Being welcoming, but what for? Understanding the different refuge-cities rhetorics

The common points and specificities of each public speeches’ compilation have been precisely detailed in the first part of this chapter. Although our two refuge cities promote the same humanist values, their rhetoric is not quite the same. The second step is to understand these differences and observe the objectives sought by these processes.

Two cities that do not speak the same language: contextualizing values

The analysis of the speeches allowed us to highlight nuances and gaps between the statements made by local executive authorities in Barcelona and Paris. Indeed, the former mobilizes more universal moral principles by placing them in a broader geopolitical context, while the latter links its values more closely to concrete local issues. Let us look for a moment at the factors explaining these differences.

First of all, a key factor is the migratory and humanitarian situation of each city. As it has already been emphasized, Paris has been facing a problematic humanitarian situation since 2015, with the emergence of squalid makeshift camps on its streets. At the beginning of January 2019, over 2,000 exiles were reportedly spread over three main camps in the northeast of the capital. There is therefore a real local issue regarding housing and access to vital resources (water, food, care) for migrants, which explains the references to the principle of ‘dignity’ (or ‘indignity’) in the executive’s’ remarks. However, these problems are not encountered in Barcelona. For instance, in the autumn of 2015, when the Parisian reception facilities were overcrowded, Barcelona’s executives demanded asylum seekers and refugees be sent there in Catalonia. No makeshift camps similar to the Parisian ones were set up there, and, until the summer of 2018, the reception facilities did not yet have any real problems of being too small. These differences therefore highlight the gap between a more generalist discourse in Barcelona, which places its action in a global European situation, and a more specific discourse in Paris, where local issues are at stake.

A second explanatory factor is the local public opinion. The inhabitants of Barcelona seem to be rather in favor of welcoming refugees, as indicated by the important demonstration of February 2017, Volem Acollir, mentioned earlier. In this context, Ada Colau could allow herself to promote hospitality. This is illustrated by the following excerpt from one of her Facebook publications:

The day before yesterday, 50 people died of asphyxiation in a ship’s hold. Yesterday, more than 70 people died in a truck. Today, we woke up with two shipwrecks: perhaps more than a hundred dead. We have a sea full of dead people. Borders full of barbed wire, spikes, blades ... and dead people.

Men, women, boys, and girls, dead.

And part of Europe cries, screams, wants them to be saved, not to die, but ... but not to come, to leave, to disappear, not to exist and not to have to see them on television, and even less on our streets, with their blankets, in the underground or on the stairs of our houses.

Some people irresponsibly promote fear ‘of others,’ ‘of illegal immigrants,’ ‘of those who come to sell without a permit,’ ‘of those who come to take advantage of our health system.’

But that's all fear is: fear. Our fear of living a little less well against their fear of not surviving. Our fear of having to share a small part of our well-being against their fear of hunger and death.

Fear versus fear. And theirs is stronger. So, Europe, Europeans: let us open our eyes. There won’t be enough walls or barbed wire to stop it. No tear gas, no rubber bullets. Either we approach a human drama with the ability to love that makes us human, or we will all end up dehumanized.

(Colau Ballano 2015a)

These are the first comments the Mayor published on her Facebook page about the migration situation, at a time when the City was receiving hundreds of messages from its fellow citizens asking how they could help migrants (Respondent 1 2018). This pro-reception and very active part of Barcelona’s population has thus allowed Ada Colau to freely mobilize a certain lyricism and pathos that are not found in Anne Hidalgo’s remarks. On the contrary, in Paris, the question of reception creates significant tensions, mainly via the question of makeshift camps which are located in neighborhoods already suffering from many socio-economic problems. As a local elected official explained (Respondent 2 2018), the aim in Paris is to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, between the ambitions of humanist welcome and solidarity, and the ‘legitimate’ claims of the inhabitants not to welcome ‘again’ poor and immigrant populations in already disadvantaged neighborhoods. Parisian citizens seem more divided on the reception issue than in Barcelona. Thus, the mayor of Paris sticks to a more factual, pragmatic discourse, basing it on the actions carried out in the city to resolve the humanitarian situation, hoping to satisfy those who wish to see migrant camps disappear, whether for compassionate reasons or for rejecting ones.

Among the factors that explain the differences between the discourses, speakers’ backgrounds should be taken into account. Both cities were then run for the first time by women, who tended to strongly embody their city and personalize their mandates. Therefore, their words are significant, because they actively participate in the construction of their cities’ identities. Analyzing their backgrounds is useful to understand the different types of discourse that each can mobilize. Indeed, the two mayors are quite far apart on this point. Anne Hidalgo can be considered a political professional: after studying law and social sciences, she passed the civil service exams to become a labor inspector, then worked in various ministerial cabinets under Lionel Jospin’s government. Before becoming Mayor in 2014, she was first Deputy Mayor of Paris and Regional Councillor for the Ile-de-France region (Bacchi 2014). Socialized for a long time in this professional environment, her discourse is therefore more institutionalized than that of Ada Colau, who has recently joined politics. The Mayor of Barcelona has not had a traditional political career. Before arriving at Barcelona City Hall, she was above all an activist, particularly known for having been the spokesperson for the Plataforma de Afectados par la Hipoteca, an organization that prevented thousands of evictions of over-indebted families during the 2008 economic crisis. Prior to that, she was involved in anti-globalization and anti-Gulf War and Iraq war movements (Sust 2013). Her political career therefore began with her position as Mayor of Barcelona in 2015. Claiming to be herself ‘daughter of emigrants’ (Colau Ballano 2015b), Ada Colau then proposes an ‘unfiltered’ speech, an activist speech from her militant trajectory, particularly on social networks.

The analysis conducted here has highlighted the importance of the link between the context and the mobilized values: although humanism is based on broad and fairly general ethical principles, the values it promotes are linked to specific situations.