Malta: The problems of Scaling Hospitality

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The Mediterranean – I commented a few months ago in a separate blog entry - seems to be full of bad guests and even worse hosts, these days.

The stresses of hospitality, I agued, were not at all new. The rules and obligations of hospitality have preoccupied humanity since the days of Homer. By looking at hospitality in Greek Myth, I sketchily outlined the ways a host can be a bad and nasty one:  refusing to accept guests; failing to provide care; destroying the guests under his protection; trapping the guest and preventing him from moving along their journeys. Valid points, today as they have been 3,000 years ago. 

If you're still unsure what bad hospitality is all about, I recommend you watch Season 3 Episode 9 of Game of Thrones. The recent events that have rocked Malta in the past 48hours add another one to the list: A bad host, is, primarily, the one who applies the rights and duties of hospitality in the wrong places.

The flow of events need not be repeated in much detail. Unless the Europe Union would practically intervene to shoulder the burden, AirMalta flights, at the command of the newly appointed Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, would ferry the recent Somali arrivals back to Libya. A written order from the European Court of Human Rights - claiming a breach of human rights - halted these plans.

Yet, despite the Court's insistence on the breaking of ‘human rights’, it is interesting how at the local level – both in political discourses and in the surge of commentary and counter-commentary - has been, with a notably precious few exceptions entirely framed in the language of 'hospitality'.

The arguments in favour of keeping the migrants, to start off in a light and easy way, are clear: the guests that have arrived at our shores have fled from poorer and more dangerous places. This, at the very least, entitles them to some basic and immediate goodness, shelter and care until their long term plans are sorted out. It is not difficult to find these arguments couched within the discourse of religion and Christianity, thanks to us being the first and best descendants of this fellow’s disciples:

I'm watching you, Joe...

It is with the argument that migrants need to be pushed back into the sea that things start to get interesting for an Anthropologist. Joseph Muscat's argument - adopted and endlessly repeated by his followers - is basically as follows: We Maltese have been good hosts, taking in migrants, saving them from the Sea, feeding them etc. for way too long. Our resources are now at an end; there is no more room for new guests. The European Union - a community of nations who are, in theory at least, equal to each other - need to start shouldering their part of the burden. We've been good hosts, they've been bad hosts at our expense. We're the laughing stock of Europe, trodden over by our neighbours who obviously think we're inferior to them. It needs to stop. We'll become bad hosts and throw the guests out. If the league of friends refuses to host parties, then the parties have to stop.

I told you, the parties have to stop

Joseph Muscat's weaving of Hospitality, Nationalism and European politics, seems to be the most natural thing in the world, but it puts its finger on a problem of Hospitality which has preoccupied anthropologists of the Mediterranean for ages.

For a good part of its history, the study of Hospitality has been largely drawn to sorting out and navigating its moral mazes, ambiguity and fickleness (ex. Hospitality is couched in the discourse of pure gift giving but is obviously interested and calculated; hospitality draws the stranger in but also is a tool through which the potentially dangerous foreigner is kept at some distance; it offers the stranger resources yet keeps him from managing them; the objects of hospitality can be at once life giving - such as water - or life destroying - such as poison). 

Michael Herzfeld, however, took research into hospitality in a completely new direction: what makes Hospitality so important is that it can be scaled, expanded and amplified to describe relations between larger entities and imagined communities.

I will explain.

Hospitality primarily refers to the personal relationship between an individual guest and an individual host. This relationship offers an evocative image and language: the house is opened to the guest, doors are open, and dinners and spaces are shared. Yet, as Herzfeld notes, anthropologists have often encountered that this basic image could be used to describe the relationships between larger conceptual entities. Villages can also be hospitable. Nations can also use the discourses and imagery of hospitality: they can invite tourists into their territories and cities and histories; they can accept migrants from the rough seas. Hospitality is a shape shifter, and can expand and contract and move along contexts to inhabit the way relationships between increasingly large communities – Family, Village, Region, Nation, Continent – are morally described and are expected to behave. 

However, if you think that the above image adequately 
represents the scaling of Hospitality, then you're wrong

Scaling hospitality, however, is not easy. It is not easy because, say, the Village is not simply a larger version of the family, no matter how hard it tries to picture itself as so. A nation is not a large village. The EU is not a big nation. So in moving up the scale, Hospitality, or its discourse, has to deal with constructs that are increasingly difficult, complicated and themselves bound to other processes (ex. Inter village trading and feasting, national contraction and industry, continental politics).

Attempts at representing nations as being an enlarged version of their countrymen have been made, however.

And this is where the problem lies. 

Both those Maltese in favour of migrants and those against them are bad hosts because they have scaled hospitality onto the level of National and Regional politics in a simplistic way.  Once one starts to talk at the level of intercontinental migration flows, illegal migration, asylum, one is no longer simply talking about hosts and guests: one is now into the realm of international human rights and EU politics. 

The European Court of Human Rights has slapped us on the wrist, telling us that throwing migrants out into the sea because the rest of the European Union has been a bad host who let Malta do all the good hosting is not reason enough to refuse to accept asylum seekers. 

The Court has reminded us that this is why we have law in the first place! Largely because the fates of migrants are way too important to be left to the fickleness of hospitality. As anthropologists and Game of Thrones have adequately noted, hospitality is a fickle thing: offering good and extended hospitality, while being, in theory, required by some divine law, is also bound to so many other variables: the moods of host and guest; their current resources; the relationships of the host with other possible hosts or peers; one’s vague perception of who the complete stranger is. Hospitality, anthropologists have noted to the point of disgust, is likely to fail as much as succeed. 

The Maltese case, is therefore a lesson about the scaling of hospitality, and how bad hosts and bad guests are primarily those who insist upon their rights and obligations – to stay and to send away; to feed and to poison – when the matter is simply not one of hospitality but of international law.