‘When you invent the ship’, warned the late cultural theorist Paul Virilio, ‘you also invent the shipwreck’. Virilio was speaking about technologies, but his words have a broader relevance. Social conditions harbor the potential for catastrophe just as many inventions do.
During his December journey to the eastern Mediterranean nations of Cyprus and Greece, Pope Francis drew attention to the conditions for irregular migration that result in thousands drowning at sea and many more languishing for years in camps. The International Organization for Migration records 23,150 missing migrants in the Mediterranean since 2014.
Greece has received over 1 million sea arrivals since the beginning of 2015, with over 856,000 in 2015 alone. Recently, there were 103,000 refugees in Greece and over 60,000 asylum seekers. In Cyprus, the government estimates that asylum seekers account for four per cent of the population.
In both countries, Francis acknowledged the problem that many asylum seekers are stuck in Greece or Cyprus because other European countries refuse to accept their fair share. In Cyprus, speaking directly to migrants, the Pope called for ‘effective recognition of the dignity of every human person’.
In Greece, for the second time in five years the Pope visited Lesvos, an Aegean island through which hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers have passed since 2015. There, Francis spoke at the ‘reception and identification centre’ (which has replaced the squalid Moria camp which burned down in 2020) and got to the heart of the problem:
‘The Mediterranean, which for millennia has brought different peoples and distant lands together, is now becoming a grim cemetery without tombstones … Let us not let our sea (mare nostrum) be transformed into a desolate sea of death (mare mortuum). Let us not allow this place of encounter to become a theatre of conflict. Let us not permit this “sea of memories” to be transformed into a “sea of forgetfulness”. Please brothers and sisters, let us stop this shipwreck of civilization!’
"Perhaps in 2022 a greater recognition of human interdependence can be a starting point, helping to roll back what Francis labels a culture of indifference."
The ship is the irreplaceable symbol of a shared fate, from the Odyssey to the Bible to Moby Dick. When a government fares poorly, the ‘ship of state’ might be imperiled. Environmentalists sometimes invoke the lone voyage of ‘Spaceship Earth’ to urge collective action against common threats. More lightheartedly, the improbable tale of the Irish Rover depicts the diversity of characters to be found on a ship, all hailing from different places but sharing the same journey.
With his call to ‘stop this shipwreck of civilization’, Pope Francis reminds us that at stake in the Mediterranean are not just the ones who might be lost at sea. The claims of civilization itself are also ‘in the same boat’.
Indifference to asylum seekers matters not just because of what it does to them, but also because of what it does to us. Commenting on the Pope’s journey, the theologian Assaad Elias Kattan notes that ‘the foreigners do not bring with them only their grief’, but also experiences and know-how that receiving countries often lack: ‘All these in their turn shape an inclusive society that includes innovation as well as a sense of solidarity and mutual support, elements which are absolutely necessary if we do not want to turn humanity into a vast and inhospitable desert.’
Without these values, a society risks becoming unmoored from its declared respect for human dignity. The hypocrisy of (rightly) criticizing the human rights abuses of others, while erecting and maintaining structures of exclusion against those legally entitled to seek asylum, can only corrode what Francis referred to as ‘this developed civilization that we call the West’.
Are there any prospects for improvement? If the human tragedies of irregular migration are nothing new, perhaps the pandemic has created the conditions to reconsider systems that leave some ‘at the mercy of the waves, in the wash of indifference’. As the Pope has observed, the pandemic ‘has made us realize that we are all on the same boat; it has made us experience what it means to have identical fears’.
Our interdependence has become tangible in exposure site lists, chains of transmission, precarious work conditions that encourage some to work through sickness and the vaccine inequity that creates the conditions for new variants. But the pandemic has also foregrounded indifference – e.g. the refusal of some to wear a mask or get vaccinated, indifferent to their neighbors’ wellbeing.
Perhaps in 2022 a greater recognition of human interdependence can be a starting point, helping to roll back what Francis labels a ‘culture of indifference’. Perhaps the pandemic’s hard lessons of interdependence can encourage more of us to take another look at the structures and systems we have been prepared to walk past. Perhaps we could pay more regard to asylum seekers and to all those consigned to the ‘existential peripheries’ of our civilization.
Stephen Minas is associate professor of law at Peking University and senior research fellow at the Transnational Law Institute, King’s College London, where Stephen completed a PhD in law. Stephen has worked on climate issues in various capacities in domestic and international processes. He is an alumnus of Newman College.
Main image: Pope Francis visiting the Mytilene refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece (Vatican News)