, again, this contrast. The country has been looking for housing for the Ukrainians. And this is a country where housing is really a problem.

And in the last few years housing has really become probably the most talked about problem in this country because there’s simply not enough affordable housing for everybody. Young people are living with their parents until they’re 30-35 because they cannot find anywhere to live. It’s a serious question. Still, accommodated the Ukrainians. Office buildings are being transformed into affordable housing, etc. which is all good. But it doesn’t solve the housing problem. And in the meantime, other asylum seekers from different parts of the world are now creating an official national crisis because there’s no place for them, even if they’re accepted. They’re accepted but they’re homeless. They are sleeping in the streets—the people who are legally here, the people who have the papers, who have been accepted. Of course, this problem could be solved because there’s enough money, but then it becomes a question of political will. And the political will is not there because many people have been frightened by the media of the dark-skinned refugees. The general population here is not afraid of the Ukrainians because one, they are white and Christian; two, we hope that they will not stay forever. And three, very important, it’s women and children and elderly people. There are no guys.

On the other hand, if you are poor and you live in Somali, and you have no other solution, then who will you send to Europe? You will send your oldest son, a healthy 25-year-old black guy to Europe. That’s a different image.

J: Who would maybe earn money in Europe and send this money outside the European economy to their family in Somali.

[56:15] Poland and the Belarus refugee crisis

Chris, do you think that Poland was independent in making this decision about their border? Or was it a more general European security policy in this case?

C: The border with Belarus?

J: Not to allow those particular people from Belarus into the EU.

C: No, it was both. Until last summer, the EU paid Belarus to keep the border closed. The fences and the police were paid by the EU. But then the EU put sanctions on the lukashenko regime because of the way he oppressed the protests, and in revenge for the sanctions, he opened the border. Then the EU proposed to pay for a wall on the Polish side, but Poland said they could do it themselves. So, the decision was made both by Poland and the EU.

J: For me the most horrible thing is how people and people’s lives become the weapon itself. Sending people to threaten your opponent with their presence is the most dehumanizing thing ever. Using people to create a crisis situation. How can we deal with it? I don’t understand how we can find a solution here.

C: It’s cynical. And, apparently, it’s easy to make the general population believe that this is the right solution.

J: They explain it like that: if we have these people accepted, lukashenko would send the others. We can’t allow this to be used against us. But for those thousands of people it was deadly.

C: Politics uses human beings as weapons. That’s exactly what’s going on now. Now, that brings us back to our first question. Demyan, is it possible to change the mind of a general public through publishing texts like these? It’s a very old question.

D: Very.

C: Personally, I don’t think so. A platform like ours is never going to change the national attitude. But there’s another thing we can do: we can make sure that these publications reach editors of mainstream media, and they reach politicians who are active on a national level. That is something you can do. And they, in their role, can use these publications to create a different story and different policies.

J: It’s all the matter of opinion and the matter of information. Fear is the first thing that appears if you see something threatening the system. The question is how to work with fear, not to…

C: And that’s why I’m saying. If we can take care that our publications reach people with influence, that’s how you can build the influence.

If you’re talking about fear, for instance, some, let’s say, right-wing media in Western Europe, they say that you see stories that the Ukrainians are bringing weapons into the EU.

I have no idea if it’s true. Probably it happens but probably not on a very large scale, but these are the kind of stories that create fear.

J: We consider that as a part of informational work that’s to be done. The informational front is another front in the war right now, and it is global. In Africa, there are stories manufactured by russian propaganda that stoke the fears of the food crisis and portray Ukraine as responsible for it.

C: Right. I think the question should be how do we reach people in influential positions.

J: But politicians basically react to society.

D: Politicians, public administrators are part of society. They are born from society. If we understand how to change people’s thinking in education, then we understand how to change the principles of unity. We have seen that countries can create economic unions. Can this also be done with values? I can now mention one of the international value-based organizations, the Club of Rome.

C: The universal Declaration of Human Rights is the basis for the European Court of Human Rights, and it is a very influential body.

J: And it’s functioning. It’s not just present, it’s working.

D: Do ordinary people practice human rights daily?

C: Good question.

[01:06:58] the UK response to migrants

It’s a fundamental question, and people do practice human rights. But I think we have seen that the Declaration of Human Rights has been influential. I mean the UK, England, since Brexit, they have had trouble with the European Board of Human Rights. One very practical recent example: they invented a new way to scare migrants, people who are coming on little boats, from France to England. And the new idea is now to send those people to a camp in Rwanda in Africa. They accept the refugee application, but while it is being considered, the applicant is sent to a camp in Rwanda. And they have an agreement with the Rwanda government, and they pay the Rwandan government to build camps for asylum seekers who are trying to get into England.

One month ago the first plane full of people who were going to fly to Rwanda was at the airport, and the European Court of Human Rights said it was illegal and stopped the flight. The UK Government insists that post-Brexit they do not have to comply with the European Court of Human Right anymore.

J: That’s shocking information.

The same shock I felt getting to know one story of a Ukrainian girl’s experience in Great Britain. The girl is 13 and managed to escape from Mariupol and join her older sister who is a student in the UK. But the migration office refused to document her because she was underage and not accompanied by her parents. She had to leave the country, and she crossed Europe again to go back home to Mariupol, and nobody knows her story after that. She disappeared from all the media.

D: We know about other cases, too. The Ukrainian diaspora in the UK is full of successful IT and business people, and they have many success stories. But they also speak of very conservative politics. We think about this girl. I believe she is alive.

