Plus Ça Change: The Politics of Alterity, and Italian and Maltese Responses to Recent Migration Challenges

This article analyzes the evolving refugee related policies of Italy and Malta in recent years by employing Hannah Arendt’s insights into the origins of refugee status and the power of alterity as an animating force of human behavior. We contend that both these countries have circumvented European Union and United Nations compacts and rules governing refugee treatment during this difficult historical era and that their behavior, and that of their populations, provides a powerful and salient reminder of the challenge of ensuring displaced people rights in the face of human willingness to ‘other.’ We argue too that the bases of those obstacles take multiple forms including deliberate appeals to hatreds, fears, and grievances, real and imagined, by political leaders for purposes of securing power, as well as via perversions of national memory and history. More deeply, the wellsprings of the behaviors to which Arendt pointed lie in individuals’ innate relative incapacity to tolerate difference, presenting a critical ongoing challenge for democratic governance amidst conditions of pluralism of whatever stripe. Keywords: refugees, Syrian Civil War, Hannah Arendt, Italy, Malta, alterity