Refugees welcome: Arrival gifts, reciprocity, and the integration of forced migrants
| Author | Volker M Heins,Christine Unrau |
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1755088217753232 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088217753232
Journal of International Political Theory
2018, Vol. 14(2) 223 –239
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088217753232
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Refugees welcome: Arrival
gifts, reciprocity, and the
integration of forced migrants
Volker M Heins and Christine Unrau
University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Abstract
Against competing political theories of the integration of immigrants, we propose to reframe
the relationship between the populations of host countries and arriving refugees in terms
of a neo-Maussian theory of gift exchange. Using the example of the European refugee
crisis of 2015 and the welcoming attitude of significant parts of German civil society, we
argue that this particular situation should be understood as epitomizing the trend toward
internal transnationalism. Increasingly, the “international” is becoming part and parcel of the
“domestic” sphere. Since Marcel Mauss was concerned with the question of how separate,
culturally different communities can establish ties of solidarity and cooperation between each
other, we use his work to answer key questions about the relations between international
refugees and native citizens in their home countries: What are the expectations underlying
gift-giving in the context of welcoming refugees? Should refugees feel obliged to repay
the arrival gifts? How should we deal with the normative ambivalence of gift-giving and its
potentially humiliating effects on those who receive gifts but are unable to reciprocate? Most
importantly, how does gift theory help us to clarify the very concept of integration which is
at the heart of recent debates on the ethics of immigration?
Keywords
Ethics of immigration, gift theory, hospitality, integration of refugees, internal
transnationalism, Marcel Mauss
The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born.
Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.
Leviticus 19:34
Corresponding author:
Volker M Heins, University of Duisburg-Essen, Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation
Research, Schifferstrasse 44, D-47059 Duisburg, Germany.
Email: volker.heins@uni-due.de
753232IPT0010.1177/1755088217753232Journal of International Political TheoryHeins and Unrau
research-article2018
Article
224 Journal of International Political Theory 14(2)
If refugees and asylum seekers are to be welcomed into any society, and shown a measure
of hospitality, this will not be because the polity is welcoming but because society is so.
Chandran Kukathas (2016: 266)
Introduction
The so-called refugee crisis in Europe, and in particular the decision of the German gov-
ernment in September 2015 to open its borders to what turned out to be around 890,000
refugees and asylum seekers within that same year, most of them from Syria and Iraq, has
provoked very different responses and interpretations. Many observers across the world
were impressed by what they saw as the expression of a cosmopolitan moral attitude on
the part of the German government and large sections of the population. The Indian novel-
ist and postcolonial critic Pankaj Mishra, for example, celebrated Germany as “Europe’s
conscience” and as the sole remaining candidate for “the moral leadership of the West”
(Mishra, 2015). Others were less kind in their assessment. Wolfgang Streeck, director
emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne and a fierce
left-wing critic of the Merkel government, offered an almost Maussian interpretation of
the decision to admit and welcome hundreds of thousands of refugees without entry visas
or any other documentation. Opening the borders—or rather refusing to close them within
Europe’s open-borders Schengen system, which has removed passport checks and border
controls between its member states—was a gift for countless desperate people.1 Yet
Streeck claims that the motive behind this seemingly humanitarian action or nonaction
was “to shame” the rest of Europe in a spirit of “hegemonic self-righteousness” (Streeck,
2016). According to this view, Germany was engaging in something like a potlatch: While
pretending to present a friendly face to the world, the government of this particular coun-
try was increasing its moral prestige by publicly sacrificing wealth and security, thereby
showing less fortunate Europeans, many of whom were suffering from German-imposed
austerity policies, who is calling the shots on the continent.
This is yet another example of how an international gift can trigger a controversy
about the intentions of the donors, its true beneficiaries, and the very character of the gift.
Without losing sight of this controversy, we would like to shift attention from the inter-
national reverberations of Germany’s refugee policy to what has been called the growing
“internal transnationalism” (Hardy, 2004) of modern states which are often no longer
“nation”-states in the traditional sense of the term. Internal transnationalism is the prod-
uct of two intertwined trends: the growth of diasporic communities in countries which
are immigration destinations and the development of manifold relationships between
these groups and the native population.
Yet, there is another way to think about internal transnationalism. Political theorists
such as Jürgen Habermas have expressed the hope that through a process of juridifica-
tion, relations between states in international society can be subject to forms of legal
management analogous to those already shaping the relations between citizens within
states. The refugee challenge—and internal transnationalism more generally—is the
result of the opposite development: instead of being domesticated and civilized by inter-
national law, the dynamic of the “international” gradually eats into the domestic sphere
of modern states, potentially pitting native and immigrant groups against each other.
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