It’s not about the European Union, it’s about Western Civilization. One question for me is why do we still use these words—Western or Eastern civilization—if we know these terms were coined by French journalists and aristocrats in the 19th century? They do not describe the communities. Originally, the word “civilization” was meant as an antonym of “barbarism”, but now we use it to describe “civilizational” differences between us, and that is a mistake.

D: Because we have no borders between civilizations, we have no civilizations—we are humanity. Our program Wars. Ukrainians. Humanity is the platform for writing about any wars and at the same time about humanity, of course. And this program is really our chance to talk about human values. We have many wars, we have migrants with the same feelings from different countries. Every migrant has the same feelings, the same problems and the same futures.

[01:19:00] perceptions of the vulnerable

J: It’s about our perception of people who are not included in the social system. For example, if we meet someone who sleeps on the street, we may think that it’s someone who just didn’t manage to find the right place in the society, who didn’t make it. It means, this person is personally weak, has failed somehow, and that’s not good for society because we want only strong and really talented, and successful people in our society. But if it happens in your life that you have to start again in a foreign society, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong with your life. It just means you don’t belong to this particular society. Yet.

D: We have the golden rule. Maybe we can come up with a new rule: if you send people to Rwanda, you will go with them. A rule for new politics: do to yourself what you wish to be done to others. I don’t have examples of this rule functioning—maybe some exist in fiction. We need this training, we need these stories. Have we as humanity, as people, the same programs for migrants from Syria, from Yemen?

J: Who is listening to them?

D: Listening or writing these stories?

C: This is always a very good way to proceed, to collect the voices of people.

J: I would say a few words about my personal motivation. Within our shared humanity, I understand there may be many reasons for different cultures to clash with each other. But what we hope for, is that the future is not defined by conflict but by meeting and discovering each other’s experience. If we still have borders, how do we define who is the citizen of this territory? Do we keep countries as we have them or not? Who is then the basis of the society or can we talk about the basic society in a country or is it already changing? It’s a question for Ukraine as well. We can already project that after the victory Ukraine will need rebuilding programs and these will bring about a big change in the population. The economic resources of Ukraine will be attractive for many people from many cultures. People of different cultures will come to Ukraine to inhabit it, to live there, to develop the resources, and this will mean changes to our climate, our places, and our society. This needs answers: are we ready — our policies, cultural policies ready to meet all the people and to create an environment where it comes to good life and not to another war? Because some Ukrainians are not used to foreigners.

[1:31:10] the Other in the future society

C: I think we are talking about the society of the future after the victory. I was reading the essay by Demyan again and also the response of Robert McTaque which is interesting. I think of every rule or agreement for future society you can always ask one question — how does this work for the Other: the stranger, the foreigner, the migrant? Because it’s always a perfect test for any agreement that you make, is this rule or agreement closed, for a closed community, or is it open to the world.

D: To change societies, there’s only one way—through books. Different writers, in different languages, in different countries writing about the same things: humanity, values. And I believe, in our circle we have different writers and we can do this. When we create these books, we can share them, and make these books popular. They can become soft law that changes society’s mindsets. And then politicians will follow, there will be new statutes, perhaps new constitutions. But everywhere we’re starting from books and very small circles of thinkers. Remember the Schuman declaration? Schuman, Monnet, and three others, five persons laid the foundation to the European Union. It’s true, Monnet was a very influential person. It’s important. Richard Branson, for example. He is a very open man and he speaks a lot about wars, about human rights, about how to change the situation. At some point, Elon Musk seemed to me to be a new generation entrepreneur… (in 2024 we know for sure that this is not so, we saw the complete absence of ethical frameworks and Elon Musk’s deranged, destructive, even hostile idea of the world order and the role of a visionary entrepreneur in society — note from D.Om 22.11.2024)

C: Has he spoken out about Ukraine?

J: He visited Ukraine already.

D: Two or three times.

C: During the war?

J: Once during the war. He met the president.

C: Interesting.

J: When you’re talking about books, it makes me think about stories. A book is a material thing. A story is something that is fixed in the format of a book. But it’s all about stories we tell ourselves about ourselves: who we are, what is our culture? Elon Musk tells a story about space development. It’s interesting, sure, but this is his story about his interests and his motivation. There are others who live spiritual stories, others who live commercial or industrial stories. And the story of the European Union, it’s been the industrial story told in the industrial era. And now new times have come, and digital stories are told. For me, the question is what story do we tell about the future we want to have. And then we use the tools that make the story work, that make the story attractive for the right people, that make it spread. Media are really influential but they make too many mistakes. Good stories can get shortened so much in mass media that the information that reaches people gets just wrong.

[1:38:53] the role of stories

C: I think that’s the keyword, the stories. Stories we collect, stories we tell, and the stories we imagine about life in the future. And whatever story you tell, whatever constitution you make, whatever agreement you reach, it’s always good to think how it works for the Other.

J: Some stories are more powerful, some are not. But really often stories become powerful if they are based on human weaknesses and not human strengths. And russia uses this practice a lot to tell stories that are based on human weaknesses. I’m talking about that because I see this as a condition of the environment we are in, and we have to accept that we work in these conditions. With any great story we find, we believe, we start to tell, we meet some resistance, or come against the current of different, even dangerous stories told by others.

C: I agree.

Questions

If you had the power to design Ukraine’s immigration policy, what would be its main principles? How could you ensure it was adequate to meet the needs of the future?
Think of a time when a story changed your view of the world? What kind of story was it? Where did you encounter it? What, do you think, made it as powerful as it was?