The hotspot model lets migrants come in, and then restricts them so that the society is free of refugees
By Pramod K Nayar
Since 2015-16,the European Union, faced with large movements of migrants, adopted what it officially termed the ‘hotspot approach’. A 2015 document from the European Council announced this approach and while it refused to define what it meant by a ‘hotspot’, the approach itself was spelled out:
“characterized by specific and disproportionate migratory pressure, consisting of mixed migratory flows, which are largely linked to the smuggling of migrants, and where the Member State concerned might request support and assistance to better cope with the migratory pressure…”
A member state has to request assistance at a specific hotspot and the EU would come to the assistance of the state. At the hotspot, humanitarian actions are undertaken. The hotspot approach alters significantly the geography of aid and humanitarian efforts.
Caring for Distant Strangers
Humanitarianism appears, at first sight, to be at odds with the colonial project for it emphasised care and compassion towards the less fortunate and colonised subject. But this model of caring, tied as it was to the modern state, was also a form of population control. Unlike colonialism’s brutal control over territory, humanitarianism sought and acquired control over people through relief and aid measures. The fact that care and charity required extensive documentation and classification of degrees and kinds of destitution even during famine, implies the colonial state’s quest for even greater control and a meticulous ordering of the people.
This is the reason why, official writings such as the Report of the Central Executive Committee, Indian Famine Charitable Relief Fund (1898) provide statistics of the type and number of people who received aid: “respectable poor”, artisans, persons clothed, children in poor houses supplied with milk, etc.In other words, humanitarianism was also a form of surveillance, scrutiny, classification and control.
Humanitarianism was always a global project and, spatially speaking, expansive, bringing the world into the ambit of the aid society and the European organisation.
Geographies of Aid
In the 19th century, the heyday of colonial empires, the European states set out to alleviate the misery of the natives in the colonies (forgetting the fact that quite a lot of this misery stemmed from their own, colonial, presence in the region!).
As scholars have noted, the humanitarian movement from the late 18th century focused initially on anti-slave trade campaigns, later expanded to movements for the protection of Aboriginals, the temperance and reform movements. From European capitals that collected information about disasters or distress in the colonies, the movement for aid and care reached out to outposts, producing what geographers David Lambert and Alan Lester term ‘cartographies of colonial philanthropy’. We see indelible signs of such a geography of aid and the ‘civilisational mission’ in official reports such as Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements)published by the House of Commons (1836).
Societies for humanitarian work were established: like The Aborigines Protection Society (founded 1837), the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and British India Society (both founded in 1839).In 1824, Charles Lushington documented the list of such institutions in his book, The History, Design and Present State of the Religious, Benevolent Institutions Founded by the British in Calcutta and its Vicinity.
Working through missionaries, school teachers, doctors and others, the imperial state extended its role and influence into the social order. Many such societies and organisations worked with newly created committees during, for example, the great famines of the late 19th century in Madras, Bombay and Calcutta.
For the British, therefore, humanitarianism and philanthropy served a moral imperialism: as the world’s moral leaders it was their duty to extend care towards the lesser mortals. This moral imperialist project of global humanitarianism was not about the destitute Other (the colonised) but about the English self. That is, philanthropy comes to define “Englishness” itself. As the historian Sumathi Ramaswamy has argued in a thoughtful essay in Modern Asian Studies on Pachaiyappa Mudaliar— thefounder of the famous college in Madras and one of the first to create an endowment for education — the idea(l) of the generous philanthropist was itself a posthumous construction. The British narratives of their relief work were also, similarly, a construction of imperial character-building.
There were, even then, exceptions. For example, during the 1877 Madras famine, several Indians and Europeans appealed to Britons for donations to a famine relief fund. Viceroy Lytton was furious at what he saw as insubordination — where the voluntary organisations were supplanting the government relief works — and attempted to shut down the fund! That much of the aid came from the natives themselves perhaps fuelled his fury.
Ordering Compassion
The hotspot model of care and control, writes political scientist Polly Pallister-Wilkins, operates through two logics:
“one concerns the imbrication of care, protection and vulnerability with access to mobility, and the other concerns the need to provide order and security (in all its forms) within the hotspots themselves.”
The hotspot ensures that all mobility is monitored. That is, care is strictly aligned not just with the vulnerability of the refugees — that is why they are refugees! — but also with security. ‘Security’, it needs to be understood, is not the security of the refugees alone, but of the rest of the European nations receiving them. In the words of Pallister-Wilkins, hotspot modes
“enable policy makers and politicians to maintain liberal order elsewhere in the face of socio-political opposition to refugees, growing xenophobia and a fear of increasing support for far-right parties.”
That is, as a response to the flow of migrants, which induces anxiety among the receiving populations, the hotspot model allows them to come in, and then restricts them to hotspots which are then seen as flashpoints and as zones of containment. The hotspot can be controlled. Refugee vulnerabilities are acknowledged, addressed and, more importantly, restricted to those hotspot zones, so that the rest of the society, city and nation is free of the refugees.
Humanitarianism is another form of governance.
(The author is Professor, Department of English, University of Hyderabad)